Memories of Odysseus: Tales from the Ancient Greek Frontier

272 Pages·2001·0.917 MB·English

by  Francois Hartog

M O
EMORIES OF DYSSEUS
For Thomas
M O
EMORIES OF DYSSEUS
Frontier tales from ancient Greece
F H
RANÇOIS ARTOG
Translated by Janet Lloyd
EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS
© Éditions Gallimard, 1996
English translation © Janet Lloyd, 2001
Transferred to Digital Print 2011
This edition first published 2001 by
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9LF
Scotland
French edition first published 1996 by Éditions Gallimard
5, rue Sébastien Bottin
75007 Paris
France
English edition published with the aid ofa translation
subvention kindly given by the French Ministry ofCulture
Typeset in 11 on 14 Ehrhardt
by Charon Tec Pvt. Ltd, Chennai, India, and
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
A CIP Record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7486 1448 6 (hardback)
ISBN 0 7486 1447 8 (paperback)
The right ofFrançois Hartog
to be identified as author ofthis work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
Foreword: Odysseus in Auschwitz Paul Cartledge vii
Introduction: Travellers and Frontier-men 3
1 The Return ofOdysseus 15
A voyage and a return journey 15
Anthropology 21
The return to Ithaca 26
The voyages ofa name 36
2 Egyptian Voyages 41
Seeing Egypt 42
Greek views 47
Egypt, the first civilizing power? 64
From Thrice Greatest Hermes to Champollion 73
3 The Invention ofthe Barbarian and an Inventory ofthe World 79
Barbarians and Greeks 79
Representing the world 88
Centre and extremities 95
Viewing the world from Alexandria 103
4 Greek Voyages 107
The voyages ofthe elder Anacharsis and frontiers forgotten 108
Frontiers within, or ordinary kinds ofdiscrimination 116
CONTENTS
The limits ofArcadia 133
Alexander between Rome and Greece 150
5 Roman Voyages 161
The voyages ofPolybius 163
The voyages ofDionysius ofHalicarnassus 171
The voyages ofStrabo and Aelius Aristides 188
Conclusion: Memories ofApollonius and the Name ofPythagoras 199
Notes 211
Index 255
vi
Foreword: Odysseus in Auschwitz
Paul Cartledge
On we go, amigos…
down the ages way across the watery world,
and yearning, yearning for my home,
as you all do, as we do, though we can’t go home,
never again…
Judith Kazantzis, The Odysseus Poems
We are what we remember – and forget. François Hartog, Directeur d’Études
at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and Director ofthe Centre
Louis Gernet de recherches comparées sur les sociétés anciennes, has long
been preoccupied with human memory, with special reference to its manipu-
lation in and impact upon the writing of history both ancient and modern.1
One of his major influences has been the inspiration of the late Sir Moses
Finley, a collection of whose essays in French translation he edited in 1981
under the title Mythe, Mémoire, Histoire.2 At one point in the fascinating
interview with the editor that is appended to those essays Finley remarks:
“yet again the alterity of Antiquity receives confirmation” (p. 257). Alterity
too, like memory, has proved to be a major theme of Hartog’s own work,
most notably in his brilliant and groundbreaking monograph, The Mirror of
Herodotus(1980–91, 1988), also translated by Janet Lloyd. But a more potent
influence still on Hartog, as on most of us born in the shadow of the Second
World War, is the crushing experience, even ifat second or third hand, ofthe
Shoah (Jewish Holocaust) and its aftermath. That tragedy must, somehow,
be remembered, but how is the remembrance best to be achieved and used?3
The after-shocked suicide ofone ofthe Holocaust’s most articulate witnesses,
Primo Levi, whom Hartog tellingly recalls towards the end of the present
vii
FOREWORD
book, cannot fail to excite deep anxieties and doubts.4It is hardly surprising
that memory and representation have been described as quintessential post-
modern concerns.
Ifmemory by itselfneeds no further justification as a subject ofstudy by a
master-historiographer, one can still fairly ask what the point ofa memoir or
memories ofOdysseus/Ulysses might be. There have been many Odysseuses
over the ages. What has been called for short “the Ulysses theme”5has been
traced out from Homer via the Greek tragedians through Hellenistic and
Roman antiquity, through the European Middle Ages, and on down to James
Joyce and beyond, not least to “the immensely inventive, ifflawed, reprise of
the Homeric original in Nikos Kazantzakis” (G. Steiner, TLS, 15 October
1999). Odysseus has even entered our everyday English language – we speak
freely of any unusually lengthy or problematic journey, whether mental or
material, as an “odyssey”. F. A. Lincoln’s Odyssey of a Jewish Sailor(1996) is
just a serendipitous recent instance. A rather more elevated literary manifest-
ation of this tradition, more properly a literary phenomenon, has been the
work of West Indian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, a specifically colonial or
postcolonial appropriation of the Ulysses theme, in the form of both a mod-
ern verse epic (Omeros) and a stage-play.6 In the world of film one thinks
immediately of the Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos’s Ulysses’ Gaze
(1995), a meditation on the crisis of identity in post-Communist Balkan
Europe.7 A more popular filmic approach, or perhaps gesture, towards the
Odysseus legend or myth, is the Coen brothers’ presumably self-referential
O Brother, Where Art Thou?(2000).
Scholars too have not allowed Odysseus or his reception to escape their
attention for long. Recent work deserving special mention includes the col-
lection ofessays edited by Beth Cohen on the representation ofthe female in
the Odyssey(1995), William Thalmann’s study of the representation of class
in the Odyssey (1998) and, closer to the concerns of Hartog, Irad Malkin’s
Returns of Odysseus(1998).8Closer – but not all that close. For, as in his book
on Herodotus, Hartog unlike Malkin is not much concerned in Memories of
Odysseuswith the reality underlying the representations, but rather with the
representations themselves, with what they can tell us about Greek mentality,
or Greek culture, at a number ofkey points between the creation ofthe monu-
mentalepic somewhere around 700 BCand the Second Sophistic of the high
Roman imperial period, and, in turn, what those representations and recep-
tions have meant in key periods and to key cultural figures ofthe early mod-
ern and modern world.
viii
FOREWORD
Few perhaps – and certainly not Homer’s original Odysseus – would echo
C. P. Cavafy’s paradoxical urging in “Ithaka” (1911), his famous poem on
exile and nostalgia (which means literally the pain caused by the desire to
return home), to “pray that the way be long”! Hartog’s book is at any rate not
at all long, given its immense chronological, geographical and cultural range.
For him, the figure ofOdysseus in literary representation, from the Odysseus
ofHomer who always remembers to Philostratus’s Odysseus-like Apollonius
ofTyana who unifies all the heterogeneous places through which he alone has
passed, serves as a guiding thread. It is the figure ofOdysseus too who serves
as the original inspiration of the invention and practice of historiography in
ancient Greece, since the true historian was considered to be he who spared
neither time nor effort nor resources to traverse land and sea in order to see
with his own eyes.9
Two major themes, or perhaps rather variations on a single major theme,
identity, recur throughout the space of this new book: ethnicity and alterity.
Who the Greeks thought they were, and how they thought themselves as
Greeks by a variety of oppositions of themselves to “others” of one sort or
another – these are Hartog’s principal preoccupations here, as they have been
ofother recent historians ofancient Greece, in their different ways and from
their different perspectives.10 From the point of view of method Hartog’s
general approach is distinctively informed by one consistent and recurrent
mode of disciplinary crossover, from history towards anthropology. We find
ourselves thus in the same general intellectual territory as the American
anthropologist James Clifford’s punning Routes: Travel and Translation in the
Late Twentieth Century,11even ifwe are now already in the early twenty-first.
Times move on, as do people and peoples. In such a context the metaphor
of travel springs to mind almost unbidden – as we follow the symbolic wan-
derings of Odysseus through the self-conscious ancient Greek imaginings
and constructions of themselves and others, with Dr Hartog’s stimulating
book in hand as our map and guidebook. And what a journey or rather series
of journeys we are treated to here! An opening chapter, “The Return of
Odysseus”, sets the scene. This is to be a long-run, anthropologically oriented
cultural history ofancient Greece, a history ofGreek self-representationand
self-exploration through the journeyings of Odysseus, through evocations
ofhis name, and through metaphorical interpretations and various other uses
of him to formulate and problematize the question of Greek identity. It is
to be a history of limits and boundaries, a history of humanity, suffering
and escape.
ix
FOREWORD
In the second chapter, “Egyptian Voyages”, Hartog focuses specifically on
Egypt, source ofa Baudelairian forest ofsymbols for Greeks from Homer via
Herodotus to Neoplatonist philosophers such as Porphyry. What interests
Hartog is the impact ofthe differing visions ofEgypt on the development of
Greek cultural identity. The din caused by the clash ofintellectual, political,
religious and social attitudes over the centuries is very clearly conveyed.
“There is no country in the world that the Greeks more enjoy hearing
about” – so says an Egyptian priest, in good Greek, in Heliodorus’s novel
Aethiopica. Iamblichus, the neo-Pythagorean philosopher, on the other hand,
was moved to comment on the imperfection of all translations: “even when
it is possible to translate names, they lose some of their power (dunamis)”.
Perhaps it would not be wise to pursue such reflections too far here. Let us
stick rather with Herodotus, who appropriated his Egypt for his Greek
addressees through the classic Greek heuristic device of polar inversion:
what They do and are, We do not do and are not – and We are who We are
precisely because of that negative opposition. Thus, to take just one of his
score of supposed illustrations, whereas Egyptian women urinate standing
up, Egyptian men urinate sitting down – an unfortunate inversion of Greek
norms of masculinity, according to which it was considered manly to be
upright, but womanish or (even worse) servile to stoop or squat.
Verbally speaking, this polarization of Greeks and Others was consecrated
in the opposition of all Greeks (including women and children, who were
otherwise deemed morally and spiritually inferior to adult men) to all non-
Greeks, who were collectively lumped together, and often enough denigrated,
as “Barbarians”. By 500 this new polarity or ‘field of Otherness’, as Hartog
describes it, was fixed and delimited for a very long time to come. Chapter 3,
“The Invention of the Barbarian and an Inventory of the World”, concen-
trates mainly on politics and geography. It illustrates the variations that could
be played on the general theme ofidentity through polarized alterity, starting
off from the presumption that the norm and centre were constituted by the
relatively egalitarian, relatively autonomous Greek polisor citizen-state. Every
other political formation was deemed more or less abnormal, more or less
eccentric, more or less marginal. Another key mode ofdistinction was by way
of the rite of animal blood-sacrifice: you are what, and how, you sacrifice.
Finally, a more inclusive, and more bookish mode of boundary-drawing and
identity-fixing: Hellenism, following the example of the establishment of
the Library at Alexandria, might now also be redefined as a shared literary
heritage, regardless ofethnicity in the physical sense ofblood or descent.
x