Oaths and Swearing in Ancient Greece

474 Pages·2014·1.692 MB·English

by  Alan H. Sommerstein, Isabelle C. Torrance

Alan H. Sommerstein, Isabelle C. Torrance
Oaths and Swearing in Ancient Greece
Beiträge zur Altertumskunde
Herausgegeben von Michael Erler, Dorothee Gall,
Ludwig Koenen und Clemens Zintzen
Band 307
Alan H. Sommerstein, Isabelle C. Torrance
Oaths and Swearing
in Ancient Greece
With contributions by
Andrew J. Bayliss, Judith Fletcher,
Kyriaki Konstantinidou and Lynn A. Kozak
ISBN 978-3-11-020059-1
e-ISBN 978-3-11-022736-9
ISSN 1616-0452
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
3.0 License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.
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Preface
This volume completes the publication of the project The Oath in Archaic and
Classical Greece, based at the University of Nottingham and funded by the Lever-
hulme Trust (award no. F.00 114/Z), whose assistance is warmly acknowledged.
The main previous publications of the project have been the Nottingham Oath
Database (Sommerstein, Bayliss and Torrance 2007) and Oath and State in Ancient
Greece, edited by Sommerstein and Bayliss and referred to in this volume as S&B.
The authors have in broad terms a common view of the nature and effect of
oaths as a cultural phenomenon of ancient Greek society, as will be apparent
from this volume, though – as will also be apparent – they inevitably disagree on
matters of detail and nuance and on the interpretation of some particular pas-
sages and incidents.
The several chapters of the volume deal with different aspects of the oath
phenomenon, and it thus inevitably often happens that the same passage is dis-
cussed from different points of view in more than one chapter.
We should draw attention to a peculiarity in the chapter numbering. There
are some tall buildings that have no thirteenth floor, and some books in which
chapter 14 directly follows chapter 12; this volume, contrariwise, has both a
chapter 13 and a chapter 13a. This is because there are several references in S&B
to specific numbered chapters of the present volume, and changes in the chapter
plan since the publication of S&B would otherwise have rendered some of these
references incorrect.
The acknowledgements made in the preface to S&B apply equally to this
volume, and are gratefully reiterated. But it is particularly appropriate, on the
occasion of his retirement from the Department of Classics of the University of
Nottingham, that Alan Sommerstein should record explicitly his deep apprecia-
tion of all that the University, the Department, the School of Humanities, their
academic and administrative staffs, and not least their students, have done to
assist and encourage him over all but forty years, and especially over the ten
years of the Oath project.
The authors are also pleased to acknowledge their gratitude to the Institute
for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame for a small
research grant which supported work on § 5.2, and for funding to support the cost
of indexing, which was carried out with great efficiency by Dr Joanna Luke.
Alan H. Sommerstein (Nottingham), Isabelle C. Torrance (Notre Dame),
Andrew J. Bayliss (Birmingham), Judith Fletcher (Waterloo),
Kyriaki Konstantinidou (Istanbul), Lynn A. Kozak (Montreal) March 2014

Contents
Abbreviations  X
1 What is an oath? (A.H. Sommerstein)  1
2 Oath and curse (K. Konstantinidou)  6
2.1 Horkos and Erinyes: oath as a curse  8
2.2 Explicit self-curse and oath-taking  19
2.3 The explicit self-curse in Greek drama  24
2.4 The explicit self-curse in law-court speeches  37
3 Oaths in traditional myth (I.C. Torrance)  48
4 Friendship and enmity, trust and suspicion  60
4.1 Oaths between warriors in epic and tragedy (L.A. Kozak)  60
4.2 Oaths in business (A.H. Sommerstein)  67
5 The language of oaths  76
5.1 How oaths are expressed (A.H. Sommerstein)  76
5.2 The “Sophoclean” oath (I.C. Torrance)  86
5.3 “Of cabbages and kings”: the Eideshort phenomenon
(I.C. Torrance)  111
6 Ways to give oaths extra sanctity (I.C. Torrance)  132
6.1 Sanctifying witnesses and significant locations  132
6.2 Oath-sacrifices  138
6.3 Gestures, libations, and unusual sanctifying features  143
6.4 Multiple sanctifying features  149
7 Oaths, gender and status  156
7.1 Women and oaths (J. Fletcher)  156
7.2 Servile swearing (A.J. Bayliss)  179
7.3 The oaths of the gods (I.C. Torrance)  195
8 Oaths and characterization: two Homeric case studies
(L.A. Kozak)  213
8.1 Achilles  213
8.2 Odysseus  222
VIII   Preface
9 Oratory and rhetoric (A.H. Sommerstein)  230
10 “Artful dodging”, or the sidestepping of oaths
(A.J. Bayliss except as stated)  240
10.1 The difficulty of proving an oath false: the case of Euripides’ Cyclops
(I.C. Torrance)  240
10.2 The concept of sidestepping  243
10.3 “The art of Autolycus”: extremely careful wording to conceal the
truth  256
10.4 The “Thracian pretence”  259
10.5 Capturing the commander  262
10.6 Other careful or dubious interpretation of wording: agreements that
end sieges  265
10.7 Substitution  266
10.8 False foundations  270
10.9 Dodging the “blank-cheque” oath  273
10.10 What does this evidence tell us about Greek attitudes to
sidestepped oaths?  276
10.11 Conclusions  279
11 The binding power of oaths  281
11.1 Were oaths always totally binding? (A.H. Sommerstein)  281
11.2 The oaths of lovers (A.H. Sommerstein)  287
11.3 The tongue and the mind: responses to Euripides, Hippolytus 612
(I.C. Torrance)  289
12 Responses to perjury  295
12.1 Divine responses (I.C. Torrance)  295
12.2 Human responses (K. Konstantinidou)  303
13 The informal oath (A.H. Sommerstein)  315
13.1 How informal oaths are used  315
Appendix: swearing by Hera  326
13.2 How binding were informal oaths? The case of Aristophanes’
Clouds  331
13a Swearing oaths in the authorial person (I.C. Torrance)  348
13a.1 The orators  348
13a.2 Pindar and other poets  349
Preface   IX
13a.3 Xenophon  360
13a.4 Three more authorial oaths in prose texts  367
13a.5 Conclusions  368
14 The Hippocratic Oath (I.C. Torrance)  372
15 The decline of the oath? (A.H. Sommerstein)  381
Bibliography  394
Index locorum  413
Subject index  445
Abbreviations
Abbreviations not listed below are as in LSJ (H.G. Liddell / R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon9, rev.
H. Stuart Jones [Oxford, 1940] with Revised Supplement ed. P.G.W. Glare [Oxford, 1996]) or OCD4
(S. Hornblower / A.J.S. Spawforth / E. Eidinow (eds.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary4 [Oxford,
2012]), except that some names of ancient authors and works are abbreviated in a fuller form
than in these publications.
[Apoll.] pseudo-Apollodorus (the mythographer)
Ath.Pol. (if cited without author’s name) the Athēnaiōn Politeia ascribed to
Aristotle
BIWK G. Petzl, Die Beichtinschriften Westkleinasiens (Bonn, 1994)
CA Classical Antiquity
CID Corpus des inscriptions de Delphes (Paris, 1977‒2002)
CP Classical Philology
CSCA California Studies in Classical Antiquity
DTA R. Wünsch, Defixionum Tabellae Atticae (= IG iii, part 3) (Berlin, 1897)
ED M. Segre, Iscrizioni di Cos (Rome, 1993)
EMC Échos du Monde Classique / Classical Views
h.Dem., h. Herm., etc. Homeric Hymn to Demeter, to Hermes, etc.
Horkos A.H. Sommerstein / J. Fletcher (eds.), Horkos: the oath in Greek
society (Exeter, 2007)
HSCP Harvard Studies in Classical Philology
IPArk G. Thür / H. Taeuber, Prozeßrechtliche Inschriften der griechischen
Poleis: Arkadien (Vienna, 1994)
Lyc. Leocr. Lycurgus [not Lycophron], Against Leocrates
Prov. Coisl. Proverbia e codice Coisliniano n. 177, in: T. Gaisford, Paroemiographi
Graeci (Oxford, 1836), 121ff.
RO P.J. Rhodes / R.G. Osborne, Greek Historical Inscriptions, 404‒323
B.C. (Oxford, 2003)
Σ scholium or scholia
S&B A.H. Sommerstein / A.J. Bayliss, Oath and State in Ancient Greece
(Berlin, 2013)
WD Works and Days (Hesiod)