In Search of Lost Gods
Tales of Greek sexual cheating and election by democratic lot
Mary Beard has begun a new series of BBC radio programmes. In each episode of Being Greek, the Cambridge historian examines a character from ancient Athens or the city-state’s environs with the aim of glimpsing the lives of ordinary folk, not the elite. Beard is an excellent broadcaster, leading the listener along paths littered with revelations and uncertainties, deploying a style that is at once conversational and curious.
There is only one problem with the programmes, so far. You learn more about modern elite attitudes to the ancient world than you do about the lives of ordinary people in the ancient world itself.
Just why has been well articulated by another historian of ancient Greece, Greg Anderson. In his book, The Realness of Things Past, he asks why modern historians overlook and marginalise the central and most obvious feature of ancient Greek life - and almost any premodern way of life, in fact. That feature is the intimate, seamless way that people lived with God or the gods.
This pervasive piety is absent in Beard’s first programme and sidelined in the second, which is doubly striking as that one features the life of the remarkable, fifth century BC priestess, Myrrhine.
She achieved high office, possibly becoming the most important person in Athens, as Athenians would have viewed it, when, by democratic lot, she became priestess of Athena Nike. As Plato later noted in his dialogue the Laws: the application of a lottery to decide sacred offices was intended to leave the ultimate choice to the gods and avoid social friction. And the lot fell on her. But there is more.
Myrrhine’s name also belongs to the shrub, myrtle. That plant was used to weave ceremonial crowns worn by temple officials. The fact that a woman named “Sacred Myrtle” became the city’s war-victory temple guardian was celebrated as a direct indicator that the gods much approved: she was called, in truth, by “divine fortune”, her surviving gravestone insists.
Myrrhine held the office for life. Her priesthood and person united the newer democracy and older theocracy; her significance was enormous. But we learnt none of that in the radio programme. Instead, Beard focused on what power Myrrhine exercised when at home, at the end of a day, away from the temple - with the explicit implication being: not much. Only again, that reading of things is not right, for reasons highlighted by the absences of the first episode.
The setting for the opener to the series is another temple, the source material provided not by a gravestone but a speech. The celebrated Greek rhetorician, Lysias, penned a legal defence to be read in the temple of the Delphinion at the sacred trial of Euphiletos. He was up for killing the adulterer Eratosthenes whom he had found in a bed, at his home, with his wife. What was missing from Beard’s account this time was the framing of the defence. The adultery was a violation of the sanctity of the household, an act of sacrilege, and Anderson’s analysis reveals why that matters.
He points out that ancient life was not shaped by modern abstractions, such as rights, the state or the economy, but by participation in a living ecology located in actual places, inhabited by interdependent households, mortal creatures, and gods. Divine agents were experienced as actively constitutive of everyday existence, not merely as useful fictions to bolster all-too-human claims to position or authority, as the modern worldview is inclined to interpret them. Moreover, decolonising this interpretation of the past is fascinating - bringing us back to the significance of the household.
It was central to ancient democracy. Athenians were much concerned with the power of the “demos”, the demos not being a population of individuals with inalienable rights, but instead regarded as a single organism composed of households operating within an active, multifaceted cosmos. Citizens did not come together to decide on matters of war or justice as if they were an atomised group of individuals needing to reach a compromise, for they knew themselves already to be a unity born of the gods and the land. Voting, say, was a way of determining how to act well and democratic activity in general was not monopolised by the agency of voting freemen but was exercised by collaborating networks of households.
With that women played central, crucial roles, a corollary of households being the parts that made the Athenian whole, not male individuals. Women’s domestic roles were not, therefore, a negation of their agency, as the word “domestic” implies in an age in which the domestic is relegated to the private and away from the public sphere. Instead, women, even when at home after a day in the temple, were of immense consequence.
Managing neighbourhood and household activities such as manufacturing, buying and selling, was part of it, as was the physical and spiritual care of land. These were central “democratic” tasks. Women could not speak in courts of law, as Beard points out in her programme, but that does not mean they did not have a voice, for legal disputes involved the protection of the household, in which women played an integral part. To put it another way: the presence or absence of an individual in a certain sphere like the courts is not a good indicator of the presence or absence of their agency.
Similarly, although there was an ideal of gender separation amongst aristocrats, designed to keep respectable women, well, respectable - a feature of so-called homosocial cultures - this needs to be judged alongside the involvement of women in the household.
That, too, was about mediation with the divine, for domestic rituals, alongside temple ones, were crucial to the survival of city life. A “politis”, or female citizen, might serve as a priestess or, more commonly, as the leader of numerous other religious activities, from seasonal festivals to daily rites. Even very wealthy households, which were relatively few in number, would not have thought of their wealth as private but rather to be spent on the common, supernatural (to us) good as an inseparable and continuous part of life.
Of course: people were not equal in the modern sense but that was because personal identity was shared to an extent hard now to imagine and, although that sharing would not be acceptable or desirable today, this does not mean Athenian women were, in effect, helpless victims or lesser citizens. Brutality and injustice existed for sure, as well, but must be understood from within the imaginary of these sacred realities. That lost sphere is the core challenge of contemplating now what it was to be an ancient Greek.
Consider another tricky subject, slavery, and the distinctly uncomfortable matter of the evidence of slaves only being admissible in courts after the torture of the enslaved witness. In her first programme, Beard interprets this practice as an irrational form of sadism - irrational because Athenians also knew that evidence sought under torture was far from reliable. So why do it, if not for reasons of straightforward cruelty?
But, as Anderson points out, if the meaning of the demos is held in mind, the torture of slaves has a rational basis, for all that it is repugnant now. Slaves were regarded as a facet of the household unit, too, a part that could be violated so as to avoid spiritual pollution or the anger of the gods. A curse would be visited upon the household if knowledge of transgressions was withheld because transgressions against the household were desecrations. So, torture was not a cruel and odd exception to an otherwise admirable Athenian humanism, anymore than only freemen having the franchise was a peculiar oversight in a city-state that valued democracy. Rather, the practice was deemed proper for the resolution of wrongs that deeply mattered to the demos and the gods - and, of course, trying to understand the practice is not to excuse it, but is better than merely dismissing it.
In the case of Euphiletos, Eratosthenes and the adultery, another detail absent from Beard’s account is illuminating. In his defence, Euphiletos stresses that he killed Eratosthenes before Eratosthenes reached the hearth, which was a place of household sanctuary. This was important to his case so that the sacrilege of the adultery was not eclipsed by the sacrilege that killing Eratosthenes at the hearth would have perpetrated. Further, Euphiletos argued that he was acting on behalf of the demos in protecting his household, and so the institution of the household, too, which is not merely a cynical claim to win over a pliable jury, but a reasonable one that other Athenians would have understood.
Ancient Athenians become strange. Then they can challenge us, not be treated as people who would be improved by ethical ideals that emerged millennia later in very different times and places. They might even be seen as human beings who knew how to relate to aspects of reality of which the modern mind knows not. This matters because the weirdness and complexity is expansive, reseeding a spiritually-denuded culture. Conversely, if you sieve human history, you do a disservice to the imagination. Put the gods down to superstition, so as to focus on modern preoccupations with power or sexual misadventure, and an opportunity to tell a different, more difficult story is lost.
Beard’s infectious curiosity is constrained by puzzling over why ancient life does not conform to modern standards, generating her trademark mix of interest, amusement and disgust; ancient Greeks are assessed as if people like us. But there is an alternative approach, which rarer historians like Anderson can inspire. With that, curiosity can range freely, venturing further, towards other worlds. Then, being Greek is seen not as a version of modern life that is judged and found wanting, but as fascinating: a radical counterpoint to modernity, not a flawed anticipation or faint echo.
I will listen to future programmes and ask whether the piety is discounted or explained so as to explain it away. Or might the realness of things past be treated yet as a remarkable participation in a cosmic ecology?
I think Beard must half know that her approach closes a portal into an almost lost universe, for the second programme contained a moment of reflection on her mode of analysis. The tendency to substitute the gods with anachronistic worries about status and power was gently challenged by one expert with whom Beard spoke. Nick Lowe pressed: “We shouldn’t try to colonise those silences with our own fantasies.” Beard nervously chuckled. “Is that a lesson for me, Nick, the great coloniser with her own fantasies?”
She was right. There was a time in which the gods lived. Where might we travel if we regarded once more divine realms as real?
JULY DATES FOR YOUR DIARY!
Inside the Mind of William Blake, 5th July, Bradford Literary Festival, Bradford
Art & the Sacred Today 7th July, a conversation with Rupert Sheldrake, The Garrison Chapel, London
Wisdom and Psyche, 10th July, I’m speaking at this day conference, Blackfriars, Oxford
The Idler Festival, 11th–12th July, Fenton House, London, I will be talking therapy and, with Robert Rowland Smith, offering a Philosophy Slam!
Thank you. I find good food for thought here, helpful for developing discernment in the present, for restoring wholeness in the wake of devastation.
Really enjoyed that, thank you.