Alexander Boris de Pericles Johnson

Alexander may be the given first name of the United Kingdom’s new Prime Minister, but he prefers himself to look to Athens rather than Macedon for political inspiration. During the Tory leadership campaign, at least, during the now famous TalkRadio interview in which he professed to a hitherto unsuspected bus-painting hobby, Johnson said (to use the transcription on the TalkRadio website):

I’ve always greatly admired Pericles of Athens because he was the guy who said, uh, that politics was about the many, not the few. He was the first to use exactly that… a great orator. And, uh, he, uh, it was said that he thundered and lightened when he spoke. But what he did is he used great infrastructure. He invested in fantastic infrastructure. Uh, he developed the, the, not just the Acropolis, but the Piraeus port which was integral to the success of a lot of Athens.

Nor was this the first campaign during which Johnson invoked the name of Pericles. According to a feature in the Spectator magazine in May 2016, Johnson ‘contends that Pericles, the great Athenian statesman he so often cites, would also have been an Outer. Boris argues that “to stick up for democracy is entirely Periclean” and that the referendum ultimately comes down to whether you believe in “rule by the many, not the few”’. Johnson is said, moreover, to have a bust of Pericles in his office.

Boris Johnson has been eager to play up his classical connections, as in this 2011 Mail on Sunday article

Johnson’s Periclean self-projection has unsurprisingly been picked up ‒ and tweaked ‒ in newspaper discussion on his leadership. Patrick Kidd in the Times wrote a piece the other day entitled ‘Boris Johnson could prove more of a chancer than his hero Pericles’. In this column he referred to the TalkRadio interview, writing: ‘Asked recently why he so admires Pericles, Johnson said that the Greek believed government should be conducted “by the many, not the few” (a phrase subtly different from “for the many”), that he was a magnificent orator who “thundered and lightened when he spoke” and that he “invested in fantastic infrastructure”.’ Kidd then develops the thesis that Johnson may be more of an Alcibiades ‒ arrogant, spoiled, charismatic to some, a disaster to Athens. The same suggestion is made by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian. The more learned of the online comments go a bit further and invoke the name of Cleon.

Two names stand out in these discussions for their absence: Thucydides and Plutarch, the two key authors through whom we derive our varied pictures of Pericles and his successors. The public debate carries on as if we have unmediated access to the world of Athenian politics. Our main sources, however, make Pericles central to strong historical plots, and it is they who are responsible for the words which are sometimes attributed to Pericles himself.

Plutarch’s Life of Pericles adds a dimension not found in Johnson’s idealization of Pericles: time. Plutarch posits a change between the early and the late Pericles – a change from a more demagogic to a more aristocratic mode of government. This change solves the problem of the divergence between the Thucydidean and Platonic image of Pericles: the negative Platonic image of Pericles’ pandering to the people is restricted to the early portion of Pericles’ life; for the later stages, Plutarch explicitly supports the Thucydidean picture of a Pericles who resists the people’s whims.

Johnson recuperates as positive much that in Plutarch is highly ambivalent. The imagery of thunder and lightning applied to Pericles’ rhetoric is taken from Plutarch, via the comic playwright Aristophanes’ Acharnians. In Aristophanes, the presentation of Pericles’ powers of persuasion is highly negative. He is arraigned for using his linguistic skills to foist the disruption of the Peloponnesian War on the Greeks, and all for petty personal motives. Similarly ambivalent in Plutarch is the presentation of Pericles’ spending on infrastructure. Though Plutarch acknowledges the beauty of the temples that Pericles had built, he also reports strong criticisms of Pericles for spending the allies’ financial contributions on beautifying Athens like a ‘vain woman’.

As for the language of the many and the few, the source for that lies in the famous funeral speech that Thucydides places in the mouth of Pericles during the first year of the Peloponnesian War. In this speech (written up by Thucydides perhaps a quarter of a century or more after it was supposedly delivered), Pericles is made to say that Athens is called a democracy because it is governed ‘for the many rather than for the few’. Pericles’ language is in fact evoked most closely by the slogan of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party in the party’s 2017 election manifesto. But in Thucydides’ speech Pericles grants democracy this definition as a concession. He explains that Athens’ constitution is called a democracy because it respects the interests of the many, but he immediately qualifies this claim by stressing that it allows individuals to achieve a status that matches their personal excellence. It is a definition that prepares for Thucydides’ own claim that Athens under Pericles was in name a democracy but in fact rule by the first man. Pericles, on Thucydides’ reading, had the strength to resist the changing moods of the people (he notably fails to call an assembly when he sees that they are angry at the immediate results of the Peloponnesians’ first invasion of Attica).

Would Pericles have been an ‘outer’? Obviously not … but perhaps it is better to dismiss that question as an anachronistic absurdity. A more productive use of anachronism may be to explore the similarities and differences between Pericles’ imperial Athens, imposing standardized measures on the subject allies that she (in Thucydides’ view) tyrannically enslaved, and the fantasy image of Brussels cooked up by irresponsible journalists like the young Johnson. Anachronisms aside, it is worth dwelling on (Thucydides’) Pericles’ boast that his generation handed down a city more powerful than the one it inherited, and wondering on the prospects that future historians will say the same of the United Kingdom during its current rule by a Conservative and Unionist Party controlled by the products of 1980s Oxford.

References

• https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/boris-johnson-could-prove-more-of-a-chancer-than-his-hero-pericles-p6x8bdl77
• https://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/05/boris-to-dave-somehow-or-other-weve-got-to-have-debates/
• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/27/boris-johnson-no-10-pericles-greek-hero
• For more on Brexit and anachronism, see the blogpost Down with anachronism: March 29, 2019

• In a 2011 feature for the Mail on Sunday, as shown in the screenshot above, Johnson offered a section of the Funeral Speech given by Thucydides’ Pericles as one of his favourite Greek quotes, although readers should note that in this ghost-written piece placed to support an educational initiative, the task of finding the actual Greek quotes was outsourced to a member of the Anachronism team.

Down with anachronism: March 29, 2019

The good news: Team Anachronism aka RAP aka Tim Rood, Carol Atack, Tom Phillips (with much help from fellow member MU aka Mathura Umachandran) has today submitted a full draft of Anachronism and Antiquity to Bloomsbury Academic: on time in our internal chronology (mental deadline: March 2019); four weeks late had we read the small print in our contract. Call it timely or untimely, the book will be published next year.

One indication of the topic’s timeliness might be thought to lie in two uses of the word ‘anachronism’ in the New York Review of Books in the month in which our project began. The Irish novelist John Banville wrote that the character of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles-based private detective Philip Marlowe ‘appears to us now an anachronism’, owing to his ‘unflagging decency’ as well as ‘the insouciance with which he shows off his chauvinism, his racism, his contempt for “fairies”, and of course his misogyny’. In branding Marlowe an ‘anachronism’ for displaying what are in fact generally seen as the dominant masculine attitudes of the time of his creation, Banville uses the word in a way which (though not uncommon) extends conventional dictionary definitions of the word. The language of anachronism is most commonly applied to people who cling to attitudes and practices that have gone out of fashion, or to those attitudes and practices themselves. Applied to works of fiction, it is still generally used with a historicizing sensitivity, in relation to the period described within the fiction. Since John Banville wrote that review, however, revelations of the mores of contemporary Hollywood have raised the question of just how much of an anachronism Marlowe is.

Humphrey Bogart (as Philip Marlowe) and Lauren Bacall (as Vivian Sternwood Rutledge) in The Big Sleep, 1946.

In whatever domain it is applied, ‘anachronism’ implies a judgement on the direction of history. The politics of anachronism are laid bare with particular clarity when, in the same issue of the NYRB, the historian Keith Thomas observes that subscribers to the ‘resurgent nationalism’ that lay behind the Brexit vote ‘seemed not to appreciate that the idea of an absolutely sovereign nation-state is an anachronism’. Subscribers to that nationalism have clung to their delusion with such insistence that Keith Thomas’ judgement on the course of history itself might seem anachronistic (witness the cover pages of today’s UK tabloids). And in the meantime the period of our project has seen an upsurge of the sort of appeal to ancient exemplarity that some philosophers of history regard as an anachronism in the age of historicism: Thucydides is drawn on for insights as Britain sets out on its Sicilian Expedition, as the chances of staging another vote à la Mytilene Debate are discussed, and as patriots are called traitors.

There is a wood-panelled pub near Anachronism Headquarters which prides itself on a rather old-fashioned ambience: it is not unknown for customers to be told the price of their pint in guineas and shillings. It has a small but pleasant and leafy outdoor area at the back, a pleasant place to meet for a drink (especially on balmy days such as today). Two or three days before 23 June 2016, I met a MSt student there to celebrate his result. Someone at the bar asked the landlord how he was going to vote in the coming referendum. “OUT” was the loud reply.

Proposed 50p coin to mark 29 March 2019.

I will not be going to this pub to celebrate the submission of the book manuscript (the term ‘manuscript’ thankfully being an anachronistic survival); indeed I have not set foot in the pub since that day. The features that seemed quaint now seem grotesque, smacking of the worst sort of nostalgia. So on this of all days ‒ b******s to Brexit, down with anachronism, long live Anachronism and Antiquity.

References

• Banville, ‘Philip Marlowe’s revolution’, New York Review of Books, 27 October 2016, 38-9 at 39.
• K. Thomas, ‘Will they really leave, and how?’, New York Review of Books, 27 October 2016, 40-1 at 41.
• ‘50p Brexit coin from the Royal Mint‘, Numismag, 30 October 2018.
• Royal Mint Brexit coin page.

Herodotus’ conspiracy narrative: time episodic, relative, and absolute

I’ve been meaning for a while to write a blog about the current episode in British political life (relatively awful or absolutely the pits?). This is not it.

In Book 3 of his Histories, Herodotus reports a crisis in the Persian empire. King Cambyses has had his brother Smerdis secretly murdered and then gone on an expedition against Egypt. In his absence, two brothers, one of them called Smerdis, from the Median priestly caste of Magi, usurp the throne, with Smerdis pretending to be Cambyses’ brother of the same name. Cambyses dies in Syria, after a reign of seven years and five months. After the imposters have reigned for seven months, a group of conspirators forms to overthrow them. As the conspirators move towards the palace, Herodotus interrupts the narrative to describe events taking place at the same time in the court. The usurpers try to persuade Prexaspes, a courtier who had been given the task of killing Cambyses’ brother, to proclaim openly his support for the usurper Smerdis. But things do not go according to their plan. Prexaspes, addressing the Persians from a tower, exposes the Magi’s deception to the crowd and then kills himself by throwing himself from the tower. This dramatic event happens just as the conspirators are reaching the palace. Herodotus then switches back to them: forcefully led by Darius, they gain entry to the palace and complete the job (3.69‒79).

The Behistun inscription provides another source for the story of Darius’ rise to power (Mount Behistun, Iran).

Herodotus’ account of this incident receives detailed treatment in Donald J. Wilcox’s 1987 monograph The Measures of Time Past – a work that has influenced a number of scholars of anachronism ancient and modern. Wilcox’s book is based on a distinction between ‘relative time’, which prevailed until Newton, and ‘absolute time’, which was uncovered by Newtonian physics. In relative time, events themselves create their own time-frame. In absolute time, there is a time-line that contains the events. Absolute time is ‘objective, continuous, all-embracing’; in Newton’s own words, it flows ‘equably without regard to anything external’. Wilcox fleshes out this model further by tracing a path from relative to absolute time through figures such as Augustine, Bede and Scaliger, the final step before Newton being the invention of the BC/AD system ‒ a system founded on ‘a single, continuous, and linear time frame’ which proved ‘fit for the use of those who accepted the notion of absolute time’.

Wilcox sees Herodotus’ account of the conspiracy as an example of ‘episodic time’ ‒ a form of relative time which was ‘discontinuous, emphasizing process rather than the progressive building of events on one another’, and in which ‘the exact temporal order was not an important factor in the process that produced the final result’. He describes the account as episodic because he finds it impossible that Herodotus had a grasp of the temporal order of the events: how could the conspirators have entered the palace after the death of Prexaspes? Herodotus, he concludes, ‘was willing to sacrifice neither story to the demands of a linear sequence and had available a sense of time which allowed him to keep both’: ‘the determining factor … was the moral and social context of the events’ ‒ in this case ‘the remoteness of the eastern kings’, ‘the arrogance and intrigue of the court’, and ‘the boldness and decisiveness’ of Darius.

Wilcox’s argument helpfully stresses the cultural contingency of systems of time-measurement: he allows that our own dating system ‘would have been as inaccurate in the eyes of Herodotus and Thucydides as their relative dating is primitive in ours’. But there are historical and conceptual problems in his arguments, and problems, too, in the way that he reads the ancient historians.

Let us first return to Herodotus’ conspiracy narrative. One problem with Wilcox’s reading is that he ignores the clear explanation in Herodotus’ narrative of how the conspirators were able to gain entry to the palace: it was their high status that won over the guards. Herodotus also suggests that they enjoy some form of divine assistance, revealed by an omen. Wilcox ignores, too, the fact that the conspirators realize that Prexaspes’ action endangers their plan and that the eunuchs in the palace, once they realize what has happened, threaten the guards with dire punishment. Herodotus highlights the very problem that Wilcox claims he ignores because of his sense of ‘episodic time’.

Wilcox’s reading of Herodotus’ account ignores the strong thematic links that bind the parallel narratives together. The most important theme relates to truth and lies. (As I said, this is not about Brexit.) Darius tells his fellow conspirators that he will offer a lie (fake news from the king) to ensure that they can pass into the palace; he suggests that people tell the truth or lie entirely in accordance with their self-interest. Prexaspes’ self-sacrifice in telling the truth at the cost of his own life offers at least a partial modification of Darius’ sophistic assertion. (Oxford has some towers, too…)

What of Wilcox’s general notion of relative and absolute time? The main historical problem lies in his account of BC/AD dating. He repeats the common contention that this ‘absolute’ system was invented by the French Jesuit Denis Pétau (Dionysius Petavius) in his 1627 Opus de doctrina temporum. In fact, datings before Christ’s birth are already attested (albeit rarely) in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, written in the eighth century (Caesar crossed to Britain ‘in the sixtieth year before the incarnation of the Lord’). They become more common in the thirteenth century, and by the fifteenth they appear in graphic timelines (e.g. as the Carthusian Werner Rolevinck’s Fasciculus temporum (1474)). Prior to Petavius, Scaliger discussed the shortcomings of ‘ante Christum’ dating by contrast with his own Julian Period ‒ a period of 7980 years based on a 28-year solar cycle, a 19-year lunar cycle and a 15-year indiction cycle ‒ which provides a continuous timeline well adapted for astronomical calculations (and is indeed still used for this purpose). The shortcomings of BC dating were recognized by Petavius too: he explained that he included BC dates only for those who might be scared of the unfamiliar Julian Period, but he makes the Julian Period his main chronological anchor. It is true that BC dates were used by Newton in his posthumous Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) ‒ but he also uses the Julian Period for an astronomical calculation. It was the nineteenth-century discovery of the age of the planet that rendered it (and rivals such as anno mundi dating) less useful (even though Scaliger conceived of the possibility of an infinity of earlier Julian Periods).

The conceptual problems in Wilcox’s model spring from his failure to distinguish between the measurement of time and time itself. With the ancient historians he looks at how time is presented in narratives; with Newton he explores ideas of time. And yet Newton’s time is in some ways not too far removed from some Greek conceptions of chronos ‒ which some classicists describe as an ‘absolute time’ by contrast with aiōn, ‘relative time’ (e.g. Collard on Euripides Suppliant Women 787‒8). Chronos is as universal as Newton’s ‘all-embracing’ time: ‘“all things” are regularly the target of time’s activity’ (Finglass on Sophocles Ajax 646‒7); it is ‘unwearying’, and ‘full in its ever-flowing stream it goes its round begetting itself’ (Critias TrGF 43 F 3.1‒3); it ‘has no father’ (Euripides fr. 303), but is itself the ‘ancient father of days’ (Euripides Suppliant Women 787‒8). In a comparative study of ancient Near Eastern cultures, Sacha Stern has indeed suggested that the ancient Greeks were unusually aware of the continuity of chronos as a separate entity.

Ideas about time, whether expressed through the imagery of a Greek poets or in Newton’s slightly more precise language, do not bear on the way time is measured. There is no such thing as an absolute chronology suitable for absolute time. All ways of measuring time are relative, and BC/AD dating is no more appropriate for Newtonian time than any other system of calculating years relative to a single point, including many of the systems used in Greco-Roman antiquity. If the term ‘absolute chronology’ is to be used at all, it should refer to a system which specifies the time in which events occur in relation to an external system (‘the first year of the twenty-third Olympiad’) rather than in relation to previous events (‘next year’).

Wilcox’s conception of absolute time seems as flawed, then, as his reading of Herodotus’ conspiracy narrative. And yet it is undeniable that Herodotus’ Histories do at times have an episodic quality ‒ and that occasionally his choices about where to reveal important information seem to us strange. Indeed, Wilcox’s analysis of ‘episodic time’ in Herodotus would have been better served by looking at the placement of other information that seems germane to the conspiracy and its aftermath. In his speech to the Persians before he jumps off the tower, Prexaspes retells the genealogy of the Achaemenids (the royal Persian line) as a way of asserting the correct order of rule in the empire. Much earlier in his work, Herodotus has told how Cyrus, the founder of the Persian empire, had a dream in which Darius’ rise to power was foreshadowed; and in recounting this dream Herodotus reveals that Darius himself is an Achaemenid (1.209). And yet Darius’ supposed Achaemenid descent plays absolutely no role in the conspiracy narrative ‒ even though it would have been highly relevant to Darius’ arguments for monarchy in the ensuing ‘constitutional debate’ (3.82). Darius is presented instead (as Wilcox notes) as a chancer who is last to join the conspiracy and whose ruthlessness and cynicism prove decisive in its success.

Wilcox does, then, capture something of the effect of reading Herodotus. But it is still questionable whether it is appropriate to speak of ‘episodic time’ ‒ as opposed to ‘episodic narrative’. Herodotus’ failure to integrate the whole of Darius’ past in a single story-line is not a cognitive clue to his sense of time but a sign, rather, of the extraordinary complexity and variety of the material that he was attempting to integrate and of the narrative artistry with which he nonetheless succeeded in shaping it.

References

S. Stern, Time and process in ancient Judaism (Oxford, 2003).
D. J. Wilcox, The measures of time past (Chicago, 1987).

For BC dating, see A.-D. von den Brincken, ‘Beobachtungen zum Aufkommen der retrospektiven Inkarnationsära’, Archiv für Diplomatik 25 (1979) 1‒20.

• For a suggestion of how Herodotus’ story could be brought to bear on the current political crisis see Edith Hall’s post ‘Leadership Crisis Lessons from Ancient Persia’ on her Edithorial blog.

Rabelais, Erasmus, and the crisis of exemplarity

‘Was Rabelais an atheist?’ That was the question that the Annales historian Lucien Febvre set out to interrogate in his 1942 monograph The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century. His response has become a classic expression of the dangers of applying later conceptions and terminology to earlier historical periods:

‘When dealing with sixteenth-century men and ideas, when dealing with modes of wishing, feeling, thinking, and believing that bear sixteenth-century arms, the problem is to determine what set of precautions to take and what rules to follow in order to avoid the worst of all sins, the sin that cannot be forgiven – anachronism.’

For Febvre, Rabelais exemplified the impossibility of atheism in his historical milieu.

Whatever the case with Rabelais’ (non-)atheism, many historians would be reluctant to rely on so firm a notion of what was historically possible within any given period. Periods, after all, are heuristic tools, and many different historical rhythms can be identified at any one time. We can helpfully pursue these thoughts here by looking at the shifting rhythms of exemplarity in the work of Rabelais himself.

Historians interested in conceptions of the past often present the Renaissance as a decisive turning-point. An increasing sensitivity to anachronism is thought to have led to the collapse of ancient modes of exemplarity based on the idea of an unchanging human nature. According to many accounts, the hold that exemplarity exercised on the early modern imagination proved to be self-defeating. When people actually attempted to put the theoretical model into practice by imitating the ancients (whether in literature, law, or military tactics), the outcome was a much stronger appreciation of their historical distance from antiquity.

A further weakening of the model of exemplarity arose from the profusion and complexity of ancient exempla. Collections of different exempla led to a more nuanced sense of their various historical contexts. They also revealed that some individuals were credited with conflicting character traits ‒ a particular problem given that metonymy was one of the dominant modes of exemplarity: if the very name of an ancient figure such as Alexander was shorthand for particular qualities, what to do when those qualities included drunkenness and lust as well as courage and daring?

The contrast between Christianity and paganism is seen as another important facet of the Renaissance crisis of exemplarity. Important reflections on this religious contrast are found in Rabelais’ comic masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel (published between 1532 and 1552) as well as in one of Rabelais’ inspirations, the writings of the Dutch humanist Erasmus. Rabelais presents a council scene in which the bad king Picrochole (‘Bitter bile’) is told by his rash advisers that if he pursues wars of aggression he will become ‘the most sprightly and knightly prince there ever has been since the death of Alexander of Macedonia’. Suggesting that he divide his army, the advisers then plot out step by step the conquests he should seek (they even start alluding to those conquests in the past tense, as if anticipating that they have already happened). At one point Picrochole suggests that he should rebuild the temple of Solomon once he has conquered Jerusalem, but his advisers tell him not to rush: ‘Do you know what Octavian Augustus used to say? Hasten slowly. It behoves you first to hold Asia Minor, Caria, Lycia, Cilicia, Lydia, Phrygia, Bithynia, Carrasia, Satalia …’

The Plus Ultra device of Emperor Charles V with the Pillars of Hercules, here displayed on the Town Hall (Ayuntamiento) of Seville, Spain

Thus far Rabelais’ scene seems to show the power of ancient models of military conquest. The allusion to Alexander is a hit at the imperial ambitions of the Hapsburg emperor Charles V. Charles promoted comparisons with Alexander and other ancient models: his device Plus ultra (‘More beyond’) showed two columns, standing for the Pillars of Hercules, which in antiquity were emblems of the limits of the world, but had now been superseded by Charles’ conquests in Mexico and Peru. Rabelais’ satire may also be expressed through imitation of a literary model, the speech in Herodotus (5.49) where Aristagoras of Miletus tries to persuade the Spartans to invade Asia Minor by listing the successive stages of the conquest (Rabelais had translated parts of Herodotus).
The Christian twist to the exemplary model comes after Picrochole’s predictable defeat. The Alexander allusion is recalled as the wise giant-king Grandgousier rebukes an envoy sent by Picrochole:

The time has passed for such conquering of kingdoms to the harm of our Christian brothers and neighbours. Such imitation of ancient heroes – Hercules, Alexander, Hannibal, Scipio, Caesar and so on – is contrary to the teaching of our Gospel, by which we are each commanded to guard, save, rule and manage his own realms and lands, and never aggressively to invade those of others. And what the Saracens and Barbarians once dubbed prowess we now call brigandage and evil-doing.

The sense of change is strengthened by the fact that even the non-Christians Saracens no longer approve of vainglorious dreams of conquest.

Rabelais’ account of Picrochole’s ambitions is a brilliant re-working of themes found in the moral and educational writings of Erasmus. The saying of Augustus to which Picrochole’s counsellors allude ‒ ‘hasten slowly’, festina lente ‒ is the subject of a long discussion in Erasmus’ Adages (a miscellany of discussions of ancient proverbs originally published in 1508); Rabelais seems to expose its dangerous malleability by putting it in the mouth of speakers themselves more intent on haste than caution. Besides the Adages, Rabelais was picking up Erasmus’ 1516 work Institutio Principis Christiani (The Education of a Christian Prince). Erasmus there warns that the ancient historians have to be read ‘forearmed and selectively’ rather than as storehouses of useful advice:

‘Both Herodotus and Xenophon were pagans and very often present the worst type of prince, even if they wrote history for the purpose of … portraying the image of an outstanding leader.’

Erasmus then turns his attention to the characters the historians depict: ‘when you hear of Xerxes, Cyrus, Darius, or Julius, do not let the prestige of a great name seize you: you are hearing of great and raging bandits.’ Rabelais’ re-working of Erasmus is the more pointed because Erasmus’ educational treatise had been dedicated to the young Charles V.

Reading Erasmus and Rabelais should caution us against constructing too strong an antithesis between classical antiquity and the Christian era. Erasmus openly acknowledges that his condemnation of ‘bandits’ is taken from the Stoic author Seneca (De Beneficiis 2.18.6). And Rabelais’ council scene includes an ‘old nobleman’ Echephron (‘Prudent’) who objects to the planned conquests with an argument that is lifted directly from the mouth of the counsellor Cineas in chapter 14 of Plutarch’s Life of Pyrrhus: when Pyrrhus/Picrochole, prompted to explain his final goal after all the toils of military conquest, replies that they will then rest at their ease, Cineas/Echephron asks why they do not take their rest straightaway without exposing themselves to danger first. There are also classical precedents for Grandgousier’s analysis of the change in the moral evaluation of aggressive warfare from ‘prowess’ to ‘brigandage’: Thucydides, for example, observes that brigandage was not disavowed by characters in the Homeric poems and was still in his own day honoured in remote parts of Greece that clung to the old ways (1.5).

Looking deeper into the rhetoric of exemplarity in the Renaissance unsettles, then, some of the over-simple polarities used in the construction of intellectual history. And as our project progresses, we will be using anachronism to unsettle scholarly complacency further as we explore the temporal schisms that lurk just below the surface of the ancient discourse of exemplarity.

Anchoring Innovation

It might seem fanciful to claim that the project ‘Anchoring Innovation’, now underway in Classics departments in the Netherlands following a major government grant, addresses some of the same themes as our Leverhulme-funded ‘Anachronism and Antiquity’. It appears odd, after all, to speak of ‘innovation’ and ‘anachronism’ in the same breath. But what makes this claim valid are the implications of the term ‘anchoring’.

The aims of the ‘Anchoring Innovation’ project are set out in a programmatic paper by Ineke Sluiter published in the European Review. The goal, Sluiter writes, is ‘to identify how people in Antiquity dealt with change in ways that allowed them to feel an unbroken sense of self, identity, group cohesion and cultural belonging within the different and certainly not monolithic entities that made up ancient society.’ Through the metaphor of ‘anchoring’, the project seeks to analyse how the past clings on even amidst innovation.

Sluiter offers a number of examples of continuity in change that reflect the sort of temporal multiplicity that is central to our anachronism project. She invokes the notion of anchoring to explain why the architectural writer Vitruvius suggested that some seemingly otiose features on stone buildings (for instance, the small projections known as guttae, ‘drops’) were based on functional features such as pegs found in old wooden buildings. A different method of ‘anchoring innovation’ is offered by the building programme on the Acropolis at Athens following the devastating Persian invasion of 480 BC. While the Athenians built a new Parthenon and Erechtheum, they used the remains of the old temple of Athena to reinforce the north wall of the Acropolis (where they can still be seen to this day) ‒ remains which, Sluiter notes, ‘would have reminded the Athenians of the historical events that led to the new building activities, which were therefore securely “anchored” in the past’.

While the Dutch project uses anchoring as a metaphor, physical anchors offer fruitful material for our anachronism project. In a geographical account of the Black Sea, the versatile second-century AD writer Arrian offers an account of an object to be found in a temple at Phasis, a city at the eastern end of the sea, famous as the location of the Golden Fleece:

There the anchor of the Argo, is shown. The iron one did not seem to me to be ancient ‒ and yet in size it is not like present-day anchors, and in shape it is somehow different ‒ but rather it appeared to me to be more recent. Ancient fragments of a stone anchor were also shown, so that one might reckon that these are more likely to be the remains of the anchor of Argo. (Periplus of the Black Sea 9.2)

Rather than making explicit the grounds for his suspicions about the authenticity of the iron anchor, Arrian mentions in passing two features that give that claim a superficial plausibility: its size and shape. It is the following statement that stone fragments are more likely to be authentic that makes clear the basis of his reasoning.

The grounds for Arrian’s suspicions are laid out more fully by the British polymath George Stanley Faber (1773‒1853) in one of his enquiries into the key to all mythologies:

the story was a mere fiction of the priests. … Those impostors do not seem to have considered, that such pretensions involved a direct anachronism. Anchors are never once mentioned by Homer, the remarkable exactness of whose descriptions is well known; hence we may reasonably conclude, that they were a subsequent invention. How then could the Argo have had an anchor, when its imaginary voyage is unanimously supposed to have been prior to the siege of Troy?

Faber is here picking up the historical approach to archaic poetry found in ancient scholarship. The claim that anchors are not mentioned by Homer was in fact disputed in ancient scholarship. Homer does mention in nautical contexts the casting of eunai, ‘beds’, and these ‘beds’ are sometimes glossed in the margins of manuscripts as ‘anchors’ and even described as iron: ‘he calls the iron anchors of the boats “beds” because the boats are bedded by these and at rest’ (scholion on Odyssey 9.137). But it is clear from a number of passages that eunai were stones rather than curved metal anchors (Greek agkura is cognate with words meaning ‘bent’); indeed, according to another ancient commentator (on Iliad 18.570),  the word ‘stone’ (lithos) was preserved as a term for ‘anchor’ (anchoring innovation in action!).

Clearer support for Faber’s position is found in ancient scholarship on Pindar. Pindar’s celebrated Argonautic narrative in his fourth Pythian ode includes the detail that the departing heroes ‘slung the anchors above the prow’ (4.191-2). Critics in antiquity objected that anchors ‘did not exist in the time of the heroes: therefore we say that Pindar has composed this in a peculiar way’. The word here translated ‘in a peculiar way’, idiōs, is evidently gesturing towards the anachronism of Pindar’s description. Both the Pindar scholia and Faber point to the contrasting practice of the epic Argonautica written by Apollonius of Rhodes, who, in Faber’s words, ‘with great propriety gives his heroes a large stone for an anchor’. Implicit in these accounts is a view of technological advance: the age of the heroes did not know the use of iron.

Arrian’s discussion of the touristic sights of ancient Phasis invites comparison with other ancient evidence for Argonautic relics. Apollonius alludes to the Argonauts exchanging at Cyzicus, a city on the southern shores of the Propontis, a light for a heavy anchor, and it is known that Callimachus alluded to the same story. The original light anchor was subsequently dedicated in a temple of Athena, and scholars at the start of the nineteenth century (such as Arrian’s translator Thomas Falconer) could still wonder whether the stone fragments which Arrian mentions were the remains of this anchor.

Stone anchors at the Hellenic Maritime Museum. Photo by José M. Ciordia (pompilos.org), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

 

The story that the Argonauts exchanged anchors may originally been have an attempt to explain the existence of two different relics. But why cast it as an exchange of light for heavy? The increasing weight of the new anchor perhaps chimes with the wild and inhospitable reputation of the Black Sea which the Argonauts were about to enter. It also follows a common evolutionary schema ‒ a move from small to large ‒ that would have particularly point in those accounts that portrayed the Argo as the first ever ship: by trial and error the Argonauts arrived at the optimum size. This evolutionary schema stands in tension, however, with Arrian’s comment that the size of the iron anchor he saw at Phasis was appropriate to the age of the heroes. Arrian was evidently following the Homeric image of the extraordinary strength of the ancient warriors, able to throw rocks that men in the poet’s day could not lift.

There was nothing especially innovative in Arrian’s reasoning about the anchor at Phasis. What it does show is how a sense of anachronism, though sharpened by the need to work through the implications of competing evolutionary and devolutionary narratives, was grounded in philological commentary on ancient poetry. Whatever new insights emerge from the projects on anachronism and innovation currently underway in Oxford and the Netherlands, it is not too far-fetched to claim that they will themselves be anchored in the spirit of historical criticism fostered by critics in antiquity.

References

• I. Sluiter, ‘Anchoring Innovation: A Classical Research Agenda’, European Review 25: 1 (2017), 20–38.
• S. Faber, A Dissertation on the Mysteries of the Cabiri: or, The Great Gods of Phoenicia, Samothrace, Egypt, Troas, Greece, Italy, and Crete). Being an Attempt to Deduce the Several Orgies Of Isis, Ceres, Mithras, Bacchus, Rhea, Adonis, and Hecate, from an Union of the Rites Commemorative of the Deluge with the Adoration of the Host of Heaven, 2 volumes (Oxford, 1803).
• T. Falconer, Arrian’s Voyage round the Euxine Sea: Translated, and Accompanied with a Geographical Dissertation, and Maps (Oxford, 1805).