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.
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).
Anachronism and Antiquity 