CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION OR CULTURAL CROSSROADS?

The culture of ancient Greece has always been regarded as pivotal to European self-understanding, especially within the areas of philosophy, aesthetics and politics, providing the Western world with the roots of thought, art and literature as well as a tradition of democracy which has been (or at least thought to be) influential ever since.

It has often has been suggested that if it was not for the heroic deeds of the Hellenic alliance against the Persian emperors in the battles of Thermopylae and Salamis in 480 BCE, European culture would have been substantially different. Be that as it may, Greek and Roman culture became a mirror of what Europe (mythically: the sly goddess chased by mighty Zeus) wished to be through “the rebirth” of ancient culture, from the Renaissance through nineteenth-century Romanticism. This “rebirth” became a statement of the nature of Europe’s roots. Werner Jaeger’s monumental work Paideia (literally “the education of children”), published in 1934, can be mentioned as a famous late testimony of this hope for restoring Europe to the values of Hellenistic ideals.

Yet much has changed since, back in the eighteenth century, Winckelmann perceived the haunting beauty of the white marble survivals of Greek sculptures as an expression of “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur”, edle Einfalt und stille Grosse.

Among the fiercest of adversaries of Graecophile self-glorification was Martin Bernal, himself a Jew, who accused a whole philological and historical tradition for being anti-Semitic in denying what he coined as the “Ancient Model” (more or less the interpretatio graeca view). Contrary to the view of ancient Greece being inhabited by a race of blond Indo-Europeans (the “Aryan Model”, according to Bernal), he presented a counter-story of Cadmus, a Phoenician black king, who occupied Thebes in order to sow the dragon teeth whence the “autochthonous” race of Thebans were to rise (Bernal 1987: 1. 2, 7, 31, passim). Although much acclaimed at the time of its appearance, Bernal’s book, Black Athena, clearly suffers from the very strategy it rebels against, namely to reduce the growth and development of populations to the origin of races (cf. Torresin 1988: 29f.). If the very notion of “race” has become suspect, then so has Bernal’s counter-story of Greece.

Another and more influential theory in the study of Greek religion was launched by Walter Burkert who took great pains in demonstrating the impact of the “orientalizing revolution” in the eighth century BCE on Hellas.³³ Intensive exchange with the high cultures of the Semitic East enacted its undeniable influence on the complex of Greek cults and myths (Burkert 1992: 128f.). While hailing Burkert’s contributions to the picture of Greece in the Mediterranean world of antiquity, we must be careful not to overestimate foreign influences on a superficial level. By this I mean that we will have to distinguish substantial similarities which support a theory of transmission or reception from similarities which merely throw a thin layer of foreign inspiration over a ritual or mythical complex that is intrinsically different.

Apart from fruitfully pointing to substantial eastern similarities, in the obvious affinities between the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh and the Homeric epics, along with numerous parallels between Hittite and Greek archaeological findings, we must not turn a blind eye to the particular ways in which the Greeks adopted such elements. Burkert is clearly aware of this, and elsewhere he attempts to ground many of the prevailing themes of Greek religion, not in cultural exchange as such, but in a biologically informed functional theory of “sacrificial violence” pertaining, historically, to an original society of hunters and gatherers (Burkert 1983: iff.). In this respect, however, one might be left with the impression that much of the source material is selected to fit into a preconceived theory, leaving little space for other possible interpretations.

Be that as it may, another school of classical Greek studies has been most prominently pursued in Paris by Jean-Pierre Vernant and his colleagues, scholars such as Marcel Detienne and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Instead of tracing basic elements of Greek religion back to their cultural origins, whether as a matter of transmission from neighbouring cultures or from older layers of a more “primitive” society, they seek to comprehend the complex of ritual and myth from a structural point of view of intra-cultural transformations.³⁴ Apart from a rich picture of the workings of a culture within the frame of a single language, we also get a picture of Greece as part of an Indo-European heritage. Although Georges Dumezil, one of the founding fathers of Indo-European structuralism, was a bit reluctant to carry his investigations too deep into Greek mythology, later and bolder studies have provided us with a clear impression of how deeply Indo-European morphological correspondences organize thematic (or “ideological”) and linguistic elements pervading ancient Greek culture. One point of criticism raised against Dumezil pertains to his royalist, right-wing sympathies. However that may be, it does not present a sound argument against a structural method which does not concern ideological similarities in any political sense, but merely morphological structures pertaining to the transmission and organization of culturally embedded ideas.