How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, ...the invention and rapid spread of coinage which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society. By transforming social relations, monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system (presocratic philosophy) and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods (in tragedy). Seaford argues that an important precondition for this monetisation was the Greek practice of animal sacrifice, as represented in Homeric Epic, which describes a premonetary world on the point of producing money. This book combines social history, economic anthropology, numismatics and the close reading of literary, inscriptional, and philosophical texts. Questioning the origins and shaping force of Greek philosophy, this is a major book with wide appeal.
This book further develops Professor Seaford's innovative work on the study of ritual and money in the developing Greek polis. It employs the concept of the chronotope, which refers to the phenomenon ...whereby the spatial and temporal frameworks explicit or implicit in a text have the same structure, and uncovers various such chronotopes in Homer, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Presocratic philosophy and in particular the tragedies of Aeschylus. Mikhail Bakhtin's pioneering use of the chronotope was in literary analysis. This study by contrast derives the variety of chronotopes manifest in Greek texts from the variety of socially integrative practices in the developing polis - notably reciprocity, collective ritual and monetised exchange. In particular, the Oresteia of Aeschylus embodies the reassuring absorption of the new and threatening monetised chronotope into the traditional chronotope that arises from collective ritual with its aetiological myth. This argument includes the first ever demonstration of the profound affinities between Aeschylus and the (Presocratic) philosophy of his time.
Richard Seaford is one of the most original and provocative classicists of his age. This volume brings together a wide range of papers written with a single focus. Several are pioneering explorations ...of the tragic evocation and representation of rites of passage: mystic initiation, the wedding, and death ritual. Two papers focus on the shaping power of mystic initiation in two famous passages in the New Testament. The other key factor in the historical context of tragedy is the recent monetisation of Athens. One paper explores the presence of money in Greek tragedy, another the shaping influence of money on Wagner's Ring and on his Aeschylean model. Other papers reveal the influence of ritual and money on representations of the inner self, and on Greek and Indian philosophy. A final piece finds in Greek tragedy horror at the destructive unlimitedness of money that is still central to our postmodern world.
This volume brings together Hellenists and Indologists representing a variety of perspectives on the similarities and differences between the two cultures. It offers a collaborative contribution to ...the burgeoning interest in the Axial Age and will be of interest to anyone intrigued by the big questions inspired by the ancient world.
Abstract
This paper searches early Greek texts (Homer, Herakleitos, Parmenides, Plato) for the genesis of the idea of the individual mind or soul as a unitary site of consciousness, and explores the ...relation of this genesis to the first monetisation in history. Money simultaneously promotes the isolated autonomy of the individual and provides a model (the unification of diversity by semi-abstract substance) that shapes both the unity of individual consciousness and the presocratic conception of the cosmos as constituted by a single semi-abstract substance. The argument confirms and develops the importance accorded by Alfred Sohn-Rethel to the 'real abstraction' of commodity-exchange in the origins of Greek philosophy.
TRAGIC VOICES Seaford, Richard
The Classical Review,
10/2003, Letnik:
53, Številka:
2
Journal Article, Book Review
Recenzirano
Much study of tragedy is still influenced by Nietzsche - or rather, by the tradition of which Nietzsche is the most notable proponent. N. Loraux's newly translated book "The Mourning Voice: An Essay ...on Greek Tragedy" is in this tradition, but unusual both in being explicitly Nietzschean and especially close to his "Birth of Tragedy". For her, Nietzsche's notion of tragedy as a synthesis of the Dionysiac with the Apolline is especially important in the expression of the voice in tragedy. (Quotes from original text)
In this collection of new essays, an international group of experts explores the significance of reciprocity (the principle and practice of voluntary requital, of benefit for benefit or harm for ...harm) in ancient Greek culture. Reciprocity has been seen as an important notion for anthropologists studying economic and social relations. A key question has been whether reciprocity constitutes an alternative pattern to the commercial, political, and ethical relationships characteristic of modern Western society. This volume takes the question forward in connection with Greek culture from Homer to the Hellenistic period. Building on previous research on this topic (especially on Homeric society), it provides a wide-ranging examination of reciprocity inGreek epic and drama, historiography, oratory, religion, and ethical philosophy. It asks fundamental questions about the importance of reciprocity in different phases of Greek history, the interplay between reciprocity and the ideology of Athenian democracy, and between reciprocity and altruism in ethical thought. Clear and non-technical, with all Greek translated, this volume will make debate on this important subject available to a wide circle of readers in classical, literary, anthropological, and historical studies.
To the intriguing similarities that have been observed between Greek and Indian thought around the middle of the first millennium I will here add another: the interiorisation of ritual (specifically, ...the cosmic rite of passage), a process connected to the advent both of monism and of the all-importance of the inner self. The interiorisation of ritual is an idea that has been used by Indologists but not, so far as I know, by Hellenists. This is not to deny that there are differences between the two cultures in the way that the ritual is interiorised, and in the nature of the sources. But this chapter focuses on the basic similarity, and indicates a way of explaining why interiorisation occurred. I should add that, of the three kinds of explanation (listed in the Introduction) for the early similarities between Greek and Indian ‘philosophical’ thought, I favour – for the period before Alexander crossed the Indus – autonomous parallel development. Pre-Socratic and Upaniṣadic thought both exhibit coherent internal development, influenced in my view by the monetisation that made Greece and India (and China) different in this period from other societies. This is an argument that I will pursue in detail in a monograph. But the importance of monetisation will emerge even from within the relatively narrow confines of this chapter.The interiorisation of Vedic sacrificeEarly Vedic sacrifice is based on a large series of imagined equivalences (or correspondences, or identifications) through which, especially in the Brāhmaṇas, what is within one's control (especially ritual control) corresponds with what is outside it. Ritual correspondence is defined by Clemens Cavallin as ‘a relation between two or more entities, which connects them in a way that makes it possible to influence one of them through the ritual manipulation of the other (or to explain e.g. the use of one entity in terms of the other)’. Such equivalences allowed sacrifice to be used as a means of encapsulating – so as to acquire or control – a wide range of phenomena.However, this system of correspondences was not static. For the period of the Brāhmaṇas and early Upaniṣads the system of correspondences was transformed into monism, in a way that involved the individualisation and interiorisation of the sacrifice. I will describe how several scholars come to this view from different perspectives, so that my argument does not depend on the reliability of any one of them.
Tragic Money Seaford, Richard
The Journal of Hellenic studies,
01/1998, Letnik:
118
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Tragedy was a product of the classical polis, but took its themes (with very few exceptions) from an imagined earlier age, the heroic age that is also the subject of the Homeric poems. The result, it ...has been argued, is a creative tension, notably between the spirit of heroic autonomy and the rule of law characteristic of the polis. The institutions of the polis make themselves felt, anachronistically, in the tragic representation of heroic myth.
PDF
