PRELIMINARIES

‘In revolutionary France of April 1849, a banquet was held of “socialist priests”, 33 of them, 3 in cassocks, and the rest dressed as lay men. 600 working men joined the festivity, and toasted Jesus of Nazareth, father of socialism.’

In 1891 Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum. The early chapters carry the message that socialism is unjust and deleterious to workers' interests, whereas private property is natural, blessed by God, and conducive to the common and private good. That principle once established, the Pope is now ready to pronounce on the issue of how the class struggle can be moderated, through a proper understanding of how wealth should be used. For guidance on this point, he says, the place to turn is not to philosophy but to the teachings of the Church; and the Pope now cites authorities. Thomas Aquinas receives pride of place, followed by New Testament texts urging charitable giving. We hear that in God's view, ‘there is nothing disgraceful in poverty, nor cause for shame in having to work for a living’: 2 Corinthians 8:9 is cited, where St Paul says of Christ: ‘He who was rich became poor for our sake.’

Our knowledge of late fifth-century Athens in general and of the plague of 430–426 bce in particular has largely, and at times exclusively, rested on the broad, cantankerous shoulders of the historian Thucydides. Indeed, Thucydides' own strong opinions on his native city, the possibility that he wrote some sections of his History well after their events, his very skill as a writer, and his proven capacity to shape his narrative creatively have sometimes led to the scholarly suspicion that he had at least embellished some of the more gripping parts of his discourse, including the section on the plague. However, during the 1990s, construction projects for the 2004 Olympics in Athens yielded numerous exciting discoveries involving Classical Athens; among them, in 1994 a burial pit at the ancient Kerameikos cemetery that can be dated, based on vases found in the site, to the early years of the Peloponnesian War. This, however, was no ordinary sepulcher, but is characterized by a neglect of traditional burial customs. The roughly 150 skeletons found there were interred in a plain pit composed in an irregular shape, with the bodies of the dead apparently having been laid out in a disorganized, random fashion. Further, no soil had been deposited between the layers of corpses. The bodies were found in outstretched positions, though a number had their heads pointed to the outside and their feet toward the center of the grave.

The final version of this book project has been thirteen years in the making. It has spanned births, deaths, theater productions, an extended department chairmanship, and sundry other obstacles. Indeed, so long has the completion of this book been delayed that some of the people whom I will subsequently thank here might not remember ever having discussed its ideas with me!

I am first and foremost indebted to the two institutions where this project began and ended: the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC and the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge University. My work on the meaning of the Athenian Asklepieion commenced during a term in 1993–94 as a Junior Fellow at the Center when I thought I was writing a book on Euripides. I am extremely grateful to the Center's directors at that time, Deborah Boedeker and Kurt Raaflaub, not just for extending a fellowship to me at a critical moment, but also for fostering such a truly collegial and friendly environment, and to the other Junior Fellows for their incredible range of knowledge and their lively conversation, especially Eric Csapo, Ahuvia Kahane and Dirk Obbink. At another critical moment in 2005, Pat Easterling and Robin Osborne helped me secure a Visiting Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and made me feel welcome as a Visiting Scholar in the Faculty of Classics at the University.

The story so far . After the defeat of his generals Datis and Artaphernes at Marathon in 490, Darius intended to invade Greece again, but was distracted by a revolt in Egypt in 486, during which year he died. His son by Atossa, Xerxes, succeeded him and crushed the revolt in 485. Xerxes spent four years preparing his expedition against Greece, the first act being the digging of a canal through the Athos peninsula in 483 (7.22). Late in 481, envoys were sent to demand ‘earth and water’ from the northern Greek states down to Boeotia (46.4n.). The army mustered in Cappadocia, and marched to Sardis, whence in spring 480 it began the expedition; the fleet collected at Abydos (7.20–40). H. gives a total of 5,283,220 men (7.186.2), a fantastic exaggeration no doubt, but indicative of the vast scale of the force. On the way, roads and bridges were constructed, and the Hellespont spanned by pontoons at Abydos (7.33–7). Progress was measured, partly because of the sheer numbers involved, and partly because Xerxes wanted to be able to use the crops in northern Greece to help feed his troops (7.50.4). Army and fleet advanced in contact with each other so as to coordinate their actions (7.236.2), but at the head of the Thermaic gulf in Macedonia, the land route diverged from the coast and they separated, reuniting at Aphetae on the Gulf of Pagasae, where the fleet is waiting at the start of book 8. H. does not tell us enough to be certain which route or (more likely) routes the army took. See map for possible solutions.

INTRODUCTION: PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON AND THEODOR MOMMSEN

In 1849 a cartoon appeared in Germany depicting The Progress of Learning (‘der Fortschritt der Wissenschaft’) over 300 years. Three panels present scholarly figures in dress appropriate to the academic profession of their epochs, the sixteenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each panel bears a caption, apparently drawn from Roman law.

On the left: ‘Justice is the constant and unwavering determination to give to each his right.’ This is a citation, attributed to the classical jurist Ulpian (d. 223), from the sixth-century Digest of Justinian.

In the centre: ‘The king is completely exempt from all law.’ This is an Absolutist State's version of a statement of the same jurist, Ulpian: the emperor is exempt from the laws.

On the right: ‘Property is theft’ (Dominium est furtum). No Roman jurist, we may be sure, ever made this pronouncement. The slight figure in this panel is full of nervous energy as he points emphatically at his audience. He is Theodor Mommsen, Extraordinary Professor of Roman Law at Leipzig. At the time only thirty-one years of age, he was later to become arguably the greatest historian of ancient Rome of all time. In 1840 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon of Besançon had posed the question: ‘Qu'est-ce que la propriété?’ and had given as his answer: ‘La Propriété, c'est le vol.’ Nine years later we find Mommsen being credited with a Latinized version.

It may not be a natural or human right to own property, but it is no accident that humans in complex societies strive assiduously to acquire, possess and attach the label ‘mine’ to external objects that are felt to be needed or seen to be of value. Aristotle was reflecting the communis opinio, then as now, when he claimed that a private property regime was preferable to one of communal ownership. His specific arguments, too, have struck a chord with theorists and politicians down the ages. They are primarily utilitarian: private property makes good social and economic as well as moral sense. It is important however not to overlook two other aspects of his intervention: first, the fact that he spoke out at all, and second, the fact that he misrepresented Plato in the course of doing so.

On the first of these points: Aristotle was provoked by the arrangements that Plato prescribed for his ideal state. It was the same with slavery (though in this case Plato was not the provocateur). There is no reason to suppose that Aristotle would ever have produced his theory of natural slavery, had not its basis been queried by certain (unnamed) individuals. Private property was an even more firmly established institution in Greek society than was slavery.

Introduction

This chapter sets out the theoretical basis on which the analysis of the following chapters takes place. First it considers some of the approaches that have underpinned and characterised previous studies of Etruscan material culture change; next it draws on recent developments in the wider discipline of archaeology and beyond in order to establish a theoretical model for the following chapters.

Models of change in Etruria

This section examines the characteristics of previous treatments of Etruscan material with particular emphasis on how change in material culture has been approached. Its aim is to open discussion about certain assumptions that have been implicit in previous treatments, and to highlight the limitations of such approaches for our understanding of Etruscan culture more widely. Though this section may often seem critical of these approaches, much of the work of the following chapters is based on their conclusions. The analyses in the rest of the book take for granted the chronological and cultural framework established by such work; they aim not to contradict them, but to push their conclusions further.

Classical studies

One of the most important factors affecting the study of the Etruscans has been the closeness of the subject to the discipline of Classics. Both within and outside Italy, the study of the Etruscans has proceeded concurrently with the study of Greece and Rome and this has had a significant influence on the way in which Etruscan culture has been studied.

No Greek drama is more instantly associated with plague, whether mythic or real, than Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, and thus no Greek drama has received such scholarly attention in the context of the Athenian plague. But failing to discuss the Oedipus in some sustained manner, however brief, might cause confusion and leave my picture incomplete. I shall therefore limit my discussion to supplementing a summary of Bernard Knox's perspicuous examinations of the plague and of medical language in the Oedipus Tyrannus (Knox 1956; 1957: 139–47), and this discussion is intended as an introduction to my subsequent analysis of the Trachiniae as a plague drama. My contribution will consist mainly of an interpretation of the circulation of nosological discourse throughout the text and a consideration of whether Sophocles' innovation of a plague at Thebes during the Athenian plague might have contributed to the second-place finish of the program that included the Oedipus Tyrannus. Knox (1957) discusses the image of Oedipus as a doctor and shows the role of various Hippocratic terms in the Oedipus, but he leaves Sophocles' means of the representation of the plague itself relatively unexplored; thus, while there are many Greek words in the index to Knox's Oedipus at Thebes, nosos is not one of them, nor, for that matter, is loimos. And, as with the case of other dramas I examine in this book, the deployment of nosos through the dramatic text is central to its meaning.

INTRODUCTION

When Aristotle was launching his enquiry into the end of political science, he resolved to consider first the opinions of ordinary people rather than philosophers, or at least ‘those [opinions] which are most prevalent or have something to be said for them’. Taking a leaf out of his book, I begin with a quotation from the Guardian of 10 January 2007:

My interest is less in the proliferation and trivialization of human rights in the modern world (to which this citation bears eloquent witness), than in the representation of property as an established natural right, worthy company for the right to life itself. In this chapter I put this judgement or assumption to the test with the aid of philosophers, theologians, jurists and politicians from the middle of the twelfth century to the end of the eighteenth.

THE EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT

Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Samuel Pufendorf (1632–94) and John Locke (1632–1704) all sought to give private property the status of natural law by locating its emergence in the state of nature. The problem they faced was that they were working within a tradition, stretching right back into antiquity, according to which the primeval condition was a form of communality in which all humanity had equal access to the resources of the earth. Moreover, late antiquity and the Middle Ages had produced a Christian reading of this tradition, by which the Christian God had ordered things in this way. Their response to the challenge was twofold. First, in order to counter the possible charge that mankind had thwarted God's purpose, they argued that the establishment of private property, while not a direct consequence of a dictate of God, was man's rational response to the divine command to use the resources of the world for his self-preservation and increase. Secondly, in order to justify the apparent breach of the principle of equal access to material resources, Grotius and Pufendorf proposed that agreement, tacit or express, must have preceded first occupatio; while for Locke the crucial step in the establishment of rights over unoccupied land was creative labour.

The contributions to property theory of these philosophers of the early Enlightenment should be seen as part of a wider concern with the great political issues of the time, domestic and international.

This disturbing passage drawn from Ad Gregoriam in palatio develops a metaphor borrowed from Augustine of Hippo as a tool for thinking out the legacy of early Christian literature for the husband–wife relationship. In Augustine's sermons, we find the repeated suggestion that the contract of Christian marriage involved, among other things, nothing less than the outright purchase of a wife by a husband, much as one would purchase a slave. A famous passage in Augustine's Confessions, in which Monnica explains to her friends how she bore with the mistreatment of an abusive husband, picks up the same metaphor. We will see below that the theme of the marriage as a ‘sale’ of the wife to the husband was not the only idea of Augustine's on the subject of marriage to attract the attention of later writers.

Introduction

In this chapter, the corpus of Etruscan bronze hand mirrors will be used in an investigation of the treatment of the surface of Etruscan bodies. It has two aims: the first is to examine the cultural function of mirrors, or as Serra Ridgway puts it, to look at ‘mirrors as objects not just “pictures”’ (Serra Ridgway 1992: 282). As will be shown, the sudden appearance of mirrors in the archaeological record is closely linked to the function of the mirror in adornment. Adornment, or the manipulation of the surface of the body, is a process that is always bounded by the parameters of social and cultural expectations, and is an essential part of the creation of self-identity. The second aim is to look at the variations in such social and cultural expectations between male and female bodies. This is derived from the images of men and women depicted on the mirrors themselves.

Though the earliest recorded find of an Etruscan hand mirror was in 1507 from a tomb near Castellina in Chianti, it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that interest in them became significant. At this time, they were called paterae, and were thought to have been used in the pouring of libations. It was not until 1824, when Inghirami published his Monumenti Etruschi, that they were identified as mirrors.

Here I shall close with some general considerations about Athenian drama and society toward the end of the fifth century BCE. In this study, I have not sought even to imply that the readings presented here exclude all others or that Asclepius is the only key to understanding Greek drama, which is as complex an art form and, in Kenneth Burke's terms, a social action as any seen in the history of Western literature. I have, however, tried to ask a different set of related questions about tragedy in Athens than has normally been the practice among scholars in this field. What happens if we take nosological imagery and language seriously, and consistently so? Why does this imagery seem to increase in frequency after the plague at Athens and especially after the construction of the City Asklepieion on the south slope of the Athenian Acropolis, at the upper western edge of the Theater of Dionysus? What significance does the appearance of Asclepius and related themes have in tragedy? Why do Asclepius temples sit so often next to theaters? Do questions about disease imagery in Athenian drama give rise to new resonances and interpretive possibilities after the plague and the construction of the Asklepieion? These familial questions are part of a complex system of meaning generated from the conditions of performance. In Athens during and after the plague poets drew on traditional associations of healing and music to suggest a balm for the troubled audience.

This passage, the most famous episode of the sixth-century Vita Genovefae or Life of Saint Genevieve, reflects a late Roman certainty that miraculous powers and historical events could not be understood in isolation from one another. By organizing the women of Paris to protect Paris from Attila the Hun through their prayers, Genovefa ran a considerable risk. Having followed her advice, the citizens then lost their nerve and threatened her with stoning or drowning as a false prophetess. Yet the saint's ability to mobilize both the male and female property-holders of Paris toward complementary tasks also demands our attention.