Most admirable daughter, I marvel that, after turning your back on fleshly cares and freeing your heart from the lawful bond which fixed it, you have turned your countenance to the Holy Spirit, saying: ‘What I ask, is that you give a ruling on what place a wife will be able to find in the sight of God, or clarify how far she may have compensated for the licence of the marital state (maritalis licentiam potestatis). Long afflicted by trials and adversities, I have taken refuge in this sole point of comfort, that I might discover whether somehow there is anything which in the future life may bring assistance to a woman placed under the authority of a husband, lest I should also dread the pain of future punishments, being deprived of the joys of security in the present.’

CHAPTER 1. THAT THE HUMAN RACE IS TO BE ALLOWED TO BE TESTED FOR A TIME, SO THAT IT MAY REJOICE FOREVER IN THE FUTURE

O height of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God; how unfathomable are His judgements! [Rom. 11:33]. For the world is allowed to rage, and sadness is let loose to take control of minds, so that those whom a deceitful enjoyment had unyoked from Christ may come back and conquer themselves to rise above the pleasures.

Plague struck the Athenians in 430, and its impact, multiplied by the confinement of the area's population inside the city walls for protection against the Spartan attacks (a condition the rustic Dicaeopolis laments at the opening of Aristophanes' Acharnians), is felt in Sophocles' first tragic drama about Oedipus. Moving further inside the walls, to the heart of the polis, Asclepius enters the south slope of the Acropolis by 420, yet thematically he occupies the lower part of the slope several times before then. The social energy released by the increased concern with disease and Asclepius may be seen circulating through Euripides' Hippolytus, which was produced in 428 bce. The extant drama is the second Euripides composed on this subject and, given the timing of the drama's production and the prominence of nosological imagery in its language, it is conceivable that the plague was one of Euripides' motivations in returning to this myth; if nothing else, the plague informs and gives resonance to the tragedy's preoccupation with illness. In this chapter I examine the intersection of disease language and imagery with myths and rituals that involve the threat of famine, with initiatory rituals, and allusions to Asclepius himself.

Introduction

The study of Etruscan cities spans as brief a time as that of domestic architecture. After the somewhat piecemeal excavation of a few sites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notably Vetulonia (Falchi 1898) and Marzabotto (Brizio 1891), the first systematic excavation of Etruscan settlements took place in the mid-twentieth century. As a result, traditional studies of Etruscan cities exhibit a heavy reliance on funerary data (see Chapters 1 and 5). As discussed in Chapter 1, the Crocifisso del Tufo cemetery at Orvieto in particular has been used to illustrate the layout of Etruscan cities (Mansuelli 1970b; 1979: 363; 1985: 111; Drews 1981: 148), and the Banditaccia cemetery at Cerveteri has been deployed in a similar way (Gros and Torelli 1988; for doubts about such use of funerary data see Damgaard Andersen 1997). A further similarity with the study of domestic architecture is in the incorporation of urban form into the debate over Etruscan origins. Early in the twentieth century, Haverfield tried to argue that town planning was part of the ‘ancestral heritage’ of Italy, extending back into the second millennium bc (Haverfield 1913: 72). Such an early date has been dispelled by Ward-Perkins (Ward-Perkins 1958: 109–11). However, in more moderate form, the long-term continuity, at least from the ninth century bc, of the process of urbanisation is a generally accepted principle (Colonna 1970: Castagnoli 1971: 75–81; Gros and Torelli 1988: 6–12; Guidi 1985, 1989; Harris 1989).

Fifteen to twenty years after the Trachiniae and roughly six after the Heracles of Euripides, Heracles returns to the Theater of Dionysus, though not as the lead role, in another tragic drama whose hero is a bearer of nosos and who stands in an ambivalent relationship with his community, and with no obvious connection to the city of Athens. However, one of the central paradoxes of Sophocles' Philoctetes, and of the efforts of modern interpreters to understand it, is the opposition between the drama's setting on the isolated, barren island of Lemnos, far from anything resembling a polis, and the pervasive consensus among a very diverse group of scholars that this work has something to do, however elusive it might ultimately be, with the nature of the Athenian polis at the end of the fifth century bce (Jameson 1956; Calder 1971; Segal 1981; Greengard 1987; Vickers 1987; Rose 1992). My contribution to clarifying this relationship will be to reexamine the text's discourse of healing and cure in the light of the associations among disease, social strife, the language of democracy, and the cult of Asclepius, the figure who, according to Heracles at the end of the drama, will finally cure Philoctetes.

PRELIMINARIES

‘When I roll out the whole of this text of Plato's (or of Socrates’) Republic which I have in my hands, I know very well that I won't find those words.' The speaker is Pier Candido Decembrio, and the work Dialogues against Lactantius, written c.1443 by the Franciscan Antonio da Rho (Antonius Raudensis). Da Rho is putting forward Decembrio, in real life his friend and collaborator, as the defender of Plato against the early fourth-century Christian apologist Lactantius. The work as a whole belongs in the context of the contemporary debate between advocates of Plato and advocates of Aristotle. What Decembrio knew he would be unable to find, as he ‘scrolled down’ the Republic, was any statement to the effect that in Plato's ideal polity resources should be in common among the citizens. It just isn't there, said Decembrio. He was quite right. Platonic communality was for the Guards and Auxiliaries alone. It was Aristotle who first, for his own purposes, blandly stated that Plato's arrangements embraced the whole citizenry; and the late antique Neoplatonists told the same story, again, for their own purposes.

I'll come back in due course to Decembrio and the wider debate. For the present, let us note that it was unusual to charge Aristotle with misreading the text of Plato, with being, in effect, a bad historian of philosophy. More generally, it was unusual to apply source criticism to a text.

Introduction

According to Torelli, the late sixth century was ‘un momento cruciale’ in the urban development of Etruria (Torelli 1985: 32). This chapter traces the archaeological remains of Etruscan domestic architecture from the Iron Age in order to examine what led to this crucial moment and what form it took. The period from the eighth to the fourth century in Etruria was one that saw great changes in domestic architecture: not only the replacement of curvilinear structures by rectilinear ones, but also an increase in the regularity of these structures, both internally and externally, to such an extent that, by the fifth century, large, regular blocks of houses were constructed. In attempting to understand these wider changes, this chapter will examine the underlying network of smaller changes in the material culture: for example architectural form, the materials used in construction, the internal structure, and the treatment of entrances.

The changes in house form will be considered as a further element of Etruscan culture that will illustrate the importance of boundaries and differentiation in late sixth-century Etruria. As discussed in Chapter 1, the premium placed on the definition of boundaries was materially manifest in the creation and manipulation of surface. In the case of domestic architecture, the most obvious difference articulated is that between the private and the public spheres. Cultural changes in attitudes towards this difference are mirrored in changes in the physical relationship between inside and outside the house.

In the early sixth century, the monk-priest Eugippius of Lucullanum made a compendium of extracts from the work of Augustine of Hippo, thus making accessible for future generations a body of work so voluminous that, according to another early medieval handbook, only a liar could claim to have read it all. Eugippius dedicated his collection, the Excerpta Augustini, to an aristocratic lady, the virgin Proba, with the modest reflection that even if in the vast abundance of her book collection she could engage directly with Augustine's writings, she might nonetheless find pleasure in having the extracts. Scholars have long suggested that it was probably from Proba's library in Rome, near St Peter's, that Eugippius worked, since the wording of the sentence in which he contrasts the ‘complete’ works in her collection with the exiguity of his extracts implies that the extracts were made on the basis of her codices. The daughter of Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus (consul in 485) and the sister-in-law of Boethius, the virgin Proba was a personage of standing, and there is every reason to believe that her library was exceptionally well-appointed, since she came from a line of women writers and literary patronesses going back nearly two centuries.

Sadly, however, Eugippius' extracts are all that remain of Proba's library. We will see below that some literary codices bearing traces of senatorial ownership do survive from early sixth-century Rome, but only a handful.

I earlier suggested how Euripides' Hippolytus, read as a plague drama rife with disease metaphors, rituals designed to ward off plague and famine, and allusions to Asclepius, emerges as a more topically significant and historically richer drama. The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles and the Trachiniae were likely composed during or soon after the last attacks of the plague, the influence of which we see throughout both. These dramas are in the first wave of the plague's effect, with the second wave coming roughly a decade later because of the new Asklepieion next to the theater and because political conditions in Athens lent themselves to a revivification of the metaphor of the sick city. After the construction of the Asklepieion gets underway around 420 bce, patterns of nosological imagery and civic stasis intensify in Euripidean drama, and they continue through the subsequent decade. In this chapter I shall focus primarily on two Euripidean tragedies that are broadly concerned with nosological discourse, the Heracles and the Phoenissae, though I shall also be bringing to my study, as needed, other tragedies which survive both complete and in fragments. My discussion will be somewhat circuitous, as I internally frame a broader examination of the Heracles with an analysis of aspects of the Phoenissae and other dramas composed during the same period (including ones that only survive in fragments), but this path will enable a clearer understanding of the nosological dynamics in the Heracles.

A few decades ago, after philological examinations of very specific terms for types of bodily woes, scholars tended to dismiss the metaphorical aspects of disease in general out of hand, as “mere metaphor.” These scholars erred, I believe, in making sweeping assumptions about poetic language in its historical situation, in underestimating how rapid shifts in that situation could affect metaphoricity, and in not considering how their own historical conditions might have affected the way they read the Greek texts. Recently, G. E. R. Lloyd has more fundamentally cast doubt upon the traditional conception of metaphor as an analytical tool for Greek discourse, especially for studying the Greek terminology for disease (Lloyd 2003: 8–9):

In other words, can we really be so sure which use of nosos designates real illness and which is a trope? And could there not sometimes be slippages between the real and metaphorical applications of a word even inside the same text? Such slippages will quickly become apparent when I turn to examining specific dramas.

MEDES AND PERSIANS

‘Darius the king says: this is the kingdom which I hold: from the Scythians who are beyond Sogdiana to Ethiopia, from Sind to Sardis’. Xerxes inherited from his father an empire that stretched from the Asia Minor coast to India and from the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf, and included Egypt. It far surpassed anything the Near East had seen before, and would not be surpassed in size until the Roman empire.

One unusual feature of this empire is that, despite the fact that it was the successor to the Elamite, Babylonian and Assyrian empires, which made much use of at least nominally ‘historical’ texts recording the deeds of their kings, the Persian empire has left us very little of the kind. There is only one document that can be described as a historical account of specific events, Darius' great inscription at Bisitun (DB = Brosius no. 44), which recounts his crushing of the revolts that greeted his accession to power. Other royal inscriptions list the peoples of the empire, describe the building of great palaces and outline royal ideology, but they do not concern themselves with specific events. Again, apart from the carving that accompanies DB, Achaemenid art does not use representations of individual events. Records were kept of battles, acts of benevolence towards the King etc., but these would have been on perishable material and have not survived (cf. 85.3 and n.).

The late sixth century was a crucial period in Etruscan history: it witnessed the first monumental sanctuaries, the beginnings of planned cities, and the radical reorganisation of cemeteries. More widely, it was a period of intense contact with other cultures, notably those of Greece, Phoenicia and Central Italy; and it marked a dramatic and irreversible transformation of the agricultural and political landscapes of Etruria. Such changes came at the end of several centuries of internal development within Etruria, the beginnings of which can be traced back at least to the early first millennium bc. This book aims to examine these changes in Etruscan material culture. It brings together different aspects of Etruscan archaeology within a single analytical framework. While doing so it develops a new approach to Etruscan material and an integrated perspective on a society that is usually separated by intra-disciplinary boundaries. As such, it aims to provide a coherent explanation for change in Etruscan society.

Changes in Etruscan material culture (artefacts, images and standing structures) are traditionally explained in two main ways. The first sees the changes as a logical progression from primitive to modern; the second describes how the cultural world of Etruria falls under the influence of the Greeks. According to most accounts of Etrusco-Greek interaction, as Ridgway has so accurately put it, ‘it was the proper business (and privilege) of the barbarians to be Hellenised, e basta!’ (Ridgway 2000: 181).