Scholars of rabbinic literature are increasingly aware of the various ways in which the emerging culture of the sages was deeply in conversation with surrounding cultural currents. The essays by Seth Schwartz, Yaakov Elman, and Catherine Hezser in this volume already have pointed readers in this direction. In the present contribution, I wish to continue this theme from the perspective of linguistics and folklore studies. In particular, I shall focus on the expression of cultural proximity, maybe even intimacy, of the Aramaic and Hebrew-speaking Jewish culture of the Greco-Roman and Byzantine period with the Greek-speaking culture of the same time and place. The evidence I shall call upon is found in hidden puns relating to the Greek language that underlie some Aramaic or Hebrew texts. These demonstrate a marked interlingual proficiency and creativity on the part of the authors, narrators, and even their audiences. The traversing of linguistic borders that seems to have been regarded with aesthetic pleasure and cultural appreciation offers yet more demonstration that cultural isolationism was hardly a dominant trait in the culture that we call ancient rabbinic.

The texts in which I have found these puns are from rabbinic works, shaped between the third and the sixth century, approximately, in Jewish Palestine, texts in which the Hebrew Bible serves as a constant point of reference and basis for interpretation. Remarkably, maybe one could even say paradoxically, one important literary context in which such puns appear is the midrashic account of the historical clash between Judah and Rome in Lamentations Rabbah, a text that surely emerges out of this period, although in its later formations it was strongly influenced by the Babylonian Talmud.

The subject of this essay is the prehistory of mishnaic law. Sixty-two of the sixty-three tractates of the Mishnah treat questions of halakhah, that is, law, practice, and ritual. When the Mishnah talks about blessings and tithes, Sabbath and festivals, marriage and divorce, torts (physical and financial damages) and contracts, slaughter and sacrifice, or purity and impurity, it devotes almost exclusive attention to the exposition of law, at great length and in great detail. Whence come all these laws and all these details?

The Mishnah itself is not interested in this question. The opening paragraphs of Mishnah Avot, the lone mishnaic tractate not devoted to legal matters, presents the theory of a rabbinic chain of tradition, stretching via master and disciple from Moses on Mt. Sinai to the mishnaic sages themselves:

“Not for me are the things of Gyges, rich in gold, a concern, / Nor has envy yet taken me, nor do I resent / The works of the gods, and I do not desire great tyranny; / For [these things] are far from my eyes.” Archilochus fr. 19 W [= 122 W2] / “Eros again the limb-loosener whirls me, / sweet-bitter, impossible, creeping thing...” Sappho fr. 130 LP / Archaic Greek poetry confronts the reader with a sudden explosion of distinctive, individual voices from all over the Greek world, in contrast to what came before - the two great lone voices of the Greek epic tradition, Homer and Hesiod - and to what followed - the almost total dominance of Athens in the literary record of the classical period. Thus, in addition to Archilochus of Paros and Sappho of Mytilene on Lesbos (quoted above), the remains of Archaic poetry include verse composed by Hipponax of Clazomenae, Semonides of Amorgos, Xenophanes of Colophon, Solon of Athens, Theognis of Megara, Alcman of Sparta, Alcaeus of Mytilene, Stesichorus of Himera, Ibycus of Rhegion, Anacreon of Teos, Pindar of Thebes, and Simonides and Bacchylides of Ceos, spanning a period from roughly 700 to 450 BCE.

A tension between two views of the Archaic period, one emphasizing the emergence of the individual, the other stressing the importance of the community, is as dominant in approaches to colonization as in everything else. Colonization, on the one hand, is viewed as a kind of protocapitalist enterprise of self-starting, pioneering risk-takers and entrepreneurs as well as the castoffs of society (and an individual affair). Alternatively, colonization is seen as a protoimperialist movement that established Hellenism in foreign territory, secured trade for the mother city, and inscribed the polis by means of the spatial allocations of city and country that some of the earliest colonies created. Thus establishing a colony was an official activity of an established state, or city-state (polis). In encounters between Hellenes and indigenes, moreover, Greek colonization could be seen to prefigure the classic trope of Greek and Other, which was fully expressed in the struggles with the Persians that unfolded in the late Archaic period. Indeed, the definition and redefinition of Hellenic identity, of Greekness or “Hellenicity,” was ongoing and continued right through the end of Greek hegemony and on into the ascendancy of Rome. In recent years, as programs of archaeological investigation have expanded and borne fruit, and as comparative perspectives in colonial studies have gained hold, the centrality of the colonial movement to Greek identity and experience has become clear.

Lawgivers and tyrants seem at first an odd couple: of the latter we have a negative view, whereas the former make a more positive impression. Certainly, so wise a sage as Solon, the sixth-century BCE lawgiver of Athens, has found many admirers throughout history, whereas few have confessed to liking his near contemporary, Periander the tyrant of Corinth - certainly not after reading this impassioned denunciation of him: “Now while Periander was in the beginning milder than his father [Cypselus, also tyrant of Corinth], he later, owing to a correspondence with Thrasybulus, the tyrant of Miletus, became far more murderous than Cypselus . . . Periander . . . understood that Thrasybulus was advising him to murder those among the townsmen who were in any way pre-eminent. So Periander then unleashed every savagery upon the citizens, for he finished off whatever Cypselus had omitted to do in the way of killing people or sending them into exile.” (Herodotus 5.92) / Now I have started off with this passage on Periander for several reasons: first, because it shows us what sort of a reputation the tyrants in the end had, but, second, because another fact about Periander helps make a link between tyrants and lawgivers.

In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel claims that there is a paradox inherent in the very notion of a “history of philosophy”: “The thought which may first occur to us in the history of Philosophy is that the subject itself contains a contradiction. For Philosophy aims at understanding what is unchangeable, eternal, in and for itself: its end is Truth. But history tells us of that which has at one time existed, at another time has vanished, having been expelled by something else. Truth is eternal; it does not fall within the sphere of the transient, and has no history.” Although few scholars would now endorse Hegel's solution to the problem of philosophy's “development in time,” the tension between philosophy and history still remains. For, if the notion of an atemporal and transhistorical truth is no longer in vogue, scholars who work in the “history of philosophy” nonetheless analyze philosophic texts in abstraction from the historical and cultural contexts that ground these discourses. Certainly this has been the dominant approach to the Archaic Greek thinkers, who have generally been treated as detached intellectual theorists since the time of Aristotle and Theophrastus (who wrote the first “histories” of philosophy). At the end of the nineteenth century, John Burnet famously characterized Archaic philosophy as “The Greek Miracle” - the extraordinary creation of a rational mode of thinking radically distinct from the discourse and “mythic” mentality of Greek culture.

“For Froma Zeitlin” / “From the eighth century onwards, the history of inter-state sanctuaries, including the two most prestigious, Olympia and Delphi,was the history of the establishment of a state framework for pilgrimage.” - Catherine Morgan, Athletes and Oracles, 234. / The “Panhellenic” sanctuaries of Delphi, Olympia, and Delos are astonishingly complex, and their importance for the history of early Greece can hardly be overstated. To consider even the most exiguous remains from one of these sites is, immediately, to find oneself enmeshed in an intricate web of economic, social, artistic, literary, and religious histories. The present discussion, accordingly, does not attempt to be in any way systematic, nor does it offer detailed histories of the sites themselves. Instead, it will knit together a few of these remains, tracing their interconnections and their underlying patterns. The daunting complexity of these sites has one benefit: their inscriptions, statues, and buildings are mightily overdetermined, threaded through with cross-cutting political and ideological strands. They are, for that very reason, at once difficult and fascinating. Individual monuments both demand and reward close attention; hence this chapter will move from the relatively general and schematic to the relatively specific and concrete, from secondary literature to the close reading of poems and sculptures.

Traditionally, treatments of the Archaic Greek world have been dominated by discussion of the polis - a term that is often loosely (but not entirely erroneously) translated as “city-state.” Victor Ehrenberg, who in many ways pioneered modern research into the origins of the polis, described it as the very “foundation and support of Greek culture”; more recently, Oswyn Murray has characterized it as “the dominant form of government in the Greek-speaking world for roughly a thousand years, enabling city dwellers to control directly all or much of their own government, and to feel a local loyalty to an extent which no modern society has achieved.” In reality, this emphasis on the polis has tended to obscure the fact that in numerous regions of Greece, especially in the north and west, it was not the exclusive or even dominant form of sociopolitical organization until fairly late in the Classical period. On the other hand, there is no denying that much of the literature that survives from the Archaic period betrays the perspective of poets for whom the polis constituted an important point of reference, and this should at least serve to justify continued interest in how and when this characteristically Greek institution arose. To answer these questions, however, we first need to define what the polis was. Although it would be a mistake to assume that every polis developed in the same way or as a result of the same factors, there are nevertheless certain shared defining characteristics that can be identified.

In a year probably not long after 550 BCE, one of Athens' leading families lost a daughter and buried her in a rural cemetery at Myrrhinous (Merenda) in eastern Attica. The girl was named Phrasikleia, and her family commissioned Aristion (a sculptor who came from the marble-rich island of Paros but who made his reputation in Attica) to carve a statue in Parian marble to mark her grave (see Figure 30). To judge from its nearly perfect state of preservation, the statue did not mark the grave for very long: rather, it was apparently removed for its own protection and was buried (together with a statue of a nude youth) in a pit, where it was discovered in 1972 CE. The image is over life size - if we assume most women in the middle of the sixth century stood less than 1.79 m (or about 5'10'') tall. It shows a girl standing upright and frontally, wearing a long-sleeved dress, belted at the waist, with a zigzag hem that flares gently over close-set, sandaled feet. The dress is incised with ornaments (rosettes, stars, swastikas, meanders) and was originally painted in deep red, yellow, and other bright colors (the skin may have been painted white or cream): the effect would strike the modern eye as garish, but the Greeks were in many ways different from us, and the practice of vividly painting marble sculpture was the ancient Greek norm.

Arnold van Gennep's The Rites of Passage (1909; English trans. 1960) has had a profound impact on how we understand the nature of the “life cycle” and its rites de passage - each of which consists (to varying extents) of stages of separation, transition, and (re)incorporation. The life cycle, particularly in a community-oriented culture such as Archaic Greece, cannot be examined merely at the level of the individual; it must also be considered from the perspective of the individual vis-à-vis both household and society. In this chapter, I will examine the Archaic Greek rites of birth, initiation, marriage, and death in light of van Gennep's schema and attempt to ascertain the ways in which the Greeks negotiated these potentially anxiety-producing passages. Rites of passage are considerably better attested in the Classical period than in the Archaic, but the fragments available to us - literary, archaeological, and iconographic - allow us to see that many of the “Classical” life-cycle rituals are in fact rooted in Archaic practice. / Stages of Life / Before we address the specifics of the Archaic Greek rites of passage, we should examine the ways in which the life cycle was divided. Not surprisingly, there were a number of ways to classify the stages of life.

The ten essays in this volume aim to provide an overview of the culture and society of ancient Greece during the formative years that we conventionally refer to as the Archaic period, from about 800 to 480 BCE. It was in these years that all the elements we think of as making up Greek civilization, from poetry and philosophy to architecture and city planning, were created and experienced their earliest stages of development. This was an exciting period of discovery and experimentation, without which we cannot understand or appreciate the achievements of Classical Greece that have shaped the civilization of the West ever since. Our word “archaic” derives from the Greek archaios, meaning simply “old” or “ancient.” It is, for example, the word that Modern Greek uses to describe what we call Ancient Greece or the Ancient Greek language. There is none of the negative connotation implied in our use of the word “archaic” to describe something that is hopelessly old-fashioned, primitive, or out of date. On the contrary, archaios was often a mark of respect, especially in the area of religion, where whatever is older - a temple, say, or a cult statue - is better, more sacred. The Greeks of the Classical period and later did not refer to what we call Archaic Greece by this name, for they did not divide their earlier history into periods as we do. But they did describe as archaios certain objects, especially works of art and architecture, that would fall into what we call the Archaic period, and in this sense the choice of the word Archaic is reasonably faithful to the Greeks themselves.

For most of the twentieth century, scholars believed that the Archaic period saw dramatic changes in Greek military practices, significant enough to merit the name “hoplite revolution” or at least “hoplite reform.” This revolution was thought to have had major social and political consequences, especially for the development of Greek democracy. In brief, the story went as follows. In Early Iron Age fighting, as described by Homer, aristocrats dominated the battlefield, fighting heroic duels in front of a large, but largely uninvolved, mass of supporters. The invention of new equipment, especially the double-handled hoplite shield, led to the adoption of a close-ordered formation, the hoplite phalanx, that relied not on individual exploits but on group solidarity. Aristocrats had to welcome anyone who could afford the new equipment into the phalanx, in order to make it as large as possible. Hoplites adopted new unwritten military protocols that made warfare more ritualistic and confined it largely to competitions for status rather than survival. In individual communities, hoplites gained a sense of group identity and demanded a greater voice in politics. In many early poleis they supported tyrants who broke the aristocrats' stranglehold on power and paved the way for democracy. In the last thirty years, scholars have challenged every part of this story, despite its undeniable explanatory power. In what follows, I will first explain the traditional view in more detail, and then look at the challenges.

A series of Greek vase paintings dating from 670 to 625 BCE depict up to five men blinding another figure with an elongated, pole-like object (see Figure 15). These vases have been thought to represent Odysseus' wounding of the drunken Cyclops, Polyphemus, as recounted by Odysseus himself in the Odyssey (9.105-566). Such an interpretation depends upon understanding the Odyssey to have been composed sometime before the first of these vase paintings and to have influenced artists soon after its appearance. Indeed, it is hard to overstate the importance of not only the Homeric but also the Hesiodic poems to the ancient world. Herodotus claimed the two taught the Greeks about their gods (2.53), and Homeric poetry became fundamental to Greek and Roman education. It was only natural that in order to examine the history of Rome and the domestic policies of the emperor Augustus, Virgil rewrote the stories of Achilles, Hector, and Odysseus. The popularity of the poems has hardly waned since then. In Omeros (1990), Derek Walcott explores the postcolonial Caribbean through the lens of Homeric epic. The narrators of Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad (2005) are Penelope and the maids whom Odysseus has killed after he dispatches the suitors (Odyssey 22.437-73). Yet despite all the attention lavished on the poems since antiquity they are far from known quantities. Let us return to Odysseus and the Cyclops.