The Tyrant's Writ: Myths and Images of Writing in Ancient Greece
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The Tyrant's Writ: Myths and Images of Writing in Ancient Greece
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Overview
Particularly innovative is the suggestion that fifth-century Greek historians and dramatists portrayed writing as an essential tool of tyrants, who not only issue written decrees but also "inscribe" human bodies with brands and cut up land with compasses and rules. The despotic overtones associated with writing inform discussion of its function in democracies. Although writing could promote equal justice, ancient sources also linked this activity with historical and mythical figures who opposed the populist regime. By examining this highly nuanced portrayal of writing, Steiner offers a new perspective on ancient views of written law and its role in fifth-century Athenian democracy.
Originally published in 1994.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691602547 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1761 |
| Pages: | 294 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Tyrant's Writ
Myths and Images of Writing in Ancient Greece
By Deborah Tarn Steiner
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1994 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03238-2
CHAPTER 1
Tokens and Texts
The story begins, conventionally enough, with the earliest references to inscribed objects in the Greek sources. Homer's Iliad includes only two scenes where inscription appears, but both have generated long centuries of dispute. The controversy is a double-headed one: it concerns both the nature of the graphic signs evoked by Homer and the poet's knowledge of and attitude toward writing. Are the objects presented in the song inscribed with picture markings, or with the letters of the alphabet? Has the singer included an anachronistic reference to writing, revealing his own familiarity with the technology, or does the traditional song preserve a faint memory of Linear B or of a Semitic script, witnessed but not understood? Neither the wranglings of scholiasts nor subsequent generations of scholars have resolved these puzzles. But if the enigma of the markings remains, then the scenes can shed light on a different problem. By placing the inscribed objects back in their context, we can trace the relationship between alphabetic letters and semata and suggest how the Greeks might have included writing within existing modes of communication.
In Iliad 7, Ajax and the other Achaean heroes who have volunteered to meet Hector in single combat mark their tokens with a sign ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], 175) and put the lots in Agamemnon's helmet. Nestor shakes the helmet, and out jumps Ajax's lot. The herald carries the token through the assembled army, and when he reaches Ajax, the hero recognizes it as a sema (189). In Iliad 6, Proetus sends Bellerophon to Lycia carrying a tablet he has inscribed with "baleful signs" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], 168). When the Lycian king receives the message, he too identifies it as a sema (176–78). The two scenes closely parallel one another, both closing with an acknowledgment that the artifact received is a sema. My question concerns the relationship between the designs, alphabetic or pictorial, on the surface of the lot and the tablet, and their status as semata or tokens in the eyes of Ajax and the Lycian king.
A brief glance at other episodes in the Homeric songs shows that it is not the markings on the objects that elevate them to the rank of signs. Numerous other natural events, artifacts, and living things, whether thunderbolts, stars, tombstones, or animals, qualify as semata, and none of them is inscribed. Instead, the lot and tablet are significant communications, in and of themselves, which function independently of the graphic symbols that they include. The pictures or words they carry seem almost redundant, bearers of a surplus meaning. But the link that Homer creates between a sema and an inscription is not a gratuitous one. He stands at the head of a long tradition of poets and philosophers who similarly conflate tokens, pictograms, and alphabetic script and explicitly and implicitly compare and contrast the manners in which objects and graphic signs fashion meaning. I believe that these likenesses and differences underlie early Greek views of writing and that we must approach texts through the tokens that are their precursors and subsequent companions in both the literary and the archaeological record.
Two models of communication
What is crucial about semata is that they be acknowledged as message carriers. An individual who fails to recognize that a set of entrails, a lightning flash, or a chance remark (kledon) is significant will not think to search out the meaning. This distinguishes semata from more conventional types of communication: when one person addresses another, the listener knows that the speaker wants to tell him something. But with the exception of oracles (and these involve their own methods of oblique message-giving), semata do not communicate so directly: unless the individual is looking for a sign, he might miss the message when it comes. So recognizing an object or event as significant is the first of the tasks performed by the receiver of a sema, whereas discovering the meaning of the communication is the second. Sometimes a conventional code can help out: one type of bird flying from one part of the sky spells luck, another misfortune. But even where such a code exists, it is not a linguistic one. The sign is not encoded speech after the fashion of the alphabetic mark, nor can it be decoded into an exactly corresponding semantic representation. Picture writing functions similarly, presenting its images not merely as decorative devices, but as significant communications whose meaning must be extracted or disembedded. Even when each picture represents a thing, the viewer must still supply the necessary links between the individual designs and the overall message. Again, the pictures do not express phonetic signals by visible symbols, but operate outside the linguistic code.
Recent work by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson offers an account of communication that captures the distinction between messages fully dependent on a linguistic code and semata. People communicate successfully by using both the semiotic and the inferential model. The semiotic model describes how the speaker encodes a thought into a phonetic signal according to a conventional system of differences while the receiver decodes what he has heard into its corresponding semantic representation. Two assumptions lie behind this model: first, all human languages are codes that associate thoughts to sounds; second, communication depends on an underlying system of signs that are random and differential. But semantic representations elicited by the linguistic code from the phonetic signal do not always precisely correspond to the thought the speaker hopes to communicate. Sometimes the gap has to be filled by the receiver of the message, w ho draws on a host of other indicators — his knowledge of the situation, of the speaker, of the broader "environment" surrounding the communicative act. At this point the inferential model can supplement or bypass the linguistic code. Sperber and Wilson supply an example of inferential communication: John asks Mary how she is feeling today, and her only response is to produce an aspirin bottle from her bag. There is no formal code that matches the aspirin bottle to the message "I feel terrible," but John has no trouble understanding what Mary means. He does not decode the communication but infers its sense using his ordinary processes of reasoning and his knowledge of the situation and the speaker. What makes Mary's gesture communicative is John's recognition of her intention to tell him something: he can understand the meaning of the bottle without recourse to linguistic convention or a formal code.
In Book 20 of the Odyssey, the hero of the song confronts an inferential token or sema whose success depends on his recognition of its message-bearing character. H ere the disguised Odysseus contemplates his coming battle with the suitors and feels discouraged. He turns to Zeus for reassurance, asking the god to send him a double portent to show that he supports his cause. H e wants both a verbal communication and a nonlinguistic one, an utterance ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) from some mortal here within his house and a portent ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) from the sky (100–101).The god delivers on request: "Zeus heard him, and straightaway he thundered from gleaming Olympus" (102–3). The thunderclap is Zeus's aspirin bottle. It does not match any linguistic code spelling out the success of Odysseus's endeavor, but the hero instantly infers the meaning of the natural event and rejoices in his coming good fortune (104). Recognizing the god's intention to inform, he understands the thunder as a communication which tells him that all will be well when he fights the suitors.
No sooner has Odysseus received the first message than the second one arrives. A woman sitting at her mill grinding wheat hears the thunderclap. She too recognizes the disturbance in the otherwise clear sky as a teras and, drawing on what she knows of meteorology, infers Zeus's communicative intention (113–14). She quickly adds a retroactive prayer asking that this may be the last day the suitors spend on earth. When Odysseus hears her petition, he decodes the message according to the regular semiotic model, matching the phonetic signs to a linguistic code. But a semantic representation would only tell the hero that he has an ally close at hand. It is the inferential model that allows him to recognize the words as part of Zeus's own communication, a second thunderclap embedded in the woman's speech. The poet makes sure his audience understands the true nature of the remark: the millwoman has uttered a sema (111) for the disguised hero and a kledon (120), a word of omen significant only to the listener who is seeking a response to a question or problem unknown to the speaker. The natural phenom enon and chance remark become semata precisely because Odysseus infers the god's intention to inform.
The two Iliadic episodes cited earlier follow a similar pattern. Again it is the broader "environment" surrounding the sending and receiving of the token and tablet that explains their status as semata. In Iliad 7 the poet sets the scene for a divine communication. In the moments before Nestor shakes the helmet, the assembled Achaeans raise their hands to Zeus and make their individual prayers: "And so one might say looking up to the broad heaven, 'Father Zeus, grant that the lot falls on Ajax, or on the son of Tydeus or else on the king of gold-rich Mycene himself"' (177–80). Now Ajax occupies the same position as Odysseus who made a prayer-invocation and then waited for a reply; the army has named Ajax as their hero of choice, and he too must receive confirmation from Olympus.
Several other details reinforce the portentous quality of the moment. The selection by lot is a sacred occasion, which brings suprahuman powers into play. Nestor, a figure whose age and wisdom give him an almost mantic status in the poem, shakes the helmet. O n other occasions he will act as a sign giver or serve as the mediator between a divine communicator and a mortal addressee. As he mixes up the objects, he copies the gesture of the oracular priestess who shakes ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], 181) the mantic symbols before drawing out the chosen lot. When Ajax's token leaps from the helmet (as though impelled by divine impetus), the herald who carries it through the crowd moves with the authority granted him by his sacrosanct profession. Occupying the liminal ground between men and gods, he is the proper person to deliver Zeus's message to its rightful receiver.
The hero instantly affirms that he is the owner of the token: "he recognized the sign of the lot seeing it" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], 189). The term sema carries a double meaning here, referring at once to the mark that each Achaean champion originally set on his token ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], 175), and to the message-bearing character that the object has now assumed. It is the lot's new aspect that causes Ajax to respond in precisely the manner of Odysseus on hearing the thunderclap, to "rejoice in his heart" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], 189; cf. Od. 20.104). Ajax explains the reason for his pleasure. It is not so much that he has won the lottery but that his win stands proof of the divine force that favors his enterprise: "I rejoice in my heart since I think I shall conquer goodly Hector" (191–92). According to the logic of the sema, his prediction should come true.
The "signifying" character of the token explains a second element in the scene that has preoccupied both ancient and more modern commentators. If the signs scratched on the tokens indicate the heroes' names, then why do the bystanders not identify the owner of the object long before the herald completes his circuit, and why does only Ajax recognize the mark as his? But divine semata often have a more exclusive target: the millwoman knew the thunderbolt was significant (otherwise thunder would not appear in a clear sky), but because she was not the proper receiver of the message, she missed the full communication apprehended by Odysseus. Now the massed Achaeans fail to understand the lot because it is not addressed to them. Only Ajax can grasp the double meaning of the token, which both identifies him as the champion in the coming combat and indicates that Zeus will stand by his side.
According to this analysis, the disputed markings would have little role to play. The lot becomes a sema when Ajax recognizes Zeus's intention to inform and infers the meaning of the divinely issued sign. If the symbols scratched by the heroes are some form of writing or cipher, then they belong to a different model of communication, one that depends on the linguistic code and deploys its symbols within a conventional system of differences. But the "protowriting" that goes on here suggests that for the singer of the episode, the two forms of sign making were not strictly differentiated. A traditional token might readily accommodate inscription, and surface markings can draw attention to or reconfirm its role as a significant communication. Ajax's sema is a doubly determined one.
But w hat of semata that have nothing to do with the gods? T he second Homeric example turns about a token exchanged between mortals and involves no divine intervention. In his encounter with Diomedes in Book 6 o f the Iliad, Glaucus names his ancestor Bellerophon, and describes the inauspicious start to the hero's career. Proetus, deceived by his wife Anteia into believing that the young hero has tried to seduce her, sends Bellerophon to the home of his father-in-law and equips him with an inscribed tablet to give to his host:
[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].
and he gave him baleful signs, which he inscribed many and soul-destroying in a folded tablet, and told him to show them to his father-in-law, so that he might perish. (168–70)
For nine days the Lycian king entertains his guest with lavish feasting, and on the tenth he asks for the treacherous tablet: "and then he inquired of him and asked to see the token" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], 176). No sooner does the king receive the sema than he dispatches the hero to perform a series of life-destroying tasks.
Again commentators debate the meaning of Proetus's inscriptions. Some declare that these are alphabetic signs, whereas others prefer to understand them as some kind of picture writing (what the scholia call [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) or a cipher known only to Proetus and the king. But once again the question is peripheral to the events that the poet describes. The tablet, like other semata, functions inferentially and can deliver its message even without the semiotic inscriptions. The language of the episode demonstrates the two models of communication at work. When Proetus inscribes his tablet, he scratches on it "baleful signs (semata)" or encoded language; but when the Lycian king receives the letter, he acknowledges it as a token (sema, 176 and 178). The transition from the plural to the singular form signals the move from the formal code to the token message. The Lycian king decodes a semantic representation from the inscriptions in the letter but infers the sender's intention in giving him damaging information about the bearer. Like Ajax's lot, the tablet collapses the difference between writing and sign making, introducing semiotic communication within the framework of the traditional token.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Tyrant's Writ by Deborah Tarn Steiner. Copyright © 1994 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsAbbreviations
Author's Note
Introduction
1 Tokens and Texts
2 Rites of Inscription
3 Impressions and Assemblages
4 The Tyranny of Writing
5 The City of Words
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index of Principal Passages Cited
General Index