Abstract
In addressing the question of nature in the ancient Greek world, I thought that I would turn to the gods because they so complicate conventional distinctions between nature and culture.1 At one end of the spectrum, they embody elements of nature and indeed personify natural forces — Zeus, the Indo-European Sky God, cloud gatherer and hurler of thunderbolts, and at the other end they represent ideals of civilization and moral order: Zeus Polieus, Zeus Euboulos (“the Good Counsellor”), Zeus Xenios (“Protector of Hospitality”); or consider anarchic Aphrodite, the joyous and dangerous goddess of sexual intercourse, often flanked by two winged youths Eros and Himeros, abstract nouns for sexual desire and yearning, as contrasted with Aphrodite, defender of cities and warlike Bringer of Victory (Nikephoros), portrayed in sculpture with a diadem of towers on her head.
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Notes
Vincent Scully, The Earth, The Temple, and the Gods (New York, 1962; rev. 1969), 123.
Segal, Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 1. Those who are familiar with the opening essay in this book will know how much I have profited from his account of Bassai and, indeed, from his discussion of nature and culture in Greek thought; see also his ‘Nature and the World of Man in Greek Literature’, Arion 2 (1963), 19–53.
Scully (note 5), 126. For a discussion of the temple and its sculpture, see Mary Beard and John Henderson, The Classics (Oxford, 1995), passim,esp. 75–82.
See Martin Mueller, The Iliad (London, 1984), 113–14; cf. James Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad (Chicago, 1975; repr. 1995), 189–92. For a foreshortened view of city to agrios at Troy in the Iliad, see Stephen Scully, Homer and the Sacred City ( Ithaca, N.Y., 1990 ), 10–14.
Cf. Zaidman and Schmitt Pantel (note 2), 173–74. Cf. Marcel Detienne, `Culinary Practices and the Spirit of Sacrifice’, in Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, edd., The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks, tr. by Paula Wissing (Chicago, 1989 ), 1–20.
Cf. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, tr. by John Raffan (Cambridge, Mass., 1985 ), 164–65.
W.H. Auden, ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ (1939).
An evolutionary view of the universe is not entirely absent in Homer. For the Iliad, see Laura Slatkin, The Power of Thetis (Berkeley, 1991) and Jenny Clay, The Politics of Olympus (Princeton, 1989 ), 11–12; for the Odyssey, see Charles Segal, Singers, Heroes, and the Gods in the Odyssey ( Ithaca, N.Y., 1994 ), 195–227.
Arthur, ‘Cultural Strategies in Hesiod’s Theogony: Law, Family, Society’, Arethusa 15 (1982), 63–4; cf. James Redfield, The Sexes in Hesiod’, Annals of Scholarship 10 (1993), 31–40.
For discussion of the poem’s ending, which I place at line 955, see Richard Hamilton, The Architecture of Hesiodic Poetry (Baltimore, 1989), 96–9; cf. Mark Northrup, ‘Where did the Theogony End?’, Symbolae Olsoensis 58 (1983), 7–13. For akoitis also see Th.410.
Cf. M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, tr. by Janet Lloyd (Sussex, 1978 ), 107–9.
Cf. Annie Bonnafé, Eros et Eris: Marriages divins et mythe de succession chez Hésiode (Lyon, 1985), 92–7.
Cf. Foley (note 21), 33–35; Eleanor Irwin, ‘The Crocus and the Rose: A Study of the Interrelationship between the Natural and the Divine World in Early Greek Poetry’ in Douglas Gerber, ed., Greek Poetry and Philosophy: Studies in Honour of Leonard Woodbury (Chico, California, 1984), 147–68; Richardson (note 19), ad loc.; Ileana Chirassi, Elementi di cultura precereale nei miti e riti greci (Rome, 1968), 91–155; G. Piccaluga, ‘Ta Pherephattés anthologia’, Maia 18 (1966), 241–2.
For the narcissus as monstrosity, see Clay (note 14), 214; Carl Ruck and Danny Staples, The World of Classical Myth (Durham, N.C., 1994),318, see a pun perhaps between the hundred (hekaton) heads of the flower and Hekate, who mediates in the story between Demeter and Persephone.
Cf. Charles Penglase, Greek Myths and Mesopotamia (London, 1994), 154–55; Foley (note 21), 111–12; Segal (note 21), 124–25 and 141–50.
Cf. Foley (note 21), 118–37; as well as both Arthur and Suter (note 21).
I wish to thank Professors Donald Carne-Ross, Carl Ruck, Charles Segal, and James Wiseman, each of whom has helped to bring this paper into its present form.
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Scully, S. (1998). The Nature of the Gods in Early Greek Poetic Thought. In: Cohen, R.S., Tauber, A.I. (eds) Philosophies of Nature: The Human Dimension. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 195. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2614-6_12
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