Myth and Societyin Ancient GreeceZONE BOOKS NEW YORK1990ZONE BOOKS611 Broadway, Suite 608New York, NY 10012'All rights reserved-FirstPaperback Edition, Revised---, 996 ,-, ",-No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in aretrieval system, or transmitted in anyJorm or by any'mearis;il1cluding eleCtronic, mechariicil;'photocopying,microfilming, recording, or"otherwise(except for thatcopying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public without written permission from'the Publisher. 1980 Harvester Press Limited'Originally published in France as M)'the etsocieteen Grece ancienne1974 by Librarie Franyois Maspero.Published 1988 by Editions la Decouverte.Printed in the United States ofAmericaDistributed by The MIT Press,Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, EnglandLibrary of Congress CatalOging in Publication DataVernant,Jean-Pierre.[Mythe et societe en Grece ancienne. , Myth sociery -;',-. ,:::.-"Jean-Pierre Vernant; translated by Janet Lloyd.p. cm.Translation of: Mythe et societe en Grece ,!-ncienne.Bibliography: p.ISBN 0-942299-17-5 (pbk.)I. Greece-Social life and customs. 2. Greece-Socialconditions-To 146 B.C. 3.Mythology, Greek. I. Title.DF78.V4713 1988 87-33786938-dc19 .CIP t ,__ ._. ... : ,.. - ,".,.-. .\'l\. 21 -09- 2000 ~ 0 n ten t s, II' \ ~ K(fit"! DI-1 f : . , \ ~ ~ ~~Introduction 7The Class Struggle 1 1II City-StateWaifare 29III Marriage 55IV Social History and the Evolution of Ideas in Chinaand Greece from the Sixth to the Second Centuries B.C.(with Jacques Gemet) 79V The Society of the Gods 1 0 1 ~VI The Pure and the Impure .121 ~VII Between the Beasts and the Gods 143VIII The Myth of Prometheus in Hesiod 183.IX. The ReasonofMyth 203Notes 261BOGAZil;iONIvERSITESiKOTOPHANESi 1111111 III IIt 1111 II416051IntroductionFollowing .Myth and Thought and .Myth and Tragedy, here is a col-lection of studies under the title of .Myth and Society, the mostrecent of which have never been published before. The reader has_ right tq. que.stioIl Qf lTlyth.w.ith ....thing else, all the more so since in French (and in English) the"copular" and can carry more than one meaning and may infernot simply juxtapositionbut also association or contrast.While I was writing .Myth and Thought I had in my mind oneof Henri Delacroix's fine bqoks, entitled Language and Thought,which appeared when I was a young man. His title conveyed notonly that language already contains thought, .that language isthought, but also that thought consists ofmore than just language:It is never completely contained by its linguistic expression. Thepapers I had collected in that volume [.Myth and Thought] seemedtome to lend in a similar way, to a double reading.On the onehand, hvas trying to revealthe intelJectualcode pecu-liar to myth and to distinguish the mental aspects of myths con-cerned with, for instance, memory, time, and Hermes and Hestia,but on the other hand, I also wanted to indicate how far Greek aiit de-.idoped histoncally, broke away from the languageof myth. In .Myth and Tragedy the problem was quite similar. PierreVidal-Naquet and I aimed to throw some light upon the inter-connections between legendary traditions and certain new formsof thought-in particular in law and politics - in fifth-century7MYTH AND SOCIETYAthens. The works of the tragedians seemed to us to offer a par-ticularly favorable field in which the texts themselves allowed usto seize upon this confrontation, this constant tension as expressedin aliterary genre which iIsed the great themes of legend but ..treated them in accordance with its own specific demands so thatthe myths are both present and, at the same time, challenged. 'Ourdesire to respect the equivocal and ambiguous character of therelationship between myth and tragedy was no doubt affected bythe double methodological orientation ofour. a structural analysis of the texts -..:. works themselves- todetect the system ofthought within them, but, at the same a. method.ofhistoric;al as this alone couldexplain the. changes, innovations, and restructuring that tookplace within any system. this third volume one might be tempted to suppose theconnection between myth and society to be a looser, more acci-dental, and less significant one, and to suspect that this time Ihave simply juxtaposed a number of studies on the subject ofGreek society and its institutions alongside a number of otherson the subject of myth. And in factthis book does open with threearticles on the subject of the class struggle, war, and marriage,and closes with the'mythology of spices, the myth ofProrrtetheus,and some general reflections on the problems of myth as theyappear toGreek scholars ..my choice of this or .various circumstances, requests, oropportunities that are boundto arise in the course of one's research. However, when I considerthe question closely it seems to me that here, as elsewhere, chancehas another, 'hidden side to it, and that the digressions made inthe course of a work can often be accounted for by a kind of inter-nal necessity. I do not think that the careful reader will have anydifficulty in picking out the thread that links var-ious studies and also links this book to those that preceded if:I shall therefore make only a few brief preliminary remarks.The framework of my first article is a debate within Marxism. In8INTRODUCTIONexamining the validity of the concepts of a slave-based mode ofproduction, of class, and of the class struggle When applied toancient Greece, I wanted, by returning to the ancient texts, togive Marx his due for his acute sense of historical reality and hisunderstanding of the specific characteristics of different types ofsocial forms. In emphasizing what was - in many respects,... thedecisive role of the city's irisrltlitiol1s and poHticallifein the nmc-tioning of the social system, I also intended to make the pointthat economic factors and relationships do not, in the context__________-:-__ polis, have the same effects as _modem capitalist societies. In order to present the economic factsaccurately it is necessary to take account of the attitudes andbehavior of the social agents, for these show that the religion andeconomics of the societyare still Inilifs respectthe starting p6iri(and background"or this "papetis LouisGernet's study, "La Notion mythique de la valeur en Grece."l. "City-State Warfare" was written as the to a col-lective work, Problems of Waifare in Greece. It is no mere chancethat so much of this preliminary study is devoted to the recipro-cal relations that can be established between the religious andthe military spheres. They were bound together by complex and,once again, equivocal relatiOnShips whose development can betraced through time.The study of marriage and the transformations it underwentbetween the archaic and classical.periods was specifically under-taken to solve a problem which had been posed by a particularwork of mythological analysis. When Marcel Detienne studiedthe corpus of texts relevant to Adonis and widened its scope toembrace the whole of the mythology of spices, he turned up a. new problem: how to account for the manifest disparity betweenthe picture myth gives us, in which the wife is diametricallyopposed to the concubine, and the much more vaguely definedinstitutions of fifth- and fourth-century Athens. To my mind, thehistorical study of the customs of marriage and the inquiry intothe structural analysis of the corpus of myth collected by Detienne9MYTH AND SOCIETYare two aspects ofasingle piece of research. The aim of this dou-ble approach is to distinguish more dearly the reciprocal effects'of society and myth and to define both the and, atthe same time., the divergences between these,two-levelsthaL _illuminate one another arid now reinforce, checkandcbun';-terbalance one another.Our remarks on the Greek gods consider the pantheon fromtwo points of view: first, as a divine society with its 9wnhierar-chy, i'n which each god enjoys his oWn privileges, bearing a more or less close, more or less direct rela-tion to the structure of human society; and second; asa classifi-catorysystem, langUage with its own intellectual ends.In "The and the Impure," an oft:he thesisof Louis Moulinier, we attempt to show that while this authorhas sU,ccessfully discovered what these concepts mean in psycho-logical and social terms, they can only be fully understood throughtheir relation to a coherent body of religious representations.Then there are the last two studies: "The Myth of Prometheusin Hesiod" and "The Reason of Myth." They seem to us to, speakfor themselves, and both refer so clearly to the book's centraltheme that there is no need to labor the point: to what extent andin what forms is myth present iIi a society and a societypresentinits myths? In fact, expressed in this way, the question is perhaps junction between two terms: Three terms, myth, thought, and soci-ety, form as it were a triangular framework in which each to someextent implies the other two while rema.ining at the same time '"distinct and autonomous. Piece by piece, hesitantly and incom-pletely, our research, in collaboration with others, has attemptedto explore the field of study that this framework deBnes.10CHAPTERThe Class Struggle!In his study on the problem of class struggle in classical antiquity,2Charles Parain tried to define the specific characteristics of formsof social life thatunderwel1tprofound changes in the periodbetween-pre-Homeric-Greece.ahd.-Imperial Rome, and that alsopresent marked spatial variations. Parain is well aware of the diver-sity in the historical material. He is, however, interested in a moreabstract level of al1alysisand attempts to define the fundamentalcharacteristics that gave a unique structure to this whole periodof human history in the Mediterranean West and constitute a par-ticular mode of production.For Marxists, the ancient world is a class society which in itstypical form can be defined as a slave mode of production. Butdoes it follow inevitably that the whole history of classical antiq-uity can be seen in terms of an opposition between the two con-flicting classes of slaves and slave owners? If Marxist theory hasto be reduced to such a brief, rigid, and anti-dialectical formula,it will scarcely be capable of illuminating the work of historians.First of all, slavery has its own history. Its birth and develop-mentare inevitably linked to certain modes ofTand appropria-tion. As a result, its spread, its importance, and its forms (in thefamily, agriculture, manufacturing, state administration) are notthe same in different places nor at different times. Thus, all ancientclassical societies cannot be classified indiscriminately as slave soci-eties. Several of Marx's texts themselves underline the point thatiIIMYTH AND SOCIETY. the spread of slavery within ancierit civilizations undermines.and ..ul timately. destroys the forms of property characteristic of theancient city. In Capital, for example; Marx sta.tes:Peasant agrictilfure ol1asiriallscaleano thecarryiriffout6finde- ..pendent handicrafts ... form the 'economicfoundation'ofthe" .--.-.classical communities at their best, after theprimitiveform'"of ownership ofland in common had disappeared, and before. slavery had seized on;productioriin.earnest.3.:':'..- ..- .. ..-- ...Marxists should therefore consider slavery dialectically as a pro-cess, both in so far as it determin7s the specifie characteristics,after a certain of the social and iilso-far as, in the course of its development, it destroys the originalforms that these social relationships assumed in the context of city. Historians of ancient Greece and Rome will not, there-fore, have exactly the same perspective. As far as Greece is con-.cemed, the perspective, again,. will not be the same for the wholeof antiquity. It will be different for the archaic period when thecity developed its original structure and slavery, which still existedonly on a small scale,-retained its patriarchal character, and forthe classical age and the subsequent period df dissolution, whichwere marked by the expansion of servile labor in different branches..... ..... .. ".....;':'c < ..",.