The Seer and the City: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Ideology in Ancient Greece

by Margaret Foster

Overview

Seers featured prominently in ancient Greek culture, but they rarely appear in archaic and classical colonial discourse. Margaret Foster exposes the ideological motivations behind this discrepancy and reveals how colonial discourse privileged the city’s founder and his dependence on Delphi, the colonial oracle par excellence, at the expense of the independent seer. Investigating a  sequence of literary texts, Foster explores the tactics the Greeks devised both to leverage and suppress the extraordinary cultural capital of seers. The first cultural history of the seer, The Seer and the City illuminates the contests between religious and political powers in archaic and classical Greece.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520401426
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	05/28/2024
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Margaret Foster is Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at Indiana University.

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CHAPTER 1

Beyond Entrails and Omens

Herodotus's Teisamenos and the Talismanic Seer at War

I begin with an observation and a paradox. First, the observation. Greek colonial expeditions resembled in certain fundamental ways military ventures. Just as Greek armies could march with their commanders to the site of a distant battlefield, colonial expeditions, guided by their oikist (founder), traveled to a new land in which awaited at least the possibility of a hostile encounter. Several ancient authors confirm that the colonists' initial engagement with native populations could be violent, while Thucydides explicitly compares colonial and military ventures: in his speech on the eve of the Sicilian expedition, Nikias tries to reason with those citizens eager for the undertaking (6.23.2–3):

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We must also consider that we go to settle a city among foreign and hostile people and that those of us who do this must either become masters of the country on the very first day they land in it or know that, if they fail to do so, they will encounter hostilities on every side.

Modern scholars have followed Thucydides' lead in comparing colonial and military campaigns. As Malkin observes, "There is no great difference, after all, between the oikist as a leader of a colonial, or a military expedition." Second, I note a paradox. Whereas seers are frequently paired with military commanders in accounts of late archaic and early classical Greek warfare as well as in myths current in this period, they rarely appear paired with oikists in colonial narratives concerning the same time frame. This paradox captures the central concern of this book — namely, the consideration of why the seer, while conspicuous in military contexts, is absent from comparable and contemporary colonial ones.

In order to address this discrepancy, however, we must first develop a more nuanced understanding of the presence of the Greek seer on campaign. The prominence of military manteis in Greek representations of warfare cannot be attributed solely to their expertise in the divinatory requirements for battle. This expertise is crucial, as others have well shown, but it leaves us with an incomplete picture. This chapter will argue that, in addition to their possession of divinatory skill, certain seers could be considered figures of extraordinary talismanic power. Best observed through specific examples, talismanic power can be defined as a divinely guaranteed ability to succeed, especially in the contexts of warfare and athletic competition. An individual believed to possess talismanic power was seen to enjoy an outsize portion of divine favor that enabled him to win, sometimes against all odds and occasionally in a manner defying rationalization. Put another way, we might define talismanic power as a potent, culturally specific, and more narrowly defined form of the general concept of charisma.

A belief in talismanic power flourished during the archaic and classical periods, especially in the late sixth to early fifth century B.C.E. Inherited from earlier generations, the concept of talismanic power was particularly suited to the late archaic and early classical zeitgeist. During this time frame, the perceived existence of talismanic figures and the polis's desire to harness their efficacy dovetailed with a range of analogous phenomena. Anecdotes associated with this period report the assistance of epiphanic heroes and gods in battle, such as Theseus and the Dioskouroi, as well as accounts of athletes who performed extraordinary deeds beyond the limits of normal human capability. A corresponding array of cults sought to incorporate these larger-than-life figures into the framework of the polis with a view to capitalizing on their ritual power. Cults for heroized athletes, for the archaic Seven Sages, for oikists, and for local heroes populated the religious landscape at this time. Herodotus's report of the Spartans' relocation of the bones of Orestes from Tegea to Sparta also belongs to this milieu (1.66–68). Herodotus concludes his story by noting that ever since the bones of Orestes have resided in Sparta, the Spartans themselves have been invincible. Fittingly, archaic and classical literary texts (e.g., epinikia), oral traditions (e.g., hero-athlete narratives), and visual media (e.g., victory statues) that presented expressions of talismanic power accommodated these other beliefs and experiences as well.

Internal and external pressures converged on the late archaic and early classical Greek polis to create an environment especially receptive to these related phenomena. Assertions of talismanic status, especially in connection with athletic victory, seem to have functioned as a strategic way for elites to counter the dilution of their traditional forms of ritual power. At the same time, these elite assertions were offset by the polis's interest in co-opting a variety of powerful talismans for its own use. The looming threat of Persia and its subsequent extraordinary defeat also encouraged the desire for and claims of heroic or numinous assistance.

In this era of internal upheaval and foreign invasion, the Greek seer thrived. Nevertheless, modern scholarship has yet to explain the seer's importance by relating it sufficiently to the phenomena discussed above and especially to the concept of talismanic authority. To uncover the seer's own claim to talismanic power, however, it is necessary first to come to grips more generally with this cultural belief by surveying its most conspicuous recipients, namely, athletic victors of the so-called crown games. To this end, part 1 of this chapter will provide an overview of talismanic athletic victors in the late archaic and early classical periods. Part 1 will emphasize that what distinguishes talismanic power in this period from its manifestations in Homeric poetry is the polis's interest in its regenerative powers. As we will see, a belief in the regenerative or enduring potential of talismanic power helps account for instances of athletic victors who are subsequently recruited by their cities to ensure military victory or to lead successful colonial expeditions as oikists.

In part 2, Herodotus's characterization of the Greeks' seer at Plataia, Teisamenos, as a "leader of wars" will serve as the primary case study for understanding how military seers could also be perceived as talismanic. Herodotus's extended comparison of Teisamenos and the mantis serving the Persians, Hegesistratos, further underscores the talismanic nature of the seers at Plataia. Part 3 then integrates seers into a larger cultural nexus of talismanic figures. For, once we recognize that seers could be viewed as talismanic themselves, we can examine how they converge and intersect with other figures similarly depicted, including athletic victors and oikists. That seers are analogous in the context of warfare with other types of talismanic figures anticipates chapters 3–6: since talismanic oikists and athletes prominently appear in colonial contexts, the seer's erasure from these same contexts proves all the more striking. Put another way, the military seer explored in this chapter will serve as a foil for the colonial seer explored in the remainder of the book.

I. CROWN VICTORS AND THE CONCEPT OF TALISMANIC POWER

In Diodorus Siculus's account of the late sixth-century war between Kroton and Sybaris, the outnumbered Krotoniates manage to defeat the Sybarites. The Krotoniates themselves credit the athlete Milo with the surprise upset (12.9.5–6):

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... with Milo the athlete leading and, due to the superiority of his bodily strength, the first to put to flight those marshaled against him. For this man, who had won an Olympic victory six times and had courage to match his physical nature, is said to have come into battle decked with his Olympic crowns and dressed in Herakles' gear with lion skin and club. And [they say] that he was an object of wonder in the eyes of his fellow citizens because he was the reason for their victory.

In this extraordinary scene, Milo, decked with crowns and the lion skin and club of Herakles, routs the Sybarites. Diodorus at first seems to attribute the feat to Milo's superior strength, but this initial explanation gives way to his description of Milo's striking costume and the Krotoniates' estimation of the Olympic victor as a thauma (object of wonder). The effect of the entire passage, culminating in the Krotoniates' astonishment, suggests that physical prowess alone does not tell the whole story.

Leslie Kurke illuminates the strangeness of this passage by connecting it to a cluster of recurring dictional features in agonistic inscriptions and epinikia for athletic victors. As she perceives, a number of agonistic inscriptions and epinikia valorize the victor's crown and, at the same time, formulate an equivalence between the crown and the term kudos. This equivalence between the victor's crown and kudos introduces a further element in these contexts, the polis. For the crown itself can transform into the kudos the victor bestows upon his city, as in Bacchylides' Ode 10 (15–18):

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however many times, because of Victory, binding your golden head with flowers, you have established kudos for spacious Athens and glory for the Oineidai.

In like manner, Herodotus records a dedicatory epigram that, mirroring the language of agonistic inscriptions, again links a (metaphorical) crown to a polis's kudos (4.88.2):

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Having bridged the fishy Bosphorus, Mandrokles dedicated to Hera a memorial of the bridge of boats, placing a crown on himself and kudos on the Samians, having accomplished it by Darius's design.

Surveying the appearances of kudos in Homeric epic, Émile Benveniste observed that the word can signal a hero's talismanic power. In the Iliad, a god can bestow kudos upon a hero and thereby instantaneously provide him with an "irresistible advantage" for victory. Athena sees to it that Diomedes can win the chariot race: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (For Athena placed strength in his horses and gave kudos to him, Il. 23.399–400). The hero Antilochos makes clear that he knows full well the cause of Diomedes' victory as he urges his own horses on: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (I am not ordering you in any way to contend with those horses of the valiant son of Tydeus, to whom now Athena has granted swiftness and to [Diomedes] has given kudos, Il. 23.404–406). As Benveniste observes, in these and other instances in the epic poems, kudos appears to operate as a "talisman of supremacy" for the hero to whom it is granted. Building on Benveniste's understanding of the term in Homeric poetry, Kurke argues that the kudos referred to in epinikia and agonistic inscriptions continues to operate in this sense in the sixth and fifth centuries. That is to say, athletic victors of the crown games become the primary inheritors in the archaic and classical periods of this "talismanic potency."

Since post-Homeric texts equate kudos with the victor's crown, the crown itself can be understood on its own to signify the talismanic power an athlete receives at his moment of victory. Pindar's Isthmian 1 provides a clear instance of the equation between crowns and kudos when the poet places them in apposition as he announces his intention to praise the Isthmus (10–12):

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since it gave the people of Kadmos six crowns from contests, triumphant kudos for the fatherland.

The merging of the two terms in both epinikia and inscriptions also suggests that the crown becomes more than just a sign of the victor's kudos. It can become the physical manifestation of it. As such, the crown itself seems to have served as an expedient vehicle for transferring talismanic power between the victor and his city. The crown's ability to embody the victor's talismanic power accounts for the crown's prominence in certain reentry rituals that attended a victor's return from the games. The technicus terminus for the entire reentry ritual was the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (to bring in the crown), and its culminating moment was the victor's public dedication of the crown at a local shrine. This focus on the crown again implies that more than functioning as a token of prestige the crown brought with it a perceived power that the city desired to incorporate within its walls.

Thus Kurke's important insight into the meaning and internal dynamics of this grouping of recurring terms (athletic victor, crown, kudos, and polis) yields results beyond the scope of the texts themselves and makes sense of a number of related cultural practices. Claims of talismanic power are not the genre-bound assertions of epinikion or the boasts of agonistic inscriptions but are in keeping with purported manifestations and declarations of it elsewhere in the late archaic and early classical periods, a point relevant to our encounter with the seer Teisamenos in part 2.

It is necessary to pause and acknowledge that the concept of talismanic power is contested in modern scholarship. Discussions of talismanic power have encountered resistance over the course of the last century, often because of the larger theoretical frameworks with which the concept has been linked. In the early twentieth century, the so-called Cambridge ritualists were interested in the Greeks' belief in talismanic power, but when this interest became associated with the Cambridge school's discredited and more notorious treatments of topics such as weather magic, their consideration of talismanic power was dismissed as well. The work of a later generation of scholars, such as Émile Benveniste, Hermann Fränkel, and H.S. Versnel, revived the subject, suggesting that one could read together the concepts of talismanic power, kudos, and, through a comparative anthropological lens, mana. In response, Poulheria Kyriakou and David Pritchard take issue with relating kudos to mana, with understanding kudos as signaling talismanic power, and, by extension, with the concept of talismanic power itself. For Kyriakou and Pritchard, athletic victory brought political capital and prestige.

To my mind, understanding the figures explored in this chapter as endowed with talismanic power as much as with political capital and prestige, which they also certainly enjoyed, more fully explains the way in which these figures are represented by our sources. The concept also helps to account for why ancient authors, as we will see below, repeatedly equate these human figures with numinous phenomena, such as the epiphanies of cult heroes and gods. Kudos, as others have shown, is a polyvalent word whose exact meaning in a given context is often difficult to discern. But, as in the examples presented here, the word does seem to have been for some ancient authors one way to attempt to name and articulate talismanic power, whose potential the Greeks were especially keen to recruit in the late archaic and early classical periods.

To return to Milo, we can now see that the athlete heading into battle bedecked with his six Olympic crowns is an image teeming with talismanic power. As Diodorus Siculus presents it, the athlete's talismanic power accounts for his ability to rout the enemy and to appear as an object of wonder, a thauma, in the eyes of his fellow Krotoniates. Even Milo's Herakles costume relates to his talismanic status insofar as it announces that his performance in battle will exceed the bounds of normal human capability. What is more, Herakles himself can be viewed as a paradigm of talismanic power, especially given his close identification with both warfare and athletic competition, that is, the two spheres in which kudos predominately operates. Finally, the episode reminds us that while kudos can denote talismanic power, it remains but one way to define or capture the phenomenon, and our ancient evidence can present manifestations of talismanic power without relying on the use of the word kudos to signal its appearance. Milo's talismanic power, for instance, receives concrete expression in his six Olympic crowns, while the "proof" of its existence rests in the athlete's ability to deliver victory single-handedly to Kroton.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Conventions and Abbreviations

Introduction
1. Beyond Entrails and Omens: Herodotus’s Teisamenos and the Talismanic Seer at War
2. Sailing to Sicily: Theoklymenos and Odysseus in the Odyssey
3. Suppressing the Seer in Colonial Discourse: Delphic Consultations and the Seer in the City
4. Th e Disappearance of Melampous in Bacchylides’ Ode 11
5. Hagesias as Sunoikister: Mantic Authority and Colonial Ideology in Pindar’s Olympian 6
6. Amphiaraos, Alkmaion, and Delphi’s Oracular Monopoly
Conclusion

Bibliography
Index
Index Locorum

Editorial Reviews

"Foster’s central observation about the striking absence of a certain style of religious expert where we might well expect them is new and important for historians of ancient religion and colonialism alike. So too, her writing is clear and the overall argument is well-constructed."

Reading Religion

"Foster systematically and clearly identifies and explains a significant anomaly in the Archaic and Classical Greek location of authority among the competing media of divine communication. . . . She has made a substantial contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of power, the push and push-back, between dominant and non-dominant cultic programs in ancient Greece—a description that resonates with ongoing discourse in postcolonial studies."

Bryn Mawr Classical Review