The New Politics of Olympos: Kingship in Kallimachos' Hymns (Video)
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- My name is Michael Brumbaugh and I'm an Associate Professor in the Department of Classical Studies
- and Affiliate Faculty in Latin American Studies. Since coming to Tulane in 2013 my teaching and
- research have ranged broadly over topics in the languages and literatures of the ancient
- Greeks and Romans as well as their subsequent legacies from antiquity down to the present day.
- In particular I'm interested in topics related to how Greek literature and literary culture
- intersect with political ideology.
- Now today when we hear the word "political" our minds naturally go to our own political system,
- dominated as it is here in the U.S. by two opposing political parties. Now ancient versions
- of this sort of factionalism do occasionally crop up in my work, but more often I'm focused on
- a broader view of what constitutes politics. Today I'll be talking about my book, The New Politics of
- Olympus, which came out in 2019. But before getting into the details of that book I thought it'd be
- useful to take a step back and get a clearer picture of the kind of politics I'm referring to.
- So let's start off with a reasonably well-known quotation by a pretty well-known ancient Greek.
- In the first book of his Politics Aristotle says that, "The human is by
- nature a political animal." Of course when he said it, it sounded something more like,
- "Ο άνθρωπος είναι εκ φύσεως πολιτικό ζώο."
- Now whatever image that may conjure to a modern mind, it might be more
- helpful to translate Aristotle's phrase "πολιτικό ζώο" as a creature of the polis,
- which is the Greek word for a city-state. Aristotle goes on to say that unlike other animals,
- say bees for example, who are similar to us insofar as they live in a sort of community
- and respond to positive and negative physical stimuli, humans have the power of speech. And this
- in Aristotle's view is crucial because it allows us to respond to pleasure
- and to pain by saying, "I like that" or "Hey, that hurts." In the context of a community
- humans thereby come to develop both individual and shared perceptions of what is good and bad,
- right and wrong, etc. Naturally perceptions of these moral qualities are going to vary over time
- from place to place and indeed within a single community. But Aristotle believed that language
- and communication with others in the polis is what enables the uniquely political animal to make the
- leap from merely experiencing pleasure and pain physiologically to articulating and debating more
- nuanced moral ideas that emerge from efforts to collectively maximize pleasure and minimize pain.
- As moral ideas take shape, they come to have influence over the structure of our lives
- within the polis community. And taken together, they form ideologies or constellations of
- ideas that guide our decision making and help us rationalize and justify our political structure.
- Given that language is the medium for working out these ideas, it's hardly surprising that
- literature would serve both as a vehicle for transmitting them across space and time,
- but also as a laboratory for experimenting with them. So we've got to think about literature not
- just as a static heap of book roles tucked away in the library, but instead as an ongoing
- dynamic conversation, just as Raphael sought to depict it here in the School of Athens fresco.
- And so Greek literature offers us a distillation of the Greek's obsession with asking and answering
- questions about the best and the worst way to organize just about everything; from an
- individual life to the entire political community. Sometimes this takes the form of a philosophical
- treatise that explicitly teases out this or that set of questions. Plato famously carries
- out his investigations in dramatic dialogues where characters discuss the nature of piety, or goodness,
- or justice while going on a walk together or sitting under a shady tree beside a stream.
- Most literature, however, doesn't attack these questions head on, but instead examines them in
- the context of human lives. Thus we can see how moral and political questions are being worked
- out in narratives set in front of reading or listening audiences who can actively engage
- with the material by creating inferences and analogies relevant to their own experiences.
- My book examines the intersections of politics and literary culture at a period when Greek
- power and influence was not limited to the area occupied by the modern nation of Greece,
- but instead swept over most of Mediterranean basin extending as far as present-day Pakistan.
- At the head of a vast army, Alexander the Great absorbed most of this territory into a single
- kingdom in just a few years. But his sudden and unexpected death in 323 sent fissures shooting
- through his empire as his successors struggled to assert claims to his power. The most successful of
- these carved up his spear-one territory and set about creating kingdoms of their own.
- In most cases ruling over ethnically and culturally diverse populations who had not previously existed
- together in a single political community. The most effective of these successors was named Ptolemy,
- who ruled over Egypt, controlled the waterways in many of the islands of the eastern Mediterranean,
- as well as significant portions of the coastline from present-day Libya
- to Lebanon. The dynasty he established stood for nearly 300 years until the future Roman
- emperor Augustus deposed the last Ptolemy, queen Cleopatra, and annexed her territory.
- The Ptolemaic kingdom with all its power, the vast territory it claimed, the dynasty that lasted three
- centuries, all of it had to be invented. It had to be manufactured because it was newly created from
- the ground up. Now, let's say you're Ptolemy. You've got this huge army and the resources to keep them
- loyal to you, which is a whole different issue. It's terribly inefficient and not to mention
- completely impractical to trot your army out every time you want someone to do something.
- You need a way to manifest that power that doesn't principally rely on the use of physical force.
- A way to fix that power indelibly into the imagination, both of those you seek to rule and
- of your neighbors who want to take away bits of your kingdom from you. To pull this off, Ptolemy and
- later his successors, invested heavily in symbolic forms of power in order to project authority and
- legitimacy at home and abroad. Art, literature, and knowledge production more generally quickly
- became central to their efforts and a massive research complex known as the library and museum
- was created to serve as both a cultural repository and an international think tank that attracted
- superstars in every branch of learning in order to transform an insignificant peripheral city
- into the cultural capital, not just of the Ptolemaic regime but of the entire Greek world.
- No single figure was more important to this effort than a Greek polymath named Kallimachos, whose
- efforts are the central focus of my book. Born into an elite greek family in Kyrene, a well-known
- Greek colony in modern-day Libya, Kallimachos became an influential power broker in Alexandria, the city
- on the Nile Delta that Ptolemy was constructing as the center of his sprawling kingdom
- Over the course of some five decades, Kallimachos manipulated the levers of power as the first three
- Ptolemaic kings set in place the building blocks of a dynasty that would endure for three centuries.
- While his name is unfamiliar to most people today, well-known Roman authors like Virgil,
- Horace, and Ovid considered Kallimachos to be the most influential Greek literary figure after
- Homer. Among other things, Kallimachos was responsible for organizing the vast and growing collection of
- texts that Ptolemy was acquiring for his library, which aimed to acquire every book ever written.
- Kallimachos thus became a gatekeeper for a vast store of knowledge and cultural memory.
- He wrote dozens and dozens of works in both prose and poetry, establishing himself as the dominant
- literary figure of his time. Of that massive output, only a single one of his books survives today.
- Paradoxically, that one book has received rather little attention from modern scholars, who've been
- kept pretty busy trying to piece back together his other fragmentary works. Though long overlooked,
- Kallimachos' surviving book offers us an important window into the foundations of the Ptolemaic
- regime; an anthology of poems written throughout his career. We call this book, The Hymns, because
- it contains six songs of praise celebrating the major Olympian gods: Zeus, Apollo (who gets two hymns),
- Artemis, Athena, and Demeter. Long thought to be curiosities of a purely religious
- or literary character, and of interest only to a small group of esoteric poetry specialists,
- these carefully crafted works must be read in dialogue with the burgeoning efforts to manifest
- political power and authority in the first decades of the Ptolemaic regime. Kallimachos was neither a
- propagandist for the crown, nor a reactionary critic. And instead he staked out a position
- all his own that allowed him to stay close to power and yet also influence its development.
- Working within an authoritarian regime in which the king's favor could devastate you
- just as quickly as it could elevate you, was tricky business. And so Kallimachos was
- forced to become a master of figured speech. When Kallimachos sang the praises of the all-powerful gods,
- he described them as kings and queens, part of a divine family and a unified political regime. In so
- doing, he adapted and amplified elements that were central to the narratives that the Ptolemies were
- advancing about themselves. In this way, Kallimachos helped merge the Ptolemaic kings and queens
- with gods and heroic figures from legend who already occupied a place in people's imagination.
- Thus when Kallimachos sang a song praising Zeus as the king of the gods he subtly repackaged the god
- in a way that gave him a sort of Ptolemaic family resemblance, thereby co-opting him as a supporter
- and legitimizer of the new regime. Of course when Kallimachos did it, it looked a little nicer.
- Moreover, Kallimachos sought to redefine both Zeus and Ptolemy, all but erasing the
- space between the two as individuals, presenting them as virtually synonymous with one another.
- This went hand in hand with other efforts the regime was undertaking to harness the
- authority of such larger than life figures. So we can set Kallimachos' songs side by side
- with freshly minted coins, new monumental building programs, innovations in religious worship, and even
- foreign and military policy to gain a more complete picture of the diverse efforts that
- coalesced around institutionalizing and perpetuating the regime's power.
- My book is the first attempt to study Kallimachos' hymns in its entirety, analyzing how the six hymns,
- both individually and collectively, seek to reshape political values in order to bolster
- the Ptolemaic regime and secure a place for literature and for Kallimachos at its core.
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