https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctvn1tbcw
Author(s): Peter W. Rose
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Year: 1995
Language: English
Pages: 424
Front Matter
Front Matter (pp. i-vi)
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents (pp. vii-viii)
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Preface
Preface (pp. ix-xiv)
Peter W. Rose
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Introduction: Marxism and the Classics
Introduction: Marxism and the Classics (pp. 1-42)
In this book I propose to apply what I characterize as a Marxist approach to several ancient Greek texts. For me, such an approach implies a simultaneous concern with the politics of artistic form and with a central ideological theme. That theme, which has largely determined my choice of texts, is inherited excellence-the ways in which ideas about descent from gods or heroes and about aristocratic origins play a central role and undergo significant transformations in texts that both reflect and constitute the Greek cultural heritage.
There is of course no innocence in my choice of the theme of inherited...
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1 How Conservative Is the Iliad?
1 How Conservative Is the Iliad? (pp. 43-91)
In approaching a text as vast and complex as the Iliad, we cannot hope to deal with all the potentially relevant dimensions. Even in attempting to keep a relatively narrow focus on the theme of inherited excellence and the politics of artistic form, we find that an extraordinary range of issues are relevant. Of the two major conflicts in the narrative-one between Achilles and Agamemnon, another between the Greeks and the Trojans-the first is centrally imbued with the ideological ramifications of inherited excellence and the second, which entails the broader issues of the role of the gods and the status...
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2 Ambivalence and Identity in the Odyssey
2 Ambivalence and Identity in the Odyssey (pp. 92-140)
There are various levels on which one may seek to historicize a text. The most obvious is a kind of historical contextualization in which one attempts to situate the text in a set of plausibly reconstructed circumstances felt to belong with the text. But at another level one has to confront the question of how-in what sorts of ways-these circumstances might be in the text. Furthermore, one needs to confront the identity of the text as itself a historical fact, as an independent material existence offering its own contribution to our grasp of a historical moment. Finally, one needs to...
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3 Historicizing Pindar: Pythian 10
3 Historicizing Pindar: Pythian 10 (pp. 141-184)
If the task of any Marxist criticism worthy of the name is to historicize the text, the challenge is peculiarly acute in the case of Pindar-the first major author after Hesiod to survive in sufficiently complete texts to permit a serious encounter with a politics of form. The problem has several dimensions, which I separate for purposes of analysis. First is the traditional perception of Pindar’s place in the unfolding of any putative historical continuum between Homer and the fifth century. One needs both to assess the political and social developments of this period and reassess the characteristic ways Pindar...
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4 Aeschylus’ Oresteia: Dialectical Inheritance
4 Aeschylus’ Oresteia: Dialectical Inheritance (pp. 185-265)
The move from Pindar to Aeschylus takes us from a world of hegemonic oligarchs and tyrants to one recast by the invention of democracy, from the celebration of inherited excellence to the dissection of inherited evil, from the form of choral lyric to the form of tragedy and-even more decisive-of trilogy.
We have seen that the invention of the epinician during the sixth century involved the transformation and adaptation of communal prayers celebrating gods and heroes into a form memorializing aristocratic athletic victors. The impulse for such a gesture was undoubtedly complex, but, as I have attempted to show, certainly...
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5 Sophokles’ Philoktetes and the Teachings of the Sophists: A Counteroffensive
5 Sophokles’ Philoktetes and the Teachings of the Sophists: A Counteroffensive (pp. 266-330)
The work of Aeschylus represents, in the trajectory from Homer to Plato, the apogee of progressive ideology manifested in a form, the tragic trilogy, which was capable of embodying at least the utopian hope of forward movement-however painful-out of the brutal hierarchies inherited from the past. That past and that hope were conceived of in eminently social and political terms, terms to which the vast and mysterious conglomeration of forces beyond human control, the gods, was seen with cautious optimism as somehow ultimately ("in time") amenable. The old gods, whose erotic adventures with mortals were alleged to be warrants for...
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6 Plato’s Solution to the Ideological Crisis of the Greek Aristocracy
6 Plato’s Solution to the Ideological Crisis of the Greek Aristocracy (pp. 331-369)
If it is legitimate to see in Sophokles’ Philoktetes an implicit appropriation and transformation of sophistic anthropology and educational theory, it must be acknowledged that such a reading places a heavy burden of meaning on the frame of ancient myth which constitutes the poet’s narrative raw material. That frame, as Sophokles has tailored it, is just a story of three men on a deserted island. This cannot be in any real sense a society, and even as a putative metaphorical image of a society it is remarkably restricted-just two older men battling for the adherence of a third, younger man...
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Afterword
Afterword (pp. 370-374)
We are taught to read classical texts teleologically-to understand the rationale for whatever comes before in the text as an anticipation of or preparation for whatever comes at the end. So too there is a strong disposition among interpreters of ancient Greek civilization to read what comes before Plato as caught in a Hegelian dialectical spiral ascending inevitably toward its culmination in Plato. Thus what is negated along the way is felt to be somehow supersedednot annihilated but preserved on a more sublime plane.
The Marxist model I have applied in the preceding chapters treats both the reading process and...
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References
References (pp. 375-406)
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Index
Index (pp. 407-412)
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