The Anthropology of Greece

...instead he must discover patterns of social and religious behavior in what ancient people wrote down...

...The essays collected in this book do not present an ordered survey of Greek culture, but rather a series of tantalizing glimpses into a past that perhaps will never completely be revealed...

...He examined usage not only of particular terms, but of the practices they described, in whatever language they were expressed...

...When Prometheus is nailed and chained to the rock, he is not being subjected by Zeus to an arbitrary punishment...

...It is mainly due to Louis Gernet that methods have been devised for extracting from the reluctant data information about basic systems of values in the Greek world...

...Gernet's approach was essentially intuitive and eclectic...

...They are arranged by subject, Religion and Society, Forms of Mythical Thought, Law and Pre-Law, Social Institutions, Philosophy and Society, but in fact each one of these different topics is in some way considered in every essay...

...For him the prehistoric period described in myth was not specially creative or mysterious but, more simply, pre-literate...

...Rigidity and dogmatism are completely absent from his writings...

...Since Gernet's lively questioning brings immediacy to events in the distant past, it is a pity that the translators were not able to represent his writing in less stilted and obscure English...

...When Jason arrives with one foot bare, his uncle Pelias has reason to be frightened, for Jason has adopted the stance of a person come to claim his patrimony...

...Where certain scholars now insist on finding polar oppositions such as nature versus culture, Gernet spoke with sensitivity and subtlety about the lack of fixed distinction between town and country in Greek life before the Hellenistic age...

...The aim of the philosopher, like the priest and the prophet, is to acquire the privileged knowledge and powers accessible otherwise only to the gods...

...Instead he shows how legal codes and social stratification existed from the earliest times...

...For example, what translators Father D.B...

...Gordon in Myth, Religion, and Society (Cambridge 1981) as "Value in Greek Myth," a far more accurate representation of Gernet's style and emphasis...

...Does Greek legal procedure, which does not draw a clear distinction between proof (as we think it) and a convincing account, help explain why Greek historical writers so often failed to see a difference between past and present, or hearsay and eyewitness evidence...

...Hamilton, S.J., and Professor Blaise Hagy call, rather vaguely, "the Mythical Idea of Value in Greece," is translated by R.L...

...Some are short general articles...

...One cannot find in Gernet's work reference to the romantic notion that primitive man lived in an ideal, classless society...

...Monotheism, whether pagan or Christian, does not seem to have effected any immediate moral improvement...

...he was interested in discovering what was special about Greek society...

...Gernet looked at the practices of other cultures, but never tried to speculate about the existence of universal symbols or archetypes...

...He used every scientific technique at his command, especially linguistics...

...But much recent work seems almost to impose patterns on the evidence, where Gernet tended to let the data he had assembled speak for itself...

...If the Greeks can be said to have been superior to other people, it is in their ability to indicate through ritual and custom the importance of such social organisms as the city, and to recognize, through ritual, that its ethical demands could be different from and even opposed to those of the family...

...Structuralists in particular have applied his cross-disciplinary approach to problems Gernet did not have time to explore...

...others longer and more technical...

...So, for example, he was able to show that some of the strangest events in mythology were not simply fantasies of primitive minds...

...Philosophy, perhaps the Greeks' most enduring legacy to surviving Western cultures, develops directly from the central concerns of Greek religion...

...Myth encodes practices that people in subsequent periods of history were able to articulate and develop...

...Also the Greeks' willingness to recognize the reality of the unseen led them to deduce the existence of such intangibles as legal right...

...Mary Lefkewitz THE ANTHROPOLOGIST who studies ancient Greece cannot question the natives and observe their customs...

...He speaks of the Greeks with respect, and sometimes with admiration, but he always regards them from a distance and never uses them to represent or address the concerns of his own time or society...

...Social theory may suggest what to look for, but not how to find it in documents originally intended for audiences who needed no explanation of the practices the modern anthropologist is striving to describe...

...Disappointingly, perhaps, customs do not so much evolve as adapt or change...

...Do all men tend to enact prehistoric customs without being directly aware of their significance, like the Greek tyrants who practiced endogamy and behaved on occasion like mythical kings...

...rather he is undergoing the penalty regularly inflicted on men convicted of capital crimes, apotympanis-mos (literally, "beating-out"), a slow, painful, and humiliating death...

...He made himself familiar with all the documents, not just legal codes and lawyers' speeches, but the famous works of literary fiction...

...When Althea throws the firebrand that represents her son Meleger's life into the fire, in order to kill him, more than sympathetic magic is involved: the soul of the royal son in ritual and myth is linked to the hearth, itself an enduring symbol of the life of the family...

...Gernet himself would have made no such claim, but certain of his discoveries shed light on patterns of human behavior that seem at first to have little to do with Greek law or religion...

...Since Gernet's work has been available in French to scholars in article form since the 1920s, many of his most familiar ideas can seem deceptively familiar...