ABSTRACT

Edited with an introduction by an internationally recognized scholar, this nine-volume set represents the most exhaustive collection of essential critical writings in the field, from studies of the classic works to the history of their reception. Bringing together the articles that have shaped modern classical studies, the set covers Greek literature in all its genres--including history, poetry, prose, oratory, and philosophy--from the 6th century BC through the Byzantine era. Since the study of Greek literature encompasses the roots of all major modern humanities disciplines, the collection also includes seminal articles exploring the Greek influence on their development. Each volume concludes with a list of recommendations for further reading. This collection is an important resource for students and scholars of comparative literature, English, history, philosophy, theater, and rhetoric as well as the classics.

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Criticism Ancient and Modern

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II

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Greeks, Romans, and the Rise of Atticism

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Roman Aristotle

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G Jonathan Barnes

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Jonathan Barnes

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CICERO AND GREEK PHILOSOPHY*

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THE CLASSICAL REVIEW

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IN JOSEPH US* 1-4 55

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[71 1-4 57

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[10]

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[ 1 1 ]

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[>7l

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4 75

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[33] IN JOSEPHUS*

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/. The Amalekites

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[35] IN JOSEPHUS*

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spontaneously invented a name for the creature derived from the most prominent features of its anatomy: kamdopardalis [the normal Greek word for ‘giraffe*]. (10.27.1-4) It is worth spending a little time analysing what is going on in this passage. The first point to note is that an essential piece of information, the creature’s name, is not divulged until the last possible moment, after the description is completed. The information contained in the description itself is not imparted directly by the narrator to the reader. Instead it is chan­ nelled through the perceptions of the onlooking crowd. They have never seen a giraffe before, and the withholding of its name from the reader re-enacts their inability to put a word to what they see. From their point of view the creature is novel and alien: this is conveyed partly by the naive wonderment of the description, and partly by their attempts to control the new phenomenon by fitting it into familiar categories. Hence the comparisons with leopards, camels, lions, swans, ostriches, eyeliner and ships. Eventually they assert conceptual mastery over visual experience by coining a new word to name the animal, derived from the naively observed fea­ tures of its anatomy. However, their neologism is given in Greek (kamdopardalis), although elsewhere Heliodoros is scrupulously naturalistic in observing that Ethiopians speak Ethiopian. The reader is thus made to watch the giraffe from, as it were, inside the skull of a member of the Ethiopian crowd. The narration does not objectively describe what they saw but subjectively re­ enacts their ignorance, their perceptions and processes of thought. This mode of presentation, involving the suppression of an omniscient narrator in direct communication with the reader, has the effect that the reader is made to engage with the material with the same immediacy as the fictional audience within the frame of the story: it becomes, in imagination, as real for him as it is for them. But there is a double game going on, since the reader, as a real person in the real world, differs from the fictional audience inside the novel precisely in that he does know what a giraffe is. This assumption is implicit in the way the description is structured. If Heliodoros* primary aim had been to describe a giraffe for the benefit of an ignorant reader, he would surely have begun with the animal’s name, not withheld it. So for the reader the encounter

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with the giraffe is not a matter of coming to terms with a new experience, so much as an exercise in matching Heliodoros’ delib­ erately eccentric formulations with what is already known about giraffes.1 Knowledge about giraffes in late antiquity will have derived from autopsy in only a very few cases, although exotic animals were regularly exhibited in the arena. However, there exist a number of descriptions in classical authors which confirm that a literate reading public could be counted upon to have at least second-hand information about the animal.2 What all this means is that the description of the giraffe func­ tions on a second level as a riddle aimed at the reader. The infor­ mation it releases at such a measured pace serves as a series of clues from which the animal can be identified, although Heliodoros does not observe the modern protocol in such games of making the clues progressively easier.3 The answer to the riddle of course is the name of the creature: the rules of riddling entail both that the answer should be postponed until all the clues have been supplied and that it must be properly given, even when it has become perfectly obvious. So although the Greek word kamilopar-dalis is introduced in a way formally consistent with the dramatic frame of the narrative (i.e., it is supplied by people within the story rather than by authorial statement), it functions to confirm to the reader that this passage truly was a riddle, and that the riddle is now over. Heliodoros has taken some pains to observe the proprieties of realism here. The use of an ignorant audience within the fiction allows the riddle to be accommodated without damage to dramatic illusion. Nevertheless, once the riddle is recognized as such it becomes a game played directly between author and reader, bypassing the dramatic situation and even the narrative structure. Perhaps we can think of two Heliodoroi, first the author, a real man sitting in a room somewhere writing this text, and second the narrating voice in the text, which is just as much part of the fiction as the events it narrates. The narrator maintains the dramatic realism, but the author grimaces over his shoulder at the reader, playing with the etymology of the word kamelopardalis in a way which is not meaningful for the Ethiopian-speaking spectators. Similarly the reader operates on two planes: one addressed by the narrator, responding to events with the immediacy of real experi­ ence, the other bookishly responding to the author’s textual game,

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which challenges him into interpretative activity, into being a solver and realizer of the text rather than just a passive consumer of it. I have subjected the giraffe to such prolonged analysis because it is an emblematic beast. The point I want to stress in this paper is that Heliodoros’ whole novel demands an active interpretative response from his reader. The Aithioptka is a much more challen­ ging read than any of the other Greek novels, precisely because it is pervaded at every level by the kind of self-conscious game-playing typified by the riddle of the giraffe. Here, for instance, is the Egyptian priest, Kalasiris, who acts as narrator for about a third of the whole novel, describing a dream he had on the island of Zakynthos: as I slept, a vision of an old man appeared to me. Age had withered him almost to a skeleton, except that his cloak was hitched up to reveal a thigh that retained some vestige of the strength of his youth. He wore a leather helmet on his head, and his expression was one of cunning and many wiles; he was lame in one leg, as if from a wound of some kind. (5.22.1) The vision reproaches Kalasiris for failing even to pay him a visit while in the vicinity, prophesies punishment for the omission, but conveys greetings from his wife to Kalasiris’ charge, the heroine Charikleja, ‘since she esteems chastity above all things’ (5.22.3). Again a riddle is set up by not immediately identifying the old man, and again the description is presented from the point of view of a character within the story. Here, however, the situation is rather more complicated, since Kalasiris himself has two aspects, as narrator and character within his own narration. As narrator he knows the identity of the dream figure, but in his presentation of his own experience he omits any explanatory gloss, and re-enacts the perplexity of his initial reaction. He describes the dream as he saw it, rather than as he subsequently understood it. Again the reader is challenged to disambiguate the riddle by matching the points of the description with knowledge acquired elsewhere. Every detail corresponds to something in the Homeric poems.4 This time Heliodoros has succeeded in keeping the easiest clues to the end, particularly the formulaic epithet polytropos (‘of many wiles’), proverbially associated with one epic individual, and the reference to a wound in the leg which also clinches its owner’s recognition in the original. Further clues are offered by the fact

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that the old man has a home not far from Zakynthos and a wife associated with chastity. From all this any half-educated reader would have little diffi­ culty in identifying the figure as Odysseus. Again, by the rules of the game, a formal answer must be supplied, and again it is sup­ plied realistically without breaching the narrative frame. A few sentences later Kalasiris makes this final request of his host on Zakynthos: Take your boat over to Ithake and make an offering to Odysseus on our behalf. Ask him to temper his wrath against us, for he has appeared to me this very night and told me that he is angry at having been slighted. (5.22.5) In these cases, the game is played gently. Heliodoros wants to stimulate his reader, not defeat him. Ample help is given so that the identification can be made correctly; the game is collaborative rather than competitive. However, it concerns material from out­ side the novel, and is perhaps not so very far above the level of a general-knowledge quiz. When Heliodoros starts playing compar­ able games with his own invented story, where all readers start equal, he is apt to make greater demands. Let’s start with an easy example. At the very end of the novel, Charikleia has returned to her native Ethiopia after eloping with her beloved Theagenes from Delphi, where she was brought up as the daughter of the priest of Apollo, Charikles. She has been recognized by her real parents, Hydaspes and Persinna, king and queen of Ethiopia, but Theagenes stands in mortal peril, since he has been designated a sacrificial victim in celebration of the Ethio­ pians’ victory over the Persians. At this juncture a message arrives from Oroondates, the defeated satrap of Egypt, asking Hydaspes to restore to her father a girl captured by the Ethiopians while on her way to Memphis; Oroondates adds that he is himself attracted to her, and knows that she has been brought to Ethiopia on Hydaspes’ orders (10.34.3-4). Hydaspes allows the father, an old man in pitifully shabby clothing, to look around for his daughter. Unable to find her among Hydaspes’ captives, the old man weeps, but suddenly rushes at Theagenes, drags him from the sacrificial altar, calling him villain and scoundrel, and informs the king, ‘This is the man who kidnapped my daughter’ (10.35.1-2). Again a vital piece of information is withheld: die identity of

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the old man. And again we are presented with a series of clues provided dramatically from inside the narrative frame: partly through the satrap’s letter, which the reader of the novel reads through the eyes of a character in the novel (Hydaspes), and partly through the subsequent action, description of which is limited to what could have been seen and heard by those present, thus enabling the narrator to conceal his omniscience about the old man’s identity and motives. The contents of the letter, however, cohere so closely with events already narrated that it is plain that the daughter the old man is seeking is Charikleia. This is confirmed when he fails to find her among Hydaspes’ captives, since she has been removed after her recognition by her natural parents. But even when the reader has become sure that the object of the old man’s quest is the heroine of the novel, he may still be reluctant to identify the old man himself as Charikles, because of the sheer improbability of the priest of Delphic Apollo suddenly turning up in rags beyond the southern frontiers of Egypt -until, that is, he recognizes Theagenes and refers to the elopement from Delphi which took place six books previously. These clues are quite sufficient to enable the reader to work out who the old man is before Helio­ doros gives us the answer: Tressed by Hydaspes to explain more clearly what he meant, the old man (who was none other than Charikles) '.. . ’ (10.36.1). What must be noted here is that the reader can entertain and confirm the identification of Charikles only because he has a surplus of knowledge over the Ethiopians which is the result of his having read the novel so far and their having not. The riddle this time does not involve material from outside the text and is more than just an incidental piece of fun. The game which the reader is being invited to join is a riddle which not only tests his memory of earlier sections of the plot, but also has a crucial bearing on its future. For if the identity of Charikles is enigmatic, even more so is how he might affect the prospects of Theagenes; the hero is condemned to die as a human sacrifice, but the reader’s expectations are geared up to a reprieve, partly by the knowledge that romantic heroes do not get killed on the last page,5 but also, more specifically, by Theagenes’ exhibition of prowess in wrestling a runaway steer and an Ethiopian giant, and by suggestions that, despite her maidenly inhibitions, Charikleia is on the verge of coming clean about him to her parents. The sudden intervention

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of her wronged foster-father confounds all expectations, and his well-founded accusations make Theagenes’ future look decidedly bleak. The solution of the riddle, then, moves the plot forward into a new and more unpredictable (and hence exciting) phase.6 This characteristic pattern of withholding information (riddle), releasing it obliquely and gradually (clues), and then explaining it in retrospect (answer) also informs larger spans of narrative. In Book 8, for example, the hero and heroine have fallen into the clutches of the nymphomaniac Persian princess, Arsake. Charikleia is sentenced in a rigged trial to be burned at the stake for a murder she did not commit, a sentence she welcomes as a release from the miseries of her life. The fire is lit, and with a fearsome denunciation of Arsake and assertion of her own innocence, Charikleia leaps into the heart of the flames: There she stood for some time without taking any hurt. The flames flowed around her rather than licking against her; they caused her no harm but drew back whenever she moved towards them, serving merely to encircle her in splendour and present a vision of her standing in radiant beauty within a frame of light, like a bride in a chamber of flame. Charikleia was astounded by this turn of events but was nonetheless eager for death. She leapt from one part of the blaze to another, but it was in vain, for the fire always drew back and seemed to retreat before her onset. A miracle! At least it seems so because a vital piece of information is omitted: how does a romantic heroine escape being fried to a crisp when she jumps into a bonfire? The passage exhibits all the by now familiar features. Events are presented from partial viewpoints, first Charikleia’s in her dramatic speech; then the moment of her mounting the pyre and her unexpected survival are seen through the crowd’s eyes (note how visual appearance is stressed); and finally the heroine’s again in her astonishment. The absence of any authorial explanation for such an inexplicable and unexpected development constitutes a riddle, and invites speculat­ ive interpretation. Knowledge from outside Heliodoros’ novel is of marginal utility, and consists mainly of an awareness that romantic novels simply do not incinerate their heroines with two books still to go, so that the reader was in some sense expecting Charikleia to survive.7 The actual course of the plot was never

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really what was at issue, so much as the means by which the inevitable outcome would be accomplished, and it is precisely those means which are problematized by the riddle structure. As usual, the answer is provided retrospectively and within the dramatic frame, but in this case the solution involves the introduc­ tion of new ‘facts’ of which the reader has hitherto been quite unaware. That night, in their prison cell, Theagenes and Charikleia talk over the day’s remarkable events. Charikleia suddenly remem­ bers a dream vision of her now dead mentor Kalasiris that had visited her the previous night and delivered this prophecy: If you wear pantarbe fear-all, fear not the power of flame Miracles may come to pass; for Fate ’tis easy game. (8.11.2) The solution to the riddle is itself a riddle, which Charikleia elucidates for her sceptical beloved: thinking she was about to die, she had secreted about herself the recognition tokens left her by her mother, including a ring set with the jewel called pantarbe and engraved with mystic characters. This, she surmises, protected her from the fire (8.11.7-8). Heliodoros’ manipulation of his narrative is obvious. Any ‘honest’ writer would have narrated this self-evidently important dream in its proper chronological place. The postponement is half­ heartedly explained within the dramatic frame by the suggestion that Charikleia simply forgot about it, but this is only for form’s sake.8 Heliodoros is deliberately withholding information, to induce puzzlement and speculation, to encourage the reader to take, in Umberto Eco’s notorious phrase, ‘inferential walks’. In comparison with the other riddles we have discussed, this one may seem adversarial rather than collaborative. Rather than slowly releasing material which will guide the reader safely to the correct solution, Heliodoros’ aim appears to be to keep us in the dark until such time as it suits him to tell us something we could not have otherwise known. But, although the author is playing more roughly here, he is still observing the rules: the clues are there, though probably their significance is realized only in retrospect. As Charikleia goes to face trial, intending to denounce herself and find release from the torment of her existence, Helio­ doros duly records that she wore her recognition tokens ‘as a kind of burial shroud, fastened around her waist beneath her clothes’ (8.9.8). And this reference to the tokens takes us back, across half

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the novel, to the embroidered message in Ethiopian hieroglyphs which Persinna exposed with her daughter and which remained unread until Kalasiris tracked her down in Delphi and deciph­ ered it: Above all, be sure to find among the treasures that I laid beside you a certain ring. Keep it by you always. It was a gift that your father gave me during our courtship, engraved all around with the royal crest and set with a pantar be jewel that endows it with holy, mystic powers. (4.8.7) These holy, mystic powers are unspecified.9 Nevertheless, the mere mention of them would lead a competent reader to surmise that the plot would exploit them sooner or later, and an exceptionally alert reader might beat the author to the connection in Book 8. It is not difficult to find other sections within the narrative of the Aithiopika which are constructed as riddles, a vital piece of information being kept back and then released as an answer. Two more examples can be mentioned briefly, both from the ninth book, whose military subject matter could easily lead to the false assumption that its narrative technique is simple. Oroondates is besieged by the Ethiopians in Syene. He parleys with them, and secures their permission to send two envoys to his troops at Elephantine, ostensibly to negotiate their surrender at the same time as his. His real motives are not divulged, nor are they when he makes an apparently impossible break-out and stealthily enters Elephantine by night (9.7ff.). The riddle set is: what is his plan?, and, as is by now familiar, the reader’s ignorance is produced by the exploitation of partial in-text viewpoints. In this case all Oroondates’ actions are described as seen by the Ethiopians with­ out authorial explanation. Some additional clues are given later in the narrative, but the full answer is withheld until the moment when the Persian army from Elephantine suddenly turns up with Oroondates at its head (9.13), at which point the omniscient nar­ rator intervenes to fill in the gaps he had left in his own narrative. There ensues a battle, in which the Persians have a seemingly decisive weapon, their armoured cavalry. A lengthy description stresses the totality of the protection of both rider and horse and the awesome power of their arms (9.15). Against them Hydaspes stations troops of the Blemmyes and Seres, two subject nations, with special instructions which are not communicated to the

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reader. This is the riddle. The answer emerges in the battle, when the Blemmyes rush forward like madmen (all this is seen from the Persian point of view, without explanation), throw themselves to the ground and stab upwards with their swords into the horses’ unprotected bellies as they thunder over their heads (9.17-18), and then butcher the dismounted knights through the one vulnerable point in their armour, between the legs, as they lie helpless, too heavy to move. Meanwhile the Seres part ranks to reveal Hydaspes’ corps of elephants, the sight of which throws the cavalry into panic. Ethiopian archers pick off the survivors by shooting arrows through the eye-slits in their helmets. Unobtrusive clues to the stratagem were furnished in the description of the armour, where all the details which become important in the battle were unosten­ tatiously included. These examples present the riddle format over a medium-term narrative span. The pattern recurs with sufficient frequency for us to identify it as a characteristic feature of Heliodoros’ narrative technique. To reiterate, release of information is deliberately con­ trolled so as to entice the reader into identifying and answering, with varying degrees of certainty, questions posed by the narrative. The implied reader of the Aithiopika is compelled to be constantly engaged in interpretation and speculation, and must respond to the author’s games in order to actuate the text fully. Formalist critics earlier this century made a distinction between what they called histoire, that is the story as it ‘actually’ happened, complete and in chronological order, and ricit, that is, the way that the story is presented, the textual surface. To use their terms, Helio­ doros’ ricit consistently omits or postpones important aspects of the histoire, and the author communicates directly with the reader about the histoire through riddles, over the head of the narrator and his ricit. By this stage, it has probably become clear to anyone who knows the Aithiopika and the recent secondary literature on it that what I have been discussing is an exact counterpart in microcosm to the macrotextual structure of the whole work. This is where Heliodoros marks a spectacular advance over his predecessors in the romance form. At the end of the tradition, when Heliodoros was writing,10 two weaknesses of conventional romantic narrative must have become obvious. The first was its predictability: curi­ osity to know what happens next is the motor of reading any fiction, but with a stereotyped basic plot there can never be

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any real doubt about the ending. Heliodoros redirected curiosity from outcome to explanation. The second problem is lack of direc­ tion and unity: romance was prone to fall apart into a series of exciting but only loosely connected adventures, at the end of which the protagonists recovered their lost happiness and simply lived out the rest of their lives as if nothing had happened. By leaving central questions unanswered Heliodoros is able to hold large spans of text together, and the most important answers, when they do arrive, involve decisive change for the protagonists. Both these strategies imply an interpretatively active reader. The opening of the novel is deservedly famous.11 A gang of bandits come across a beached ship, surrounded by twitching corpses and the wreckage of a banquet. Through their eyes, and with their ignorance of what has taken place, the reader is made to assimilate the scene in obsessive but unexplained visual detail. In the midst of the carnage sits a fabulously beautiful young woman, nursing a fabulously handsome young man. It does not take long to identify them as the hero and heroine of the novel, and learn that their names are Theagenes and Charikleia, but Heliodoros tantalizes us over further details. Thus at the very beginning of the novel two riddles are established: what has hap­ pened on the beach? and who exactly are the hero and heroine? Heliodoros prolongs the reader’s ignorance by his characteristic use of partial viewpoint. Sometimes, as with the bandits, there is a fictional audience whose specific perceptions act as a channel of partial information to the reader, but elsewhere Heliodoros as narrator simply relates what an uninformed witness of the events would have seen or heard. For example, we are only allowed to find out about the hero and heroine as they speak to others r are spoken about: Heliodoros as author knows all about them but keeps quiet in favour of his recording but not explaining narrative voice. The opening scene is eventually disambiguated by Kalasiris, an Egyptian priest. He regales Knemon, a surrogate reader within the text who shares the real reader’s curiosity about the protagonists, with a long story, beginning in Book 2, of how he met Charikleia at Delphi, witnessed the birth of her love for Theagenes and helped the lovers to elope. He chronicles their subsequent experiences, until at the end of Book 5, half-way through the novel, the story circles back to its own beginning and at last resolves the mystery of the scene on the beach.

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Kalasiris, however, is no more a straightforward narrator than is Heliodoros.12 In fact, he comments himself (2.24.5) on the appar­ ently tricksy quality of his story-telling. By the time he tells Charikleia’s story to Knemon, Kalasiris has long known her to be the natural daughter of the King and Queen of Ethiopia, exposed by her mother at birth because of her white skin, but he suppresses this knowledge so that Knemon (and through him the reader) can actively participate in the discovery. First he learns (through a reported narrative, 2.30ff.) that she is only the adopted daughter of her ostensible father, Charikles, the priest of Apollo, and how she came to be adopted. Then (2.35) he is granted an enigmatic prophecy by the Delphic oracle, and visited in his sleep (3.11) by Apollo and Artemis who tell him to take the young lovers with him to Egypt and onwards. Assisting their love against Charikles’ wishes through a complex and duplicitous intrigue, he eventually tricks Charikles into allowing him to see the embroidered band exposed with her, a message from the Ethiopian queen to her abandoned child.13 The performance of Kalasiris is in many ways emblematic of the whole novel, intensely self-aware, theatrical, manipulative, enigmatic. He is the focus where the roles of author and reader intersect. Like the reader he has to make speculative sense out of cryptic fragments of information, and like the author he employs less than complete release of information to puzzle and please his audience; he is both a solver and setter of riddles. But his narrative does not resolve all the ambiguities it poses. The obscure oracle is in fact a predictive armature around which the whole future course of the plot is built.14 Some elements of it are obvious and others are resolved by Kalasiris, but it also looks beyond his death to the very end of the novel. It is another large-scale riddle, whose answers are supplied by the course of the story itself. Its last couplet, which predicts that the lovers will: . . . reap the reward of those whose lives are passed in virtue: A crown of white on brows of black only receives full explication in the last sentence of the work, when Theagenes and Charikleia, now formally to be married and honorary Ethiopians (hence the brows of black), don the white mitres of the High Priest of the Sun and High Priestess of the Moon in Ethiopia. In the interim, it has served to elicit deliberately misguided guesses about the ending of the novel, for example as the terms of its prophecy appear to be fulfilled in the human

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sacrifice which threatens Theagenes and Charikleia when they reach Ethiopia. To conclude: it is characteristic of Heliodoros at every level of narration to withhold information, not simply to produce effects of shock and surprise, but to enlist the reader into an actively interpretative role. If this essay has dwelt on specific examples from the second half of the work, that is because there has been a tendency in scholarly work on the novel to dwell on its overall structure and particularly the figure of Kalasiris and to regard the sections narrated by Heliodoros himself as technically simpler and less interesting. This is untrue; the technique is all-pervasive. The plot itself contains frequent examples of characters compelled to speculate interpretatively, notably in response to dreams, not sur­ prisingly since the narrator so conspicuously fails to provide an authoritative centre of final meaning. Heliodoros was clearly very interested in these issues of cognition and comprehension, but I do not think his interest was a post-modernist one in hermeneutic theory, nor that these recurrent situations are intended to focus the reader’s attention on the reading process per se.x5 For all the self-conscious artificiality of individual examples, I would prefer to see the enigmatic narrative mode of the Aithiopika as an attempt to move fiction closer to life. Real life, after all, tends to be confused and senseless. We are not always immediately aware of the causes or meanings of what we see and suffer. These things more often become clear only in retrospect, as we learn more or impose patterns on raw experience. Whereas other Greek novelists, in predigesting the story for us, reduce us to the role of audience, Heliodoros has contrived to make his reader an imaginative participant in the story of Thea­ genes and Charikleia.16 NOTES

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description whether the adyton was part of the temple or a different structure altogether. Near where the temple of Palaimon should have been according to Pausanias, excavators found the foundations of an earlier stadium, as well as the concrete foundation of a Roman building. An earlier cult place for Melikertes was probably located somewhere in this area, but all remains were obliterated during the destruction of Corinth by Mummius (146 BC). Elizabeth Gebhard has tentatively identified an area located immediately to the south of the temple of Poseidon as a temenos for Melikertes, dating from the classical period.3 The earliest remains, however, that can be directly linked with Melikertes are from two sacrificial pits from the 1st century AD filled with animal bones, pottery, and lamps of a unique shape unknown anywhere else in Greece. The Palaimonion was rebuilt in the Roman period, and the temple as it stood in the second century AD has been reconstructed from the few remains found and from representations on coins from the Isthmus and Corinth. The reconstructed temple has eleven columns, with an opening leading to a passageway under the temple. From the foundations, the height of the passage can be estimated at about 1 m 90, high enough to allow a person to stand upright. The passage was completely underground, and a bend in the tunnel would have prevented light to penetrate inside the underground chamber. What about the cult, then, and the lament that is both “initiatory and inspired?” Philostratos is not our only source for this aspect of the ritual. Plutarch also mentions the cult in his life of Theseus:

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the question: does Melikertes ever appear to his worshippers? Pausanias describes another adyton in the context of a hero cult, that of the oracle of the hero Trophonios at Lebadeia, where in order to consult the oracle, the worshipper descends into an underground khasma. There, those who reach the inner sanctum, the adyton, learn the future. According to Pausanias, there is no single way of doing this, but some learn through seeing, others through hearing (9.39.11). What about the himeros evoked by Aristides? The word can express longing or yearning, but also love and desire. This is the word used by Philostratos, for example, when he describes how desire is awakened in Achilles and Helen after they hear descriptions of each other. Yet, in the case of Melikertes, Aristides is not talking about romance, but about a dead, heroized, child. At first glance, it may seem that the himeros described by Aristides is caused by the vision of the boy’s image, but on closer examination, it becomes clear that this himeros is very closely related to what precedes as well; it is the participation in the rites (telete, ) and oath, as well as the description of the picture that follows that awakens the himeros for the hero. Moreover, Aristides emphasizes at the end of the passage that these sights are the sweetest to see and to hear making it very clear that both components are essential. In some way, then, himeros is closely linked with initiation into the mystery of the hero Melikertes. Something similar seems to be at work in the where we see worshippers falling in love with heroes. Indeed, in some cases, loving a hero seems to be a form of initiation. When phantoms first appear, the vinegrower explains to the Phoenician, the identity of each is not immediately obvious. Heroes may appear in different guises—they can change their appearance, their age, or their armor—and they can be difficult to recognize from one time to the next (21.Iff). He gives the example of a Trojan farmer who particularly empathized with the hero Palamedes. After the farmer displays his admiration for Palamedes in various ways, the hero decides to visit and reward his admirer, whom he describes as his Palamedes appears to the farmer as he tends his vine:

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apotropaic. We find it, of course, in the Heroikos as well, in the story of Achilles requesting that a young Trojan girl be left on the beach for him, only to be torn apart limb from limb (56.10). I want to come back to my point of departure: why are laments so important in the cults of Melikertes and Achilles? It seems that in both cases, the songs and the laments are closely linked to the nature of the ritual in honor of these heroes: in both cases, hymns and laments are described as being part of initiatory or secret rites. What are we to make of the (mostly later) authors’ insistence on describing these cults as initiations into mysteries? And what is the link between hero cults in general and such rites? The key to interpreting these allusions in the Heroikos may be hidden in Sophocles 5th century BC tragedy: Oedipus at Colonus. The play describes the death and heroization of Oedipus near the grove of the Eumenides at Colonus. As many have noticed before, and as Calame has recently shown, the establishment of the cult in honor of Oedipus described in Sophocles’ resemble in many ways an initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries.11 If the link between a hero cult and mysteries can already be attested for the fifth century BC, then, the initiatory nature of the cult of Melikertes in the Roman period as well as the cult of Achilles described in the Heroikos are perhaps not exceptions, or late (Roman) developments, but rather represent a particular strand of hero cult.12 What about initiation and mysteries in the Heroikos in general? I would like to turn back to an episode at the very beginning of the dialogue : “Stranger,” says the vinegrower, “you have not yet even heard the nightingales that sing here both when evening comes and when day begins, just as they do in Attica.” This, of course, is very reminiscent of the chorus’ description of Colonus in Sophocles’ play where the nightingales play an important part:

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Hypatia’s Murder—The Sacrifice of a Virgin and Its Implications

Sarolta A. Takdcs

chapter |2 pages

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