Heidegger and Being: (Writing to @SemprePhi)

Hi. I read some of Heidegger’s Being and Time when I was around twenty, not realising that it was only the first third of a much larger projected volume. His essentially existential approach to gaining a theoretical grasp of ‘Being’ left me cold. This is because even then I didn’t think there was an existential approach possible, since, by definition ‘Being’ by itself is beyond actual existence.

Or at least by my definition, which was fuelled (at the time) by the sort of thing Plato said about it, and some of the statements by the presocratics. We might imagine that it exists, as all things must do, somewhere in space and in time. This Plato said was an illegitimate way of thinking about ‘the one true thing’. By its nature it cannot have its reality and nature in space and time.

Heidegger is aware of this of course, but nevertheless deflects from the consideration of Being as Being (the presocratics Aristotle described as the first philosophers to consider the question of Being qua Being). He looks leftwards again and again at existential and phenomenological approaches to questions of Being.

In the end, he argues, in a manner similar to Sartre later on when talking about meaning (in Existentialism & Humanism, which is the slightly inaccurate title his book is given in Britain), that existential experience, however imprecise and however poor it is as a process,  is the way in which to gain an understanding of what is difficult to apprehend.

In short, for me, Heidegger is not actually talking about Being at all, but the Being of living beings, and occasionally looking upwards at more abstracted and transcendent conceptions of what Being itself might be, though it is an unattainable concept.

Heidegger was a pupil of Edmund Husserl, who has been a major influence on me, also, though it a different way. Many of my essays on subjects start off from one place, and end up in another. Occasionally I follow the line of an established author or authors, and as the essay goes on, I start to deconstruct the elements which hold their argument together. After that, I may entirely reverse the premises of their argument, and go off in another direction. I was doing this before I had my close encounter with Husserl, but learning to see all information as elements which might be capable of being read and constructed in entirely different ways, and breaking down conventional narratives into their components, was a key part of my intellectual development.

I also had the advantage of having read widely in philosophy and ancient literature before I began formal study of the ancient world. So there was much more going on in my head than a direct interaction with texts as themselves. There were always other possible contexts, and other ways of understanding what their actual concerns might have been (this widened to an interest in iconography and ritual texts – no one treats the latter seriously (in their own terms), outside of a purely anthropological interest. Wittgenstein thought this was a foolish approach by the anthropologists).

One of the first things which set me on my current path was noticing (as I’ve mentioned elsewhere), that some equivalent technical terms in ancient Egypt were used in the same way as Aristotle did. But the Egyptian evidence was nearly a thousand years older (the concept of ‘completion’ for example). So it occurred to me that both the established history of philosophy (i.e., invented by the Greeks in the 5^th century BCE), and that the idea that philosophy was the successor to religious thought (considered scarcely rational), might be components in a false narrative. So I started to move the building blocks of the conventional narratives around, to see if they made more sense when looked at from a different point of view.

I’ve mentioned Aristotle referring to the presocratics as the first philosophers to consider Being as Being, meaning in all the abstracted glory of the concept (Aristotle made an important distinction between the actual and the potential infinite, and the latter is still the basis of most mathematical work on the infinite. Why? It is hard to do mathematics and geometry with the actual infinite. The modern assumption is that nobody before the Greeks ever conceived of a direct engagement with the infinite (or with Being).

Yet the prosocratic concern with Being qua Being is in the wrong place. If it was in the right place, it would follow on from the kind of discussion we get from Plato and Aristotle, when contemplating various intellectual puzzles (the aporia). Yet there it is at the beginning of the Greek philosophical tradition. It is in fragments only, many of which were used by Aristotle in his Metaphysics. Could it be that these fragments were the product of a sophisticated discussion of philosophical questions in the Eleatic school and elsewhere, much earlier, and that such discussion has just dropped out of the record? Or perhaps was never committed to writing at all?

I know the answer to that question now, which is that the Greeks did indeed get their philosophical ideas from elsewhere, which is not to say that they did not do philosophy themselves before this (I’m in the process of writing up the evidence and case for the Greek close encounter with Ancient Assyria in the seventh century BCE.)

I’ve been reading an extensive paper on Heidegger, and his uncompleted project of Being and Time. The latter half of the proposed book was actually looking to a deconstruction (or even destruction) of the history (and modern understanding) of philosophy. That was a big surprise, since it is essentially what my overarching project is about. For me, it is largely a necessary task because the Enlightenment placing of the first sophisticated discussion of philosophical questions in Greece between the seventh to the fourth centuries BCE entirely obscures the relevance of philosophy to the history and development of religion, both in the ancient Near East, and in ancient Greece. That false narrative needs to be fixed.

I’ve beaten over a thousand words in about an hour, so I will break off here. If you are interested the essay (actually seminar notes) on Heidegger’s Being and Time is at: https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campuspress.yale.edu/dist/8/1250/files/2016/01/Heidegger-Being-and-Time-1qtvjcq.pdf . By Karsten Harries, from 2014.

I’ll write about Parmenides and Heidegger’s discussion of Plato’s Sophist later.

Hope you have had a great start to the year!



Best, Thomas

Plato and Cosmic Mind

I was digging through my archives today, to find a draft paper I wrote some years ago. I found along the way this draft letter, intended for the attention of book publishers. I wrote this on the 10th of June 2012, when the completion of The Sacred History of Being was some way off (the end of 2014). However, this text does describe the final version of the book pretty well, and points to a significant issue in the modern interpretation of what Plato was saying. 

***

To: [as appropriate]

Dear [as appropriate]

For the past two hundred years or so, works exploring the earlier history of ideas in Europe and the Near east, have been happy to settle on a consensus. This consensus is that the articulate discussion of the idea of Being began with the Greeks – particularly in the writings of Plato. There are earlier references to Being, in the Bible and elsewhere, but these references are deemed not to be the product of the kind of intellectual clarity which Plato and the Academy brought to discussion of the subject. This earlier notion of Being is treated as the focus of belief and of worship, rather than as an articulate concept.

While this allows the Greeks to retain their status as the originators of philosophy, and the religions which grew up in the Near east to retain faith as their (modern) focus, the foundation of this distinction is false.

Recent study of the pattern of religious practice in ancient Rome, and also in Assyria and Babylonia, shows that beyond a certain point, religion no longer resembles what we in the modern world understand to be religious. The work of the late historian Simon Price has shown that observance and ritual was of key importance in Roman religion, whereas belief in the gods was not. Similarly in Mesopotamia, belief in the gods was not a requirement in society, but the observance of ritual was important. Further, it is a commonplace among specialists in Mesopotamian civilization that the gods and their respective temples were often referenced in documents by numbers rather than by name.

The principal importance of observance and ritual in these and other cultures does not mean that there is no intellectual model standing behind observance and ritual. But it is not a model which depends on the existence of belief.

The importance of observance and ritual in the ancient world can be shown to follow from an articulate understanding of the idea of Being. An understanding which treats Being as a conjecture rather than any kind of certain knowledge.

My book is a study of the idea of Being, which extends the history of the idea into the middle of the second millennium BC, and shows that the articulate understanding of the concept was present in Mesopotamia as far back as the 14^th century BC.

The book discusses those aspects of Being which underpin observation and ritual. It identifies key texts in both pre-classical Greece and Mesopotamia which illustrate this concern with the aspects of Being. It also pursues the parallel between the restricted properties of Being which are the focus of the medieval Kabbalah and the sets of properties which were deemed to be appropriate to describe the head of the Babylonian pantheon.

The final part of the book explores the significance of the Assyrian Sacred Tree, and is an extended discussion of a 1993 paper by the Assyriologist Simo Parpola. This paper opened up the possibility that the sacred tree stood for the articulate concept of Being, and that the articulation of the idea was identical in most respects with the model of Being represented by the Kabbalah. The symbol of the tree is well known, and it can be traced in palace reliefs to the 14^th century BC, thus establishing an upper date for the concept of Being.

The book also reviews the views of Plato, who supplies us with some very old discussion about the nature of reality. There is a long-standing problem for scholars with Plato, in that he could not provide a logical argument for the reality of commerce between the world of Being, and the world of appearance. At least not in terms of likely explanation. But then he was clear that in speaking of the divine, that was not possible. At the upper end of the divided line (in the Republic), only conjecture is possible. So the discussion of the apparent world as a copy of the divine world is no more than a likely story. The real argument for the reality of commerce is not directly discussed. 

However it emerges from an analysis of the development of the modern ontological argument, which, by the time it is being discussed by Berkeley and Kant, results in the conclusion objective reality is an illusion (something Plato was insistent about). Berkeley’s solution to the question of the persistence of appearance beyond our perception, is that appearance is perceived by cosmic mind. Our perceptions are part of the perception of the cosmic mind.

The suggestion is made that this is the solution to the question of commerce with the divine (the transcendental) left unresolved by Plato. There is no copy of the divine world. All appearance represents slices through the nature of divinity. About which stories can be told.

The commerce with the divine world is achieved through those things which are common to the divine world and the world of appearance. These are (what we might call) transcendental intersubjectivities, which have already been identified as the property sets of Being, which are in common in both worlds.

***

The classicist Lewis Campbell made much the same suggestion in a footnote to his translation of Plato's Sophist in the 1860s. He was right. It appears however that, around 150 years later, many classicists would still rather not know what Plato was talking about. 

Echoes of Eternity

 Much of the cultural production of the ancient world, east and west, was based on the idea of reflecting aspects of the divine in human life and thought. Many social structures and institutions were based on this approach. The model for these things was was astronomy and the heavens, and the heavens were conceived of as a moving image of eternity, and eternity was understood to be coterminous with the Divine. Since it moved, it contained life and thought, and repaid the attention of man. We still live, work and think inside what is a scarcely changed neolithic temple, which is the sky.

 The final word count is around 56 thousand words. Two of the chapters - 'The Greek Ontological Model in the 1st Millennium B.C.E', and 'Patterns of thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain', are quite large pieces of work (6k and 10k words respectively). The introduction and a chapter each from the three parts of the book are available via the list below.


The chapter list:

Introduction: The Interpretation of Ancient History

Part One. 6

Camera Obscura: Marx, Aristotle & Ptolemy. 7

Synoikismos and the Origins of the Polis. 12

Kingship in Ancient Assyria. 20

Proskynesis, and the Deification of Alexander. 25

Part Two. 34

The Greek Ontological Model in the 1st Millennium B.C.E. 35

Post-Enlightenment Plato, and That Which Cannot Move. 47

Greece and the cultural Impact of the Assyrian Empire. 57

The Threshold in Ancient Assyria. 68

Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Iconography of the Ancient Near East. 75

Part Three. 80

The Keys of the Kingdom: Binding and Loosing in Heaven and Earth. 81

Being and Eternity in the Neolithic. 87

Patterns of thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain. 93
The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard

What We Have Lost, and How the Ancient Concept of the Cosmos Died

Marx and Historicism.. 129

Publication date, June 30, 2020.

TY, May 5, 2019. Details updated May 27,  July 5, and September 6 and 17, October 1,  November 26,   December 12, 2019, May 5 2020, and June 14 2020.. Updated October 10.

The Classicist Response to Black Athena (Writing to Denise Eileen McCoskey)

[I wrote this mail in response to Denise Eileen McCoskey's article 'Black Athena, White Power', which was published in Eidolon in November 2018. The subtitle for the article is: 'Are We Paying the Price for Classics' Response to Bernal?']

On Sat, Dec 8, 2018 at 8:40 AM Thomas Yaeger wrote:

Dear Prof. McCoskey, 

Many thanks for writing the article 'Black Athena, White Power', published in Eidolon. It articulates a number of my own thoughts over the last thirty years, about classics and post-enlightenment eurocentric perceptions of ancient civilization. Black Athena made a huge impact on me on first publication, and the book was largely responsible for me moving to London to study in 1989. In London I had the option of studying ancient near-eastern languages and history, as well as Greece and Rome. 

In the end, the controversy over Black Athena made me interested in the mechanics of what makes scholarly arguments acceptable, and unacceptable. That's down to education, preconceptions, and the contemporary cultural context in which the arguments are made. It is no wonder that it can take so long to shift a body of ideas which is long past its prime. 

You wrote: 

...most classicists did not want to take up the difficult and often messy questions that were being posed. They preferred to insist that the Greeks should not, could not be questioned at all,.... In doing so, they reinforced a powerful yet solipsistic image of the ancient Greeks and also classicists themselves as exceptional, self-created and self-sufficient...

This has resulted in the discipline of classics essentially trading in forms of fiction since the middle of the eighteenth century. There is also (as I quickly discovered) a cavalier disregard for evidence which does not support these fictions (there is a lot more of that evidence than is imagined). But the difficulty that classics finds itself in is partly the product of a general will to shape the past in terms of what suits a modern and distinctly western cultural perspective. That also needs to be addressed. This 'general will' involves not only arguing for the supremacy of the Greeks, but the twisting of the history of ideas to support this notion. As a consequence, classics is one of the gatekeepers for two preposterous notions - the Greeks being a wholly autocthonous and self-sufficient cultural entity, and that no-one before them engaged with philosophical abstraction, or had the intellectual capacity to do so. 

My engagement with Black Athena largely revolves around its implications for the general history of ideas, since the linguistic evidence, particularly that published in the third volume, suggests strongly that the Egyptians were as comfortable with abstract thought as the Greeks, and there are plenty of plausible Egyptian loan words connected with abstract concepts in the Greek vocabulary. But the Egyptians were not the only external influence on the development of Greece, and may not have been the most important cultural influence between the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.  Ancient Assyria seems to have played a significant role in the early intellectual and political development of Greece, particularly around 700 BCE. 

Much relevant detail is now known about the Assyrian connection. But not to classicists, who usually know little about Mesopotamia. This is not entirely their fault, since one of the most important papers on the subject was published in the proceedings of an ANE conference, and was not written for classicists in any case. I also wrote a paper on the cultural influence of Assyria on Greece at around the same time (2004), using mainly Greek sources (so far only available on my blog, and published only recently). It has been looked at hundreds of times, but has attracted no comments at all, despite the potential implications of the argument for our understanding of the beginnings of Greek philosophy. 

You might want to take a look at these two papers, since they both undermine the notion that Greek civilization was self-made. They also, from the point of view of classics scholars, come from an unexpected angle, and put new information into any discussion about the early development of Greece. 

1. Parpola, S., 2003b Assyria's Expansion in the 8th and 7th Centuries BCE and Its Long-Term Repercussions in the West, - in W. G. Dever and S. Gitin, eds., Symbiosis, Symbolism and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel and their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palestine. Proceedings of the Centennial Symposium, W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research and the American Schools of Oriental Research, Jerusalem, May 29-May 31, 2000 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns), 99-111  

2. Yaeger, T., "Greece and the cultural Impact of the Assyrian Empire" https://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2018/10/greece-and-cultural-impact-of-assyrian.html (published October 11, 2018). [Parpola has read this article]. 

My general thesis on abstract thought in the ancient world is: The Sacred History of Being, which was published in November 2015 (The Anshar Press,  ISBN: 9781311760678). It discusses not only the Greek and pre-Greek notions of Being, but also the various obstacles which medieval and modern scholarship has erected which make it very difficult to understand the early history of ideas. https://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/p/the-sacred-history-of-being-as-its.html

Thanks again for writing such an excellent article. 

Best regards, 

Thomas Yaeger

[Reply received Feb 02, 2019].

Orientalism and the Post-Enlightenment Agenda (Writing to Katherine Blouin)

[In 2018 I had some brief conversation with Dr. Katherine Blouin via Twitter. Which prompted the following email]. 

 I thought I should tell you about my work, since I am part of the largely disorganised cohort working for a radical change in our understanding of the role of ancient Greece in the development of western civilization.

My initial background is in classics and philosophy. At UCL I also studied Mesopotamia (languages and culture). This study was across three departments - UCL ancient history (text corpus, with Amelie Kuhrt), UCL department of Hebrew (Sumerian, with Mark Geller), and SOAS for Akkadian language (mainly with Andrew George). As a result I left college with a view of the relationship between Greece and Mesopotamia which was quite different from what I was led to believe while I was there.

 I graduated in 1992. I've been writing on the relationship between Mesopotamia and Greece since then. I arrived late to Said's work, since I was initially in thrall to Martin Bernal's thesis in Black Athena (though I did attend Said's series of lectures at UCL in the fall of 1993).

My main interest is in the history of philosophy. The conventional history of philosophy is pretty much a fabrication, The evidence doesn't support what is said about it, and it isn't actually that difficult to detect the fraud. Which led me to consider why the fraud was easily accepted. The answer turned out to be, as Bernal suggested, the post-Enlightenment agenda. The Enlightenment sought to understand everything in terms of common sense explanations, and not much in ancient philosophy conformed to common sense ideas.

So I've been researching and writing, off and on since 1993, about the origins of philosophy, Greek philosophical writing, and the cultural history of the west.

I was also interested in the role of anthropology in our understanding of past modes of thought. In 1993 I wrote a study of Frazer's essay on Plato, in which he argued that the idea of 'Being' was a barren notion, and nothing useful could be said of it. That is not what they thought in antiquity. So his later work was essentially a reframing of the past with one of its most important concepts entirely written out (formally published in 2016).

Hence I wrote The Sacred History of Being, which was finally published in November 2015. The point of this book was to show two things (amongst others): that the concept of Being was of immense importance before Plato, and that modern arguments about the nature of the Divine did not at all resemble ancient arguments, and so we could not easily understand what the ancients were talking about.

So we have a real problem. I've published a couple of volumes since The Sacred History of Being, which largely serve to illuminate how the ancients understood both physical reality and the Divine. Without a grasp of their radically different way of understanding, much of the ancient world is just unintelligible (oracles, omens, sacrifice, extispicy, etc).

These extra volumes serve as the basis for understanding that most ancient divine cult was transcendentalist in nature. Meaning that religious thought already embraced ideas and abstractions which surface in the writings of Plato and others. In Mesopotamia, in Israel, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, etc.

Which brings me to where I am now. I showed in The Sacred History of Being that the Assyrians and Babylonians were capable of abstract thought, and conceived of the Divine as a pure abstraction. They understood the basis of dialectical thought (collection and division) which the Greeks are credited with. They embraced the idea of excellence as the Greeks did, and the concept informed the education of their kings. They understood morality to emerge from the logic of excellence, as the Greeks did. They also conducted public debates on the relative merits of this or that good thing, as the Greeks also did.

 I intend next year to publish a concluding volume in the series which provides the evidence for these Assyrian and Babylonian parallels.

 After that, the jig will be up for the classicists. But I have no expectation that they will take notice of what has happened.

 One of the [key] things they have taken on board from their subject is the pursuit of excellence. They pursue this through what they understand as the rigourousness of the study of their source materials. The context of these materials, and the rest of the world, have relatively no importance for them. So why should they change their views?

Thomas Yaeger, October 18, 2018. [Reply received]

What is Philosophy?

The word is made of two Greek components. The meaning of the first is obvious.  Sophos means ‘wise’ and was applied to those who had wisdom (’sophist’). It is comparable to the Latin ‘sapiens’, and both may owe their origins to the Egyptian ‘sp’, which has a range of meanings, including ‘to teach’.

We got both the word ‘philosophy’, and the practice of the discipline, via Pythagoras, who flourished in the sixth century. Plato spent much of his life criticising the philosophers who came after Pythagoras, known to us as the sophists, because they professed wisdom, but often had none. So apparently possessing a love for philosophy didn’t make you a philosopher. At least not in the eyes of Plato. The sophists may have come into being as a result of the success of Pythagoras. They often retooled ideas from the ancient near East, but with very little understanding.

Was there philosophy before Pythagoras? Of course, but the word had no currency. Who was practicing philosophy before the mid-sixth century BCE? Almost everybody. It is what priests used to do and is one of the things the ancient seminary was for (they also taught ritual observance, and administration). Philosophy is not the invention of Plato’s Academy. The Academy is modelled on teaching establishments around the Mediterranean, mostly associated with divine cult. Solomon’s Temple for example, was, among other things, a teaching establishment. The Pharisees and Saducees were the philosophically inclined who were associated with the Temple. They did not always agree on matters, but their role was to debate issues and to engage in rational conjecture.

   

Debate and questioning had always been a feature of civilisation, and we have records of some public debates from as far back as ancient Sumer (third millennium BCE). A close examination of the text corpora of Plato and Aristotle shows that the most consistent feature of their work is a concern with puzzles and paradoxes (the aporia). We have no texts by Pythagoras, but we have an extensive body of writing about his life and ideas stretching from Plato (fourth century BCE) all the way to the late Neoplatonists Porphyry and Iamblichus (third century CE). The same basic pattern of thinking appears in all of these philosophers, which is that the world cannot be known or understood purely in terms of sensory experience. This is because the world is full of puzzles, paradoxes, illusions and falsehoods. The genuine philosopher has to rise above these stumbling blocks in order to have wisdom. Real wisdom is therefore transcendental in nature. And everything is necessarily open to conjecture.

This is one of the principal themes of Plato’s Republic, and many of his remarks in his other works are essentially footnotes to his argument that wisdom is obtained by rising through a sequence of images (aka the ‘Forms’ - the illusory and the false) to the transcendent realm of ‘The Good’ in which all things meet and agree. The Good has no existence in time and space, and no properties to speak of, except that it contains all knowledge which is to be had (the Babylonians had the same idea, and called it the Abzu, or the abyss). The philosopher may then descend from ‘The Good’ via the Forms, and bring back knowledge of the transcendent reality to man. And the solution to many puzzling things.

Of course when Plato talks of ‘The Good’, he is talking of the Divine. But if  he had indicated that he meant God, he would have suffered the same fate as Socrates. He does clearly indicate however, at one overlooked passage in the Sophist, that he is talking of divine things.

Where did Pythagoras get his idea for a school of philosophy, and where did his philosophical ideas come from? Abydenus (a pupil of Aristotle, who appears to have been able to read and translate Akkadian documents written in cuneiform script) is the earliest writer to mention that Pythagoras spent several years as a soldier in the service of the Persian king Cyrus, and travelled with him on his campaigns around the Near East. And that wherever he went, he made a point of visiting establishments devoted to the gods. And asked questions. We know he was in Babylon at one point, and seems to have attended a public lecture there. He also visited religious establishments in Lebanon and upper Syria, in Arabia, and also Egypt (he didn’t get a very respectful response in Egypt, and was passed down the chain of divine establishments to the least important, before he received answers).

So much of Pythagorean doctrine, passed on to Plato, probably via the three books on Pythagorean ideas offered for sale by Philolaus, had its origin in establishments devoted to the gods. Pythagoras was the head of a religious cult as well as a philosopher, which is an important detail which is often ignored. We separate out religion and philosophy, because they are so different from each other now. But this was not the case in the middle of the 1^st millennium BCE, and not the case for the two millennia before that.

This is why it is important to understand the nature of ancient civilizations, since it is nearly impossible now for us to understand what philosophy once was, and what it was understood to be for. It is also nearly impossible for us to understand the nature of religion in the past, since we habitually and uncritically regard it as essentially the same as it is now, just with different personnel, different regalia,  and a plethora of bizarre ritual practices, many of them murderous.

Philosophy is about asking questions, and conjecture about how reality makes sense beyond purely physical descriptions of the world, and beyond mathematical and geometric understandings which don’t actually address the question of what the world is, and how it works. Reality is transcendental. It cannot be understood without addressing its transcendental nature.

Among the fundamental questions which lie at the heart of ancient philosophy are: ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ And: ‘Is reality itself one, or many? If it is one, how is there a multiplicity of things in the world?’ Another question, which is addressed, but not answered by Plato: ‘If this world is not reality itself, is it a copy? And if it is a copy, is reality now two, and therefore not itself?’ The whole agenda of ancient philosophy is addressed by the following question: ‘If this world is not reality itself (and clearly it is not), what is it that we experience, and why?’

Thomas Yaeger, December 30, 2018.

Greece and the cultural Impact of the Assyrian Empire

In 'The Threshold in Ancient Assyria' I discussed Pauline Albenda's work on pavement slab designs, which seem to have been derived from originals in carpet form. The designs may have originated in Egypt, and perhaps these may have been adopted as the result of cultural interaction beween Egypt and Assyria. 

This particular pattern of ornamentation was present in a Greek context of a similar period, somewhere between the later 8th century B.C.E., and the end of the 7th century B.C.E. Plate 295 of Richter's A Handbook of Greek Art *1 reproduces a photograph of the rear of a breastplate, found in the river Alpheios at Olympia [now in the national Museum, Athens], which is dated to the middle of the 7th century B.C.E.. The text on p 211 suggests that it is engraved with ‘animals and monsters and with a group perhaps to be interpreted as Zeus greeting Apollo’.

This is quite likely, but there is so much more of interest to the design. The Greek figures walk on a palmate border of a ‘fleur-de-lys’ type repeating pattern, and between Zeus and Apollo there is a form of open blossom. These figures occupy the bottom half of the backplate: above them are designs which are of largely Mesopotamian origin. Behind each shoulder of the backplate there are two crescent motifs, each facing outwards; between them are opposing sphinxes rampant; and below these, what appear to be opposing lions rampant. Inside the left crescent (from the back) there is a lion figure, apparently trotting, and looking back over its shoulder. The open area of the crescent is divided into two major spaces by a line, and below the line there is an image of a bull, looking forwards, with its head held low. Within the crescent on the right there is the same division of space, and above the line there is a similar lion to the first, and it too faces back, away from the centre of the design. Beneath the line, there is another similar bull figure, likewise with its head held low, and opposing the first bull. The final space within the crescents shows a palmate design, of alternating buds and blossoms. There are also traces of the palmate design behind the hind legs of the lions, running along the line of the armour’s armholes.

This does not seem to me to be a symbolically empty appropriation of foreign design elements. Any of the elements could have been used by the creator of this armour, but the elements used and the arrangement of those elements speak of a degree of understanding of the symbolism of these images, since both the foreign iconography and the native Greek images are arranged according to the same logic which we have seen in the context of Assyria. The rampant sphinxes are directly above the meeting of Zeus and Apollo, as the open blossom is directly below. The two figures behind Apollo are arranged very much as in Mesopotamian iconography: a handmaiden reaches forward and touches the shoulder of Apollo, and holds the wrist of the figure behind, in the manner which establishes proximity and contact with the divine in Mesopotamia. The line of figures on the left, headed by Zeus, are connected by their overlapping shields and robes.

Richter tells us that: ‘Several shields found in the Idaean cave in Crete are conspicuous examples of early Orientalizing art (c. 700 B.C. ?); they are decorated in embossed relief with monsters and animals in so marked an Eastern style that they are thought by many to be importations;…’ ,*2

This rear breastplate comes from what is known as the ‘orientalising period’ in Greece, generally agreed to be about 720 to 550 B.C.E.. This was ‘a period of change all over the Mediterranean world. Colonies were being founded east and west; intercommunications were improved; and contact with the ancient Oriental civilisations – Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Phoenicia – was established. The resultant Oriental influence is shown by the adoption of Eastern floral motifs, such as the lotus and palmette, and of Oriental monsters and beasts, such as sphinxes, panthers, and lions’. *3

 According to the evidence at present available, substantive stone sculpture, that is, statues and reliefs approximately life-size and over, were not produced in Greece before about the middle of the seventh century B.C.E. Before that time even cult images were apparently more or less small in size and mostly of wood. It evidently was contact with the East that initiated the making of large stone sculptures in Greece.  *4 

In 681 B.C.E. Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, was murdered while praying in a temple *5 Sennacherib marks a potential high-water mark for Aegean/Assyrian contact. Cory’s Ancient Fragments records a statement by a Greek writer (Abydenus) that Sennacherib (or more likely his generals) once captured Athens. *6  The capture of Athens is not attested by any other source.

Sennacherib was succeeded by Esarhaddon, Sennacherib’s youngest son, after a short violent dynastic crisis. The first act of the new king was to rebuild Babylon in atonement for the 'sin of Sennacherib' in destroying it. There was an abortive attempt in 680 B.C.E. by Merodach-Baladan’s son to capture Ur, and in 677 B.C.E. the King of Sidon, Abdi-Milkuti, revolted, was caught and beheaded. Sidon was ‘torn up and cast into the midst of the sea’, its inhabitants deported to Assyria, and its territority given to its rival, Tyre. Esarhaddon then had to deal with problems along the eastern and northern borders, principally the Scythians (Assyr Ishkuzai), who had crossed the Caucasus and joined the Cimmerians who were already in Asia Minor, Armenia and Iran.

The Medes, located north of Elam, became a problem around 680 B.C.E. – Esarhaddon tried to prevent them becoming a serious difficulty for Assyria, partly through dividing them against each other. He put a friendly prince on the throne of Elam in 675 B.C.E. (Urtaki). Ultimately Esarhaddon’s goal was the invasion of Egypt – already in 679 B.C.E. he had captured the city of Arzani ‘on the border of the brook of Egypt’. He was met by the resistance of the Pharaoh Taharqa in the spring of 671 B.C.E.… ‘

I laid siege to Memphis, his royal residence, and conquered it in half a day by means of mines, breaches and assault ladders. His queen, the women of his palace, Ushanahuru, his ‘heir apparent’, his other children, his possessions, horses, large and small cattle beyond counting I carried away as booty to Assyria…. Everywhere in Egypt, I appointed new (local) kings, governors, officers, harbour overseers, officials and administrative personnel. I installed regular sacrificial dues for Ashur and the (other) great gods, my lords, for all times… 

In May 672 B.C.E. Esarhaddon proclaimed his son Ashurbanipal as his legitimate heir (Esarhaddon died in Harran in 669 B.C.E.). He fought Taharqa as his father had done. Egypt remained under Assyrian control until about 655 B.C.E., when Psametik expelled the Assyrians with the help of Ionian and Carian mercenaries.*7

Traditionally much of the orientalising influence is ascribed to Egypt, partly because some of the Greeks said the Egyptians had influenced the development of their country (though it is denied by scholars for later periods), but mainly because the evidence is unequivocal: the sculptures, ivories and other items are plainly the product of Egyptian influence. However, while agreeing with the importance of Egyptian aesthetic influence on the development of Greek civilisation at this time, I would like to argue for an equally important influence on Greek civilisation over a much longer period, stretching from the late 2nd millennium,  to the sixth century B.C.E. By this I mean the influence of Mesopotamian culture in general, and the influence of the culture of Assyria in particular.

In the Laws, Plato argues that a hostile relationship similar to that which the Greeks experienced with the Persians,  had existed in the past with Assyria: ‘…the inhabitants of the region about Ilium, when they provoked by their insolence the Trojan War, relied upon the power of the Assyrians and the Empire of Ninus, which still existed and had a great prestige; the people of those days fearing the united Assyrian Empire just as we now fear the Great King. And the second capture of Troy was a serious offence against them, because Troy was a portion of the Assyrian Empire.’*8 

We are also told by Plato that the constitutions of Greek states were framed in order to meet this danger. If this statement by Plato is correct, the implications are huge, and it is perhaps surprising that there has been so little discussion of it by scholars. The Laws is however a philosophical and literary work, and not automatically a source you would consult for accurate historical information. 

If Plato's suggestion is in fact correct, what it means is that political developments in Greece from the Trojan War onwards,  were shaped, to a degree hard to determine at this distance, by the nature and the political ambitions of the Assyrian Empire. Plato's view is that the influence was negative,  in the sense that the  Greek constitutions were created to counter the power and influence of the Assyrian Empire by means other than direct military action against it. 

If the Greek anti-Assyrian confederation (we need to give it a name) deliberately shaped their political arrangements to counter the influence of Assyria, such a strategy implies that the Greeks had, or very quickly developed, a strategic understanding of the power of Assyria sometime in the twelfth century B.C.E., at a time proximate to the Trojan War. But having that knowledge of Assyrian culture and intentions, could have had unexpected consequences. Some aspects of the Assyrian empire, for example, might have been adopted by the Greeks, rather than being rejected. Perhaps including the idea of a form of  empire itself - a quasi-imperial structure which could be opposed to the Assyrian threat. But an imperial structure with important differences. 

Interestingly, the three persons of the dialogue are an un-named Athenian stranger, Cleinias, a Cretan, and Megillus, a Lacedaemonian – representing the three cultural groups explicitly named by Protagoras as practising philosophy in Plato’s dialogue of the same name. *9. These three cultural groups were perhaps the core of a Greek confederation against the 'empire of Ninus'.

The translation of this passage in the Laws, published by Thomas Taylor, is slightly different, suggesting that the time spoken of was later than the Empire of Ninus, and contemporary with the Heraclidae: ‘…those that dwelt about Ilion, who, trusting to the power of the Assyrians descended from Ninus, dared to excite war against Troy. For the form of that government, which was still preserved, was by no means despicable. And as we at present fear a mighty king, in like manner all at that time feared that collected coordination of people. For the destruction of Troy a second time raised a great accusation against them; because the Trojan power was a portion of the Assyrian government’ *10

There was some fairly accurate information available about the Assyrian Empire to the Greek speaking world, though some sources available to us severely garble some of the details. These accounts were collected by Isaac Preston Cory in the early years of the Nineteenth century, when there were no contemporary documents available, and only the Bible and Classical literature contained relevant information. This collection is not much consulted now, though still occasionally reprinted, since we have access to a large number of original documents, inscriptions, and other artifacts. *11

Diodorus Siculus reports the years of the empires existence reasonably accurately: ‘…the empire of the Assyrians, after having continued from Ninus thirty descents, and more than 1400 years, was finally dissolved by the Medes. *12 . Whereas Herodotus says, quite inaccurately, that: 'The Medes were the first who began the revolt from the Assyrians after they had maintained the dominion over Upper Asia for a period of 520 years'.*13 Herodotus mentions more than once in his Histories that he would write a history of Assyria. We can be fairly sure therefore that it would not (or did not, if it was actually written) cover Assyrian history more than 520 years before its fall between 612 and 609 B.C.E. – that is, not much earlier than 1120 B.C.E..

On Sennacherib, through a quotation which survives in Eusebius, Alexander Polyhistor, whose accounts are of variable quality, says:

After the reign of the brother of Senecherib, Acises reigned over the Babylonians, and when he had governed for the space of thirty days, he was slain by Marodach Baladanus, who held the empire by force during six months: and he was slain and succeeded by a person named Elibus. But in the third year of his reign Senecherib king of the Assyrians levied an army against the Babylonians; and in a battle, in which they were engaged, routed, and took him prisoner with his adherents, and commanded them to be carried into the land of the Assyrians. Having taken upon himself the government of the Babylonians, he appointed his son Asordanius (Ashur-nadin-shumi) their king, and he himself retired again into Assyria. *14

This pretty much squares with what we know from recovered contemporary sources. Merodach-Baladan (Marduk-apal-iddina)  was an old adversary of Sargon II and former king of Babylon. He returned from refuge in Elam in the first year of Sargon’s reign, and ‘assisted by Elamite officers and troops raised the entire Aramean population of southern Iraq against the Assyrians, entered the capital-city and proclaimed himself King of Babylon’ *15 The armies of Assyria marched against him, and he was defeated at Kish. However Merodach-Baladan escaped and hid ‘in the midst of the swamps and marshes’. Roux continues: Sennacherib plundered his palace, captured innumerable prisoners, deported 208,000 persons to Assyria and gave Babylon a king of his choice, Bêl-ibni, ‘the son of a master-builder’ who had grown up in Nineveh ‘like a young puppy’.

‘Elibus’ may be a Greek rendering of Bêl-ibni (‘Belibnus’). Between the chaotic years 703 and 700 B.C.E. there were three kings of Babylon. If they are the same, he is, as Polyhistor’s account says, successor to Merodach-Baladan, but he did not slay him (he survived to fight another day). Bêl-ibni seems to have been trouble – Roux suggests that he was ‘more than suspect of collusion with the rebels’ and was himself taken away and replaced by Sennacherib’s son, (Asordanius).

So in many of the details in this account, Polyhistor is clearly relating broadly accurate data from sources available to him. And some of the information is more detailed (though we cannot be sure that it is more accurate) than we have even now from contemporary documents painstakingly dug from the earth.

Which makes the following part of the quotation, of particular interest to us, so interesting: he says that, during the reign of Sennacherib, the Greeks, directly or indirectly, mounted an expedition against the Assyrian Empire.

When he received a report that the Greeks had made a hostile descent upon Cilicia, he marched against them and fought with them a pitched battle, in which, though he suffered great loss in his own army, he overthrew them, and upon the spot he erected the statue of himself as a monument of his victory; and ordered his prowess to be inscribed upon it in the Chaldæan characters, to hand down the remembrance of it to posterity. He built also the city of Tarsus after the likeness of Babylon, which he called Tharsis. And after enumerating the various exploits of Sinnecherim (Sennacherib), he adds that he reigned 18 years, and was cut off by a conspiracy which had been formed against his life by his son Ardumusanus. *16

So the Greeks mounted an expedition against the Assyrian empire around 700 B.C.E., and engaged Sennacherib in battle in Cilicia.* 17 Locating the statue of himself which he erected as a monument to his victory over the Greeks would be a remarkable discovery, if it still survives.

Burn says of the colonisation of the Eastern Mediterranean by the Greeks: ‘As early as the foundation of Cumae, Ionians were beginning to trade and settle in the Levant. There were new settlements in the plain of Tarsus and one, called Poseideion, at Al Mina north of Ras Shamra. Geometric pottery reached Hamath (Hamah), which was sacked by the Assyrians in 720; but the Assyrians also severely checked Greek aggression. King Sargon, in a famous boast, says that he ‘dragged the Ionians like fish from the sea’, in operations near Tarsus, and ‘gave peace to Cilicia and Tyre’. *18  Greek trade with the Levant remained important, and influenced Greek culture….’ *19  Tarsus was clearly the key point on the coast of Cilicia during the late 8th and early 7th century B.C.E, and the engagement with Sennacherib was probably close by. His enhancement of Tarsus into an Anatolian Babylon suggests the conscious creation of a semi-autonomous centre of power in a place regularly threatened by various groups. [Tarsus was the chief city of Cilicia, standing near the centre of the Cilicia Campestris, on the river Cydnus, about twelve miles above its mouth. *20

But there is more extraordinary information to come. Another fragment relating to Sennacherib surviving in the pages of Eusebius is by the historian Abydenus, a disciple of Aristotle according to I. P. Cory’s introduction. He says that Abydenus wrote an Assyrian History, and was also a copyist from Berossus, a Babylonian by birth and a priest of Bel, with access to the literature of his own country. Berossus flourished during the reign of Alexander the Great, and resided at Athens for some years. He does not seem to think much of Sennacherib in terms of kingly qualities. But he tells us that the Cilician military engagement involved a sea battle. This may not surprise us: it is more likely than that the Greeks marched across Anatolia. However what follows is not to my knowledge mentioned any where else, and therefore is surprising. Abydenus suggests that the defeat of the Greeks was so severe that Sennacherib was in a position to build a temple at Athens.

At the same time the twenty-fifth who was Senecherib can hardly be recognized among the kings. It was he who subjected the city of Babylon to his power, and defeated and sunk a Grecian fleet upon the coast of Cilicia. He built also a temple at Athens and erected brazen statues, upon which he engraved his own exploits. And he built the city of Tarsus after the plan and likeness of Babylon, that the river Cydnus should flow through Tarsus, in the same manner as the Euphrates intersected Babylon.

A Sargonid temple in Athens, and the erection of bronze statues, with a portion of his annals inscribed upon them, is an extraordinary thought [the annals of Sennacherib’s campaigns found in Assyria on prisms do not contain an account of a campaign which extended to Attica, but they are not complete]. I am not aware of any archaeological discoveries in Athens which would support the contention that Sennacherib or his armies were ever on Athenian soil, but the statement comes from someone who was a student at Aristotle’s Lyceum, and is so extraordinary that it is hard to imagine it being made unless there was some basis to it. One could argue that the parallelling of the Assyrian experience with the Persian experience (in Plato’s Laws) is employed here too – the Persians had come to Athens, and had forced the Athenians to abandon their city. However the Persians had looted Athens, destroying much of the city – there is no parallel with this for Sennacherib's visit. The Persian attack would probably have accounted for the destruction of a surviving Assyrian Temple, if such existed, along with much else of interest in pre-Periclean Athens.

After the defeat of the Assyrians at the hands of the Babylonians and the Medes (somewhere between 612 and 609 (the exact details are unclear), Babylon became the capital of the Assyrian Empire. The following years concerning Babylon are also unclear in the record, and the details are sometimes contradictory, but these details are not of importance to this argument.

Astyages reigned over the Medes from 585 –550 B.C.E., followed by Cyrus (Axerdis). Cyrus eventually became the first Great King of the Persian Empire (formerly he had been known as the King of Anshan). We are told by Abydenus that Axerdis was the first that levied mercenary soldiers, and that one of whom was Pythagoras, a follower of the wisdom of the Chaldæans:

Can this be the famous Pythagoras who stands close to the beginnings of Greek philosophy? The remark is made by a member of Aristotle’s Lyceum, and is made without any fear that a mis-identification might be made. The dates are about right – Pythagoras flourished about 540-510 B.C.E., which would place him at the right time to be such a mercenary soldier, sometime after 560 B.C.E. (Cyrus became king of Babylon in 538 B.C.E.). He would not be the first soldier in the world whose horizons were broadened by travel in the service of a king. * 21

 Chaldaea is often used in a vague geographic way, but Xenophon refers to Chaldaeans in the mountains North of Mesopotamia. Effectively this is the land which is known to the Greeks as ‘Syria’, encompassing Cappadocia and Cilicia, as well as the northern Levant and Mesopotamia [the term also refers to lands in the south of Mesopotamia, (for reasons which are not clear within the contemporary model of the distribution of power and influence in the Levant of the 1st Millennium B.C.E.). Merodach-Baladan thus is counted as a Chaldaean]. It is interesting that here no mention is made of Pythagoras as a follower of the wisdom of the Egyptians, which might be taken to suggest an understanding that Levantine and Mesopotamian sources were of significance for his doctrines as much as those later assumed to be important in late antiquity, i.e., Egypt.

In the account of Pythagoras by Diogenes Laertius, a letter is quoted (from Pythagoras to Anaximenes) which contains some lines which show Pythagoras to be aware of Median power and its dangers, though he is clearly in Italy at the time of writing: 

….if you, the best men, abandon your cities, then will their good order perish, and the peril from the Medes will increase. For always to scan the heavens is not well, but more seemly is it to be provident for one’s mother country. For I too am not altogether in my discourses but am found no less in the wars which the Italians wage with one another. *22

Clearly Pythagoras was no stranger to political disputes, and indeed seems to have perished in the course of one. It is not inconceivable that he was once a soldier, and his interest in the Medes may be the result of mercenary service in the Median army in the early sixth century, as the remark by Abydenus claims. *23

‘…[Axerdis] also reduced under his dominion Egypt and the country of Cælo-Syria, whence came Sardanapallus.’ *24

Pythagoras would have found himself in both Egypt and in Caelo-Syria (i.e., ‘upper Cilicia’ - Cilicia and Cappadocia) if he was in the service of Cyrus for any length of time, and in a position to explore the philosophy and theology of these cultures. ‘Sardanapalus’ is ‘Ashurbanipal’, who appears in the Old Testament as ‘Asnapper’. If he came from Caelo-Syria, this would very likely make him a Chaldaean. In fact Alexander Polyhistor explicitly describes Sardanapalus as ‘the Chaldaean.’*25

If Ashurbanipal is Chaldaean, and his lineage is clear, then either or both his father and mother count as Chaldaean also. Going back in time, the first clear break in the continuity of the lineage is Sargon II (Sharru-kin, or ‘true king’). His name invites suspicion, and his ancestry is not known. He arrived on the throne in the same year that Merodach-Baladan mounted the throne of Babylon (721 B.C.E.). This suggests a degree of instability across the whole of Mesopotamia, suitable for the purposes of usurpers. In which case Assyria had been run by Chaldaean kings for nearly two hundred years by the time Pythagoras encountered Chaldaean ideas.

If Assyria was as powerful and as long-lasting an entity as it was, and a major factor in the development of Greek constitutional arrangements, why do we have no history of the Assyrian Empire written by a Greek writer? Herodotus said he would write one - we get some information about Assyria from his Histories, but the main focus of his book is the later conflict between Greece and Persia. Abydenus apparently wrote one, but it is no longer extant. Another history of Assyria was written by John of Mauretania, but that has gone too. So they did once exist. Plato's information perhaps comes from the history written by Herodotus.

All that survives from Greek writers however is quotations and fragments here and there, often embedded in the pages of Eusebius. It is possible that these histories did not survive because they revealed more about the reactive nature of the Greek relationship with the Assyrian empire than was comfortable. Particularly as the years passed, and they were confronted with a new threat from the East. The development of the Greek constitutions, and the development of the institution of the polis, may have owed a very great deal to the challenge presented by Assyria. And if Sennacherib did inflict a severe defeat on the Ionians near Cilicia in the seventh century, and conquered Athens, it is likely to have been an experience they were only too happy to forget. 

Notes and references.

1. Richter, G.M, A Handbook of Greek Art, Phaidon, 1959, fourth impression 1994, pbk  Plate 295
2  Richter, G.M, A Handbook of Greek Art, Phaidon, 1959, fourth impression 1994, pbk p210-11,
3  Richter, G.M, A Handbook of Greek Art, Phaidon, 1959, fourth impression 1994, pbk. p297 - 

4.  NB:  Richter states incorrectly that:‘Egypt had conquered Assyria in 672 B.C., and from then on the East was opened to Greece’. [p56].

5 See also: the ‘Babylonian Chronicle’ (ABC, pp 81); ARAB, II, sect.795. See: E.G Kraeling, ‘The death of Sennacherib’, JAOS, LIII (1933), pp. 335-46; S. Parpola, ‘The murder of Sennacherib’ in B. Alster (ed.), Death in Mesopotamia, Copenhagen, 1980, pp. 171-82). [Roux in his Iraq, p323, says ‘Sennacherib….. met with the end he deserved: he was stabbed to death by one of his sons or, according to another version, crushed by the winged bulls that protected the sanctuary.’ (n 15 Ch 20 ‘The House of Sargon’;  see also II Kings xxx. 36-7.)
6  Cory, I.P., Ancient Fragments, 1832.
7 Roux, G., Iraq p323-332  Penguin Books, new edition, 1992.
 8 Plato, Laws, translated with an introduction by T.J. Saunders. Penguin Library. 1970.
9 Plato, Protagoras and Meno. translated by W.K.C. Guthrie, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1956 (various printings).
10 Works of Thomas Taylor, Plato's Laws. Prometheus Trust, 1996 [first ed., 1804]
11 Cory, I.P.,  Ancient Fragments, 1832.
12 Diodorus Siculus, lib. II. p. 81.
13 Herodotus, The Histories Lib. I. c. 95
14 Alexander Polyhistor, quoted in  Cory’s Ancient Fragments, 1832.
15 Roux, G. Iraq, Ch 20 ‘House of Sargon’, p321. new edition 1992.
16 Alexander Polyhistor, quoted in Eu. Ar. Chron. 42. [Armenian Chronicle of Eusebius].
17  Burn mentions that ‘Greeks and Assyrians clash in Levant’ in his 2nd Chronological Table ‘The Growth of Greek Civilization c 780-480 B.C E'. (Burn, A. R,  A History of Greece, p88-9, 1965, rev. ed. 1979).
18 . Cilicia was Quê to the Assyrians - Roux, G. Iraq, ‘The Assyrian Empire’, p31.
19 Burn, A. R., A History of Greece, p88-9, 1965, rev. ed. 1979.
20 Smith, William, A Smaller Classical Dictionary of biography, mythology, and geography. Abridged from the larger dictionary. Lond., 1852
21 Abydenus,  quoted in Cory’s Ancient Fragments, 1832. So much to discuss here! It is unlikely that Astyages was the first to levy mercenaries, but Greek hoplite soldiers were certainly serving in armies around the near East. They can be identified in a number of wall reliefs, including some in the British Museum's Assyrian galleries. They are quite distinctive in the reliefs illustrating the siege of Lachish.
22. Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Bk VIII 49-50 In this passage it is clear that it is the city (the polis) and how it functions and is organised, that was understood to be a bulwark against Median and Assyrian influence. If the city was neglected, then good order would perish.
 23 see Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers, bk 2 for his account of Pythagoras
24 Abydenus, quoted in Eu. Ar. Chron. 53.
25 Alexander Polyhistor, quoted in Eu. Ar. Chron. p 44.

Time to Move On (Writing to Josephine Quinn)

A response to the article 'Time to Move On', published in the TLS in September 2018.

Dear Dr. Quinn,

Eleanor Robson referenced your TLS article of 18 September on her Twitter feed. I couldn't agree more with your argument, though I might quibble (minorly) with some of the details. The term 'classics' is long past its sell-by date.

 I studied classics myself, but because I was studying in London in the early 90s it was possible for me to study the languages, history and culture of ancient Mesopotamia at the same time. As a result I saw a different picture of the relationship between ancient Greece and Mesopotamian civilization than the one I was being taught. I've been studying that relationship ever since.

I self-published a book about that relationship in 2015 ('The Sacred History of Being'). Some classicists have read it, but most are disinclined, possibly because the argument seems to them to be too fantastic to be given serious consideration. Even the very idea of such an argument seems often to be beyond the pale.

It upends a number of constructs in our understanding of cultural development in antiquity, both east and west, which is a hard thing to swallow. But the evidence is there. The core argument of the book is that the same key ideas appear in the context of religion in Greece, Assyria, Babylonia, and also in Israel.

It is possible that Pythagoras brought these ideas back to Greece, after military service with the Persians (there is an account of this in existence). Which suggests that both abstract ideas and philosophical thought were not first developed by the Greeks. For most classicists of course, it is axiomatic that philosophical thought first began in Greece. The fact that Plato contradicted this, and said that philosophy was of a very great age, seems to cut no ice at all. Scholars (to generalise) are stuck in an episteme, which simply will not allow the idea into conversation, even if it is there in the text.

I've argued for a long time that the Greek Enlightenment of the 5th century B.C.E., is to a large extent a product of the European Enlightenment. And as you say, that is where 'classics' saw the light of day in the form we recognise. But the construct of classical civilization, as something aloof from other cultures around the Mediterranean, has been seen through a number of times during the past seventy years. Richard Broxton Onians saw through it, and knew the connections with Mesopotamia were there, and possessed a good understanding of their significance. I first read his book about thirty years ago, and I still think of it as one of the great unexploded bombs in scholarship.

Thanks very much for writing the article, and for your clarity of thought.

Best regards,

Thomas Yaeger

The original article, published in the TLS on September 18, 2018. A set of reviewer notes for The Sacred History of Being (with chapter listings) is available.

The Greek Ontological Model in the 1st Millennium B.C.E.

This is a discussion of the ontology and theology of the Greeks, in the context of the 1st Millennium B.C.E. It is essentially an overview of where I was, written between 26 July and the 3rd of August 2003. I have revised some of the English, and excised a couple of short passages, but the argument remains as it was. It is quite a long read (around six thousand words), but some readers will find the discussion rewarding and worth the effort. It has a number of themes, but essentially it is a discursive account of Plato as a theological writer. 

It is divided into six sections, which I list here:

Abstract and Introduction

Where is the Theology of the Greeks?

Discovering Greek Theology

The Intellectual basis of Greek Theology

Magic and Ontology in Ancient Greece

Beyond Motion and Change

Abstract

This essay proposes a substantial revision to the current cultural model for the Greeks. It argues that we need to modify our picture of the ontological model available to the Greeks in this period, and consequently to adjust the corresponding ontological model we use to interpret the cultural significance of their religious thought and practice. It also attempts to rearrange some of the fractured pieces of the Greek cultural continuum into a more appropriate set of relationships.

Introduction

This essay is, in contemporary parlance, ‘left field’, in that it does not develop a current line of argument about Greek civilisation, but instead proposes a very radical re-interpretation of the Greek cultural phenomenon. It does this, not because the author wishes to wilfully and contrarily reorder the phenomenon, but because the author has been pushed toward a radical re-interpretation by the evidence itself for the understanding of ancient Greece over a period of twenty years: this evidence suggests that the ontology available to the Greeks themselves in the 1^st Millennium B.C.E. was much more sophisticated than we have hitherto allowed ourselves to imagine. As a whole, the phenomenon of philosophy (and its sudden appearance) in Greece is problematic in its broad relationship to a number of aspects of the Greek cultural matrix (with which it has a number of clear connections), and there has been no recent serious attempt to address these issues. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine in what circumstances within the academic world of classics such radical re-interpretation would be possible. Plus there is the question of who has the responsibility and expertise to start playing around with the ontology of the Greeks – the philosophers or the classicists?

So this is a radical little text, dealing with a cultural no-man’s land, which is unlikely to find an orthodox home in a journal such as JCS or JHS, or any of the others. Too bad! It is nonetheless a serious piece of work which I think deserves at least a little attention, in that its radical re-ordering of the Greek cultural matrix  offers the possibility of understanding the theological background to the development of, for example, participatory democracy in Greece – the sort of background  scholars have suspected for some considerable time - but have been unable to explore. The reason it has not been possible to explore it (it is argued in this essay) is because the ontological model we attribute to the Greeks is not the one they had.

The essay also  proposes a new way of understanding the role of sacrifice among the Greeks, and has a few new words to say on Greek conceptions of participation and magic.

Where is the Theology of the Greeks?

Much of it is in the pages of Plato. Plato is a religious writer. His writings do not tell us, as the current orthodoxy generally holds, about a secular programme of philosophical investigation. Instead his writings tell us about the theology of the Greeks. This has not been recognised much in practice and in detail by scholarship – however the later commentators all the way up to Proclus wrote their commentaries on the basis that he was writing about theology. In the renaissance they read Plato very much the same way. However we do not ourselves currently have a conception of theology or of its history which comfortably allows us to see the ideas expressed in the dialogues as evidence of theology.

The later commentators have been dismissed as insignificant to the interpretation of Plato because much of what they wrote betrays ideas of eastern origin. In other words, their theological interpretation of Plato depends on ideas which are clearly drawn from eastern sources, and on that account  their interpretations are illegitimate as a means of understanding and interpreting Plato. On this account the later Platonists are designated by us as ‘Neoplatonists’. A distinction they would not have understood.

The presumption here behind the orthodox position is that both Greek religious and theological ideas and the ideas contained in Plato are autochthonous – i.e., they don’t belong within a common cultural matrix whose boundaries across Europe and the Middle East are difficult to define. Greek ideas are Greek, and Plato’s dialogues represent an expressly Greek (and essentially  philosophical) interpretation of reality.

One of the reasons for the popularity of the autochthonous nature of Greek ideas is the easy identification of religion as the outward expression of an inward theology.  While it is true that aspects of an outward religion may (and sometimes do) reflect details of an inward theology, it is also the case that there is no necessary and obvious connection between them at a formal level (this on account of the various purposes, many of them pragmatic, which underpin the show of religion).  In other words, it is not possible to guess the nature of the theology underpinning a religious literature and its iconography simply by analysis of those things.  It has (for example) been too easily assumed that Homer tells us what we need to know about Greek religion (Plato’s view of  Homer and the other poets is well-known). But, constructing a picture of Greek theology on the basis of the descriptions of the Gods and their actions in Homer results in a morally unsatisfactory result and a source of embarrassment - to the Greeks as well as ourselves. It is hard to imagine a people with the intellectual curiousity and power of the Greeks being happy to consider the Homeric epics as sufficient description and explanation of the world for any length of time, and for any serious purpose.

However, the contemporary view is that, since Plato is not writing about Homeric ideas of divinity, he cannot be telling us about Greek theology: therefore he is writing about a more or less secular programme of philosophical inquiry.

On the contrary, I repeat that Plato is writing about Greek theology, and that theology is part of a common body of philosophical theory and argumentation, orally maintained for many generations. Naturally it isn’t the case that all Greeks were familiar with the ideas which find expression in his pages, any more than a straw poll in an English street would reveal a picture of the central theological beliefs of the Church of England. But it is the case that Plato is writing about the theology of his culture, in that it reflects the body of doctrine shared by his peers.

What are the reasons for arguing that Plato is not writing about theology? Firstly, what Plato writes does not resemble closely what we now regard as theology. We don’t expect to encounter theology in a dialogue format. He deals with abstract arguments which, it seems, only occasionally admit of a theological interpretation. Discussions of the relationship between the one and the many are expressly conducted in terms of logic. And so these discussions are treated in pedagogical terms. It might be that an argument by Plato might be seen by a later writer as having a theological application, but that does not mean that Plato was discussing theology.

 Secondly, Plato is regarded as the apex of philosophical speculation in the ancient world. He did not invent philosophy, but to a significant extent invented the discipline which we now recognise as philosophy.  It is often assumed – because there appears to be no evidence to the contrary – that clear abstract thinking began with Plato. And clear understanding of ideas of infinity and the boundless, the currency of later theological speculations, also began with him (earlier philosophers such as Anaximander and Parmenides may have concerned themselves with such concepts and arguments, but they represent no more than the foreshadowings of what Plato would do. It isn’t real philosophy as we understand it).

In short, before Plato abstract speculation in the writings of the presocratics does not really count as philosophy. Certainly not as these speculations are  represented to us in the historical record. Before Plato, there is, it is assumed, no coherent logical argument about intellectual abstractions. It has been argued in fact that, before Plato, most speculation was carried out at the level of concrete images, and that concrete ideas alone were the currency of earlier ages in Greece and elsewhere.

During the past 150 years or so, the civilisations of antiquity, in cultural and intellectual terms, have been seen as a relatively new development, grown out of an ‘urdummheit’, or initial stupidity. This is not a difficult view to understand, if we do not separate out (as we now do not) the apparatus of public religious expression and the theology which gave it a legitimate life, since the credulity apparent in the ancient world, with its bizarre cults and practices, its sacrifices to the gods, its Hades and Sheols, its divine honours, suggests a degree of unreason. When read at face value, these practices do appear to indicate an intellectual capacity not yet fully formed.

Not only do we not separate the forms of religious expression from the theological underpinnings, the same doctrine of ‘urdummheit’ (mercifully no longer an axiomatic premise in the study of the ancient world) has left us with no conception of an ancient theology, beyond whatever poor thing might be assumed (usually something convenient to our own assumptions) to lurk inside the outward show. It is not there, because it cannot be there -  the intellectual capacity necessary for philosophy and abstract theology was not developed until the middle of the first millennium B.C.E.

Discovering Greek Theology

We have to interpret the evidence of the past on the basis of what we already know about the world. How we pass beyond what we know to an understanding of something which, beforehand, we did not understand, is still a process which involves a degree of mystery. In some way the categories of our understanding have to be modified by the perplexing experience of evidence which takes us beyond the structures already established in our minds (and in the academic curriculum). Despite the best efforts of Francis Bacon to formalise the process of intellectual invention, we still cannot mechanise this, and cannot prescribe how it is that we go from one intellectual model of the subject in question, to a better one. But a better model is what is required.

The ancients (including Plato) have been accused of mistaking a subjective ontology for an objective one (Both J.G. Frazer and Benjamin Jowett approached Plato from this point of view). In other words, they were accused of making a fundamental mistake in their understanding of the world, and that this is the principal difference between us and them – by contrast we do not make this particular ontological mistake. Consequently it is all too easy for us to treat their conceptions as if they were struggling to deal with the kind of epistemological and ontological questions which are of importance to us, and which make sense within our own ontological model of reality – practical questions of understanding physical issues  – how do we know what a thing is, and understand its relations with other things in the world; how we understand and delineate ‘real’ (phenomenal) things; how we deal with things on a rational basis; how we avoid thinking about phenomena in faulty ways. And so on. When the Greeks address abstract metaphysical questions, such as whether the Good is one or many, we behave as if they failed to understand the limits of philosophical enquiry.

On the contrary it is we who traduce their ontology. They were not talking about the phenomenal world as an ontological structure (not until the advent of Stoicism as a doctrine and a practical view of life from the 5^th century B.C.E. onwards, in both Greece and, it would seem, Egypt). They were talking about what they regarded as reality itself, which (they presumed) underpins the phenomenal world.

Though we cannot formalise the process of changing ontological models, we can say something about the process, and what it involves.  A subjective ontology is one which is held within the mind, and is assumed to describe to an accurate degree the reality which is being apprehended. Which in this case is the material and textual evidence from ancient Greece. Discovering the difference between a subjective and an objective ontology depends on observation of the limits of the subjective ontology in explaining what is observed. 

Where there is a discrepancy, there is likely to be a deficiency in (at the least) the ontological description. An obvious example of this phenomenon is the long-standing and highly successful account of the planetary motions by the astronomer and geographer Ptolemy, which provided a reasonably practical  mathematical description of what was observed from the earth, but did not come close to describing the real motions of the planets. Even when the ontology is adjusted to more accurately describe the observed reality, it may be that the revised theoretical model only accounts satisfactorily for what is observed at the level of mathematical description, without actually addressing the real nature of the phenomena.  Sometimes no amount of revision of the description is adequate: sometimes the model has to be changed.

It follows therefore, that if the ontology we give the Greeks, and the ancients in general, is significantly faulty, then there ought to be evidence within both the written record, the monumental record, and the archaeological record, which is not easily (or at all) accommodated by the existing model. As a general description, the existing model may be satisfactory for our contemporary purposes, but it does not satisfactorily account for all the available detail, and more importantly, account for the significance accorded to the detail in the ancient world. For example, we often account for ancient religious belief and practice in terms of ideology and propaganda, but this leaves out a detailed accounting of the perceived intrinsic worth of these ideas in the ancient world, and their contemporary context. The presumption appears to be that it is simply uneccessary to address these details in such terms.

There ought also to be deformations in the history of the apprehension of the Greeks (their reception), as a result of the struggle to make sense of their civilization within the categories we choose as a means to understand it. There is of course such evidence. Martin Bernal has dealt with much of the history of the revised scholarly model of Greece developed from the eighteen-forties onwards, (and in an exemplary fashion) in the first volume of Black Athena, which was received more warmly by the academic community than might have been expected. However Bernal’s work was intended to open up the territory, not to close the book on a bad period for the study of antiquity in Europe. At the moment we are in an interesting place, in that the former model of antiquity created by scholars no longer holds sway, but most of its parts are still in place to stave off undesirable vacuum. Many questions need to be answered still about the development of the scholars model, and about the traduction of the intellectual world of antiquity which resulted. The evidence remains, but is now no longer securely framed by the labours of 150 years of scholarship which produced a collusive and fictional tale of ‘how it was’. The anomalies in the evidence are still a legitimate subject for academic enquiry. But now they should be apprehended as far as possible as they are., as they present themselves, and explained as far as possible in terms of the culture which gave rise to them.

Systematic study of this anomalous evidence ought to lead us to a more precisely tailored ontology for the Greeks and the ancients, by suggesting an alternative hypothesis upon which (all) the evidence might rest.  In the course of such a study we should remember that the anomalous nature of some of the evidence from ancient Greece arises from the curious way it sits within our own models of the past – not because this evidence is intrinsically intrusive, violating the cultural context in which it is found.

Some of the anomalies are within particular bodies of evidence. For instance, the Platonic dialogues, read as philosophy, contains many pieces of information which are not easily integrated within modern analyses of his work which see that work within the frame of a research or teaching programme, for which there is no evidence. There must have been teaching of some sort in the Academy, but we have no idea about the nature of that teaching, and all current models depend on retrojections of later notions about philosophical pedagogy in Greece.

The work of other ancient writers is similarly unhappy at being interpreted in terms of a model of philosophical activity which depends ultimately on later conceptions of what it is to do philosophy, and in which, through long practice, scholars have become comfortable with sidelining the context and much of the detail of the texts. Not to mention the now dubious practice of emendation which has gone on since the recovery of classical texts in the renaissance (cf Scaliger’s commitment to ‘extreme scholarship’ in the ‘reconstruction’ of Aristotle’s Greek from an Arabic translation).

 Other anomalies arise in details of description and practice. Some of these seem to be satisfactorily explained in terms of the ‘urdummheit’ model, in that they are explained in terms of the failure to be something like ourselves. Examples might be the use of oracles, the consultation of entrails, the notice given to omens and the practice of divination, the honour and worship directed at statues and images, as well as the worship of ancestors and the dead, the importance of liturgy and ritual, the emphasis on completion and perfection, the ubiquitous practice of animal sacrifice, the attribution of the sacred to inanimate things, and the prevalence of the view that the detail of the world is almost entirely conditioned by ends.

These things, which seem like a disparate array of ancient peculiarities (and are so treated by and large by modern scholars), are in fact tied together as a set of practices and phenomena by an underlying body of ideas. Within that body of ideas they make sense. The varieties of practice and phenomena are intelligible as the development of an intellectual apprehension of reality, in a manner paralleled by the development of ideas and practices in our own intellectual world.

This intellectual apprehension of reality is in fact what ancient theology is.

Much of this theology can be obtained through a careful reading of Plato’s Timaeus and the Parmenides. However there are other texts which contain rich information about the same body of ideas. Plato’s the Sophist and the Theatetus, and the Republic are others. Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption is another one of these works. The Enneads of Plotinus, despite their relatively late date, give perhaps the clearest picture of the theology shorn of the context of disputation found in the Platonic Dialogues.

The essence of Greek theology is an intellectual apprehension of the ground of reality, of the ultimate reality, as being beyond all categorisation and apprehension. This ultimate reality, though one, is also twofold, in that while it gives rise to all subsequent manifestations and shadows of its nature, it also remains as itself, abiding and unseen; above all participation in the world it generated.

This is the both the ultimate reality and the ultimate target of intelligence. It is both unformed and the repository of all possible forms. It is chaos in a sense, in that it is beyond all human reduction to order, but it embraces all reality in potential.

It is also the ultimate ground of power: the source to which all things must look for renewal. All intermediary sources which can renew the power of an entity, practice, phenomenon or idea, also draw power ultimately from the principal source.

It is also the place where the same and the different meet. All distance is collapsed in the ultimate ground of reality. Opposites are one, and the most distant objects are in the most intimate contact. The beginning and end of time are conjoined and inseparable.

This is the essence of the ideas enshrined in Greek theology.

Initiation into the theology was by the method illustrated by Plato in his dialogues – through the insufficiency of logic and argument to pin down the ultimate reality as other than something which utterly transcends the categories of human description and understanding, and which is in fact beyond all description and all understanding.

This is the core of an ancient practice of dialectic. In itself there is little about it which can be said to be exclusively Greek, except insofar as we have great evidential detail through Plato. However, traces of the idea echo through the religious beliefs and iconography of the Greeks, once you know what to look for. It is the common occult substratum which binds together some of the most important aspects of Greek civilization.

Greek civilization, its key literature, its art, its ritual, its religious beliefs, is underpinned by a range of ways of thinking, ways of interpreting, ways of conceiving, ways of operating, and consequential ends, which all owe their validity to the common occult substratum of theology. The occult substratum did not give rise to these modes of thinking and operating (it appears to be - at least to an extent - ‘hard-wired’ into our conceptual apparatus), but informs them with meaning which they would scarcely have without it (French classical anthropologists have done excellent work in unpicking Greek cultural practice without any conception that, at some very deep level, a sophisticated philosophical model underpinned the details of festivals and rituals). 

Initiation into the substratum, or even slight knowledge of its existence and content, would, for the Greeks, inform life, art and belief in an extraordinary way: it would be amplified and vivified in proportion to the degree of understanding of the ideas involved in the cultural apparatus. Most Greeks were however uninformed about the real nature of their culture’s theological background, but they nevertheless had a grasp of some of the consequential details, without understanding their origin in the depths of a complex and (in certain senses)  unified body of  discursive ideas about the divine.

The intellectual basis of Greek Theology

If the ultimate ground of reality is as revealed (essentially negatively) in Plato’s dialogues, and in the Enneads of Plotinus, then a number of  fairly obvious logical inferences will be made.

Firstly, this ultimate ground of reality is the principal subject of religious awe, honour and worship. Other entities may have a claim on priestly worship, but only in so far as they participate in the ultimate ground of reality. However, much of the imagery, conception and narrative in religion is accidental rather than essential, in that it arises in response to human credulity, vanity, and political requirements. Religious establishments pay a price for their existence in the world, and paying honour to accidental divinities is part of that price. Creating them (even setting them up in heaven, which a skill of the theurgists)  is another part of that price.

Secondly, the nature of the model in which the ultimate ground of reality is the complete collapse of not only the categories of perception, but also the ultimate ontological collapse of the categories of reality and existence, means that the ground of reality is, despite appearances, immanent to all things, whether abstract or concrete.The ultimate ground of reality can be emulated and invoked; can be summoned, and made near.

Thirdly, it follows that contact with the ultimate ground of reality is a matter of apprehension and understanding – a matter of ontological models and ontological nous: of knowing, and knowing what you are doing.

Fourthly, for the foregoing reasons, it is immensely important that the ultimate ground of reality be recalled and invoked to the greatest degree by the wise, and be made proximate in the world to the utmost. Not as a merely pious observance, but as a vital part of religious activity. The arguments leading up to the insight that the ultimate reality is a place which transcends the logic and order of the physical world, where things which happen seem to be impossible within the logic of that physical world as explored within the Platonic dialogues (motion and change), mean that the ultimate ground of reality makes difficult or even impossible things possible. Contact and transaction with that ground of reality is therefore imperative if temporal power of any kind is desired.

Magic and Ontology in Ancient Greece

Numerous theories of magic have been given some kind of life since the late nineteenth century. The one which has had the most influence is of course Frazer’s theory of sympathetic and contagious magic. It is not clear from The Golden Bough in which the theory is described that other possibilities have been discarded. However other possibilities have been discarded. Wittgenstein objected to Frazer’s general picture of ancient society on the grounds that it made ancient man stupid; unable to make distinctions between fallacious notions and plausible ones, which are  (as we think) relatively easy for us to make. 

In Frazer’s prize-winning late nineteenth-century essay on the development of Plato’s theory of Ideas, it is clear why other possibilities are not considered: for Frazer Plato’s ontology is merely a projection of subjective categories, and not in any way a proper apprehension of reality. The reason for this judgement is that Plato is not concerned with the same realities as Frazer – i.e, epistemological questions about the physical reality which is the concern of the scientific and technical enterprise of the late nineteenth century (he makes this view explicit). Plato’s ontology is about what Plato considered (subjectively) important, and is not subject to falsification. Frazer as a consequence did not consider the Parmenides to be an important dialogue from the point of view of understanding Plato’s philosophy, and considered that many of the questions discussed in that dialogue (and elsewhere), were merely ‘popular questions of the day’.

There is some truth in the proposition that Plato’s ontology is not subject to falsification. If Plato’s ontology is erected on the basis of an earthbound logic applied to abstract questions, rather than observation and experiment, then it cannot be subject to falsifcation in any strictly scientific sense. But we are not concerned here with a scientifc sense of falsification, but rather a logical one. The ontology  (essentially a theory of Being) which emerges from the dialogues of Plato is expressly an ontology which is apart from any human and earthbound interest – it may be about ‘the Good’, but that ‘Good’ is not necessarily good in any terms a human being can easily understand. This ontology does not feed any human, subjective and pre-existing model of reality – instead (to the consternation of scholars looking for a purely pedagogical purpose to the Platonic dialogues) it violates it to the maximum degree. The arguments explored in the course of the dialogues often destroy the validity of views and opinions which seem to be plain common sense.  The logic used to reach these positions necessarily invalidates itself in the course of argument, and the nature of the ultimate reality 'established' as a result of these arguments expressly violates any subjective and pre-existing ontology in the mind of the inquirer. Therefore the charge that Plato confounded a subjective ontology with an objective one is unfounded.

As for the Frazerian theory of magic, which he seemed to think was applicable to the ancient world as well as to the ’savages’ who peopled nineteenth century anthropology, it is expressly based on Locke’s seventeenth century theory of the association of ideas (Frazer’s world view was thoroughly enlightenment and Lockean)  – it presumes the absence of  a model of reality based on an ontology which has a theory of Being as its core. It is an appropriate theory therefore if the the notion that Plato was dealing in theology is imaginary.  However if the Platonic theology is not imaginary, then the Frazerian theory of sympathetic and contagious magic is not appropriate for an analysis of the world of ideas in Greek antiquity.

Magic outside the world of the credulous depends for its possibility and efficacy on an ontology which makes participation possible. We do not have to accept this logic, but it is important to understand that magical relationships between things were considered to be a consequence of the ontology which supports participation between things which are separate at the level of physicality. Magic may be practiced by those who know little or nothing of the ontology which gives the practice plausibility and its logic. However those who know of the basis of the logic in the ontology have greater power because they know what they are doing (cf Plato’s remarks on magic performed by prophets and diviners in the Laws).

In the Renaissance those who were enthused by the writings of Plato understood there to be an ontological basis to the principles of association between objects, and presumed that this was understood by the Greeks. This has been seen to be implicit in the texts of the dialogues at various times in the history of their critical interpretation. Almost none of the contemporary academic discussions of the ancient world depends on the existence of an ancient ontology which is based on a sophisticated theory of Being.

The study of the thought of the ancient world requires that our understanding of ancient theology and ontology is clarified, so that we understand that, whatever Plato or other authors may say, we should not presume that they are making the kind of mistake which Frazer and his successors suggested that they made. The ancient ontology may be faulty, but whatever might be wrong with it, plain stupidity is not the souce of the fault.

In attempting to understand the subtle distinctions between the varieties of religious ritual, craft and art, and understand where an action, statement, formula or construction is shaped by an ontology and its understanding rather than some other cause, we might follow Aristotle in looking at the cultural production of the past in terms of four separable causes – the ontological (or final cause), the efficient, the formal and the material. Cultural productions which depend on a theory of Being are productions which are those produced in the context of an ontological theory, and an understanding of that theory. It matters little whether that understanding is accurate and well-informed or not – what we are looking for is the tell-tale signs in the production which mark these items as evidence of a contextual theory of Being. 

It is however quite common for these tell-tale signs to appear in periods where there may be no understanding of ontology at all – in which case the physical evidence tells only something about the intellectual history of its origins. For the understanding of the intellectual stature of those times, other evidence is necessary.

Beyond Motion and Change 

The theology which makes participation a vital part of the universe (since the One gave rise to the Many) also in some of its arguments suggests participation (and motion and change) to be impossible (cf. the argument in the Sophist about whether or not forms may participate if they are unchanging). At a certain point in the development of theological ideas, therefore, a premium would be placed on the devising and isolation of methods in which participation with the ultimate ground of reality would be maximised without motion and change. In other words, importance would be placed on the development of techniques to make participation efficacious which did not depend on motion and change - two things which appeared to be illusory. Hence the ideas of completion and perfection became central to religious practice.

 The ideas of completion, perfection, limit, and end were closely associated. They were however not the same, though they could, according to standard practice in ancient Greece as elsewhere in the ancient world, stand in for each other metonomously, or metaphorically. Participation was made emphatic by achievement of these states. As Aristotle wrote, each end is the thing for which its component parts exist. There are many ends for which things exist, but there is one ultimate end for which all exists (Plato made this idea explicit by saying that ‘you exist for the end, and not the end for you’). By extension, it is clear that the lesser ends exist for the final end of all things (the Good, or the ultimate ground of reality). Each end has characteristics in common with the ultimate ground of reality, and this is a mode of participation with that ground.  Thus, the limit of a thing, or the reaching of its end, or the completion of an action, or the achievement of a perfect excellence in anything is in effect, within the ontological model which depends on a theory of Being, the opening of a high-road to the ultimate ground of reality.

This is suggestive of a deep-seated unity behind a number of disparate phenomena. Excellence, declared by Aristotle to be something performed for its own sake, now has a clearer rationale (one which was always implicit in the Ethics where he makes clear that the highest virtue is contemplation, which makes men like the gods – at least according to the argument of his book). An excellence performed is implicitly performed for the most perfect excellence, and can be seen as an act significant in the context of a theory of Being. A property of the transcendent end is emulated by the performance of the excellence, and a bond is thereby established. Excellence has an explicit theological context to Aristotle, and is not confined to the secular world.

This leads us to the idea of ‘binding’ as it was understood at the time of Ficino’s revival of Platonism. Several concepts cluster around this idea, which is closely related to the ideas of participation and joining, and ‘harmonia’. Binding is the act of  opening a connection with the ultimate ground of reality through the establishment of a mode of participation, and by so doing, the agent of the action enters territory where possibility of thought and action are magnified. This can be achieved in a number of ways, including the precise performance of an appropriate ritual, the performance of an appropriate sacrifice - at the appropriate time, for the appropriate reason, and to the appropriate divinity (amplified by multiplicity of sacrifice, or by a more acceptable victim), the correct and complete recital of a liturgy, the consultation of an oracle, the honouring and worship of a god according to the proper styling (the god having a special kind of completion as a an attribute). The correct and appropriate distribution of the shares in the sacrificial animals among the community is also the performance of a special (as opposed to the ultimate) excellence.

The act of sacrifice itself represents the act of ‘binding’ within the ontological model. That is, whereas it has been presumed that the act of sacrifice is to be interpreted as an act of giving to the god, and receiving in terms of the distribution of the parts of the body of the sacrificial animal (as it must have been interpreted by those not privy to the ontological justification in antiquity), in fact it can be understood as a form of completion given to the animal at the crucial moment of slaughter.