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Knowledge has rules. But there are rules imposed by
the functionality of the process and rules that are imposed by rulers
that have some
power and try to impose it. Those are the good rules, these are “only”
enforcement attempts. To understand the structure of knowledge and the
construction of science is the beginning of the way to look for
efficiency.
Knowledge is a tool to understand and explain phenomena
and, in this way, allow to deal efficiently with the integration of man
in the different contexts in which he takes part. A tool, and nothing
more, which is certainly very colossal. The tools, which for a long
time (naively) were thought that man was the only one to use, are
fundamental to accomplish a work (conceptual or material) in an
efficient way, we emphasize in an efficient way [Note: Einstein was
nicknamed as the man who retained the laboratory - a laboratory
is a tool - inside the hat, due to the conceptual experiences he
carried out], they are so striking that many areas that have as
object of study the evolution and development of man, (history,
anthropology,...) base their work on the interpretation of the
instruments and tools that have been used through the ages,
as they allow not only to define the objectives that were aimed
at, but also the perceptions, knowledge, ambitions and desires,
reasoning abilities, etc..
Strategies, operating modes, such as tactics, technologies and
even techniques, integration processes and established dialectics,
all in short, count when we do not look at phenomena in an almost
isolated way (such as events) but consider the processes in their
integration (“internal” and “external”) with a concern to seek
optimization of means and the efficiency of the whole. Knowledge,
the primary object of science, must also be (perhaps even above all,
being a multiplier) the target of these intentions and care. And yet,
as we will try to show below, possibly because of its importance, it
is one of the most fractionated and uncoordinated fields and tools
that man uses. Not that knowledge is disrespected in a particular
way. The same happens, for example, with the houses in which we
often forget that have foundations, with the trees in which we do
not attend to the roots that we do not see, with the sea that we
consider as a water surface ignoring the kilometers of depth that
it sometimes has and the currents and movements that develop
there…
Epistemology, which some despise (or ignore?)
classifying it
as “mere philosophy” (in opposition, they defend, to a science that
is “a solid thing”, but of which they must know little because they
do not understand the importance of some of their foundations),
also sometimes suffers from the same marginalization. Sciences
themselves (classified as hard / soft, pure, experimental, natural,
exact,...), also pass through this colander (also a mere instrument,
which serves to “fix” the knowledge tools), a sieve that goes beyond
its function as a mean to become an end in itself (abusively and at a
cost because divert attention from what is fundamental, that is,
literally, grounding, giving the support that it consolidates). Many
forget that positivism (logical empiricism) had the purpose of, in
addition to providing greater rigor (compared to empiricism) and
thus facilitating the search for precision, defending its authors
from the risk of expressing opinions (which sometimes went
against the current with solidly established “truths”, and we don’t
even have to go to the realm of the sacred, the inquisition or
parallel things, such as “the heavier bodies that the air cannot fly”,
or “the continents cannot move, Pangeia is idiocy”). The “crime
of opinion” must be avoided (or disguised), the importance of
the assumptions considered, corollaries, postulates, axioms, etc.,
does not make sense, “…from the data presented we conclude
that…” what avoids more exposures, “these works should only
be published after my death”, that avoids retaliation against the
author…. The examples have no end, the harmful effects too and…,
unfortunately, they are not past waters.
Alternatives? Certainly exist. The problem is in
finding them,
defining them (doing the necessary research and getting it to
succeed) and, perhaps above all, implementing them. Next, we
point out proposals for responding to the problems we have
raised. However, we believe that it is an important and serious
problem that justifies investments in terms of the enormous
damage it causes to the development of science and, even more, to
the fantastic effects that science can have on the lives of men and
societies, so we will not only continue to engage in research on
the topic, as well as we propose that there must be a coordinated
action of the many positions that strive in this same direction.
Parts help us to conceive the whole, given the limitations
of the means (the tools) that we built in a process of millions of
years in which, successively, we were responding to the problems
we have faced and the adaptive capacities that we have (which
were also being developed). The dialectics, fundamental in this
whole process, cannot be overlooked, but the capacities we
have compel us to constitute a conception of the global based on
specific aspects (almost in an impressionistic context) in which,
from specific stimuli, we compose an image of the whole, what
passes, naturally, for sets of sensations, which give meaning to
the multiple individual stimuli, for an interpretation strategy
and for decision making that integrate a perception of the global
(personalized, no doubt, but similar at least to those of us that are
close… culturally) that have allowed us to survive and overcome
difficulties for millions of years.
However, today we have undergone profound transformations
in the context in which we are integrated and of which we are a
part, transformations that are widely spoken, but little identified
in their specifications and, even less, in the effects and implications
that they have on our (individuals and societies) lives. Vision, one
of the senses that most marked the development of man, is a good
model of this whole process. Being a way of recording different
stimuli, such as through rods (sensitive to light in general) and
cones (sensitive to different rays that allow us to distinguish
colors), which work in very specific ranges of stimuli, through
a set of operations that optimize the detection of situations in
different conditions (magnifications, low light, excess light, types
of light, ...), giving rise to a perception that allows us a sense of the
situation in which we are located, in order to be able to adapt our
strategies to the solutions we need to find. It is, therefore, from the
contribution of specific actions that we build the globality of our
(particular) world, in a stratagem in which we start from punctual
for the whole, the global, in the way we see it, in a process that is
the opposite of what science did when looking to be more incisive
in that it went from the whole to the specific, dividing into areas
of knowledge, in analysis / synthesis processes, in deductions
/ inductions, etc.. Processes that can be complementary if, in
science, we do not forget the final objective, which is globality, and
that the isolations we make are useful as tools, instruments of an
integration process that allows us to serve man... in an efficient
way.
Resisting the temptation to stick to partial goals is, therefore,
fundamental. This is because the search for truth is not the
function of science (for a long time, although it is still ignored),
what we are looking for are coherences. Coherences that seen
at the local level may not be contradictory but at broader levels
they become more evident, because the restrictions increase, and
the dialectics gain lives that they would not otherwise have. The
concretization, the execution of a work, is, therefore, a good way
to test the consistency of a conjecture, because if in “laboratory”
the isolation of variables can be done and can even be productive,
when we move to application situations, models are confronted
with the “globalities” of situations and validations that could
otherwise be omitted (it is the leap that is taken when we move, in
I, R & D, from a model to a prototype, before we even have to face
the challenges of setting up industrial production lines…).
Knowledge, as we have argued above, faces the challenge of
globality. Tasks can be distributed, roles assigned. We can (should
we?) form teams, define strategies, set goals, make efforts, ... But
all of this is justified in the sense that there is global coherence.
Otherwise, the effort may be useless, or even counterproductive.
The teams do not work, the strategies are meaningless, the
tasks and functions are pointless. The tools that are essential
for the realization of a work (conceptual or material) are no
longer efficient. Knowledge, that is a tool, a tool and nothing
more, to understand and explain phenomena, sense because the
practical efficiency it offers has global. Everything that revolves
around it, researchers, consumers of knowledge, distributors,
and disseminators of knowledge, no longer makes sense. At least
at the levels of the (huge) investment that exists. It is a whole
space of development that disappears, unless, unguarded, we
do not realize that the change must take place and we continue,
automatically, to make the usual gestures, comply with habits and
“live in second-hand”. And sometimes worsening everything. But
there are solutions.
There was another conception not only of water and its
availability, but of the world itself, which went from local and
static to global and dynamic. Due to this change we have evolved and today we begin to ask ourselves about: groundwater; ocean
and ocean dynamics; origin of water in space, in the terrestrial
nucleus, in the formation of the Earth, ... - ANOTHER WORLD
VISION IS PREPARED Figures 1&2.
a) With the integration of R, D & T (Research, Development
& Technology), although still done imperfectly and partially, there
was a great evolution and transformation in terms of resource
profitability.
b) If the integration of the different fields of human
production ceased to be seen in local terms and changed to a
global view, would we not have similar gains? But much greater
because the capital at stake increases and the resulting income
has a much larger base.
c) In a simplified and succinct way, we have in the
development of any product Figures 1 & 2:
a) The current trend is for the debate to be held at the
SECTOR level (production, distribution, consumption, ...), if not at
the SUBSECTOR level (research, development, technology, ...);
b) The big problems (big not only in size and effects, but
mainly because they are ignored) occur in the articulation of the
sectors;
Examples:
a) If education does not consider production, distribution
and consumption, it can hardly be integrated understand, globally;
b) If production does not pay attention to distribution /
marketing, and consumption no longer meets needs and has no
meaning;
c) If planning does not consider the potential of education
/ training, as well as consumption, it will not be able to profit
from the resources that will be available and the objectives that
it should seek.
d) The debate that is taking place today in some thinkthanks,
in some universities, in some political spheres and little
else.
Knowledge is one of the great products (due to the dimensions
it reaches, the multiplier effects it has, the investments (human,
financial, time, etc.), which should be very concerned with the
integration of the so, it different fields it seeks to serve, where
it operates and of where it should (which it does not) gather the
means it needs to develop and progress, it is certainly from the
most unstructured fields and less coordinated with other areas
of production, living closed in on itself and in a rapid process of
increasing isolation (q.e.d).
The debate is urgent, and the identification of problems
requires the collaboration of those interested in different areas
of knowledge (basically all because knowledge all involves). Once
the problem has been identified (as we know it well in research, in
science) the solutions will be found and the articulations, in their
own merit, will not fail to be established. Until then, ambiguities
will prevail (which apparently may interest some, who certainly
for lack of confidence in themselves to escape the dialogue). There
will always be those who win with try any process, but distributing
miseries does not favor anyone, especially when wealth is the
alternative. To be an expert in this time of change is to be the one
who knows best the flaws that can be committed and, therefore,
is able to identify, evaluate and promote the safeguards to avoid
them. It is not necessary to be in an ideal world, even utopian, to
understand that the change will happen and, as any surfer will
easily understand, it is necessary to know how to take advantage
of the good waves.
The aim of this paper is to show some examples of
the attitudes towards the burials and afterlife both in general and
specially in the case of the nobles and the kings in the 10th century.
One of the main questions of this research is to answer how Junius 11
can help to understand views about afterlife in late Anglo-Saxon
England, but in a practical way, connected with the afterlife and
highlighting the funeral practices. Since there are more evidence of
funerary evidences that survived until today from the aristocracy,
especially the kings, the main samples of the tenth century are the
kings’ tombs, especially the house of Wessex and kings of the
Anglo-Saxon England. New Minster in Winchester refoundation seems to
have connections with the main concerns about the places where the
Wessex kings were buried. The kings were in the top of the list of the
privilege of ad sancto based on the hierarchy of social status that is
be buried in the holy ground of the churches or monasteries in Anglo
Saxo England. Even tough, it is difficult to measure who decided where
the dead kings would be buried [1].
One question necessary to mention, but not
fundamental, it is the idea of purgatory. Le Goff [2] claimed that
before the twelfth century there was not consistently belief in
purgatory, challenged theory for some authors, as for example in Anglo
Saxon England there is some authors that talk about purgatory or
something similar more than only heaven and hell in afterlife: Bede,
Boniface and Ælfric [3]. There are also the two Junius anonymous
homilies: Oxford Bodleian Library, Hatton 114 and Oxford Bodleian
library, Junius 85/86 also only mention two possible final destinies to
the souls in the afterlife [4]. In an all those examples there are
similarities and differences in the approach of heaven and hell but the
focus of this paper is to understand the attitudes towards the kings or
nobility tombs. Although, in most of Anglo-Saxon writings there is no
clear mention about the space of the purgatory, but only heaven, hell
and earth (that includes earthly paradise). Another subject that
connects vision of the afterlife is the rituals made for the sick people
that aimed help the soul of the person to go to the right sphere, to
heavens. Most of then found in the Anglo Saxon England from tenth and
eleventh century, especially in the southern England [5], where the
center of political power was being built by the House of Wessex in the
tenth century.
Before going to the burials of the noble people,
especially the kings, it is noteworthy the connection of the heathen
burials, or
prehistoric with the monstrous, initiated in the 8th century by the
Christians and possible to trace in the writings. This explains in the
late Anglo-Saxon locations for death penalty of criminals on those
monuments or historical ritual places [6]. In the eight century the
Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity began to use the Christian
religion to stablish an effective power over their territories. The
cemeteries from the age before the Anglo-Saxons cemeteries were chosen
not only as burials, but as settlement, and even the architectural
construction of the halls was modified by those changings: Prehistoric
monuments and monument complexes were used not only for burial but
sometimes as locations for settlement as well. (…) A changing style of
hall also suggests an increased investment in elaborate, large
buildings, and the introduction of restricted and bounded areas with
fenced enclosures that, although not confined to these sites, served to
demarcate and shape space perhaps even regulating access and movement
[7].
There were also an increasing of the number of
corporal punishments in the early tenth century, especially after
Athelstan laws and a clear limitation of possibility to appeals to the
king of appeal to king mercy [8]. This might show how the house of
Wessex aiming to control the society and create the Alfredian project of
a unified Anglo-Saxon England. About the afterlife according to Peter
Brown, Western Christianity left behind
between 7th centuries a more physical notion of afterlife in
favor of a new one more based on the soul punishments [9].
The monumentality reflected the new era for the elite: Planning
and structured layouts and larges enclosures with elaborate
gateways are features present at Cheddar, Goltho, Steyning, and
Little Paxton. The visual approach to such structures is suggested
to have been an important factor in their design: the entrances
and enclosures used as a means of framing the buildings. (…)
Ritualized itineraries and more formalized royal activities of the
tenth and eleventh centuries (see for example, the itineraries of
Edgar, Edward and Æthelred) [10]. The tenth century is a moment
of change of the Anglo-Saxon regions and the landscapes will
reflect that. The old prehistoric sites will be reused by this elite
while new buildings and burials will also be used as a tool to
control not only the real life, but the afterlife of the Anglo-Saxons.
As architecture plays a very important role in Junius 11 Art.
The Endowment and Reformation of New Minster of
Winchester is a culmination of a process of tension where the
West Saxon kings claimed to be the king of the Anglo-Saxons, and
their most important tool was the church and all the imagery
about kings brought up by the Christian Bible, especially the
Old Testament. The sovereignty of the Rex Anglo saxonicus was
assured and repeatedly proven by the support of the church and
materialized by the construction of the New Minster in The kings
who were more inclined to pursue with more tenacity the project
created by Alfred of a united Anglo-Saxon England tendentially
were Edward the Elder, Æthelstan and Edgar. Edward law code are
seen as an extension of Alfred’s, which they both appear before
With Edgar came a revived imperial vision and a return to early
years saw a reaction against The Refoundation of the New Minster
can provide access to the views about seminal and intrinsic nature
of power and buildings in Anglo Saxon England. The New Minster
was used as a tool to reassure their power as king: Winchester
was included in the Burghal Hidage (temp. Edward the Elder) as a
fortification rated at the highest assessment of 2400 hides. It has
been suggested that the royal court may have settled there towards
the end of Alfred’s reign. At least from this time, it probably took
some political administrative and economic functions away
from the exposed coastal lines trading-centre and royal villa of
Southampton. Although the latter remained of importance both to
the West Saxon economy and to shrivel government, Winchester
began to advance to national significance. In this context, the
foundation of the New Minster by King Edward the Elder and his
advisers (…) may been seen as a political action, underlining the
king’s power in the refortified borough as against the bishop or
some of the leading citizens may have been at times out of favor
with the king, due to dynastic politics, the city remained of crucial
importance to the southern part of the kingdom, first of the Anglo-
Saxons and later of England [11].
Even though happening later is not randomly how an episode
of a plot against monks and the consequences inserted in the
records of Refoundation of Winchester Minster in 996 is told
evocating the same ‘story’ told in poem Genesis from Junius 11. It
is remarkable how the highlighted aspects of poem and drawings
are retold here. Apparently, it seems not connected, but the plot
against those monks resemble the plot of Lucifer against God, and
the object of desire of both are materialized in the right of the
monks in have their monastery.
ix. CONCERNING THE ANATHEMA ON THOSE WHO PLOT
AGAINST THE MONKS.
If moreover it should happen on any
occasion, at the Devil’s instigation, that, glorying in the arrogance
of presumption. The cast-down canons should wish to plot to cast
down the flock of monks which I have respectfully established
with a shepherd in God’s property, let it be done with them, and
with everyone who might give them, and with everyone who
might give them aid, blinded by some kind of bribe, as happened
with proud angels and with the first man seduced by the Devil’s
trick, namely that, having been expelled from the bounds of
Paradise and from the sublime seats of the kingdom of Heaven,
they shall be thrust down into the fires of the Abyss with these
[other] disdainful ones who have spurned the Lord’s service, and
be tormented with perpetual misery. Nor pulled out from there to
boast that they have evaded the torments, but rather, they shall
be joined together in the Underworld with Judas, the betrayer of
Christ, and his confederates, shrieking with cold, scorched with
heat, deprived of joy, troubled by lamentation, fettered by fiery
shackles, smitten by dread of the attendants, perplexed by the
memory of crimes, removed from recollection of all goodness,
mourning, they shall be punished with eternal torment [12].
The identification of the traitors against the monks with the
rebel angels shows how the narrative of fall of Lucifer was deeply
connected with this historical moment of rebuild the Kingdom
(as England) and the reformation itself. And this episode might
show the resistance of the ones who have not accept the new
spiritual and political directions of the late Anglo Saxon England.
This episode among the others new elements might have been the
perfect cultural and social environment that motivated the artistic
choices behind the project of Junius 11. Also, there is a connection
between the Endowment of the New Minster in Winchester and
the burials of the nobility and the kings from the house of Wessex
as we can see in the Table 1 in the annexe. Apparently there was
an connection between times when the ruler has a compromise
with the Alfredian idea of a unified Kingdom of England and the
period of a fragmentation where Wessex and Mercian have had
some territorial conflicts and this idea of unified England was not
put as a priority by the King and his court, kingdom of Eadmund
I (939)-9946), Eadred (946-955) and Eadwig (955-959). Alfred
brought the body of his father Æthelwulf to Winchester from
Steyning in Sussex. And as said before the New Minster was part
of his plans for Winchester. As we can see all the noble during
Edward the Elder (899-924) and Æthelstan (925-939) were
buried in the New Minster.
Modes of royal burial varied with the political needs of each
generation. The Tenth century was characterized by intradynastic, West Saxon succession. From 899 through 1013, every ruler of
England was a patrilineal descendent of Alfred the Great, with
each king succeeded by his brother, son or nephew [13]. There is
a pattern, when the ruler was someone who prioritized the Union
of the Anglo-Saxons as England as a unified kingdom, the dead
noble people were buried in the new Minster, that is the ruler ship
of Edward the elder (899-924), and Æthelstan (925-939). In the
meantime, between 939-959, during the ruler ship of Eadmund I
(939)-9946), Eadred (946-955) and Eadwig (955-959) as kings of
Wessex, there was some troubles in Mercia to accept those kings as
their ruler, and they seem to be no to worried about that as project
as their predecessors. It is remarkable, given this context the most
prominent site as king`s grave was Old the Old Minster], that royal
burial shifted away from Old Minster in the tenth century. This
move was initiated by Edward the Elder (r.899-924), who opened
his reign by building a large new church, known as New Minster,
next door to Winchester`s mother church. The king intended his
foundation to supersede Old Minster as the kingdom premier
royal burial place, but the mausoleum faltered after Edward`s own
death; only one later Anglo-Saxon ruler, Eadwig (d. 959), would be
entombed there` [14].
But with Edgar, both ideas of a unified England as
one kingdom
and the New minster as important place as burial of noble and the
kings came back to centre of the stage. And more than this, there
is the idea of reformation of The New Minster as symbol of this
moment. The New Minster as tool for Edward the Elder to assure
his legitimacy as new king of Anglo-Saxons: Æthewold`s interest in his
father`s resting place might be attributed to convenience,
were it not for the fact that Edward began cultivating his own
father`s body at precisely the same time. Edward, however,
pursued a more ambitious message than his cousin. While
Æthelwold could revoke his father`s seniority as ruler of Wessex,
Edward portrayed Alfred as the founder of an all-encompassing
Anglo-Saxon kingdom, rendering Æthelred`s superior position
within the West Saxon royal family a moot point. The concept of a
cohesive Anglo-Saxon nation was rotted in Alfred`s own rhetoric
- among other innovations, he was the first West Saxon ruler to
be styled rex Anglorum Saxonum in his charters - but Edward`s
posthumous celebration of his father`s body and memory helped
cement this ideology [15].
The management of the AngloSaxon kingdom in the 10th
century was perfected for a better control of the territory for
such kings as Edward, Athelstan and Edgar: The Basic functions
of the West Saxon Hundred unit can all be found as features of
the landscape prior to the tenth century and it appears likely
that earlier social and political institutions were re-shuffled at
this time. I tis evident that the entire administrative machine
was tightened up and regularised from the reign of Alfred, but
increasingly so during the tenth century reigns such as Edward
the Elder (899-925), Æthelstan and Edgar [16]. The ordinances
of Edgar show that worrying about the administrative regional
powers, a worrying meaning to make uniform the procedures
through the Anglo Saxon-England. That show a new moment
of the management of the kingdom: In the Danelaw areas the
equivalent unit to the hundred was the wapentake. The word
“wapentake” is derived from the Old Norse vapnatak, which refers
to the brandishing of weapons in consent in an assembly [17]. In
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the entrance for the year 975, there
is the information how Edgar was consecrated in Bath seeking
remember the Glories of the Roman Empire, and the possibility of
being called King of the whole island.
975 Her geendode eorðan dreamas Eadgar, Engla cyning, ceas
him oðer leoht, wlitig 7 wynsum, 7 þis wace forlet, lif þis læne.
Nemnað leoda bearn, men on moldan, þæne monað gehwær
in ðisse eðeltyrf, þa þe ær wæran on rimcræfte rihte getogene,
Iulius monoð, þæt se geonga gewat on þone eahteðan dæg Eadgar
of life, beorna beahgyfa. feng his bearn syððan to cynerice, cild
unweaxen , eorla ealdor, þam wæs Eadweard nama .7 him tirfæst
hæleð tyn nihtum ær of Brytene gewat, bisceop se goda, þurh
gecyndne cræft, ðam wæs Cyneweard nama. Ða wæs on Myrceon,
mine gefræge, wide 7 welhwær waldendes lof afylled on foldan.
Fela wearð todræfedgleawra Godes ðeowa; þæt wæs gnornung
micel þam þe on breostum wæg byrnende lufan metodes on
mode. þa wæs mærða Fruma to swiðe forsewen, sigora waldend,
rodera Rædend, þa man his riht tobræc. 7 þa wearð eac adræfed
deormod hæleð, Oslac, of earde ofer yða gewealc, ofer ganotes
bæð, gamolfeax hæleð, wis 7 wordsnotor, ofer wætera geðring,
ofer hwæles eðel, hama bereafod. 7 þa wearð ætywed uppe on
roderum steorra on staðole, þone stiðferhþe, hæleð higegleawe,
hatað wide cometa be naman, cræftgleawe men, wise soðboran.
Wæs geond werðeode Waldendes wracu wide gefrege, hungor
ofer hrusan; þæt eft heofona Weard gebette, Brego engla, geaf eft
blisse gehwæm egbuendra þurh eorðan westm [18].
After that Edgar travelled according to The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle to Chester, another ancient Roman stronghold,
symbolically building his supremacy over the whole Great Britain.
The use of a ship to go there brings the idea that Albion, Britannia
is an Island. His travels by ship fact or post fiction reveal that
conscious factor. He was not the first king of nobleman to use the
ancient monuments as a frame for his royal activity and connect
himself with the past of the Roman Empire. But with Edgar the
theatrical reached the maximum peak until that moment: There
are implications here of far reaching vision in which the ancient ,
whether prehistoric or Roman, and perhaps the physical remnants
and memories of the Pre-Christian Past , were being drawn upon
in a variety of ways to create a network of theatres and arena s
in which power and authority were articulated and enacted.
(…) It is thus fitting to end with Edgar, a master of spectacle and
theatricality. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in 973 (ASC
(A) Edgar, ruler of the English, was consecrated `as king in a great
assembly` at Bath [19].
King Edgar had a great interest in the activities of Continental
Europe and look for ancient sites and use the, as symbolic ritual
[20]. Edgar was also a master of the theatrical politics. But as
said before, his kingdom is the result of a process initiated with
King Alfred, the idea of an only one nation of English people. The
ritualization and symbolic new usage of the Roman past. Cultural
topography of emerging Angle-land was to be found in texts
of Christian Anglo-Saxon culture, is allegorized form. The new
literary monumentalizing in intent, seeking as it did to control
the narrative of land, ancestry and identity through written text
in which engagement with the physical land became increasingly
symbolic and relative to a more transcendent spiritual cosmos
and polity [21].
As in Junius 11, the ancient monumentality of the roman
columns and the roman portraits were reused in the Christian
context to show to establish the power of God as king of the
Heavens, the same process has been made by the refoundation
of the New Minster in 964, with the assistance of Æthelwold,
the new bishop. His predecessor was buried the New Minster.
Given Edgar interest in renewing the new Minster, it is possible to
believe that he decides to bury his brother there, Eadwig, aiming
to reactivate the project of New minster as a King mausoleum.
In the new Minster refoundation charter, written in 966, the
preface is very similar to the beginning of Genesis poem of Junius
11, as start with the fall of the rebel angels: EADGAR REX HOC
PRUILEGIUM NOUO EDIDIT MONASTERIO AC OMNIPOTENTI
DOMINO EIUSQUE GENITRICI MARIE EIUS LAUDANS MAGNOLIA
CONCESSIT. ΧΡ OMINIPOTENS TOTIUS MACHINAE CONDITOR
inefabili pietat uiuersa mirfice moderator que condidit . Qui
coaeterno uidelicet uerbo quaedam ex nichilo edidit quaedam
ex informi subtilis artifex prpagauit materia. Angelica quippe creatura ut informis materia nullis rebus existentibus diuinatus
formata luculento respelnduit uultu. Male pro dolor libero utens
arbitrio contumacy arrogans fastu creatori uniuersitatis famulari
dedgnans semetipsum creatori equiperans aeternis baratri
incendiis cum suis complicibus demersus iugi mertio cruciatur
miseria. Hoc itaque thmate toius sceleris peccatum exorsum est
[22]. It starts very much alike with the genesis from Junius 11, and
even the fall of the Lucifer and his rebel angels. And also, the text
talk about how this sin leads to others worst sins, following the
same narrative of Junius 11 in image and text.
The prominence of Edgar and the fact he is the first King to be
picture in a throne is another evidence of his agenda of controlling
the spaces of power, supernatural or not altogether with the
Benedictine Reform. King Edgar was able to control spread his
control over the church itself [23]. Then during the 10th century
there was a long process of searching by the nobility to look
for the monumentality, to the past of old or prehistoric burials
aiming to open their claiming to the power. The House of Wessex
started in project with Alfred but only in real life with Edgar this
project reached his peak of successful through the theatrical
power played by Edgar using all the Christian recurrent elements
present on Junius 11. It is impossible claim that Junius 11 was
totally created during Edgar`s kingdom (959-975) or during the
Refoundation of the New Minster (964). But after all the evidences
here presented it is possible to highlight how the tombs were used
by the kings of Wessex to reassure their own power throughout
the whole England, and how the afterlife will be the centre theme
of art productions (e.g. British Library Junius 11).
From a graphic point of view, smiles are prior to
tears. While the smiles are documented in human graffiti from the
Paleolithic period (Middle Magdalenian), tears are documented much
later, in animals of post paleolithic periods. These data help us to
make a few reflections about our way of seeing art, which may be
influenced by our culture, too serious, for a few graphs that are not so
much.
The figure reproduced below is a cave engraving of
the Bourdois shelter, located in the Vienne, France. They will agree
with me that at first glance it does not seem to have anything of
particular. It is a small human face endowed, of course, with a broad
smile [1]. But, if we consider that the spelling in question is 15,000
years old, the thing changes, and the impression that the smile produces
increases. Indeed, we are facing one of the first smiles in the History
of Art. The smile of Bourdois is not, far from it, as famous as that of
the Mona Lisa, and yet its transcendence is much greater. Even if only
because a smile from 15,000 years ago contains many more puzzles than
one of just four centuries. And if not, look closely at the face, is it
possible to look at this smiling face for a long time without smiling?
This reaction, almost instinctive, says a lot about the human species,
about who we are and why we are here (Figure 1).
This enigmatic fascination, which all attentive
observers share, is caused by the intimacy of a gesture of different and
partly undefined nuances. And is that every smile always harbors a
suspicion: the shadow of dissimulation. You can see in it the trace of
deceit, submission or fear. But, although the shadow
of a doubt looms over its inner light, the smile is, above all, an
expression of pleasure and happiness. For a smile manages to stay true
to itself and its own mystery. That is to say, what really hides is,
neither more nor less, than the secret of happiness.
On the other hand, the fascinating attraction that a
smile exerts can be understood as a power of seduction that, Freud did
not hesitate to describe as erotic [2]. And although the genius of
psychoanalysis was too often carried away by interpretations of a sexual
nature, it is quite possible that this time it was not misguided.
Almost all the specialists in gestural mimicry agree in affirming that
the smile has an erotic function. Even scholars of human behavior have
highlighted the erotic relationship of
the smile in current primitive peoples [3]. This relationship may be
very old, perhaps prehistoric. In paleolithic art we have four examples
in which the smile is associated with anthropomorphic figures with
upright sex [4]. These spellings seem to reflect a relationship between
happiness and sexual satisfaction.
A few meters from the smiling face of Bourdois we
have, in the same frieze, four sculpted female silhouettes, in a
position that today we would not hesitate to describe as erotic. So much
so, that Guthrie has compared these paleolithic profiles with the
images of the Playboy. The comparison with current pornography deserves
to be criticized at least in two essential points. The first is that
porn is characterized by its seriousness, it is, in the words of
Braudillard, deadly serious [5]. Which means that there has been a
process of verification of the erotic in the pornographic, or, to put it
another way, the vital and joyful component of the erotic has been
eliminated, turning it into something mechanical and artificial, reduced
to an act highly stereotyped And secondly, the pornographic in Western
culture excludes the sacred, something that does not happen for example
in the East.
However, as can be seen in three of the graphs reproduced
below, the silhouettes of Angles-sur-l’Anglin, have an inescapable
erotic tone. The pose of naked bodies has a disconcerting effect.
It is almost impossible not to see in them the bodies of contemporary
models or sex symbols. What does not lead us to ask
the following question, what we see is conditioned by our pornographic
aesthetics or does it have some biological basis? Look
at the sinuous lines that frame the vulvas and delineate the hips
and part of the legs. These parts of the female body are erotic in
virtually all human cultures [6].
The reason why aesthetics uses
these forms has a biological basis, that is, a “practical” sense. It is
no coincidence that the beauty ideals of a tribe of Trobians and
Westerners are so similar [7]. Nor that, apparently, these ideals,
based on body proportions, have not changed over time. Well,
they respond to a purpose, which is to stimulate reproduction,
because according to certain studies, female hips and legs without
visual indicators of women’s fertility. Furthermore, not only
the silhouettes of Angles-sur-l’Anglin have that disconcertingly
modern character; but there are other similar examples in the
caves of Le Gabillou and La Magdeleine. The position of these
female bodies, reminiscent of Goya’s Nude Maja, is eminently
erotic. For example, the position of the arm behind the head in
the bas-reliefs of La Magdeleine, is an expression of enjoyment
that is also observed in sexual scenes from Roman times. In a
painting of the House of the Restaurant of Pompeii (1st century),
A woman bends her arm in this way while practicing sex with a
man. The scene, of obvious interpretation in the Roman case, is
not in the prehistoric. What is evoked in Paleolithic art is not the
act itself, but something more complex whose final meaning escapes
us. But what is interesting here is to point out that artists
or paleolithic artists are the creators of a visual eroticism that is
surely different from what we understand today. It was probably
a happy and perhaps sacred eroticism, but the result of the complex
world of seduction, the mystery of attraction, of creation
and of life (Figure 2).
Prehistoric eroticism, and its Paleolithic graphic expression,
have their roots in human evolution. Specifically, in the development
of our particular mode of sexual reproduction. About two
million years ago, our hominid relatives began a strategy of reproduction
that we could describe as optimistic, since it consisted,
mainly, of having sex a more or less constant pleasure. This
fact was crucial in the evolution of our species. Our reproductive
success (it is estimated that we are around 7,000 million people
in the world) is unparalleled in the history of placental mammals.
If we are a prolific species par excellence it is thanks to the intrinsic
quality of our sex to provide us with pleasure at any time
of the year. The other animal species either do not experience
as much pleasure or are subject to short periods of heat. Human
sexuality does not depend, like that of other mammals, on the olfactory
stimuli and the hormonal chemistry of pheromones; but
predominantly visual stimuli, based mainly on physical features
and body proportions [7]. This explains, to a certain extent, the
eroticism of artistic expressions. Today the pornographic market
has reduced the erotic to its minimal expression. The most visited
websites on the internet are, by far, pornographic. We are a
species that we bet on the pleasure of reproduction. And natural
selection has favored this optimistic strategy.
From a graphic point of view, smiles are prior to tears. The
tears that appear on the faces of the Tassili cows, studied by Le
Quellec [8], seem to have a symbolic meaning. We have to go
back to the Egyptian period (2000 BC) to identify the tears, not
in a human, but in a cow again, which apparently cries because
they are going to sacrifice their bull in a relief of a sarcophagus
of Deir el- Bahari Are human feelings attributed or is it that these
feelings are not exclusively human? Are historical cultures more
pessimistic than prehistoric ones? About four million years ago,
the Mesopotamian civilization left us a magnificent example of
the existential pessimism that has developed in our culture in a
way surreptitious as a principle of unquestionable reality. Since
then, pessimism has slowly imposed itself, making us believe
that the human species is sinful by nature. That’s what researchers
think of the human imagination as Beltrán [9]. And it is that
the real, in our world, is the serious thing, that is, the drama of
life. In other words, more Freudian, our principle of reality is occupied
by the drama of the serious. This is an automatism that
operates mechanically in our culture without hardly questioning.
However, is optimism defining us as a species? The instinct
of reproduction is the means by which the organic announces
the joy of existence. Therefore, what we call optimism is the
force that animates existence and drives reproduction. We can
appreciate the laughter in the animals, the song of the birds, the
tail of the dog, the purring of the cats. Is the joy of existence the
engine of evolution? From this point of view, the upright position
of the sapiens animals, allows the face to be seen, which is fundamental
in the non-verbal communication of the smile. And besides,
the bipedal position exposes the sexual organs, “shames”
that all human cultures cover in some way. Shame is one of the
fundamental axes of laughter. This feeling has played an important
role in the development of human humor, in, for example, the
phallic exhibitions.
Classical scholars have tended to locate the nucleus of Greek identity in one or more of the three principal themes of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century identity discourse: culture, nationality, or race [1,2]. Of all the elements to influence recent scholarship on Greek identity, however, that which surrounds ethnicity has been the most pervasive [3,4]. And yet it would be an error to see this as a scholarly innovation; for ever since the birth of Greek historiography in the fifth century B.C.E., ethnicity has been a central issue in the debate over Greek identity. That Herodotus’ four key criteria of Greekness-blood, language, religion, and customs-closely parallel those identified by modern scholars-descent, ‘commensality or the right to share food’, and cult-is evidence of the circularity and irresolution of the ongoing discourse [5-7]. Indeed, since the Second World War, scholarship has emphasized ethnicity, favoring at first the anthropological ‘instrumentalist’ approach which argued that ethnic identity was a guise for political or economic aims. However, a series of ethnic resurgences in the 1970s and 1980s undermined instrumentalism, resulting in the development of more nuanced interpretations which present ethnic identity as unstable and unfixed; as negotiable and situation-specific-conditionality confirmed in this study [8,9].
‘Greekness’ is chimera: a fluid concept dependent on, and derived from, mutable context and circumstance [8-10]. It was no more crystallized collectively in sixth century B.C.E. Attica, Thessaly and Euboea than it was in the closing moments of the Battle of Actium when Ptolemaic Egypt, the last of the Hellenistic kingdoms, fell to the Romans in 31 B.C.E. [11]. Yet a civilization of Greeks (a term derived from the Latin ‘Graeci’ and transmitted via the Romans; for their part the Greeks, as the putative descendants of the mythological figure Hellen, refer to themselves as ‘Hellenes’, the people of ‘Hellas’) undoubtedly existed in antiquity [12]. One need only borrow Gustave Flaubert’s conceptual framework in Dictionnaire des idees recues and graft onto its portentous clichés and quotations culled from a conspicuously small body of extant ancient texts to demonstrate the veracity of this statement. The result, rendered here in machine-gun-like staccato in the interests of both brevity and satirical effect, is a compendium of traits which seem to confirm the existence of an identifiably Greek civilization: democracy (Athens, polis, kingship foreign and alien to Greeks) [13]. Literature (Homeric epics, Iliad, Odyssey). Drama (Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus). Art (naturalistic, idealized human form). Philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras). Further, it was a Greek-speaking people who, in response to social pressures at home, colonized the region of the Eastern Mediterranean between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C.E. [14]. The epiphenomenal by-product of this diasporic process was the diffusion of cultural artefacts that are widely recognized as quintessentially Greek, a profundity acknowledged by the later Hellene Dio Chrysostom when he wrote that ‘Greece lies scattered in many regions’ [14].
While none of this is false or blatantly misleading, it nevertheless neglects the complex interplay of internal forces (e.g. ethnicity, language, culture) and externalizing dynamics (e.g. ‘othering’) which, at various times and to varying degrees, informed Greek identity-that is, the traits which compass Greekness (to Hellenikon, ‘that which is Greek’) [15]. The distinction is critical, for the tension raised by this ambiguity suggests the problematic which lay at the heart of this study: what is Greekness and can it be quantified? So considered, this paper sets out to assess Greekness within the context of the Hellenistic (‘Greek-like’) age, the temporal bookends of which are marked by the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E. and the death of Cleopatra VII, the last Macedonian ruler of Egypt, in 30 B.C.E. [16]. The approach adopted is comparative, framed by a parallel examination of Greekness as expressed through the image (coins), text (epigraphy and official correspondence), and social practice (urban planning, government, and religion) of the Hellenistic rulers of Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Asia. The findings of the study support the conclusion that when examining Greekness, to paraphrase the philosopher Heraclitus, the only constant is change [17].
To situate it within the continuum of ancient Greek identity, and thus establish its position along a sensible trajectory, an analysis of Hellenistic age Greekness compels a brief ethnographic survey, beginning with the earliest generally perceived articulations of communal Greek identity. In the aggregate, the evidence reveals the instability, equivocality and multivalence of the cardinal elements which the Greeks used to distinguish and define their civilization-in relation to both themselves as well as to non-Greeks-over time. We begin with the Persian Wars of the fifth century B.C.E., for the events surrounding them are widely considered the catalyst for a shared sense of Greek identity [11]. We turn to a famous passage from Herodotus’ Histories (written before 425 B.C.E.), in which the author gives an account of the conflict between the Greeks and the Persians [18].
‘It was most human that the Lacedaemonians should fear our making an agreement with the barbarian.... (But) there are many great reasons why we should not do this…; first and foremost, the burning and destruction of the adornments of temples of our gods, whom we are constrained to avenge to the utmost rather than make pacts with the perpetrator…and next the kinship of all Greeks in blood and speech, and the shrines of gods and the sacrifices that we have in common, and the likeness of our way of life…’ (Herodotus, Histories 8.144.1-2; trans. A. D. Godley). This speech is attributed to the Athenians, who at the time were being enticed by the Persians (the ‘barbarian’ mentioned above) shortly after witnessing the virtual destruction of their city. Though courted by the emissaries of the shahanshah, who sought an alliance, the Athenians demurred, a restraint explicated to the Lacedaemonians (i.e. the Spartans) through the invocation of ‘the Greek thing’ (to Hellenikon) [19].
Scholars cite this passage as an unambiguous statement of the precise components that constituted Greek identity-that is, common blood, common tongue, common cult foundations and sacrifices, and similar customs [20]. To a certain extent, such a perspective is justifiable: first, it is undoubtedly true that these ethnic and cultural traits were shared by certain-though arguably not all-Greeks and thus formed the basis upon which some Greeks united against the Persians. Second, as Hall notes, in the ‘extant literary corpus there are few statements that define Hellenic identity quite so explicitly’ [20]. For many, the implications are tantalizing enough to support bequeathing the passage canonical status in the debate surrounding Greek identity- thus putting paid the question [20].
Such interpretations are, however, fraught with difficulty. Firstly, although the Persian Wars motivated unprecedented levels of intercultural contact, a dynamic enhanced by Athenian efforts to prop up a faltering Greek alliance in a rhetorical effort akin to propagandistic carpet-bombing, Herodotus’ view cannot be said to be wholly representative of the majority of the ‘Greek’ world [8]. The best that can be said for it is that it was strategically ‘Athenocentric’ view of Greekness, since groups like the Spartans, who considered everyone outside Sparta a ‘foreigner’, certainly possessed no inviolable sense of communal Greek identity [8]. Moreover, Herodotean audiences would undoubtedly have been aware of Athenian efforts to restrict citizenship to those who could prove both patrilineal and matrilineal lines of descent, thereby circumscribing the franchise by birth and, by extension, ethnicity [21]. At the same time, the Athenians-who viewed themselves as the ‘most Greek of the Greeks’-also promoted myths of autochthony (the idea that, quite literally, the ancestors of the Athenians were born from the land of Attica, rather than through sexual reproduction) over the kinship ties that had hitherto linked Athens to Ionia-efforts meant to distance the Athenians ethnically from the ‘lesser’ Greeks, the Dorians [20,22] Thus, the grandiose Athenian claim that ‘kinship’, a ‘common language’ and shared cultural practices formed the basis of an unbreakable solidarity between Greeks was, at best, insincere rhetoric [8].
It would, however, be a mistake to view the developments of the ‘inventive’ fifth century as having a genesis in the Persian Wars [8]. Rather, they represent a culmination of Greek sociocultural evolution that stretched at least as far back as the mid-eighth century, when the Greeks embarked on the great colonization of the Eastern Mediterranean [23]. Whatever the impetus behind it, colonization brought the Greek diaspora-already possessed of a sense of communal identity defined by internal criteria such as ethnicity, language, aesthetics (e.g. pottery design) and poetry (e.g. Homeric epics), and religion-into contact with non-Greeks on unparalleled levels [11]. The result of this process was the crystallization of the Greeks’ sense of communal identity in relation to others; from this point forward, Greekness became defined not just by what the Greeks were, but by what they were not: barbarians [8,11,24].
Yet the tidy ‘Greek-barbarian’ binary this suggests, as revealed in a programmatic statement in the proem of Book I of Histories, is rather more complex than it seems [20,25]. For although there was a tendency amongst some to stereotype non-Greeks with supposedly ‘un-Greek’ attributes-as, for example, when the Greek tyrant Aristagoras of Miletus represented the Persians as weak, effeminate and decadent to the Spartan king Leonidas-just as often there are Greeks who expressed a more balanced view-as when the dramatist Aeschylus refused to stigmatize the Persians in his play Persae, which he produced a mere seven years following the end of the Persian Wars [25,26]. The dialectic surrounding the Greek-barbarian dichotomy reached an apex with the Macedonian conquest of Greece, an event which transformed the geopolitical context of the Eastern Mediterranean world.
By the early fifth century, when Herodotus wrote of the Athenians’ invocation of ‘to Hellenikon’, the schema of which indicates the primacy of culture as a defining trait of ‘Greekness’ alongside the archaizing ethnic classification, the Macedonians-viewed by more than a few Hellenes as barbarian- had already claimed Greek ancestry. The locus classicus of the Macedonian case can be found in the following passage from Histories, in which Herodotus describes the attempt of Alexander I of Macedon to compete in the Olympic Games [27,28].
‘That these descendants of Perdiccas are Greeks (as they themselves say) … and I shall demonstrate that they are indeed Greeks later in my account, but in any case, it is a fact known by those who manage the contest of the Hellenes. For when Alexander chose to compete and came down to enter the contest some of his Greek fellow-competitors were about to bar him, alleging that the contest was not for barbarian athletes but for Greeks. But when Alexander demonstrated that he was an Argive, he was judged to be a Hellene and competed in the footrace where he jointly took the first position’.
The nub of the Macedonian argument rested on Alexander’s membership in the Argead genos, specifically as a descendant of Temenus of the Peloponnesian Heraclidae-descendants of Herakles, the mythological Panhellenic Greek figure [11,29]. The genealogical (and fictive) path that legitimated Alexander’s claims - and, subsequently, his descendants - is a torturous one (complicated by the coupling of Herakles’ sexual tenacity with the wanderlust obliged by his Labors) and has been covered extensively elsewhere [28-30]. Suffice it to say and given what we know of the malleability of communal Greek identity, the assertion was legitimate enough. In time the Macedonian claim became generalized so that every Macedonian, not just the Argead dynasty, could be seen as Greeks of a kind. Yet not every Greek was convinced, a bifurcation of opinion that proved decisive in the wake of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.E.) [31].
The conflict between the poleis (city-states) of the Peloponnesian League, led by Sparta, and those of the Athenian Empire was disastrous. As the war ground on indecisively, not only did it coarsen life within the walls of the poleis, the inhabitants of which were subjected to deprivation, disease, and death on an unprecedented scale, but it also had the effect of coarsening public debate and discourse [31]. The war was ended ignominiously when the Spartans, determined to break the decades-long deadlock, allied with the Persians, the Greeks’ ancient enemy, to defeat the Athenians [31,32]. The Greek world that emerged following the war was riven; its civic discourse polluted by suspicion and mistrust [33].
As tensions festered, the intelligentsia groped for solutions to prevent a recrudescence of all-out war. To this end, the philosopher Isocrates proposed a controversial solution: the Greek world, he argued, should unite in a Panhellenic crusade against the Persians [34]. As uncontentious as this may sound, it was anything but; for Isocrates suggested that the campaign be led by a figure whose Hellenic pedigree was still very much in doubt: Philip II of Macedon, a successor of Alexander I and, as such, a member of the Argead dynasty [29]. Not that any of this mattered to the rhetorician Demosthenes, who vehemently rejected the bona fides of Philip’s Greekness. Indeed, Demosthenes opposed Isocrates’ plan on the basis that the Macedonian king was no more Greek than any other member of the great unwashed horde of non-Greek barbarians [35]. In his Third Philippic Oration, Demosthenes damned not only Philip and the Macedonian throng, but castigated the Greeks who supported him:
‘But if some superstitious bastard had wasted and squandered what he had no right to, heavens! how much more monstrous and exasperating all would have called it! Yet they have no such qualms about Philip and his present conduct, though he is not only no Greek, nor related to the Greeks, but not even a barbarian from any place that can be named with honor, but a pestilent knave from Macedonia, whence it was never yet possible to buy a decent slave’ (Demosthenes, Third Philip Oration 9.31; trans. J. H. Vince). Philip’s destruction of the combined Athenian and Theban forces at Chaeronea in 338 B.C.E. effectively mooted the debate over Macedonian Greekness [11]. When the Macedonians subsequently levelled Thebes, they left standing only the house of the venerated Greek poet Pindar. It was a deliciously potent symbol of their cultural Greekness [36].
In a way, the Macedonian conquest of the Greek world vindicated Isocrates who, decades earlier (ca. 380 B.C.E.), wrote his Panegyricus (a ‘discourse bringing all together’) [33]. Presented as an address to the Greeks gathered at a national festival, the Panegyricus stressed Greek unity by asserting that, ‘…the name Hellenes suggests no longer a race but an intelligence, and that the title Hellenes is applied rather to those who share our culture than to those who share a common blood’ [38]. While this may seem like nothing more than the next step in the continued evolution of communal Greek identity, nothing could be further from the truth. For Isocrates deliberately abandoned not only a criterion of Herodotean Greekness, but also the last vestige of Greekness as defined in the earlier Archaic Period (ca. 750-480 B.C.E.): that is, ethnicity (blood) [29,37,38]. Although it cannot be said that Isocrates intended a lowering of the barriers between Greeks and non-Greeks, or that every Greek agreed with his definition of Greekness, his was nevertheless a potent vision of the new Greek world, and it had particular resonance in the ‘cosmopolitan’ Hellenistic cultures of Seleucid Asia and Ptolemaic Egypt, where far more ambiguous criteria like education and culture came to dominate the discourse of Greekness [37].
Philip’s overwhelming defeat of the Greek forces at Chaeronea decisively settled Macedonian affairs with the Hellenes. The way was now clear for the monarch’s long-gestating crusade against the Persians. Yet Philip did not live long enough to realize his dream; for in 336 B.C.E., he was murdered [39]. The task of prosecuting Philip’s campaign of ‘liberation’ and ‘punishment’ fell to his son and successor, Alexander the Great who, over the course of a decade-long campaign, not only defeated the Persian Empire, he also forged through conquest a Macedonian kingdom that stretched from the Aegean Sea in the west to the Hindu Kush in the east [40]. This cosmopolitan (albeit loosely-knit) kingdom was one of the largest single political entities the world had yet seen. With the benefit of hindsight, its swift dissolution following the death of the man who forged it seems a foregone conclusion.
The ‘funeral games’ that followed Alexander’s death in 323 B.C.E. consumed his nascent empire, and for the next fifty years its history was one of violent struggle and shifting alliances between the diadochoi (i.e. Alexander’s generals) [40]. When the last of these men died in battle in 281 B.C.E., a single unified ‘Alexandrine Empire’ was nowhere in sight. In its place stood the estranged empires of Seleucid Asia and Ptolemaic Egypt, as well as a varying number of smaller kingdoms [41]. For the next three centuries, these far-flung, polyethnic and polyglot (although the Greek lingua franca was koine, a dialect of Attic Greek) realms populated by a minority of Greeks served as the locus of Hellenistic culture. The remainder of this study surveys the semantics surrounding Greekness during this period, as expressed through the image (coins), text (epigraphy and official correspondence), and social practice (urban planning, government, and religion) of the Hellenistic rulers of Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Asia [29].
‘For now, that there was no one to take over the empire, those who ruled peoples or cities could each entertain hopes of kingship and controlled hence-forward the territory under their power as if it were a spear-won kingdom’ [41]. As with Alexander before them, the authority of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kings rested theoretically on the right of the victor - that is, the right to exercise sovereignty over lands won through conquest [40]. Yet rulership in these ‘spear-won’ kingdoms was rather less straight forward than the imposition of monarchical will through brute force [42]. For one thing, the Seleucids, whose vast, heterogeneous realm stretched from Asia Minor to Bactria, constituting the bulk of the now-defunct Achaemenid Empire, had to reckon with numerous existing power centers: not only non-Greek temple-states like Babylonia, but also numerous Greek poleis, the foundations of which were in some cases centuries old [43]. These poleis were accustomed to a certain degree of internal autonomy, a license which fostered both democracy and political harmony within the confines of the city-state. Naturally, these islets of Greekness in an ocean of indigenous cultures guarded such traditions jealously.
Epigraphic evidence suggests that the Seleucids, acutely aware of their status as minority rulers, acknowledged and likewise protected these ideals of civic Greekness, as shown demonstrably in the following passage from a letter from the Seleucid king (attributed variously to Antiochus I or II) to the city of Erythrai (ca. 261 (?) B.C.E.) [40,44]: ‘And since (your envoys) have shown that under Alexander and Antigonus your city was autonomous and free from tribute, while our ancestors were always zealous on its behalf; since we see that their judgment was just, and since we ourselves wish not to lag behind in conferring benefits, we shall help you to maintain your autonomy and we grant you exemption not only from other tribute but even from (the) contributions (to) the Gallic fund. You shall have also (... and) any other benefit which we may think of or (you ask for)’ (OGIS 223).
The passage also reveals the Seleucids’ sense of realpolitik, a savviness confirmed by their calculated adoption of euergetism (i.e. benefaction) [45]. Euergetism was not a Hellenistic innovation; rather, it developed out of a Classical tradition known as liturgies [46]. Briefly, in the Classical age taxation was anathema; thus, most city-states had very little public revenues from which to draw for things like town improvements or festivals. The funding gap was filled by liturgies, a system of reciprocity wherein a wealthy patron undertook to fund tasks for the benefit of the community in exchange for the prestige accrued by virtue of his munificence [47]. In the Hellenistic age, euergetism replaced liturgies, and kings became the ultimate patrons of their Hellenic populations, embedding themselves more deeply in Greek tradition by funding not only the foundation of new poleis, but also such projects as the addition of new stoa and gymnasia to pre-existing foundations. Even the forgiveness of taxes fell under the rubric of euergetism, an excellent example of which can be found in the epigraph below (ca. 242 B.C.E.) [48]. Excavated at Delphi, the inscription asks, on behalf of Seleucus II, ‘the kings and the dynasts of the cities and leagues’ (of Smyrna and Magnesia-by-Sipylos) to confirm, ‘…the city of the Smyrnaeans be sacred and inviolable (and whereas) he himself, having obeyed the oracle of the god and having done what he requests of the city, has granted to the Smyrnaeans that their city and land should be free and not subject to tribute, and guarantees to them their existing land and promises to return their fatherland…’ (OGIS 228).
In return for such largess Greek cities declared the king their saviour (soter), as attested, for example, by Ptolemy I and Antiochus I; or their benefactor (euergetes), as attested by Ptolemy III; or even a living god (epiphanes), attested by Antiochus IV; with the result being the proliferation of Greek-style ruler cults-an institution which had a long tradition in the Hellenic world [49]. Since time immemorial the historical founders of Greek cities received an official cult of the dead. In the early Hellenistic period, the establishment of ruler cults remained a posthumous affair, but by the third century B.C.E. they were increasingly formulated as a way of giving thanks to founders, benefactors, donors, and saviors who were still very much alive [50]. As institutions cults propagated the divine and charismatic nature of kingship and the kings-a process which had the effect of legitimating the Hellenistic rulers in the eyes of the Greeks-and flourished in the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms on both the state and municipal levels. On the municipal level, a ruler cult dedicated to the Seleucid king Antiochus III and his ‘sister’ queen Laodike was deliberately woven into the fabric of Teos (ca. 204/3 BCE) and Iasos (ca. 197 B.C.E.), honoring Antiochus’ successful liberation of the poleis from Attalid rule [51]. At Teos, the king and queen received a cult statue, along with the following dedication: ‘In order therefore that we also on every occasion shall appear as returning appropriate thanks to both king and the queen and surpassing ourselves in the honors (given) to them for their benefaction and that the People appear to all as strongly inclined toward the expression of gratitude, with good fortune, it shall set up beside the statue of Dionysus marble statues of the finest (quality) and most religiously appropriate (character) of both King Antiochus and his sister Queen Laodice, in order that, having granted that the city and its land be sacred and inviolable and freed us from tribute…they may be common saviors of our city and jointly confer benefits on us’ [52,53].
In addition, and in keeping with ancient Greek custom, the Antiocheia and Laodikeia civic festivals were established at Teos to celebrate the creation of the new deities. Much the same process unfolded in Egypt with the development of the state ruler cult of the Ptolemies. Begun with the efforts of Ptolemy II to posthumously deify his father Ptolemy I Soter, the process not only agglomerated all the trappings of a Greek ruler cult-including a temple foundation and an annual festival with games, the Ptolemaia (which came to rival the Olympic Games in renown)-but also set out to ossify the putative genealogical link between the Ptolemies and Alexander the Great. The process culminated under Ptolemy Philopator (r. 221-204 B.C.E), who caused to be constructed a new, collective sema (i.e. grand tomb or mausoleum) in Alexandria where the mummified remains of the Ptolemaic kings were displayed alongside those of Alexander [19]. The end result was the creation of a true dynastic cult in the Ptolemaic kingdom [19].
Whether establishing Greek-style ruler cults, protecting Greek civic ideals or engaging in ancient forms of Hellenic munificence, the Ptolemaic and Seleucid monarchs virtually swaddled themselves in Classical traditions, of necessity formulating policies and displaying behavior’s that bequeathed to them an ineffable sense of Greekness-and, by extension, affirmed their legitimacy. It would be an error, however, to assume that such efforts mark the limit of these programmes; for nothing quite so readily conveyed to their subjects the Greekness of these rulers as the images they propagated on coins. Coupled with the monumentalism of Greek architecture characteristic of the Hellenistic age, these articulations of power asserted the Hellenic pedigree of the Macedonian dynasts.
In the Hellenistic kingdoms the typology of coinage was heavily symbolic. On the one hand, it constituted an essential pivot in the ongoing dialectic between the ruler and the ruled; it was an omnipresent means by which the relationship between the dominant and the dominated was reified, a self-perpetuating dynamic affirmed and strengthened through constant use [54,55]. While on the other hand, the program of representational art signifies active self-definition-that is, the symbols the ruler thought appropriate to display in public (Millar 1993). For example, new tetradrachms struck at Alexandria beginning in 290 B.C.E. were issued bearing the portrait of Ptolemy I on the obverse. The portrait is highly individualized, depicting Ptolemy Soter with scruffy ‘Alexander-like’ hair, a royal diadem, and a goat-skin aegis. On the reverse of the series was an image of the eagle of Zeus [55]. Combined, this motif encoded a message which served to reinforce Ptolemaic Greekness; for according to legend, Ptolemy was the child of Arsinoe, a descendant of Herakles and lover of Alexander the Great’s father, Zeus. This meant that Ptolemy was not only the brother of Alexander the Great, but also the son of the chief Olympic deity in the Greek pantheon, a narrative which explains coin’s iconography: Ptolemy’s carefully disarrayed locks recalled Alexander; the crown evoked Greek kingship; the goat-skin aegis was Zeus’s goat-skin aegis; and the image of the eagle clutching a thunderbolt on the reverse married two symbols which represented the Olympian. Thus, the immense narrative elicited by these small silver coins, which were used throughout Egypt for 250 years, confirmed the Greekness of the Ptolemaic line by positioning it along a continuum (arguably the continuum) of Hellenic dynastic lineage-one which began with Zeus.
As with the Ptolemies, the coinage of the Seleucids was purely Greek in style, iconography and legend [44]. Unlike the Ptolemies, however, the Seleucids did not possess an absolute monopoly over the types of coins-and hence their concomitant iconography- issued within their realm [54]. Beginning with the reign of Seleucus I (r. 305-281 B.C.E.), a diversity of images (including a head of Dionysus, Athena Nike, and even elephants) populated Seleucid coinage [56]. The range of state-minted coin types (as opposed to those minted locally by Greek city-states) was circumscribed in the third century under Antiochus I, who formulated a new pattern of motifs that remained characteristic of the Seleucid kingdom’s state-minted coins at least until Antiochus IV (d. 164 B.C.E. [56]. These tetradrachms tended to depict the monarch under whose reign they were issued (although it must be noted that, as with the Ptolemies, this was not invariably the case; for special issues were minted occasionally). Thus, the portraits found on Seleucid coins are ultra-specific: on the obverse we are presented with the un-bearded image of the reigning Seleucid monarch who, echoing the symbolic typology of Ptolemaic tetradrachms, wears the quintessentially Alexandrine hairstyle tucked casually beneath the band of a royal diadem [56]. On the reverse is found the naked, bow-and-arrow wielding image of Apollo-on-the-Omphalos [56]. As with the Ptolemies, this combined iconography was meant to reinforce Seleucid Greekness by recalling the legend surrounding Seleucus’ birth: ‘…He (Seleucus), too, was illustrious for his bravery and for his miraculous origins. His mother, Laodice, who was married to Antiochus, one of Philip’s famous generals, had a dream in which she saw Apollo unite himself with her and, having conceived, she received from the god, as a gift for her favors, a ring with a stone on which was engraved an anchor together with the demand that she give it to the son she would bear. This vision was even more amazing as a ring with the same engraving was found the following day in Laodice’s bed, and Seleucus, when he was born, had an anchor marked on his thigh’.
Once again, we are confronted by an immense and complex narrative conveyed simplistically via image and inscription on coinage. Very clearly in both the Ptolemaic and Seleucid contexts, these Hellenistic rulers saw themselves as Greek and wanted their subjects/citizens to as well. If this was insufficient reminder, the Greek settlers in these Hellenistic kingdoms need look no further than the city-states they populated. Indeed, in the various Hellenistic societies, the polis was the natural environment for Greeks wherever they lived, just as it had been during the Classical period [40]. Unlike the Seleucids, whose penchant for Greek city-founding is well documented [57,40], the Ptolemies founded virtually no poleis, the exception being Ptolemais in Upper Egypt (Ptolemaic Egypt possessed a total of three poleis, including Alexandria and Naukritas) [58]. This is explained by Egypt’s millennia-long history of pharaonic rulership, which embedded within the polity as well as its people a predilection toward monarchical rule. Meanwhile the Seleucids found themselves encumbered with a massive realm in which Greek city-states, possessed of long histories of (semi)autonomy, were already present. Moreover, it suited Seleucid political and strategic needs to find their own poleis in order to entice Hellenic settlement. To this end, an urban fabric arose based on the so-called Hippodamian plan of classical Greece, a standard and familiar formula which bequeathed to these new foundations such quintessentially Greek elements as agora, theatres and gymnasia, the pedagogical institution that reinforced Greek identifications [59]. In so doing, Greekness became writ large across the Seleucid landscape.
The foregoing survey of Greekness in the Hellenistic world is by no stretch of the imagination comprehensive; rather, it is meant to be representative-sufficient to confirm through examples found in text, image, and social practice that Greekness was at no point universally fixed across the Greek world (a concept as ill-defined, undefinable, and inconstant as Greekness itself) [60,61]. Clearly, to anticipate congruence rejects the historical reality: in the fifth century, Herodotus’ criteria were different from those of the Archaic Greeks, who centuries earlier largely defined Greekness by blood (ethnicity); meanwhile, the Spartans considered all non- Spartans foreigners, a position which excluded the rest of the Greek world; Isocrates, for his part, argued in the fourth century for a set of criteria that not only undermined key principles of the Herodotean view, but also diverged from that of Demosthenes (and, it must be said, most fifth-century Athenians). Thus, to expect convergence across the Hellenistic kingdoms, following the end of Hellenic political hegemony, denies the agency of context and conditionality that informed the earlier debate. That the Athenian perspective should bear the weight and profundity of a canonical view is only by virtue of sheer probability. More, much more evidentiary material (inscriptions, histories, tragedies, poems, treatises, and dialogues) was produced in Athens and by Athenians than by any other Greek polis. Statistically, then, those perspectives were much more likely to survive-a reality that has since colored the debate.
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