Deborah Steiner

Stoning and Sight: A Structural Equivalence in Greek Mythology

This article examines a series of Greek myths which establish a structural equivalence between two motifs, stoning and blinding; the two penalties either substitute for one another in alternative versions of a single story, or appear in sequence as repayments in kind. After reviewing other theories concerning the motives behind blinding and lapidation, I argue that both punishments-together with petrifaction and live imprisonment, which frequently figure alongside the other motifs-are directed against individuals whose crimes generate pollution. This miasma affects not only the perpetrator of the deed, but risks spreading to the community at large, and prompts measures aimed at containing the source of the disease. Both blinding and lapidation are designed to cordon off the contaminant by removing him from all visual and tactile contact with other men. But it is not only the nature of the crimes that explains the kinship between the two penalties. I further argue that the attributes Greek thinking assigned to stones, repeatedly characterized as unseeing, mute, immobile, and dry, and symbolic of the condition of the dead, elucidate the connections and clarify the antagonism that myth suggests between lapidation and sight. Stoning, blinding, imprisonment, and petrifaction all consign the criminal to an existence exactly parallel to that of the stone, stripping him of the properties that distinguish the living from the dead, and making him both unseeing and unseen. Three examples drawn from archaic and classical literature provide examples of these interactions between stones, blindness, invisibility, and death: the snake portent sent by Zeus in Book 2 of the Iliad, the Perseus myth, and Hermes9 activity in both the Homeric Hymn to Hermes and Aeschylus9 Choephoroe.

Slander's bite: "Nemean" 7.102-5 and the language of invective

Discussion of the closing lines of Pindar?s seventh Nemean has concentrated almost exclusively on the lines? relevance to the larger question that hangs over the poem: does the ode serve as an apologia for the poet?s uncomplimentary treatment of Neoptolemus in an earlier Paean, and is Pindar here most plainly gainsaying the vilification in which he supposedly previously engaged. The reading that I offer suggests that a very different concern frames the conclusion to the work. Rather than seeking to exculpate himself, the poet announces instead that in the song that the audience has just heard, the composer has adhered to two prime virtues that the encomiastic genre should embrace: variatio and an ability to counter the language of blame. By reorienting the debate in this way, I aim to elucidate the striking metaphors and other rhetorical devices that fill the final lines, and most particularly to make sense of the canine imagery that seems so recurrent a motif. As my reading seeks to show, the dog is chosen as master trope both for his relation to the practice of invective and for his relevance to that stale act of repetition that the poet here rejects. By giving his audience a sample of the mode of speech that the calumnist practises, and that the praise poet may appropriate when combating the opposite genre, Pindar makes the merits of his own poetry shine the brighter, and invites the cognoscenti to appreciate his sophia. More broadly, the encomiastic singer?s brief deployment of the weapons of the abuse poet allows us to understand something of the overlapping and symbiotic relations between the different genres in archaic Greek poetry.

For Love of a Statue: A Reading of Plato's Symposium 215A-B

In her conversation with Socrates, Diotima explains that ‘all men are pregnant both in body and soul, and when they come of age, our nature desires to give birth; it cannot give birth in anything ugly, only in what is beautiful’ (206c). The man who has been pregnant with wisdom, moderation and justice in his soul since early youth, now wishing ‘to beget and give birth’ (209b), goes in search of a beautiful boy in whose company he may produce his offspring. Through passionate communion with the youth, ‘he conceives and gives birth to what he has been carrying inside him for ages’ (209c), engendering the instructive speeches on virtue and other matters which he delivers to the beloved. Diotimas equation between physical and mental parturition seems so appropriate and intuitively right that we tend to gloss over the real puzzle of her account: in this mode of procreation, which holds good for literal as well as spiritual birth, pregnancy precedes the actual moment of intercourse. The reading of the Symposium I wish to offer may not explain the biology of this unlikely reproductive act, but aims to set the riddle within the context of a leitmotif that weaves through the larger text: statues, and the particular mode of love they experience and inspire, are uniquely able to perform acts of autonomous generation.