Keith Dickson

Enki and ninhursag : The trickster in paradise

Since its first published editions and translations early in the last century, the Sumerian narrative now generally known as Enki and Ninhursag has been at the centre of claims and controversies over the nature of myth and the relation among the myths of different cultures in the ancient Near east. The present study proposes to review earlier interpretations on the narrative and to suggest - tentatively, given the fragmentary nature of the texts that preserve it - less a unified interpretation than a number of different but perhaps still unified approaches to an understanding of its context and content as myth.

Oneself as Others: Aurelius and Autobiography

Scholarship finds the autobiographical Book 1 of Aurelius’s Meditations peculiar in that it (1) lacks direct enunciation of the self, and (2) focuses instead on the description of others, who (3) are themselves stripped of biographical content. Philippe Lejeune’s claim that autobiography aims to construct the account of a life whose diachronicity is completely effaced by its meaning helps make sense of these anomalies. The same aim also motivates the Late Stoic injunction to examine one’s “representations” or phantasiai, which exhibit a specular relation to the subject that has them.

Voice and Sign in Pindar

We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World In a study published some years ago, J.-P. Vernant drew attention to the fundamental distinction Greek thought makes between spoken and all other modes of divination. It is a difference that reflects certain givens of ancient social and political structure, and that has its roots in the marked orientation of Greek society towards open discourse. What he has in mind as a paradigm of oral divination is the question-and-answer format of many ancient oracles. He argues that this provides far more direct and more ‘democratic’ access to the will of deity or the way of things than do styles of consultation dependent on interpretative schemes which, because of their indirect nature, are accessible only to a small and privileged group. The fine art of pyromancy, for instance, deploys a framework of transformational rules and techniques whose complexity removes the interpretation of ‘fire signs’ ( empura sēmata ) from the realm of ordinary skills and makes it instead the special province of a priestly caste, such as that of the Iamidai at Olympia.