Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece

Abstract

Ancestral fault is a core idea of Greek literature. 'The guiltless will pay for the deeds later: either the man's children, or his descendants thereafter', said Solon in the sixth century BC, a statement echoed throughout the rest of antiquity. This notion lies at the heart of ancient Greek thinking on theodicy, inheritance and privilege, the meaning of suffering, the links between wealth and morality, individual responsibility, the bonds that unite generations and the grand movements of history. From Homer to Proclus, it played a major role in some of the most critical and pressing reflections of Greek culture on divinity, society and knowledge. The burning modern preoccupation with collective responsibility across generations has a long, deep antecedent in classical Greek literature and its reception. This book retraces the trajectories of Greek ancestral fault and the varieties of its expression through the many genres and centuries where it is found.

KNOWLEDGE, SUFFERING AND THE PERFORMANCE OF WISDOM IN SOLON'SELEGY TO THE MUSESAND THE BABYLONIANPOEM OF THE RIGHTEOUS SUFFERER

“…Over the last few decades, scholarship on Greek religion and literature has been characterised by a pervasive tendency to separate cult and ritual (the so-called 'lived religion') from literary and philosophical theologies, which have been relegated to the status of purely artificial constructs with little or no bearing on Greek religious life (see Kindt (2016) 24-8 on this phenomenon). My analysis builds on a number of recent contributions which have challenged such categorisations of Greek religion, and called for a more textured approach to the question of the relationship between religion, literature and philosophy: see notably Harrison (2007), Gagné (2015), Kindt (2016), Tor (2017), and from a comparative perspective, Metcalf (2015).…”

“…39See Gagné (2013) 233: ‘The invocation to the Muses shows us the persona of the locutor-poet defining his character and his authority.’…”

“…43See Gagné (2013) 234: ‘The cycles of divine justice move beyond the scope of individual human life, but the poet's memory can perceive their shape. It lays the principles of divine time before our eyes, the slow wheels of a universal ordered law of divine retribution that moves beyond our grasp.’…”

Croesus’ Great Nemesis

“…23So, the oracle at Delphi describes the requital that the descendants of Gyges will have to pay as τίσις (1.13.2), but refers later to the same necessary conclusion as the impossibility of avoiding ‘the allotted fate’ (τὴν πεπρωμένην μοῖραν), and that Croesus ‘expiated an offence’ (1.91.1: ἁμαρτάδα ἐξέπλησε); cf. Solmsen (1974) 141 and n. 9; Nicolai (1986) 53; Gagné (2013) 327. In the exchange between Solon and Croesus, immediately before 1.34.1, Solon can characterise himself as a man who knows the divine to be ‘entirely jealous and disruptive’ (1.32.1: τὸ θεῖον πᾶν ἐὸν φθονερόν τε καὶ ταραχῶδες): Pippidi (1960) 88 and n. 53.…”

“…134‘Depersonalizing’ Hesiod's justice: Gagné (2013) 239. ‘Desacralization’ from Edmunds (1985) 96–7; Gagné (2013) 232–3 and n. 131.…”