Pathos and Mathos Before Zeus

Pathos and mathos before Zeus
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
The Tangled Ways of Zeus: And Other Studies In and

Around Greek Tragedy
Alan H. Sommerstein
Print publication date: 2010

Print ISBN-13: 9780199568314
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199568314.001.0001

Alan H. Sommerstein (Contributor Webpage)
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199568314.003.0012
Abstract and Keywords

This chapter seeks to interpret the statement in Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1768 that Zeus
laid down the law pathei mathos (learning through suffering), asking in particular
whether we are meant to assume that learning and/or suffering existed before Zeus laid
down this law, and, if we are, what the relationship was between them. It argues that the
only answer consistent with Aeschylus' text, and with current popular beliefs about
primeval times, is that before Zeus there was no suffering (all man's needs were
produced spontaneously by the earth) and no learning (because it was unnecessary).
Zeus deprived man of happiness, so that he could survive only by acquiring wisdom
which, at the end of the Oresteia, the Athenians at least have succeeded in doing.
Keywords: wisdom, Agamemnon, Oresteia, Zeus, learning, suffering, primeval
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It was Zeusso sing the chorus of Aeschylus' Agamemnon (1778)who laid down
() the law . This is not the place to investigate the exact meaning of that
brief phrase or its significance for the Oresteia as a whole; 1 though it cannot be too often
emphasized, firstly that is not the same as and does not
imply that the person who learns is necessarily the same as the person who suffers,2 and
secondly that despite the efforts of a long succession of translators to confine the
application of the law to mortals3 to the exclusion of gods, nothing in its actual expression
(p.179) implies any such restriction. The main purpose of the present note, however, is
to raise anew the question: if the law was established by Zeus, what then
was the relationship between suffering and learning under his predecessors, Ouranos
and Kronos, of whom we have been reminded in the preceding stanza (16873)?
I say to raise anew because the question is one that has been asked before. It seems to
have been first raised by Kitto:4
What Aeschylus says about [Zeus] is that he brought a new law, Learn by
suffering. How was this new? We cannot imagine that under his predecessors men
learned without suffering; Aeschylus did not believe in a past Golden Age. The only
interpretation is that under the earlier gods men suffered but did not learn;
nothing came of hard experience.
Some years later the same question was discussed by Maurice Pope,5 who, without
referring to Kitto, considered the same two possibilities of interpretation only to reject
both:
Are we to suppose [the chorus] to mean that such useful experiences as the
sacrifice of Iphigenia were denied to mankind in the bad old days? The thought is
grotesque. Or are we to suppose that such experiences were taking place all the
time but that nobody learned anything from them? The thought is less grotesque,
but it is a very complicated one to have to think. On the other hand the thought
sequence in the pessimist interpretation is natural and easy. Things have always
been like this.
[110] Whether Pope's favoured interpretation is really natural and easy may be a
matter of opinion. What is not a matter of opinion is that it will not square with the text: if
you say that X the principle Y to hold as valid law ( 178), you are
saying that before X did this Y was not valid law. D. J. Conacher in his rebuttal of Pope's
paper 6 found no difficulty in accepting the explanationsubstantially the same as Kitto's
which Pope had (p.180) considered very complicated. And there the matter has
rested.7 Let us now reexamine it.
Under Zeus, according to the chorus, there is suffering, and it leads to learning; there is
learning, and it is the result of suffering. What was the position before Zeus? There are
four logical possibilities; all of them have been canvassed in one or other of the studies
mentioned above, but never all four together. The possibilities are these:
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1. Things were the same as they are now (Pope).
2. There was learning, but no suffering (rejected by Kitto).
3. There was suffering, but it did not lead to learning (Kitto and Conacher;
rejected by Pope).
4. There was neither suffering nor learning (dismissed by Pope as grotesque;
not considered by Kitto).
We have already ruled (1) out of court as inconsistent with the Aeschylean text. We can
also safely reject (2), not on Kitto's questionbegging ground that Aeschylus did not
believe in a past Golden Age (which presupposes, not only that Prometheus Bound is
genuinely Aeschylean, but also, less excusably, that that play rejects the idea of a past
Golden Agemore on this presentlyand that Aeschylus was incapable of rejecting for
artistic purposes in one play a tradition which he had tacitly accepted in another) but,
once again, because the text excludes it: Zeus is described in 1767 as
, and it must follow that whether or not suffering is being presented
as an innovation by him, learning certainly is being so presented. We are thus left with
the choice between (3) and (4). Both of these are wholly consistent with the text of the
passage: Aeschylus has given his audience no guidance as to which they should assume
to be correct. They will therefore have been guided, not by his views about the primeval
world, but by their own. Do we know anything of what their views were?
Yes, we do; a great deal. Before the reign of Zeus came the reign of Kronos; and
throughout all antiquity was a (p.181) proverbial expression for a
paradisal or utopian existence,8 free from every imaginable kind of suffering. Typical is the
Hesiodic account (Works and Days 10919):9
First of all the immortals who dwell on Olympos made the golden race of mortal
men. They were in the time of Kronos, when he ruled in heaven. They lived like
gods, having a soul free from grief, utterly without toil and trouble, nor did
wretched old age come over them at all, but they always kept the form of their feet
and hands, and rejoiced in feasting, remote from all evils. They died as though
overcome by sleep, and all good things were theirs; the bountiful earth of her own
accord brought forth abundant fruits for them, and they gladly inhabited their
lands in peace, with many blessings.
[111] Later sources abundantly confirm this picture. There was universal peace10 and
freedom from fear 11 and from all diseases.12 Even animals did not eat one another,13
and the very climate was perpetually equable14 so that men had no need for clothing,
bedding, or housing. Private property,15 slavery,16 and government17 were unknown;
men were directly ruled by the gods18 with absolute justice,19 and themselves partook
of immortal, divine descent20 and were not (p.182) only better but physically bigger
than the men of today.21 Most persistent of all is the idea that in the age of Kronos the
earth spontaneously () bestowed her produce on man in bounteous abundance
without the need for toil, an idea that in fifthcentury comedy repeatedly found
expression in such delectable fantasies as this:
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Every gully ran with wine, and barleycakes fought with loaves of bread at the
portals of men's mouths, begging to be gobbled up if you like the whitest; fish
would cook themselves on the way home, and lay themselves on the table; beside
the diners' couches flowed a stream of soup rolling down hot chunks of meat, and
there were channels of sauces there for whoever wanted them to give ample
facilities for dunking each mouthful to be soft to swallow; and there were ground
cakes in little trays, sprinkled with seasonings; and roast thrushes with milkcakes
would fly down your throat, and there was great din of flatcakes jostling one
another to get between your jaws; and boys would play at knucklebones with
savoury titbits and slices of sow's womb.22
We can therefore take it as certain that when Aeschylus' audience heard that Zeus, the
overthrower of Kronos, had introduced the principle , they understood this
to mean that Zeus had done three things: brought suffering into the world, brought
learning into the world, and established a causal relation between them.
That Zeus had brought suffering into the world was, as we have seen, thoroughly
traditional. That he had brought learning into the world may seem on our evidence to
have been less so; at any rate descriptions of the age of Kronos are not as a rule explicit
on this point, and Plato in the Politikos (272bd) can make his protagonist float the idea
that the men of those days used their ample leisure to discuss philosophy and gather
wisdom. He admits, however, that this is not the sort of account that is currently given
concerning them (272c), though tantalizingly he does not tell us what were generally
(p.183) supposed to have been the topics of the conversations men used to have with
each other and with animals. But the best elucidation of the degree of men's intellectual
ability and achievement in the age of Kronos probably comes from [112] Prometheus
Bound. For our present purpose it matters little whether this play is or is not by
Aeschylus; 23 it is at any rate a fifthcentury Attic drama, written for an audience whose
background beliefs were the same as those of the audience of the Oresteia or of
Telecleides' Amphiktyones.
It is customary to regard the anthropology of Prometheus Bound as being based on the
idea of progress from primitive and miserable beginnings, in sharp contrast with the
degenerative anthropology first fully articulated by Hesiod. It should, however, be
remembered that the sorry state from which Prometheus claims to have rescued
humanity (Prom. 44257) was not their state during the reign of Kronos, but early in the
reign of Zeus. We are told nothing directly of how men fared under Kronos, but we do
hear at some length (40624) of how the whole world is grieving for the fate of
Prometheus and lamenting for the ancient honours held by him and his brethren
( 410)the Titans under Kronos, defeated and imprisoned by Zeus; which
strongly suggests that in this play, as in all other relevant Greek literature, it is assumed
that the reign of Kronos was a time of felicity for mortals. Certainly the play nowhere
denies this. And yet in the early days of Zeus's reign Prometheus finds men lacking not
only the necessities of decent life but the intelligence to devise means for procuring these
necessities. They were childlike (443); they had eyes but saw not, ears but heard not,
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andlived out their days haphazard and confused (4479); they did all things without
understanding (4567); it needed the intervention of Prometheus to make them
intelligent and possessed of mind (444). What has brought about the change? Did men
formerly, under Kronos, possess intelligence, and has Zeus deprived them of it? Or was
it rather that under Kronos they had no need of intelligence because, in the words of
Hesiod, the bountiful earth of her own (p.184) accord brought forth abundant fruits
for them, and that Zeus, by cutting off earth's bounty, plunged men into a state of
wretchedness from which they could escape only with the help of that intelligence which
they did not yet possess? For the first explanation there is no evidence whatever; the
second, on the other hand, might well be regarded as implicit in the traditional picture of
the age of Kronos. It may even have been made explicit in some lost treatment of the
myth earlier than Prometheus Bound: this would account not only for the way in which
the author of that play seems able to take it for granted, but also for the use of the name
of Kronos (and words derived from it) in colloquial Attic precisely to connote stupidity.24
In Prometheus Bound human learning is almost exclusively (in the broad sense)
technical. In the Oresteia it is rather moral and political wisdom that is to the fore. But the
principle holds just as strongly that where there is no suffering, as under Kronos, there
will be no learning. Man will be happy, no doubt, but his happiness will be that of a child or
a pampered slave, utterly dependent on the favour of his divine providers. The harsh
regime of Zeus seems a curse on mana curse which Old Comedy repeatedly dreams of
shaking off; 25 and yet only under that regime can man be fully human, with the mind of an
, as Pope rightly emphasized,26 is precisely
adultand one meaning of Aeschylus'
to have the mind of an adult. Before Zeus, the law , even if it was
theoretically true, was ineffective (), vacuous, [113] trivial: it is of no interest that
X is the cause of Y, if X is something that can never occur. Zeus, by introducing suffering,
for the first time made the law actually operative ( ). And thus, paradoxically,
if human intelligence is a good thing (as Greeks on the whole do seem to have (p.185)
believed it to be),27 the regime of suffering inaugurated by Zeus can be seen as a great
blessing. Whether Zeus had that in view from the start is quite another matter. I see no
reason to believe that the Zeus of the Oresteia did, any more than did the Zeus of the
Prometheus plays.28
Such then seems to have been, in its simplest form, the common Greek understanding of
how human life came to be as it now is. Man was once possessed of all happiness and
devoid of all wisdom; then came Zeus and deprived him of happiness, so that he could
survive only by acquiring wisdom. But it is not difficult to see how the same transition
from bliss and unintelligence to suffering and intelligence could be interpreted in a sense
almost diametrically opposite. What if were replaced by ? What
if, instead of suffering being seen as the stimulus to intellectual advance, the gaining of
wisdom were seen as the cause of suffering? That may well seem to be what happens to
the individual human being as (s)he passes from infancy to adulthood; but it is not an
entirely straightforward matter to turn this idea into an origin myth. What, after all, is the
sorrowbringing wisdom that the growing individual learns? As the Sophoclean Ajax
knew,29 it is the knowledge of the griefs and hardships that the world contains. But that
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kind of knowledge cannot have been the cause of the existence of those griefs and
hardships. The connection has to be made in a slightly less direct way. Children are
typically eager to know everything that adults knowincluding things that adults prefer to
keep concealed from them; only when they themselves become adults do they discover
how great a spiritual burden some of that knowledge is. That idea can readily enough be
transposed into mythical terms. In the childhood of humanity, someone reached out for,
and got, knowledge of that kind which humanity often feels it would have been better off
without. That is the basis of the story of Pandora's jar (Hes. Works 94ff.); for though we
are not told why she removed the jar's lid, Zeus had instructed Hermes to give her an
(Works 678, 779; missing, together with (p.186) the jar, from the
parallel passage in the Theogony) and one may reasonably suppose that she removed the
lid (while poor Epimetheus' back was turned) for the same reason for which Greek
women (or so their husbands alleged) were for ever removing the lids of storage jars or
secretly opening cupboards: she wanted to know what was inside, in case it might be
something worth stealing.30 And of course the same notion of reaching out for knowledge
that proves a curse is also the basis of the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis.
But with later Greeks the idea of does not seem to have been popular.
There is, as we have seen, plenty of nostalgia for the age of Kronos, but it does not, even
in comedy, include the wish for a return to a state of blissful imbecility: it is one thing to
wish for a life in which one will never need to put a strain on one's mental apparatus, and
quite another to wish that one did not have that apparatus. Most Greeks considered
human wisdom a good thing, not just in the wretched world we now inhabit, but
absolutely: no ancient Greek could ever, as Christians have often done, regard a mental
defective or holy fool as a person deserving admiration in his lifetime and worship after
. And what has caused [114] humanity to
his death. It is better to be adult
become mentally adult, in the Oresteia's way of looking at things, is the harsh, ungiving,
unforgiving world in which Zeus has caused them to live.
And yet in one sense the Oresteia too can be said to join hands with Genesis. When Adam
and Eve have eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, God himself expresses the view
that this man has become like one of us:31 they who were created in the physical image
of God have now become, in a sense, mentally his peers as well.32 In the Oresteia the
acquisition of wisdom is no matter of eating an attractive (p.187) piece of fruit: it comes
by sufferingby blood and toil and tears over a period of generations. But when it has
been attained, when humanity, and in particular the Athenians, have become wise at last
( Eum. 1000),* the Erinyes who have been agents of so much of
that suffering have this to say of <the Athenians'> relationship to the divine world:
'
.
You are under the wings of Pallas,
and her father reveres you.(Eum. 10012)
That is the ultimate and paradoxical outcome of what the popular mind sawand the
Page 6 of 10

Oresteia nowhere rejects this viewas the spiteful decision of Zeus to cut off the
spontaneous bounty of Earth and condemn man to a life of toil and pain: the emergence of
a human population who merit the awe and reverence33 of Zeus himself.34
Addenda
p. 182 n. 22see now also Ruffell (2000); Farioli (2001: 27137); Olson (2007: 757, 99
107) (text of, and commentary on, four of the fragments cited by Athenaeus).
p. 183 n. 23I would not now maintain the view that Prometheus Bound was earlier than
Ajax; Bees (1993) seems to me to have demonstrated that it belongs to the 430s.
p. 185 n. 29:the Sophoclean Deianeira (Trach. 14254; note 143 '
) and the Sophoclean Procne (Soph. fr. 583.35) knew it too.
p. 187this reading and interpretation of Eum. 1000 (where West 1990 a had adopted
van Herwerden's emendation wise amid surfeit) are brilliantly
defended by Chiasson (1999/2000); I was probably wrong in the Loeb (Sommerstein
2008: ii. 477) to understand the phrase as wise in due season (i.e. not needing to learn
wisdom, too late, through painful experience), which gives a sense for which
there is no clear parallel.
Notes:
(1) On these matters see Kitto (1956: 68, 6986); Conacher (1987: 1112, 835); and
Sommerstein (1989 b: 1925).
(2) Cf. Booth (1976: 228).
(3) So Thomson (1938) man shall learn by suffering; Murray (1952) Man by Suffering
shall Learn; Vellacott (1959) man must suffer to be wise; Fagles <and Stanford>
(1977) we must suffer, suffer into truth; cf. Fraenkel (1950) by suffering they shall win
understanding and LloydJones (1979) by suffering they shall learn, both of whom make
it clear in their notes that they mean they to refer back to men (= 176); Grene
and O'Flaherty (1989), while translating 177 accurately enough as knowledge comes in
suffering nevertheless impose the timehonoured interpretation by speaking of Zeus as
having set this law firmly in our hearts [emphasis mine: AHS]. Tony Harrison's Oresteia
(in T. Harrison 1985/1986) omits the passage altogether, along with the whole of the
Hymn to Zeus (16083). Of the English translations I have sampled, only those of Weir
Smyth <([1925] 1957)> wisdom cometh by suffering and Lattimore (1953) wisdom
comes alone through suffering avoids, as the Greek does, any attempt to identify the
sufferers <with> the learners either directly or indirectly. The German renderings
collected by Neitzel (1980: 283 n. 3) show a greater tendency to circumspection: only
four out of eight interpolate a reference to humanity. On Neitzel's own interpretation of
the passage (retaining the manuscripts' reading , and taking the sense to be
bringing it about, by means of suffering, that learning is effective) I agree with Conacher
(1987: 94 n. 21).
Page 7 of 10

(4) The quotation is from Kitto (1961: 68); earlier editions <of Kitto's Greek Tragedy>
have no corresponding passage, the chapter having been rewritten for the third edition.
Kitto had already stated the same conclusion in Kitto (1956: 81), but without the
supporting argument.
(5) Pope (1974: 111).
(6) Conacher (1976: 332): it is Zeus alone who put man on the road to using his
intelligence and so to learn through suffering.
(7) Neitzel (1980) does not consider the question whether learning and/or suffering
existed before Zeus.
(8) Cf. [Pl.] Hipparchos 229b; Arist. Ath.Pol. 16.7; Plut. Arist. 24.3; Philodemos, On Piety
51 Gomperz <= B6798 Obbink>, citing inter alia the archaic epic Alkmeonis (fr. 7 Davies
<= West>). On the history of the concepts life under Kronos and Golden Age, see
Baldry (1952: esp. 846); Guthrie (1957: 69ff.); Gatz (1967: esp. 11428);Blundell (1986:
13564).
(9) Cf. alsoibid. 902: For formerly the races of men had lived on earth remote from evils
and without harsh toil and painful diseases that dealt death to men.
(10) Telecleides fr. 1.2, Pl. Polit. 272e, Laws 713e.
(11) Telecleides fr. 1.3.
(12) Ibid.
(13) Pl. Polit. 271e.
(14) Ibid. 272a; cf. perhaps Hes. fr. 204.124ff. MW <= fr. 155.124ff. Most> which seems
to describe a deterioration of climate at the end of the heroic age.
(15) Plut. Cim. 10.7 . In Pl. Polit. 271e272a
the logical
connection as the text stands is obscure, and one wonders whether
may not be a gloss (based on recollection of the fifth book of the Republic), in
which case would originally have referred to property in land and goods.
(16) Plut. Comparison of Lycurgus and Numa 1.12; Luc. Saturn. 7, 20.
(17) Pl. Polit. 271e.
(18) Pl. Laws 713ce.
(19) Ibid. 713e; Plut. Mor. 266f.
(20) Soph. fr. 278 Radt : cf. Gatz
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(1967: 11516).
(21) Telecleides fr. 1.15.
(22) Telecleides fr. 1.414; cf. Cratinus fr. 176. Numerous other fragments, many of them
cited by Ath. 6.267eff., take us to the same fantasy world without linking it explicitly (in the
lines that have survived) with the age of Kronos; on this comic topos see Gatz (1967:
11621); Heberlein (1980); Sutton (1980: 5865); Zimmermann (1983: 5961); Reckford
(1987: 3238).*
(23) See (against authenticity) Griffith (1977); (for authenticity) Pattoni (1987). Pattoni
does not in my judgement come near refuting Griffith's case; but her comparison
between the prologues of Prom. and of Sophocles' Ajax (see especially Pattoni 1987: 181)
makes it highly likely that Prom. is the earlier of these two plays.*
(24) Cf. Ar. Clouds 929, Wasps 1480, Pl. Euthyd. 287b, Hyp. fr. 252;
Ar. Clouds 1070; , , com. adesp. 10524 <Kock =
607, 610, 751 KA>. In most of these passages the meaning is old fool; but Hyp. loc. cit.
used in the sense of (Bekk. Anecd. i. 104.7), and in Ar. Wasps 1480 the
term is applied to tragic actors challenged to a dancing contest, and the three who take
up the challenge (the sons of Karkinos) are in fact young men.
(25) Thus Zeus is successfully defied in Aristophanes' Peace, and actually deposed in his
Birds and Wealth. Cf. Sutton (1980: 423); Reckford (1987: 326, 33940, 35963).
(26) Pope (1974: 1089).
(27) It may be sufficient here to cite two relevant texts: one is Soph. Ant. 33264; the
other is the Odyssey.
(28) See Sommerstein (1989b: 23 n. 78).
, |
(29) Soph. Aj. 5545
.*
(30) Cf. Ar. Thesm. 41827, 5569, 81213; Ekkl. 1415; Alkimos, FGrH 560 F 2.
Semonides fr. 7 West gives us one woman who wants to hear everything, know
everything and have her eyes everywhere (1314), another who is constantly stealing
(556though she steals from neighbours' houses or from offerings at altars rather than
from her husband), and a third who knows all the wiles and tricks of a monkey (789).
(31) Genesis 3: 22.
(32) Their only remaining inferiority is their mortalityfor, as Genesis 3: 22 clearly
indicates, they were created mortal and could have become immortal only through eating
the fruit of the tree of life. In Hesiod too man is mortal even in the age of primeval bliss
(Works 116, 121).
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(33) Eumenides 10012, like Agamemnon 177 (see n. 3), has been mangled by a long
succession of translators who have read it through the lenses of their (or perhaps, in
some cases, their predecessors') preconceptions about Greek religion. This has led to
such renderings as the following: yours at last the grace of Zeus (Thomson 1938);
therefore shall Zeus the Father love you (Murray 1952); heaven'skingguards and
governs well those favoured ones (Vellacott 1959); blessed with Father's love (Fagles
<and Stanford> 1977); on youher father looks with kindness (LloydJones 1979);
Zeus will favour you (Raphael and McLeish 1979); with her father looking on you with
favour (T. Harrison 1985/1986). Even Lattimore (1953) (grand even in her father's
sight) tones down the Greek somewhat, as now does Podlecki (1989) (Father Zeus has
respect for you); of my sample only Weir Smyth (<[1925] 1957>) (the Father holdeth
ye in reverence) translates the words that were before him. Recently there has been a
welcome tendency to recognize the true force of (stand in awe of, especially
gods and one's parents LSJ; cf. Eum. 389, Supp. 652, Iliad 1.21) and hence the audacity
of what Aeschylus makes the chorus say here; see Goldhill (1984: 278) and Chiasson
(1988: 20). The translation of Grene and O'Flaherty (1989) omits the passage, together
with almost the whole of the trilogy's conclusion.
(34) This chapter was originally published inH. D. Jocelyn (ed.), Tria Lustra: Essays and
Notes Presented to John Pinsent, Founder and Editor of Liverpool Classical Monthly
(Liverpool, 1993) 10914. I am most grateful to Mrs Helena Hurt Pinsent for giving
permission for this republication.
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The Tangled Ways of Zeus: And Other Studies In and

Print publication date: 2010