Trustees of Boston UniversityGreek Tradition RevisitedAfter Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor by Margaret Alexiou; Eroticism inAncient and Medieval Greek Poetry by J. PetropoulosReview by: David RicksArion, Third Series, Vol.
And integrated treatment of ancient Greek mythic tradition. The Cambridge companion to Greek mythology / edited by Roger D. Occurrence of the world-ages motif in Greek and Indo-Iranian lore may reveal that. System of dichotomies), we must revisit the (revised) translation of line. #Success Criteria Grids Gods and Goddesses [PDF]. Activity Sheet Greek God Fact File Templates [PDF]. Activity Sheet Greek Gods and Goddesses In this lesson children learn about Ancient Greek religion, research information about a variety of Greek gods and write their own Greek myth.
1 (Spring - Summer, 2005), pp. 131-148Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL:.Accessed: 22:41Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected] of Boston University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Arion.This content downloaded from 195.34.79.20 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:41:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsTradition Revisited DAVID RICKS V/n a flight to the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 a party of Greek athletes misbehaved in time-honored frat boy fashion.
Along with the carousing and the goosing, it was alleged?a solemn press recorded?that the chaps had, in us air space, given vent to 'Hellenic songs.' Clearly more was meant by this than that they were singing in Greek: 'Hellenic' seems to have been used to imply 'obscene,' even 'Aristophanic'; but the lexical choice unwittingly endorsed the case for strong continuity in the Greek tradition.
In what follows, I attempt a belated assessment of two long-awaited books. on that durably tempting and contentious subject.1 Since the time when a precocious teenager, N. Politis, later the first Professor of Folklore (Laographia) at the Uni? Versity of Athens, began to collect the materials amassed in his Neohell?nik? Mythologia (1871), much ink has been spilled on two related questions: (1) How far has modern Greek folklore preserved ancient material and, for that mat?
Ter, the same mentalit?s and (2) How far can modern mate? Rial (in various dialects) be used as a resource for the interpretation of ancient texts? Both these questions, be it noted, are separable from the inflamed discussion about the ethnic and cultural origins of the Greeks of today.2 Many Greek authorities, not surprisingly, have upheld implausible views of direct continuity from ancient times; of such views. Margaret Alexiou, After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2002), xvii +567 pages, $65.00; J. Petropoulos, Eroticism in Ancient and Medieval Greek Po?
Etry (London: Duckworth 2003), xiii + 206 pages,?45.00. ARION 13.1 SPRING/SUMMER ZOO 5 This content downloaded from 195.34.79.20 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:41:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsGREEK TRADITION REVISITED J. Lawson's Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion (1910) was a charming summary for the Philhel? Lenic scholar. Social anthropologists, again not surprisingly, have increasingly reacted by turning aside from such ques? Tions, or else by reading them, rather sternly, as 'Invention of Tradition' across the board. A significant exception is Charles Stewart's Demons and The Devil: Moral Imagina?
Tion in Modern Greek Culture (1991), a discriminating study of the cosmology of late-twentieth-century Naxiot mentali? Ties which carefully unravels post-pagan, (post-P)Christian and modern rational strands of thought in a contemporary culture which demands treatment on its own terms.3 Stu? Dents of literature, for their part, have had the freedom to read modern Greek literary responses to the ancient Greek past as a case of literary reception which cannot but in? Volve, but need not stand or fall with, notions of privileged continuity. 4 In returning to the fray, both Alexiou and Petropoulos bring a range of relevant scholarship in which they can have few, if any, equals: each of them addresses, if anything, an even wider range of periods than their titles suggest (Alexiou in fact recurring repeatedly to classical material, as Petropoulos looks forward to folklore data from the last two centuries). There is a family resemblance between these studies, to?
Gether with a degree of overlap resulting from the fact that neither had recourse to a draft of the other; but their intel? Lectual ancestry and scholarly idiom differ starkly enough, even if there is an encouraging degree of convergence in their conclusions. Neither book lends itself to being an introduc? Tion to its subject; but both will, to our gratitude, form an essential resource for future explorations.? After antiquity is a title not free of the vatic After.
A not unfair, but, as it happens, unpromising place to begin a discussion of the book is its peroration: This content downloaded from 195.34.79.20 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:41:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsRicks 133 Finally, such an approach to postclassical Greek literature and cul? Ture can contribute to other areas and disciplines by showing us how to look; both in the past, and in the present; both in literature, and in myth and ritual; and above all, at creative uses of language. What we find is the specific vitality of Greek tradition, a vitality rooted in the unusual diversity of its means and resources.
If we have missed this in the past, it may be because our overly narrow views of literature can, in the long term, only impoverish literature. The reciprocal influences of creative traditions in different societies is sic to be found not just in masterworks but also in the regener? Ative powers of tales, songs, and dances, performed by women and men alike, and everything else that lies behind them. (413) The last breathless clause, to one who has not read the book, gives due warning of its genre: the loose, baggy mon?
But if the final paragraph displays some of the features which most irritated an earlier reviewer, it also allows us to unpick those ways in which it sets out to offer something new. 5 In plain language: (1) Alexiou seeks to display some distinctive contours of Greek verbal culture, viewing that culture in its wider setting (which entails contextualizing the disjecta membra of folk songs as they appear in written col? (2) She aims to show that the barriers between high and low literature, and between oral and written texts, are permeable, at more than one period. (3) She maintains that women have played a larger role, or at any rate, a dif? Ferent role, in the development of Greek tradition than has always been noted. (4) She is eager to challenge accepted modes of literary history as applied to the works of a lan? Guage so long in use and?more controversially?of a cul?
Ture which (5) is at bottom resistant to Occidental (as, of course, to Orientalist) approaches. Finally, and (as it turns out) most elusively, (6) she makes some distinct investment in the continuity of the Greek language itself. These are ambitious goals, even for a long book by a sea?
Soned scholar; but they are goals which Alexiou's previous book, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (1974, rev. This content downloaded from 195.34.79.20 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:41:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsGREEK TRADITION REVISITED 2oo2), achieved, on a thematically narrower front, to magis? Terial effect, as Petropoulos notes on the second page (viii) of his own book. Apart from The Ritual Lament's own merits, no better prospectus could have been set out for the larger and complementary sequel, much of it building on a series of important papers, which is presented here. But as exposition and argument, After Antiquity does present the reader with serious stumbling blocks as well as rich rewards. Let us try to produce a balance sheet with reference to the six aims identified above, taking them in reverse order. First, the question of language.
This reviewer will be the last to resist the claim that it is possible, with benefit, to compare and contrast verbal documents from different phases of the Greek language. But the discussion, ostensibly on language, which forms part one of this book and takes up 150 pages, is as disorderly as it is intermittently suggestive. The author acknowledges in her preface that Geoffrey Hor rocks' Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers (1997) appeared too late for her to use; but there is no doubt that Horrocks' lucid work now provides an unrivalled analysis-cum-reader of the development of Greek, which en? Ables us 'to chart major linguistic changes' with a new clar? Ity.6 Alexiou, by contrast, tends to act on the view that hard cases make good law: she has an inclination to seek out the most deviant texts possible and to present them out of chronological order. 7 The commitment to renouncing the teleology of some earlier treatments, typically committed to the triumph of the so-called 'demotic,' is admirable; but the chance, for example, to forge a powerful alliance with the subtle approach to long-lived poetic formulas which has been adopted by G. Sifakis is not taken.8 And in Alex iou's discussion of linguistic matters, revolving round the no?
Tion of 'polyglossia,' many passing observations on what are more than matters of detail are at best questionable.? 'We must look forward, backward and sideways' (2) may sound vigilant, but is in clear breach of any highway code for scholarly exposition. In fact, most readers in search of This content downloaded from 195.34.79.20 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:41:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsRicks 135 Alexiou's main contribution will readily skip chapters one and three on linguistic matters and save their energies for chapter two on Romanos the Melode in the fifth century and chapter four on the twelfth-century literary revival. In both areas, recent work by Byzantinists?Alexiou notable among them?has helped to show unexplored complexities of lan? Guage, imagery, and allusion. The old quip went that all churches should have a promi?
Nent sign displayed outside saying, 'important if true.' This undoubtedly applies to some of Alexiou's most sweep? Ing contentions about the cultural differences which, in her view, demand that Greek tradition be approached on its own terms?contentions which, though they do not vitiate an im? Portant book, do sometimes mar it. Particularly troubling is the fact that virtually every distinction made here between Eastern and Western outlooks in fact collapses (as Alexiou at times concedes) into a broader distinction between pre modern and modern outlooks.10 With this goes an ulti? Mately unsatisfactory, though often thought-provoking, account of the relation between Hellenic tradition and Or?
The most disreputable form of relating the two was of course the Colonels' 'Helleno-Christian civilization.' But the great critic Zissimos Lorenzatos (d.
2004) argued pow? Erfully?at the cost of his friendship with George Seferis? That Orthodoxy was integral to any understanding of Greek culture: a point of which outsiders like myself are painfully conscious.11 Alexiou, for her part, appears to equivocate: the Church's tradition is enlisted by her in the cause of Greek cultural distinctiveness, but rather little is made of her corporate life in relation to Greek tradition, and little is said of the Church of the East which does not hold equally for Western Catholicism and popular religion. Instead, a dubi? Ous case is made for prized elements in the folk tradition as being essentially Christian: the wonder tales are 'Christian in essence' (5) because of the presence of 'atonement and reciprocity'; an erotic distich about an old flame (agap?) is deemed to echo 1 Cor.
13.4-13, and indeed to show that This content downloaded from 195.34.79.20 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:41:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsGREEK TRADITION REVISITED 'the violent and dangerous aspects of eroticism. Are not absent from the modern folk songs, but they are tempered with Christian thought' (406). Most far-reachingly, Alexiou contends that there is 'a store? House?or treasury?of key words and concepts in the Greek language, many of them emotionally charged and semanti cally enriched by virtue of past semantic associations with the New Testament' (412). This is a large and complicated claim to appear on the text's penultimate page; it is unsubstantiated by a jejune footnote (501 n.i).
The great nineteenth-century critic (and, alas, anti-Semitic politician) Iakovos Polylas spoke of the national language as 'purified in the light of the Gospel'; but if Alexiou intends more than so general a state? Ment she needs to provide, among other things, much more evidence that the liturgy (let alone the Bible) has, as wording, been 'familiar to everyone' (34; see also 65). In fact, the view of so subtle an anti-Occidental writer as Alexandros Papadia mantis appears to have been that the populace's very igno? Rance of the liturgy was a providential sign of an authentic Christian identity which literacy had now come to imperil.12 At its most extreme, Alexiou's argument seems to approach the view, most closely associated with the work of A. Far rer, that the images employed in Scripture are normative for belief?and that the Orthodox tradition is based on images different in kind from those familiar in the West?but her own typology can go amiss, as when she sees, not the Virgin, but Christ in the Burning Bush (61).
Playing to her undoubted strengths, some of Alexiou's most powerful observations concern the need for rewriting Greek literary history in the longue dur?e. They crystallize around the two chapters (four and eight, both drawing on previous publications) where written, self-consciously liter? Ary, texts are the main focus of attention. In the first of these, a powerful case is developed for the identification of the 'high' twelfth-century writer Theodore Pr?dromos with the author of the vernacular 'beggar' poems of an impover?
Ished scholar, the Ptochoprodromika. Alexiou's discussion This content downloaded from 195.34.79.20 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:41:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsRicks 137 of these texts (of which she is preparing a major edition) un? Pick with acumen the web of interactions between sacred and secular, court and domestic, classical and quotidian, in a way which is thoroughly convincing. Likewise, in a pene?
Trating chapter on the late nineteenth-century short-story writer, Georgios Vizyenos, Alexiou makes good her impor? Tant claim that much of what is most challenging in the nar? Rative modalities of this slipperiest of modern authors has to be seen in the context of medieval and folk narrative models with a strong Eastern orientation. These readings are both demanding and rewarding: most elegantly, they suggest likely, if not conclusive, evidence of a link between these two fertile literary periods in the form of a tie between Vizyenos and the satirical Timarion from the twelfth century (107). This only confirms one's view that chapters four and eight belong together, not separated between the Language and Myth parts of the book; and also that Alexiou's argument (perhaps against its deepest instincts) is at its strongest when applied to highly conscious literary authors. It is an argument, too, which can and should inspire liter?
Ary scholars to look again at other Greek authors who have used the full range of Greek tradition and to explore their al lusiveness more fully. It is a pity, then, that, rather than opening up such discussion, this book has a tendency to seek to close it down. Outside its key areas of emphasis it can badly lose its touch, and the passing references to authors of the modern period are, almost without exception, tenden?
Tious and unhelpful.13 Yet the approach that Alexiou fruit? Fully adopts in relation to Vizyenos could bring benefits in relation to major authors whose status she appears to down? Grade, despite the fact that they too employ a wide range of texts: sacred and secular, oral and literary, ancient and mod? Take Dionysios Solomos, whose poem 'The Cretan' (1833) is, like Vizyenos' short stories, both radically elusive as narrative and allusive to ancient, Byzantine, Veneto-Cretan, and folk tradition.
Take Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis' elaborate and ludic rehabilitations of some of the seemingly most re This content downloaded from 195.34.79.20 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:41:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsGREEK TRADITION REVISITED calcitrant Byzantine modes (ecphrasis, the catalogue): an in? Spiration to later writers, he is more than an 'exception' (314). Take Alexandros Papadiamantis (267), who, in a dif? Ferent idiom from Vizyenos, drew insistently and deeply on Christian and pagan elements in folk and learned culture and challenged nationalist assumptions.^ For Alexiou, 'women. Have contributed more signifi? Cantly to the common culture in the Greek-speaking world than in the West' (14).
This is so large a claim that it is hard to see who could hope to be in a position to sustain it. Iou acknowledges that concentrating on women and the life cycle alone would have made for a tidier book (412; see also 94), but she does add valuably to the observations of The Greek Lament by widening the range of genres, notably to include the neglected wonder tales. And even where her dis? Cussions do not satisfy (e.g., 381 and 400 on love songs as perhaps reflecting a culture of widespread marital infi? Delity?a very literalist outlook, this), they are often sugges?
Tive (e.g., 398 on the bird-like voices of women's singing).T5 It has been an important emphasis in Alexiou's approach over the years that Greek tradition employs a set of metaphors with 'flexibility and coherence' (349) and that we should follow language and imagery where they take us. (In particular?as Cavafy insisted in poem after poem?we should be ready to go across the boundary from pagan to Christian, and sometimes back again.) Alexiou's detailed readings of the kontakion or of the modern short story con? Firm that the Greek language (so too its literary expressions) covers a spectrum, and does not consist of stable, discrete forms?whether synchronically or over time. Some of the strongest examples, it is true, are not mentioned here: take Papadiamantis' allusiveness to the Theocritean idyll, com? Bined with one of the latter's most striking features, the use of dialect.16 But Alexiou convincingly argues that the tradi? Tional language of 'contamination' of folk tradition by written needs to be used with circumspection in modern dis? Cussions; likewise any rigid distinction between oral and lit This content downloaded from 195.34.79.20 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:41:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsRicks 139?rate.
She only ceases to convince when she pleads too ur? Gently for Greek distinctiveness.1? Attentive to the musical and ritual settings of the words which are her main focus of attention, Alexiou insistently draws our attention to ritual context; that she often does so in a way that is anecdotal or avowedly tentative, rather than couched in strongly social-anthropological terms, does not deprive this approach of valuable insights: indeed, it often has considerable poignancy. Rightly, she fore? Grounds performative context and challenges imported dis?
Tinctions between 'mythical' and 'historical' material, while broadening the traditional emphasis on song to in? Clude discussion of the cultural division of labor between song and tale (208).
Overall, her picture of Greek tradition is bound to be selective, and it is not always easy to discern its contours; but Alexiou makes good her claim that the tradition is a complex and flexible one, which not only permits but encourages the responsible scholar to move from phase to phase. O where alexiou's book is passionate in character, Petro poulos is sober and unsentimental, taking a dry pleasure in the contrast between his scholarly idiom and the X-rated material which is often his subject (129 a notable example): you can see that he was a pupil of K. Petropoulos sets out very clearly on pages 1-8 the devil's advocate's case against the use of modern folksong material to explain an? Cient material, and his final conclusions (87-88), cautious yet far-reaching, are in a very different mode from Alexiou's: First, numerous formal features and erotic motifs common to cer? Tain types of modern Greek folk song are clearly datable to the tenth or, at the very latest, the twelfth century.
(This is a fact some? Times disregarded or played down by scholars.) And second, many of the generic aspects of medieval folk-poetry evolved out of a var This content downloaded from 195.34.79.20 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:41:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsGREEK TRADITION REVISITED iegated song tradition whose main influential stages and precedents can be traced, ultimately, to ancient Greek culture.
The first of these points is undoubtedly important: some modern scholars have enjoined too rigidly against extrapo? Lating back from song texts which have been recorded, for the most part, only in the last two hundred years, and very few have dared to discern historical development behind them.18 Petropoulos, basing himself on a wealth of material, much of it unpublished, encourages us to go a little further, with the possibility of future dividends beyond his erotic mo? Tifs and the laments studied by Alexiou: the wealth of what Petropoulos correctly terms 'medieval' (which subsumes Byzantine) material awaits further analysis. His second con?
Clusion is equally important: while allowing for the 'contam? Ination' of the popular tradition by learned material (including even rhetorical handbooks: see summary on 60), Petropoulos cogently identifies cases of durable motifs.1? The route towards these conclusions is not entirely smooth for the reader owing to merely physical reasons: the book really needs to come with a set of markers like a bre?
Viary, as the reader flips back and forth from main text to endnotes to testimonia to appendices?and the fact that all material is translated, or at best transliterated, makes this a study easier to consult than to read. That said, there is rich food for thought here, often on points less prominent or pre? Sented in a less orderly manner in After Antiquity. Los makes stimulating use of genres to which Alexiou pays less attention (oneir o critica, for example, or the defixio? And, for that matter, of the rich seam of straightforward ob? Scenity in Greek tradition); he provides important evidence of linguistic development (e.g., 143 n.25 on gameo) or for development of imagery (e.g., 37 on the woman as par? Tridge).20 Exploiting the fact (11) that there is ancient visual evidence for all elements of the nuptial ritual, he does more with iconographie evidence (some of it appearing as plates) than Alexiou.
And although his book's purview may appear This content downloaded from 195.34.79.20 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:41:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsRicks 141 circumscribed compared with hers, it seems to me that his use of social anthropology (e.g., 50) or his historical ap? Proach to the life cycle (e.g., 41-43 and testimonia on the history of the wedding) are more immediately cogent than some of Alexiou's examples. To illustrate the complexities, however, one might usefully turn to a less convincing case?just the sort of case which shows how the assessment of continuity rests on probabili? Ties and involves fine judgements. Petropoulos (45) describes the following modern wedding song (Aegina c.
1912) as 'an appropriation or Christianization. Of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, with Apollo/David playing the lyre and the angels joining in the festivities': In the heavens above the angels are attending a wedding, they make merry and take their leisure and the Apostles are holding a feast. David is playing the harp, Jacob is playing the psaltery. Over there if a dance happens to be struck up, the monks also join in, and whoever should criticize them, may he be full of miserable pain. It does seem to me rather stretched to describe this as in any sense a mythical exemplum?let alone an adaptation of Peleus and Thetis. And can we assume that the Aeginetan villagers were unaware that the scene was upace Luke 20.34L'?
In fact, that pericope from the Gospel must be so surely imprinted on the least educated Christian mind, through the homiletic tradition which Petropoulos notes elsewhere, that the song in question could just as readily be read as a playful response to it: 'If, per impossibile, mar? Riage could take place in heaven, then all should join in with gusto, whatever the clergy tell us.' We would have, then, a slightly more homespun version of Thomas Campion's 'Let old angrie fathers lurke in an Hermitage: / Come, weele as This content downloaded from 195.34.79.20 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:41:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsGREEK TRADITION REVISITED sociate this jollie Pilgrimage!' 21 Such a reading would then dramatize the ecclesiastical-popular tensions which Petro? Poulos documents elsewhere (e.g., testimonium TG7, from the eighteenth century, on 114-15). Particularly valuable in Petropoulos' account, in any case, is his emphasis on the ribald strands of Greek tradition which are documented in unpublished archives and in journals but which have rarely been the subject of sustained scholarly at? Tention; as too is his whole chapter on 'nuptial blame' and the scoptic tradition?a tradition perhaps as likely to be played down by modern feminists as by strait-laced old folk lorists.
One clear bonus from Petropoulos' book, moreover, will be the help it gives us in interpreting imagery in the mod? Ern Greek written poetry which falls outside the bounds of his study: his discussion of cypress imagery, for example (so too Alexiou 261), will prove suggestive for reading Angelos Sikelianos' poetry, to mention the greatest of the modern po? Ets to use such motifs.22? Where does this look at three thousand years of rich and widely dispersed material leave us?
If we revert to our two opening questions, we shall see that both of these studies take us some way further to finding answers. The issue of cultural continuity from ancient to modern is given clear but sober support from both authors in relation to a vari?
![Goddesses Goddesses](/uploads/1/2/5/3/125384596/353196583.jpg)
Ety of songs of the life cycle, where the balance of proba? Bilities does, on the evidence, suggest that certain perduring motifs have left their mark. When it comes to the use of later material specifically to illuminate classical texts, this is more Petropoulos' aim than it is Alexiou's: in this he fol? Lows avowedly in the steps of the late J. Kakridis, a scholar whose Neo-Analytical approach to Homer has some continuing influence and who is a mystifying absen? Tee from Alexiou's book. It is unlikely, however, that she would dissent from Petropoulos' conclusions.
This content downloaded from 195.34.79.20 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:41:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsRicks 143 Looking to the future, these two difficult and valuable books do, as I initially suggested, leave us with a scholarly agenda deriving from their most salient point of conver? In both of these studies considerable emphasis is rightly laid on the twelfth-century material. Half a century ago, valuable material from Eustathius of Thessalonica which bears on modern folklore was excerpted by Phaidon Koukoules.23 In the meantime, so much has changed in me? Dieval studies, Western and Eastern, that it is time for a scholar of discernment?and a degree of patience?to re? Turn to works like Eustathius' Homeric commentaries, now edited by van der Valk, and to see what further material can be unearthed. Both Alexiou and Petropoulos persuasively argue for the centrality of the twelfth century to any discus? Sion of interactions between different (historical and social) strata of Greek; and both do so in terms which go beyond the 'revival' or 'precursor' model which has tended to condition the approaches of, respectively, classical- and modern-orientated scholars.
Petropoulos helpfully speaks of Byzantine culture?and, by extension, modern Greek culture?as an enormously complicated, often contradictory, and sui generis legacy of post-classical and Christian erudite forms and aesthetic practices, encrusted, as it were, with popular elements that per? Sisted darkly but undeniably under the Orthodox skin of medieval Christendom. (3) Such a formulation gives due weight to tensions in the tradi? Tion, which Petropoulos' citation of St. John Chrysostom's attack on lewd nuptial customs brilliantly illuminates (50-51); and drawing attention to contradictions and even conflicts is salutary for future study.
24 There has always been a danger of leaning towards, on the one hand, a bowdlerized over? View of Greek folk culture as 'Christian in essence' (a peril from which Alexiou, as we have seen, is not immune), or, on the other, to the older view that the modern Greeks have only a thin veneer of Christianity over their essential pagan This content downloaded from 195.34.79.20 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:41:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsGREEK TRADITION REVISITED ism. This latter view could be expressed with a high degree of approbation?or with Protestant sternness, as in this con? Clusion to Mary Hamilton's Greek Saints and their Festivals (1910): The miscellaneous examples given in this last chapter will suggest to the reader how great an influence the antiquity of Greece still has over the modern Greek, how superstition continues to obstruct the progress of education, trade, and general enlightenment, and how the whole mode of life is affected by a wilful fostering of an?
Cient traditions.25 There can be no doubt that some (no doubt ancient) tra? Ditions are, even today, wilfully fostered?perhaps for touristic purposes in some cases.
Other popular elements seem durable with a self-consciousness that doesn't make them any the less traditional. My wife and I were staying in a small mainland village, where a friend introduced us to the materfamilias of the taverna as being on our honeymoon. The salad we had ordered appeared in due course, with some ceremony and to great hilarity, in the form of a very large unsliced cucumber. There would be different ways to read this (fertility rite; skomma directed at the groom; en?
Couragement to the bride), but it was surely in a different vein from the Carry On humor which might attend such an occasion in the West, and it did look like an authentic pop? Ular element?perhaps the more so because unaccompanied by any elaborate verbal byplay.
Greek cultural continuity isn't always so arresting or ac? Some of the strongest suits of diachronic study have already been played: the lament by Alexiou, erotic motifs by Petropoulos. In exploring further the range of often less im? Mediately attractive texts, sacred and secular, ancient, me? Dieval and modern, these two learned and suggestive works offer new thoughts, to be pursued by others and?let us hope?by the same authors in future studies. This content downloaded from 195.34.79.20 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:41:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsRicks 145 NOTES i. Petropoulos 137 gives a succinct bibliography; I put in my pennyworth in 'Greek tout court?'
Arion 1.3 (Fall 1991), 2.9-44. Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More (Austin 198z) provides a trench? Ant and at times one-sided account of the role of laographia in the ideology of modern Greece. This book may be seen as essential prior reading for anyone coming to the two books under review.
One attempt in this direction is my own The Shade of Homer: A Study in Modern Greek Poetry (Cambridge 1989, rpt. Christopher Robinson, Times Literary Supplement, 14 October Z003, 10. More in sympathy with Alexiou's project is Karen Van Dyck, journal of Modern Greek Studies zz.i (2004), 107-11. For a few caveats on this admirable work, which only go to show how far it has advanced the discussion, see the joint review by Alan H.
Stein, Elizabeth Jeffreys, and Peter Mackridge, Di?logos 6 (1999), 69-8z. She is right, of course, that Greek is best understood as a web rather than a single very long thread; but Horrocks' account, by virtue of its chronological treatment, enables us to see the wood for the trees.
(It must also be pointed out that typographical errors in the Greek in After Antiq? Uity are numerous. Once we're looking at papyrus letters, this is really a problem.) 8. See his articles, 'Homeric Survivals in the Medieval and Modern Greek Folksong Tradition?' Greece and Rome 39.z (199z), 139-54 and 'Homeric Poetry and Modern Greek Folk Song: A Second Essay,' Di?logos 3 (1996), 95-110. Building on data from the medieval and post-medieval Akritic song tradition presented by I. Prombonas, Sifakis cogently argues for the persistence of a limited but durable formula-stock (with the neces?
Sary metrical adjustments) dating back to Homer. It is conceivable that Alexiou is unacquainted with these works; possible that she has not dis? Cussed them on the grounds that her study as a whole is committed to downplaying the 'epic tradition' on which earlier folklorists tended to build their studies of Greek cultural continuity. So, for example, Peter Mackridge's view in his standard descriptive study, The Modern Greek Language (1985), that Greek dialects, even by the 1980s, occupied a marginal and precarious position, is dismissed with? Out evidence (39); meanwhile, the use of Cypriot dialect in written poetry, by contrast (461 n.66), is implied by Alexiou to be of only marginal impor?
Tance when it has been recurrently used by the two most prominent of Cypriot poets, Costas Montis and Kyriakos Charalambides. Alexiou sometimes extrapolates rather wildly from (disputable) lin? Guistic evidence in an effort to show that Greek culture lacks our Western categories (so 155 argues that there is no Greek word for 'private,' based on discussion of the adjective idi?tikos). This content downloaded from 195.34.79.20 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:41:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsGREEK TRADITION REVISITED ii. Two books of essays which have appeared in English give expression to this view: The Lost Center, Kay Cicellis, trans. (Princeton 1980) and The Drama of Quality, Liadain Sherrard, trans.
(Limni, Evia 2000). See e.g., his story, 'Rural Easter' (1890), where the raucous misun? Derstandings of the cantor provoke the narrator's exclamation, 'Al?theis Orthodoxoi Hellenes!' (Alexandros Papadiamantis, 'Exocbik? Lampr?,' Hapanta vol. Triantaphyllopoulos, ed.
Athens 1982, 133). By contrast, Anthony Hirst's God and the Poetic Ego: The Exploitation of Bib? Lical and Liturgical Language in the Poetry of Palamas, Sikelianos and Elytis (Oxford 2004) shows just how far none of his three major poets is an anima naturaliter christiana?which may have wider implications for the modern Greek literary tradition.