Individual and collective – public and private?

Now that the pitfalls inherent in the material have been marked out, I will move into my analysis. To repeat, my aim is to use the Characters to trace part of the discourse that controls and generates identity and agency within the polis in the Diadoch period. The first step is to investigate the processes of interaction constructed in the Characters: Who are the actors depicted, what do they do, and where do they do it? When addressing these questions, it is necessary to bear in mind a simple caveat, namely that the Characters deals with behavioural deviations from ἄξια, from what is deemed proper or adequate.¹²³ They do not feature devi-ant behaviour that is illegal, but what one might call ‘moral’ divergence.¹²⁴ As such they depict and organise interactions that are characterised by an actor behaving in a manner that is judged to be out of sync with the identities encoded in the minds of the reader or audience, as well as the intradiegetic alteri who stand in for

122 Macedon, Polyperchon, and Kassander: Theophr. Char. 8.5, 7, 8; Antipater: 23.4. Mal-ta: 21.9; Sicily, Sparta, Thurioi: 5.9; Delphi: 21.3; Byzantion, Kyzikos, Rhodos: 5.8; note also the constrast between Europe and Asia at 23.3.

123 For this meaning see LSJ s.v. ἀξία II. Since the Characters lack any authentic description of intent or purpose, this descriptor is not found in the text, but is my interpretation.

124 The Characters offers an exception to all attempts at generalisation. The worst case scenario of the Characters, Theophr. Char. 6.6, shows a small-time thief, who also spends time in prison. Dem. 20.104 also suggests that the Slanderer (Theophr. Char.

28.6) might be acting illegally when he disparages the dead, though the enforcement of Demosthenes’ Solonic law will undoubtedly have been problematic. In this case, however, the exceptions confirm the rule.

them.¹²⁵ Put simply, they are thus a document of social, rather than legal con-trol.¹²⁶

The first general answer to the questions posed above is that the actions depicted in the Characters are performed by individual adult male actors, often acting as citizens in the ‘public’ sphere, and thereby represent but a small slice of the entire sphere of what a modern observer might consider social action.¹²⁷ If we apply the technique of inversion, this means that the sphere of intra-familial interaction, the ‘private’ space of interaction between husband, wife, and children is marginalised in keeping with the text’s homosocial construction of society:

deviant behaviour exhibited there seems largely irrelevant to the text and is ap-parently not classified as social.¹²⁸ It stands to reason that this marginalisation is connected to the well-known Athenian discourse on the inviolability of the house-hold, which considered control of the oikos the sole prerogative of the κύριος (“lord, master, husband”).¹²⁹ One of its most famous textual manifestations is Lysias’ speech On the Murder of Eratosthenes, which exemplifies the socio-economic

125 Theophr. Char. 21.1. On ‘etiquette’ in the Characters see the extensive discussion by Millett 2007, 58-92.

126 On the significance of social control, its manifestation in through agency and repro-duction through social interaction see Cohen 1991, 236f. and passim.

127 Cf. Leppin 2002. On the citizen in the Hellenistic age cf. Gehrke 2003, 226-228. On the construction of the private-public dichotomy in Athenian society see esp. Cohen 1991, 70-97, who identifies the physical confines of the oikos as the core of the ‘private’

realm and anything outside it as ‘public’, but is fully aware of the great elasticity and relational fluidity of these concepts in discourse (76f.), unlike the classic work by Habermas 1990, esp. 12f., who imagined there was a static division between private and public spheres in the ancient polis. The semantic fields associated with the oppos-ing terms, developed by Bourdieu 1977, 140-157, are now well known: private – public;

inside – outside; concealment – visibility; dark – light; secret – open; shame – honour;

female – male (Cohen 1991, 80). One may be tempted to add individual – collective, but the construction of these poles is not as simply dichotomous, a complication that will be addressed in due course. The terms public and private are used in inverted commas to express that they function as aids to convey what is meant in conventional language, but are not meant to signify a static dichotomy.

128 Volt 2007, 120, 131-133 does not share this view. In my opinion many of the passages he adduces as depicting the family sphere are in fact descriptions of social interaction among adult male citizens about this sphere and document the enmeshed nature of the oikos rather than an interest in the interior of the household itself. Millett 2007, 71-82 has a whole chapter on conduct “at home”, but considers it in a mainly spatial sense, without addressing the complexity focused on here.

129 On the legal manifestation of this discourse about kyrieia see: Harrison, Alick R.W. The Law of Athens. Vol. 1. London 1968, 30-36, 70-78, 200-205; MacDowell, Douglas M.

The Law in Classical Athens. New York 1978, 84-86.

and sexual contingencies tied to the legal aspects of this discourse in Athenian society.¹³⁰

The Characters respond to this same discourse by focusing on interaction and interaction spaces wherein adult male citizens, to be imagined as kyrioi, interact with one another, although this interaction can also consist simply in an obser-vation process.¹³¹ As a result of this focus, they leave a narrative gap in their world, one of several blank spaces left largely unaddressed, namely intra-familial inter-action in the strict sense.¹³² The most obvious manifestation of this gap is that the characters seem to have neither (living) fathers, nor male children of a more ad-vanced age, nor does inheritance ever feature.¹³³ The generation conflict between father and son, a result of the necessity of splitting up the estate and/or passing κυρ(ιε)ία from generation to generation within a single household, is thus com-pletely absent.¹³⁴ Mothers, women and wives, small children and daughters all occur on the sidelines, but are never focalised, nor is the focus generally on intra-familial relationships – especially in the case of daughters – but on their inter-action with a (male) third party, or on the contingency they experience as depen-dants because of the man’s actions.¹³⁵ The Illiberal Man (ἀνελεύθερος), for exam-ple, tries to cut costs at his daughter’s wedding, keeps his children out of school on festival days, and has his wife make do with the occasional hired servant girl.

In all three scenes, the focus is upon the primary actor’s deviant behaviour in a

130 Lys. 1, esp. 24-36. On social control and its interplay with legal norms, especially con-cerning adultery and sexual control, see Cohen 1991, 133-170.

131 Adapting Luhmann’s far more complex conception (1998, 69f.; 538) to my own pur-poses, I treat all observation as action and view it as consisting in the identification of difference and concomitant semantic sortition.

132 Other such blank spaces include polis religion and female action.

133 An actor’s own father occurs only in an intradiegetic narrative about genetic disease at Theophr. Char. 19.2, and at 13.8, where the Overzealous Man (περίεργος) informs his father that his mother is already in bed; the Characters here reflect the complexity of the social discourse, allowing only approximate generalisation. As a rule, however, the ol-dest sons are ephebes, who occur at 7.5; 21.3; 27.3, 6, 13 (21.3 is marked by his hair being cut, possibly as part of the κουρεῶτις; on coming of age at Athens see Garland, Robert S. J. The Greek Way of Life: From Conception to Old Age. London 1990, 179-187).

Cf. Millett 2007, 79.

134 The exception is Theophr. Char. 17.7, but the conflict is located in a distant future.

Such conflict is visible in comedy, the most prominent example being Bdelycleon and Philocleon in Aristophanes’ Wasps. See Garland 1990, 154-157.

135 Mothers occur at Theophr. Char. 6.6; 13.8; 19.8; 20.7, one left to starve, one insulted, two embarrassed. Daughters: 22.4; 30.19 (only in a marriage context). Children: 1.6;

5.5; 7.4, 8; 9.5; 14.10; 16.11A; 17.7; 20.5; 21.3; 27.3; 30.6, 14. Wives: 3.2; 10.6, 13;

16.11A; 18.4; 19.5; 21.11; 22.6, 10. Women: 11.2; 12.3; 13.10; 17.3; 27.9, 15; 28.3f.

Hetairai: 11.8; 17.7; 20.10; 27.9.

sphere of interaction subject to specific expectations, rather than on their intra-familial implications: the daughter’s celebration is a neighbourhood event, the children are visibly absent from school, and the wife’s maid is noticeably different every time.¹³⁶ The sphere of family interaction itself is thus conspicuously absent, an empty space on the sidelines of the narratives of the Characters: even the Talker (λάλος) stops at this liminal threshold of the house and does not actually pursue his victim inside.¹³⁷

However, the Characters does not simply reflect a normative ideal, but rather offers the full, lived incoherence of Athenian reality, including the fact that Athenian conceptions of what we call the public and the private sphere were anything but neatly dichotomous.¹³⁸ About fifteen passages do thematise inter-actions that could potentially be located inside the family sphere without the direct involvement of other male actors, including, for example, the Offensive Man’s (δυσχερής) custom of sleeping with his wife without washing beforehand, or the Country Bumpkin’s (ἄγροικος) unseemly domestic activities.¹³⁹ Such passages themselves exemplify the constant threats that challenged the ideal privacy of the domestic sphere in practice. As David Cohen and Virginia Hunter have shown, the oikos was not a space that could be disconnected from the social network, not a space that could be kept blank to the eyes of others.¹⁴⁰ Slaves and day labourers, nurses and teachers, guests, friends and neighbours could all pass to and fro, providing a flow of information about domestic affairs in the form of gossip.¹⁴¹ The same anxiety can be seen in the frequent assertion in forensic speeches that slaves provide information about private (i.e. secret) matters.¹⁴² In the Characters,

136 Theophr. Char. 22.4, 6, 10.

137 Theophr. Char. 7.6.

138 Cohen 1991, 70-97, maps out the situational complexities of the concepts. On gendered spaces in Athens and beyond see Trümper, Monika. “Gender and Space,

‘Public’ and ‘Private’”, in: Sharon L. James and Sheila Dillon (eds.). A Companion to Women in the Ancient World. Malden, MA 2012, 288-303.

139 Theophr. Char. 4.9-11; 10.5f., 13; 14.6, 9; 16.4, 7; 17.3; 18.4; 19.5 (ἀναπόνιπτος ἐν τοῖς στρώμασι μετὰ τῆς γυναικὸς αὐτοῦ κοιμᾶσθαι [...]); 20.2, 5, 7; 27.10; 30.11.

140 In-depth analysis in Hunter, Virginia J. Policing Athens: Social Control in the Attic Lawsuits, 420-320 B.C. Princeton 1994, esp. 70-93; Cohen 1991, 84-97; cf. Nevett, Lisa C. House and Society in the Ancient Greek World. Cambridge 1999, 174f. and similarly Millett 2007, 73-81.

141 On the presence of nurses and teachers see Theophr. Char. 9.5; 16.11A; 20.5; 27.13.

Theophr. Char. 14.9; 17.2; 18.2 shows household slaves going out without supervision, providing a link to the public sphere. At Theophr. Char. 4.6; 17.2 we find slaves ac-quiring intimate information. Plat. Leg. 738d-e assigns the same function to friends who link public and private. On the function of gossip see also Cohen 1991, 64-69.

142 E.g. Lys. 1.16, 18; Dem. 30.37; Lyc. 1.29; Isae. 8.12.

the Disagreeable Man’s (ἀηδής) breach of order consists precisely in broaching sensitive familial subjects before the extended household, shaming his mother in the process.¹⁴³ While the Characters thus seem to reinforce a specific construction of individual male agency, they also reflect the cracks in the normative discourse and thus the stable incoherence of social construction.¹⁴⁴ The crucial point is that such information is only available because it has escaped from the oikos, marking a failure of individual male agency and control.¹⁴⁵ The consequence of this failure is that the Characters seems to tentatively include this sphere in the proving ground that is the social life of the adult male citizen, complicating the boundary between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ spheres.

Now what do these observations mean for the construction of the individual offered by the text in light of the approach adopted here? A simple correlation between individual and collective, private and public has emerged as too starkly dichotomous, as incompatible with the social complexity reflected in the text.¹⁴⁶ Perhaps the best way of conceptualising the individual actors depicted in the Characters is not as deep, personal individuals in the modern psychological sense, a conception that Christopher Gill rightly judges inappropriate to Antiquity,¹⁴⁷

143 Theophr. Char. 20.7f.

144 On the stable incoherence of Athenian culture see Cohen 1991, 236-240.

145 Millett 2007, 58-68, like Cohen 1991, mainly reads this process of information control in the context of social honour and shame.

146 See also Blok 2004 and Sourvinou-Inwood, Christine. “Männlich – weiblich, öffentlich – privat, antik – modern”, in: Ellen E. Reeder (ed.). Pandora. Baltimore and Basel 1995-1996, 111-120, who both identify a gendered “doubling” of polis society, whereby Dem. 54.110-113 (for instance) attests a conception of females as acting in the polis, especially in the context of embedded religion. Conceiving of individual religious action as a series of overlapping networks (Eidinow, Esther. Oracles, Curses, & Risk among the Ancient Greeks. Oxford 2007, 210-219, 228; eadem. “Networks and Narratives:

A Model for Ancient Greek Religion”, in: Kernos 24 (2011), 9-38) serves to further contrast the discourse visible in the Characters. Note, however, that the prytany decree Dow 1937, no. 36 (212/1 BC) nevertheless explicitly differentiates the demos from women and children, marking a discursive distinction between political community and dependents. On female networks of interaction and social capital cf. also recently Taylor, Claire. “Women’s Social Networks and Female Friendship in the Ancient Greek City”, in: Lin Foxhall and Gabriele Neher (eds.). Gender and the City before Mo-dernity. Chichester 2013, 213-230.

147 See Gill, Christopher. “Peace of Mind and Being Yourself: Panaetius to Plutarch”, in:

ANRW II.36.7 (1994), 4599-4640, esp. 4638. See Aristot. Pol. 1252a-b for the view that women and slaves, the kyrios’ dependents within the oikos, are naturally secondary and that the deme consists solely of the patrilineal community. It is hardly a coin-cidence that Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1112b24-29 mentions mediated action only within the exclusively male sphere of philoi. This discourse too is obviously conflicted, but to my knowledge the male prerogative and control is never really challenged, cf. Xen. Oec. 7;

but as what we might call ‘situational composite meshes’, consisting mainly of identities (i.e. expectations about interactions), but also of what we would con-sider other actors. In psychology, this conception is also known as the distributed self and is more or less identical to Callon’s model of the situational translation of compound actors, outlined above.¹⁴⁸ There is some evidence that the oikos could, in some contexts, be understood emically as part of the individual’s distributed self,¹⁴⁹ with evidence deriving mainly from contemporary curse tablets. In the Characters, the Superstitious Man (δεισιδαίμων) is at great pains to cleanse not only his own person but also his entire house and his wife and children once he suspects he has been cursed.¹⁵⁰ The evidence shows that possessions and family members could be considered parts of the ‘self’ of the individual attacked by a curse, since the indications that one has been cursed are found everywhere in the personal sphere, in humans, animals, and crops, in bodily and mental faculties,

Plut. Per. 37.2-5; Aristot. Ath. Pol. 26.4. Within an ANT-framework one might conceive of distributed selves as actants, the parts of a compound actor, on which see Latour 2007, 76-108, esp. 95f. See also Konstan 1997a, 16f., for a discussion of the fun-damental difference between antiquity and modernity constituted by the invention of the private, reflected self with a discursively constructed psychology.

148 Callon 1991, 139-143. Further on the concept of the ‘distributed self’ see Wetherell, Margaret and Maybin, Janet. “The Distributed Self: A Social Constructionist Per-spective”, in: Richard Stevens (ed.). Understanding the Self. London 1996, 219-280, esp.

221-229. In the constructionist perspective, the self ‘expands’ and ‘shrinks’ situationally and can be thought of as a sort of dynamic thread that ties together aspects of body, psyche, and environment in ever-changing configurations. The key point is again that identity is socially produced and always the result of joint interaction. The idea is thus not new here but was prefigured by the composite actor-as-network concept devel-oped on p. 74.

149 The Greek word οὐσία means both ‘property’ and ‘being’ (see LSJ s.v., A and II). The wide connotations of the word oikos suggest the same conclusion, cf. Finley, Moses I.

The Ancient Economy. Berkeley 1973, 18f.

150 Theophr. Char. 16.7, 10, 11A. See for this conception also Collins 2008, 16f., 87, 94f.

On the Athenian practice of cursing in general see Eidinow 2007, 139-155. Cf. Plat.

Leg. 933d-e (ὃς ἂν φαρμακεύῃ τινὰ ἐπὶ βλάβῃ μὴ θανασίμῳ μήτε αὐτοῦ μήτε ἀνθρώπων ἐκείνου, βοσκημάτων δὲ ἢ σμηνῶν εἴτ᾽ ἄλλῃ βλάβῃ εἴτ᾽ οὖν θανασίμῳ [...].), which likewise suggests that the people dependent on the head of a family are ‘part’ of him, as are his flocks and beehives. The same dynamic is apparent in the conceptualisation of pollution, miasma, which seems to possess a materiality that is removable through ritual action and only later becomes metaphysical; see Chaniotis, Angelos. “Greek Ritual Purity: from Auto-matisms to Moral Distinctions”, in Petra Rösch and Udo Simon (eds.). How Purity is Made. Wiesbaden 2012, 123-139, here 123-126. Accordingly Plat. Euthyph. 14e can consider ritual cleansing as operating on a societal payment code (ὁσιότης is tentatively equated with an ἐμπορικὴ τέχνη).

even hopes and dreams. This documents precisely such a distributed conception of the self.¹⁵¹

This observation brings us closer to identifying the complexities of identity underlying the individuals portrayed in the Characters. We have seen that the individual characters seem to derive from a web of identities that constructed (and at times deconstructed) the oikos as a space under the sole control of the adult male, an individual space conceived of as closed to the agency of other adult male actors.¹⁵² While some of these deconstructions are unsanctioned and are hence ignored by the text, some of them are built into the discourse as identity clusters:

symposia or visiting friends, for instance, transformed parts of the household into what one might call a ‘semi-public’ space for a limited time. Viewed in terms of the distributed self, however, the identities associated with such states emerge as a set of behavioural expectations that regulate the contingencies of this situation, adapt the distribution of the self, and render it normal rather than divergent.¹⁵³ The identities governing friendship, for instance, similarly sanction the presence of male friends in the house.¹⁵⁴ The evidence of the Characters considered so far suggests that the text conceptualises the individual as a compound, distributed actor under the sole control of the translator: the enrolled component parts contribute to his agency, which is itself paramount in exerting control over the other members of his oikos and the physical house. The discourse tends, however, to obscure the actor’s compound nature in order to reinforce his control. The

151 Cf. Eidinow 2007, 142-152. DTA 49, 50, 53, 56, 66 are some examples for the common act of binding tongue and spirit. Others (e.g. DTA 68, 74, 89, 97, 98) aim to confine members, faculties, and economic activities. The longer curses DTA 55 and 68 also attest the binding of families and households. In general the curse tablets seem to reflect a somewhat less economically potent, urban stratum of society, since inn- and shopkeepers are common and the concerns are local. Their concern is with controlling the agency of others through disabling communication and faculties, as well as exclu-ding the target from society (e.g. SGD 48).

152 Cf. Du Boulay 1974, 19 for a modern Greek parallel as well as Bleicken 1995⁴, 422-427, who observes a “Nebeneinander und Ineinander” (425) of private and public for the Classical period.

153 Theophr. Char. 2.10; 5.5; 6.3; 7.7; 9.3; 10.3, 11; 12.11; 13.4; 17.2; 21.2, 7; 24.9; 30.2, 4, 16, 18. On the symposium as a social space see: Davidson, James N. Courtesans &

Fishcakes. The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. London 1997, 183-186 (where he considers the oikos as little more than an economic container).

154 Cohen 1991, 84-86; cf. Konstan 1997a, 82. The value of philia enmeshes individuals into the self by equating them with kin (Plat. Leg. 738d-e; Isae. 3.19, 4.18f., 9.10f.).

Since friends are normatively expected to participate in the major events of public family life, including festivals, weddings, larger sacrifices, and funerals (Dem. 58.40;

Isae. 2.3, 8.18; Aristoph. Acharn. 1056, 1067f.), they become woven into the social network of household and self.

individuals of the Characters are thus constructed as equals interacting with one another in a social space that is ‘public’ in the sense that it exists on the fluctating

individuals of the Characters are thus constructed as equals interacting with one another in a social space that is ‘public’ in the sense that it exists on the fluctating

Im Dokument Accommodating the Individual (Seite 120-131)