"In this original and arresting study, Sara Forsdyke explores Greek literature's complex hybrid of elite literary culture and the non-elite, largely oral culture that lies below its surface. She ambitiously examines themes, imagery, and symbolism with a view to detecting subtle traces of sub-elite popular culture as it existed in both free and unfree social contexts. She is as interested, for example, in how slaves tell tales as she is in the tales the masters told themselves about their slaves; there has never before been a book angled quite like this one."--Paul Cartledge, University of Cambridge

"In this original and stimulating work, Sara Forsdyke carefully sets forth a methodology for assessing ancient Greece's non-elite culture and applies it in a number of engaging case studies, challenging previous scholarship, but without polemic. This book should be of interest to a broad audience of classicists and historians of later periods."--Matthew R. Christ, Indiana University

"In this original and arresting study, Sara Forsdyke explores Greek literature's complex hybrid of elite literary culture and the non-elite, largely oral culture that lies below its surface. She ambitiously examines themes, imagery, and symbolism with a view to detecting subtle traces of sub-elite popular culture as it existed in both free and unfree social contexts. She is as interested, for example, in how slaves tell tales as she is in the tales the masters told themselves about their slaves; there has never before been a book angled quite like this one."--Paul Cartledge, University of Cambridge

"In this original and stimulating work, Sara Forsdyke carefully sets forth a methodology for assessing ancient Greece's non-elite culture and applies it in a number of engaging case studies, challenging previous scholarship, but without polemic. This book should be of interest to a broad audience of classicists and historians of later periods."--Matthew R. Christ, Indiana University

Slaves Tell Tales

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Chapter One

A lot of grassroots history is like the trace of the ancient plough. It might seem gone for good with the men who ploughed the field many centuries ago. But every aerial-photographer knows that, in a certain light, and seen at a certain angle, the shadows of long-forgotten ridge and furrow can still be seen. —E. J. Hobsbawm

This book attempts to understand the ways that ordinary farmers, craftsmen, and slaves in ancient Greece made sense of their world and their place in it. Unlike the wealthy elites, who produced written texts illustrating their worldviews, the ordinary people of ancient Greece left little or nothing from which their experiences and perspectives can be recovered. Like the "trace of the ancient plough," the culture of these groups is largely lost since it existed in "living" forms such as festivals and oral storytelling. Yet when seen from the right angle, the surviving evidence can reveal traces of this lost culture. This study is an attempt to excavate popular forms of culture that lie barely discernable beneath the surface of ancient Greek literature.

Yet this book is not simply an antiquarian inquiry into some curious cultural relics, but an attempt to show that forms of popular culture were vital to the practice of politics in ancient Greek communities. While the intimate linkage between popular culture and politics is not surprising to historians of other time periods, it has received less attention by historians of ancient Greece. The remarkable sophistication of the ancient Greek city-state, and especially of the classical Athenian democracy, has seduced historians into believing that the formal institutions, rather than informal social practices, were the primary locus of politics.

By contrast, I argue that diverse forms of popular culture such as festival revelry, oral storytelling, and the spontaneous collective punishment of social offenders were crucial aspects of ancient politics. Drawing on the approaches of historians of other pre-modern societies, as well as the interpretations of social scientists who study modern peasant cultures, I show that these and other forms of popular culture were sites of vital political discourses and practices that, at different times and places, operated alongside, within, and sometimes even in opposition to the formal institutions of the Greek city-state.

Although I make some strong claims about the importance of popular culture in the classical Athenian democracy, I also draw material from a variety of different ancient Greek city-states. By looking broadly at popular culture throughout Greece, this book puts Athens in perspective and shows, contrary to much modern scholarship, that Athens had more in common with other city-states (e.g., Sparta), and indeed pre-modern and modern peasant societies in general, than is currently recognized.

The Comparative Method: A Problem-Oriented Approach

Each essay in this collection begins with a question. Why did slave-owners on the island of Chios establish a hero-cult for a runaway slave? Why did the ruler of Sicyon name the tribal divisions of his city after lowly animals such as pigs, asses, and swine? Why did the poor citizens of Megara invade the houses of the rich and abuse them verbally and physically? Why were adulteresses in Aeolian Cyme mounted on a donkey and paraded around the town? I suggest that the answers to these questions reveal something fundamental about ancient Greek civilization, namely the centrality of popular culture to the political discourses and practices of the Greek city-state.

Yet in order to arrive at this answer, I reach far beyond the confines of Greek history to examine, for example, images of the grotesque body in popular culture of the Middle Ages, slave tales of trickster animals in the antebellum South, or the ways that landlords and peasants in contemporary Malaysia engage in an ideological struggle to define the terms of their mutual dependence. I draw from this comparative material in part because so much of the evidence for the ancient Greek past—particularly the everyday life of ordinary citizens and slaves—has been lost. By comparing ancient Greece to other historical societies, we can sometimes recognize similarities and patterns that help illuminate the relatively scanty evidence for popular culture in ancient Greece.

There are great risks, of course, in using comparisons in this way. Critics will be quick to charge me with intellectual dilettantism—picking and choosing superficial points of similarity between societies while ignoring fundamental differences of social structure and historical context. In response, it is important to emphasize that I am not claiming identity of either social structures or causal relations between various social and political phenomena in different historical periods. Rather, the comparative evidence is used in one of two ways. First, it is used to support and in some cases provide texture (allow for "thick description") of cultural practices that are only hinted at in outline in the ancient evidence. For example, the social context of an ancient Greek song in which a group of boys appear to threaten a wealthy landowner if he does not give them food and drink can be illuminated by comparison with similar, potentially violent rituals of hospitality between rich and poor in Early Modern Europe.

Second, the comparative evidence is used to construct general models by which the ancient evidence might be understood. For example, patterns of riot and protest in Early Modern Europe can provide the framework for understanding some of the ways in which ordinary citizens in ancient Greece negotiated their relations with those more powerful than themselves. In the latter case, the applicability of the early modern evidence is based not on a single point of comparison—the fact of riot—but rather on a pattern of elements that is evident in both cultures, for example, a concurrence of economic distress among ordinary citizens and extra-institutional, ritualized forms of collective action. I claim neither that the causes of economic distress were identical, nor that the social structures of the ancient Greek city-state and Early Modern Europe were the same. And, as we shall see, the rituals of protest took different forms in different historical societies. English peasants made cacophonic music before the houses of the wealthy, while French journeymen engaged in ritualized forms of cat torture as a mode of protest against exploitation. In ancient Greece, youths sang songs outside the houses of the wealthy and demanded lavish fare. On occasion, these rituals of hospitality resulted in assaults on wealthy landowners' property and even their families.

While acknowledging the cultural specificity of each historical society as well as their differences of social structure, economy, and political regime, I nevertheless argue for a common pattern, namely the tendency of ordinary citizens and peasants to use ritualized forms of popular culture as a medium for expressing discontent. Through the use of such general comparisons, I hope not only to shed light on some hitherto neglected features of Greek civilization, but also to add some case studies from ancient Greece to the available pool of empirical examples through which historians can understand the dynamics of pre-modern societies.

Whereas this study places considerable emphasis on such patterns of similarity between ancient Greece and other societies, I do not intend to obscure the historical specificities of each civilization. My emphasis on similarities is in part a reaction to the tendency of ancient historians to stress the exceptionality of ancient Greece (a term which usually refers to the Athenian democracy). Certainly ancient Greece was a distinctive society with its own cultural traditions, social structures, and historical trajectories. Yet these differences should not lead us to think that ancient Greece was unique in every aspect. A central argument of this book is that by recognizing certain parallels in non-elite worldviews between ancient Greece and other periods of history, we can recover a largely overlooked terrain of the political life of ancient Greek communities.

Popular Culture: How to Recover It?

While this book is aimed in part at ancient historians, I also hope to pique the interest of historians of popular culture in other time periods. Despite the deficiencies of our sources in some regards, ancient Greece provides rich historical material that can illuminate some fundamental problems relating to the study of non-elite culture. I have already touched upon the first such problem, namely the methodological issue of how to recover the culture of ordinary people of the past. This question arises from the obvious fact that the mass of farmers, craftsmen, and slaves left little in the way of material remains, let alone written texts. How then can we confidently reconstruct the ways that they viewed and experienced the world? How can we know the fears, hopes, and fantasies of the mass of laboring humanity in past ages?

On the surface, the difficulties of recovering the culture of the masses might seem to be less severe for historians of ancient Greece. After all, ancient Athens was a democracy during its "Golden Age" (fifth and fourth centuries BCE) and hence the cultural achievements of this period were at least in part a product of the people—the ordinary citizens who farmed the fields, attended festivals, and voted in the political assembly. Yet this view is problematic for several reasons. First, Athens was unique in the degree of involvement of the masses in the institutions of the state. Most ancient Greek states were oligarchies, and, although there were other democracies, these were less radically egalitarian than Athens. If we want to understand the culture of ordinary people throughout the Greek world, we cannot look to Athens as representative. Second, even among historians of Athenian democracy, there is a vigorous debate about the degree to which the surviving evidence reflects a genuinely non-elite perspective. For example, scholars have noted that most surviving speeches given in the political assembly and law courts were by politicians from wealthy Athenian families and that elite values feature in the arguments made by these speakers. Other scholars have argued, conversely, that elite speakers were compelled to appeal to the beliefs of the mass of ordinary citizens in their audience and that therefore the surviving speeches reflect non-elite or democratic culture. Regardless of one's position in this debate, it is an undeniable fact that all the literature that survives from ancient Greece was written by wealthy elites. How then, can we be sure that any surviving text reflects a non-elite world view?

By comparison, historians of the early modern period have the "chapbook," a cheap printed book, as evidence of the popular culture of their period. These scholars can also reasonably rely on the collections of oral tales gathered by folklorists in the nineteenth century. Similarly, historians of slavery in the modern era have oral and written testimony that has allowed them to reconstruct aspects of the culture of, for example, slaves in the antebellum South. By contrast, no popular books or recordings of oral tales survive from ancient Greece. Ancient popular culture has been lost—at least in its direct form—to later researchers.

The qualifying phrase, at least in its direct form, is a crucial point. Some elements of popular culture survive as refracted through the writings of elites. Occasionally, elite writers mention elements of popular culture in the course of pursuing other agendas. For example, Plato and Aristotle provide evidence for popular festivity even as they construct an ideologically motivated argument connecting festivity with social disorder and democracy. By stripping away this ideological bias and by analyzing the Greek evidence in relation to popular festivity in other cultures, one can recover something of its significance for non-elites in ancient Greece.

There are two other ways in which Greek popular culture has entered the surviving literary record. First there are literary genres that bear a clear genetic relation to popular non-literary forms. Most important among these genres are iambic poetry, comedy, satire, and the novel. These literary genres often preserve clearly identifiable popular themes (especially reversals of normal relations, obscenity, and grotesque imagery) even if we cannot take for granted that these elements are exact copies of their popular versions.

Second, there are those genres that—though not derived from popular forms—nevertheless draw material from them. For example, Herodotus makes use of folktales, fables, and proverbs in his Histories. More broadly speaking, the theme of the downfall of the mighty in Greek tragedy may owe something to the reversals or leveling of hierarchical relations in both popular ritual and storytelling. Plato's representation of Socrates in his philosophical dialogues similarly seems to bear some relation to the popular grotesque (as Bakhtin has called it) both in his personal appearance and in his penchant for using analogies drawn from the world of ordinary laborers. Again, however, we cannot assume that these appropriations are direct reflections of popular culture and can therefore be simply lifted from elite texts unproblematically.

What are we to do, then, with these diverse and indirect remains of popular culture? How can we move responsibly from surviving literature to popular culture? The problem is not new, even for historians of popular culture in later periods. Peter Burke has described the popular culture of Early Modern Europe as "An Elusive Quarry" and spends several chapters of his book dealing with the problem of recovering a culture that was largely oral and articulated in "living" forms such as festivals. Even Bakhtin's brilliant discussion of the popular culture of the Middle Ages has come under severe criticism for its acceptance of Rabelais's comic novels Gargantua and Pantagruel as a direct source for peasant culture in sixteenth-century France. Most notably, the literary scholars Stallybrass and White have challenged Bakhtin's attempt to understand popular culture through the lens of a literary text.

The arguments of these scholars are worth considering. Stallybrass and White propose that there are no separate domains, such as authorship and popular festivity, but rather each "are constructed in interconnection with each other." Using the example of Ben Jonson's play Bartholomew Fair, they write: "there can be no question of understanding the play either as a homology of the 'real' Bartholomew Fair, or as a mere thematic pillaging of popular custom by an aloof and appropriative high culture." According to these scholars, sites and domains of discourse emerge out of an "historical complex of competing domains and languages each carrying different values and kinds of power."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Slaves Tell Talesby Sara Forsdyke Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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