Kingship and Ritual
Edited by Kathryn A. Morgan
from
UniversityofTexas Website
The scholarly model of development away from monarchy in most of the
Greek mainland is rooted in an overly uncritical acceptance of
fabricated king lists and of the relevance of the Roman and eastern
models for Greek practice. This acceptance stems from a desire to
credit ancient Greek accounts of their own past, but also from a
modern prejudice that traces a teleological development from
monarchy to various forms of republicanism. The construction of
mythic-historical kings satisfies a desire for tidy origins, as
well as for an original focus of authority from which subsequent
developments are diffused. We must, then, always ask whose interests
are served by a model of original kingship and hereditary descent of
authority. If aristocratic elites in the Archaic and Classical
period fantasized about royal descent, this served the dual purpose
of reinforcing their elite status and communicating to non-elites
the (relatively) more egalitarian nature of elite influence in the
polis. Thus attempts at dominance by powerful members of the elite
can be cast as reversion to a superseded past. The contrast between
legitimate hereditary kingship and illegitimate and tyrannical
usurpation of power may thus be seen as a contrast between a
quasi-official historical construction and the harsher reality of
authoritarian government.
Second: ritual and cult. If Morris’ emphasis on the chiefly ritual
importance of the wanax is sustainable (even if it is not the whole
story), the centrality of cult is a major area of continuity between
Bronze Age and later notions of monarchic rule. Ritual kingship
casts a shadow down as far as the Athenian archôn basileus and the
heroic honors paid to ancient city founders. In most later
conceptions, it is the gap between the human and the divine that is
significant, as we see in much of the poetry of Pindar, and also in
the vase paintings cited by Morris. Religious and temporal power do
not coincide. Yet the figure of the tyrant complicates this divide.
Sicilian tyrants such as Gelon and Hieron were anxious to become
city founders, by fair means or foul, and the Emmenids of Acragas
may have used their hereditary priesthoods as a springboard for the
acquisition of temporal power. Peisistratus’ charade as favorite of
Athena, escorted into the polis by the goddess in her chariot, is
also relevant here. We start, it seems, with a ritual king who does
not embody our conception of monarchic rule. While this tradition
continues, we are also presented with an authoritarian ruler (the
tyrant) who attempts to draw to himself the trappings of religious legitimation. This change of emphasis lies behind the Zeus-like
powers of the tyrant in tragedy and comedy, as detailed by Seaford
and Henderson. The Prometheus Bound shows that if a tyrant can be
conceived as a god, a god can also be conceived as a tyrant.
According to Zecharia Sitchin, who has written many books on the
Sumerian tablets, the term "men of renown" in the Genesis passage
should read, from its Sumerian origin, "men of the sky vehicles".
This puts rather a different complexion on the whole story and makes
a great deal more sense of it. The reference to "heroes of old" is
also relevant. The word hero comes from the Egyptian term, "heru,
which, according to researcher Wallis Budge, was "applied to the
king as a representative of the Sun God of Earth." The precise
meaning was "a human being was neither a god nor a daemon." The term
has the inference of a crossbreed race.
The writer Homer (8th-9th
century BC) wrote that "the heroes were exalted above the race of
common men". The poet, Pindar, (518-438 BC) a very relevant name for
readers of "The Biggest Secret" by
David Icke - used the term,
hero/heru, to describe a race "between gods and men". It is
extremely likely that Horus or Haru, the Egyptian son of God and a
mirror of the much later "Jesus" came from the term
heru, which
means the Sun God’s representative on Earth, the hybrid or Aryan
race. (p 72 - "Children of the Matrix" by
David Icke.)
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Morris’ focus on cult is chiefly picked up by Seaford’s treatment of
the tyrant in tragedy. For Seaford, one crucial aspect of the tyrant
is his perversion of ritual. We see this both in the stories
associated with historical tyrants such as Polycrates, and in the
abuse of ritual by tragic characters such as Clytemnestra. The abuse
of the sacred forms part of a larger pattern in which the
destruction of the royal family and the institution of polis cult
becomes a structuring principle in Greek tragedy. The contrast with
Morris’ picture of the Bronze Age situation is instructive. There,
kingly authority is ritual authority. In the later period, however,
ritual becomes a tool in the pursuit of power, and is often
perverted by that pursuit. Seaford’s tragic tyrant exists in a
problematic relationship with ritual, and successful polis cult is
only possible once the tyrant has been expelled. Thus religious legitimation and power has been detached from the king and attached
to the polis. It seems reasonable to consider this a symptom of the
considerable transformation in governmental structures after the
Bronze Age. Even if, with Morris, we find traces of communitarian
government in the earlier period, it is clear that there has been a
reconfiguration of attitudes towards the individual figure of
authority. But the area in which the tension between individual and
community is played out remains constant, and that area is ritual.
Another important characteristic of tyrannical power is wealth.
Seaford points out that tyrants are greedy for money and the power
it allows them to exercise. Yet tyrannical greed may have a positive
counterpart in lavish expenditure, and here again, the importance of
religious factors is striking. As Morris notes, the capacity of
sanctuaries in the Archaic period to attract tyrannical largesse and
the concomitant power and influence wielded by such sanctuaries,
reminds us of the religious significance of kingship in the
prehistoric period. Historical tyrants, both Greek and foreign, seek legitimation and negotiate power in their relationships with these
sanctuaries. Just as tyrannical greed is intimately connected with
impiety in the world of tragedy, so tyrannical expenditure upon
offerings and religious building projects attempts to realign the
tyrant and re-embed him in the religious sphere. In the tragic
imagination, as Seaford suggests, the use of money may mark a
failure in reciprocity, but on a pragmatic level it enables
successful diplomatic exchange and marks pre-eminence. Thus it is
that the Athenian demos engages in quasi-tyrannical expenditure with
its massive use of public moneys, a phenomenon analyzed in Lisa Kallet’s
fascinating essay. The demos both taxes and spends in a
demonstration of its pre-eminent power; its role as economic patron
forestalls challenge from members of the elite, who do not have the
resources to match it. The symbiotic relationship of tyranny,
wealth, and expenditure (studied by Kallet and Seaford), taken
together with the implication of the king or tyrant in religious
concerns (as we see in the essays of Morris and Seaford), goes far
to explain the extraordinary magnificence of the fifth-century
building program on the Athenian acropolis. While Kallet rightly
sees this as an instance of public patronage, it is significant that
this patronage, to use Morris’ words, marks "the convergence of
polis and shrine."
The third area where Morris’ treatment of kingship is significant
for this volume as a whole is that of regional geographic variation.
This concern manifests itself in the remaining essays in two ways.
It emerges as an awareness that we can best understand Athenian
developments in light of a broader Greek context. Thus we note that
robust forms of kingship established themselves chiefly on the
margins of the Greek world, while the communitarian model had
greater force in the heartland. Nevertheless, a network of economic,
military, and diplomatic relationships ensured lively exchanges
between widely varying constitutions. My own essay explores the
notion of "constitutional slide" as a function of the close
proximity of differing forms of government. The richness of
constitutional variation allows both Plato and Isocrates to
criticize democratic tyranny and construct political structures
based on ethics rather than on the number of people in whom power
was vested.
Regional variation mandates an awareness of multiple
audiences and permits the development of "amphibolic" readings of
texts as diverse as Isocrates’ Panathenaicus and the funerary
monument of Dexileos, the object of an unsettling analysis by Josiah Ober. Ober rightly points out that tyranny in the Classical period
was a concern to poleis other than Athens. Our tendency towards
Athenocentrism often predisposes us to ignore this wider context,
but to do so is to ignore an important area of cultural exchange.
Tyranny could remain a concern in Athens because the Athenians had
frequent contacts with kings and tyrants in a politically unstable
world. But it was an exportable concern, as Ober’s investigation of
the Erythrae decree concerning repairs to the statue of a tyrannicide shows. Athens liked to export democracy to the subject
cities of its empire, but its hatred of tyranny, and the concomitant
iconography of resistance to tyranny was just as real an export.
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