whose "life" is it anyway?

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Whose "Life" Is It Anyway?Thésée et l'imaginaire athénien: Légende et culte en Grèce antique by Claude CalameReview by: Robert GarlandArion, Third Series, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Fall, 1997), pp. 207-221Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163679 .

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Whose Life Is It Anyway?

ROBERT GARLAND

Claude Ca?ame, Th?s?e et l'imaginaire ath?nien: L?gende et culte en Gr?ce antique, 2nd edition, with preface by P. Vidal-Naquet

(Editions Payot Lausanne), 491 pages, paper, Fr. 50.

p A RESENT DAY nationalism works effectively enough without the aid of flag-bearing heroes to symbolize the national

spirit. Our modern day heroes, such as they are, tend to engage in

more trivial or at least less lethal pursuits than leading us aspir

ingly onwards and upwards. That is no doubt all to the good, so

far as good may be detected in the tide of patriotic pride which

post-Cold War politics has ushered into our world. But if, as I do,

you happen to believe4n the power of Greek religion to work mira

cles, it may be seriously questioned whether Athenian imperialism would have achieved such devastating successes in the fifth cen

tury without the spiritual assistance, for want of a better phrase, of the quintessentially non-Athenian Theseus, who, fortunately

for himself and perhaps more fortunately for the Athenians, was

never subjected to a searching investigation into his origins and

affiliation by passport control at the borders between Megara and Attica.

For there can be no question that Theseus' infiltration into the

Athenian consciousness and his subsequent absorption into the

Athenian cultic calendar represents an unprecedented coup on the

part of a foreign interloper. Even after everything has been said

which can usefully be said to account for it, the modern sensibility, or mine at least, still finds itself in awe of the circumstance that

such a palpable and, from a modern historical perspective, easily detectable falsehood could have foisted itself upon his otherwise

sophisticated adoptive countrymen. The reason why no one blew

the whistle on Theseus, in contradistinction to the Tyrannicides, the fallaciousness of whose patriotic myth both Herodotus (5.55;

6.123) and Thucydides (6.54-9; cf. 1.20.2) trenchantly exposed as

a blatant example of the re-writing of history for self-seeking ends, was due to two main reasons: firstly, to the obscurity of the era in



208 WHOSE LIFE IS IT ANYWAY?

which Theseus was alleged to have lived, about which almost any

thing could be said with impunity; and secondly, to the overriding necessity that the Athenians felt in affirming the mythic cycle con

nected with his name to be rooted in fact.

In other words, if the Athenians apparently accepted without

demur the authenticity of Theseus' attachment to their city, this was because Theseus, more than any other of the approximately three hundred heroes and heroines known to us by name who

resided within Attic territory,1 came to be emblematic of, and even

to personify, their democratic constitution, their national unity, their distinctive and venerable religious system, and their much

vaunted freedom from foreign domination. So intimately did the

Athenians take the hero to their hearts that not even the ultra-criti

cal Thucydides seems to have raised so much as a supercilious eye brow when he credited Theseus with being the architect of the

synoecism (2.15). Thucydides' unblushing acceptance of the his

toricity of the deeds and person of Theseus is one of the most inter

esting facts about Greek historiography, although we would do

well to bear in mind that the distinction between myth and history in fifth-century Athens was distinctly permeable?more perme

able than we often are prepared to allow. Hypercritical as we think

of Thucydides as being, he did not deny outright the possibility of

the existence of monstrous races such as the Cyclopes and Laistry

gonians (6.2.1). As Finley2 once commented, "The atmosphere in

which the Fathers of History set to work was saturated with myth. Without myth, indeed, they could never have begun their work."

But perhaps another reason for Thucydides' acceptance of Thes eus is the fact that to have done otherwise would have been even

more unpatriotic, say, than suggesting that the Royal House of

Windsor comprised a bunch of jumped-up foreign johnnies. The defining moment in Theseus' elevation to the status of

national hero, the moment, we might say, when he was officially

granted honorary citizenship, occurred in c. 476/5 when, as Plu

tarch reports, the Athenians received instructions from Apollo's oracle at Delphi "to recover the bones of Theseus and, after giving them honorable burial, to watch over them."3 Before c. 510 Thes

eus was a figure of very minor significance in Attica, as is demon

strated by his comparative unimportance in Athenian art. He was,

moreover, vastly overshadowed by his rival Herakles, on whose

life his own deeds and career appear to have been quite self-con

sciously modelled. If his elevation was due to one person primar

ily, that person was undoubtedly Cimon, whose father Miltiades



Robert Garland 209

had been chiefly responsible for the spectacular victory at Mara

thon. For it was Cimon who dutifully recovered Theseus' putative remains from Scyrus, an inhospitable island in the northern Spor ades, where they had been languishing neglected for several hun

dred years, after our hero had allegedly been murdered by

Lycomedes, the opportunist local king of the island.

Cimon subsequently gave Theseus' old bones honorable burial

at a still unidentified location in the center of Athens, in symbolic

acknowledgment of his role as Athens' true founder or oikist?s, since only individuals of comparable rank could be buried intra

murally. The Athenians accorded Theseus this unique honor on

the grounds that it was he who had single-handedly bestowed on

Athens the status of polis by unifying the demes out of which she was composed. It was in large measure due to this re-burial, which

the Athenians conducted in the unshakable belief that they were

regaining an essential part of their heritage, which we in turn who

claim to know better maintain had never been theirs, that the

Athenians succeeded in generating their own political renewal and

resurrection in the aftermath to the Persian Wars. After all, we

should not ignore the fact that these wars, however triumphalist in

tone they might have been in their final stages, had caused the

destruction of all that was dearest and most precious to them, viz., their temples, statues, graves, homes, the lot. All Attica, except the

Acropolis, had been evacuated in the wake of the Persian invasion.

The return of her citizenry thus more than justified the decision to

re-consecrate and revive the polis in this formal way by reburying and resurrecting their "national" hero through a spiritual sleight of hand which makes Christianity's eschatological promises appear moderate by comparison.

It is Calame's self-professed task in part to attempt to arrive at a

definition of the semantic configuration of Theseus by identifying within the narrative of his life what he calls "its essential isoto

pies." These are defined as "the repetition of figurative elements

which give the narrative its semantic coherence, in the same way

that the canonical schema contributed to its syntactical coher ence" (59). Calame's methodological technique is intended to ren

der intelligible the unconscious formulations which the Athenians

imparted to the figure of their chosen hero, through a series of

what are seen as closely interconnected and thematically apposite

legends. The author does this by conducting a near-exhaustive

investigation into "all the phenomena in which common sense




observes evidence of the symbolic" (37), including ritual, mytho

logical narrative, and the figurative arts, both sculpture and vase

painting. He claims to examine both the "semio-narrative syntax"

and the "semio-narrative semantic." The assumption upon which

this exercise rests is given as follows (38):

In semiotics ... it is agreed that we recognize the existence of

the natural world ... by the significative vision of the subject and the cultural group to which it belongs. For us Westerners, the world around us that is informed by meaningful visions

presents itself to us as a physical and biological reality that

is particularly subject to modifications which are imposed on

it whether by linear developments (human growth), or cycli cal developments (seasonal growth), or by unforseeable

accidents.

Calame's purpose in L?vi-Straussian terms may thus be described as an attempt to show "not how men think in myths, but how

myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact."4 Myth is meta-language or, to use Louis Hjelsmlev's con

cept, a "semiotic connotative," or, as even the least Continental of

us can perhaps agree, it is, as Ca?ame puts it on one occasion with

unimpeachable simplicity, what is "l? pour autre chose" (30). It has been said rather uncharitably of modern French critics

that, envious of the prestigious signs of physicists, they now com

pete by chalking up theorems and theories of their own, words

having failed them. No one could accuse Ca?ame of having been

failed by words, even though he, too, resorts to theorems that

involve Subject, Anti-Subject, Disjunction, Conjunction, and

Predicate, along the lines of Algirdas Greimas's "grammaire actan

tielle" (57). This is a long book on a subject extremely rich in

interpretive potential and with vast implications for our under

standing of the genesis of myth and its application in the service of a distinctive political ideology, since Theseus' life and exploits served to explain to the Athenians more about their religious insti

tutions than did those of any other single figure in their legendary or historical past. More cults were established in consequence of

Theseus' expedition to Crete and his subsequent slaying of the

Minotaur than of any other event.

Calame's first chapter, entitled "Symbolic Creations," investi

gates, at a level of somewhat vertiginous abstraction, the chestnut

ridden connection between myth and ritual, which will be one of



Robert Garland 211

the author's principal concerns throughout the book. Disarmingly introduced as "a chapter of anthropological elucidation," and

acknowledged in the preface by Pierre Vidal-Naquet to be "diffi

cult reading, to be sure" (12), it is in places almost impenetrable,

being chockful of the obscurantist terminology of Greimas's S?m

antique structurale (cf. especially 55-60, which are none the less

essential reading as an introduction to the author's analytical

technique).

Chapter 2, entitled "The Adventures of Theseus," offers a voy

age around the narrative of Theseus' life, analyzed syntactically in

a way that seeks to extrapolate a logically structured coherence

from the sum of its parts. The discussion proceeds chronologi

cally, beginning with the establishment of Theseus' claim to the

Athenian throne as the son of Aegeus. It concludes with his acces

sion upon returning from his Cretan adventure and following the

suicide of his father. As Ca?ame (70) points out, everything about

Theseus is highly irregular, in the best traditions of a structural

anthropological analysis of his life:

The very conception of Theseus situates itself at the point of

divergence from normality, and this from a triple perspective:

spatial (outside of Athens and of Troezen, on an island),

juridical (outside the legal ties of marriage), and social (out side the values assigned to a person of adult years).

It is in Calame's eyes further testimony to the hero's pervasive

marginality that all the exploits that he undertakes in order to

insert himself into Attica and obtain political power reveal not the

tactics and strategy of a fully-fledged hoplite but rather those of an

ephebe. So, too, in his military role as guardian of Athens' borders

Theseus is associated with the skira, land that is uncultivatable

and characteristic of the frontier zones where ephebes did their

military service. And it is the skira, accidentally on purpose, which

happens to be the kind of terrain where Ca?ame himself did

anthropological field work in New Guinea among peoples called

the Iatmul and Kuma, to whom he alludes briefly with personal

insight in Chapter 1 (27-28).

Aegeus' death, which, as everyone knows, was caused by the

hero's fatal failure to hoist a white sail announcing his victory to

his father on shore, effectively put an end to the chain of murders

which began with the assassination of Androgeos and which




prompted Minos' demand for human tribute (123). As Ca?ame

points out, whether Theseus' lapse of memory was deliberate or

involuntary, a question which became a popular subject of debate

in later Greek and Roman literature, it has the consequence of

making him a parricide (122), which is not the least extraordinary of his qualifications as a model for the future Athenian citizen.

Chapter 3, entitled "Cults 'Founded' by Theseus," examines

both the cults and the rituals which became attached to the Thes

eus legend and whose origins are hence collectively traced to a sin

gle defining political and religious moment. In Attica these include

the Hecalesia held in honor of Zeus Hecalus, which originated from a vow made by an old woman called Hecale to Zeus for Thes

eus' safe return just before he went hunting the Marathonian bull; the Cybernesia, which commemorated the helmsmen who

directed his ship to Greece; the Oschophoria and Pyanepsia, both

celebrated in honor of the successful accomplishment of his

Cretan adventure; the Panathenaia and Synoecia, which commem

orated the synoecism; and many more besides. Other cults alleg

edly founded by Theseus existed on Naxos, Cyprus, and Delos.

Ca?ame says much, rightly, about the manipulation of public sen

timent which seems to underlie this whole exercise, concluding

(176) that "in the description of deeds performed outside Athens

neither rite nor myth escape [the] process of manipulation, aiming to integrate the practices of the one into the logic of the other." It

should not be overlooked, however, that the exercise also presup

poses a quite extraordinary degree of consensus and collaboration

on the part of a very disparate collection of venerable cults, all of

which, for whatever reason, either saw it in their best interests to

ascribe their origins to the initiative of Theseus or alternatively could be bullied into so doing. Knowing as we do absolutely noth

ing about the links which previously existed or now had to be

forged between the promoters of the cult of Theseus on the one

hand and the numerous priests and priestesses on the other who

now in some sense at least placed their autonomy under its con

trol, it is difficult to envisage the stages by which this mammoth

and preposterous goal was achieved.

In Chapter 4, entitled "Mythical Figures of a National Hero," Ca?ame passes to a semantic investigation of myth and ritual, dem

onstrating how the narrative and iconographical record alike pay close attention to the stages of Theseus' maturing from pats to cit

izen-hoplite. He observes that when Theseus pits himself against



Robert Garland 213

the monsters which infest the road between the P?loponn?se and

Athens he is depicted in the conventional guise of a young man,

viz., beardless and nude (187). In his combat against the Minotaur,

however, he assumes for the first time in his career the role of

adult.

In Chapter 5, entitled "Athenian Cultic Cycle and Space," Ca?ame is much exercised, in true structuralist fashion, with the

relationship between cult and alimentation particularly vis-?-vis

the Pyanopsia and Oschophoria festivals, as well as in connection

with cults of Athena, Poseidon, and Demeter. Summarizing the

previous chapter and anticipating the present one, he writes (289):

The sensation of hunger with which we are left from a syntac tical study of rite in short supply can be supplemented by a

semantic analysis which will focus primarily upon the values

invested in the description of ritual in the "Predicates" as well as in the actors who occupy the "positions actantielles" of

Subject and Destinator.

The investigation permits him to draw certain conclusions regard

ing "ritual collaborations," not the least between the tutelary dei ties Athena and Poseidon on the one hand and Theseus on the

other (354). Ca?ame demonstrates that the festive calendar and the location of sanctuaries within the territory of Attica in combina

tion gave semantic expression to the narrative of the hero's life.

The final chapter, entitled "Symbolic Heroisation in History," which investigates the Theseus myth from a political standpoint, is the most interesting for the historian. "Great political figures and military encounters constitute . . . the key to the invention of

myth," the author importantly states (398). A study of the histori cal development of the myth follows, from the first appearance of

individual elements such as the combat with the Minotaur and the

rape of Helen, through to the genesis of the Theseus cycle, its sub

sequent appropriation by the Athenians, and its political implica tions in the fifth and fourth centuries. Though other scholars have

argued for earlier attempts by self-interested politicians, notably Peisistratus or Cleisthenes, to attach themselves to the figure and deeds of the hero in order to invite favorable comparison with their own deeds, Ca?ame (416) is surely correct in identifying Cimon as

the essential brains behind Theseus' promotion to national hero

par excellence. This is suggested by the recovery of his bones,




which is described by the author as "an ostentatious action which

could not but evoke memories of the solemn return of Peisistratus,

mounted on a chariot and accompanied by a woman dressed as

Athena, on the occasion of his second seizure of power in Athens."

As in the world of show business so in the world of Greek religion, it takes the work of a lifetime to become an overnight success. Very

probably much of the ground for his promotion was laid in the

generation before Cimon appeared on the scene.

Cimon's motives for backing Theseus deserve a rather more

detailed treatment than they receive here, however, and I would

suggest the following reconstruction.5 In the wake of his father's

impeachment, which took place barely one year after his great vic

tory at Marathon in 490 and which was followed by his death in

disgrace shortly afterwards, the youthful and ambitious Cimon

was in dire need of an instrument with which to polish up the fam

ily's tarnished image, this being a necessary precondition to his own political rise. If the recovery of Theseus' bones was the instru

ment in question, it undoubtedly served the purpose, for, as Plu

tarch informs us, this was the chief reason why the Athenians felt

well-disposed towards him. In the years to come, moreover, they

tangibly demonstrated their gratitude to him by the frequency with which they elected him to the office of general.6 No less

important, however, was the fact that the cult of Theseus together

with its extensive religious network of support gave Cimon a pow

erful weapon with which to counter the political influence of his

rival Themistocles, who, being himself no mean self-advertiser, was not oblivious to what might be effected on the political stage

by the not-so-subtle deployment and exploitation of religious sen

timent. Cimon's championship of Theseus may in fact have been

intended as a response to Themistocles' recent introduction of the

cult of Artemis Aristoboule?Artemis, that is, Of-the-First-Rate

Advice?whose patronage had been decisive in Themistocles'

efforts to persuade the Athenians to resist the Persians with their

newly acquired fleet in the straits of Salamis in 480. As further evi

dence of the same rivalry and of Cimon's determination not to be

outbid, Themistocles' reconstruction of the Telesterion at Phyla seems to find an answering echo in Cimon's restoration of the

much more prestigious sanctuary of the Two Goddesses at Eleusis.

Vidal-Naquet7 has pointed out that the political re-alignment which took place in Athens in this period and the concomitant fall

from grace of Themistocles guaranteed that the hoplite victory at



Robert Garland 215

Marathon rather than the naval victory at Salamis was destined to

become the event which Athenians would henceforth come to cele

brate as their finest hour. In part, no doubt, this adjustment was

made possible by the fact that Theseus himself was credited with

an epiphany on the battlefield of Marathon (cf. 417). Though this

may not have amounted to a complete re-writing of the history of

the Persian Wars, it was certainly a version of events that was far

from innocent of implications for Athenian foreign and domestic

policy. Ca?ame suggests (443) that the hero symbolized not only

military values, but also, by virtue of his Cretan adventure, which

secured for Athens her freedom from Minos' thalassocracy, the

new maritime values. At the beginning of the classical epoch, therefore, Theseus is "the hero of exterior defence and of the

expansion of Attic territory, first on land, later at sea." Ca?ame even goes so far as to claim that Theseus' "autochthonous" appa

rition at Marathon and his "autothalassic rebirth" are contempo

rary.8 This may possibly be so, though it is worth pointing out that

Theseus was not to our knowledge credited with any role at the

battle of Salamis when these new maritime values were first put on

public display. But the fact that qua founding father of the Athen

ian state he could be identified as non-partisan in his affiliation,

possessing links with both the military and the navy, may well

have assisted in the creation of a new political consensus in the

470s. Here as in other areas of social and political life, Theseus'

role is likely to have been analogous to that of a politician who

seeks to foster a spirit of national unity. We wish we knew more

about political alignments in this critical era.

Ca?ame rightly emphasizes that the "symbolic elaboration" of

the Theseus legend is "the product of moments of political crisis

experienced by the democratic Athenian system" (420). It is a leg end that went through progressive enlargement and "resemantiza

tion" as Athens' own political aspirations took shape and evolved.

We are not entitled, however, to draw the conclusion that Theseus'

repatriation and the re-working of his legend in favor of Athens was merely a self-conscious propaganda ploy, even if it is (indis

putably) evident that there were individual political interests at

stake. We cannot, for instance, assume that Cimon did not believe

in the authenticity and power of the bones, even though he surely realized that their recovery would work to his advantage. Not

everything about Theseus should or can be reduced to a mundane

and squalid search for a political agenda.



2l6 WHOSE LIFE IS IT ANYWAY?

Th?s?e et l'imaginaire ath?nien is the work of a high-priest of

semiotics, one, moreover, who is capable of trailing an abundance

of mystification in his coat tails. Taxing, erudite, straining towards a deep understanding of one of the profoundest mysteries

which the pagan world has bequeathed to us?namely the causal connection between its myths, its politics and its rituals? Calame's book will make intellectual demands upon the most pro fessional student of Greek religion. It is right that it should. We are

only now at the point of acknowledging just how remote the world of Greek religion is from anything with which it can remotely be

compared. Increasingly scholars are looking not only to identify the outward forms of religious devotion but also to ask more

searching questions about their implications for the self-identity of the devotees themselves. We are still early on in our understand

ing of the connotative code which informs religious gestures and

explains religious innovations?indeed it is only over the last

thirty years that we have begun to recognize the existence of such a code at all. This study, which gives full weight to the power of

cult in primis to foster what Ca?ame calls "the practical efficacy of

symbolic creation" (443), or, as I would phrase it,9 to chart and

articulate the not always visible currents that turn the course of

history in one direction rather than another, is thus to be warmly welcomed, for it offers a searching diagnosis of one of the most

psychologically charged moments in Athenian history and thus? since the two are intimately related?in the history of Athenian

religion.

It is, moreover, precisely by analyzing in close detail a moment

of civic tension like the one which shot Theseus to stardom that we

can best hope to comprehend the implications of religious ritual and imagery, both narrative and visual. As ancient historians we

have come a long way since Frantz Cumont in Recherches sur le

symbolisme fun?raire des romains (1942) instructed us in a type of

symbolic analysis that reduced everything to a series of neat,

unproblematic and hermetically sealed quasi-Freudian equations (viz., snake =

death, egg =

rebirth, olive = life, and so on). In sum,

in Calame's company we take a major step forward in compre

hending the fictive distance between events and their echoes or

anticipation in religion. If I yet feel certain qualms about some of the assumptions and

pretensions that underlie this investigation, these are admittedly no more than I would express towards any other scholarly work in



Robert Garland 217

the same critical genre. At the beginning of Chapter 6 Ca?ame

states with unimpeachable diffidence (397) :

Legend, both in its forms and in its content, cannot but be

the object of a constant "resemantization" in accordance

with historic moments, but also with the places where it is

formulated and reformulated; at the same time it is in a state

of permanent "resemantization" as a result of our own read

ings, always influenced by temporal as well as spatial circumstances.

The statement would seem to take us perilously close to Derrida's

theory of the text as an endless sequence of signifiers either signi

fying nothing or at least possessing no ultimate or determinate

meaning. Conversely, however, Ca?ame professes belief in the

existence of "a series of narrative sequences which, with evident

variations, all establish the canonical schema" (85). He further

claims (399) to be able to identify the supposed "Urform" of the

legend, which "from the point of view of narrative syntax" he

takes to be the encounter with the Minotaur (because it is this epi sode that installs Theseus on the Athenian throne) and the abduc

tion of Helen (because it is this that leads to his exile and death).

My nagging criticism with this, a familiar one for a cloth-eared Brit to level against Continental theorists and all their houses, is

that of over interpretation, oversimplification, and overstipula

tion. Bertrand Russell defined an external object as a circular sys

tem radiating many possible impressions. As Ca?ame himself

concedes, any version of a legend is at best only a partial and provi

sional record of the changes which it is constantly undergoing. All

surviving (and lost) versions of the legend of Theseus offer differ ent perspectives on an inherently mutable and provisional logos and as such they all constitute an experimental lottery of omis

sions and emphases. We are dealing, in other words, with a partic

ularly intractable and intransigent example of what Derrida

describes as phonocentrism, since we are incapable of determining to what extent the written legend may have contaminated the

alleged "purity" of the spoken versions that preceded it and consti

tuted the initial point of departure. And the process of contamina

tion continues even as Ca?ame interprets, I write, and you read.

Are we entitled to assume that all these perspectives are valid, and




if so that they are equally valid? To coin a phrase, whose Life is it

anyway?

It goes without saying that the Athenians can themselves hardly be credited with any conscious understanding of the system of

interrelations that Ca?ame elucidates within the legend, and this

brings me to the question whether certain methods of inquiry, when driven to their logical conclusion (the approach favored by both Roland Barthes and Algirdas Greimas, on whom Ca?ame

chiefly bases his discursive method), may au fond be self-seeking in both senses of the term. As Schlegel memorably observed, "Each person has already found in the ancients what he needed

and wanted, especially himself." Other semiologists, such as

Umberto Eco, would give more weight to the unpredictability and

complexity of sign production. All, however, would agree that

there is a sound neurophysiological basis to the capacity of all

organisms to interpret signs.

To put it bluntly, I find myself constantly asking whether

Th?s?e et l'imaginaire ath?nien is, for all its flashes of brilliance, in some sense imaginary itself, a self-enclosed symbolic world resistant to anything as vulgar as rational analysis. Here, however,

is not the place to launch an attack on the "theorists," on the value

of whose approach James Redfield has written defensively in a

recent issue of this journal and on whose worthlessness Camille

Paglia has written in apocalyptic tones in the same volume.10 My own approach to the Theseus myth, as to any other, I have to con

cede, is uncompromisingly historical and chronological. It seems to me essential to try to determine as best we can the first appear

ance of any legend as well as the first moment when it begins to

play an integral role in a mythic cycle. This, in my view, should be

the starting point of any interpretive exercise, whereas for Ca?ame

it tends to be the end point. I have other criticisms of a different order. One important

aspect of the myth that receives rather short shrift is the moral

complexity of Theseus' character, which in this book lies buried

beneath larger narratological concerns. I submit, too, that we lose

a sense of the complex mechanical factors whose mobilization and

deployment made possible this bold volte-face in Athenian politics and religion. It was, after all, not merely a conceptual watershed,

but one which must have required fundamental changes in the

ways a vast range of cultic activity was organized and presented

itself to the world. Finally, more attention should perhaps be given



Robert Garland 219

to the special interests of the Atthidographical tradition, on whose

evidence Plutarch chiefly relied, citations from it being largely confined to the notes. What ultimately matters, however, is that even if Calame's perhaps now somewhat dated semiotics strike a

raw nerve, sacrificing as they do everything upon the altar of

semantic coherence and leaving few narrative details either to

chance, gratuitousness, or the purely anarchic delight of storytell

ing for storytelling's sake,11 and even if, too, some of his aper?us

appear too fran?ais by half, the sheer weight of scholarship that

underpins this investigation renders it an invaluable resource for

classicists and historians of whatever ideological bent.12 A few

details: the bibliography is rather selective13 and there are some

important discussions that have been confined to the notes. The

second edition is provided with a General Index but no Index

Locorum.

There could hardly be a hero who shot to meteoric prominence from more inauspicious origins than Theseus, "doubly a bastard"

(70) and "the bastard son of an adoptive son" (74) in Calame's

words. The strangeness of it all was not overlooked by his most

famous biographer, who wrote "everything seems to prove that

the hero came into the world against the wishes of the gods."14 Entitled only by legerdemain to a place in the hearts of trueborn

Athenians, Theseus was none the less ideally and ideologically

equipped to foster in these same Athenians a radically new self

image that would enable them to re-define their polis and assume

a role in the Greek world for which their existing credentials did not equip them. Theseus, in other words, is the imaginary Athen

ian. As Kron15 first argued, it is surely because Theseus, unlike all

the other Attic heroes, was representative of the entire citizen body and not merely a local fraction thereof that he failed to be included

among the ten eponymous heroes who were established as the

founders of the ten Athenian tribes. His exclusion from this club

in 510 was therefore critical to his elevation in 475.

I began this review by remarking on the absence in our modern

world of a symbolic image of comparable resonance and luminos

ity to that which Theseus represented to his countrymen. If we

want to be sanctimonious we might imagine that the Athenians

committed much evil by evoking his name, and further that Thes

eus, or the image of the ideal Athenian that he came to represent, may even have provided them with justification for committing




that evil. It always strikes me as profoundly ironic, given the cata

logue of sexual offenses associated with his name (e.g., his raping of the under-age Helen, his raping of the daughters of the outlaws

Kerkyon and Sinis, and his attempted rape of Persephone), that his

tomb in Athens eventually became "a place of refuge for household

slaves and all those of humble estate who are fearful of others more

powerful than themselves" (Plu. Thes. 36.2). For though Ca?ame

characterizes him at one point as "the just hero" (73), which is true

perhaps in respect to his role as monster slayer, Theseus was far

from being a kind of anemic Lone Ranger fired by selfless devotion

to the common good and bent upon redressing injustices in an

Aegean-style Wild West. On the contrary, he was a master of dirty

tricks, an unregenerate philanderer, and a statutory rapist. So

when they invoked his memory and read their history into his life, the Athenians could hardly deceive themselves into the comforting belief that their empire was remotely beneficial to anyone but

themselves. Heroism in the Greek world had zilch to do with "vir

tue," either in the Christian or Platonic sense of that term. In other

words, if Theseus is the imaginary Athenian, his own deeds mirror with frank and disarming exactitude his real-life counterpart's

bullyboy tactics in the realm of foreign policy. In conclusion, Claude L?vi-Strauss has said that the anthropologist goes to do

field work in order to test himself and have a vision, just as a Com

anche brave once went into the desert. In Th?s?e et l'imaginaire ath?nien Ca?ame brings us his own distinctive and concrete vision

of a no less visionary hero who received his education in the pryta neum of hard knocks.

NOTES

1. E. Kearns, "The Heroes of Attica," Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Stud

ies Supplement vol. 57, Appendix. 2. M. I. Finley, The Use and Abuse of History (London 1986), 13.

3.Thes. 36; cf. Cim. 8.6.

4. Claude L?vi-Strauss, The Cooked and the Raw (New York 1969), 12.

5. As I have tried to demonstrate at some length in "Theseus' Old Bones," Ch.

4 in Introducing New Gods (London and Ithaca 1992), especially 84-5.

6. Cim. $.6

7. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, "Une ?nigme ? Delphes. A propos de la base de Mara

thon (Paus. 10.10.1-2)," 281-302 in RH 238 (1967). 8. "Autothalassic rebirth" is, of course, a reference to the dithyramb composed

by Bacchylides in c. 484-70 (Dith. 17, ed. Maehler [Teubner]), which describes

Theseus' descent to the depths of the sea in defence of his claim to be the son of

Poseidon.



Robert Garland 221

9. Cf. Introducing New Gods (note 5), viii.

10. James Redfield, "Classics and Anthropology," 5-23, and Camille Paglia,

"Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders," 139-212, in Arion, 3rd ser., 1.2 (1991). 11. There are numerous places on almost every page where this point can be

illustrated. I choose just one (265): "Le rapt d'H?l?ne conduit ... a l'?chec de

Th?s?e sur les deux plans fondant la coh?rence s?mantique de l'ensemble de sa bio

graphie l?gendaire; ?chec amoureux, mais aussi ?chec d'une politique tant dans son

aspect ext?rieur qu'int?rieur." 12. See, for example, his exemplary discussion of the nine versions of Theseus'

abandonment of Ariadne on Naxos (106-116). 13. A noteable ommision is E. Ruschenbusch, "Patrios Politeia. Theseus, Dra

kon, Solon und Kleisthenes in Publizistik und Geschichtsschreibung des 5. und 4.

Jahrhunderts v. Chr.," 398-424 in Historia 7.4 (1958). 14. Plu. Rom. 35.7.

15. U. Kr?n, Die zehn attischen Phylenheroen, (Berlin 1976), 224 and 244. Cited

by Ca?ame (441).



whose "life" is it anyway?

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