BMCR 2009.01.13, Jan N. Bremmer, Greek Religion and Culture

Jan N. Bremmer, Greek Religion and Culture, the Bible, and the Ancient
Near East. Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture, v. 8.
Leiden/Boston:  Brill, 2008.  Pp. xviii, 424.  ISBN 9789004164734.
$148.00.

Reviewed by Barry B. Powell, University of Wisconsin-Madison
([email protected])
Word count:  4423 words
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Greece's debt to the Ancient Near East was so profound that some
scholars today prefer to view Greek culture as an offshoot of Near
Eastern culture. Nonetheless it was different, based in a system of
writing so altered from its Near Eastern antecedents that a kind of
veil prevented scholars from seeing what went before, and how what went
before shaped Greek culture. In this elegant book Jan Bremmer brings
together fourteen articles that trace Eastern influence on Greece, all
published before but here lightly revised and organized according to
the presentation of various themes in the Bible: creation, Eve,
paradise, fratricide, heavenly war, the Flood, "don't look back,"
seers, dining customs, the scapegoat, revelation, magic, the healing
god, Attis, and the Golden Fleece.

In "Canonical and Alternative Creation Myths" Bremmer notes how
creation myths in the East were told only in a ritual context, but in
Greece during secular feasts at the houses of kings and aristocrats.
The Babylonian story of Tiamat and Apsu, the primordial waters, turns
up in the Greek tradition of Tethys, a form of "Tiamat," and Okeanos,
whom Homer calls apsorhoos, as if he knew the Babylonian name Apsu.
Other Greeks thought that Night, not water, might have been the first
being, like the "darkness upon the face of the deep." Hesiod's account,
of course, which had the most influence, combines earlier traditions of
the watery, dark origins of things, but introduces Eros, a motive force
not really clear in Eastern sources. Bremmer writes as if Greeks had
actually read such Babylonian documents as Enuma Elish that describe
the intermingling of Tiamat and Apsu, but because that cannot be true
we continue to wonder how Homer and Hesiod might have received their
material.

The so-called canonical Greek cosmogony ends with the race of the
Titans, but there were other "orphic" cosmogonies. The Derveni papyrus
teaches much about such occult views, which seem to have traced the
origin of the world to a primordial unity followed by the separation of
heaven and earth. Bremmer finds the source of this mytheme in Egypt,
where it certainly is important, as he accepts that the gold plates
found in Mediterranean graves descend from the Egyptian Book of the
Dead. While Bremmer distinguishes the cosmogonic image of an initial
separation from Hesiod's description of spontaneous appearance followed
by sexual generation, surely Cronus' castration of Sky, who lay across
Earth, suggests the same image, an original unity until Sky separated
from Earth.

Aristophanes parodic bird-cosmogony, which involves a winged Night and
a primordial egg without parent whence sprang the birds, must depend on
Orphic models, Bremmer thinks, and eventually go back to the Egyptian
so-called Hermopolitan cosmogony, in which the ibis-god Thoth laid a
primordial egg. From the Aristophanic egg sprang Eros, Hesiod's
personification of first motion. Aristophanes and the Orphics must be
taking Eros in this role straight from Hesiod.

In "Pandora or the Creation of a Greek Eve" Bremmer notices that many
local traditions claimed that the first man belonged to the hometown.
As for woman, Hesiod's account was canonical. He tells the story of
Pandora twice, in Works and Days and in the Theogony. She was a
separate creation, a different race and a major innovation, along with
fire and sacrifice, which are all bound together: Prometheus cheated
Zeus with the division at Mecone; Zeus punished man by withholding
fire; Prometheus stole fire; Zeus made woman, the source of all our
suffering. The myth of the theft of fire is old, but Hesiod has told
his own story about it. Hephaestus, the artificer, is not ordinarily a
god who worked in clay, but in Works and Days he does mix clay with
water to make the first woman. Pandora's other artificer, Athena, is
also a god of crafts. Hesiod takes Pandora's name as meaning "gift of
all the gods," but it could as well mean "gifted by all the gods," or
"giver of all presents," a suitable title for the first woman.

Pandora is a thorough calamity, irresistible but lies and deception
within, qualities that come from Hermes. She wears necklaces and crown,
the original sex-pot, and Epimetheus stands no chance against her
wiles. She opens the jar, but Hope remains within, a conundrum never
explained (if Hope is in the jar, what is the good of it?). Hesiod
appears to have confused different elements in concocting his tale.

Hesiod's myth was little told, although Sophocles wrote a satyr play on
it and numerous vases between 470-450 BC show Pandora, perhaps inspired
by the play. Occasional later authors treat the myth. Her original home
may have been in Thessaly, a area of which was called "Pandora."
Pandora transcended local myths of anthropogony because she was the
ancestor of all women everywhere, of the female race. Ancient Near
Eastern myth, by contrast, told only of the origin of the first males.

In "The Birth of Paradise" Bremmer wonders why the Septuagint uses the
Persian word paradeisos for the Garden of Eden.  He examines the word
in the Achaemenid and post-Achaemenid eras. The word appears to be
Median in origin, meaning enclosure and broadly applied to storage
space, orchards, stables, vineyards, and tree farms. In the later
Achaemenid period, the word narrowed in meaning and came roughly to
designate a hunting park for the aristocracy. With the fall of the
Achaemenids, the word referred to enclosures that were small and
without animals to hunt. Probably from the usage of paradeisos in
Hellenistic Egypt, where paradeisoi accompanied the king's palace, did
the authors of the Septuagint in the early third century BC apply the
word to the Hebrew gan Eden, "garden of Eden."

In "The First Crime: Brothers and Fratricide in the Ancient
Mediterranean" Bremmer wonders why the first crime (Cain killed Abel)
was fratricide. He inspects attitudes towards brothers in Greece, Rome,
and Israel to note the importance of brotherly solidarity in a
cutthroat pre-state world. But the very closeness of brothers could
lead to exaggerated violence, of which myth preserves many examples.
Cain's murder of Abel was a natural choice for the author of Genesis to
characterize life after the expulsion from paradise.

There was war in Heaven. "Greek Fallen Angels: Kronos and the Titans"
reviews such traditions in Greece and in the East. The Titans were
thoroughly bad creatures throughout antiquity and even equated with the
biblical 666, "the beast." Homer rarely mentions them, but Hesiod's
account was complemented by the lost Titanomachy, perhaps by Eumelos of
Corinth. We know nothing about the epic except that it told of the
struggle between Zeus and the Titans. Details in Apollodorus must go
back in some way to this poem. Bremmer attempts to sort out something
about the lost poem, for example, that Aither came first in the
generation of the gods and that there was a hundred-hander named
Aigaion. Bremmer tries to recreate Hesiodic innovations based on older
tradition represented by the lost Titanomachy.

Various details suggest origins of stories about the Titans. The
genital-mauling sickle looks like an Anatolian scimitar. The stone that
Kronos swallowed could be a Cretan fetish. The casting of lots for
portions of the universe is an old motif. If a surviving fragment of
the Titanomachy refers to the Flood (it is only a guess), then
(stretching further) perhaps the lost Titanomachy ended with an
anthropogony?

Although Bremmer has characterized the Titans as evil fellows, is this
true of Okeanos, oldest of the Titans? Bremmer reviews the other
Titans, whose names too often are opaque. Who is Kreios, for example?
Hesiodic Iapetos looks like biblical Japheth, but it is hard to see
why. Kronos alone had cult, very occasionally, and festivals named
after him. We cannot explain his name either, although Bremmer fancies
a Hittite origin. A Syrian festival in which masters and slaves changed
places sounds like the Kronia celebrated in Ionia, so maybe there is a
connection; perhaps a poem came with the imported festival. Again
Bremmer imagines Homer or his sources consulting books in Eastern
archives; in any event the Titanomachy no doubt depends on Eastern
models.

As primordial beings the Titans were logically associated with
anthropogony, although Greek myth in general shows little interest in
the topic. The Orphics (whoever they were) had made the connection by
the mid-fifth century BC in the story of the Titans' attack on
Dionysus, from whose ruins was made man. Later, the giants took the
place of the Titans in this story. In Ovid Deucalion and Pyrrha are
descendants not of the Titan Prometheus or Epimetheus, but of the
giants. The Hellenistic Jews knew of these traditions and recast them,
for example in the Third Sibylline Oracle from the second century BC,
which describes a war between the sons of Kronos and the sons of Titan.
Jewish stories of the fallen angels, imprisoned in an underworld,
reflect Hesiod's story and the lost Titanomachy.

Next Bremmer examines "Near Eastern and Native Traditions in
Apollodorus' Account of the Flood." All agree on the Near Eastern
origins of this story. Apollodorus' account depends on Hesiod, a lost
Orphic cosmogony, and the lost Titanomachy, of unknown date but later
than Homer (whom Bremmer places in the wrong century). Undoubtedly the
division of the world by lottery, and features of the Iliadic Deception
of Zeus go back to Eastern sources, but Bremmer again trips in
imagining that the unknown author of the lost Typhonomachy was directly
familiar with the Babylonian poems Atrahasis, Gilgamesh, and Enuma
elish. And certainly the Homeric poems were not "gradually fixed in
writing" (p. 105) (!), but were fixed in writing at a single time and
place.

Bremmer reviews the Flood in Apollodorus. He suggests that the myth
entered Greece in Locris, but was refined in Thessaly where the role of
Deucalion was defined. Although Greek accounts sometimes closely
reflect details in the Eastern accounts, never do they place animals on
the ark, so prominent in the famous Hebrew description.

In "Don't Look Back: From the Wife of Lot to Orpheus and Eurydice"
Bremmer notices how little use the Bible makes of Lot's wife's
transformation into a pillar of salt because while fleeing she looked
back. Commentators, too, have said little. In Greece he finds the
similar motif more influential.

You must not look back when dealing with ghosts, as Odysseus is told
and Assyrian rituals require. In magical ceremonies in general you must
not look back, nor when saying farewell (for the same reason?). The
custom is associated with separations of various kinds and of course is
rooted in an aversion to behold something terrible. Bremmer sees such
magical behavior as a ritualization of a natural human response, but
does not turning around give the ghost power over you? Is that the same
thing as repulsion at beholding the horrible?

As for the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the first attestation of
"don't look back" is in Virgil's Georgics. Even the name Eurydice
cannot be traced back earlier than the second century BC. We cannot
identify Virgil's source, but presumably it was some Greek compendium.
Bremmer sees it as a literary motif in Virgil, rather than something
based in ritual (but isn't Eurydice just such a ghost that magical
practice forbids one to see?).

"Balaam, Mopsus, and Melampous: Tales of Traveling Seers" reminds us
that seers are important in both biblical and Greek traditions. In
Israel, however, a master trained a disciple, whereas in Greece
seership ran in families.  Biblical seers "saw" things, while Greek
seers "knew" things.  Both types moved around a lot. In Greece, the
families of Mopsus and Melampous were famous for seership. Mopsus was
an early Argonaut, famous for his boxing. Greek seers were often
warriors and died in battle, in myth and in reality (Balaam too died on
the battlefield). Mopsus was expert in divination by birds and lots. He
defeated Calchas in a riddle contest, who then died from shame. Mopsus
is at home in Cilicia, where he gave his name to numerous places. He is
named in a Phoenician/Anatolian Hieroglyph bilingual inscription,
although the Anatolian Hieroglyphic version (in the so-called Luwian
language) appears to reflect a form "Moxus" for the seer's name.

Homer refers to Melampous twice, as if his story were well known. A
complex myth, reconstructible from many sources, tells how he
understood the speech of animals and through his mantic skills won a
wife for his brother Bias. He came from Pylos, then later wandered to
Argos and cured the king's daughters of madness, for which he received
part of the kingdom as reward. Many seers were kings, unlike their
biblical counterparts, who did not go beyond king-maker. The seer as
king must, however, precede Homer, because in the archaic age no seer
ever became king.

In the Old Testament Deborah, although a woman, is a prophetess. There
were Greek female seers too, but unlike their male counterparts they
were not travelers. In the Aramaic/Israelite literature, seers were of
a lower class than in Greece, and they were visionaries rather than
technicians.

In the "Hebrew Lishkah and Greek lesche" Bremmer returns to the old
problem of the nature and origin of the lesche. Whatever it was, it
must go back to the Mycenaean period because it gave its name to a
month in various isolated and archaic calendars. Meals were served at
leschai. The Delphians called the Cnidian treasury a lesche because
they met there to discuss serious matters, but its architecture is that
of a dining hall. Evidently philosophical speculation was a feature of
the lesche, where the guests sat in chairs, in the old style, and did
not recline on couches.  The tragedians use the word to refer to clever
speech and social council. An early, perhaps original function was for
adult males to meet in a common mess. Strangers stayed in the lesche
overnight. Its importance declined steeply by the fifth century BC when
it was replaced by the private symposium and the public assembly (but
what is the relationship between the lesche and the symposium?).

Many hold lesche to be Greek in origin, but it may be the same as
Semitic lishkah, evidently a room where people drink or priests eat,
later associated with the temple in Jerusalem. As for the scant
traditions about the telling of myths at the lesche, our information
does not allow good conclusions.

In "The Scapegoat between Northern Syria, Hittites, Israelites, Greeks
and Early Christians" Bremmer examines this ritual famous from
Leviticus by first looking at evidence from third-millennium Ebla,
where something similar took place to purify a room. A thousand years
later a Ugaritic text refers to the custom, although now used to
prevent a disaster. By far the most detailed early description of the
scapegoat ritual is from a Hittite archive c. 1300. The animal--or a
woman--is adorned then sent away to the land of the enemy in order to
avert plague. The Israelites received the rite from Northern Syria, but
allowed only animals to bear the weight of transgression, and attached
the rite to the temple calendar.

Information from Greece is more abundant. Scapegoat or pharmakos
rituals were common: a man or woman would take up the pollution of the
community, either during a crisis of plague or drought, or during
certain festivals. Such rites turn up often in Greek myth. They appear
to have come into Greece via Ionia.

In real life human pharmakoi were chosen from the scum of society, but
in myth their marginal quality could even encompass kings. Although of
common origin, they were given special foods and treated as if they
were important to enhance the efficacy of the ritual. Often the Greek
pharmakoi went to death voluntarily. Their bodies were burned on "wild
wood." They wore plants associated with a marginal social status. They
were led from the heart of the city out through a special gate. They
circumambulated the city, then were stoned and chased over the border.
The pharmakos was rarely or never killed in reality; in myth they are
often killed, as if the story clarifies the ritual's meaning. Scapegoat
rituals tend to take place at the new year to banish evil influence on
the new season.

What, if any, relationship does the scapegoat ritual have to the
Christian doctrine of the atonement in which the sacrificed victim
removes the burden of sin from the community? That teaching seems to
have been Paul's formulation, but he may have heard something like it
from early followers of Jesus. Faint anticipations appear in Jewish
sources, but seem not to have influenced the doctrine of vicarious
death. Bremmer finds a more likely culprit in Euripides, whose plays,
often performed under the Ptolemies, celebrate the theme of one dying
for the good of all. The argument is clever, but hard to believe; Paul
appears to have been an original thinker capable of his own theologies.

The next chapter invokes Steven Spielberg's sentimental film "Close
Encounters of the Third Kind: Heliodorus in the Temple and Paul on the
Road to Damascus." Sometimes people see gods, especially in battle (for
example, the Angel of Mons in the First World War). Heliodorus, sent by
Antiochus IV to take the money from the Jewish temple, saw a rider all
in gold charging on a horse, and so did those who accompanied him. He
also saw two angels before losing consciousness. Later, Heliodorus
converted to adoration of the Jewish God.

Something happened to Paul, too, on the Damascus road. He alludes to
the incident twice, and Luke tells the story three times. Bremmer cites
numerous literary parallels for a vision at noon, then explains Luke's
description as a topos. (But what if Paul did have a vision around
noon? Paul is not a figure in a literary or mythical work.) Following a
strange theory of literary influence, Bremmer seeks for parallels
between Luke's description of Paul's experience and passages in
Euripides, especially the Bacchae.

"Persian Magoi and the Birth of the Term Magic" takes up a theme that
Arthur Darby Nock famously explored in the 1930s. The name Magus first
appears in Heraclitus, where it refers to practitioners of a private
cult. The author of On the Sacred Disease, in the first attack on magic
as we think of it, takes the Magus as a charlatan, a purifier, and
begging priest. Aeschylus calls a man Magos Arabos, as if he had no
idea what a magus really was. In Euripides the word means "practitioner
of magic."

Of course the word is Persian in origin. One Xanthos, a historian of
Lydia, appears to have referred to them and to Zoroaster. Herodotus,
our first real prose source, does not take them to be charlatans, but
seers who understand dreams, celestial phenomena, and are important in
sacrificial rite. The philosophers, too, disagreed with the earlier
poetic use of magos as term of abuse. The word appears in the Derveni
papyrus, c. 420 BC, where they seem to cast spells. Perhaps the singing
of these wandering Magi of verses from the Persian Avestan suggested to
their critics that they were nothing but gibberish mongers.

"Anaphe, Apollo Agletes and the Origin of Asclepius" investigates
scholarship surrounding Apollonius of Rhodes' description of Apollo's
raising of the small island of Anaphe off the coast of Crete. Apollo
appears in history to have been special on the island. Bremmer is
especially interested in the origin of Apollo's epithet Agletes. W.
Burkert thought that the alternative form Asgelatas was a corruption of
the cult epithet of Akkadian Gula, a Mesopotamian healing goddess.
Asgelatas seems to be a variant of Asklepios, but what is the origin of
that name? His sons fight in the Iliad, leading a Thessalian
contingent. In Thessaly, where Asklepios' cult seems to have
originated, his name has the form Askalapios (which does not scan). His
name has many other variations through Greece, often playing on the
popular etymology from Greek aigle, "shining," but the many different
forms suggest a pre-Greek name. In any event, in a nocturnal festival
dedicated to Apollo Aigletes on the small island of Anaphe women and
men mocked one another and may have engaged in orgiastic intercourse,
practices more appropriate in festivals to Demeter (?) and Dionysus.

What is the relationship between the Attis of cult and literature? In
"Attis: A Greek God in Anatolian Pessinous and Catullan Rome" Bremmer
reports on a nineteenth-century scholarly tradition equating the Atys
of Herodotus (killed in a boar hunt) with the Attis of myth and cult,
but this association was never true in the archaic and classical
periods. The earliest attestation of Attis in Greece is from the fourth
century BC, when the cult appears to have appealed especially to women.

The name ates/ata turns up in Phrygian inscriptions from the sixth and
fifth centuries BC, maybe meaning "father," but Bremmer dismisses (too
hastily) their identity with the Attis of cult. Bremmer retells the
highly complex and bizarre myth of Attis preserved in Arnobius of the
third century AD, who summarizes an Athenian essayist Timotheus from
the third century BC. Many very old Near Eastern elements turn up in
the story. Not until the third century AD do we hear of Attis'
resurrection.

Other early sources tend to leave out Attis' self-castration and the
odd hermaphroditic character Agdestis, Attis' companion, apparently
named after a mountain, about whom Arnobius has much to say. Bremmer
takes the Galli, self-castrated followers of Attis, to be named after
the river Gallos in northwestern Anatolia (not after the Mesopotamian
spirits the gallu, as some think) or after a king (mythical or real) of
the same name.

One can isolate features of a hypothetical original Anatolian myth, but
nothing can be confirmed. Certainly there was an Anatolian festival of
Attis and priests who called themselves Galli. The mourning for Attis
was part of the festival. A pine tree may have been involved, promising
renewal. The Galli may have castrated themselves at this festival (but
hardly as examples of "those transcultural groups of men who have given
up their sexuality in the service of religion" (p. 290), and hardly
comparable to the North American Indian Berdaches, men who dress and
behave as women. Does Bremmer understand the psychology of sacrifice?)
It is never clear from Bremmer's descriptions whether the Galli removed
testicles and penis together, or only the testicles and left the
scrotum, or exactly what is known about the nature of the mutilation
(what does "lost his manhood" mean? p. 292).

The cult of Cybele was introduced to Rome in 204 BC, but the first
mention of Attis in Roman literature is in Catullus' poem 63, from the
mid first century BC. Here Catullus freely combines features from the
cults of Dionysus and Cybele, probably basing his poem on a Hellenistic
original.

"The Myth of the Golden Fleece" examines prominent elements of this
celebrated myth, especially the account in Apollodorus, in light of
Near Eastern parallels and folkloristic motifs. As for the fleece,
Bremmer is sympathetic to its identification with the Hittite kursha, a
ritual bag made of cowhide, goatskin, or sheepskin containing fertility
amulets. Other explanations attach the kursha to the Greek aegis,
"goatskin," and perhaps the kursha gave rise to both the Golden Fleece
and the aegis. (But as always with such explanations that attach cult
implements to traditional narrative, there is plenty of room for
speculation.) In the myth of Jason, the Hittite myth of the battle
against the monstrous Illuyankash may explain his need to kill the
dragon that guarded the fleece, because this myth may have been told at
the same festival where the kursha was displayed. (But doesn't the
dragon always guard a treasure in folklore?)

Why did Medea kill her brother Apsyrtus? The question prompts a very
long excursus on close relationships between brother and sister not
only in Greece, but in India, Persia, and Arabia. Apparently brothers
and sisters like one another.  So why did Medea kill Apsyrtos? To break
all ties with the past and, through violating traditional
brother/sister affection, to heighten the horror of her personality.

How did the stories that made up the Argonautica come from East to
West? Overland across what would become the royal road from Sardis to
Susa, and by sea from the North Syrian and Cilician coasts. Although
Bremmer thinks that traders brought the stories, we do not ordinarily
think of traders as singers of tales. Bremmer views Cyprus as playing
an important role in the transmission of some stories, and sees the
word kibisis, referring to the wallet that only Perseus used, as of
Cypriote origin. Perhaps, but I was surprised to learn that on Cyprus
the "alphabet" too might have been passed to the Greeks.

The book concludes with three appendices. One examines Genesis 1.1 in
light of Persian parallels, seeking to find a model for the succinct
"In the beginning..." Similar phrases are used of Ahura Mazda, but it
is impossible to establish chronological priority. A second appendix
about magic and religion notes that the semantic range of these words
is post-medieval and modern and did not exist in the ancient world. Our
own opposition depends on James George Frazer and is therefore of
limited use in understanding the ancient world. In the third appendix
he explores the meaning of the name Megabyxos, a friend of Cyrus the
Great and enemy of the false Smerdis.

A persistent weakness of the book is Bremmer's fancy that early Greek
poets were reading Ancient Near Eastern literatures and in this way
influenced by them. This misconception gives a certain scholastic tone
to his research, as if an old-fashioned Quellenkritik will solve the
very real problems he articulates. The too-abundant notes are also an
unpleasant feature, as if Bremmer were playing a parlor game when the
reader wants to learn something about the ancient world. A footnote
should lead the reader to a source worth exploring, or verify a point
of contention. Too many of these notes, to obscure journals or even
such languages as Polish, do neither. I doubt we need a footnote to
prove that Gladstone was busy in December, 1872 (p. 101) or that Greek
poets could be given to exaggeration (p. 176), or seven citations to
verify that Codrus dressed as a woodworker when he killed himself (p.
180). Will anyone consult the thirteen citations that discuss the
wording of a quotation by Clement of Alexandria (p. 236)? But Bremmer
writes in a European tradition that admires such behavior, and his
clear style, transparent organization of thought, deep learning, and
sober judgments make this book a treasure to explore.