Cornell University Press Classics Magazine 2023

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PATRONAGE AND THE RESTORATION OF CHURCHES ON THE ÎLE DE LA CITÉ

by Gregory I. Halfond

In the year AD 585, workmen in Paris discovered lodged within a clogged drain two metallic figurines: a snake and a dormouse. Once removed, for purportedly the first time in its history the city experienced not only infestations of vermin, but also devastating fire. Indeed, not long thereafter, a fire broke out which burned many private residences, and threatened to spread to public buildings as well, including an oratory dedi cated to St. Martin, which stood at the north gate on the Île de la Cité. According to Bishop Gregory of Tours, writing not long after these events, the oratory and other nearby church es were miraculously spared. These buildings included the church of the bishop of Paris, dedicated to St. Stephen, and located on the southeastern corner of the Île de la Cité, the same part of the island where over 1400 years later another cathedral nearly succumbed to flames.

The fire that spread through the cathedral of Notre-Dame on April 15, 2019, was extinguished before bringing down the entire structure, but as the New York Times reported in July 2019, the cathedral actually came precariously close to experiencing this very fate, which would have been a near-incalculable cultural, historical, and symbolic loss. Speaking not long after the fire had been put out, French president Emmanuel Macron called for the cathedral to be rebuilt within five years, ob serving, “In the course of our history, we’ve built cities, ports, churches. Many have burned or were destroyed in wars, revolutions, or by man’s mis takes. Each time, each time, we’ve rebuilt them.”

“In the course of our histo ry, we’ve built cities, ports, churches. Many have burned or were destroyed in wars, revolutions, or by man’s mistakes. Each time, each time, we’ve rebuilt them.”

Macron’s speech was a necessary reminder of the illusion of permanency that surrounds cultur al landmarks such as Notre Dame. So closely are they associated with a particular location or culture that it seems impossible that there ever was a time in which they did not stand. But on the Île de la Cité alone churches have been built, destroyed, rebuilt, and expanded many times over the centuries. The oratory of St. Martin, which had been spared by the fire of 585, for example, did not stand long, although there is no evidence to suggest that it suffered a premature demise.

Conversely, in Gregory of Tours’ own diocese, during the tenure of his predecessor Eufronius a fire raged throughout the city, destroying all of its churches, and requiring the bishop to sponsor a major restoration effort.

Bishops in Eufronius’ time participated in a culture of patronage, in which ecclesiastical and secular elites alike carefully managed the flow of resources to client individuals and institutions. Similar to those corporate and individual donors who to date have pledged millions of dollars towards the restoration of Notre Dame, early medieval elites were cognizant of the societal and personal benefits deriv ing from their generosity. Patrons of the churches of the Frankish Kingdom anticipated in return for their support prayers, personal prestige, strategic alliances with influential recipients, and even divine favor.

However, as I discuss in my book, Bishop and the Politics of Patronage in Merovingian Gaul, the unequal distribution of patronage could have the unintended consequence of undermining social cohesion and alliances. This problem, of course, remains true today. Newspaper reports have emerged in recent months regarding backlash against wealthy donors to the Notre Dame rebuilding project on the grounds that this money might have been better spent on addressing social inequalities. Even in light of such criticisms, elite patronage has proven a remarkably du rable socio-economic instrument. In Paris alone, it quite literally provided the foundations for the many churches whose illusionary permanency has helped to define the identity of the city since antiquity.

Macron’s speech was a necessary reminder of the illusion of permanency that surrounds cultural landmarks such as Notre Dame.

THE EXCERPT

Introduction

Who Owns the Past?

Following a wave of protests in 2020, dozens of Confederate monuments, statues, and memorials across the southern United States were damaged or removed, including a statue of Jefferson Davis in Rich mond, Virginia and one of Robert E. Lee in Montgomery, Alabama. Yet, the 2020 assault on Confederate monuments was hardly unprecedented—many had already been removed following the 2015 Charleston mass shooting and 2017 demonstrations in Charlottesville. The damage, defacement, and remov als in turn provoked fierce reactions, including some from President Trump, who complained that “they have no idea what they are ripping down” and “you don’t want to take away our heritage or our history.”1 Regrettably, the presi dent did not specify exactly whose heritage or history he had in mind but, to judge from the differential employment of pronouns, an inclusive definition was not intended.

It was not only monuments commemorating the Confederacy that were targeted. Across the United States, statues of Christopher Columbus were van dalized or removed, including in Chicago’s Grant Park, and (Woodrow) Wil son College at Princeton University was renamed after Mellody Hobson, a prominent black alumna, on account of the twenty-eighth president’s racist and segregationist policies. Abroad, the United Kingdom addressed similar con cerns, as the governors of Oriel College, Oxford, voted to remove a statue of

on

Cecil Rhodes, on the grounds that he represented imperialist values that were no longer acceptable, while demonstrators in Bristol toppled a statue of the merchant, politician, and slave-trader Edward Colston.

The events described above illustrate more than that the meaning of mon uments changes over time. Were that the case, their conservation could per haps be justified in part with the rather flimsy defense that it is unethical to practice selective memorialization and occlude the historical record or, more importantly, as a continuous rejection of outmoded attitudes and ideologies, as has sometimes been argued for the preservation of Fascist architecture in Rome. Rather, the point is that, throughout their life histories, monuments mean different things to different people.

There are numerous examples of monuments to which multiple and diverse “stakeholders” lay claim, including the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, con tested by Muslims and Jews, or Ayodhya in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh where, in 1992, Hindu activists demolished the Babri Mosque, triggering riots in which more than 2,000 lost their lives.2 Of course, contestation can also take less violent forms. In her polyphonic analysis of the Athenian Acropolis, Eleana Ya louri explores how the “Sacred Rock” is simultaneously a global and a national symbol. (Actually, when set alongside other regional monuments like Thessa loniki’s White Tower, the Acropolis also becomes a local Athenian landmark.) Much of the time, these competing claims are in tension with one another, and the profession that certain monuments are part of “world heritage”—an argu ment that the British Museum has often employed to justify its custody of the Parthenon Marbles—can easily be exposed as yet another iteration of Western colonialism. On the other hand, as Yalouri explains, national recognition of the Acropolis’s global significance proves to be advantageous in establishing a debt that Greece is owed by the West.3

It has become common in recent scholarship to regard monuments and landscapes as lieux de mémoire, a term employed by the historian Pierre Nora to denote sites, whether material or nonmaterial, that function as the “ulti mate embodiments of a memorial consciousness.”4 In fact, the idea had al ready been anticipated by the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who argued that the truth claim of a group memory “needs to be presented in the concrete form of an event, of a personality, or of a locality.”5 In an analysis of how dif ferent ages constructed the topography of the Holy Land, Halbwachs dem onstrates persuasively that landscapes and monuments can change their signification over time, but his Durkheimian analytical framework is less at tentive to synchronic contestations over meaning. That, instead, the physical vestiges of the past do evince multivocal interpretations on the part of diverse

stakeholders can be illustrated by the history and cultural heritage of mod ern Argos in Greece, as is evident in the following case study.

the Battle for the Barracks

On March 9, 2017, the Byzantine Museum of the Argolid finally opened its doors to the public after a twelve-year remodeling project. Its realization drew to a close a contentious and, at times, bitter strug gle that had divided opinion in the town of Argos for forty years. The building in which the museum is housed had originally been built in 1828–1829, to the design of the Ithakan architect Lambros Zavos and on the orders of Greece’s first governor, Ioannis Kapodistrias, in order to house two squadrons of the Greek cavalry (figure 1). The barracks flank the southern side of the market square at Argos—a loca tion that had previously been occupied by a hospital during the Second Vene tian Occupation (1686–1715) and subsequently by the Turkish Bezesteni (covered market). Over the course of almost 150 years, the barracks had ac commodated not only the cavalry but also the infantry, the Sixth Artillery Reg iment, and a mounted detachment of the town’s gendarmerie. For a brief period in 1893–1894 the building served as the town’s high school, after the roof of the school building collapsed; during the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 it housed Turkish prisoners of war and, in 1922, it provided shelter to refugees from Asia Minor. Originally a quadrilateral building ranged around a large open courtyard, the north wing was demolished in 1938. In 1968, the Greek Ministry of Defense agreed the sale of the building to the municipality of Ar gos for the token price of 8,214,000 drachmas (a little over 24,000 euros), after which it quickly fell into disrepair.

On March 5, 1977, the municipal council—with the enthusiastic backing of the then mayor, Dimitrios Bonis—voted to demolish the structure with a view to developing the site. Among the suggestions for its use were a park, govern ment offices, a multistory car park, and a bus station. Within a few months, a “preservationist” movement had arisen, spearheaded by the archaeologists of the Ministry of Culture’s Fourth Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiqui ties, who proposed in September 1977 that the barracks should instead be con verted into a cultural center. The preservationist cause was strengthened further at the end of the year with the foundation of the Cultural Association of Argos (Politistikos Omilos Argous, POA), though the association never counted more than 180 subscribing members. On the side of the “demolitionists” were devel opers and contractors, the majority of the municipal council, the parliamentary

deputies for the region (most—though by no means all—from the conservative New Democracy party), and some local journalists, including Georgios Thomo poulos, former mayor and editor of the Argiakon Vima newspaper.

Locals, however, were not the only stakeholders. Kapodistrias had been con troversial in his own lifetime and his legacy would turn out to be no less contentious, but his short term in office coincided with the foundation of a free Greek nation. As a consequence, buildings associated with his regime were endowed with a national significance in addition to any local meanings. Indeed, the issue of the barracks soon drew in the Athenian press and promi nent public intellectuals, such as the architectural historian Charalambos Bouras and the archaeologist Manolis Andronikos, as well as senior govern ment figures—most of whom sided with the preservationists. For example, the Greek minister of defense, Evangelos Averoff, announced that he was will ing to forgive the municipality the final payment instalment of 400,000 drach mas if it would restore the building and use it as a museum, a cultural center, or something similar. On January 24, 1978, after consultation with the Cen tral Archaeological Council, the minister of culture, Georgios Plytas, declared the building a historical monument and, in April, the Ministry of Culture ap proved a plan to convert it into a cultural center, for which twenty million

Figure 1. The Kapodistrian barracks.

I ntro D uct I on

drachmas were set aside. An architectural commission, under the presidency of Solon Kydoniatis, was appointed to draw up plans for the cultural center, which were submitted to the Ministry of Culture in March 1979. Almost immediately after the Ministry of Culture’s resolution to list the bar racks as a historical monument, the municipal council filed a request with the Council of State in Athens to annul the decision. The Council of State would eventually reject that request in December 1978, but while the matter was awaiting a judicial decision, bitter divisions persisted. In October, Bonis lost the municipal elections and was replaced as mayor by Georgios Pirounis, who proved to be no less adamant in his determination to demolish the barracks. Pirounis defended the demolitionists, arguing that they were not—as the Athe nian press had portrayed them—uneducated rustics who desired to replace historical monuments with tenement blocks and cement but included intel lectuals, lawyers, civil engineers, public officials, and even historians. He also claimed—though without presenting any evidence—that a team of experts had consulted historical sources and determined that there was no connection between the barracks and Kapodistrias. A further complication arose from the support that foreign archaeologists of the École Française d’Athènes (French School of Archaeology), who had been working periodically at Argos for al most a century, had lent to the side of the preservationists. One of them, Pierre Aupert, was denounced to the French ambassador for interfering in internal Greek affairs. In a similar vein, Argiakon Vima on December 13, 1981, accused the École Française of intervening in matters that were of concern only to citizens of Argos. Matters were not helped by inertia at the Ministry of Culture, where Geor gios Plytas had been replaced by Dimitrios Nianias. August 1980 saw the swearing in of yet another minister of culture, Andreas Andrianopoulos, who decided that he needed to refer the matter of the barracks back to the Central Archaeological Council. The council unanimously reaffirmed its earlier ver dict in favor of preservation and, on October 16, the president of Greece, Kon stantinos Karamanlis, even signed off on a decree that again designated the barracks as a listed building. On the other side, however, the demolitionists secured the tacit support of the New Democracy prime minister, Georgios Rallis, and the issue again ground to a standstill. Nor did a swift resolution to the situation occur after the national elections of October 1981, when Andreas Papandreou’s socialist PASOK party was swept to power and the actor-turnedpolitician Melina Mercouri was appointed minister of culture. In March 1984, Mercouri finally approved a plan to convert the barracks into a cultural center that would also house a Byzantine and folk museum but the Ministry of Plan ning, Settlement, and the Environment delayed the work further by deciding

to commission yet another study of the surrounding area. Meanwhile, in a last-ditch attempt to downgrade the property and devalue its status as a na tional monument, Mayor Pirounis installed sheds in the courtyard of the bar racks. It was only with the elections of October 1986 and the appointment of a new mayor, Dimitrios Papanikolaou, that the deadlock was finally broken and the green light given for restoration, though formal approval was not given until 1992.6

cultural Heritage(s)

The “battle for the barracks” illustrates some of the key issues that are explored in this book: the often irresolvable tension between conservation and devel opment; the clash between perspectives focused on the past and those oriented toward the future; the potential symbolic—and sometimes economic—capital that accrues to the physical remnants of the past; and the involvement of out siders and foreigners who undeniably demonstrate a commitment to the past, but often to a past that is quite different from that envisioned by local residents. To be sure, most of the movable and immovable antiquities that are discussed in this book pre-date the Kapodistrian cavalry barracks by at least seventeen centuries. Yet, since 1975, when “neoclassical” buildings of the nine teenth and early twentieth centuries came under the official protection of the Greek state, all can be considered part of what we might call the “cultural heri tage” of Argos.7

Articles 1 and 2 of the comprehensive legislation (Law 3028/2002) concern ing the protection of antiquities, passed by the Greek parliament on June 28, 2002, define cultural heritage as “the evidence for the existence of individual and collective human activity,” from antiquity to today, which is found “within the boundaries of the Greek state, including territorial waters and other mar itime zones in which Greece exercises the relevant jurisdiction under interna tional law.” The definition includes “intangible” as well as “tangible” goods but also applies to “cultural goods that originate from the Greek state, when ever they were removed,” and those that are “connected historically with Greece, no matter where they are found.”8 This nationally enacted legislation clearly articulates the principle that cultural heritage “encapsulates, material izes and preserves the experience and historical memory of the national com munity,”9 and what gives it this efficacy is its ability to give “tangible and physical representation to intangible concepts and notions of cultural, social or historical identity, such as a sense of place, community or belonging.”10 But, as the example of the Kapodistrian barracks shows, cultural heritage can also

Three QuesTions wiTh JULIA TROCHE

author of Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egpyt

1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

While preparing a course I was co-teaching with my colleague Dr. Brinkman that took place, in part, in the British Museum, I came upon the False Door of Ptahshepses (EA682) which features notably in a philological dis cussion in my book. The stela’s inscription evinces the apotheosis of a deceased man named Djedi. I spend pages analyzing partic ular epithets and spellings in its inscription, but this false door, which stands over twelve feet tall, completely overwhelmed me with its physicality. Teaching from this artifact was transformative. It compounded for me its ma teriality and experiential nature, and brought this esoteric evidence alive.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now?

This is my first book, so I approached the pub lication process with such trepidation. I realize this experience may be different for others, of course, but for me the process was so incred ibly supportive and critical and instructive. My editor was patient and knowledgeable. My peer reviewers went above and beyond offer ing truly constructive feedback. And everyone else—the copy editors, typesetters, marketing team, etc.—were similarly encouraging and brilliant. Next time, I definitely will not be so tentative starting the process.

“I came upon the False Door of Ptahshepses (EA682), which features notably in a philological discussion in my book.”

3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?

I wish I could change our field to be quicker to embrace compassion, change, and inclusion. My book considers how power was construct ed and maintained, systemically, and how it was transgressed and negotiated through individual and group action. Our field is in a moment of power negotiation, both in terms of systemic issues (racism, lack of TT jobs, closing programs) and in terms of new ways of “doing” ancient history (e.g. digital). Instead of fighting over limited, traditional resources, we can choose to be mentors, advocates, and accomplices, finding new resources and met rics by which to lift up our fields.

an inTerview wiTh Joel Chrsitensen auThor of The Many-Minded Man, hosTed by JonaThan hall

The Cornell University Press Podcast

Joel JonaThan Joel

Welcome to 1869, the Cornell University Press Podcast. I’m Jonathan Hall.

This episode we speak with Joel Christensen, author of The Ma ny-Minded Man: The Odyssey, Psychology and the Therapy of Epic. Joel Christensen is Associate Professor and Chair of Classical Studies at Brandeis University. He is co-author of A Beginner’s Guide to Homer and Homer’s Thebes.

We spoke to Joel about how the Greek epic tradition was not based on the written word, but on large scale performances, in which ancient audi ences experienced the stories as ways to think about their own lives, how the Odyssey in particular offered audiences a form of folk psychology, and what lessons modern cognitive psychology can learn from Homer. Hello, Joel, welcome to the podcast.

Hi, thanks for having me, Jonathan.

Oh, it’s our pleasure. Well, I want to give you a congratulations on your new book, The Many-Minded Man: The Odyssey, Psychology and the Therapy of Epic, it sounds like a very exciting book. And I think it’s in teresting that I’m talking from Ithaca, I’m located in Ithaca and that’s the island home of Odysseus, obviously, not in the Greek Archipelago, but named after that.

So tell us what inspired you to write a book on the Odyssey?

I think the primary thing that probably inspired me to write a book on the Odyssey was teaching the Odyssey year in and year out. I did my early work and graduate school and my dissertation on the Iliad. And, you know, the story I usually tell, which doesn’t make it untrue, that I tell them all the time, is that we’re, you know, what we work on and what we get attracted to is based in part in our experience.

So I started graduate school about a month before 911, I moved to New York City, and I was in New York City for 9/11. And over the years that I worked in graduate school, I kept going back to the Iliad, because it is a poem of war and a poem of rhetoric and politics. And when I left gradu ate school and started teaching at the University of Texas in San Antonio, what I found frustratingly, is that the Iliad didn’t seem to get students to respond to it.

On the other hand, they kept going back to the Odyssey, so I teach my most thrilling and exciting classes on the Odyssey—a poem, I didn’t know as well, and that I didn’t think I understood or even respected as much. So part of what really pushed me was trying to understand why students were getting such fulfilling experiences from reading the Odyssey when I didn’t.

So, the real sort of key moment for me, happened in around 2011—my dad died suddenly. And I found myself returning to the Odyssey in class and thinking about the ways in which it forces us to think about the way that other people in your life create your identity for you.

So for people who may not remember the Odyssey, Odysseus returns

JonaThan

home after 20 years, and he’s not fully home until after a series of re unions—first with a son who never really knew, his wife, and then this problematic part in book 24 of the Odyssey, when Odysseus shows up in disguise still, and he tricks his father Laertes and father cries. And then he immediately relents, and says, “No, no, I’m your son Odysseus, I’m here.” And his father doesn’t believe him. And he has to prove it to him by showing him his scar that he got from when he was a young man on a hunting trip.

And then they go through this orchard, and name the trees that their fathers and grandfathers planted, and they took care of when Odysseus was young. And one day I was teaching that and just completely undone by it because it made me remember my father. And the way he bought five acres of land in the middle of the woods in Maine, when I was in third grade, and we spent the rest of his life trying to turn that into like lawn and gardens. Right. By the time I was in sixth grade, I had to stop the lawn mower and refuel in the process of mowing this ridiculous lawn.

So I think what I started to understand from the Odyssey, is how much rereading and growing with a narrative repays you, but also how much your place in life dictates or shapes the way you receive a narrative.

So again, you know, I responded to the Iliad as a younger man, in a time of war living in New York City, seeing the anti-war protests, debat ing with friends about the War on Terror. And when I returned to the Od yssey and taught it, I saw my students responding, but I also was a father. We had two children and you know, 16 months, and I’d lost a father. So I started to see the Odyssey in a way as a poem about what it means to choose to live. And what you need to do in order to survive.

And the sort of the next part of this was the psychology angle. And the psychology angle is this—we’re born without a manual on how to use the human mind, right? And I’ve always been interested in how the what poetry does in the world, how it shifts people, how it changes them, and how narratives shape you over time. And as I watched students respond to the Odyssey, what I saw them responding to was the building of char acter, identity, and really emotional responses.

So my question started to be, how does the Odyssey anticipate the way its audience’s minds work? And how does it reflect the way minds work together in the world, right, both both emotionally, and, and intellectu ally.

So first step, I’ll pause after this, the first sort of critical step out of that day where I was thinking Odysseus, and his father and the trees, I read a short article in The New York Times, it was an op-ed about a concept called learned helplessness. And that’s a basic concept that’s been around since like 1900 or so. It says that when we experience failure, we’re less likely to try after repeated failure. And we’re also it turns out, liable to succeed less when we try, because we get habituated to the idea that we won’t succeed. And we sort of both lose skill-sets, right? But you also lose an extent to the belief that you can do something to change your surroundings. So this has been this has been, you know, used to describe depression, cycles of poverty, responses to racism and trauma.

JonaThan

And I went into class with this idea, and address the problem at the beginning of the Odyssey, which is that Odysseus has been on this island for seven year, right? We see him here and book five of the Odyssey. He’s been in this island, seven years, crying all day at the edge of the sea. And having sex with Calypso at night, even though he doesn’t really want to. And then Hermes comes and says, make a ship, or have him make a raft so he can leave. And we had been talking the day before about why doesn’t he try?

Right? Why doesn’t he build a ship until that moment? And there are all sorts of arguments you can make? Oh, well, it’s the gods, he knows he can’t go. But at the basic level.

My question was this, can we imagine that the Odyssey is depicting someone who has been broken down by life, who doesn’t believe that he can succeed anymore, and needs something radical to happen to shift him out of it? And how would this shape our reading of the epic, and help us understand what ancient audiences were doing with it?

So at a very basic level, like that’s the first observation that I sort of built the research for the book on, and I moved from there to sort of look at a whole series of different ideas of the way human minds work and modern psychology, both clinical and cognitive, to really look at the epic as a whole with a basic question like, what does it do in the world? What does it say about human minds? And why is that an important question to ask now?

Wow, that’s a beautiful and amazing story. You have a first-hand experi ence of the Odyssey as a therapeutic tool, you see your students respond ing to it, and seeing that tit helps them compared to the Iliad. So tell us, you have you have a term called folk psychology, tell us how reading, hearing, experiencing the Odyssey is therapeutic.

So folk psychology is an idea that you’ll see in different in different texts in different way. But the main author I draw on is a guy named Jerome Bruner, we use a cognitive psychologist who used to teach at Harvard. And he has a book named, I think it’s “Possible Worlds, Ac tual Mind.” So maybe you flip it around. And the idea is that, you know, you can have embedded in a narrative tradition of basic concept of how human minds work and don’t work. And he calls this a folk psychology. And he doesn’t use the word folk in any way to contrast it with say, official or scientific, just that it’s something that doesn’t come out of a clinical environment. And it’s a basic assumption of the way human minds work in the world.

So for me, understanding the epic or Greek epic tradition as psychological, oras conveying folk psychology, is based in understanding its performance context and the way people experienced it in the ancient world. So we too typically experience ancient literature as something on the page, we read alone and think about, and then only once or twice, but earlier, I mentioned that the important step of rereading and returning to a narra tive as you change in life.

Joel

In the ancient world, audiences would have heard sections of Greek epic all the time, and they would have seen it performed in monumen tal performances, and they would have had it throughout their life, they would have talked about it, they would have reflected on it. And so it has sort of a narrative load, and occupies a cultural space that almost nothing in our modern world does, right? Like maybe if you took like religious texts, added the Marvel Universe, and then threw in some fan-fiction al together, it might have the cultural space that epic had in the ancient world.

And so even before like Aristotle, and philosophers talked about trage dy and the catharsis that happened there, I think that ancient audiences experienced epic, as a way to think about their own lives and their own problems. And it changed over time with them. So part of the perfor mance context is that the epics weren’t written down. They weren’t per fect scripts. They were performed and sung in response to audience in terests. And so really what they are are complex narrative engagements, they don’t give solutions to problems, they give ways to think about what it means to be a human.

So back to this idea of learned helplessness that I mentioned, the epic, the Odyssey actually presents three different figures who are paralyzed by their inability to have agency in the world. First, we see Telemachus in book one, then we see Odysseus in book five, and throughout, we see Pe nelope. So the three chief characters in this epic, are sidelined from the action, they can’t make choices, they don’t know how to navigate in the world. And what we get then are different interventions that communi cate, how they can re-engage with the world and what they need. Telema chus needs a tutor, he needs someone to show him how to act, and so he needs to hear other stories and different examples of how people work in the world. Odysseus needs something that’s akin to cognitive behavioral therapy—he needs to try and then he needs to fail again.

So in book five, when he – people, often forget – when he leaves that lonely island, he almost dies several times— his ship wrecks again, he has to choose to swim to safety, and he has to decide to live. And then the most the central part of the Odyssey, if you ask an average person, what they remember from the Odyssey, nine times out of ten, they’ll remem ber the part of the story of Odysseus tells himself. So from books nine through twelve, Odysseus tells all the famous stuff from the Odyssey, the bag of the winds, the Cave of the Cyclops going to the underworld Circe changing the men, the Sirens, that’s all his story.

And I think the primary lesson we learn in the middle of the epic, is that the way you regain agency in the world, is by getting control of your own story by telling stories about yourself that put you in the center of the action. And I really got this inspiration from the clinical therapy practice of narrative therapy, as written by a man named Michael White, who’s from Australia. And he really emphasizes and this echoes a lot of what happens in clinical therapy, in talk therapy, which is that part of the reason we can’t act in the world, part of the dysfunction we feel is that we believe bad things about ourselves, right? Or we believe that

we didn’t have control of situations, or we did have control of situations where we didn’t. So part of the goal of talking about stories, and to be tell ing our own stories, is figuring out where our own responsibility stands and where it doesn’t.

And I know I’m going on a little longer on this one, but in the begin ning of the Odyssey, Zeus says this fabulous thing that I returned to several times in the book—he’s looking down on the mortals and he says mortals, they’re always blaming us for their problems when they make their fate worse than it needs to be because of their own stupidity, right? And the word stupidity is recklessness or blindness. But this is a radical break with the mythical tradition. It’s a break. You know, when people read the Iliad, they’ll say, oh, what’s fate and what’s divine will? In the be ginning of the Odyssey Zeus is saying, no. Yeah, some things are gonna be fated, right? But you also have some responsibility for your life.

So back to some of your earlier question, what makes the epic ther apeutic? It gives you a series of case studies. And a lingering question throughout. And the question is, how are the players in the epic respon sible for their own suffering? And how are they not? And I think by going through this process, this narrative process, you learn to ask the question about your own life, right? You learn to think about causality and agency differently, you learn to accept that there are some things you can’t con trol. But that even within that range, there are some things you could if you just take it into your own hands.

That’s really cool. I like that the quote that you had from Zeus, and that the Odyssey offers in many ways as you said folk psychology or we could say proto-psychology of giving people agency and growing from their ex periences. That’s beautiful.

So we have this as a form of psychology. What can modern psychology or cognitive science learn from Homer?

Well, I think one thing you can learn is that it takes a long time to heal the human mind. But even more importantly, there’s a situatedness, right, there’s a community aspect of mental health, that I think often in the West, we get too far away from, right? The whole notion of one of the most powerful lessons that I’ve gained from the Odyssey is that you ar en’t who you say you are, you are who other people say you are. And one of the most uncomfortable and painful things in our life, is when other people believe or say things about us that are so that can conflict with what we believe about ourselves, right?

And so for me, these are different levels of narrative and story, right? The most honest you can be in life, is if other people know what’s going on in your mind, right? If other people say the same things about you believe them about you, that you do, and the most pain comes from when you have that gap between the two.

So I think one thing to learn, and to really focus on for psychologists and for individuals is that a Odysseus doesn’t get to be home until, or he doesn’t get to be Odysseus until he’s embraced by others, right? So our

JonaThan

Joel

Joel JonaThan

identities are comprised of social rules we don’t control. And I think that runs against some of the, you know, popular spirit, especially of Amer ican individualism, the idea that you are an individual and that you can exert your will, right?

But this goes back, you know, to the old line of poetry that, you know, no man is an island, right, independent of the main. And I think so I think that’s a powerful reminder. But I think it also, it’s a good remind er for modern clinical practitioners, but also theoretical, that, you know, human minds haven’t changed radically, right? I mean, for 2000 years, and that there’s a lot of wisdom in traditional narratives and traditional cultures. That can be I don’t want to say confirmed by but can be explored from the perspective of the scientific side as well.

So one of the things that I find particularly troubling, is the notion that, you know, we’re going to solve our all of our problems with science, right? or drugs, when the harder lesson is that some things take time, and some things can’t be fixed. So I think what I found, remarkably and is how many modern concepts are echoed in the Odyssey. Right? Now, part of the problem there, and I think in danger of my approach is that I’ve gone looking for them.

But I think the process of conversation between the worlds is incredibly enriching, and can really help us understand the final important thing, which I think psychologists understand but which in the public, we don’t talk about enough, which is the power of story. So one of the things that has been really overwhelming and sad has been while I’ve written this book, is watching how much narrative gets away from people, and how fast it moves online, how much it changes the way we look at the world, and can really pervert our public discourse, right about what we believe our place in the world is and what stories we choose to believe.

So this year, as we’ve been in isolation, I’ve been thinking, look, we have social distancing for diseases. Sometimes we need them for bad ideas as well. Right? I don’t know how to do that. But here’s the thing. You talked about you being in Ithaca, NY, and Odysseus going back to to Ithaca—it takes a very long time to get from Ithaca to Troy and back again. Here, now we can move our stories and our identities in the blink of an eye. And we haven’t adapted to that speed of storytelling, and that speed of identity construction.

So I think if anything, we need to reflect on the power of story. And re ally, by the end of the epic, and the end of the book, as I write it, it’s really self-reflected, and reflective in thinking about how dangerous narrative can be, how tales and stories and ideas about identity can move us to places where we harm communities instead of help them.

That’s fascinating and refreshing, in that, as you so well said, we live in a very fast paced world, where things are expected to change very rapidly and the news cycle, and the media cycle that we that we are in, doesn’t allow narrative to actually gestate or grow. It’s just a new story, a new story, a new story.

And it it is refreshing, that that this ancient tale, this ancient epic, has

so much to offer us, if we just dive into it, there’s a great quote that you have at the very beginning of the book by Heraclitus, “The person who journeys on every road cannot find the limits of the soul by walking. That is how deep its story is.” And are our soul searching, our soul mining requires time, requires depth. And we live in an age of superficiality in many ways, but folks like you are mining, mining the depths of these traditions and bringing this out and we encourage readers to pick up Joel’s new book, The Many-Minded Man: The Odyssey, Psychology and the Therapy of Epic.

We’ve only scratched the surface, certainly on what you’ve uncovered with your research. But this has been a fascinating conversation that I’m sure we could go on for hour, there’s so much to talk about. But I so ap preciate you coming on to the podcast and sharing what you found.

Thank you. It’s always great to talk about Homer.

JonaThan

Joel Joel JonaThan

Excellent. Excellent, cool. Well, great talking with you and look forward to talking with you again soon.

Thank you. All right, take care.

That was Joel Christensen, author of The Many-Minded Man: The Odys sey, Psychology and the Therapy of Epic.

THE EXCERPT

Introduction Opening of Hostilities

Julian is a fascinating subject for historians: a man of ability and drive, who was placed in a position with the potential to afect the course of history. Unfortunately, scholarship on Julian has too often sufered from an excess of either adulation or vitriol. In addition, modern analysis of his less than two-year reign is beset by controversies that range from questions about his sanity to speculations regarding the motives for some of his admittedly more opaque actions. The present inquiry works from the assumption that Julian was both intelligent and rational, and that there was coherent method to his actions. This was tied to his intellectual relationship to the Christianity he rejected; specifically, his appropriating a Christian theo logical framework and employing within it numerous Christian texts to re craft pagan deities.1 There are any number of facets that conceivably could be construed as related to Julian’s interactions with Christianity: his revisiting of existing laws on a broad scale, the trials at the beginning of his reign of those opposed to him and responsible for past misdeeds, and so on. This work will focus on Julian’s recapitulatory overwriting of Constantine, in terms of both a religious metanarrative and a religious monumental construction, al lowing us to see the shape of a deliberate plan unobscured by opportunistic maneuvers or actions of debatable intent. Although the development of the ar gument in this book happens roughly to follow the chronology of Julian’s reign, readers should note that it was clearer to organize the material thematically,

and therefore the section on “materiality” by necessity doubles back some what, chronologically. Julian returned to an earlier theme or tactic in his sec ond Antiochene phase, so following a strict chronology would actually obscure Julian’s actions. I hope this approach will contribute to a new perspective on Julian and ofer a foundation for future close analysis of his writings in light of his response to Christianization.

Julian would proceed with his campaign in depth, producing both literary and material narratives of resurgent paganism. He made statements of pur pose that indicate deliberation and forethought. He pursued his agenda aggres sively, drawing on previous anti-Christian polemicists and tacking with the wind to move his agenda forward, flexibly adapting to changing circumstances. The emperor drew much more heavily from Christianity than has been appre ciated, appropriating both Biblical texts and theological concepts. Any improve ments in our understanding of Julian must include a review of his formative experiences, so let us begin with the central event of his childhood.

the Purge of 337

Flavius Claudius Julianus was born in Constantinople in 331 or 332 to a life that must have seemed full of promise (Figure 1).2 Although there is some uncertainty about the date, there was nothing uncertain about the boy’s pros pects. His mother, Basilina, was of an “old and noble family” in Bithynia and the daughter of the praetorian prefect Julius Julianus.3 She was educated in Greek liter ature by the tutor Mardonius—a Gothic slave owned by her father—who would later tutor her son as well.4 Basilina died not long after Julian was born, in what the timing suggests may have been the result of complications from childbirth. She was apparently a devout Christian and endowed the church at Ephesus with her estates.5 Although Julian chose a markedly diferent religious path, he later honored his mother’s memory by naming a settlement near Nicaea after her.6 His father, Julius Constantius, was the half-brother of the ruler of a great world empire and recently restored to favor with the emperor, complete with a place in government. As the son of Constantius I and his second wife, Theodora, Julius Constantius had fallen foul of interfamily political intrigue. Constantius I’s first wife, Helena, had not fa vored Julius Constantius and held significant influence with her son Constan tine, who would become sole emperor. Constantine had one son, Crispus, already, but after he had a son, Constantinus, with Fausta in 316, the emperor’s younger half-brother was perceived as a liability and, like his own brother Fla vius Dalmatius, was sent away to provincial exile in Toulouse and later lived in

Julius Constantius d. 337

Gallus d. 354 Julian d. 363

Flavius Dalmatius d. 337

Constantine I d. 337

Constantius II d. 361

Corinth.7 Following the restoration of relations, Julian’s father had not been added to the imperial college, but he had been given the next-highest rank of patricius, was named ordinary consul in 335, and was intended by Constantine to play a role in leading the empire in the succession.8

The good prospects for young Julian evaporated with the death of his uncle Constantine in 337. At that time, with Diocletian’s restructured New Empire in existence for over half a century, the Old Empire existed only in memory, no more a reality than the Roman Republic. Constantine had been in power for over three decades, and many were no doubt anxious that in departing he would take stability with him. Constantine had intended a return to shared rule, with his sons supported by senior advisers in lesser roles. Those additions to the list of successors to Constantine “may be read as a dynastic coup, backed by elements at court,” a perception which would explain the simultaneous execution of Ablabius, the eastern praetorian prefect and a possible instigator of such a move.9 The three sons of Constantine and Fausta, Constantinus, Constantius II, and Constans, benefited from a purge that eliminated all other potential claimants to imperial rule.

Constantius II may have deserved better treatment from historians, as most of the accounts of him are from Nicene Christians opposed to his meddling in the church or from pagans opposed to his Christianizing of the empire. These were hotly contested issues, and by the time tempers had cooled enough for a dispassionate assessment, there were no living witnesses. Recent research takes the attribution of responsibility to Constantius II for the murders of his relatives—Julius Constantius and his eldest son, the Caesar Dalmatius and his father, brother, and uncle—and puts it on much firmer ground, using both written history and numismatic evidence.10 While it is possible that Constan tius II, at age twenty, may have been swayed by senior military officers, Julian always held him ultimately responsible.11 Soldiers executed the senior men of

Constantius I HelenaTheodora

Basilina

Constans d. 350

Constantine II d. 340 Crispus d. 326

Minervina Fausta

Figure 1. The Constantinian dynasty and the imperial succession

the family, but Julian and his elder half-brother Gallus were apparently spared due to their age and Julian was initially turned over to his mother’s family.12 Ju lian’s opponent Gregory Nazianzen later wrote that Mark, the bishop of Are thusa, had been instrumental in saving Julian.13 When Julian described the purge years later in an autobiographical myth, he described himself in relation to the sons of Constantine as “cast aside by those who had no care for him.”14

As far as the physical impression the invasion of their home in Constantinople left, consider his vivid description of himself: “as if stricken by smoke, filth, and flame brought forth from the blood and tumult and slaughter of men.”15 Given this background, it is not surprising that Julian would later make use of the Gospel of Matthew’s theme of the righteous ruler miraculously spared from Herod’s purge to portray himself as a parallel to Jesus of Nazareth.16

Both that vivid description and the allusion to the Gospels highlight a dif ficulty for the historian. We know precious little about Julian’s younger life that does not originate with him.17 Given his readiness elsewhere to distort demonstrable historical fact, we must treat his account of his early years very cautiously when reconstructing the facts. If our aim is to investigate the emperor’s engagement with Christianity, Julian’s account of his youth may be disregarded as primarily propaganda, but its significance lies in his crafting of the account in ser vice to his religious campaign.

education

Julian’s education would have begun around the time he was rescued from the purge. Following the murders of his family, Julian had been temporarily taken under the protection of his mother’s distant relation bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia and was being raised by his maternal grandmother on her estate.18 This teaching would have started with letters and syllables until after his seventh year he began his lifelong association with Homer.19 Julian’s education was being supervised by Eusebius, a leading non-Nicene figure, although a more directly influential figure was his Scythian tutor, Mardonius, who was responsible for instilling in him a love for Greek literature.20 When Constantius II deposed bishop Paul of Constantinople and moved Eusebius to replace him, the latter relinquished oversight of Julian’s education.21

Julian’s transfer to the remote Cappadocian estate known as Macellum or “the enclosure” ended that respite with his grandmother. Macellum has been placed seven kilometers south of Caesarea, and while the dating of Julian’s residence there is debated, it was most likely 342–348.22 We know that Julian’s stay in Nicomedia coincided with that of Libanius, who came in 344 and

departed for Constantinople in 349, which as Julian was only of the age of rhetor training at the end of that period, suggests that Julian’s six years in Cappadocia ran from 342 to 347–348.23 Here, Julian was reunited with his older half-brother Gallus, when he returned from Tralles, which was the most likely moment for him to learn the truth about his family’s fate.24 Realizing that he lived at the suferance of the man likely responsible for murdering his family, a situation that might last only as long as Constantius failed to produce an heir, weighed very heavily on Julian. His tutors attempted to soothe him by repeatedly telling him that Constantius had been deceived and had yielded to the will of the army.25 Julian portrayed his anguish, despair, and possibly a temporary flight from the estate in his autobiographical myth, written years later: “When he understood the great number of the evil deeds, how much had happened to his relatives and cousins, he was so shocked by the depth of the evil that he genuinely wanted to cast himself into the underworld.” Then the reader gets their first hint of divine intervention in Julian’s life. “But then gracious Helios with foreseeing Athena cast him into sleep or a trance and steered him from that thought. When he had been awakened again he was sent into the wilderness.” There are parallels in this wilderness account with Christian literature that will be explored later. For now, we, like Julian’s readers, see him grasping his predicament and the need for purpose in his life. “Then finding there a rock he rested himself briefly and considered how he should escape so many great evils. For the present, all appeared wretched to him, and for the moment, good was nowhere to be found.”26 It would take years from Julian’s youth, but he would find that purpose. In the meantime, he was detained at Macellum, in what he described as a “castle of oblivion,” using the term for remote places to which Persian unfortunates were sent to disappear permanently.27 Julian later blamed their imprisonment for ruining the character of his half-brother Gallus, and indirectly leading to Gallus’s disastrous reign in Antioch.28 Julian’s new tutor was George of Cappadocia, later the bishop of Alexandria, his tutelage all conducted under the authority of Julian’s cousin Constantius II, whose marked Arian sympathies seemed to be one of the few things on which all contemporary observers could agree. Julian later expressed his gratitude for his exposure to philosophy, which he claimed made all the diference, and certainly more than the organized exercise sessions with the household slaves.29 Julian’s theological training came from those solidly on the non-Nicene or “Arian” end of the spectrum, which naturally would influ ence the way in which Julian engaged Christian theology. 30 Julian was obvi ously aware of Bishop George’s library, as he requisitioned it following the bishop’s death in his new see of Alexandria. This theological awareness was also reflected in the use Constantius II made of Julian as an adult. According

to Socrates Scholasticus, Julian was made a lector or reader in the church at Nicomedia.31 As Constantius II’s Caesar, Julian appears to have presided over the Synod of Beziers in 356.32 The combination of rigorist non-Nicene theology, imperial manipulation of the church, and willingness to contravene religious principles in the ruthless pursuit of political goals may also be reflected in Julian’s approach to theocratic rule later. The scriptural familiarity Julian developed during this period would serve him well later, allowing him to make allusions to Christological texts in his restructuring of pagan deities. Julian’s scriptural references are primarily drawn from Matthew’s Gospel and the Pentateuch.33 His training in this phase would hold continuing influence mediated by George’s library, as when George died years later, Julian insisted on the retrieval of his books.34 These volumes therefore contributed to Julian’s “mental furniture” in two phases of his life and likely provided the scholarly resources for his later writings against Christianity.

In 348, Julian was moved again. Constantius traveled to Macellum and in terviewed the youths, following which he took Gallus to the court at Antioch and sent Julian to study in Constantinople. Julian studied rhetoric under the pagan Nicocles and the ostensibly Christian Hecebolius, and was still allowed to visit his grandmother’s estate in Bithynia, later writing fondly of his sum mer visits to her.35 Libanius suggested that Constantius feared the positive im pression that Julian might make “in the great city,” and therefore transferred him to Nicomedia.36 At Nicomedia, Julian sent someone to transcribe the lectures of Libanius and so became his quasi-student, a relationship that the rhetor would play for all it was worth in years to come.37 While Julian did not know Libanius at this time, like most in his circles he would have known of him. Libanius was an accomplished teacher and practitioner of rhetoric, an irrepressible networker, and through his prolific orations and letters one of the modern world’s best sources on late antiquity.38

In March 351, Julian and Gallus were transferred again and given increased responsibility and freedom. As Constantius was distracted by his civil war in the Western Empire, Gallus was elevated to Caesar, was married to Constan tius’s sister Constantina, and sent to rule in Antioch.39 Constantina was an em bittered veteran of imperial politics and a reportedly negative influence on Gallus.40 She had been married to Hannibalianus for two years before his mur der in 337 and was the marital interest of the Western usurper Magnentius, who ofered to wed her in 350.41 Julian appears to have had a close relationship with Himerius, the famous Bithynian sophist, with an association that may extend farther back than most would assume. An oration of Himerius was given at Sirmium on 15 March 351, with oblique references identifying the presence

Three QuesTions wiTh DAVID A. BLOME author of Greek Warfare beyond the Polis

1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

While researching the Spartan army, I came across a saying attributed to the Spartan king Agesilaus: “When someone asked him why Sparta lacked fortification walls, he pointed to the citizens under arms and said: ‘These are the Spartans’ walls.’” The upland Greeks that I study would have known exactly what Agesilaus meant. In fact, they repelled two Spartan invasions during the classical period with almost no assistance from fortifications.

3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?

Historians debate each other primarily in writ ing, whether in conference presentations, book reviews, or introductory chapters, and they’re really good at it. However, I would like to see more public debates between historians, es pecially on controversial topics. Such debates could potentially lead to broader engagement with historical issues outside of academia.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now?

In a phrase: citation management software.

“My favorite moment was when, as a grad student, my language level reached the point where I could read it for myself.”

THE EXCERPT

Introduction Vital Strife

This book is about the close yet puzzling rela tionship between sleep and the early modern ethics of care. Its first epigraph, from Richard Mulcaster’s pedagogical treatise, the Elementarie (1582), captures an impor tant paradox concerning the nature of care as it was understood by Renaissance humanists: the care put into the work of reading, writing, and learning each day is for the sake of avoiding cares that assail our souls with worry and distress. These are cares that, as Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 AD) sug gests in the second epigraph, are best alleviated by the restorative solace that sleep brings to laboring and exhausted bodies. Sleep annuls care, because sleep removes us from ourselves. It thus dissolves our attachment to the form of care, cura sui, that Seneca describes as being “prior to everything else” by let ting us—temporarily, at least—escape the physical and cognitive vestiges of our daily toil.1 For Mulcaster and other Renaissance humanists well versed in Ovid’s poetry and in Seneca’s letters, care was a curiously ambivalent thing. A highly malleable facet of human agency and expression, care was recognized as a necessary catalyst to any pursuit of ethical or literary virtue. But because care could slide so easily into feelings of distress and suffering, it was itself an object of anxious concern and therapeutic attention.2 Too little care in one’s endeavors showed sloth and negligence, while a surplus of care threatened to harm souls overly attached to virtue. And yet, as Cicero writes, “the devotees of learning are so far from making pleasure their aim, that they actually endure

care, anxiety and loss of sleep, in the exercise of the noblest part of man’s na ture, the divine element within us (for so we must consider the keen edge of the intellect and the reason).”3 Humanist pedagogues like Mulcaster shared Cicero’s vision of the deep value of intellectual activity by cultivating atten tion, bodily rigor, and affective devotion in their classrooms as care for and among their students through the reading and translation of classical texts by Ovid, Seneca, and of course, Cicero himself.

Grounded in habits that promoted the mutually reinforcing ends of diligent study and ethical care so valued by classical Roman writers, humanist peda gogy also drew support from models of political-theological vigilance and spir itual care foregrounded in the epistles of St. Paul (c. 50–64 AD) and extended by thinkers such as Desiderius Erasmus. His manual on the life of the Christian soldier, Enchridion Militis Christiani (1501), begins with a chapter titled, “We must watche and loke aboute us euer more, whyle we be in this lyfe.”4 To watch is to extend a care that refuses sleep, while sustaining a commitment to vigi lance for as long as we inhabit our mortal bodies. After all, it takes hard work and wakefulness to know the good, and our creaturely proclivities toward idle ness, sloth, and most essentially the escape from care afforded by sleep all seem to work against our ethical and spiritual interests in that regard. Erasmus’s un derstanding of human life further clarifies the political-theological valences of sleep and care. For if the sovereign’s care for his subjects is in some sense mod eled on the constant care that God manifests in watching over his creation—the God “that keepeth thee [and] that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalms 121:3–4, King James Version)—then the rupture in attention caused by sleep inevitably threatens the integrity of the monarch’s watch over the body politic, just as it threatens to derail the humanist commitment to vir tue in the classroom and beyond. For early modern monarchs, teachers, and students alike, sleep would seem to embody a paradigmatic form of careless ness, one that temporarily dissolves the psychosomatic territory on which Renais sance humanism proudly planted its flag.

Yet despite these humanist and political-theological antipathies toward sleep and related states of idleness, inaction, and carelessness, the works at the heart of this book—by Jasper Heywood, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton—show signs of what I call “humanist fatigue”: a sense of intellec tual weariness and skepticism concerning the body’s capacity to sustain the forms of vigilant care and self-discipline that govern the moral psychologies of Renaissance humanism and Pauline political theology. Instead, these writers value the unconscious motions of physical life, giving credence to the mysteri ous yet vital power of sleep—a power that in early modern literature curbs the self-instrumentalizing ends of humanism and offers shelter from the harms of

sovereign domination. Through sleep, we care for life, even as we abandon life’s cares. So it is with every human soul, whose physical foundation is acknowl edged each night by a return to slumber that dissolves our connection to the world while renewing the body that upholds it. In this way, sleep and sleepless ness form the emblematic center of a fascination with paradoxes of ethical care in early modern literature, drawing attention to a mounting concern with the nature of physical life and its recovery—a concern that I argue is biopolitical in that it attributes ethical value and political significance to states of dormancy. Succinctly put, early modern writers are sensitive to a biopolitical conundrum, or paradox, that sleep presents for the care of the early modern self and others: to sleep is to care for the bodily life that sustains waking attention, but only insofar as sleep abandons the forms of wakefulness that promote ethical and spiritual care.

In the chapters that follow, this form of care submerged in carelessness is taken as a sign of shifting value in early modernity, one that literary thinking is uniquely disposed to capture in the wake of Renaissance humanism and its cultures of vigilant attention.5 In its most extreme guise, the idealization of vigilant care shared by humanism and Christian political theology takes an al legorical form articulated in the epistles of St. Paul: sleep is the face of death, and thus an anticipatory figure for the end of an earthbound, creaturely life that demands constant vigilance in its strug gles with sin.6 Against this allegori cal capture of the living body and the forceful assertion that death is the deeper meaning of sleep, early modern dramatists and poets give rise to a po etics of care that draws attention to the strange vitality of somnolence. This moment, I argue, owes much to the literary absorption of ancient Stoic eth ics and cosmology in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, partly routed through the English translations of Senecan drama collected in Thomas Newton’s edition of Seneca: His Tenne Tragedies (1581). More particularly, Jas per Heywood’s rendering of Hercules’s cosmic swoon at the center of Seneca’s Hercules Furens (c. 50 AD), which depicts sleep as a restorative benefit to the corporeal soul and a therapeutic salve to the hero’s fury, sets into motion a literary icon of sleep to which early modern English writers return time and again.7 As if bearing witness to a primal scene where the life and sustaining relations of the oikos are annihilated yet somehow must be remade, early mod ern writers reanimate and configure anew the event of Hercules’s sleep and his tragic reawakening through their own literary approximations of sleeping life and the early modern ethics of care. From Spenser’s Redcrosse knight to Shakespeare’s King Lear to Milton’s Adam, these and other creations of En glish writers follow the figure of Seneca’s Hercules in foregrounding the pal liative virtues of sleep and its essential role in the ethical care for life. In its

emphasis upon the physical body’s self-sensation as the necessary foundation and starting point for the path to virtue, ancient Stoicism serves as a touch stone for what this book argues constitutes an emergent form of value in early modernity, one that is housed in physical life and its autopoietic capacities for restoration through sleep.

In this way, sleep begins to shed its political-theological trappings of spiri tual vulnerability, carelessness, and threatening isolation from the Christian community. Instead, for early modern writers trained under the precepts of humanism, the event of sleep marks a gathering point of interest in an expe rience that eludes the forms of vigilant care and attention on which the ends of Renaissance humanism depend, even as it constitutes a distinctive form of care for the embodied life that underpins such efforts. This form of care—first disclosed by the living being’s innately sensed and favorable disposition toward itself as a physically constituted being—is what the ancient Stoic philosopher Chrysippus (c. 279–206 BC) describes as the first principle of life, an idea that is reproduced in my final epigraph and which informs Seneca’s dramatic de piction of Hercules’s restorative slumber. Taken from Thomas Stanley’s His tory of Philosophy (1656), the passage describes Chrysippus’s view of care as both a natural impulse and the first property of living creatures. Over the course of this book, I will show how ancient Stoic physicalism and its founda tional theory of care are reanimated through early modern works that turn to the unconsciously regenerative processes of life and the subtler, stranger sensations that emerge in sleep: from psychosomatic slackness to perceptual drift and other such liminal experiences at the boundaries of conscious thought and intentionality. Central here is the Stoic concept of oikeiôsis, which lacks a precise English translation but includes senses of dearness, affiliation, appro priation, and belonging. Oikeiôsis names the ethical development of animal life from an incipient mode of care for its organic physical constitution into a fully realized ecological cosmopolitanism among living beings. For the Stoics, we are all citizens of a thriving cosmic whole, striving to find our place in it. Sleep plays a distinctive role in this process by relaxing the perceptive tension that animates thought and action, which restores the foundational balance of the soul’s ruling principle and harmonizes its motions with the pneuma, or the active principle of reason that permeates all physical entities in the Stoic cos mos. Drawing on the Stoic model of oikeiôsis and the therapeutic role it con ceives for sleep, early modern writers rethink the place of sleep in their own literary constructions of ethical care and domestic affiliation. In short, they are captivated by the seemingly paradoxical yet recalcitrant truth that while sleep is an experience defined by carelessness, it also discloses a distinctive form of care on which human life depends. For these writers, sleep constitutes an immanent

virtue and a norm-positing capacity for psychosomatic restoration. Meanwhile, they view the condition of sleeplessness as a harmful and often involuntary amplification of waking cares, which becomes a much greater threat to the ethi cal flourishing and cohesion of persons and polity alike.

This latter point is crucial to the arc of the book. It is borne out by the ety mology of a word representing a special kind of hell that plagues many a mod ern soul: insomnia. While the word “sleep” can be traced to Old English texts as early as the ninth century, “insomnia” does not frequently appear in print until the eighteenth century. Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionary (1623) contains an entry for “Insomnie” that defines it as “watching, want of power to sleepe,” which suggests that in its earliest uses, the term could mark both a specific lack—a “want of power”—on the part of the self as well as a commitment to nocturnal vigilance connoted by the word “watch.”8 Before “insomnia” was regularly used in print, writers typically employed some variant of “sleepless” to describe the condition of not sleeping when one was supposed to do so, though even this term only appears for the first time in print during the fifteenth century.9 Such a sketch of its lexical history gives credence to the notion that in somnia begins to emerge as both a distinctive historical concept and an ethical problem for the care of early modern embodied life—meaning the bodies of self and others, as well as the social body of the polity—and that this moment represents a shift away from longstanding political-theological wisdom asserting the necessary and mutually reinforcing relationship between vigilance and care in models of governance. In other words, both sleep and sleeplessness undergo a significant and mutually affecting transformation during the early modern pe riod: while sleep does not entirely shed its associations with spiritual peril and deathliness, it is increasingly valued for its restoration of the laboring body burdened with cares, while the debilitating threat of insomnia is seen as a vital concern in the care for physical life.

One might think that in this way my argument stretches to attribute a sec ular view of the care for physical life and its value to depictions of sleep in early modern literature. That is not the case, though my readings of sleep and in somnia will tiptoe between sacred and secular determinations in assessing the early modern valuation of physical life, as well as its standing in relation to the norms of vigilance that shape prominent figurations of sovereign and spiritual care. Following Graham Hammill’s characterization of early modern political theology as “an ongoing entanglement and antagonism between two discrete discourses and styles of thinking—politics and theology,” I understand the liter ary writers whose works I discuss to articulate a tense, sometimes contradic tory, yet often productive relationship between the ethical demands of physical life and spiritual virtue, or between political and theological calculations of

the care for human life.10 In so doing, these writers show their disdain for the shared commitments to martial and spiritual vigilance that guide much politicaltheological and Renaissance humanist wisdom on the virtues of care. While Heywood, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton may at times attribute a sacred significance to the dormant life that guards against corrosive forms of excessive wakefulness, they also understand the reproductive capacities and value of that life to be grounded in the physis of the unconscious material body. In other words, their aim is to deny in both ideological and practical terms the paradigm of vigilance that shapes early modern understandings of ethical life and virtu ous activity. And insofar as these writers articulate a view of sleep’s restorative power that is immanent to living bodies—and, indeed, acts as a source of shel ter from the harms of sovereign domination and the self-instrumentalizing ends of humanism—we can say that sleep for them constitutes a form of bio power that may or may not be sacralized, but which need not be taken as a theological notion in itself.

Because this vital power of sleep is amenable to—and in some cases, di rectly modeled upon—the pagan cosmology of ancient Stoic thought, it also affords a broader view of what theology might mean in early modernity as writers strain beyond the confines of humanist Christian doctrine in assessing the life of sleep. For the Stoics, Zeus is pneuma: the rational and active body that is thoroughly blended with all passive matter throughout the cosmos, forming its hylozoic and panpsychic unity. When Margaret Cavendish argues that Nature is a single, organic whole and recognizes an “innate matter” that acts as “a kind of God or gods to the dull part of matter, having the power to form it,”11 or when she suggests that “innated matter, is the soul of nature” and the “dull part of matter, the body,” she affirms ancient Stoic principles that imbue physical matter with a cosmic rationality that is both an active princi ple and a body in its own right.12 From one angle, then, the accounts of physi cal life and sleep in this book might be drawn into the circle of arguments made by critics whose readings of early modern liter ature track processes of secu larization in western Europe: the valuation of physical life looks ahead to a world of medical and biological norms that treat the body in merely, if not purely, physical terms.13 But from another vantage, the restorative physis of sleeping life and its conceptual debt to the Stoic doctrine of the pneuma would seem to retain an unavoidably theological or at least spiritual quality that re sists a decisive narrative of secularization. Without attempting to reconcile this impasse, the readings I pursue hold open possibilities afforded by both secu lar and theological strands of thought, hewing closely to the sort of openness concerning panpsychism and nature that is staked out by Thomas Nagel in Mind and Cosmos. Nagel’s recent work sustains a set of philosophical convic

Three QuesTions wiTh

RICHARD P. MARTIN author of Mythologizing Performance

1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

Because a number of the chapters of this book began as stand-alone essays over the years, and those, in turn, had their start as papers deliv ered in various places, what I best remember, leafing through them now, are the trips and audiences, from Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio to Athens and Crete, La Plata (Argenti na), Grenoble, Lausanne, and Cambridge, UK. I also remember the pleasures of exploring other literature and media in search of useful analogies. In that regard, getting deeper into

3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?

I wish I could get all the various experts in the multifarious subfields of Classics—histo ry, archaeology, philosophy, philology—to try to read one another’s books (or even articles).

“I remember the pleasures of exploring other lit erature and media in search of useful analogies.”

Quentin Tarantino’s movies—Pulp Fiction was the gateway drug and it shows up in an essay on Hesiod, here—was a blast.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now?

As the writing started with the earliest essay and continued intermittently over the next thirty-five years, I’d have to look back to my twenty-nine year old self, struggling to get hold of books, spend time in libraries, and scribble on legal pads after a toddler had been lulled to sleep. I wish I had known touch-typing (I still don’t, however, so maybe that answer should not count).

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