E.R. Dodds - The Greeks and the Irrational

PREFACE

This book is based on a course of lectures which I had the honour of giving at Berkeley in the autumn of 1949. They are reproduced here substantially as they were composed, though in a form slightly fuller than that in which they were delivered. Their original audience included many anthropologists and other scholars who had no specialist knowledge of ancient Greece, and it is my hope that in their present shape they may interest a similar audience of readers. I have therefore translated virtually all Greek quotations occurring in the text, and have transliterated the more important of those Greek terms which have no true English equivalent. I have also abstained as far as possible from encumbering the text with controversial arguments on points of detail, which could mean little to readers unfamiliar with the views controverted, and from complicating my main theme by pursuing the numerous side-issues which tempt the professional scholar. A selection of such matter will be found in the notes, in which I have tried to indicate briefly, where possible by reference to ancient sources or modern discussions, and where necessary by argument, the grounds for the opinions advanced in the text.

To the nonclassical reader I should like to offer a warning against treating the book as if it were a history of Greek religion, or even of Greek religious ideas or feelings. If he does, he will be gravely misled. It is a study of the successive interpretations which Greek minds placed on one particular type of human experiencea sort of experience in which nineteenth-century rationalism took little interest, but whose cultural significance is now widely recognised. The evidence which is here brought together illustrates an important, and relatively unfamiliar, aspect of the mental world of ancient Greece. But an aspect must not be mistaken for the whole.

I

Agamemnon's Apology

The recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making.

William James

Some years ago I was in the British Museum looking at the Parthenon sculptures when a young man came up to me and said with a worried air, "I know it's an awful thing to confess, but this Greek stuff doesn't move me one bit." I said that was very interesting: could he define at all the reasons for his lack of response? He reflected for a minute or two. Then he said, "Well, it's all so terribly rational, if you know what I mean." I thought I did know. The young man was only saying what has been said more articulately by Roger Fry1 and others. To a generation whose sensibilities have been trained on African and Aztec art, and on the work of such men as Modigliani and Henry Moore, the art of the Greeks, and Greek culture in general, is apt to appear lacking in the awareness of mystery and in the ability to penetrate to the deeper, less conscious levels of human experience.

This fragment of conversation stuck in my head and set me thinking. Were the Greeks in fact quite so blind to the importance of nonrational factors in man's experience and behaviour as is commonly assumed both by their apologists and by their critics? That is the question out of which this book grew. To answer it completely would evidently involve a survey of the whole cultural achievement of ancient Greece. But what I propose attempting is something much more modest: I shall merely try to throw some light on the problem by examining afresh certain relevant aspects of Greek religious experience. I hope that the result may have a certain interest not only for Greek scholars but for some anthropologists and social psychologists, indeed for anyone who is concerned to understand the springs of human behaviour. I shall therefore try as far as possible to present the evidence in terms intelligible to the nonspecialist.

1 For notes to chapter i see pages 18-27.