A philosopher’s appreciation for Jean-Pierre Vernant

(January 4, 1914—January 9, 2007)

By Nickolas Pappas

Department of Philosophy, CCNY & the Graduate Center, CUNY

Page I

A line about Jean-Pierre Vernant’s teaching stands out in the obituary by Oswyn Murray. Vernant “always used the ‘tu’ form and recognized you as a fellow worker whatever your age.”(1) It did not surprise me to read such a thing. Considering the friendship-in-scholarship he fostered with his writings alone, I can imagine what teaching was available to students of Vernant’s acquaintance.

There are no academic genealogies connecting me with Vernant that I know of. We barely have disciplinary turf in common: He was a classicist while I as a student of ancient philosophy enter classics only by courteous permission. Even so Vernant, whose books I came across by accident in the first place, then went back to on a whim and subsequently at last feeling driven to read, showed me what methods worked best on antiquity and when I could apply them. “Fellow worker” is too strong a thing to say—not many people work as he did—but my study of Vernant did create a fellowship between us. It’s not every day that one is taught so well by a stranger.

I turned to Vernant as if from Nietzsche—“as if” because in my initial readings and even while growing attached to his writings I did not realize what role he could play in a re-evaluation of Nietzsche’s classical scholarship. That part of my appreciation would take longer. I did already know that the problem existed. Nietzsche’s Greece is a deep well from which he draws up inexhaustible quantities of life-giving water. But he has not dug through to China the way he thinks he has. The inspiration is genuine, the surmises continue to astonish, but too many of the facts are false or incomplete.

Philosophers have made empirical mistakes before. No one waves the pineal gland in Descartes’s face. Hegel’s history of thought survives his belief that Heraclitus came after Parmenides. Doesn’t Nietzsche deserve the same pass on factual details? He insisted that the Dionysus cult entered Greece from Asia when Dionysus had been worshipped in Greece longer than most of the Olympians; so what?

But it would mutilate Nietzsche’s thought to make historical fact so irrelevant to the value of his philosophizing that the philosophy becomes an ahistorical analysis of morals. His point is that historical fact presses itself into philosophy, no matter how unwelcome or recalcitrant the fact may be. No more apriorism for philosophy now; no more of those just-so stories that English genealogists tell about where morality comes from. Those stories have been dropping from the blue but now philosophy stands prepared to become something else.(2) An actual story like that of the primeval masters and slaves will show where modern morality came from and where it did not come from.

Nietzsche writes as if the real story of antiquity though in need of being deciphered from the surviving evidence really exists in there.

So surely it matters that Nietzsche’s purported portrayal of the ancient Romans applies much better to the ancient Germans in his own back yard. In On the Genealogy of Morals Essay I he characterizes non-Jewish ancient society as bifurcated into slaves or commoners on one side and their masters the warrior-aristocrats on the other. Another ruling class composed of priests sometimes intrudes on the two-tiered system, but this priestly caste is something closer to an exception to the basic social division; and more typically Jewish; and an alternative to the warrior rulers.(3)

As a matter of fact however, as Celtic, Vedic Indian, and Roman pantheons show the most clearly, Indo-European societies tended toward tripartition. Georges Dumézil in the mid-twentieth century argued that such cultures represented themselves as divided among priests, warriors, and farmers.(4) Dumézil’s analysis contains all three of the classes from Genealogy I but depicts those classes as co-existing and even coordinated instead of divided—as Nietzsche would have it—between warrior-rulers legitimately in power and priests as late arrivals and usurpers. Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna examines the priestly caste in still more detail, with an eye to the powers available to the Roman flamen and Vedic brahman, two priests at the heart of their societies.(5)

Least of all were the priests arrivistes among the Romans, whom Genealogy I calls the noblest of all peoples and wrings its hands over wondering how the priestly people par excellence (Jews) ever could have overcome them. Overcome they did though. “Whom does one bow to in Rome today?” Nietzsche asks in triumph showing his decisive fact, a priest perched where the imperial warrior had been.(6)

As history this is something more like fantasy. Not only did the Romans have their own priests and priestly governors—according to tradition the first pious king to officiate over sacrifices was Numa, the king after Romulus—but the Roman Republic even had a position of chief priest, pontifex maximus. Caesar himself held the position of pontifex maximus and Augustus took it on some time after Caesar’s death. After Augustus and following his precedent every emperor was pontifex representing the priesthood until the reign of the Christian emperor Gratian (375-383), who found that title inappropriate for the emperor and transferred it to Rome’s bishop.

No priesthood had to invade Rome when it had already been ensconced there. No one but a high priest was ever bowed down to in that city.

What the First Essay of Genealogy describes, as I said, is Germanic culture, of which one can truly say that it left priests out of its vision of itself until the much later time of a foreign takeover. In his report from Gaul, Caesar observed that the Germans had no priests comparable to Celtic Druids.(7) He must have found this worth mentioning because the absence of a priestly class made the Germans anomalous among Indo-Europeans. Indeed, early Germanic legal documents describe a society of nobles, commoners, and slaves. The nobiles are most likely warriors while the ingenui and serviles belong together as the Genealogy’s low-born.(8)

Nietzsche accuses English genealogists of projecting the morality they know best into the deep past that gave birth to morality.(9) Here he is in the same fix. What claimed to describe Europe’s most ancient precedent culture now looks more like a projection of Germany’s ancient past, along with more than a sneer or two about Judaism. Not to put too fine a point on it, Nietzsche got his facts wrong and these errors matter.

The question is not whether the scholarship holds up, but what to do when you realize it doesn’t. It is important to bear in mind that later findings do not refute Nietzsche altogether. Even as a historian he advances general assertions that remain defensible and indeed are better defended now than they were in his time. The following sorts of claims, for instance:

          Socrates is an abrupt development in Greek culture.

          Tragedy does not communicate a moral anything like what
          one finds in later moralizing literature.

          Greek religion is neither frivolous nor demonic but represents a
          coherent way of ordering human experience and a moral code that
          deserves to be recognized as one.

          Modern Europe is radically unlike its archaic beginnings and can
          profitably investigate those beginnings for alternatives to modern
          culture. Greece represents the rest that has been thought and said.

If some of these broad historical claims seem more like truisms or platitudes today, that should be seen as the result of Nietzsche’s success at changing moderns’ views of antiquity. Even as a historian he will not go away easily.

The challenge for Nietzsche’s readers then becomes how to keep the broad outlines of his history while avoiding the pitfalls created by his historical errors. Take The Birth of Tragedy and its re-creation of Greece in “the tragic age” as a time with greater integrity than a merely “pre-Socratic” epoch enduring the long advent until Socrates. Nietzsche takes tragedy to symbolize a culture that could recognize irrational impulses as natural and even as wise. Even when keeping those impulses at bay under Apollo’s guidance the tragic age did not deny their existence. Only Socrates ruled out the irrational as unreal—unreal because irrational.

But if Nietzsche is right about the totalizing effects of Socrates/Plato, philosophy’s cheerful optimism not only followed tragedy but blocked it from a later observer’s view. It takes a skillful interpreter to reconstruct a culture whose very claim to be culture had been denied.

The challenge of conceiving pre-Socratic Greece may be seen as the subject Vernant took up first, in The Origins of Greek Thought.(10) Such a book was possible only after the 1950s. Nietzsche’s talk of Homeric heroes had to proceed in ignorance of what would later be known about the Mycenaeans as Bronze Age Greek-speakers contemporary with the Trojan War. Schliemann may have unearthed Mycenae in the 1870s, but it was not until 1952 that Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B to prove that the residents of those ruins spoke Greek. Given the continuity of language, dwelling, and religion from the Mycenaeans onward, the question about ancient Greece became: What could account for the revolutions of the eighth century? For it was during roughly the lifespan that ended in 700 that the Greeks appropriated the Phoenician alphabet, produced the Homeric epics, likely started the Olympic Games, and brought a wide scattering of autonomous cities into international political and financial relationships. What made all these achievements so suddenly possible, and what did their concurrent appearance signify? Some accounting needed to replace talk of Greek miracles; anyway one can’t set out to study and understand a miracle.

Nietzsche himself is too prone to miraculous explanations. This is a pitfall of his emphasis on Greek myth. Did Dionysus wake the new civilization?

It is true that no readers took Nietzsche’s mythmaking literally. But the religious language did help divert attention away from democracy as an explanation. In all the effort to say what tragedy was and where it came from Nietzsche either ignores the story of Athens’ politics or makes fun of democratic explanations. The tragic chorus as Athenian citizens? Ha! It would be “blasphemy” to speak of “constitutional popular representation” in this context. If anything The Birth of Tragedy associates Athenian democracy with the decline of tragedy instead of with the conditions that gave it life and health: Euripides destroyed tragedy when he used it to represent everyday life and the (democratic) language of contracts and lawsuits.(11) Nietzsche’s beloved tragic age has nothing to do with democracy or with those movements, even when not democratic yet, that took the Greek poleis from inherited monarchy and aristocracy to citizen organizations. (See for example the oligarchic Spartans’ language of equality among their hoplite citizens(12): nowhere near democracy, but no longer a traditional monarchy either.)

Nietzsche is not alone in despising ancient democracy too much to discuss it. Most modern glorifications of ancient Greece before him downplayed democracy or condemned it outright. Jennifer Roberts has traced the extent and long duration of anti-democratic assessments of Greece well into the nineteenth century and among surprising cases (e.g., Rousseau).(13) Nietzsche is not going out of his way to despise the Athenian achievement. He does not deserve to be seen as liberal history’s villain. But he does not buck the anti-democratic trend either.

Vernant by contrast took the rise of Greek citizenry to be the telling change that inspired the others, and particularly inspired the philosophical revolution of the Ionian cities along the coast of Asia Minor. The Origins of Greek Thought identified citizens’ equality before the law—what the Greeks called isonomia—as the key to the new worldview. On his paradigm, as compelling as Nietzsche’s utterly different mythic one, isonomia inspired a worldview in which all cosmic forces have the same rank. One force may be stronger than another but they meet on equal footing and admit of direct comparison.

Now it is possible for Anaximander to say the earth hangs suspended in mid-universe with the forces around it balanced on all sides.(14) More abstractly but in just the same spirit the time that humans occupy becomes the equal of the gods’ time, past and present fundamentally alike and commensurable. In place of a long-gone era in which gods created the world through processes that since ceased to operate,(15) Thales imagines a single common era. Water as archê today implies water as archê in all past epochs.

Even that word archê is telling. What had meant “rule” as in kingship and hegemony comes to bespeak an impersonal governance of the universe that grants no special privileges and recognizes no ranks. And in general the era that Vernant describes, while no less impressive than it had been for Nietzsche, owes its successes to worldlier phenomena and therefore opens itself up to the historian’s investigations as a divine tragic age could not have done.

Nor does it seem that the era will end magically either: Socrates remains as important as ever, but not because he entered an alien world. The era of legal procedures and financial exchanges and first cosmological inquiries is a world recognizably like the present age, and Socrates could have communicated with it.

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