Greek and ANE

In his recent book Travelling Heroes, Robin Lane Fox examines Greek travel in the eighth century BC, focusing on the Euobean Greeks who traded and settled throughout the Mediterranean.

Fox argues, in the summary of Edith Hall, the TLS reviwer , that “these electrying Euobeans can explain much of the contents of archaic Greek literature. It was, he argues, their distinctively Greek experiences of and reactions to distance places that shaped Greek myth, rather than their Greek intercultural repsonses to Meospotamian or Hittite texts, ideas and images.” Against the trends of recent scholarship, he concludes that “Ancient Near Eastern Culture did not, after all, have much influence on archaic Greek mythology as reflected in our earliest literature – the hexameter poems of Homer and Hesiod.”

Hall is unpersuaded. She’s concerned in part that the exaltation of the Greeks might once again ignite various forms of Eurocentric passion that post-colonialism had, she hoped, put down for good. More to the point, she claims that “Lane Fox’s attempt to keep Greek myth Greek is at odds with his sensible insistence throughout much of the book on what he more than once calls the ‘multi-cultural’ nature of much of the Eastern Mediterranean. The exclusive Greek ownership of Greek imacinative culture is not really consistent with his pervasive stress on social and mercantile interpenetration, and even on the requirement for at least some of his travelling Greeks to have learned other languages.”

Hall also notes that the Greeks were well aware of the differences between historical accounts and poetic. Aristotle makes the distinction, and refers to epic and tragedy as forms of poetry rather than history.