Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics: April (2007)
Abstract
This paper attempts to read the gold “Orphic” tablets found in tombs from Thessaly to Sicily against the background of Homeric epic. It introduces the notion of “speech type-scene” and draws conclusions, from the deployment of formulae and pragmatic situations, about the “voice” one is supposed to hear behind the tablet texts. It was originally delivered as a paper at the Ohio State University conference Ritual Texts for the Afterlife (April 2006), organized by Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles-Johnston.
While our understanding of the so-called “ Orphic” tablets continues to improve thanks to the scrutiny of many learned proponents of Religionswissenschaft, the appreciation of these texts from a literary standpoint has lagged somewhat behind. What follows, therefore, are some tentative thoughts on the poetic heritage and environment of the Gold Tablet texts. The broader study of Greek poetry will be seen to advance their explication; by the same token the tablets significantly increase the available stock of Greek poetic reality—whatever their religious functions may have been.
As the first rule of comparative studies is to know what to compare, we should begin by assuming that texts written in Greek hexameters of any time or place can and should be compared with one another. As a matter of practice,one can extend this principle to cover as well medieval and modern Greek texts in the dhekapendasyllavos meter that became the inheritor of the hexameter. The second rule of comparative studies—that one proceeds from an internal analysis of any given text to external comparisons—will be invoked here to require that we discover the internal structures of the tablet texts and compare them with other structures; one-off, random word equivalences are not useful unless they lead to analysis of larger rhetorical and literary structures.
Richard P.Martin (Stanford)
Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics: April (2007)
Abstract
This paper attempts to read the gold “Orphic” tablets found in tombs from Thessaly to Sicily against the background of Homeric epic. It introduces the notion of “speech type-scene” and draws conclusions, from the deployment of formulae and pragmatic situations, about the “voice” one is supposed to hear behind the tablet texts. It was originally delivered as a paper at the Ohio State University conference Ritual Texts for the Afterlife (April 2006), organized by Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles-Johnston.
While our understanding of the so-called “ Orphic” tablets continues to improve thanks to the scrutiny of many learned proponents of Religionswissenschaft, the appreciation of these texts from a literary standpoint has lagged somewhat behind. What follows, therefore, are some tentative thoughts on the poetic heritage and environment of the Gold Tablet texts. The broader study of Greek poetry will be seen to advance their explication; by the same token the tablets significantly increase the available stock of Greek poetic reality—whatever their religious functions may have been.
As the first rule of comparative studies is to know what to compare, we should begin by assuming that texts written in Greek hexameters of any time or place can and should be compared with one another. As a matter of practice,one can extend this principle to cover as well medieval and modern Greek texts in the dhekapendasyllavos meter that became the inheritor of the hexameter. The second rule of comparative studies—that one proceeds from an internal analysis of any given text to external comparisons—will be invoked here to require that we discover the internal structures of the tablet texts and compare them with other structures; one-off, random word equivalences are not useful unless they lead to analysis of larger rhetorical and literary structures.
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