Every culture has its antipodes, and for the Greeks it was freedom-unfreedom, for the Near East, government-anarchy, where slavery was insignificant.1 The ratio of slaves to free citizens, in the wealthiest period and part of Greece, Periclean Athens, was 3:2,2 and yet her wealth paled next to the oriental states. The very meaning of freedom derived from its antithesis — slavery. In Asia, large-scale slavery had never been practiced.3 Egypt had no concept of slavery and slaves, in any recognisable form, never appeared until the Egyptian Empire — yet were still a minuscule part of the labour force4; household slaves were easily assimilated5. In China, slaves comprised only 1% of the total population and had a very different status from that of Greco-Roman slaves!6 The corresponding ratio for Attica around 431 BC is between 25-33%.7 However, in Greece, too, Hellenistic despotism entailed the disappearance of slavery8 — and its re-emergence with the Roman Republic and, again, its disappearance with the Empire9. Freedom has no meaning unless the possibility of losing it is real. A monarchy, or centralized state, tolerates only a minimum of slaves, being jealous of their loyalty, which, if it is directed at all, will be directed towards the master. Likewise, it will set a high premium on stability, and a high discount on freedom, as the Greeks knew it ('eleutheron'),10 being habituated to government, unlike the Greeks, and unused to anarchy.
Homer, by rendering anarchy romantic, rendered death beautiful; Gilgamesh, by assuming government, achieved the reverse. Both affirm life. The Greek affirms life through the Other, as togetherness, the Mesopotamian through the Third, the state, as separateness. The Greek other may be free or a slave, necessarily, for Otherness implies either equality or subordination. The obsessive pursuit of 'glory', also, betrays the Other taking notes: 'arete', excellence, resides as much in the self as the non-self. The earthly immortality of fame, the life-in-death, contrasts with slavery, the death-in-life. Agamemnon and Achilles quarrel, not only over a slave-girl, but over a prize: the Iliad commences with the conflict between life-in-death, the prize, and death-in-life, the slave. With the Ego and the non-Ego so inextricated, without the extricating Third, the Iliad becomes a monument to the ideas of moira (fate) and hybris (excess). A man should stay within his moira, the kingdom of his self, and not transgress it through hybris, where the non-egos reside: though Ate (Folly, personified as a goddess) inveigle him thither, yet will he be visited by divine vengeance, personified as Nemesis.
The Third, in Gilgamesh, appears as the tyrannical king, who meets his alter ego, a wild man civilised. The humanised brute remonstrates with the dehumanised king, and Enkidu and Gilgamesh become one, the best of friends. When Enkidu gets into a funk before the terrible Huwawa, it is the other's turn to remonstrate.
"Mere man - his days are numbered,
whatever he may do, he is but wind.
You are - already now - afraid of death.
Where is the fine strength of your courage?
Let me lead,
and you (tarrying) call out to me : 'Close in, fear not!'
And if I fall, I shall have founded fame.
'Gilgamesh fell (they will say) in combat with terrible Huwawa'."
As expected, the reversal of Agamemnon and Achilles' roles as inextricated egos appears as the love of Gilgamesh for Enkidu. The non-ego does not threaten the ego, because both egos reside in the Third, Gilgamesh. Whereas Achilles retains his identity, moira and all, Gilgamesh relinquishes his individuality to become a relationship: king-and-friend. The demise of the non-ego buries hopes of immortality through fame, an exposé of its counterfeit existence, life-in-death. Death, in Gilgamesh, appears, not as the end of existence alone, but the end of a relationship. He'd been more than willing to brave it when the Other had been alive, to live on in the Other. The Third extricates egos so completely, as to leave no hope for immortality. In the Iliad, the Other has been thoroughly internalised, so that Achilles appears as his own spectator, choosing death, as much for himself, as for Others-in-him. Odysseus, rejecting immortality,11 affirms life, through the Other (his wife), by refusing to relinquish their common, extricated humanity, their togetherness. Gilgamesh finds no Other within him. The enjoyment of life was inextricably connected with the enjoyment of Others, not in-him, but in-the-state, outside him. Yet he is the state, and as the very principle of Otherness incarnate, must, since anarchy is intolerable, wish to continue ad infinitum, as immortality denied externally, that humanity may be affirmed internally, for one never witnesses one's own death, only others do. Thus life is affirmed through the Third, as separateness, not through the Other, as togetherness.
But orientalists must sorely be missing the priest-ridden society amidst this scene of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They must, I am afraid, content themselves with the initial piety of the drama. Weary, not of this world, but of a king's misrule, his subjects raise their voices in prayer, and the gods are not deaf to their plea.
"Gilgamesh leaves not the son to his father;
Day and night are unbridled his arrogance.
Yet this is Gilgamesh, the shepherd of Uruk.
He should be our shepherd: strong, stately and wise!
Gilgamesh leaves not the maid to her mother..."
The oriental dichotomy of government-anarchy appears as life-death, while the Greek antithesis freedom-unfreedom assumes the form of life-in-death, death-in-life — he becomes otherworldly only when he's disappointed in the Third, the Greek being both-worldly at the same time. The Epic belongs to the Early Dynastic Period, between 2700 — 2400 BC, the Heroic Age of Mesopotamian literature, just as Homer (800 BC) belongs to the Late Dark Age, the Heroic Age of Greece. In both cases, a process of secularisation was taking place, to culminate soon in city-states, but in the one instance to be ruled by kings (such as Gilgamesh of Uruk), in the other to be 'ruled' by the many. The passing of the sceptre from the gods to their temporal potentates occurs at the beginning of the Early Dynastic Period, a turning away from the other world.12
To satisfy, and silence, the clamorous demand for priests, once and for all, we shall adduce the Egyptian example, the hierocracy par excellence. The absence of hardly any evidence of personal religion during the Old Kingdom disappoints expectation. The moment anarchy reigns in the Pharaoh's stead, in the First Intermediate Period, the worst suspicions regarding the thanatomania of the East are confirmed. The universalisation of posthumous identification with Osiris, hitherto only a pharaonic prerogative, coupled with the vulgarisation of the Pyramid Texts on common coffins, signals the dispersion of sovereignty among the populace.
The Dispute of a Man, Weary of Life, a poem born of anarchic conditions, betrays a terribly disappointed reliance on the Third. It is an internal debate regarding suicide, 'to be or not to be'.
To whom can I speak today?
The gentle man has perished,
The violent man has access to everybody.
To whom can I speak today?
There are no righteous men,
The earth is surrendered to criminals.
. . . . . . . . .
Death stands before me today
Like the recovery of a sick man,
Like going outdoors again after being confined.
Death stands before me today
As a man longs to see his house,
After he has spent many years held in captivity.
. . . . . . . . .
Nay, but he who is yonder
Shall be a living god,
Inflicting punishment upon the doer of evil.
Nay, but he who is yonder
Shall be a man of wisdom,
Not stopped from appealing to Re when he speaks.13
Other variations harp on the same theme, being of the same age, The First Intermediate Period:
Men shall fashion arrows of copper, that they may beg for bread with blood. Men laugh with a laughter of disease.14
The fact that Hellas had been schooled in anarchy must not tempt us to infer an insouciant disregard for political unrest. During the Dark Ages, anarchy in the political sphere found a complementary anarchy in the spiritual, the pre-Homeric orgiastic cult of Dionysus.15 To regard the Homeric epics as a civilising passage to more settled times strains our credulity today, but they were a penultimate progression towards a secular view of existence.16 The deus ex machine of the Delphic oracle and the Eleusinian mysteries were psychic poultice during the revolt of the underprivileged against the nobles. Tellingly, it was the coincidental tyrannies17 which, as auxiliary to the aphoristic endeavours of the oracle enjoining one to 'Know thyself' and 'Be moderate', succeeded in mending the fracture sociale — the nearest approximation of Hellas to oriental despotism and piety.18 More telling was the ultimate secularisation of society under the Athenian Empire, when the gods were perceived as otiose at best, and inimical at worst.
There is no Zeus.
Young vortex reigns, and he has turned out Zeus. —(Aristophanes)
The execution of the epitome of rationality, Socrates, for impiety, startles us into recognition of the subterranean existence of religious feeling,19 proclaiming that Greece and the Near East share a dual view of life and death, without monopoly over this-worldliness or other-worldliness. A political chasm indeed there was, which contributed, and still contributes, through a belief in the superiority or inferiority of one system over another, to viewing civilisations across the gulf as decadent or dignified.
Notes:
1 Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, (London: New Left Books, 1974), p. 21
2 Ibid., p. 22
3 Ibid., P. 21
4 William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, p. 47
5 John R. Baines, Egypt, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 146
6 S.E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, p. 502; Jacque Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilisation, trans. J.R.Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 150
7 William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, p. 9
8 Ibid., pp 39-41
9 Ibid., pp. 63, 101 – 102, 113 - 117
10 .E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, pp. 323 – 324: Two centuries divide Homer and the innovation of chattel slavery; yet, the political conditions of the Homeric period were fecund with hints of the coming bondage of the masses. Indeed, this article's central argument is that political conditions caused the psychological preparedness for the coexistence of democracy and slavery.
11 The Odyssey, Book V, trans. Samuel Butler, The Internet Classics Archive
12 V.Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself, (London: Watts & Co., 1956), p. 154
13 Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), pp. 141-144
14 Ibid., p. 86
15 J.B. Bury & Russell Meiggs, A History of Greece, p. 194
16 John Richard Thornhill Pollard, Ancient European Religions, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 912
17 J.B. Bury & Russell Meiggs, A History of Greece, p. 113
18 Alfred Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth, 5th ed. (New York: Random House, 1931), p. 116-121
19 Russell Meiggs, Classical Greco-Roman Civilisation, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 274
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