Supplication

Supplication August 5, 2015

F. S. Naiden is making a career in classics by unsettling settled academic opinion about ancient religion and ritual. He did it in the 2012 Smoke Signals for the Gods, which reintroduced the gods into modern accounts of Greek sacrifice. Earlier (I’m reading Naiden in reverse order!), in Ancient Supplication, he had mounted a similar argument about the practice of supplication.

Inspired by ritual studies that begin with Robertson Smith and Frazer, contemporary scholars have claimed that supplication was an “automatic” process. If the suppliant approached the supplicandus, performed the right gesture, and said the right words, he could expect a positive response. If he said No, it was because of some infelicity in the ritual. 

As with sacrifice, Naiden argues that these theories do not pay sufficient attention to ritual failures, and claims that this theory deletes personal decision and judgment. Supplication, he agrees, is a ceremony in three stages – approach, gesture, and words (appeal and arguments). But it also includes a judgment, a decision made by the supplicandus about the virtue, history, and sincerity of the suppliant. A supplicandus may have pity on a suppliant (or, in Roman supplication, may show compassion); but he may not. 

He begins the book with a helpful example from the Odyssey: Two suppliants appeal to Odysseus for mercy. One was a musician who claimed he had been compelled to play music for the suitors; the other was a diviner who had performed sacrifices. Odysseus spares the musician, but decapitates the diviner on the spot because the nature of his work meant that he had frequently prayed for Odysseus’ death or delay. Given his role in the suitors’ Occupy Ithaca effort, he deserved no pity.

The bulk of Naiden’s book is a detailed examination of continuities and variations in the four-fold act of supplication, in Homeric and classical Greek and in Roman texts. He also examines the relationship between supplication and Athenian law.

A few side comments caught my attention. First, in reviewing the sources and scope of his study, Naiden notes that he pays scant attention to Near Eastern practices of supplication, mainly because “few reports of Near Eastern supplication survive” (21). He finds fewer than a dozen in the Hebrew Bible – some of the massively unsuccessful supplications (e.g., Joab grasping the altar), and comments that the notabl absence of supplications in the accounts of Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest of Jerusalem (22). In Assyrian sources, surrender rather than supplication is the norm; Assyrian kings are depicted with a foot on the neck of an enemy, not with the enemy grasping his knees pleading for mercy. Naiden doesn’t explore what these differences might reveal about classic and Near Eastern politics and religion, but it’s a subject worthy of some comparative study.

Second, Naiden’s comprehensive coverage of the topic “removes a common shortfall in the study of ancient history, whether Greek or Roman – the absence of women, children, and slaves. All three groups supplicate in abundance. No other religious practice – no other practice whatever – has so humble as well as diverse a cast of participants” (19). That observation leaves one wondering to what degree accounts of ancient religion have been skewed masculinely.

Finally, Naiden comments on the differences between Greek and Roman appeals. Though they made appeals to pity, Roman suppliants were less likely to base their appeal on pity than Greeks (98): “Romans differed from the Greeks in allowing a suppliant to admit his own guilt and ask for mercy. A new pair of ideas – guilt and mercy – would stand alongside the long-standing pair of innocence and pity” (240). Naiden claims that the difference lies in language, as well as in law and ethics. The Latin supplico means “bend the knee” and thus emphasizes the vertical relation of suppliant and supplicandus; the Greek equivalent hikateuo means “approach” and thus includes a horizontal inflection (though the vertical remains). Mercy fits into a hierarchical scheme that is less pronounced in Greek (241). 


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