A black-figure painting by the renowned artist Exekias (active c. 540 BC) shows the Achaean warrior Ajax leaning forward, crouched and with his head bent over, intent on the ground under his face (Fig. 11). His right hand is carefully placing an upright sword into a little mound of earth; his left hand pats the earth down. The verticality of the sword contrasts both with the hunched warrior and with two spears which lean at an angle against an assemblage of armour – a crested helmet perched on the rim of a figure-of-eight shield, its empty frame eerily gazing down at the human figure. Behind the warrior, a palm tree, isolated, its branches curving down as if to caress the naked back, the only witness to the impending suicide.
Exekias’ painting is unique in its handling of its topic. Ajax, second in fighting prowess to Achilles among the Achaean warriors at Troy, had lost a contest with Odysseus for the arms of Achilles and then attempted to gain vengeance on Odysseus and other leaders of the army at Troy. Exekias shows the aftermath of Ajax’ failure. But whereas other ancient depictions show Ajax as a corpse, penetrated by the sword, he captures Ajax just before he falls on the sword, with the rest of his weapons stacked up as a reminder of his recent humiliation as well as of the military successes that brought him glory (he was particularly renowned for his shield).
The temporal tensions caught in Exekias’ painting chime with a prominent strand in recent thinking about time in a number of disciplinary frameworks: its irreducible multiplicity. For the French philosopher Michel Serres (1930–2019), a particular concern is the multitemporality of the instantaneous moment. He introduces ideas about the dynamic behaviour of fluids to reconstruct the poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s idea of a flowing river (‘Sous le pont Mirabeau coule le Seine’) as a metaphor for the unidirectional passage of time: ‘he hadn’t noticed the countercurrents or the turbulences’. Like much of Serres’ thinking, this comment connects to his fundamental claim that Lucretian atomism and contemporary physics describe the same phenomenon of the chaotic movements of atoms within fluids.1 Lucretius and modern physicists should not be seen as separated by unbridgeable time: in place of linear temporality and differentiated periods, Serres views every historical era as ‘multitemporal’, consisting of ‘a time that is gathered together, with multiple pleats’, like a crumpled handkerchief in which apparently distant points touch each other.2 He offers the example of two elderly brothers mourning a youthful corpse – the preserved body of their mountain-guide father, rediscovered decades after he had gone missing in the high mountains when the brothers were children. Serres offers this scene, ‘precisely an anachronism’, as a metaphor for the relationship between writers – their thought preserved in time – and critics;3 the metaphor encapsulates his goal of unsettling everyday assumptions about linear temporality.
Fig. 11 Ajax preparing his suicide. Black-figure amphora attributed to Exekias, Athens, sixth century BC, 558.3, Musée Communale, Boulogne-sur-Mer. © Philippe Beurtheret.
Other disciplines where human experience has been analysed as multitemporal include psychoanalysis, cognitive science, memory studies and narrative theory. Psychoanalysts from Freud to Fédida have spoken of the ‘anachronism’ or ‘anachronic’ structure of the subconscious, signifying the capacity of memory to retain and re-order traces of the past and its resistance to linear structuring.4 Cognitive theorists such as Evelyn Tribble and John Sutton approach temporal multiplicity through the workings of the human mind. They argue that views of the past as a realm that can be definitively separated from the present oversimplify how time is experienced, and see the presence of multiple, perhaps conflicting, ways of making sense of time at any given moment as a constant of human existence rather than as the product of acculturation. To capture this sense of multiplicity they have recourse to the language of anachronism, which they describe as ‘intrinsic to human experience’.5 The classical scholar Glenn Most similarly suggests that people experience their own lives by ‘ordinary empirical anachronisms … in the form of the narratives they recount to one another and, above all, to themselves’ – anachronistic narratives that are far more complex, according to Most, than anything to be found even in Proust.6 Again, philosophers of history interested in the capacity of narrative to represent history have presented a layered image of human experience, involving a blend of past, present and future,7 while historians interested in cultural memory have paradoxically aligned the anachronistic with the synchronic (given that memory brings together different times in the present) rather than seeing the terms as antithetical.8
As we noted in Chapter 1, an important inspiration for the reconfiguration of the language of anachronism is found in Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood’s Anachronic Renaissance. Rejecting the notion that linear chronology is ‘the inevitable matrix of experience and cognition’, Nagel and Wood substitute the term ‘anachronic’ for ‘anachronistic’ as a means of naming artworks’ peculiar concatenation of remembering, anticipation and belatedness, but one which is free from the historicist assumption that the artwork is ‘a witness to its times’. They conceive of artworks as temporally plural, simultaneously pointing forward to their future recipients and commenting on the historicity of their own creation, whether by placing themselves within a substitutionary chain of earlier works that looks back to a remote origin or by styling themselves as authorial performances that anticipate later responses. The anachronic, in their formulation, is not so much what an artwork is but what it does.
Scholars have also in recent years paid attention to the varied ways in which the anachronic nature of time can be grasped through human engagement with material objects and literary representations of objects. A good example of this scholarly approach is Jonathan Gil Harris’ 2009 study of Elizabethan theatre, Untimely Matter in the Age of Shakespeare. Partly through the influence of Serres and another French philosopher, Bruno Latour, Harris resists attempts to understand objects within their immediate contexts of production or use, or to construct cultural biographies in which objects are understood as having different values at different temporal moments.9 Instead Harris proposes that multiple temporal traces inhere in objects and can be opened up to understanding in unpredictable ways. His analysis promotes sensitivity to how ‘things chafe against the sovereignty of the moment-state’ by being used in multiple contexts, and also by folding multiple times together as a precondition of their existence:10 ‘materiality … articulates temporal difference’, but ‘in collating traces of past, present and future, it also pluralizes and hence problematizes the time of the object’. Harris employs ‘multitemporality’ to name the process by which an object ‘can prompt many different understandings and experiences of temporality’.11 Objects, in other words, do not simply reflect temporal experience, but promote particular means of comprehending it.
As we shall see in this chapter, analysis of material objects and their representation in literary works points to an awareness of temporal multiplicity in antiquity. We will discuss the role of objects in narrative genres such as epic and historiography as well as their use as props in theatrical performance (Sophocles’ version of the suicide scene depicted on Exekias’ vase). First, however, we set this use of objects in context by analysis of the apprehension of the multitemporal moment suggested by literary and philosophical writings in antiquity.
Let us consider first two Roman attempts to capture the history of recent rhetorical performances. Cicero in his dialogue Brutus (c. 46 BC) sketches the leading practitioners of forensic oratory at Rome in the closing decades of the Republic, carefully placing each figure within his own ‘age’ (aetas). As the account approaches Cicero’s present, the gap between these ‘ages’ grows shorter and shorter, and orators are increasingly frequently positioned in overlapping generations. Time seems to become faster and, in Serres’ terms, more folded. A more phenomenological sense of multiplicity is found in an account of declamations in the rhetorical schools that was written by the elder Seneca in old age at the request of his sons. Seneca begins the work with reflections on the distortions of memory (Controversiae 1 preface 3–5):
Whatever I deposited in memory as a boy or young man, it brings out without delay as if recent and just heard. But things I have entrusted to it these last years it has lost and mislaid so that even though they are often dinned into me, I nonetheless hear them each time as new (quasi nova). … I must ask you not to want me to follow a strict order in drawing my thoughts together; I must … grasp whatever occurs to me. I shall perhaps put in several different places sententiae which were actually spoken in one declamation.
Seneca here to some extent anticipates the view of cognitive theorists that memory is ‘animated by plural temporalities and by rhythms other than those of linear succession’.12 But he presents the wavering of memory as a failing of old age rather than as inherent in human consciousness. The difference of perspective exemplifies the capacity of subjects to enrich their experience of time by their own reflections of it.
The most profound ancient investigation of the human consciousness of time is often thought to be that conducted by the Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo (354–430) in Book 11 of his Confessions.13 Part of Augustine’s discussion turns on the meaning of the past (which exists no longer) and the future (which does not yet exist): ‘our present intention draws the future into the past: as the future diminishes, the past grows, until the future is spent and everything is the past’. The stress in ‘intention’ on human mental activity is reinforced as Augustine affirms that it is ‘mind’ that ‘looks forward, and is aware, and remembers’: ‘what it looks forward to shifts through what it is aware of into what it remembers’. Past and future, then, are wrapped together in the present – which itself ‘passes in an instant’, while ‘attention endures’. Augustine then clarifies what is meant by the common expressions ‘a long future’ and ‘a long past’, namely ‘a long expectation of the future’ and ‘a long memory of the past’ (11.27–8).
Augustine’s conception of time is frequently characterized as a radical departure from non-Christian temporal perspectives. But while Christianity did shape Augustine’s division of history (with ‘six ages of the world’ of 1,000 years followed by a seventh age of rest), his account of time as shaped by memory of the past and anticipation of the future in the fleeting present is foreshadowed in earlier philosophical writings. The poet Lucretius, for instance, expresses a similar sense of the moment in a passage where, in line with Epicurean doctrine, he denies the existence of entities other than atoms and void: ‘Time also exists not of itself, but from things themselves is derived the sense of what has been done in the past, then what thing is present with us, further what is to follow after’; ‘a sense of time’, he concludes, is inseparable from the movement of atoms (On the Nature of Things 1.459–64). Aristotle, too, reached his definition of time as the ‘number of movement in respect of the before and after’ (Physics 220a25–6) by considering the human experience of time passing. For theologian, poet and philosopher alike, past and future are grasped through human perception in the present.
This tripartite model of time is found in non-philosophical writings too. Rhetorical theories of narrative divided time into ‘what has gone by, what is present, what is going to be’ (Theon, Exercises 78) – a division Quintilian thought too trivial to require further discussion (Oratorical Education 4.2.3). The same division surfaces right at the outset of the Greek literature: Calchas is introduced in the first book of the Iliad as ‘the best of augurs, who knew what is, and what will be, and what was before’ (1.69–70). Homer, admittedly, does not specify that past and future exist only as perceived through memory and expectation, but his praise of Calchas’ seercraft implies something along those lines: Calchas can exploit his special skill at times when ordinary mortals have to act on the basis of a much dimmer apprehension of what is not immediately present. There is a strong case, moreover, for claiming that the tripartite model of time is inherent in the structure of narrative as well as other human interactions. Whether or not they offer explicit reflections on time, narratives present characters acting in their present on the basis of their recollections of the past and their desires for the future. Thus the Iliad starts with a priest of Apollo coming to the Achaean camp at Troy with a plan for the future (ransoming his daughter) based on his knowledge of a past event (his daughter’s capture). Thwarted by Agamemnon, the priest then prays to Apollo for help with a new plan (revenge), invoking as he does so, with a conventional formula, his past services to the god (1.12–13, 37–42). While this tripartite model is distinct from an experience of time as multitemporal, texts such as the Iliad create situations that become multitemporal for readers by drawing the three times together. Readers experience as simultaneity what the rhetoricians divide.
The anachronicity of the present moment emerges still more powerfully in some ancient reflections on its evanescence. A memorable expression of the multitemporal moment appears in a chapter of Censorinus’ On the Birthday in which time is divided into units such as ‘day’, ‘month’, ‘the turning year’, ‘the great year’ (the period between repeated conjunctions of different planets), ‘era’ (saeculum) and ‘eternity’ (aevum), which is defined as ‘the single greatest time’, ‘immeasurable, without origin, without end’, and the same for all humans. It is in treating this final category (rather than units with culturally specific divisions, such as ‘day’ or ‘month’) that Censorinus elaborates on past, present, and future (16.4):
Of these, the past lacks a beginning, the future an end; the present, which is the middle, is so exiguous and incomprehensible that it has no length and seems to be nothing other than a conjunction of the transacted and the future. It is so unstable that it is never in the same place, and it plucks (decerpit) whatever runs through from the future and adds it to the past.
The present as slippery meeting place of past and present stands in dialectical opposition to the infinite time of the aevum, a time so immense that any unit of finite time is, in comparison with it, ‘not equal to one winter’s hour’ (16.6).
Perhaps no other ancient writer is as celebrated as Horace for giving poetic shape to this sense of fleetingness. ‘Pluck the day’ (carpe diem) is the best-known phrase in the whole Horatian corpus, often translated ‘seize the day’ and taken to express a recommendation to live for the moment. What has been less noticed, however, is that the poem which contains that soundbite (Odes 1.11) invites readers to form a subtle understanding of what a ‘moment’ entails. It does so through its evocation of a specific time and place and through its use of tenses:
Do not ask – knowing is impermissible – what end the gods have given to you, what to me, Leuconoe, and do not meddle with Babylonian numbers. How much better to endure whatever will be, whether Jupiter has allotted us more winters, or this is the last that now weakens the Tyrrhenian Sea against pumice rocks. Be prudent: strain the wine, and cut back long hopes within a small space. While we talk, grudging time will have fled. Pluck the day, trusting as little as possible to the future.14
Horace is at the seaside with a lover, but he leaves us to imagine the dynamics of their past relationship, which have made Leuconoe turn to astrology in the hope of discovering the future. He focuses instead on the present, creating with the phrase ‘that now (nunc) weakens the Tyrrhenian Sea against pumice rocks’ a powerful instance of what Jonathan Culler calls ‘the special “now” of lyric articulation’.15 The line achieves an arresting condensation of times: the sea breaking against the rocks belongs to the longue durée, but the waves’ repeated collapse is also open to human apprehension. Horace’s ‘nunc’ folds together these two time scales: winter now acts as a synecdoche for winter in general.
The surprising image of a storm ‘wearing out’ the sea locates the poem in a particular setting. David West has noted that volcanic pumice is found by the sea in Italy only in the Bay of Naples (an area known in antiquity for its relaxed sexual mores).16 On West’s reading, the image is not one of sea crashing into cliffs, but of waves rolling back pumice pebbles on a beach; it is the porosity of pumice that weakens the sea. Horace’s phrase pinpoints the specific, and repeated, moment at which waves weaken and come apart, hushed into foam and spray. Combining the momentary and the repetitive, the seasonal and the sweep of cosmic time, the lyric present constructed here opens up a perception of the multitemporal by which readers are enabled to step beyond the limited view of human temporality that holds sway over the user of ‘Babylonian numbers’ (horoscopes). This way of thinking, Horace implies, reduces the experience of time to a finite series of vacancies, a subject for calculation rather than a scene of emotion and self-reflection.
To this calculative manner, the poem opposes its multitemporal attitude. The multiplicity of times suggested by the storm crashing against the seashore is expanded through Horace’s exhortations to his companion. Horace is telling Leuconoe to make the most of the present (by having sex?). But his present-tense observation ‘while we talk’ is followed by the unsettling future-perfect in ‘grudging time will have fled’ (fugerit: we expect ‘time is fleeing’). The effect is to configure the ‘now’ (nunc) of the winter scene not simply as an evanescent immediacy, but as capable of being grasped retrospectively from a point in the future. And the ‘time’ (aetas) whose flight is experienced both in the present and in the future is itself multiple: it is at once a semi-personified vehicle of envy, the supra-human time of the cosmos, and the measure of a brief conversation (‘while we talk’) which forms part of that larger timescale. Crucially, the fleeting moment is given depth and significance by these relations. It is not only to be enjoyed through the senses (as carpe diem, with its implications of grape-plucking, intimates), but the means of an enriched reflection on what makes a moment meaningful as a time in which joy is felt more intensely through an awareness of its transience. The prudence (‘be wise’) that the poem recommends and enables is partly a matter of pursuing contentment unencumbered by fruitless dwelling on the future. But it also involves a simultaneous grasp of the present’s connections to past and future, and of the multiple dimensions of the present itself, that renders the apprehension itself an enactment of human finitude and self-awareness.
We turn now to the multitemporality of material objects, starting with a necessarily speculative reconstruction of possible responses to a painting (Fig. 12) on a psykter (wine-cooler) attributed to the Athenian vase-painter Oltos (active c. 525–500 BC). The psykter shows an ostensibly surreal scene: hoplites in battle array, carrying shields and spears, ride on the backs of dolphins. When used at a symposium, the psykter would have stood in water to keep the wine cool, creating a congruence between use and image. The water around the base of the psykter would have taken on the appearance of the sea, on which the dolphins would have appeared to ride, bobbing with the movements of the water. This interaction between object and setting makes the transformative powers that are at work in the image itself (men borne out to sea on the backs of dolphins) radiate out into the environment in which it is used. It enacts the notion of the symposium as a space of psychological and emotional transformation.17
So much for the fit between object and environment. But how is the odd scene that the psykter depicts to be understood? Scholars have tended to interpret the scene as a symbolic depiction of a choral dance:18 dolphins are often associated with choral dance in Greek poetry because of their love of music and their tendency to follow ships on which auloi (instruments similar to oboes) were being played.19 This analysis might well be correct, but the psykter also repays being read against the kind of experience drinkers at symposia would often have had. Conjoining hoplites and dolphins, the image literalizes the process by which different aspects of a man’s identity meet in symposiastic revelry. A man who serves in an ordered group of hoplites now drinks and listens to the aulos. In so doing, he takes on something of the dolphin’s intuitive response to music. More metaphorically still, he and his friends are assimilated to a group of dolphins which moves together in a different sort of harmony. Yet they retain their identity as men: the hoplites ride on, rather than become, dolphins. The image metaphorizes the new type of order that the men enact in the symposium, condensing thereby their activities as hoplites, dancers and listeners, and producing a new kind of coherence even as it draws attention to the temporal segmentation of these varied activities.
Fig. 12 Hoplites riding on dolphins; the devices on their shields suggest the symposium, as in the kylix shown on the right-hand shield here. Red-figure psykter attributed to Oltos, c. 520–510 BC. 1989.281.69, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
We approach here Harris’ elaboration of the ways in which an object ‘can prompt many different understandings and experiences of temporality’. The object’s viewers could have understood the scene as a metaphorical representation of the energies released in choral dancing, energies that might have conjured up their own memories of choral performance. Equally, they could have read the scene as related to their immediate sympotic experiences. On either reading, the image both enforces the realization that different relations to and inhabitations of time can intersect within a given moment and calls attention to the differentiation that makes such folding meaningful.
While Oltos’ psykter illustrates how artworks from antiquity are capable of foregrounding the relationship between their static form and the temporal multi-layeredness of the phenomena they present, ancient writers were interested in the experiences generated by the re-use of material objects in time periods other than those in which they were first manufactured. We focus here on ancient discussions of some object-groups which reveal a perspective incipiently similar to that developed by critics such as Nagel and Wood.
The first objects are bronze statues of the Athenian lovers Harmodius and Aristogiton, known as the ‘tyrannicides’ for their assassination of Hipparchus, son of the earlier tyrant Pisistratus (Thucydides (6.54.2) suggested that it was Hipparchus’ brother Hippias who was actually tyrant at the time of the assassination).20 Statues of the lovers by Antenor were set up in the Athenian agora at some point after the expulsion of the Pisistratids, but removed by the Persians when they sacked Athens in 480 BC. The Athenians soon commissioned a new statue-group, with gestures (arm raised about to strike) thought either to be modelled on, or themselves to have influenced, representations of Theseus, who was revered at Athens as a founding figure (p. 64). The originals were, however, recovered by Alexander the Great when he captured Susa, and the historian Arrian (second century AD) states that they ‘are now positioned at Athens in the Ceramicus [used in his time for the agora too], where we go up to the acropolis (es polin21)’; he implies, too, that they were visible to those visiting Athens, as high-status Romans often did for cultural prestige (Anabasis 3.16.7–8). Further details are added by the reports of other authors in the imperial period. Pausanias reports seeing both the original and the replacement groups (identified by their sculptors’ names) at Athens (1.8.5), while Cassius Dio mentions that the Athenians set up bronze statues of Caesar’s assassins near the tyrannicides, ‘suggesting that Brutus and Cassius had emulated them’ (47.20.4).
The tyrannicide statues are, in Nagel and Wood’s term, anachronic artworks. Arrian’s account pointedly juxtaposes four distinct times, that of the tyrant-slaying for which the statues were originally constructed, Xerxes capturing the statues, Alexander recapturing them, and the present in which the statues can be viewed in a new setting itself of political import. He presents the statue-group as part of a narrative spanning symbolic episodes in Athens’ past, suggesting that its meaning had changed along with the city’s political transformations: in Nagel and Wood’s terms, it was not simply ‘a witness to its times’, but accrued significance from these temporal displacements. Pausanias and Cassius Dio, on the other hand, speak to the distinction Nagel and Wood draw between ‘authorial performance’ and ‘substitution’ as models of artistic creation: authorial performance ‘cuts time into before and after’ through the element of agency, and ‘asserts punctual difference against repetition and continuity’, while ‘substitution proposes sameness across difference’.22 Pausanias’ attention to the names of the sculptors promotes a view of the statues as authorial performance; he was writing at a time when the replacement statues – ‘the craft (technē) of Critius’, in Pausanias’ terms – and not the ‘old/original’ (archaious: the adjective can mean either) ones made by Antenor had been widely copied across the Roman Empire. Cassius Dio, by contrast, attributes to the Athenians something closer to a substitutional view: as an act of political self-assertion, and in negotiation of their complex relationship with Rome, the Athenians present the statues of Caesar’s assassins, and by extension the assassination itself, as part of a chain with Athenian origins, linking those fighting to preserve the Roman republic with the heritage of Athenian democracy. This substitutional view may have been enhanced by the status enjoyed by the replacement statue-group as well as by the visual link with depictions of Theseus.
Our second example concerns a statue of the penultimate Roman king, Servius Tullius, which was placed in a temple of Fortuna at Rome built by Tullius himself and later, during the Second Punic War, survived a fire that destroyed the rest of the temple. The episode is recounted in various authors: Livy merely notes the fire in passing without mentioning the statue (24.47.15); Valerius Maximus hails the statue’s survival as a miracle (1.8.11); and Ovid attributes its survival to Tullius’ supposed father, the god Vulcan (Fasti 6.625–6). Most detailed and complex is the account in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities. Dionysius looks ahead to the fire immediately after recounting Tullius’ death (4.40.7):
In the temple of Fortune which he himself constructed a gilded wooden statue of Tullius alone remained unharmed by the fire when there was a conflagration and everything else was destroyed. And still now, while the temple and everything in it, all that was restored to the old/original arrangement (archaion kosmon) after the conflagration, are clearly of modern craftsmanship (kainēs technēs), the statue is, as previously, archaic (archaikē) in construction; for it still remains an object of reverence for the Romans.
The main point of the anecdote is that the statue’s survival offers a proof of the favour shown the king by the gods. But the story also reveals a consciousness of the multiple temporal perspectives that can be prompted by a given object. For Dionysius, both the ‘old/original’ form of the restored temple and the ‘modern’ craft that produced it can be apprehended simultaneously; or rather, to apply Nagel and Wood’s suggestion that ‘the original was the creature of the replica’,23 the idea of the temple’s archaios condition depends on the act of restoration. Dionysius’ account suggests further that the statue of Tullius gains from its position in the restored temple: it is described by the adjective archaikos, which (unlike the cognate archaios) always conveys a sense of period style; and while that adjective can be used of deliberate archaisms, here it emphasizes that the statue is a survival of a previous age, and in doing so enhances its numinousness.
Nagel and Wood themselves illustrate their ideas of original and replica with another Roman structure described by Dionysius, the Casa Romuli. This was a hut on the Palatine alleged to be that in which the twins Romulus and Remus were reared by a shepherd and his wife. Dionysius notes that the hut survives ‘even in my time’ (1.79.11), is treated as ‘holy’ and is repaired when damaged ‘in as similar a way to before as is possible’. As Nagel and Wood note, the original hut was probably constructed long after the time of its supposed inhabitants, but its presence on the Palatine (as that of a rival hut on the Capitoline) created a sense of connection to Rome’s past, even as its surroundings were re-shaped with buildings of marble.24
In the last two sections of this chapter we turn to imaginary objects in Greek tragedy and (to start with) Greek and Roman epic. While epic typically has a broad spatial and temporal canvas, three illustrative scenes will show how epic poets were capable of making characters’ engagement with material objects serve as a vehicle for reflection on the multitemporality of the moment.
First, a distant time and space, as evoked in the Argonautica, written in the third century BC by Apollonius of Rhodes. The passage describes how the Argonauts in the course of their voyage around the Black Sea encounter a place used by the Amazons for sacred rites (2.1169–76):
They all went together to Ares’ temple to sacrifice sheep, and they stood around the altar eagerly, which was outside the roofless temple, made of pebbles. Within a black rock had been fixed, holy, to which once all the Amazons prayed; and it was their custom, whenever they came from the mainland, not to burn sacrifices of sheep or bulls upon the altar, but they slaughtered horses prepared for a year’s length.
The black rock juts uncannily into the Argonauts’ world, and that of the reader. Unworked, housed in a simple ‘roofless’ temple, it appears as a relic of an unspecified past. Veneration is paid to it seemingly in virtue of its pure objecthood. Apollonius’ terse account enforces its mysteriousness.
Apollonius’ primordial rock is nonetheless surrounded with hints of different temporalities. The contrast between two types of sacrificial victim (sheep and horses) evokes conventional Greek views of the differences between Greek and barbarian, hinting perhaps at a contrast between the ‘primitivism’ of the nomadic, horse-rearing Amazons and the more ‘advanced’ Greeks. A more subtle mechanism is the verb-form Apollonius uses for the ‘fixing’ of the rock in the temple, ērēreisto. This form of the verb appears in Apollonius (here and at 2.1105) for the first time in extant poetry since his most important stylistic model, the Iliad, where it is used four times, always in the same metrical position as in Apollonius (with heavy long syllable in the fifth foot of the hexameter), and always of a spear being ‘fixed’ in a ‘much-decorated breastplate’ as a warrior falls in battle (3.358, 4.136, 7.252, 11.436). The echo of this violent literary past is as uncanny as the experience of seeing the stone. The primeval quality of the rock is captured by means of a self-conscious reversion to Homer, a linguistic gesture that twins belatedness and remembering. Borrowing again the language of Nagel and Wood, we might say that Apollonius translates the black rock from anachronism to anachrony. An object that, perceived in isolation, might seem a left over from a distant past becomes a means of experiencing and reflecting on the multitemporal nature of our intellectual constitution as readers. At the same time, the momentary experience of coordinating Apollonius’ recollection of Homer contrasts forcefully with the enduring qualities of the rock that it describes.25
We turn now forward in heroic, but back in literary, chronology to a famous moment in the ninth book of the Iliad. Achilles has withdrawn from battle because Agamemnon has taken away from him Briseis, a woman captured and given to Achilles as a slave when he sacked the city of Lyrnessus and awarded to him in recognition of his valour. Three envoys are sent to woo him back: ‘They found him delighting his mind with the clear-toned lyre, fair and elaborate, and on it was a silver bridge, which he had taken from the spoils when sacking Eetion’s city; with this he delighted his heart and sang the great deeds of men’ (9.186–9). Through the lyre’s history, Homer evokes a specific past: Eetion was ruler of Lyrnessus, the city where Briseis was captured, and father of Hector’s wife Andromache, who earlier in the poem has recalled in a pathetic speech his killing at Achilles’ hands (6.414). The story attached to the lyre shows that Achilles is still gripped by anger at Agamemnon’s recent wrongs; its continuing presence contrasts with the absence of Briseis. It invites us, too, to contrast the lyre’s permanence with the transience of Eetion’s city and to reflect on its varying performance history: it was once used to celebrate, perhaps, quite different deeds. The use Achilles makes of the lyre points at the same time to the future. By singing of ‘the great deeds of men’ (klea andrōn), he evokes the ‘undying fame’ (kleos aphthiton) for which the warrior undergoes the danger of battle, for which Achilles himself accepts an early death (9.413). Even without knowing the details of what Achilles sings about, we apprehend the lyre as a device in which different times fold.
Achilles singing on his lyre offers an oblique model for Homer’s own practice. In inviting listeners to hear two songs simultaneously, Homer’s own and what Achilles is imagined as singing, the scene is paradigmatic for the Iliad’s poetics. In addition to foregrounding parallelism of theme (the Iliad too celebrates ‘the great deeds of men’), the lyre captures the way in which the Iliad collapses distinct times while allowing listeners to reflect on their differences. Like Apollonius’ unworked rock, the crafted lyre transcends the moment in which it appears in the narrative and becomes an anachronic object.
The capacity of material objects to crystallize the folding of the present moment in the lasting literary monument is nowhere exploited more remarkably than at the very end of the Aeneid. Virgil presents Aeneas on the battlefield, pondering whether to spare the Rutilian king Turnus (Italian Hector to his Achilles). As Turnus pleads with him, Aeneas suddenly sees that he is wearing on his shoulder a baldric ripped from the corpse of Pallas, the young son of Aeneas’ ally Evander; consumed with fury, he ‘buries’ (condit) his sword in Turnus’ body (12.950). The verb used here for the act of killing is, as critics have noted, regularly used for the founding of cities; the Aeneid itself starts by stressing Aeneas’ multiple sufferings in war and journeying ‘until he should found (conderet) a city’ (1.5). The poem folds back on itself, inviting readers to reflect on the connection between this killing of one man and the creation of Rome. Multiple times converge even more startlingly in the description of the baldric (with a standard poetic use of the plural) as ‘monuments (monimenta) of savage grief’ (12.945): in Don Fowler’s words, ‘it is a reminder to Aeneas of the pain that Pallas suffered, it is a reminder that causes savage pain in him at this point, it will cause him to bring about savage pain in Turnus, and it is a monument representing a scene of pain’ (the baldric has depicted on it the slaughter of their husbands by the daughters of Danaus on their wedding night).26 The present folds together past and future as well as the perpetuation of suffering in art. As with Achilles’ lyre, moreover, the momentary focus on Pallas’ baldric thematizes poetics: ‘monuments of savage grief’ is an apt description of the Aeneid itself, and so a further instantiation of Virgil’s self-reflexive engagement with different temporalities.
The literary objects that we have explored in this section emblematize the complex relations that exist between the time of events and the time of their recipients. By focusing attention on the difference between these two times, they point to audience time as a domain in which readers are able to articulate for themselves a distinct form of synoptic, retrospective temporal consciousness. The rock, the lyre and the baldric do not simply open up a local understanding of time’s passing conceived in relation to particular events. The poems themselves provide frames for coordinating the different temporalities presented within them. They make available not a unified theorization of temporality, but an expanded understanding of what it is to live in time.
Our discussion of anachronism in tragedy in Chapter 3 focused on the retrojection of post-heroic practices to the heroic world. At issue here is a different manifestation of the genre’s creative capacities, namely the use of objects as a way of putting on show a multitemporal understanding of human agency. We focus here on the most famous telling of the story portrayed on the vase-painting with which we began this chapter: Sophocles’ Ajax (composed perhaps in the 440s BC), a play that is distinctive in the connection it forges between multitemporality and its thematic focus on change and resistance to change.
How was the climactic moment of Ajax’s suicide portrayed in Sophocles’ play? Objects in tragedy may be physically present (as props on stage) or captured solely by language; for the former we rely in any case (in the absence of stage directions) on characters’ words for clues not just about objects’ meaning but even about their very presence. In Ajax, Sophocles used both types of object anachronically to elicit reflection on the significance of the hero’s suicide.
A striking tableau towards the start of the play presents Ajax surrounded by visible evidence of the previous night’s carnage (maddened by Athena, he had slaughtered some of the army’s livestock under the illusion he was killing his enemies).27 Apparently set on suicide, he calls for his son Eurysaces, asserting that the child ‘will not be frightened to look on this newly-spilt blood’ (545–6), and then bids him to ‘take the thing from which you take your name’ – ‘my shield unbreakable, of seven hides, wielding it by its well-sewn thong’ (574–6: ‘Eurysaces’ means ‘broad-shielded’). The shield (which may or may not be present on stage) is a disconcertingly multitemporal object: the resonant ‘of seven hides’ alludes to Ajax’s shield as it is known from the Iliad, but while that large Iliadic shield was attached to the body by a leather strap, the tragic version has a hand-grip (porpax) like contemporary hoplite shields, but one made of leather rather than metal.28 The slight rupture introduced by this technological anachronism contrasts with the shield’s function as emblem of continuity from father to son. This sense of continuity is both reinforced and complicated by Ajax’s confident assertion that his son will be undaunted by the sight of gore – in marked contrast with the emotional Iliadic scene where Hector’s young son Astyanax cowers before his father’s nodding helmet, ‘frightened by the bronze and the crest of horse-hair’ (6.469). The complication introduced by the Homeric intertext is typical of Attic tragedy’s tendency to take elements of the epic ethos (here inherited fearlessness) and push them to uncomfortable extremes.
The presence onstage of the suicide weapon is first attested in the famous ‘deception speech’ in which Ajax seems to suggest that he has decided not to kill himself: ‘I will go where I can find untrodden ground, and hide this sword of mine, most hated of weapons, digging a place in the ground where none will see it. … since I received this gift from Hector, my deadliest enemy, I have never experienced anything good from the Argives’ (657–63). Ajax here alludes to his exchange of gifts with Hector after their duel in the Iliad, which was left unresolved owing to the arrival of night (7.303–5); he now identifies that exchange as the beginning of his misfortunes. Later in the play, in a soliloquy before he does kill himself, Ajax returns to the same scene, starting with a personification of the sword itself (which is probably placed behind a screen which will conceal Ajax’s actual death): ‘The slaughterer stands where it will be sharpest, if one has leisure to calculate – a gift of Hector, of all foreigners to me most hateful, most fell to see’ (815–18). He proceeds to announce that he has ‘fixed’ the sword ‘in Troy’s hostile earth … on an iron-consuming whetstone newly-sharpened’ (819–20), and to offer prayers that his half-brother Teucer may find him ‘fallen on this newly-dripping sword’ (828) and that the god Hermes may convey him to the underworld, ‘ribs broken by this sword with a swift, spasm-less leap’ (833–4). Ajax here attempts to exert a measure of imaginative control over his fate by successively paring down his figuration of the sword, moving from personification to detailed description to simple reference.
Ajax’s recollection of Hector’s gift has been seen as linking him with the world of Homeric epic.29 This reading is in keeping with a common interpretation of the play as a whole: Ajax is often interpreted as an anachronistic character, attached to the stubborn individualism and pride of the epic hero, an individualism that is now seen to yield to the flexibility shown by Odysseus, who pleads that Ajax should be allowed burial, thereby showing himself ready to ignore personal slights.30 Like a hero in an American Western, on this reading the Homeric Ajax cannot survive in the settled civic world.
Interpretations of Ajax’s character as anachronistic subscribe to a misleading linear understanding of temporality of the sort that is contested by the critics canvassed earlier in this chapter. The goddess Athena attributes to Ajax the intellectual qualities which Thucydides (1.138.3, 2.65.6) praises in the leading fifth-century Athenian generals Themistocles and Pericles – ‘foresight’ and skill at ‘seizing opportunities (kairia)’ (119–20). Ajax’s attempted murder of the army’s leaders would in any case have been as problematic in Homeric ethics as it is from the civic perspective of fifth-century Athens. The Homeric poems themselves continued to exercise an immense (though not unchallenged) influence on Athenian education and culture; they were capable of framing ethical and political questions even in the changed conditions of a democracy.31
Ajax’s sword appears in the play not as an anachronistic relic of epic but as an object of his multitemporal consciousness. In his closing self-address, Ajax’s initial reference to Hector’s gift links its present role to its provenance. Next, the resonant compounds ‘newly-sharpened’ and ‘newly-dripping’ offer glimpses of the immediate past (Ajax’s preparations since his last appearance on stage) and future (the sword’s appearance after his death); the latter recalls too the ‘newly-spilt blood’ (546) on which Ajax called his son to look. Finally, the sparse reference to falling on ‘this sword’ expresses Ajax’s self-assertion. Throughout the speech, he layers the object with temporal significance, allowing listeners to perceive its past and future aspects folded into its present appearance at the same time as he attempts figuratively to displace its agency with his own.
The temporal implications of the allusion to Hector’s gift repay closer examination. In the ‘deception speech’, Ajax expresses through the sword his fixed hostility towards Hector: ‘the saying of men is true: the gifts of enemies are evil gifts and bring no benefits’ (664–5). And yet the rest of that speech is full of images of alternating change, in which the cyclical patterns of the cosmos are offered as an ethical paradigm: ‘For even terrible and most mighty things yield to prerogatives: snow-footed winters turn to crop-filled summer, night’s dread sphere stands aside for day’s white-foaled light to blaze’ (669–73). Ajax draws the lesson that ‘my enemy should be hated as one who will sometime become a friend; while as for a friend, I shall aim to help and assist him this far, as one who will not remain so for ever’ (678–82). Ajax wavers, then, between seeing human relations as fixed and inflecting the present moment with a sense of their mutability.
Ajax’s engagement with his physical surroundings creates an equally powerful expression of multitemporality. While he began his final speech by addressing his sword, he closes it by turning aside from his present concerns to address the landscape and the cosmos: ‘O light, o sacred plain of native Salamis, o ground of my father’s hearth, and famous Athens, and your kindred race, and these springs and rivers and the Trojan plain, you I address: farewell, my nourishers.’ This is the last word Ajax speaks: ‘other things I address to those in Hades below’ (859–65). The address’ pathos is intensified by the way it balances various temporalities. In addressing himself to rivers, plains and light, phenomena removed from the time of human inhabitation, he projects himself into an imagined community with a supra-human order while underlining his own fragility. This sense of fragility is further suggested by the narrative progression adumbrated in Ajax’s address: he moves from his origins in Salamis and Athens (both present in his consciousness alone) to his situation in Troy, and from the ‘light’ of life to ‘Hades’. The temporal tensions come to a head, finally, as he first uses his own name (‘Ajax speaks’), ‘seeing himself sub specie aeternitatis, like the preceding objects of the landscape’,32 before reverting to the first person as he ponders his future in the underworld.
Ajax should be interpreted as an anachronic rather than an anachronistic hero. What he does through his final speeches is to offer a self-reflexive exploration of his own temporal consciousness. To the deception speech’s rendering of simple alternations, his final speech adds a more complex notion of temporality in which objects with different histories are folded together. It challenges spectators (in the modern world as much as in fifth-century Athens) by presenting a collage of experiences of time out of which they can shape their own understanding of temporal processes.
A further Virgilian moment. Aeneas has finally arrived in Italy. In keeping with instructions from the ghost of his father Anchises, he makes for Cumae to seek help from the Sibyl. There he finds a temple founded by Daedalus in his flight from Crete. On it are gilded images, among them Cretan scenes: Pasiphae and her offspring, the Minotaur, ‘monuments (monimenta) of unspeakable lust’ (Aeneid 6.26); the labyrinth Daedalus created to house the monster; and Daedalus himself, helping Ariadne unlock its secrets with a thread ‘in pity for the queen’s great love’ (6.28). Monimenta again folds time: it signifies the Minotaur himself as memorial of and warning against sexual excess and also the temple door on which he is now depicted. By portraying Ariadne, moreover, Daedalus repeats in exile the gesture of pity he made when he helped her in Crete. But he does so now in metal, and now (as we know even if Daedalus himself does not) as a premonition of the still greater pity that the abandoned Ariadne will evoke. Daedalus’ artwork points, too, to the limits of art: twice Daedalus tried to portray the ‘fall’ (casus, 6.32) of his son Icarus, twice his hands ‘fell’ (cecidere, 6.33); and Aeneas’ own viewing is cut short as the priestess tells him that ‘this is not the time for these spectacles’ (6.37). He must instead find the dark grove within which shines a golden bough that will open a path to the underworld where he is to see his father and have unfolded before him a pageant of future Roman heroes.