Transcript
Marshall Poe:
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network, and you're listening to an episode in Grinnell College's Authors and Artists podcast. And today I'm very pleased to say we have Gerald Lalonde on the show, and he is the author of Athena Itonia: geography and meaning of an ancient Greek war goddess. Gerald, welcome to the show.
Gerald Lalonde:
I'm happy to be here. Thank you.
Marshall Poe:
Terrific. As you know, I'm a graduate of Grinnell College. I graduated in 1984, and you were a professor when I was there. I think people would be interested to know a little bit about your background, how you became what you are, and how you ended up at Grinnell.
Gerald Lalonde:
Okay. In order to do that, I need to go back to my youth. I grew up in rural Washington state, a member of a large factory working family. And as a child, I entertained myself drawing and painting. And I had the idea that I would go to college to study art or architecture, but I was in a Catholic grade in middle school, and the parish priest told us, accolades, you all take the test to the seminary. It's not an application. Well, it turned out it was, and I was afraid to say no. And so I went off to six years of athletic and spiritual exercise around a liberal education, a large part of which was six years of Latin and four years of Greek. And at the end of those six years, I came to a crucial turning point.
The decision was whether I would go on to study philosophy and theology and be ordained in the priesthood. And at that point, being 20 years of age, I thought I should determine the direction of my life finally. So I took three years of credit to the University of Washington. Being a rut, a naive rustic, I thought either you had money, parents, or the GI Bill®*, or you worked your way through school. So I was working eight hours a night as a mechanic and riveter at Boeing, making the 7 47 2 hours commitment or commuting for two hours and trying to carry a full load in commercial design. After two the years of that great physical and mental stress, I decided to take my Greek and Latin credits to classics department with the idea of teaching high school Latin. Well, one thing led to another. After the degree, I was invited to graduate study and given a teaching assistantship, and the University of Washington classic department got me on an archeological excavation in Athens.
Marshall Poe:
Oh, cool.
Gerald Lalonde:
This rustic, who had never been east of Spokane, flew to Athens, and the next day I was directing an excavation in the shadow of the Acropolis.
Marshall Poe:
Wow. Really?
Gerald Lalonde:
So I was able to add to mainly philological education, art, and ancient art and archeology. And I was also established in Athens with the American School of Classical Studies and the great libraries, museums, and archeological sites, which together with my philology, became the focus of my research and teaching for my career. And my first appointment was at Grinnell College, had excellent colleagues, students, and under their auspices and that of the American school, I went into the career of research and teaching in classical studies.
Marshall Poe:
What year did you arrive at Grinnell?
Gerald Lalonde:
1969.
Marshall Poe:
That was quite a year to arrive.
Gerald Lalonde:
Very interesting year. Rather chaotic, the great activism about the Vietnamese war.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
Gerald Lalonde:
I claim that I learned more about my colleagues in that year than I could have learned in 10 normal years.
Marshall Poe:
I think that's probably right. Yes. You see people's colors in crisis situations.
Gerald Lalonde:
Yeah. One of the mantra of that time was letting it all hang out.
Marshall Poe:
Yes. I can imagine what Grinnell was like in 19... Didn't the college close briefly in 19...
Gerald Lalonde:
Yes. There was no graduation. It closed in the spring after the Cambodian invasion, the Kent State killings.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Wow. That must have been quite an introduction to college teaching, I presume... Well, I know this for a fact because when I was at Grinnell in the '80s, we did not let it all hang out. We studied a lot. So can you continue by telling us why you wrote this book, Athena Itonia?
Gerald Lalonde:
Yes. I have to talk about the progression of this book. Like most of my large research projects, this started with a very small beginning. I was the editor of the Horos inscriptions. These are inscriptions that identified or set the boundaries of property in ancient Athens. And one of these stone fragmentary descriptions was the identifying inscription for a sanctuary of Athena Itonia. So I became curious about this unusual by-name, the word I use for the second name of Gods. And then I found that there were three other fragmentary inscriptions, two inventories of the treasuries of the other gods, and also a sacrificial calendar that mentioned sacrifice to Athena Itonia. So I thought I would write an article on this unusual, this minor Athenian cult. And that was soon overridden by the fact that I found that this cult of Athena Itonia was prominent in three other places in Greek antiquity, Thessaly in the north of Greece, Boeotia central Greece, and on the remote island of [inaudible 00:07:06] in the Cyclades. Well, that led to the decision to write a comprehensive book about the cult of Athena Itonia, which had been touched on in articles and in small addition to books.
And so what started out as a small curiosity turned into a major project, and along the way, I became interested very much in this cult. And the title of the book is indicative of the progress of that interest. Geography, the question of the origin of the cult, where did it start and how was it propagated within large areas like Thessaly, Boeotia or from one area of Greece to another? And also the meaning that is the book pays a lot of attention to the attributes of Athena Itonia, what was her major character. And calling her an ancient Greek war goddess gives away what my conclusion was about that. But there was much controversy along the way about her character.
Marshall Poe:
So just to frame our discussion a little bit for the listeners, what period of time are we talking about here from the origins to the, I don't know, demise of the cult?
Gerald Lalonde:
Yes. I contend that the cult originated in Thessaly, and that's the earliest evidence of the cult in the sanctuary that was excavated, in Filia in Thessaly. Artifacts of this cult go back at least to The Geometric Period and perhaps before that, even to Mycenaean time. And the cult is manifested in these four places as late as the Roman imperial age. So it covers approximately 1000 BC to as late as the second century after Christ.
Marshall Poe:
And I don't want to misspeak here, but this is a local cult, or is it Panhellenic or... But what can we say about its geographic boundaries?
Gerald Lalonde:
Yes. It's only known in those four places that I mentioned. This is not to say that the cult did not exist in any number of other ancient Greek states. We have to understand that there was no nation-state of Greece as a whole until the independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. So Greece really was a huge diaspora of over a hundred sovereign independent [inaudible 00:10:16] city-states.
And the relation of religion that you define a Greek has someone who worshiped the gods, the Greeks, and spoke the Greek language. But ancient Greek religion is very interesting. Being polytheistic, there was no such thing as the separation of church and state. The politics, government, and religion were deeply enmeshed with one another. There was also no single scripture theology or priestly hierarchy. Greek religion was a multitude of independent cults, often of the same gods in various places, a multitude of sanctuaries for those cults, and a multitude of priests and priestesses who oversaw the operation of those cults and sanctuaries. And the gods had multiple attributes. Like most religions, Greek religion was an exercise in rituals in which people tried to establish some relationship with supposed supernatures through the rituals of prayer, sacrifice, votive offerings by which they established an affiliation that would give them some reciprocity about human problems of any sort that were in the attributes or the purview of those, that multitude of gods, goddesses, and cults.
Marshall Poe:
I think maybe the listen... I don't want to get this wrong, but I read the Iliad a couple of years ago, and there's a ritual, I think it is called a hecatomb, does that make any sense
Gerald Lalonde:
It's a hecatomb. It's a mysterious word. Literally, it means a hundred oxen, and it would be a huge sacrifice. We don't know of an individual sacrifice that resulted in the killing and roasting of a hundred ox.
Marshall Poe:
A hundred oxen, yeah. The only reason I mention it is that I thought the listers might be... Because it's mentioned many times in the Iliad, it happens a lot.
Gerald Lalonde:
But the Iliad is the result of long oral tradition and oral tradition is subject to all kinds of fantasy, mythology, exaggeration.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
Gerald Lalonde:
[inaudible 00:13:03].
Marshall Poe:
This actually gets me to right where I want to go. Well, I want to go in two directions. One is that as a medievalist myself, not a classicist, would it be fair to say that many of the sentences that you just uttered about this particular cult would be considered controversial among your colleagues? I know that in the medieval case, if you say this was the case, you have five people who say that it wasn't.
Gerald Lalonde:
No, I don't think they would argue with the general statements that I made about Greek religion [inaudible 00:13:37].
Marshall Poe:
No, they wouldn't. No. I was thinking more about the particular time boundaries and geography and this other, yes. And also that it was a warrior cult. This is somewhat polemical.
Gerald Lalonde:
That becomes polemical in some time and places that I deal with about the character.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. The thing I'm trying to get at here is the degree to which there is a lot we do not know because of the fragmentary nature of the sources. So maybe we can talk about the sources a little bit. What are the main sources for the study?
Gerald Lalonde:
The main sources are epigraphy, that is inscriptions. Literary sources from antiquity from various times.
Marshall Poe:
So when you say epigraphy, you mean things scratched onto walls and things like this?
Gerald Lalonde:
Yes.
Marshall Poe:
Yes.
Gerald Lalonde:
Inscription. Anything edged, scratched, even painted onto a two-dimensional surface.
Marshall Poe:
Yes. And so then literary artifacts, none of which come down to us in the original, they've all essentially been copied and recopied and redacted and everything else imaginable to them.
Gerald Lalonde:
Yeah. They are the end result of a long history of transmission through the centuries since antiquity. There are some occasions where inscriptions contain fragments that also appear in literature, the literary sources.
Marshall Poe:
And then is there numismatics involved? I just like that word. I wanted to say it.
Gerald Lalonde:
Yes. There's numismatics involved, especially about religion and the state, because coinage was an expression of religious devotion, but it was also a manifestation of the power and the position of government. It often involved a degree of propaganda. So coins are an important source for ancient government and also for religion. There's also all kinds of iconography in the form of-
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, I was going to mention that.
Gerald Lalonde:
...in the form of sculpture, there's painting, many types of artifacts.
Marshall Poe:
So each of these sources is a kind of world of interpretation in and of itself.
Gerald Lalonde:
In and of-
Marshall Poe:
They're not plain-spoken. They don't just tell you something.
Gerald Lalonde:
No. It's a great kind of detective work in which you look at all the different types of evidence and see where they agree or disagree with one another. And then you develop the narrative from that.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. And so far as you can even construct a narrative with any confidence.
Gerald Lalonde:
Yes. This book is really not a continuous narrative, but it's also not four completely independent works about the time and place where this cult is manifested. As I say in the introduction, there is a great opportunity for me as the author and also for the readers to make comparisons of the evidence from one place to another. The arguments about the cult in one place or one time from one to another.
Marshall Poe:
So one of the things that it's... I'm calling on my knowledge as a medievalist, is that a different scholar could look at these same sources and reach somewhat different conclusions. Is that true?
Gerald Lalonde:
Yes, it is.
Marshall Poe:
Although your interpretation is definitely correct.
Gerald Lalonde:
Often the conclusions are tentative or hypothetical. But the problem often with scholarship is that people who... They want to be definite and therefore they pass off the hypothetical and the speculative as being fact. And the problem with that is that then other propositions get based on those speculations and...
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Yeah, this is the problem of supposition being built on supposition.
Gerald Lalonde:
Right. There are several places in the book where I deal with these controversies, and I do not always end up with a definitive conclusion of my own. In the first chapter of this book, for example, about the origin of the cult in Thessaly, in the 19th and early 20th century, most of the scholarship was directed to Eastern Thessaly in the area of Achaia Phthiotis, which is near the Gulf of Pagasae. In the end, the seaport entry into Thessaly. We have there two sources. One Homer talks about the city Iton in dealing with a catalog of ships in the Iliad, Iton is one of the cities, the subject of Protesilaus. Also Strabo, the geographer from August time, mentions the city Itonos and the shrine of Athena Itonia near it with considerable geographical reference points.
Well, scholars, archeologists, topographers spend a great deal of time in that part of Thessaly, and they did not find Iton or the shrine of Athena Itonia. But in the 1960s, and there was some hint that in Western Thessaly, there might be some evidence of the cult of Athena Itonia, and chance finds around this village, the modern village of Filia, began to turn up artifacts that the local people began to sell on the market.
Finally, Greek archeological service intervened and Dimitris Theocharis headed an excavation of that. And that is the only sanctuary of Athena Itonia that is absolutely verified. And the artifacts go back to The Geometric Period. But this find created so much interest that there developed the idea that Iton and Itonos were not in Eastern Thessaly as Homer and Strabo said, but they were this place-
Marshall Poe:
In Western, yeah.
Gerald Lalonde:
Where the village of Filia. Well, that has developed all kinds of... I mean, so many people have grasped that argument saying, well, there was an Iton or an Itonos in both places, but they do not face the fact that Homer's Iton, the mother of flocks, is only one of five places that are mentioned in the command of Protesilaus, in the catalog of ships of Homer's Iliad. The other four places are well known in later Greek history, and they are all in the area of eastern Thessaly.
Marshall Poe:
Eastern. But just so the listeners understand, we don't know where this place was. I mean, it does not survive as far as we know. There's no revenant of this place.
Gerald Lalonde:
No, unless you believe with those who now believe that Filia-
Marshall Poe:
Filia. Yeah.
Gerald Lalonde:
Even though there was no city there, actually, it was a religious center that was apparently what they call an amphictyony. That is an area of devotion for numerous villages and towns that were in the area. But it was independent of all of them. It was not under the supervision of a particular city-state.
Marshall Poe:
So this was probably a place name, probably.
Gerald Lalonde:
Yes, it was. And I agree with Martin Nielson. His idea is that Athena Itonia was a merger of the Olympian goddess Athena with a local heroine or goddess who had a cult in the place Iton or Itonos, and she was the maiden of Iton or Itonos, hence the name Itonia. And at some point, she became combined with Athena in the cult of Athena Itonia.
Marshall Poe:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So one of the things that you argue in the book is that this is in fact a war goddess. Yes. Athena is the goddess of lots of things, at least to the general public like me, like weaving, I think. Isn't Athena, the goddess of weaving?
Gerald Lalonde:
Yes. All kinds of handicraft.
Marshall Poe:
I don't really associate weaving with the martial arts, but whatever.
Gerald Lalonde:
No, but like many Greek gods, Athena, if we take her at, the whole of all of the cults of Athena, she has many attributes. But martial power is one of the most prominent, and that at least in the theory of Nielson, goes back clear to the Minoans and Mycenaeans. She was some kind of palace god. And when she was adopted by the more war-like Mycenaean, she became a military deity. Some of this probably is rooted in the fact that her father is Zeus the king of gods, and that she was born from the head of her father, even though Zeus supposedly swallowed wisdom, Metis. This also accounts for an attribute of Athena as the God of wisdom.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Yeah.
Gerald Lalonde:
But you're right. There are all kinds of other lesser attributes, handy work, fertility.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. The weaving is the one that sticks in my mind. And I don't know why, because it just seems so odd to me that you would have a goddess of weaving. But what do I know? There's probably a saint of weaving.
Gerald Lalonde:
Yeah. Well, even in Apollonius's epic about Jason and the Argonauts, Athena is.... He makes Athena the guardian of Jason, Athena Itonia, because he is from Thessaly. But Apollonius adds some of these non-military attributes to that Athena Itonia. And one of them is weaving. She weaves the scarlet robe that is given to Jason. She is also the architect of [inaudible 00:25:07] building, the shipbuilding of the Argo. So...
Marshall Poe:
Well, maybe I could ask a more general question from a kind of Christian perspective if that's not silly.
Gerald Lalonde:
No, it's not silly.
Marshall Poe:
So we have-
Gerald Lalonde:
Raised the hellfire and brimstone Catholic. Part of the interest in ancient Greek religion was its great difference from...
Marshall Poe:
Yes. Well, and this is the question I was going to ask. So I was raised as Lutheran, and according to Lutheran's, God is the God of love. And that's it. There's no more to say We don't have a God of war in the Christian religion. Why was it that they had a goddess of war?
Gerald Lalonde:
Well, I think the answer is the great role of warfare in the history of Greece. Again, we go back to what it meant to be a Greek and what was Greek. Over a hundred independent sovereign city-states scattered around the literal of the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Most of the wars of the Greeks were with one another rather than against non-Greek forces. So they could use the same God or goddesses against one another. But there was no such thing as a long-term and permanent intrinsic hostility among them. But the deities retain the attributes even in peacetime. It becomes a little bit like Homeric epithets, I mean, swift-footed Achilles.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Still
Gerald Lalonde:
He's still swift-footed even when he's sleeping.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think we can say as a generality that warfare was important for the identity of these people.
Gerald Lalonde:
Yes it was. It was because there was a constant rivalry, and sometimes that rivalry led to hostility. But it was a rivalry expressed in all kinds of other ways, economically, athletically, the Olympic games are really an episode in Greeks coming together from all over the Greek world to compete with one another. And the bragging rights that resulted from victory in those games was very much like the celebration of victory in warfare.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Yeah. That's right.
Gerald Lalonde:
Less harmful. Their warfare with one another among the Greeks was somewhat different from the warfare with non-Greek peoples, aliens. That is H.D.F. Kitto, who wrote one of the best compendiums of ancient Greek culture, used to describe the battle of two phalanxes of Greek heavy armed troops as being like a rugby scrum. They came together, there were some casualties, but at the end they separated and went home. But the attitude of the Greeks about Persians in The Persian War was more like the chronic hostility in modern time between Greece and the Turks. And that is never going to... And as long cultures exist side by side with one another.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, yeah. I see what you mean. One of the things that occurred to me while I was looking at the book was that the story is not done. People are still digging around and uncovering fragments and new coins and different things in manuscript repositories. So there's more news to come as this information is uncovered. Correct?
Gerald Lalonde:
Yes. Many of these controversies, for example, about where Itonos really was in Thessaly, Thessaly is a huge area and a great part of it has not been studied or excavated with.... So there's a great opportunity for more... For evidence that may solve some of these problems.
Marshall Poe:
How do you... This is a kind of a side question, but I'm thinking of from the point of view... I've been on an archeological dig myself, and I loved it. As a historian it was just the most fascinating thing I've ever done. How does one get the opportunity to go dig around there? I mean, I suppose you have to go to school for 10 years, but...
Gerald Lalonde:
Not really. I mean, I had never had any archeological experience. And when I went to the Ancient Agora, I was assigned a great group of workman, but of course it was just excavation of the last road that ran through the area of the Agora. But I turned to out to have the best quality that archeologists can have, and that is luck. I discovered at the uni-section of this road a beautiful shrine, triangular shrine with a lovely inscription identifying it. And then the first day of the second summer, I found the richest tomb ever found in Athens.
Marshall Poe:
That... Yeah, that is luck. Yeah.
Gerald Lalonde:
But the procedure is... I mean, you have to go through, usually one of the academies in Greece. Most of them are administrated and financed by countries. The British school, the German school, French school, American School of Classical Studies is a private corporation. But if you want an archeological excavation, you have to apply for it through one of those schools, and the opportunities are quite limited. And the criteria for permits are very strict.
Marshall Poe:
I mean, I'm glad you mentioned [inaudible 00:31:39].
Gerald Lalonde:
The excavation is very expensive usually.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, I imagine. I was going to say, I'm glad that you mentioned the international character of this, because really you're operating in a scholarly tradition that goes back at least hundreds if not thousands of years. That involves people from really all over the world. And one of the things that I know having read your book is the number of languages involved. How many ancient languages and how many modern languages did you access to write this book?
Gerald Lalonde:
Of course, Greek and Latin and in some cases the dialects of Greek.
Marshall Poe:
I was going to say, there's not just one kind of Greek.
Gerald Lalonde:
No, there are numerous dialects of ancient Greek and you have to be able to read them. There's different orthography and phonology, but also some of them are chronologically of far field. I mean, there are places in this book where I had to deal, at least in a short range with Linear B.
Marshall Poe:
Oh, great.
Gerald Lalonde:
Writing of the ancient Mycenaeans. But then you have to deal with modern scholarship. It is not like the field of medicine or lawyers where you have people who translate things for you. And the history of scholarship, of classical scholarship outside of Greece and Italy is the Germans. It really begins with the Germans class-
Marshall Poe:
Most everything scholarly does begin with the Germans. That's what I discovered.
Gerald Lalonde:
It really is a break off from theological and scriptural studies among the Germans. So you have to be able to read German and French and Italian. And if you're dealing with archeology or history in Greece, modern Greek, that's probably my strongest language because I spent a lot of time there. But occasionally I have to sally into Spanish. And if you can read German, Dutch is possible. It's close enough.
Marshall Poe:
It's possible for you. I don't know about the rest of us.
Gerald Lalonde:
No, I even... One of my students once wrote to me from the University of Cincinnati saying, Jerry, I saw your name and some credit given to you in a work, a Dutch work on ancient toilets.
Marshall Poe:
Well, this reminds me of one of my favorite anecdotes from graduate school. A graduate student is in a seminar with his professor and his professor says, "I want you to read this book and report back on it next week." Hands him the book. The book is in Hungarian. And the graduate student says, "I don't read Hungarian." And the professor says, "Have you tried?"
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