Stephen Halliwell "Greek Gods and the Archaic Aesthetics of Life"

i'd like to start from a point in non-human time that is nevertheless an example of the workings of an archaic greek imagination on the occasion of the wedding feast for one of the several indeed serial marriages of the supreme olympian deity's use and we can't be sure which marriage it may have been to famous divine symbol of order and rectitude or possibly to hera his final consort zeus himself asked the rest of the assembled gods whether there was any request they wished to make of him anything of which they felt a lack in their universe

the gods responded by suggesting that he should bring into being a further group of deities whose purpose would be to adorn and give beautiful expression in words and music to zeus his great achievements and to the world order he had put in place after establishing himself as ruler of the olympian generation of deities this mythological episode which provides a specific narrative context for the creation of the muses goddesses of music song and dance was recounted as well probably as invented by the poet pindar in his hymntos use the hymn which the scholars of alexandria subsequently

placed at the very beginning of the collected edition of his works since the hymn has not survived and we have only two exiguous references to this part of it in later sources much remains inevitably obscure about the moment at which the idea of the muses was first conceived on olympus as too does the relationship of pindar's story to other accounts of the origins of the muses you probably recall that in one common indeed the stand what becomes the standard version the muses were the daughters of zeus and memory but that doesn't seem to have been

the case in pindar's hymn we might wonder whether there's a sense in which pindar's imagination at this point in his hymn was giving shape in this particular mythological vignette to a notion of something that could count as the birth of aesthetics among the society of the gods but even if that speculative thought is legitimate we're faced here are not only because of the loss of the original poem with some perplexing questions about the kind of aesthetics that might be entailed by this picture of the olympians above all questions about what it could mean for a

greek imagination to project the need for such aesthetics and aesthetics it seems of self-reflective beauty onto the gods themselves questions of this type that i'd like to broach in this evening's lecture though i'll be doing so in what i'm all too conscious is a highly selective engagement with just a few tokens of archaic greek culture i hope at least that the argument will be stimulating enough to convince you that the issues at stake are worth pursuing further it's apparent to me from other titles in the present lecture series that the formula beyond aesthetics is being

interpreted as one might hope that it would be in a spirit of pluralism in my own case as a classical scholar interested in pursuing a dialectic of ideas between past and present i've chosen to interpret that preposition beyond as a metaphor of conceptual space which gives encouragement to consider the uncertain and contestable boundaries of aesthetics from more than one historical angle of vision the present lecture will attempt to extend the horizons of beyond aesthetics backwards in time to the earliest period in western culture in which we can anchor such an inquiry in textual evidence namely

the era of archaic greece so roughly speaking from 700 to 450 bc or in terms of the great traditions of greek poetry to which i'll be referring from homer to pindar it might seem tempting in this context to allow the force of beyond and beyond aesthetics to blur into that of before but i should stress that my intention is not to argue that in any straightforward sense archaic greek culture lies either beyond or before aesthetics on the contrary i believe that in many of its most powerful products and above all in its poetry and its

mythopathic imagination the archaic period manifests a sensibility profoundly attuned to questions of beauty perceptual form contemplative pleasure emotional expressiveness and other potential constituents of a model of aesthetic experience this sensibility may be largely pre-theoretical and pre-philosophical but it's far from pre-reflective indeed it displays elements of intense self-consciousness of which pindar's image of the god's desire for the creation of the muses is one and the odyssey's internal mirroring of its own poetic status is another and a much more widely discussed example at the same time however it's my contention that this self-consciousness is of a kind

which makes the character of anything we might want to identify as an archaic greek aesthetics hard to separate from the period's concern with the values of life as a whole including religious political and erotic values in that respect archaic greece confronts us with a culture whose intimations of aesthetics are associated with a perspective that always remains open to something beyond aesthetics before i try to explain some of my specific reasons for that compound thesis about archaic greece let me just make one or two more general remarks that may help to clarify my approach in this

lecture everyone is familiar and some people are arguably over familiar with the historical paradox that aesthetics is a greek word which lacks a place in the relevant sense at any rate in the vocabulary of ancient greek itself a word that just to add more spice to the paradox it took an 18th century german writing originally in latin to convert into a category of modern thought but even a little reflection on the matter should be enough to prompt a recognition that whether the ancient greeks had something or even several things that we might call aesthetics is

a question too taxing to be reduced to a matter of mere terminology and incidentally a comparable point would apply if we were to ask about the history of the concept of religion for which ancient greek also lacks any single lexeme in the study of classical antiquity i think we've now emerged or attenuated in the process of emerging from a long period during which it was largely taken for granted and regularly asserted by both philosophers and cultural historians that aesthetics in anything like the sense baptized in the 18th century lacked a properly conceived existence in the

ancient world some forms of that claim in fact go back almost to the 18th century itself one version of it was advanced by august wilhelm von schlegel in his vienna lectures of 1808 on dramatic art and literature schlegel put the claim very misleadingly i would say but i won't press the detail point here in terms of the absence in antiquity of what he called the philosophical theory of the fine arts as a group the philosophy though it's telling that under the influence of a strongly platonizing impetus within german romanticism schlegel also made a special exception

for plato which is a whole story in its own right but one for another occasion a different version of the claim a different version of the claim that antiquity lacked aesthetics was reformulated from his own idealist viewpoint later on by benedetto crochet who saw in antiquity little more than what he called deviations from an authentic theory of aesthetics though crochet two reserved a strangely special place for plato whom he saw as both having glimpsed the problem of aesthetics for the first time and as having been an arch denier of the value of art for much

of the 20th century it remained a kind of textbook orthodoxy that no genuinely ancient ancestry could be established for aesthetics as either a determinate category of philosophy or a domain of cultural experience more generally well that this previous orthodoxy has now started to crack is demonstrated among other things by quite a bit of recent work from class work from classical scholars in which the concept of aesthetics has been explicitly reclaimed and reconceptualized one way or another for antiquity i'm thinking for example of several histories of ancient aesthetics that have been published in the last few

years in german and italian none yet in english of james porter's large polemical book the origins of aesthetic thought in ancient greece published in 2010 which brings to bear on antiquity an aesthetic template influenced by john dewey of anastasia erasmia pepone's recent book frontiers of pleasure models of aesthetic response in archaic and classical greek thought which analyzes a range of qualities found in greek accounts of bodily and mental responses to beauty and the recently published and very diverse collection aesthetic value in classical antiquity edited by enik sleuter and ralph rosen as well i suppose i

better add some of my own previous work including the aesthetics of my mises which professor spate was kind enough to mention but between them i think these various publications help to promote a sense of the boundaries of aesthetics as historically fluid and permeable making the question of what kinds of experience and value belong to aesthetics or what point one can say one has moved beyond aesthetics always delicate and debatable i've stated elsewhere my own view that the lack of a precise ancient correlate to the particular category of aesthetics which emerged in the 18th century should

not be treated in an entirely negative spirit but can be fruitfully turned into one way of challenging the supposed purity of aesthetics and of engaging in a more dialectical rather than a historically polarized form of thinking about the complicated relationship between ancient and modern thought but the new crop of writings about ancient aesthetics to which i've referred is in part i think a reflection of a much broader shift in conceptual perspectives one way of characterizing that shift is to say that in the mid to late 20th century aesthetics lived through an identity crisis a crisis

induced by the pressure both of various experimental modernisms in art which is itself of course a historically insecure category and of increasing suspicions of traditional philosophical systems it was a crisis which i think has left behind very little real consensus about what aesthetics is supposed to be rather it's brought into being multiple competing ways of framing the rationale of aesthetics and in consequence a number of ways of moving beyond an intellectually or culturally narrow conception of the subject as dealing with a supposedly pure autonomous realm of experience where classical antiquities concerned the ironic upshot is

that we're now free and entitled to believe that the absence of ancient aesthetics so-called was no real absence at all or alternatively that it was the absence of something that we can quite happily live without in any case if aesthetics has a historically unstable identity we can hardly construct a definitive genealogy for it but for that very reason it's all the more appropriate to acknowledge the diverse lines of the ancestry that can arguably be claimed for it and the intricate strands of practice and thought which have contributed to its development from ancient to modern having

offered that no doubt uh excessively concise statement of my own position on the possibilities of before after and beyond aesthetics let me now return to that juncture in pindar's hymn to zeus at which the idea of the muses was first conceived among the gods the german scholar bruno snell who attempted a speculative reconstruction of this hymn in one of the chapters of his famous book the discovery of mind suggested that and i'm quoting from the english translation if we had this episode in pindar's own language it would surely be among the most famous in greek

literature snell continued pindar could not have expressed more fittingly what poetry means to the world on the day when the world attained to its perfect shape he affirms that all beauty is incomplete unless someone is present to celebrate it there are two snags with this snellian analysis one the rather rapid move to the generalization built into that phrase what poetry means to the world and the other the highly questionable premise that the final confirmation of zeus's supremacy and the consolidation of his olympian regime means for a greek mind like pindars that the world has attained

to its perfect shape snell is right however the pindar's lyric narrative must have represented the birth or attenuate the conception of the muses as answering to and remedying a sense of incompleteness among the gods in the version of the story represented in the hymn the muses as goddesses of music song and dance add something which was previously missing from olympian society a society we need to remember based on immense but imperfectly harmonized concentrations of power and status and only very problematically committed to upholding standards of justice and order in the world which is why snell's

assumption that the world has its perfect shape in this pandaric context is highly questionable what the muses bring to this society is a value of a different kind from the operations of divine power and will in action something which can be used admittedly to reflect and glorify that power but which nonetheless converts it into material for the distinctive realm of song the second life of song together with other divine musicians especially apollo liar player and singer about whom there'll be more to say in a moment and various groups of female singers and dancers including the

graces the characters the muses embody for archaic greece the image of what might be called the divine aesthetic of this expressive beauty an aesthetic which in hisod's evocation of it in the theogony is pictured in terms of a musical ambiance that almost like a force of nature makes the whole atmosphere on olympus resonate with its sounds now such images of the music of olympian society have become so familiar to us in part because of their constant adaptation and reworking in the vocabulary imagery and tropes of many later phases of western culture that it's worth reminding

ourselves just how remarkable in terms of comparative mythology and religion is the idea that they encode unlike many other features of early greek religious mythology the embedding of the muses within a conception of the divine community has no clear precedent or parallel in either indo-european or near-eastern evidence despite the fact that the broad conception of the olympians as a society of gods owes a great deal to those two cultural zones even if one casts one's net further afield it's difficult i think to find in other religious and mythic traditions a substantial equivalence to the way

in which archaic greek culture ascribes to its gods a collective commitment to the arts of the muses it's a pervasive assumption of archaic greek religious myth that the gods can experience shared fulfillment both as performers and as audiences in the ravishing beauty of music song and dance greek gods it appears need in their world the existence of the muse's values to complete the more contemplative side of their nature the archaic greek sensibility which ascribes such lives to the gods shows itself to be simultaneously religious and aesthetic consider now however a second and somewhat different image

of this divine aesthetic this one from the homeric hymn to apollo a work dedicated to a musician god in his own right and providing rich testimony to the archaic greek sensibility with which i'm concerned it's no accident that nietzsche about whom i'll have a little more to say later on and who was certainly familiar with this poem turned apollo in the birth of tragedy though not there alone into an icon of what he saw as one of the two most fundamental artistic and aesthetic drives in this respect nietzsche was among other things deliberately refashioning elements

of an archaic greek mentality the homeric hymn to apollo shows us and celebrates an apollo who precociously demands a liar a kitharis for himself on the very day of his birth he needs music himself in other words as soon as he's brought into being the journeys he undertakes thereafter are marked at critical junctures in the poem in the hymn to apollo by musical performances these journeys are in a sense travels in song a divine analogue to the itinerary of a traveling bard such as the blind man from chaos who identifies himself as the singer of

the hymn itself and who refers to his own wanderings across the earth that blind bard of course is a figure who was often indeed standardly in antiquity identified as homer the particular scene i want to focus on here from the hymn to apollo is a passage which describes the moment which is to be thought of as one of an indefinite number of such moments when apollo arrives on olympus from his shrine at delphi to take part in the society of the gods his arrival is marked by a spontaneous impulse on the part of the whole

divine community to express itself in song and dance in that regard the scene is a counterpart to the pindaric hymn from which i started where the muses are called into being or are about to be called into being to complete the needs of the gods but in the hymn to apollo the scene takes a striking twist which discloses i believe a deep question that lurks within the divine aesthetic i've so far outlined here are the relevant lines of the hymn in a very basic translation next he travels from earth to olympus like an instant of

thought to the palace of zeus and the assembly of the other gods and at once the immortals minds turned to liar and to song the muses answering as a group with their lovely voices sing of the divine gifts of the gods and of human sufferings all the things that at the hands of the immortal gods human lives endure in their folly and helplessness incapable as they are of finding a cure for death or a defense against old age apollo's movement from delphi to olympus as instantaneous as thought because for all their anthropomorphized trappings greek gods

inhabit a special plane of consciousness might be expected to take us by means of the hymn's own mobile focus into a scene set entirely apart from the human world rather as the feast of the gods at the end of the first book of the iliad where apollo and the muses also performed together is sharply if only temporarily bracketed off from the turmoil of the war at troy yet the muses in the homeric hymn who perform in celebration of apollo's arrival on olympus sing precisely about the lives of human beings focusing what's more on the misery

helplessness and mortal finitude of their existence the paradox of this moment is reinforced when the passage continues though i won't read it now with an elaborate description of an accompanying dance by nine goddesses and two male gods with apollo himself bathed in a light of divine radiance playing the liar at the center of the ensemble while his parents zeus and leto derive intense delight from watching the whole performance if we have here in part the same divine aesthetic as found in pindar's account of the wedding feast for zeus and one of his brides it's an

aesthetic which the homeric him to apollo darkens and complicates by its subscription to the gods in a setting of exquisite performative beauty of a song about the miseries of human life the irony is made more pointed by that phrase divine gifts of the gods which has caused some scholarly disagreement um i'll just remind you of the line where that occurs the muse is answering as a group with their lovely voices sing of the divine gifts of the gods and of humans sufferings now there are in fact three different ways in which this phrase the divine

gifts of the gods or the undying gifts of the gods would be another translation uh three interpretations of what this phrase might mean some take it to refer to the god's own immortality so that the song then counterbalances divine and human spheres of existence others take it to refer to the good things which the gods sometimes bestow on human beings so that the song then deals with both positive and negative sides of human existence but others again interpret the phrase as referring to all the conditions of human existence just as the idea of the god's

gifts the same term certainly does in achilles famous parable of zeus's two jars in book 24 of the iliad but whichever of these interpretations one opts for the result in any case throws heavy emphasis onto the paradox of divinely beautiful song as a medium in which to express thoughts of human frailties limitations and sufferings what are the implications of this paradox they cannot be reduced i want to insist to a grotesque form of irony the kind of irony that would be present if we took the olympians to be deriving pleasure from contemplating the sheer miserableness

of mortal existence in a spirit of cheerful self-satisfaction that is an interpretation actually that has been advanced but it seems to me um very uh implausible and problematic olympian gods with only very rare special and indeed arguable exceptions are not like that capable as they certainly are of destructive cruelty against human beings and even of gloating over the harm they inflict they're perpetually aware of the fundamental differences between their own eternal conditions of existence and the ephemeral weakness of humans but as i've argued elsewhere the olympians rarely if ever relish the insignificance of human life

or make it a reason to celebrate their own superiority on the contrary the archaic tradition which is so powerfully established in and probably above all by the iliad and odyssey posits gods who are emotionally absorbed by sometimes even obsessed with the contents of human lives finding them a suitable object for their fascinated viewing as well as for their partisan interventions it's not surprising that more than one scholar in the past has taken this image this archaic image of greek gods as giving a kind of pecant exemplification to william blake's wonderful proverb from the proverbs of

hell eternity is in love with the productions of time that seems very much to be the case with the homeric and more generally with the archaic greek olympians the iliad imagines even zeus himself as move to concern and pity over human affairs not just in a unique case like that of his own son sarpidom for whom zeus sends down a range shower of blood enactment of his own divine grief in book 16 but also in more wide-ranging if admittedly intermittent ways at the start of book 20 for instance zeus expresses general concern for the destruction

of both greeks and trojans but then announces his intention of staying on mount olympus while the other gods go down to join in the fighting themselves to take pleasure from watching events below the significance of this last detail has generated a critical division of opinion i'll just state here bluntly my own view that neither is zeus contradicting himself by moving from an expression of concern for human beings to a decision to take pleasure in spectating nor is he anticipating pleasure simply at the fact of human conflict and suffering per se rather and this is the

relevance to the point to my present argument he's occupying a typically ambiguous divine perspective one which is not only unstable in the operations of its sympathy for human agents but also has the capacity to remove itself to a more reflective vantage point which observes human life as an object of quasi-aesthetic interest what might even go so far i think is to say that there's a rather special sense in which the iliadic zeus is not only an agent in the poem but he's also in a sense ultimately an interpreter of the iliad itself now the homeric

hymn to apollo despite its later and probably compound authorship exhibits much the same general understanding of the gods as do the homeric epics themselves if within the terms of this world view the muses and apollo can perform songs about human sufferings this i want to maintain the tokens must be token a complex conception both of the gods themselves and of the nature of song a conception that forms part of the larger archaic picture of the gods ambiguous relationship to human affairs the problems posed by this conception are as i've already suggested simultaneously and indeed inextricably

religious and aesthetic but to my way of thinking it's unsatisfactory to treat the imagery of divine music and song as so to speak objective theology as though early greeks believed quasi-doctrinally in a world of divine beings who allowed themselves the pleasures of song music and dance for their own self-sufficient reasons the phenomena in question are too obviously a projection onto the divine of aspects of human experience of aspects of human experience itself every element involved in the divine aesthetic as i'm calling it from the materiality of the instruments of the dance formations and so forth

to the values of beauty and emotional expressiveness every element is matched specifically in arcade descriptions of human song cultures this is true even of what might seem a marked property of the divine like the intense radiance which surrounds apollo as he plays the liar and dances on olympus in the homeric hymn even this feature this radiance this divine radiance described indeed by the very same term i glare the radiant beam of light is found for example in some of pindar's evocations of the transformative radiance which can be bestowed on human existence at moments of special

divinely sanctioned success one such pindaric instance occurs in a famous passage at the end of python 8 where the pessimistic famously pessimistic depiction of human life as a dream of a shadow is momentarily transformed by the radiance of a zeus scent light that example is doubly apt for my purposes since pindar's own song implicitly purports to be a transmitter of that light in other words the radiance in question is a divine property made available to humans in and through the experience of song itself this point supports the inference that what underlies the attribution of a

song culture to the gods should be thought of neither as objective theology nor as a simple transposition of human into divine but as a more delicate kind of poetic self-reference a gesture of dialectical imagination through which the idea of divine song is part of the construction of an aesthetic in which human song itself aspires to participate the paradox to which i drew attention in the homeric hymn to apollo's description of the muse's singing of the world of human suffering is deeply rooted in an archaic sensibility one of its supreme expressions can be found though it's

subtly easy to overlook at the very beginning of surviving greek poetry in the very first words one might even say of western literature actually whether they are the very first words is another matter as some people don't think that the iliad is the earliest surviving work of greek literature but let's assume it is the voice of the human poet or singer at the start of the iliad invites a muse to sing of the appalling consequences of the anger of achilles as well as of the will of zeus and stresses that those consequences include not just

the deaths of heroes but the eating of their corpses by dogs and birds the programmatic prelude to the odyssey as well they're not quite as extreme in its emphasis invites the muse to tell a story which is anticipated as one above all of suffering and loss or why ask muse to sing of these terrible things i've argued in my recent book between ecstasy and truth that we can make sense of this component of the poetics embedded and enacted in homeric epic only if the muses are taken to represent a transformative power of song the power

to convert even suffering and negativity negativity even the thought of heroes corpses being eaten by dogs and birds into beauty and expressive intensity though without thereby erasing the significance of suffering itself some such power some such transformative power as i see it is implied not only in the prologues to the two homeric epics but in several other places as well including the retrospective glimpse in the last book of the odyssey of the muse's involvement in the morning for the dead achilles and also at least on my own rather heterodox reading of the two songs about

the trojan war sung by the blind demodicus for a disuse himself in book eight of the odyssey where i take the narrative to suggest that odysseus discovers something in song that his own memories of what he has lived through cannot give him my present thesis is that the transmuting of suffering into the beauty of song lies at the heart of the paradox of the archaic aesthetic in which gods themselves are both performers and audiences of such song the gods cannot need song for the same reasons as humans do but they can symbolize the transfiguring power

of song that humans experience as one form of the divine as an epilogue to my argument i'd like now to juxtapose the archaic sensibility i've been trying all too briefly i'm aware to characterize with nietzsche's famous pronouncement in chapters 5 and 24 of the birth of tragedy but only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified noise phenomena that by the way is chapter five's wording whereas chapter 24's is subtly different nietzsche says there only as an aesthetic phenomenon does the world appear to be justified three considerations may help i hope to

clarify why i turn to nietzsche at this point first the birth of tragedy is itself evidently influenced in numerous respects by elements of archaic greek thought and imagery elements admittedly reshaped and recombined under the force of nietzsche's highly idiosyncratic style of interpretation but still recognizably greek and recognizably archaic it's far from implausible i think to suppose that these influences might have some bearing on the particular famous aphorism i've referred to in fact one explicit archaic reference point a fragment of the philosopher heraclitus which compares life or possibly time in general to a child playing a

board game is directly cited in the same sequence of thought in chapter 24 of the birth of tragedy where the relevant aphorism occurs although to do justice to that passage itself one would need to take more time than i have here at the moment to inquire into how it is that nietzsche there silently merges heraclitus's image with a homeric similar that compares apollo's power to a child who builds and destroys sand castles there's quite a difference between playing a board game and building and destroying sand castles secondly it's a general presupposition of an archaic greek

mentality that what nietzsche calls existence and the world lacks any comprehensive justification in the archaic period and for that matter long afterwards as well greek culture possesses nothing like a widely shared theodicy or cosmodesi no framework that's to say of religious metaphysical or moral assumptions to give overarching meaning to existence it doesn't even in my view archaic greece doesn't even have a way of giving overarching meaning to the existence of the gods themselves who are the products of their own turbulent world history of power ambition conflict and violence finally nietzsche connects the resonant aphorism in

question with the idea of an artist god what in the later attempt itself criticism he calls a kunstler got and thus he rolls together the religious and the aesthetic in a manner which has at least some prima facie affinities with the kinds of greek mythic and poetic material i've been talking about in this lecture now it's true that for this nietzschean artist god or world artist velt in kunstler the whole world including human beings is his work of art and that is a notion for which there is no ready-made precedent in archaic greek conceptions of

the olympians the olympians do not make the world in fact nietzsche associates this quasi-artistic force which destroys as well as creating in heavily metaphysical fashion with the dionysiak nature of primal being the opposite pole in other words to everything he associates with apollo and with the rest of the olympians on the other hand it seems clear enough that the principle of finding a justification for the world through aesthetics is not tied exclusively to dionysia creativity it's also applicable to the opposite artistic pole the apollonian in fact in some ways it's easier to see how the

principle applies to the apollonian than to the dionysiak since the idea of an aesthetic phenomenon only as an aesthetic phenomenon can the world be justified the idea of an aesthetic phenomenon especially if understood with stress on the greek etymology of phenomenon as appearance fits the eye fits the sphere of apollonian image making and beautiful illusions far more readily than it does that of dionysiac oneness moreover nietzsche understands the olympian gods themselves as a projection of aesthetic illusionism in chapter three of the birth of tragedy he calls the world that they inhabit in the archaic greek

mind an artistic middle world a kunstlerichen mittelweld a middle world interposed between themselves and the underlying horror of existence interposed between the greeks themselves and the underlying horror of existence in some sense that is to say the olympian realm to which the greek god apollo belongs is itself furniture a product of the apollonian aesthetic drive it's not unreasonable then i suggest to detect some threads of connection between nietzsche's own conception of an aesthetic justification of existence in the birth of tragedy and what i've called the aesthetics of life expressed in archaic greek religious myth those

threads are tangled however and to disentangle them completely if such a thing were possible would take a lot longer than um i have at the moment and indeed i'm not claiming to be able to do the disentanglement in full for one thing it's significant from my point of view that the birth of tragedy barely acknowledges that one of the most striking mythopathic features of the olympian realm is the god's own susceptibility to certain kinds of aesthetic experience that is something one might have expected nietzsche to make quite a bit of but he doesn't nietzsche does

refer to apollo as himself a music god a player of the liar though only once in chapter chapter 2 and only in order to play down the force of that point by contrasting the supposedly limited nature of apollonian music which nietzsche calls a kind of doric architecture in sound with the overwhelming power of dionysiac music similarly um apollo's close relationship with the muses is only glanced at in passing in a single place in chapter four of the birth of tragedy and nowhere does nietzsche confront the paradox to which i earlier drew attention in the homeric

hymn to apollo namely the idea of greek gods who are capable of finding the flawed even the tragic conditions of human life a suitable subject for their own aesthetic attention we're left then i think with the peculiarity of that paradox as testimony to certain unresolved tensions which find expression in the myth-making imagination of archaic greek culture greek gods do not help humans to solve the problems of existence indeed they reflect they magnify and in part they cause those problems and that of course was one of plato's fundamental reasons for refusing to accept such gods in

his world but they are also sources for these same human beings of possible experiences of deep transformative and consoling value the arts of the muses which greek came eventually simply to call music music are one of the most important of those sources the song culture ascribed to the gods themselves is both an authenticating mirror of human song and yet also the projection of an ideal beauty which can never be fully possessed by humans only aspired to an essential intuition of archaic greek aesthetics lies in the space between those two things as too does the reason

why such an aesthetics is intrinsically and always in need of something beyond itself thank you very much