C02: Images of Dearth and Abundance. Resources and their Literary Construction in the Context of the Greek Colonisation

Project management: Prof. Dr. Irmgard Männlein-Robert, Prof. Dr. Mischa Meier, Prof. Dr. Karl-Heinz Stanzel

Scientific employees: Vincent Clausing, Dominik Delp, Xenja Herren

Summary

The project conducts two case studies in order to examine the presentation, classification and evaluation of agrarian and social resources in literature in different areas and periods of Greek history. Our topic is the identification and analysis of the treatment of resource-related daily live experiences by literature within the historical context of the ‘Great Greek Colonisation’ during the 8th and 7th cent. BC and the early Hellenistic period of the 3rd cent. BC. One of the geographical and chronological focusses will be on 8th and 7th cent. BC Boeotia providing the background to the ‘Erga kai Hemerai’ by the archaic poet Hesiod on, another on Hellenistic Egypt as the context of the ‘Phainomena’ of Arat of Soloi. The project will explore the ‘poetic’ sources of the Archaic period and their interpretative reception in Hellenistic time, up to now largely neglected in studies of the socio-cultural context of the ‘Great Colonisation’. These sources can be viewed as a poetic reflection and evaluation of real-life agrarian conditions during the first ‘colonisation’ as well as during the comparatively ‘modern’ Hellenistic times. The ‘Erga kai Hemerai’ are the only surviving written source explicitly referring, albeit in poetic alienation, to peasant life in Early Archaic times reflecting its economic and socio-cultural background. The ‘Phainomena’ equally refer explicitly to real-life experience, thus being an instructive example of an Early Hellenistic reception of Hesiod, thus representing the adequate source for the second case study.

The first distinct literary treatment of the phenomenon of migration commonly labelled as ‘colonisation’ exists already in archaic poetry, emerging at the turn of the 8th to the 7th cent. BC. In the works of Hesiod, identifying himself as the son of a migrant from Cyme in Asia Minor, there is a deliberate effort to describe the agricultural development of a newly settled natural environment and the poetic evaluation thereof. First, from the differing perspectives of Ancient History and Literary criticism the ‘Erga kai Hemerai’ will be analysed to identify the agrarian and social resources and how they were used in order to understand the way how a natural environment was appropriated. Subsequently it has to be discussed how the conditions of life in barren Boeotia were treated in literature and poetically transformed into instructions for the formally addressed reader and beyond that into general advice without regional reference. This includes the ways to handle water supply, tools, agricultural strategies, economic treatment of profits, rural moral concepts, the transformation of real world experience into mythological beliefs and others.

Scientific Aims

The project will critically compare ancient technical texts referring to agriculture, relevant parts of other examples of archaic poetry, especially Homer´s Odyssey and particularly poetry of Hellenistic time. In this period a deliberate break with ‘classical’ traditions becomes visible, while the Archaic poetry of Hesiod is used as a literary model and transformed, as will be demonstrated by the second case study. This specific treatment of Hesiod´s works in Hellenism will be examined to obtain information about its possible intention as an advice for real-life agriculture, thus offering the chance to find out more about the question of resources in the works of Hesiod, or to determine whether rural everyday life and resource related problems of Archaic time were nothing but a literary subject considered attractive for a sophisticated Hellenistic élite. It will be discussed whether the ‘Erga’ of Hesiod were treated and ideologically functionalised by Arat and other Hellenistic writers not only as a literary, but as a cultural and symbolic resource as well. Both case studies will explore the precise instructions relating to different identifiable resources and addressed to the peasant in the texts, in order to demonstrate dynamics, resulting from the socio-cultural and political context, a context that determined evaluated and reflected the use of specific resources.

This approach results in several closely linked aims for the project:

1. Identification and analysis of the precise practical instructions related to resources (instructions about work processes, cultivation and tool-making). In a subsequent evaluation it has to be elaborated how the achieved results of work were dealt with during the respective periods. How these achievements were put to further use or transformed into social resources and how the making of tools was conducted in the particular historic-situational context. Equally it has to be checked whether the evidence allows to draw conclusions about the role, function, reasons and effects of migrations, which should be discussed in relation to the so-called ‘Greek Colonisation’ and the paradigms of research linked to this concept, such as lack of land, search for raw-materials, conflicts and others as the assumed reasons for migration. The project will try to examine the intension of Hesiod and Arat to provide practical advice by choosing this specific subject.

2. Reconstruction of the specific socio-cultural background for the use of the resources under discussion, as well as their poetic evaluation by Hesiod and Arat. This will be done in order to clarify whether information about practical work of peasants and its mythological-theological justifications in the archaic text of Hesiod served as a resource for practical and symbolic-cultural information for Arat.

3. A third aim is to analyse the so-called “Great Greek Colonisation” using contemporary literary sources, but others as well. Theoretical approaches of historical sciences for the analysis of migrations will be applied on the study of the Archaic period. The focus will be on tangible, but even more on the social and other intangible resources of migrations. The intention is to scrutinize prevailing interpretations, seeing overpopulation, hunger for land, disintegration of political structures or trade as the motivations for migration, thus getting beyond the problematic term ‘colonisation’.

Impact for the Collaborative Research Centre

The project has close links to B 04: Search for resources as an incentive for ‘processes of colonisation’ and will be conducted in close collaboration.

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