Recognizing Miracles in Antiquity and Beyond

444 Pages·2018·2.04 MB·English

by  Gerolemou

Recognizing Miracles in Antiquity and Beyond
Trends in Classics –
Supplementary Volumes
Edited by
Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos
Associate Editors
Evangelos Karakasis · Fausto Montana · Lara Pagani
Serena Perrone · Evina Sistakou · Christos Tsagalis
Scientific Committee
Alberto Bernabé · Margarethe Billerbeck
Claude Calame · Jonas Grethlein · Philip R. Hardie
Stephen J. Harrison · Richard Hunter · Christina Kraus
Giuseppe Mastromarco · Gregory Nagy
Theodore D. Papanghelis · Giusto Picone
Tim Whitmarsh · Bernhard Zimmermann
Volume 53
Recognizing Miracles
in Antiquity
and Beyond
Edited by
Maria Gerolemou
ISBN 978-3-11-053046-9
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-056355-9
e-ISBN (E-PUB) 978-3-11-056261-3
ISSN 1868-4785
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934497
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Acknowledgments
This volume could not have been completed without a great deal of help. Fore-
most, I am thankful to Stavroula Constantinou, not only for co-organizing with
me the conference on “Miracles and Wonders in Antiquity and Byzantium” in
Cyprus, in October 2014, but also for all our valuable discussions on the overall
conception of the topic and on the volume. I am also very much indebted to the
participants of this volume for a great cooperation, their punctuality and above
all the warmness with which they have embraced the whole project!
My colleagues at the Department of Classics and Philosophy of the university
of Cyprus, Demokritos Kaltsas and Spyridon Tzounakas were kind enough to read
certain articles of the volume, and I am grateful for their suggestions. Special
thanks for their valuable suggestions on the subject and their much appreciated
assistance go to: Martin Hose and Rémi Brague who gave me the idea and oppor-
tunity to start thinking on miracles and wonders in antiquity during a seminar
at the LMU back in the year of 2008, Susanne Gödde, Jan Bremmer, Julia Kindt
who read and or discussed with me parts of the work, Kai Brodersen who com-
mented on the project and supported my applications for funding and the ano-
nymous readers of the Trends in Classics for their useful comments. To Karolina
Lambrou and Nikoletta Georgiou I am grateful for all the editorial practicalities.
Et ut semper Martino Schrage pro omnibus gratias ago singulares!
Funding for this work was provided by the department of Byzantine and
modern Greek studies of the university of Cyprus which generously sponsored
the conference on wonders and by the university of Cyprus which support my
research on miracles with a research fellowship. To the Fondation Hardt and the
classics department of the university of Cincinnati I am grateful for granting me a
research stay in 2013 and 2016 respectively; these grants have allowed me to con-
tinue my research on miracles in general and work on this volume in particular.
Finally, many ideas on wonders and miracles were tested on my students
who patiently participated in discussions, sometimes ‘violently’ dragged and
without teaching consistency, from the marvels of India to the ones conducted on
the Athenian drama stage.
Maria Gerolemou Nicosia, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110563559-001

Table of Contents
Maria Gerolemou
Introduction: In search of the Miraculous  IX
I. Miracles
Andrew Nichols
Ctesias’ Indica and the Origins of Paradoxography  3
Clarisse Prêtre
The Epidaurian Iamata: The first “Court of Miracles”?  17
George Kazantzidis
Medicine and the paradox in the Hippocratic Corpus and Beyond  31
Lisa Irene Hau
‘One might rightly wonder’ – marvelling in Polybios Histories  63
Sophia Papaioannou
Omens and Miracles: Interpreting Miraculous Narratives in Roman
Historiography  85
András Kraft
Miracles and Pseudo-Miracles in Byzantine Apocalypses  111
II. Workings of Miracles
Maria Gerolemou
Wonder-ful Memories in Herodotus’ Histories  133
Chrysanthi Demetriou
Wonder(s) in Plautus  153
Margot Neger
Telling Tales of Wonder: Mirabilia in the Letters of Pliny the Younger  179
VIII   Table of Contents
Charles Delattre
Paradoxographic discourse on sources and fountains:
deconstructing paradoxes  205
Karen ní Mheallaigh
Lucian’s Alexander: technoprophecy, thaumatology and the poetics
of wonder  225
III. Believing in Miracles
Christine Hunzinger
Perceiving Thauma in Archaic Greek Epic  259
Irene Pajón Leyra
Turning Science into Miracle in the Voyage of Alexander the Great  275
Lydia Langerwerf
‘Many are the wonders in Greece’: Pausanias the wandering
philosopher  305
Antonis Tsakmakis
Miracles in Greek Biography  327
Regine May
Apuleius on Raising the Dead Crossig the Boundaries of Life and Death while
Convincing the Audience  353
Donald Lateiner
Recognizing Miracles in ancient Greek Novels  381
List of Contributors  417
Index Nominum et Rerum  423
Maria Gerolemou
Introduction: In search of the Miraculous
This volume is largely the product of a conference held at the University of Cyprus
in October 2014. It hosts a selection of thirteen papers presented at the confer-
ence with four additional contributions commissioned for the volume. It seeks to
explore the ways in which particular conceptions of wonders and miracles were
registered in Antiquity and, in one case, Byzantium.
It is however evidently impossible to discuss the meaning assigned to the
term miracle and/or wonder throughout antiquity. As noted, the volume includes
papers on non-Christian miracles and only on one Christian; for obvious reasons,
the influence of the Christian models of miracles is however naturally led into the
discussion. Importantly, this disparity serves the purpose of the volume to pri-
marily describe the Greek and Roman evidence-based view on miracles through
the lens of the pre-Christian tradition of wonders; hence, the volume does not
define wonder and miracle as two separate concepts despite their obvious and
widely accepted differences.1
Although in classical antiquity paradoxa of nature and divine miracles
formed two distinctive categories, their separation was not absolute. By offering
a parallel study of wonders and miracles as well as of hybrids of miracles, such as
magic,2 and hybrids of wonders, such as physical deformities, the volume comes
to the conclusion that as we hastily distinguish the miracle stories from nature’s
wonders, we actually ignore their similarities. Seeing wonders through miracles
and miracles as wonders allows one to outline the incomprehensible, beyond the
environment of its production and reception, i.  e. merely as exception to the law
of causality and, as we will see, a mental accomplishment against established
socio-cultural norms. Along this line of thought, the term miracle in the title of
the collection is used as a general heading,3 while miracles as well as wonders are
defined as following: They are the outcome of the action of a miraculous person
1 On common motifs between ancient and New Testament miracles see Reitzenstein 1906; Fie-
big 1911; Moule 1965; Weinreich 1969; Hahn 1976; Remus 1983; Kee 1983, 1986; Theissen 1983;
Kollmann 1996; Plümacher 1998; Johnson 2006; Bremmer on Reitzenstein 2013. Christian mir-
acles have been already meticulously analyzed by modern scholars; consider Kahl 1994; Koll-
mann 2011. Zimmermann et al. 2013; Zimmermann et al. 2017; Kollmann and Zimmermann 2014.
2 Remus 1983 illustrates how the term magic could be described as a negative miracle. Luck
1985, esp. ch. 2, p. 178, depicts miracles as instant magic.
3 For the lexical and semantic proximity of wonder, marvel and admiration see Remus 1982;
Garland 2011, 75; Pajón Leyra 2011, ch. 2.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110563559-002
X   Maria Gerolemou
(hero or a deity), a thing or a natural occurrence that causes a sensual perceptible
and consequently cognitive impression that disrupts the common and indisput-
able world order.4
⁕
In recent years, scholars have extensively explored the function of the miraculous
and wondrous in ancient narratives, mostly pondering upon the way in which
ancient authors dealt with wondrous accounts, i.  e. the treatment of the descrip-
tions of wondrous occurrences as true or fictional events or their narrative func-
tion.5 In this direction, questions were raised and variously answered in previous
collections of articles on wonders and miracles such as: What value is gener-
ally placed upon miraculous accounts? What qualifies something as a wonder
or when does it cast doubt on its validity? Moreover, they examine whether the
miraculous has an aesthetic value, i.  e. if it does not only pursue a display of eru-
dition or functions as a rhetorical instrument but also provides stylistic variety
(poikilia) resulting in entertainment and pleasure.6 They also investigate it from
the view point of its receivers; for instance, do miracles and wonders serve as
key-features of popular literature or ‘consumption literature’; i.  e. do they address
everyday people or an educated elite?7
This volume follows a different path. It focuses on three aspects of the topic
that have not been fully examined yet: a) the ability of the wondrous/miraculous
to set cognitive mechanisms in motion, expanding in this way our field of percep-
tion and broadening our cognitive abilities b) the power of the wondrous/mirac-
ulous to contribute to the construction of an authorial identity (that of kings,
gods, or narrators)8 and c) the fact that miracles and wonders represent highly
emotional events for their perceiver. To this extent, the volume approaches mira-
cles and wonders as counter intuitive phenomena, beyond cognitive grasp, which
challenge the authenticity of human experience and knowledge and expand the
4 See Fisher 1998.
5 See Prier 1989; Schepens and Delcroix 1996; Stramaglia 1999; Bianchi and Thévenaz 2004;
Thomas 2004; Labahn and Lietaert Peerbolte 2006; Nicklas and Spittler 2013.
6 See Hecataeus of Abdera FGrH 264 F25, 992–994 as cited by Popescu 2009, 34 and Dion. Hal.
Ad. Pomp. 6 on Theopompus’ use of marvel aiming at providing both entertainment and useful-
ness (ὠφέλεια).
7 See Giannini 1963, 248 n. 3; Pecere and Stramaglia 1996. Cf. Schepens and Delcroix 1996, 403–
9; Pajón Leyra 2011, ch. 2.
8 Cf. Hardie 2009 for the marvelous in Augustan literature and most recently Drake 2017 regard-
ing fourth ce. Christian miracles.