Comparativism Then and Now

Abstract

Is a comparative anthropology of the ancient world possible? The ancients certainly had no doubts on this score: Cornelius Nepos found it perfectly reasonable to juxtapose key Greek and Roman social configurations such as rules of marriage, male and female sexual behavior, and concepts of honor (1.4.1-7.2), leading him to a relativistic stance-"the standard for judging what is respectable and shameful is not the same for all men, and all things must be judged according to the traditions of the ancestors (omnia maiorum institutis iudicari)"-that anticipates Melville Herskovits. 1 Plutarch, too, in constructing his pluralistic interpretations of Roman customs did not hesitate to contrast Roman behaviors with Greek behaviors, including those of his "own" Greeks-the Boeotians of Chaeronea-or those of the sanctuary at Delphi, where he had once been a priest (cf.Quaest. Rom. 16.267d and 23.269b). 2 And yet the history of anthropological comparison within the field of Classical Studies suggests the answer is not so straightforward. Indeed, apart from some aspects and tendencies in the Renaissance in Europe-in which, as Lévi-Strauss (1976: 272) wrote, Humanism "realized the means of putting its own culture in perspective, by confronting contemporary concepts with those of other times and places"-and the scholarly career of Christian Gottlob Heyne (1739-1812)-who insisted on using the customs of what he called "savage" (Wilden) cultures to help explain those of Greek culture-comparison of the cultures of * A fuller treatment of these same themes may be found in Bettini 2009, and Short 2013 This stance is also detectable in , in the famous episode where Darius compares the funerary rites of the Greeks and Indian Callati. Arguments similar to Nepos'-and in an entirely parallel context, namely the relativization of "the good" (καλόν) and "the shameful" (αἰσχρόν)-recur in the Sophistic Dissoi Logoi.2 On "instabilité du sens" as a characteristic trait of Plutarch's research, see De Fontenay 1998: 171. Lévi-Strauss (1981, discussing Plut. Is. et Osir. 45.369, thoroughly approved of this method. also with Roman culture, which under this view took on the status of only a poor imitation of Greek culture. 5 German Altertumswissenschaft and its direct descendant, twentieth-century classical philology-with their defined philological focus and their devotion to ancient (especially Greek) culture as uniquely creative-came to predominate within Classical Studies, spelling the end of any comparative approach like Heyne's. Nevertheless, comparativism resurfaced in the second half of the nineteenth century, in England, in James George Frazer's (1854Frazer's ( -1941 The Golden Bough, where Roman material mixes freely with "evidences" from all corners of the globe-Greek, Arab, Indian, Australian . . . A true triumph of comparative anthropology, if only Frazer's methodology were not so obviously problematic! Its faults are well known, however: Frazer gathers fragments of ethnographic knowledge under a running series of general entries ...