Return to the Land of the Sun: in Homage to Jean-Pierre Vernant (1914–2007)

Abstract

FROMA I. ZEITLIN proem This piece was was originally commissioned for an issue of the literary revue, Europe (N° 964-965, 2009) devoted to the scholarly career of the renowned French Hellenist, Jean-Pierre Vernant. Member of the Collège de France, and founder of the so-called "École de Paris" whose work from the 1960s on transformed our approaches to the literature, society, and anthropology of ancient Greece. As I looked now to publish my original text in English, I discovered that I was by no means alone in my desire once again to honor his memory and assess his continuing impact on our field. To my surprise, I found a recent volume, entitled Relire Vernant, published in 2018 that included, among others, a collective piece organized by Oswyn Murray on Vernant's influence, both professional and personal, in the English-speaking world (United States and Britain), to which I contributed my own evaluations. 1 In the present text that follows, it was not my intention to offer any comprehensive overview of Vernant's work. Rather I chose a single text, Heliodorus' novel, the Ethiopiaka (Ethiopian Tale). This late Greek narrative tour-de-force, dated probably to the 4 th century ce, was, to my knowledge, never mentioned by Vernant in his very sizeable oeuvre. All the more tempting therefore to revisit Vernant's ideas about myth, religion, society, art, and the question of Hellenism, more generally, from the standpoint of the vastly different worldview of late antiquity.