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[33]

WRITING GODS, WRITING ON THE TABLETS OF


THE MIND: AN ANALYSIS OF SOME IMAGINATIVE
METAPHORS IN EURIPIDES, MELANIPPE SOPHÈ,
FR. 506 KANNICHT
Fjodor MONTEMURRO

Résumé : Le présent article aborde le fragment 506 de la Mélanippe Sophè


(Mélanippe la Sage) d'Euripide, édité par Kannicht. Dans ce fragment, pour le
personnage qui parle – probablement Mélanippe elle-même, Zeus ne peut pas
administrer la justice : il n’arrive pas à répertorier sur sa tablette toutes les mortelles
injustices ; aucune déité, ni même Diké, sa servante la plus renommée, ne l’assiste ni
collabore avec lui. Mélanippe recourt à la représentation intelligente d’un dieu qui écrit
sur sa tablette – une représentation qui n’est pas très populaire parmi les auteurs grecs
(la littérature grecque antique n’offre qu’un seul parallélisme, celui entre le fragment
506 d’Euripide et le fragment 281a d’Eschyle, édité par Radt), mais qui est assez
commune dans la littérature mésopotamienne, proche-orientale et sémitique. Une fois
analysé l’emploi de l’écriture dans le contexte de l’image de la mémoire conçue comme
un livre et celui de la conception du ciel en tant que manuscrits, sera proposée une
nouvelle interprétation du fragment : réduire le pouvoir de Zeus, ce serait de voir le
refus de la nature divine de Diké devenir une exhortation, adressée aux mortels, à
considérer et exercer la justice de manière immanente, sans prendre en compte la parole
divine. In fine, est reconsidérée une adaptation/imitation tardive de ce concept de dieux
écrivains dans le prologue du Cordage de Plaute, où apparaissent les personnages-
servants de Zeus : Arcture et les autres étoiles.
Abstract : The article discusses fragment 506 Kannicht, from the Euripidean
tragedy Melanippe Sophè, in which the speaker, probably Melanippe herself,
represents Zeus as not capable of administering justice: he cannot write down on his
tablet all men’s misdeeds, nor there is any assistants or deities collaborating with him,
not even his most famous servant, Dike. Melanippe resorts to the clever depiction of a
god writing on his tablet, not so popular in Greek (the fragment 281a Radt by
Aeschylus stands as the only parallel) but quite common in Mesopotamian, Near East
and Semitic literature. After an analysis of the use of the writing in the image of
memory conceived as a book and in the conception of the sky as a book roll, a new
interpretation of the fragment will be proposed: reducing Zeus’ power, the denial of the
divine nature of Dike becomes an exhortation to men to consider and exercise justice
immanently without taking into account the divine world.
The paper ends with a reconsideration of a later adaptation/imitation of the same
concept of booking gods in the prologue of Plautus’ Rudens in which the figures
charged to be the servants of Zeus are Arcturus and the other stars.

The poetic imagination of Euripides and his unconventional

© Fjodor Montemurro
Journal of Hellenic Religion (ISSN 1748-7811, eISSN 1748-782X)
Volume 11 2018 : 33-67.
34 Fjodor Montemurro
way of portraying gods and mythical characters in his plays are
well known. But sometimes his phantasy is so extravagant that, if
the ancient spectators were often bewildered, we are likewise
astonished. Very particular and worth being studied is a fragment
in which the Athenian dramatist exploits some fanciful images
about Zeus and Dike: it is fragment 506 Kannicht, belonging to
one of the two Melanippe tragedies1, in which we read an
interesting and almost blasphemous reproach to Zeus and his role
as judge of men’s deeds:

δοκεῖτε πηδᾶν τἀδικήματ' εἰς θεοὺς


πτεροῖσι, κἄπειτ' ἐν Διὸς δέλτου πτυχαῖς
γράφειν τιν' αὐτά, Ζῆνα δ' εἰσορῶντά νιν
θνητοῖς δικάζειν; οὐδ' ὁ πᾶς ἂν οὐρανὸς
Διὸς γράφοντος τὰς βροτῶν ἁμαρτίας 5
ἐξαρκέσειεν οὐδ' ἐκεῖνος ἂν σκοπῶν
πέμπειν ἑκάστῳ ζημίαν· ἀλλ' ἡ Δίκη
ἐνταῦθά ποὔστιν ἐγγύς, εἰ βούλεσθ' ὁρᾶν.
[λύπας μὲν ἀνθρώποισιν, ὦ γύναι, θεοὶ
τοῖσιν διδοῦσιν οὓς ἂν ἐχθαίρωσ', ἐπεὶ 10
οὔ σφιν πονηρόν ἐστιν]

“you think crimes leap up to the gods on wings and someone


inscribes them on Zeus’ folded tablets, and Zeus looks at them and
delivers justice to men? Even the whole sky would not suffice if
Zeus were writing down men’s sins on it, nor could he study them
and send punishment to each. The fact is that Justice is somewhere
here close by, if you want to see her. [O woman, gods send pains to
men they hate, since nothing wicked becomes them]”

The fragment is transmitted by Stobaeus I 3, 14a (=1, 54, 12


Wachsmuth) in the section περὶδίκης in this form. Since Grotius, the
last three lines (9-11) were separated from lines 1-8 (fragment 506
Kannicht) and rubricated among Adesp. Trag. fr. 489 Kn-Sn due to the
late form διδοῦσι (l. 10) instead of the classical διδόασι2.
Although we cannot be certain which of Euripides’ two
Melanippe plays this fragment comes from, it most likely belongs to
Melanippe Sophè: its context is unclear, but considering the religious
sophistication of the argumentation the speaker is widely accepted
to be Melanippe herself. We know, by the way, that in Melanippe
Sophè the key character had a long and highly philosophical and
sophistic speech, a rhesis that Aristotle considered as unbecoming a
woman3. It is therefore attracting to place this fragment in this
famous Melanippe’s speech, that, as we can argue from fragments
and indirect sources, was a sort of strong defense of the twins
against the idea they were monstrous portents4. Anyway, since
Justice might be a topic near the end of the play5, the fragment
may come also from the final part of the tragedy, either in
Melanippe’s or in Hippo’s mouth. Hippo, Melanippe’s mother, is
said in fact to appear in the end as deus ex machina (as we may
infer from Pollux Onomast. IV 141); the critical tone of the lines
Writing gods, writing into the tablets of the mind 35
against the Justice by gods makes us think better the speaker to be
Melanippe, but we cannot exclude the other possibility6.
In these lines, Melanippe contrasts the commonplace that justice
is in Zeus’ hands; her words do sound Presocratic, or more
accurately, Sophistic, in their firm rejection of the idea the divine
justice is governed directly by Olympian gods. She seems to make
fun of ordinary belief: Zeus, the overseer of men’s actions that
commonly embodies the guarantee of an impartial distribution of
reward and punishment among men, could not actually exercise
his role, since he is unable to be aware of what happens on Earth.
This is due to three reasons:

1. Men’s sins cannot fly away until to reach the heavenly space,


because they are not winged.
2. Zeus cannot be a good judge because there is not anyone in
charge of recording and writing down on his tablets the sins of
every person on the Earth.
3. Even if Zeus himself could list on his tablets the sins of all
men on the Earth, the entire heaven would not be enough for him.
In this way, Zeus would not be able to show himself as a god
confidently capable of sending punishment to bad people. In lines
1-7a, it seems that any hope to find a way to establish penalty for
wrongdoers would be ruled out, with a consequent desperation for
honest and good people who obey to human and divine laws. Yet
in line 7b-8, the speaker goes on to counterbalance the almost
blasphemous previous words: Dike, the justice, is close to men, she
lives somewhere nearby (ἐγγύς). This last sentence is in sharp
contrast to what has been stated before, and it can be fully
understood if we analyze in depths each image the fragment is
made of.

THE ROLE OF DIKE.

First, we need to take into account the role of Dike in Greek


belief. Dike is, as we know, a personification of Justice, and she is
traditionally associated to Zeus7. She was, according to Hes. Theog.
901, a daughter of Zeus and Themis, and the sister of Eunomia
and Eirene (Pind. Ol. XIII, 6 ff.). In Works and Days, Dike is
depicted in strict collaboration with Zeus as a his πάρεδρος,
(attendant or councillor)8 or else his ξύνεδρος9. Furthermore, in
Work and Days (ll. 252-255) Dike descends to the Earth together
with other 3000 immortals to observe men’s behaviour and then
comes back to her father Zeus to refer to him the names of men
who have mistreated her. In the tragedians, Dike appears as a
personified Justice10, who condemns all wrong but also watches
over the maintenance of justice: she pierces the hearts of the unjust
with a sword (Aeschyl. Ch. 639 ff.)11, many times is supported by
Erinnyes (Aeschyl. Eum. 510), but she is also able to reward men
for their virtue (Aeschyl. Ag. 773). Dike is also a character on stage
in a fragment from an Aeschylean play not yet identified and
which we will speak about later.
36 Fjodor Montemurro
In our fragment Dike is away from Zeus and does not work
with him; the speaker also does not propose any substitute to
replace her. In Greek religion, many other figures, personifications
or deities at different levels, are designated as Zeus assistants or
collaborators12. Let’s think, for example, of the Prayers, the Litai,
which we find in the famous passage of Il. IX 502 ff., where they
are described as “girls of Zeus, and as following closely behind
crime”. Given their divine nature, they are “materially” (if we may
use this term) attendants of Zeus13. In the same way, other deities
or gods are appointed assistants of some gods to tell them what
happened on the Earth. We can cite, for instance, Lampetia, a
nymph that advises the Sun of the theft of his cows (Od. XII 374-
375), or the raven bird that reports to Apollo the announcement of
the love affair between his daughter Phlegia and Coronis (Hes. fr.
60 M-W). But we can also mention the goddess Iris as attendant
of Hera, charged to keep an eye on the Earth to prevent Lato from
giving to birth her son (Callim. Hym. IV 216).

THE EYE OF GOD.

In Melanippe’s fragment, the human and celestial worlds are


sharply separated, and the idea of a god observer of men’s life is
firmly rejected. How and to what extent does the speaker dare to
adfirm such a thing?
It is a well known pattern of Greek standard belief the
consistent presence of the “Eye of the God [or Gods]” in human
everyday life14: it was not difficult to identify the generic God with
Zeus, who explicitly appears as overseer since Hesiod Op. 267-
26915 and afterwards in lyric16 and tragic poetry17. Similarly, the
transposition of the “Eye” from Zeus to Dike herself was
straightforward18. The origin of this traditional representation of
God supervising men’s actions is, as most in Greek culture and
religion, Semitic or Indian. The attribute of the omniscience of the
God derives from the conception of the supreme deities as “Gods
of the Light”: Zeus etymologically is the “God of the sky or of the
light” as his Indian counterpart Dyaus (Atharva Veda I 32, 4) or the
Indian Varuna, supervisor of justice, oaths and contracts, called
visvavedas “all-knowing” (from the stem ved - cp. Greek Ϝιδ).
Similarly, Zeus’ invisible spies recall those who supervise contracts
on behalf of Mithra in the Avesta and Varuna in the Vedas; the
latter, for instance, has watchers who “come hither from heaven,
with a thousand eyes do they watch over the earth” (Atharva Veda
IV 16, 4)19.

WRITING GOD.

Melanippe describes the material writing support, on which Zeus


or his attendant is supposed to write down men’s sins, by the
expression Διὸς δέλτου πτυχαῖς. Literally the words sound “the
folds of Zeus’ tablets”. In Greek δέλτος means “writing tablet”, but
the etymology is quite uncertain. Chantraine20 reports two different
Writing gods, writing into the tablets of the mind 37
hypotheses by scholars: Fick linked it to the verb δαιδάλλω, that
stands for “to work skilfully and precisely” (it is not clear the shift
to the meaning “many-folded” that we can trace in the ancient
gotic Zeld (= tent), from a not attested *deltom). It is worth quoting
also the Latin verb dolare, to which the term can be associated (and
the tempting sentence of St. Jerome dedolatis ex ligno codicillis). The
second etymology (Lewy and Solmsen) proposes a linguistic
calque, with δέλτος as a loanword from a Semitic stem (cfr. Hebrew
delet, “door”, but that in the plural means “writing tablets”, and
above all the Ugaritic and Phoenician dlt, with the same
meaning)21. That the δέλτοι had a triangular shape is a
supposition derived from the κύρβεις, triangular tablets bound in a
rotating pyramid which the Solonian and archaic laws were
written upon, but we lack of evidence about that22.
These δέλτοι are the divine tablets of destiny employed by God
and here attested in Greek literature for the first time in such an
explicit way23. The reference to the divine tablets and the
representation of a god writing on them or on books is a quite
common topos in Mesopotamian, Near East and Semitic literature.
Among Old Testament’s texts, we may quote, for instance, Psalm
69.28 ἐξαλειφθήτωσαν ἐκ βίβλου ζώντων / καὶ μετὰ δικαίων μὴ
γραφήτωσαν (“Let them be blotted from the book of the living, let
them not be enrolled among the righteous”) or 138.16 τὸ
ἀκατέργαστόν μου εἴδοσαν οἱ ὀφθαλμοί σου, / καὶ ἐπὶ τὸ βιβλίον
σου πάντες γραφήσονται (“Thy eyes did see my imperfect being,
and in thy book all shall be written”), Exodus 32.32 ἐξάλειψόν με
ἐκ τῆς βίβλου σου, ἧς ἔγραψας (“blot me out of your book you
have written”, said by Moses imploring God to let men atone their
sins); for the New Testament Apocalyps. XX 12 καὶ βιβλία
ἠνοίχθησαν· καὶ ἄλλο βιβλίον ἠνοίχθη, ὅ ἐστιν τῆς ζωῆς· καὶ
ἐκρίθησαν οἱ νεκροὶ ἐκ τῶν γεγραμμένων ἐν τοῖς βιλίοις κατὰ τὰ
ἔργα αὐτῶν (“and the books were opened; and another book was
opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged by
those things which were written in the books, according to their
works”). In the Pseudolucianean Byzantine treatise called
Philopatris we read at chapter 13 καὶ ἔστιν ἐν οὐρανῷ βλέπων
δικαίους τε κἀδίκους καὶ ἐν βίβλοις τὰς πράξεις ἀπογραφόμενος
(“he is in the sky, looking at just and unjust men and writing on
books their deeds”)24 and we can also quote the lieder by Thomas
of Celanus in the Dies Irae: liber scriptus proferetur in quo totum
continetur unde mundus iudicetur25. But the image is well known
and exploited also in not-Biblical texts: in the epos of Gilgamesh,
Belet-seri, the scribe of the netherworld, reads from tablets to
Queen of Earth Ereshkigal (Gilgamesh VII 194-195); this tablet was
probably not a register of sinners only, but of all persons doomed
for death. Similarly the prophet Malachi (Malachi 3.16-18)
mentions a book of remembrance, written by the Lord: καὶ
προσέσχεν κύριος καὶ εἰσήκουσεν καὶ ἔγραψεν βιβλίον
μνημοσύνου ἐνώπιον αὐτοῦ τοῖς φοβουμένοις τὸν κύριον καὶ
εὐλαβουμένοις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ (“The Lord took note and listened
and wrote a book of remembrance of those who revered him and
38 Fjodor Montemurro

thought on his name”). In Near East world, tablets held by gods


extend beyond the sphere of retribution, to include planning and
organization of the world in general, as, for instance (in Sumerian
text) does Nisaba, who consults a tablet when organizing the
building of the temple of Gudea26.
The origin of this notion is commonly explained as a direct
influence of the inveterate bureaucracy of the palace in
Mesopotamian world, from where it spread to Israel27.
In Greek literature, the image of a writing god is attested
mainly by fable literature, paremiographers and lexicographers.
For this reason, it is mainly conceived as a popular belief. It is
employed only in a specific way of mediating between human and
divine world, in a context that concerns the divine administration
of justice. In one of Babrius’ tale (n. 75 = n. 317 Perry) Kore and
Pluto threaten to write down the name of those doctors who do
not let people die: ἡ Κόρη δὲ χὠ μέγας Πλούτων πρώην ἰατροῖς
δεινὰ πᾶσιν ἠπείλουν, ὅτι τοῦς νοσοῦντας οὐκ ἐῶσ’ ἀποθνῄσκειν,
ἀνέγραφον δὲ πάντας ἐν δὲ τοῖς πρώτοις καὶ σὲ γράφειν ἔμελλον
(“Just recently Persephone and mighty Pluto were threatening dire
action against all physicians, because they don’t allow the sick to
die. All were indicted, and among the first they thought of posting
you”); here, however, we have not mention of tablets and the
reference is quite generic. More specific is the Aesopic tale 152 (=
Babrius 127 = n. 313 Perry), in which Zeus orders to Hermes to
write down men’s wicked deeds on the ostraka: Ὁ Ζεὺς τὸν Ἑρμῆν
ὀστράκοισιν ἐγγράψαι ἁμαρτίας <τε κἀδικήματ'> ἀνθρώπων
ἐκέλευσε κἀς κιβωτὸν αὐτὰ σωρεύειν <σταθεῖσαν> αὐτοῦ
πλησίην, ἐρευνήσας ὅπως ἑκάστου τὰς δίκας ἀναπράσσῃ. τῶν
ὀστράκων δὲ κεχυμένων ἐπ' ἀλλήλοις τὸ μὲν βράδιον τὸ δὲ τάχιον
ἐμπίπτει εἰς τοῦ Διὸς τὰς χεῖρας, εἴ ποτ' εὐθύνοι. τῶν οὖν
πονηρῶν οὐ προσῆκε θαυμάζειν ἢν θᾶσσον ἀδικῶν ὀψέ τις κακῶς
πράσσῃ (“Zeus ordained that Hermes should inscribe on ostraka
the faults of men and deposit these ostraka in a little wooden box
near him so that he could do justice in each case. But the ostraka
got mixed up together and some came sooner, others later, to the
hands of Zeus for him to pass judgements on them as they
deserved. This fable shows that one should not be surprised if
wrong-doers and wicked people are not punished soonerafter they
commit their misdeeds”).
Most of information is given by lexicographers and
paremiographers. It seems that “a writing Zeus” is a proverb. In
particular, the phrase Ζεὺς κατεῖδε χρόνιος εἰς τὰς διφθέρας,
perhaps to be found already in comedy (Adesp. Com. 921 K-A=545
Koch) better than in tragedy (olim Adesp. Trag. 446 N2), is reported
by Zenob. IV 11 = CPG I p. 87: <Ζεὺς κατεῖδε χρόνιος εἰς τὰς
διφθέρας:> ὅτι οὐκ ἀπρονόητα κἂν βραδέως ἡ δίκη τοὺς
πονηροὺς μέτεισι. Φασὶ γὰρ τὸν Δία εἰς διφθέρας τινὰς
ἀπογράφεσθαι τὰ πραττόμενα τοῖς ἀνθρώποις (“Zeus looks at his
tablets, though late”: Dike premeditatedly though slowly pursues
bad people. They say that Zeus writes men’s deeds on some
tablets”) and likewise by Diogen. IV 95 = CPG I p. 248 and Σ.
Writing gods, writing into the tablets of the mind 39
Ven. B ad Iliad. I 175. Similarly, the saying ἀρχαιότερα τῆς
διφθέρας λέγεις (“you say things older than the tablets”) is so
explained by Diogen. III 2 = CPG I p. 214: ἐπὶ τῶν σαθρά τινα
καὶ μωρὰ διηγουμένων. Ἡ γὰρ διφθέρα, ἐν ᾗ δοκεῖ ὁ Ζεὺς
ἀπογράφεσθαι τὰ γινόμενα, παμπάλαιος. The διφθέρα is a
writing support already in Hdt. V 5828, but for our fragment it is
illuminating the gloss in Hesichius’ Lexicon σ 1190 <σκυτάλαι>
βακτηρίαι. καὶ αἱ ἱππικαὶ ἶλαι. καὶ ὄφ[ρ](εων) εἶδος. φραγέλλια,
λῶροι. πίνακες, ἐφ' οἷς ἡ Δίκη γράφει τὰ τῶν ἀνθρώπων
ἁμαρτήματα. ἢ θύλακες δερμάτινοι, where the σκυτάλαι are
defined as the tablets on which Dike writes down men’s sins.
Therefore, Zeus and Dike were conceived, according to these texts,
as writing gods in a literal sense. Again, a proverbial expression
should be considered what we read in Lucianus De Merc. Cond. 12
ἐκ τῶν Διὸς δέλτων ὁ μάρτυς, perhaps again derived from a
tragedy or a comedy.
However, in tragedy and in high poetry the image of a writing
god, despite that of the Eye of the God, never became very
common29. A first generic instance could be Pind. Nem. VI 13,
where the writing god is not an Olympian deity but the Destiny
himself, Potmos:καίπερ ἐφαμερίαν οὐκ εἰδότες οὐ- / δὲ μετὰ
νύκτας ἄμμε πότμος / οἵαν τιν᾽ ἔγραψε δραμεῖν ποτὶ στάθμαν
(“although we do not know, by day or by night, towards what goal
fortune has written that we should run”). Doubtful is the reference
we read in Eur. Peleus fr. 618 Kannicht τὸν ὄλβον οὐδὲν οὐδαμοῦ
κρίνω βροτοῖς, / ὅν γ' ἐξαλείφει ῥᾷον ἢ γραφὴν θεός. Here, if we
accept Meineke’s correction γραφήν, the sentence would mean that
the God removes happiness from men’s life more easily than
cancelling a drawing; the correction is due to the direct parallel of
Aesch. Ag. 1327-1329 βρότεια πράγματ'· εὐτυχοῦντα μὲν / σκιᾷ
τις ἂν πρέψειεν· εἰ δὲ δυστυχοῖ, / βολαῖς ὑγρώσσων σπόγγος
ὤλεσεν γραφήν. Nevertheless, Stobaeus’ manuscripts read γράφει,
and in this case the sentence would better suggest a reference to
the action of the God who blots out happiness more plainly than
he assigns it to men30. In both these cases, we are faced with no
anthropomorphic god represented in the practical action of writing
but rather with a more philosophical and abstract view of the
divine. Melanippe’s fragment was credited to be the most explicit
reference to a writing god in classical Greek literature until the
discovery of an Aeschylean papyrus we have mentioned before,
P.Oxy. 2256, published by Lobel in 195231, where we find again
the Hesiodic depiction of the practical cooperation of the couple
Zeus-Dike. In the fragment 9a = 281a Radt, the so called Dike-
fragment, Dike appears as attendant of Zeus and take notes of the
men’s wrong behaviour; she is speaking to the Chorus and
explaining her role as divine secretary:

ἵζει δ' ἐν αὐτ̣ῶ̣ι̣ .[.]..[.]..[.].[ 5


δίκῃ κρατήσας τῶ̣ι̣δε.[
πατὴρ γὰρ ἦρξεν̣, ἀνταμ[είψασθαι
ἐκ τοῦ δέ τοί με Ζεὺς ἐ̣τίμ̣[ησεν
40 Fjodor Montemurro

ὁτιὴ παθων ημ̣[..].[


ἵζω Δι̣ὸς θρόνοισιν [ἠγλα]ϊσμέν̣η̣· 10
πέμπει δέ̣ μ' αὐτὸς οἷσι̣ν̣ εὐμεν[ὴς
Ζ̣[ε]ύ̣σ̣, ὅσπερ ἐς γῆν τήν̣δ̣' ἔπε̣μψέ μ' ..[
ὄψ]εσθε δ' ὑμεῖς εἴ τι μὴ μά̣[την] λ̣έγω.
{<ΧΟ.>} [τί σ']οῦ[. προ]σ̣ε̣ν̣ν̣έποντες εὐ.[].ήσομε̣[ν;
{<ΔΙ.>} Δίκην μέ[γιστ]ο̣ν π̣ρ̣εσβο̣.η.ε̣...ρο̣.[ 15
{<ΧΟ.>} ποίας δὲ τ[ιμ]ῆς ἀρχι[τεκ]τ[ο]νεῖς[
{<ΔΙ.>} το]ῖ̣σ̣ μὲν δ[ι]καίοισ̣ ἔνδι̣κ̣ον τειν..ο̣[
{<ΧΟ.>} ].σα θέ̣[ς]μ̣[ι]ο̣ν̣ τ̣ό̣δ̣' ἐν β̣ρ̣[ο]τ̣ο̣[ῖς.
{<ΔΙ.>} τοῖς δ' αὖ μα]ταίοις .[.].[.]....[..]....φ̣[
{<ΧΟ.>} ἐ]πῳδαῖ̣ς ἢ κατ' ἰσχύος τρόπο̣[ν]; 20
{<ΔΙ.>} γράφουσα] τ̣ἀ̣<μ>π̣λακ̣ήματ' ἐ̣ν δέλτῳ Διό̣[ς.
{<ΧΟ.>} ].ωι̣ δ̣ὲ̣ πίνακ' ἀναπτύσσει̣[ς] κακ[
{<ΔΙ.>} ]ηι σφιν ἡμέρα τὸ κύριον.
[]εκτέ<α> στρατῷ
[ ]έχοιτό μ' εὐφρ[όν]ως. 25
[ ].[.......]ησᾶτα[..]εχω[.]
[ ]ν[......]ο ἐπισπέ...[....]..[.]
πό]λ̣ις τι̣σ̣ οὔτε δῆμος οὔτ' ἔτη̣ς ἀνὴρ
τ̣οιάνδε μοῖραν π[αρ]ὰ̣ θεῶν καρπουμένη[
τ̣έ̣κμαρ δὲ λέξ̣ω τῶ̣ι̣ τόδ' εὐδερ̣κὲ[ς] φερε[..].[ 30
ἔθρε[ψ.] παῖδα μ̣άργον ὃν τί̣κ̣τ̣ει̣ [
Ἥρα μιγεῖσα Ζηνὶ θυμοιδ[
δ]ύ̣σ̣α̣ρ̣κτ[ο]ν, αἰδὼς δ' οὐκ ἐνῆ[ν] φ̣ρ̣[ον]ήματι·
[ ].υκτα τῶν ὁδοιπόρων βέλη
[ ].δως ἀγκύλαισιν ἀρταμῶν· 35

DIKE[5] Dike : And he [Zeus] has his seat upon his father's very
throne, having overcome Kronos (Cronus) by means of Justice (Dike);
for Zeus can now boast, since his father began the quarrel, that he
paid him back with Justice on his side. That is why Zeus has done
me great honour, because after being attacked he paid him back, not
unjustly. I sit in glory by the throne of Zeus, and he of his own will
sends me to those he favours; I mean Zeus, who has sent me to this
land with kind intent. And you shall see for yourselves whether my
words are empty.
CHORUS [14] How then shall we rightly address you?
DIKE [15] By the name of Dike, her who is greatly revered in heaven.
CHORUS And of what privilege are you the mistress?
DIKEAs for the just, I reward their life of justice.
[CHORUS?]. . . this ordinance among mortals.
DIKEBut in the reckless I implant a chastened mind.
CHORUS [20] By Persuasion’s spells, or in virtue of your might?
DIKEI write their offences on the tablet of Zeus.
CHORUSAnd at what season do you unroll the list of crimes?
DIKE When the proper time brings the fulfillment of what is theirs by right.
CHORUS Eagerly, I think, should the hostwelcome you.
DIKE [25] Much would they gain, should they receive me kindly.
(Two lines unintelligible).
. . . no city of people or private man, since such is the god-sent
Writing gods, writing into the tablets of the mind 41
fortune she enjoys. And I will tell you a proof which gives you this
clearly. Hera has reared a violent son whom she has borne to Zeus, a
god irascible, hard to govern, a one whose mind knew no respect for
others. He shot wayfarers with deadly arrows, and ruthless
hacked . . . with hooked spears . . . he rejoiced and laughed . . .
evil . . . scent of blood. . .

There are many problems connected to the attribution of the


fragment and also to the identification of the characters involved in
this dialogue. We do not know even the genre of the play.
Fraenkel32 and Lloyd Jones33 were the first to think that this
fragment would come from the lost tragedy Aetnaeae by Aeschylus
(indirect quotations in Σ ad Il. VI 239c and Eust. ad Il. 641,57 =
2.311.15 Van der Valk confirm that this is actually an Aeschylean
passage), but we cannot exclude that these lines come from a satyr
play34. The speaker at the beginning of the dialogue should be
Dike herself; she is explaining the manner by which she achieved
her historic privileges. In line 5, it seems probable that αὐτ̣ῶ̣ι̣
refers to the throne once occupied by Kronos and now by Zeus,
who gained his victory justly, because his father began the fight
(lines 6-7). Then, Dikes remembers the honour that Zeus did her
(l. 8 Ζεὺς ἐ̣τίμ̣[ησεν), because he was attacked and took counter-
measures against his fathers, thus having Justice on his side. At l.
10 Dike is proud of sitting upon or beside the throne of Zeus (ἵζω
Δι̣ὸς θρόνοισιν)35, while from line 11 she starts a dialogue with the
Chorus explaining her particular prerogative, that is to guarantee a
reward for honest men and a punishment for the wicked. He
specifies to do so by writing down their offences in the books of
Zeus, so that when the day of reckoning comes, they will be
brought to judgment36.

We do not have in Greek extant literature other passages where


a writing god is so clearly presented and described. It is interesting
to stress that the terminology is so close to Melanippe’s words. At
line 21 τ̣ἀ̣<μ>π̣λακ̣ήματ' ἐ̣ν δέλτῳ Διό̣[ς expresses the same idea of
the Euripidean fragment, corresponding to ἁμαρτίας and ἐν Διὸς
δέλτου πτυχαῖς (fr. 506 Kannicht, line 2): a god writing himself
the bad deeds of men on tablets. In Aeschylus, Dike says explicitly
to be Zeus’ servant and to write down for him all men’s misdeeds;
perhaps the pronoun τινα in Melanippe, though it is indefinite, may
be simply a reference to Dike, whose mention is explicit three lines
later (fr. 506 Kannicht, l. 6), or to Hermes. This book-keeping
Zeus with his recording angel embodied by Dike is very new in
Greek theology and he never became very common37. Considering
these fragments and all the passages quoted above, if this fanciful
image of a writing god seems to stand as a direct influence from
Semitic culture, the idea of a Zeus accompanied by his secretary to
administer justice seems genuinely Greek38. Moreover, it is worth
noting there is another difference between Semitic literature and
the less frequent samples in Greek literature: in Greek, all the
passages insist on writing men’s misdeeds with no reference to
42 Fjodor Montemurro
right-doers,39and, with the only exception of Babrius’ tale 75,
there is no mention of annotation of sinners’ names either.
Some scholars have temptingly purported the idea that
Euripides had directly taken up the Aeschylean passage40. This is
mainly due to the lack of other instances apart from these two
fragments. Anyhow, to assume this idea we have to face many
problems, first of all the staging of the Aeschylean drama. Even if
this play were the Aetnaeae, it is highly improbable that Euripides
would be able to see a representation of a work that was
performed in Sicily; we may assume that he could have read it, but
that would generate other issues. Moreover, the supposition
becomes more feeble if we consider, as it is probable, that the
fragment might come from a Satyr play: making some polemic
against a bizarre view performed in a Satyr play (where all the
extravagant and fanciful ideas on myth and plot were freely
enacted) would be very few sustainable41. It is simpler, in my
opinion, to imagine a common popular belief, as the parallels in
scholia and paremiographers may suggest, a belief which
Aeschylus took advantage of in his curious representation of Dike
and that Euripides reversed to stress the argument of separation
between Justice by the Gods and Justice among the men42.

MEMORY AS A BOOK.

In Melanippe’s lines, the rare and curious depiction of the role of


Zeus seems to be conjugated to another image employed in Attic
drama: the memory conceived as a book in which you put what
you have to remember43. The expression δέλτου πτυχαῖς in fact
may be intended not barely literally, but also metaphorically,
suggesting the reference to the tablet or the book of the mind. As
for the writing god image, the link between the memory and the
tablet of the mind can be traced back again to the Semitic East: the
phrase “tablet of the mind” (though with a word for tablet
different from deltos, i.e. luah) is found many times in Old
Testament, as in Prov. 3.1-3 “Let not mercy and truth forsake thee:
bind them about thy neck; write them upon the table of thine
heart” (the Septuagint translation omits the expression and says:
ἄφαψαι δὲ αὐτὰς ἐπὶ σῷ τραχήλῳ, καὶ εὑρήσεις χάριν), 7.3 “Bind
them upon thy fingers; write them upon the table of thine
heart” (Septuagint: ἐπίγραψον δὲ ἐπὶ τὸ πλάτος τῆς καρδίας σου),
Jer. 17.1 “Judah’s sin is engraved with an iron tool, inscribed with
a flint point, on the tablets of their hearts and on the horns of their
altars” (the Septuagint again omits these lines, but other Greek
versions have them), and again in New Testament, as 2 Corynth. 33
“You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our
ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God,
not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” (Greek
Stephanus’ text: φανερούμενοι ὅτι ἐστὲ ἐπιστολὴ Χριστοῦ
διακονηθεῖσα ὑφ' ἡμῶν ἐγγεγραμμένη οὐ μέλανι ἀλλὰ πνεύματι
θεοῦ ζῶντος οὐκ ἐν πλαξὶν λιθίναις ἀλλ' ἐν πλαξὶν καρδίας
σαρκίναις). The best known example is that of Jer. 31.33 “But this
Writing gods, writing into the tablets of the mind 43
is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those
days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will
write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be
my people”.
In Greek literature, the memory conceived as a book is not a
scant metaphor. We find it for the first time in Pind. Ol. X1 ff. Τὸν
Ὀλυμπιονίκαν ἀνάγνωτέ μοι / Ἀρχεστράτου παῖδα, πόθι φρενός /
ἐμᾶς γέγραπται, where the poet asks the Muses and the Truth,
Zeus’ daughter, to read in his memory and let him recollect of
Agesidamus, the winner guy in a fight battle, saying “Read me the
name of the Olympian victor, the son of Archestratus! Tell me
where it is written in my heart!” This Pindaric passage contains
the first attestation of the verb ἀναγιγνώσκω in the meaning of “to
read” (literally “to know it again”, cfr. LSJ) and also the first
appearance of an image that, despite that of a god writing on
tablets of destiny, will become very common in 5th century Greek.
Aeschylus is the poet who has employed many times the wax-
tablet metaphor with a more or sometime less explicit vocabulary
concerning the term δέλτος. The association of the faculty of
memory with the tablets is granted by the term φρενῶν which
often stands next to δέλτοι44. In particular, four passages have a
clear mention of the material support, the wax tablet where the
objects of memory will be inscribed; in other instances, the idea is
simply arguable from the terminology exploited. A striking
example is Aesch. PV 786-789: {Πρ.} ἐπεὶ προθυμεῖσθ', οὐκ
ἐναντιώσομαι / τὸ μὴ οὐ γεγωνεῖν πᾶν ὅσον προσχρῄζετε. / σοὶ
πρῶτον, Ἰοῖ, πολύδονον πλάνην φράσω, /ἣν ἐγγράφου σὺ
μνήμοσιν δέλτοις φρενῶν. Prometheus undertakes to tell Io of the
route that she must follow across the continents, and instructs her
to “inscribe it on the memory tablet of your mind”. Also in Suppl.
178-179 παῖδες, φρονεῖν χρή [...] / καὶ τἀπὶ χέρσου νῦν προμηθίαν
λαβεῖν / αἰνῶ φυλάξαι θ' ἅμ' ἔπη δελτουμένας, the last participle
clearly refers to the same image of writing into tablets: Danaus in
his first speech after the parodos urges his daughters to listen to
his prudent advice and says: “put my words under guard,
tableting them for yourselves”. Other instances clearly refer to the
same pattern, though without mention of written deltoi, as Choeph.
450 τοιαῦτ' ἀκούων ἐν φρεσὶν γράφου (“Listen to these things and
write them in your mind”) and Suppl. 991-992 καὶ ταῦθ' ἅμ'
ἐγγράψασθε πρὸς γεγραμμένοις / πολλοῖσιν ἄλλοις σωφρονίσμασιν
πατρός (“And in addition to the many other wise injunctions of
your father recorded in your memory, inscribe this too”), that
alludes to the same metaphor, though with reference neither to
δέλτος nor to φρήν45. Danaus again, a person characterized by
proverbial and often imaginative utterances, uses this metaphor
twice (here and at 179 quoted above) and this shows how the idea
was common to the public46. We have to observe that this poetic
image for representation of the psychological and mental process
of the fixing of words and thoughts in memory is not confined to
Aeschylus’ imagination. We encounter it also in some Sophoclean
passages, like Philoct. 1325 καὶ γράφου φρενῶν ἔσω, Trach. 683
44 Fjodor Montemurro
χαλκῆς ὅπως δύσνιπτον ἐκ δέλτου γραφήν, Triptolemos fr. 597 Radt
θοῦ δ' ἐν φρενὸς δέλτοισι τοὺς ἐμοὺς λόγους. Moreover, the
metaphor widely spread as a meaningful picture exploited more
than one time by Plato; in Theaethetus 191 C-D the metaphor of
writing into the soul conceived as a wax tablet serves to explain the
concept of the right use of the writing. The wax tablet of the
human mind (ἐν ταῖς ψυχαῖς ἡμῶν ἐνὸν κήρινον ἐκμαγεῖον) is the
place on which the truths leave their impressions: Plato calls it a
gift of the mother of the Muses47. Yet, the metaphor had already
appeared in philosophical texts, as we can argue from a passage of
Theophrastus, De sensu 51 which reports a testimony of
Democritus 68 A 135.18 ff. DK [...] πρῶτον μὲν οὖν ἄτοπος ἡ
ἀποτύπωσις ἡ ἐν τῶι ἀέρι. δεῖ γὰρ ἔχειν πυκνότητα καὶ μὴ
<θρύπτεσθαι> τὸ τυπούμενον, ὥσπερ καὶ αὐτὸς λέγει
παραβάλλων τοιαύτην εἶναι τὴν <ἐντύπωσιν οἷον εἰ ἐκμάξειας εἰς
κηρόν>. Here it is again present the comparison between the
faculty of memory and the wax tablet where the sensations impress
their cast48.
What is important for a more correct understanding of
Melanippe’s fragment is trying to explain what is the relationship
between the god writing on tablet and the writing on the tablets of
the mind. The Dike-fragment of Aeschylus (fr. 281a Radt) has
shown us a deity taking notes of men’s wrong behaviours, with
the explicit mention of δέλτoς Διός. How are to be interpreted
these words? It remains questionable whether the image in Dike-
fragment has to be intended metaphorically or not, i. e. whether it
should be enclosed into the common and well known portrait of
the mental activity of memory just transferred to the god, or it
belongs to the Mesopotamian and Near East heritage of
representing gods writing on books. The passage in Eumenides
269-275 looks really tempting, because it seems to present the
same problem:

ὄψῃ δὲ κεἴ τις ἄλλος ἤλιτεν βροτῶν


ἢ θεὸν ἢ ξένον 270
τιν' ἀσεβῶν ἢ τοκέας φίλους,
ἔχονθ' ἕκαστον τῆς δίκης ἐπάξια.
{ – } μέγας γὰρ Ἅιδης ἐστὶν εὔθυνος βροτῶν
ἔνερθε χθονός,
δελτογράφῳ δὲ πάντ' ἐπωπᾷ φρενί.

There you’ll see that whosever mortal acted


sinfully against a god or stranger or 270
did not respect his parents,
there he finds his just punishment.
The Great Judge for the mortals beneath the earth is
Hades who supervises
all and writes all on his inscrutable mind.

Here we have mention both of the φρένες and of a god. The


adjective δελτογράφος sounds complicate: it would mean “mind
Writing gods, writing into the tablets of the mind 45
written as a tablet”, but in this case we are dealing with the mind
of a god. Moreover, the god here is defined εὔθυνος, a term that
pertains to the legal sphere; it might be not extraneous in this
context a hint to the legal practice in Athens, where judges and
εὔθυνοι kept an eye on actions of some people and took notes to
be used later during the trial49. However, we have no evidence that
judges in 5th century Athens wrote their verdict on a tablet; we
know only that the jury in theatrical competitions wrote the
winner on a γραμματεῑον (cf. Lys. 4.3). Even if the increasing
practice of writing might be the main cause of the diffusion of the
image, it still remains speculative to link its employment to a
precise legal process50.
The question is to determine whether Ade writes himself, as
Dike in Aeschylus or even Zeus in Melanippe, or we should ascribe
the lines into the usual memory metaphor, though in a more high-
flown poetic diction: it would be the only case where the concept
of writing into the mind’s tablets is attributed to a god.
F. Solmsen, collecting and comparing all Aeschylean instances,
concluded that δελτογράφος φρήν in Eumenides should be
associated to other passages recalling the writing into the mind;
this imaginative metaphor would have been exploited by Aeschylus
to describe the ἄγραφος μνήμη. The Greeks knew two kinds of
μνήμη, the written and the ἄγραφος. The distinction between them
is familiar to us from the story of Theuth and Thamous in Plato’s
Phaedrus: Theuth, who has invented τὰ γράμματα, offers them to
King Thamous and recommends his new invention as μνήμης καὶ
σοφίας φάρμακον; he is told that the invention is a poor substitute
for the real μνήμη, man’s physical memory. Solmsen, ignoring the
existence of P. Oxy. 2256, supposed that the idea of Zeus’ δέλτοι
in Melanippe’s words was due to some popular imagination or
some wit, and believed that the ironical version which we find in
the Melanippe was the first form in which it was ever put forward:
“Euripides (or his character) wishes to discredit the notion that
Zeus “remembers” and punishes men’s sins - the same notion
which Aeschylos so emphatically endorses. Euripides discredits it
by putting it before the audience in the less dignified alternative:
he pictures Zeus as relying on the μνήμη of written records”51. For
Solmsen, the parallels in Aeschylus and Sophocles support the idea
that the writing tablet image should be simply considered a
metaphor for writing into the mind. In other words, in Melanippe’s
fragment the vision of a writing Zeus would be only a fanciful and
clever extension of the metaphor to represent the mental process of
write into one’s soul or one’s mind, in this case into Zeus’ mind.
Therefore, the irony in Melanippe would rely on the fact that Zeus
is not capable to record men’s crimes in his mind, but he needs a
graphic support to remember all of them.
I think that Solmsen’s clever explanation is at least highly
questionable. First of all, we have to observe that there is no
mention of φρένες in Euripidean fragment, hence we are not
obliged to interpret Διὸς γράφοντος in Melanippe as a metaphorical
usage to mean “writing into the mind” that Aeschylus many times
46 Fjodor Montemurro
exploits. Moreover, the scholium to the Eumenides’ passage claims
for a writing Ade, proposing a literal meaning of Aeschylean
words: δελτογράφῳ· ἐφορᾷ δὲ πάντα ἀναγραφόμενος αὐτὰ τῇ
ἰδίᾳ δέλτῳ. We may sometimes suspect of scholia’s interpretations
and dismiss scholiastic explanations as autoschediastic, but they
may preserve a common or popular belief otherwise condemned to
be lost.
Certainly, the two images mingled up in their development;
although Solmsen states that “it is wrong to think that the δελτο
γράφος φρήν presupposes the idea of the god himself (or his
agent) as δελτογράφος”52, a mix of both these metaphors might be
plausible53: Ade can be depicted like Zeus or Dike in the act of
writing on his tablet. It would be improper to overwrite the tablets
of the mind into the writing god image if it is unnecessary. And if
in Eumenides the text openly says that the tablet is that of the mind
(φρήν), we are not legitimate to assume that also in Dike’s and
Melanippe’s fragments the deltoi are precisely that of the mind of
these gods.
Rather, Melanippe’s text gives us other data. Supposing a Zeus
booking by himself the sins of men, as it is explicitly stated by the
absolute genitive Διὸς γράφοντος (l. 5), Melanippe conjectures that
Zeus’ tablets would be the entire sky (l. 4 ὁ πᾶς ἂν οὐρανός),
although not sufficient yet to list all men’s crimes. It is curios to
remark that the sky on which Zeus would take notes is assimilated
to a book: the tablets are traditionally described as “folded” by the
expression δέλτου πτυχαῖς (cf. Eur. IA 98 κἀν δέλτου πτυχαῖς and
also Aesch. Suppl. 947 ταῦτ' οὐ πίναξίν ἐστιν ἐγγεγραμμένα / οὐδ'
ἐν πτυχαῖς βίβλων κατεσφραγισμένα and Soph. fr. 144.1 Radt σὺ
δ' ἐν θρόνοισι γραμμάτων πτυχὰς ἔχων), but the same word πτύξ
is employed also to mean the regions of the sky space (as in Eur.
Hel. 44 ἐν πτυχαῖσιν αἰθέρος, cfr. Phoen. 84-85, Or. 1636, Phaeth.
fr. 779.7 Kannicht). Moreover, in some tragic passages the sky is
described by the term ἀναπτυχή (Soph. fr. 956.3 Radt οὐρανοῦ
ἀναπτυχάς, Eur. Ion 1445 λαμπρᾶς αἰθέρος ἀμπτυχαί) a technical
word meaning “unfolding”, referred to the rolls on which books
were written (LSJ). Since the verb ἀναπτύσσω means “open for
reading” (Hdt. I 125 βιβλίον; Eur. Erechth. fr. 370 Kannicht
δέλτων ἀναπτύσσοιμι γῆρυν) we are led to think the folded layers
of the sky are analogous to the folded writing tablets, in the same
way the sky is compared to a book roll in Isaia 34, 4 ἑλιγήσεται ὁ
οὐρανὸς ὡς βιβλίον (and see also Luc. Evang. X 2054). Zeus would
be therefore writing on the sky book and not on his mind.

I think that the Euripidean text could have another subtler


meaning, if we take into account also the plot of the tragedy
Melanippe Sophè. It seems to me that the basic idea of the fragment
is not putting discredit on Zeus, but warning mankind not to
behave bad and to try to forgive some human sins because every
man has Dike in himself. We want to reinforce this interpretation
with some observations.
Writing gods, writing into the tablets of the mind 47
1. What is the focus in Melanippe’s lines is not the poor quality
of memory of the Father of the Gods, but the impossibility for him
of controlling all men’s actions and deeds. If the sky is too small
to contain all men’s misdeeds, this does not mean that Zeus could
not do his work as a judge, but rather that human sins are really
innumerable, and no space in the sky to book all of them does not
imply Zeus is powerless or incompetent. As we have already
observed above, Zeus is not writing men’s name, but just their
sins. Therefore, the emphasis is not on Zeus low memory: the verb
ἐξαρκέω is in fact employed with a little syntactic zeugma, referred
both to the sky and to Zeus, with the basic idea of “not be
sufficient” (LSJ)55. It is because the sky is not enough to record all
sins the main reason why Zeus would not be able to assign
punishment56.
2. To cut off any communication between gods’ and men’s
world, Melanippe states the sins could not fly to reach Zeus. We
have no other parallels for sins flying away from the Earth to the
Heaven, but anyhow the depiction of flying misdeeds can be
associated to the so common already Homeric Greek metaphor of
flying words57.
3. As a result, the space of action of gods is different from the
space where justice is actually administrated; this distinction is
strongly underlined by the adversative ἀλλά at the end of line 7.
Melanippe cannot depict Dike in her common traditional role; the
emphasis on the “ineptitude” of Zeus would be useless, if Melanippe
wanted to make Dike a sort of Zeus on the Earth, assigning to her
her traditional role. Nor Dike is yet cooperating with Zeus, as on the
contrary in Hesiodic (Op. 248 ff.) and Aeschylean (fr. 281a Radt)
passages; contrasting a common mythical belief and a traditional
religious imagination, Dike, in Melanippe’s words, does not go
around on the Earth sent by Zeus, but she is very close to men to
fulfill her duties without any communication with the gods. The
sharp separation of the two different worlds stands as a philosophical
heritage of the new rationalistic and almost skeptical aptitude of 5th
century Greek thought. Collard-Cropp-Lee (1995, p. 278) may be
right in asserting that this representation rejects “not divine Justice,
but an understanding of this in terms of a limited anthropomorphic
deity”. This cultural stream is highly productive in the 5th century
Athens, launched by thinkers as Empedocles (31 B fr. 134 DK) or
Xenophanes (21 A fr. 28, 31, 32, B 14-16 DK), but we may cite
also Anaxagoras and the Orphism. Anyway, such an explanation
does not embrace the deep meaning of the entire scene of the
Euripidean fragment. The anthropomorphism, that is the extension
of human features and acts to gods, could easily be understood as
an archetypal background for the idea of a writing God already in
the Bible58. But anthropomorphism is also the base of traditional
Greek belief, a pattern still effective, for example, in all Aeschylean
dramas59. So, Euripides may have denied a too humanized
representation of gods he found in popular belief or in
Aeschylus60, but for his purpose this is only a starting point: he
tries to go farther indeed.
48 Fjodor Montemurro
4. First of all, Melanippe’s fragment represents the only instance,
in all extant Semitic (Mesopotamian and Biblical) and Greek
literature, in which a writing god is looked suspiciously and almost
denigrated for using written records to assign punishment: nothing
similar appears in Hebraic or Christian literature61. Moreover, if a
joke or wit is present here, this is not the basic idea that has
inspired these lines.What is the key point in the fragment is the
denial of the divine nature of Dike, not just his separation from
Olympian justice. The message under Melanippe’s words is an
exhortation to consider and exercise justice without taking into
account the divine world: for righteous men, justice does need any
heavenly guidelines for an honest and irreprehensible life. The
famous fragment of the Sisyphos written by Critias / Euripides (the
sources diverge in attribution) gives a rational explanation of the
introduction of the divine sphere in men’s life, and justifies all the
common attributes of the god as all-seer and all-hearer: (88 B fr
25, 5-24DK)

κἄπειτά μοι δοκοῦσιν ἅνθρωποι νόμους


θέσθαι κολαστάς, ἵνα δίκη τύραννος ᾖ
<×–⏑–×> τήν θ' ὕβριν δούλην ἔχῃ·
ἐζημιοῦτο δ' εἴ τις ἐξαμαρτάνοι.
ἔπειτ' ἐπειδὴ τἀμφανῆ μὲν οἱ νόμοι
ἀπεῖργον αὐτοὺς ἔργα μὴ πράσσειν βίᾳ, 10
λάθρᾳ δ' ἔπρασσον, τηνικαῦτά μοι δοκεῖ
<⏑–> πυκνός τις καὶ σοφὸς γνώμην ἀνήρ
<θεῶν> δέος θνητοῖσιν ἐξευρεῖν, ὅπως
εἴη τι δεῖμα τοῖς κακοῖσι, κἂν λάθρᾳ
πράσσωσιν ἢ λέγωσιν ἢ φρονῶσί <τι>. 15
ἐντεῦθεν οὖν τὸ θεῖον εἰσηγήσατο,
ὡς ἔστι δαίμων ἀφθίτῳ θάλλων βίῳ
νόῳ τ' ἀκούων καὶ βλέπων, φρονῶν τε καί
προσέχων τε ταῦτα καὶ φύσιν θείαν φορῶν,
ὃς πᾶν {μὲν} τὸ λεχθὲν ἐν βροτοῖς ἀκού<ς>εται, 20
<τὸ> δρώμενον δὲ πᾶν ἰδεῖν δυνήσεται.
ἐὰν δὲ σὺν σιγῇ τι βουλεύῃς κακόν,
τοῦτ' οὐχὶ λήσει τοὺς θεούς·62

It would not be so absurd to put our Melanippe fragment in


relation to the idea developed in the Platonic Protagoras, where the
myth of Hermes sending Shame and Justice on the Earth is
narrated. We cannot go so much farther to suppose Plato taking
back directly the Aeschylean Dike-fragment63, but we may assume
that an echo of the rational reflection proposed in Melanippe takes
home in the platonic dialogue. In particular, when Hermes asks
Zeus to whom he must distribute Justice and Shame, the Father of
God replies (Prot. 322d 1-5): “Ἐπὶ πάντας,” ἔφη ὁ Ζεύς, “καὶ
πάντες μετεχόντων· οὐ γὰρ ἂν γένοιντο πόλεις, εἰ ὀλίγοι αὐτῶν
μετέχοιεν ὥσπερ ἄλλων τεχνῶν· καὶ νόμον γε θὲς παρ' ἐμοῦ τὸν
μὴ δυνάμενον αἰδοῦς καὶ δίκης μετέχειν κτείνειν ὡς νόσον
πόλεως” (Lamb’s translation: “To all,” replied Zeus; “let all have
Writing gods, writing into the tablets of the mind 49
their share: for cities cannot be formed if only a few have a share
of these as of other arts. And make thereto a law of my ordaining,
that he who cannot partake of respect and right shall die the death
as a public pest”). Regardless of what is the real meaning of this
myth, justice seems to be conceived as something present in every
man and which every man is equipped with. But Melanippe is
even less traditional of Plato; Justice is neither a daughter nor an
entity sent and dependent by Zeus, but it is something immanent
and not divinely prompted: men do not need the God to decide
what is the best thing to do: just they must obey to the inner sense
of δίκη they have inwardly64, without any concern of god’s
judgment and punishment65.
5. At line 8, Dike is said to stay close to men; her presence is
made evident by the adverb ἐγγύς, which we find elsewhere to
define the “Eye of the god or of Zeus” (cf. Adesp. Trag. 485 Kn-Sn
and 496 Kn-Sn66). The adverb is also present in other Euripidean
passages in which Dike is said to live in the human world, though
with the specification of being in any case an ancilla deorum. The
first one is Eur. Andromeda fr. 151 Kannicht τήν τοι Δίκην λέγουσι
παῖδ' εἶναι Διὸς / ἐγγύς τε ναίειν τῆς βροτῶν ἁμαρτίας, where the
mention of Dike as Zeus’ daughter explicitly conforms her function
to her traditional role of Zeus’ cooperator. The other passage is
Eur. Archelaos fr. 255 Kannicht, which seems to be extremely
relevant for us:

δοκεῖς τὰ τῶν θεῶν ξυνετὰ νικήσειν ποτὲ


καὶ τὴν Δίκην που μάκρ' ἀπῳκίσθαι βροτῶν·
ἣ δ' ἐγγύς ἐστιν, οὐχ ὁρωμένη δ' ὁρᾷ
ὃν χρὴ κολάζειν τ' οἶδεν· ἀλλ' οὐκ οἶσθα σὺ
ὁπόταν ἄφνω μολοῦσα διολέσῃ κακούς.

You believe a day to win the intelligence of the god


And that Justice live somewhere away from men:
She is near instead; unseen, she sees
And knows who must be punished; but you cannot foresee
when, suddenly arrived, he decides to ruin the wicked

Here, though the adverb ἐγγύς underlines Dike’s presence


among men, the fragment displays again a traditional image of
Dike as servant of the gods, as we can argue from the expression
τὰ τῶν θεῶν ξυνετά. But we should draw a comparison of the
phrasing of these lines with Melanippe’s fragment: the wording is
similar, but the overall sense of fr. 506 Kannicht is completely the
opposite.

In Archelaos’ fragment both the main features of Dike are


illustrated by a word play: οὐχ ὁρωμένη δ' ὁρᾷ (l. 13), she sees
everything67 and she moves unseen and silently68. The concept is
again stated in a similar way by the same pun on the verb ὀράω in
Adesp. Trag. fr. 493.1-2 Kn-Sn ὁρᾷς Δίκην ἄναυδον οὐχ ὁρωμένην /
εὕδοντι καὶ στείχοντι καὶ καθημένῳ. In Melanippe’s fragment, on
50 Fjodor Montemurro
the contrary, Dike is said to be well visible: because men are
encouraged to look at her, if just they want to do it (l. 8 εἰβούλεσθ'
ὁρᾶν). She is forever close to men, but now she can be seen. As a
prerogative of Dike, the verb ὀράω is on purpose exploited by
Euripides to complete the separation between god and men. The
verb reinforces this reversal: as it is impossible to see a god as far
as it is a deity, so it is paradoxically simpler to “see” justice
conceived as an abstract value inside men69. It is just a matter of
finding her, because she is here somewhere: ἐνταῦθά ποὔστιν
ἐγγύς (l. 8). The adverb που appears to be another textual
consonance, though in Archelaos’ lines it is a conjecture by
Grotius70. So, while Melanippe’s fragment denies any
correspondence between human behaviour and divine punishment,
Archelaos’s one is a warning against whoever tries to escape gods’
justice.
Furthermore, the explanation of the celestial (Archelaos) or
immanent and ethical (Melanippe) role of Dike is in both fragment
introduced by the same verb δοκέω (δοκεῖς – δοκεῖτε). This
similarity may be taken into account for the collocation of both the
fragments in their respective tragedies. If Archelaos’s lines seem to
have been spoken in a dialogue between Archelaos and Kisseus
before Kisseus’s punishment that is near to follow71, Melanippe’s
lines are probably pronounced by the girl before her punishment
for having been raped by Poseidon and given birth to her two
twins, Aelous and Boeotos: as in the first case Kisseus will be
thrown into the pitfall he had prepared for Archelaos, in the
second Melanippe will be forgiven through the action of her
mother Hippo as deus ex machina. In such a way, the intervention
of Hippo, that was transformed by Zeus into a star, would be a
sort of partial rehabilitation of the role of gods, though with a stop
halfway, as stars were conceived as something in the middle
between Earth and Heaven.

And precisely about stars we want to brief reconsider a later


adaptation/imitation of the same concept of gods observing men’s
lives and taking notes on them.
One of the most striking recollection of this notion is found in
the prologue of Plautus’ Rudens, a comedy whose Greek source
was a play by Diphilus. The prologue speaker is the star Arcturus
that gives a very strange account of his own and his fellows stars’
duties (Rudens 5-16):

Nomen Arcturus est mihi. 5


Noctu sum in caelo clarus atque inter deos;
inter mortales ambulo interdius.
Et alia deorum signa de caelo ad terram accidunt:
qui est imperator divom atque hominum Iuppiter,
is nos per gentis alium alia disparat, 10
qui facta hominum moresque pietatem et fidem
noscamus, ut quemque adiuvet opulentia.
qui falsas litis falsis testimoniis
Writing gods, writing into the tablets of the mind 51
petunt quique in iure abiurant pecuniam,
eorum referimus nomina exscripta ad Iovem; 15
cotidie ille scit quis hic quaerat malum.

Arcturus is my name.
By night, I am glittering in the heavens and amid the Gods,
passing among mortals in the day.
Other Constellations, too, descend from the heavens upon the earth;
Jove, who is the ruler of Gods and me,
he disperses us here in various directions among the nations,
to observe the actions, manners, piety, and faith of men,
just as the means of each avail him.
Those who commence villanous suits at law upon false testimony,
and those who, in court, upon false oath deny a debt,
their names written down, do we return to Jove.
Each day does he learn who here is calling for vengeance.
(Transl. H. Th. Riley)

It has been E. Fraenkel that has accounted for the most


peculiar trait of this prologue. The scholar writes72: “According to
Diphilos the duties of the heavenly police are entrusted neither to
an anonymous spirit, the τις of the Melanippe passage, nor to the
ἀθάνατοι of Hesiod, but to the stars, all of them. Now it seems
perfectly natural that the stars should be members of the celestial
hierarchy and have their posts assigned by Zeus (is nos per gentis
alium alia disparat). To the imagination of the early Greeks the
stars, at any rate the more important ones, are no mere things,
disks of metal or the like, but have some kind of personality, they
feel and act like living beings. [...] But wherever we meet them in
earlier Greek poetry and art, they are kept within their proper
sphere”. However, from V century on, a new and fresh conception
of the stars began to spread in Athens. Without making reference
to Plato’s Timaeus and Laws, Fraenkel recalls a relevant passage in
the Pseudo-Platonic Epinomis, 984d ff. where the stars are said to
see and know men’s thoughts,

θεοὺς δὲ δὴ τοὺς ὁρατούς, μεγίστους καὶ τιμιωτάτους καὶ


ὀξύτατον ὁρῶντας πάντῃ, τοὺς πρώτους τὴν τῶν ἄστρων φύσιν
λεκτέον καὶ ὅσα μετὰ τούτων αἰσθανόμεθα γεγονότα, μετὰ δὲ
τούτους καὶ ὑπὸ τούτοις ἑξῆς [984e] δαίμονας, ἀέριον δὲ γένος,
ἔχον ἕδραν τρίτην καὶ μέσην, τῆς ἑρμηνείας αἴτιον, εὐχαῖς τιμᾶν
μάλα χρεὼν χάριν τῆς εὐφήμου διαπορείας. τῶν δὲ δύο τούτων
ζῴων, τοῦ τ' ἐξ αἰθέρος ἐφεξῆς τε ἀέρος ὄν, διορώμενον ὅλον
αὐτῶν ἑκάτερον εἶναι – παρὸν δὴ πλησίον οὐ κατάδηλον ἡμῖν
γίγνεσθαι – μετέχοντα δὲ [985a] φρονήσεως θαυμαστῆς, ἅτε
γένους ὄντα εὐμαθοῦς τε καὶ μνήμονος, γιγνώσκειν μὲν σύμπασαν
τὴν ἡμετέραν αὐτὰ διάνοιαν λέγωμεν, καὶ τόν τε καλὸν ἡμῶν καὶ
ἀγαθὸν ἅμα θαυμαστῶς ἀσπάζεσθαι καὶ τὸν σφόδρα κακὸν
μισεῖν, ἅτε λύπης μετέχοντα ἤδη – θεὸν μὲν γὰρ δὴ τὸν τέλος
ἔχοντα τῆς θείας μοίρας ἔξω τούτων εἶναι, λύπης τε καὶ ἡδονῆς,
τοῦ δὲ φρονεῖν καὶ τοῦ γιγνώσκειν κατὰ πάντα μετειληφέναι –
52 Fjodor Montemurro

[985b] καὶ συμπλήρους δὴ ζῴων οὐρανοῦ γεγονότος,


ἑρμηνεύεσθαι πρὸς ἀλλήλους τε καὶ τοὺς ἀκροτάτους θεοὺς
πάντας τε καὶ πάντα, διὰ τὸ φέρεσθαι τὰ μέσα τῶν ζῴων ἐπί τε
γῆν καὶ ἐπὶ τὸν ὅλον οὐρανὸν ἐλαφρᾷ φερόμενα ῥύμῃ.

Lamb’s translation: “But as our visible gods, greatest and most


honourable and having keenest vision every way, we must count
first the order of the stars and all else that we perceive existing
with them; and after these, and [984e] next below these, the divine
spirits, and air-born race, holding the third and middle situation,
cause of interpretation, which we must surely honour with prayers
for the sake of an auspicious journey across. We must say of either
of these two creatures — that which is of ether and, next to it, of
air — that it is not entirely plain to sight: when it is nearby, it is
not made manifest to us; [985a] but partaking of extraordinary
intelligence, as belonging to an order which is quick to learn and
strong in memory, we may say that they understand the whole of
our thoughts, and show extraordinary kindness to anyone of us
who is a good man and true, and hate him who is utterly evil, as
one who already partakes of suffering. For we know that God,
who has the privilege of the divine portion, is remote from these
affections of pain and pleasure, but has a share of intelligence and
knowledge in every sphere; and the heaven being filled full of live
creatures, [985b] they interpret all men and all things both to one
another and to the most exalted gods, because the middle creatures
move both to earth and to the whole of heaven with a lightly
rushing motion”

Fraenkel goes on73: “In this picture of the universe, which is


noticeable as a forerunner of “the theogony of Hellenistic and late
antiquity” (Jaeger), we see, along with the δαίμονες, the stars
invested with exactly the same functions as those ascribed to them
in the prologue of the Rudens. They will find out σύμπασαν τὴν
ἡμετέραν διάνοιαν, welcome the good and righteous man, be
grieved at the impious, and, most important of all, ἑρμηνεύεσθαι
πρὸς ἀλλήλους τε καὶ τοὺς ἀκροτάτους θεοὺς πάντας τε καὶ
πάντα”. Although, of course, this new conception of stars’ essence
and influence could have helped and given philosophical
foundations to poetic inspiration, Fraenkel is not sure where
precisely Diphilos picked up such ideas. It might, at this point, be
allowed to refine Fraenkel’s view.
First of all, we see that the notion of a writing god seems to be
here at home, because Arcturus explicitly states that the stars refer
“nomina exscripta ad Iovem” (l. 15) and again that Zeus “bonos in
aliis tabulis exscriptos habet” (l. 21). Thus, attributing to stars the
duty of referring men’s misdeeds to Zeus may be derived also by a
shifting of competences. Since, as it seems, it is Dike, the god in
charge of administrating justice, that was credited to be the
traditional attendant on taking notes of men’s sins, as Aeschylus
and the scholiastic and proverbial literature suggest, we need to
recall the important role that Dike plays in astronomic works, as
Writing gods, writing into the tablets of the mind 53
the famous Phaenomena by Aratus of Soli. According to Aratus’
account, Dike lived upon Earth during the Golden and Silver ages,
when there were no wars or diseases, men did not yet know how
to sail and raised fine crops. They grew greedy, however, and Dike
was sickened. The human race rapidly declined into the Bronze
Age (Aratus, Phaenomena 130-136):

χαλκείη γενεή, προτέρων ὀλοώτεροι ἄνδρες, 130


οἳ πρῶτοι κακόεργον ἐχαλκεύσαντο μάχαιραν
εἰνοδίην, πρῶτοι δὲ βοῶν ἐπάσαντ᾽ ἀροτήρων,
καὶ τότε μισήσασα Δίκη κείνων γένος ἀνδρῶν
ἔπταθ᾽ ὑπουρανίη: ταύτην δ᾽ ἄρα νάσσατο χώρην,
ἧχί περ ἐννυχίη ἔτι φαίνεται ἀνθρώποισιν 135
παρθένος, ἐγγὺς ἐοῦσα πολυσκέπτοιο Βοώτεω

“[they were men] more ruinous than they which went before,
the Race of Bronze, who were the first to forge the sword of the
highwayman, and the first to eat of the flesh of the ploughing-ox;
then verily did Justice loathe that race of men and fly heavenward
and took up that abode, where even now in the night time the
Maiden is seen of men, established near to far-seen
Boötes” (Transl. A. W. Mair).

Hence, according to Aratus, Dike was a star. The poet lived at


the beginning of the 3rd century BC, but his poem is modeled
mainly upon works by Eudossus of Cnidus, who lived one century
before. It is not wrong to think that the idea of Dike as a star is
older than the 4th century, the period in which Diphilus lived and
wrote74. In Diphilus (maintaining that what we read here in Plautus
is not a Plautinian innovation, but poetic material derived from the
Greek original) Arcturus and other stars are said to be wandering
during the day to observe men’s behavior and refer the names of
wrongdoers to Zeus. This was the prerogative of Dike and other
3000 immortals in Hesiod already. But Dike, the governor of
justice on the Earth, became a star in later belief75. So the shrewd
operation by Diphilus: Zeus sends on the Earth the stars
themselves, a strong poetic intuition. Fraenkel is certainly right on
affirming the playwright could not introduce such an extraordinary
thing without any foundation in more generally accepted ideas of
the new Greek theology that considered stars as human being, but
it is not by chance that the stars themselves are required to
conduct the same role whose Dike, a star herself, was traditionally
in charge of. The choice of Arcturus by Diphilus sounds very
happy and is due to many reasons linked to the plot of the
comedy76; on the other hand, the account on the role of stars has,
we can strongly assert, deeper and more complex motivations
which encompass older and newer tradition in Greek religious
belief.
54 Fjodor Montemurro

NOTES

1. Melanippe (Black-Mare) is an heroine of the complicated mythology


of Thessaly and Boeotia, but her story is not so clear and the extant
mythographic accounts diverge considerably; her only notable appearance
in Greek poetry is in Euripides’ plays. We know she was a daughter of
Aeolus (ancestor of the Aeolian Greeks) and Hippo, daughter of the
centaur Chiron, and mother by Poseidon of twins named Aeolus and
Boeotus. Euripides wrote Melanippe Wise and Melanippe Desmotis, but we
cannot establish the relationship between the two tragedies. In the Wise,
Melanippe, so called because of the wisdom she inherited from Chiron
and Hippo and displayed in the play (cfr. frr. 482–4 Kannicht), was raped
by Poseidon and, to conceal the illicit birth and survival of the twins, she
hid them in a stable where herdsmen discovered and brought them to
Aeolus, superstitiously thinking they were the unnatural offspring of a
cow. Aeolus’ father Hellen ordered to fire them, so Melanippe tried to
defend and rescue them by arguing rationally that they must be the
natural children of an unidentified girl. At the end of the play, her mother
Hippo intervened as deus ex machina. In the Captive, the action is
transferred to Metaponto in Southern Italy, where Melanippe is
imprisoned for some unknown reason; Siris, the queen wife of the king
Metaponto who ruled there, tried to kill Melanippe’s sons but failed: at
the end, Siris killed herself and Melanippe married the king Metaponto.
2. It is not necessary, as Musso, O., Euripide. Tragedie. vol. 4, Torino,
2010, p. 359 does, to consider, in view of this linguistic oddity, the whole
fragment as a “un rifacimento ellenistico della tragedia euripidea con
accenti comico-sarcastici” from which Stobaeus would have picked up his
quotation. Actually, we cannot exclude that lines 9-11 would represent a
sort of answer by another character to the rationalistic view expressed
before in lines 1-8. In addition, also the l. 5 was suspected and deleted by
van Herwerden H. (Exercitationes Criticae in poeticis et prosaicis quibusdam
Atticorum monumentis. Accedit descriptio codicis Ambrosiani, quo continetur
fragmentum Onomastici Pollucis, cum praecipuarum lectionum elencho, Hagae
Comitum, 1862, p. 53: “Spurium autem esse vel inde apparet, quod aperte
pugnat cum vs. 2, 3: κἄπειτ’ ἐν Διὸς δέλτου πτυχαῖς γράφειν τιν’ αὐτά,
quo docemur, non ipsum Iovem, sed alium quemdam scribae munere
fungi. Praeterea, expulso isto versu, optime habet ἐκεῖνος, quod
pronomen, ubi proxime Jovis nomen praecessisset, perquam foret
Writing gods, writing into the tablets of the mind 55
incommodum”) and more recently by Stephanopoulos, Th., ‘Marginalia
Tragica III', Logeion, 5, 2015, pp. 200-201, but their motivations are
inconclusive. For further discussion see Klinger, W., ‘Do kistoryi jednej
formuły poetyckiej', EOS, 1905, pp. 14-18, van Looy, H., Zes verloren
tragedies van Euripides, Bruxelles, 1964, pp. 225-232 and Collard, C.,
Cropp, M. J. and Lee, K. H., Euripides, Selected Fragmentary Plays I,
Classical Texts, Warminster, 1995, pp. 278-279.
3. Arist. Poet. 1454a 30-31 τοῦ δὲ ἀπρεποῦς καὶ μὴ ἁρμόττοντος ὅ τε
θρῆνος Ὀδυσσέως ἐν τῇ Σκύλλῃ καὶ ἡ τῆς Μελανίππης ῥῆσις. For what
reason and for what purpose the Stagyrite thought so is beyond our
present paper; for full discussion see Mayhew, R., ‘Behavior Unbecoming
a Woman: Aristotle’s Poetics 15 and Euripides’ Melanippe the Wise', in
Ancient Philosophy 19, 1999, pp. 89-104 and Miletti, L. ‘Euripide tra
poetica e retorica. Aristotele e lo Pseudo Dionigi sulla rhesis di Melanippe'.
In Malhomme, F., Miletti, L., Rispoli, G.M. and Zagdoun, M., Renaissances
de la tragédie. La Poétique d'Aristote et le genre tragique de l'Antiquité à
l'époque contemporaine, Naples, 2013, pp. 205-222.
4. van Looy, 1964, pp. 225-228; Collard-Cropp-Lee, 1995, p. 278; Biga,
A. M., La sapiente Melanippe: alcune osservazioni su una tragedia perduta, Tesi
di Laurea in Lettere Classiche e Storia Antica, Università degli Studi di
Padova, 2010, pp. 144-145.
5. See fr. 486 Kannicht and Collard-Cropp-Lee, 1995, p. 278.
6. In any event, it looks fascinating to assign the lines to Hippo.
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U., ‘Melanippe', SBBA, 1921, p. 75 wrote that
“diese tief Wahrheit, dass jede Schuld sich auf Erden rächt, passt für
Hippo ungleich besser als für Melanippe”. We may imagine that Hippo,
who has become a star by Zeus’ wish as a punishment for her
prophesying, (Eur. Mel. Soph. fr. 481, 14-17; Hyg. Astr. II 18; Pseudo-
Eratosth. Catast. 18) would give at the end of the play an explanation of
what actually happens in stars’ world, the Heaven where gods live, with
the purpose of gain forgiveness for her daughter Melanippe.
7. See among the vast bibliography on Dike, Gagarin, M., ‘Dikē in the
Works and Days', Classical Philology, 68 (2), 1973, pp. 81-94; and ‘Dikē in
Archaic Greek Thoughts', Classical Philology, 69, 1974, pp. 186-97; Dickie,
M. W., ‘Dike as a Moral Term in Homer and Hesiod', Classical Philology, 73
(2), 1978, pp. 91-101 and Havelock, E. A., Dike: la nascita della coscienza,
Bari, 1983.
8. Hes. Op. 256-261: ἡ δέ τε παρθένος ἐστὶ Δίκη, Διὸς ἐκγεγαυῖα, /
κυδρή τ' αἰδοίη τε θεοῖς οἳ Ὄλυμπον ἔχουσιν, / καί ῥ' ὁπότ' ἄν τίς μιν
βλάπτῃ σκολιῶς ὀνοτάζων, / αὐτίκα πὰρ Διὶ πατρὶ καθεζομένη Κρονίωνι /
γηρύετ' ἀνθρώπων ἀδίκων νόον, ὄφρ' ἀποτείσῃ / δῆμος ἀτασθαλίας
βασιλέων οἳ λυγρὰ νοεῦντες / ἄλλῃ παρκλίνωσι δίκας σκολιῶς ἐνέποντες.
(Evelyn-White’s transl: “There is Virgin Dike (Justice), the daughter of
Zeus, who is honoured and reverenced among the gods who dwell on
56 Fjodor Montemurro
Olympos, and whenever anyone hurts her with lying slander, she sits
beside her father, Zeus the son of Kronos, and tells him of men’s wicked
heart, until the people pay for the mad folly of their princes who, evilly
minded, pervert judgement and give sentence crookedly”).
9. Soph. OC 1377-1382; Plut. Alex. 52; Arrian, Anab. IV 9.
10. For the personification of Dike cf. e. g. Eur. Med. 764, 1390; Hipp.
1171; El. 771 and see Thalheim, T., ‘Dike', RE Pauly-Wissowa, V 1, 1905,
coll. 574-577; and West, M. L., Hesiod, Theogony, Oxford, 1966 on Theog.
902.
11. In the famous sculptures of the temple of Zeus at Olympia on the
chest of Cypselus, she was represented as a beautiful goddess, dragging
Adikia (Injustice) with one hand and having in the other a staff to beat
her (Paus. V 18; cfr. Eur. Hipp. 1172).
12. We do not make reference to Hermes, the common messenger of
Zeus, because we are posing our attention to the figures that help Zeus to
receive news about what happens in the world; Hermes, on the contrary,
is the god charged to communicate to men on the Earth what Zeus and
gods have decided about their life. It is also excluded here the Platonic
definition of δαίμων, described as something halfway between men and
gods in the Symposium.
13. Since Homer calls them κοῦραι (maidens) rather than θυγατέρες
(daughters) of Zeus, it might be not clear whether they were actually his
daughters; anyway, as West 1966, on Hes. Theog. 33, has rightly remarked,
“in Hesiod’s time it was not understood what abstractions are. They must
be something; they are invisible, imperishable, and have great influence
over human affairs; they must be gods”. For the deified abstraction and
the personification of all kinds of phenomena in Greek tragedy see
Rutherford, R. B., Greek Tragic Style: Form, Language and Interpretation,
Oxford, 2012.
14. Some famous passages from poetry: Eur. Bac. 393-394 αἰθέρα ναίον-/
τες ὁρῶσιν τὰ βροτῶν οὐρανίδαι, Adesp. Trag. fr. 491 Kn-Sn ὀξὺς θεῶν
ὀφθαλμὸς εἰς τὰ πάντ' ἰδεῖν, Adesp. Trag. 496 Kn-Sn μὴ μουσοποίει πρὸς τὸ
νηπιώτερον· / πόρρω γὰρ ἑστὼς ὁ θεὸς ἐγγύθεν, Adesp. Trag. fr 499.4-5 Kn-Sn
μέγα γὰρ ὄμμα δαιμόνων, οἷς τίνουσ' / ἀμοιβὰς κακῶν. Cf. the Homeric Sun in
Il. III 277: Ἠέλιός θ', ὃς πάντ' ἐφορᾷς καὶ πάντ' ἐπακούεις.
15. πάντα ἰδὼν Διὸς ὀφθαλμὸς καὶ πάντα νοήσας / καί νυ τάδ', αἴ κ'
ἐθέλῃσ', ἐπιδέρκεται, οὐδέ ἑ λήθει / οἵην δὴ καὶ τήνδε δίκην πόλις ἐντὸς
ἐέργει (Evelyn-White’s transl.: “The eye of Zeus, seeing all and
understanding all, beholds these things too, if so he will, and fails not to
mark what sort of justice is this that the city keeps within it”).
16. Archil. fr.177 West ὦ Ζεῦ, πάτερ Ζεῦ, σὸν μὲν οὐρανοῦ κράτος, /
σὺ δ' ἔργ' ἐπ' ἀνθρώπων ὁρᾶις / λεωργὰ καὶ θεμιστά, σοὶ δὲ θηρίων /
ὕβρις τε καὶ δίκη μέλει, Sol. fr. 13.17 West ἀλλὰ Ζεὺς πάντων ἐφορᾷ
τέλος.
Writing gods, writing into the tablets of the mind 57
17. Soph. OC 704-705 ὁ γὰρ αἰὲν ὁρῶν κύκλος / λεύσσει νιν Μορίου
Διὸς, El. 175 Ζεύς, ὃς ἐφορᾷ πάντα καὶ κρατύνει, Ant. 184 Ζεὺς ὁ πάνθ'
ὁρῶν ἀεί, Adesp. Trag. fr. 485 Kn-Sn οὐχ εὕδει Διὸς / ὀφθαλμός, ἐγγὺς δ'
ἐστὶ καίπερ ὢν πρόσω, and see Cook, A. B. Zeus. A Study in Ancient
Religion, 3 voll., Oxford, 1914-1925, I pp. 196 ff.
18. Soph. fr. 12 Radt τὸ χρύσεον δὲ τᾶς Δίκας / δέδορκεν ὄμμα, τὸν δ'
ἄδικον ἀμείβεται, Dionysius TrGF 1, 76 F 5 ὁ τῆς Δίκης ὀφθαλμὸς ὡς δι'
ἡσύχου / λεύσσων προσώπου πάνθ' ὁμῶς ἀεὶ βλέπει, Procl. Hym. 1, 37-38
Ποινῶν δ' ἀπάνευθε φυλάσσοις / πρηΰνων θοὸν ὄμμα Δίκης, ἣ πάντα
δέδορκεν, Orph. Hymn. 62. 1-3: Ὄμμα Δίκης μέλπω πανδερκέος,
ἀγλαομόρφου, / ἣ καὶ Ζηνὸς ἄνακτος ἐπὶ θρόνον ἱερὸν ἵζει / οὐρανόθεν
καθορῶσα βίον θνητῶν πολυφύλων, / τοῖς ἀδίκοις τιμωρὸς ἐπιβρίθουσα
δικαία, / ἐξ ἰσότητος ἀληθείᾳ συνάγουσ' ἀνόμοια, Jul. Aegypt. AP VII
580.2 πάνσκοπον ὄμμα Δίκης. For Dike as a watcher see also Eur. El. 771
and Oed. fr. 555 Kannicht.
19. See Pettazzoni, R., The all-knowing god, London, 1956; and West, M.
L., Hesiod, Works and Days, Oxford, 1978 on Op. 249 ff. and 267.
20. Chantraine, P., Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, Paris,
1968, p. 260.
21. See also Burkert, W., Die orientalisierende Epoche in der griechischen
Religion und Literatur, Heidelberg, 1984, pp. 33-34.
22. The κύρβεις are quoted in Cratinus fr. 300 K-Aapud Plut. Sol.
25.1, where the material is said to be the wood; other sources refer of
stone (Apollodoros apud Suidas’ Lexicon) or brass (Σ ad Aristoph. Ran.
1354); see Hyde, W. W., The Homicide Courts of Ancient Athens, Univ. Penn.
1918, pp. 319-362. For Onians’ view about the connection with the lungs
see below at n. 48.
23. For δελτογράφος φρήν in Aeschylus see below.
24. Birt, Th., Schreibende Gottheiten, in Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische
Altertum, Geschichte und deutsche Literatur und für Pädagogik, XIX, 1907, p.
707 n. 1 speaks for this passage of “christlicher oder biblischer Einfluss”.
See for instance Luc. Evang. X 20 τὰ ὀνόματα ὑμῶν ἐγγέγραπται ἐν τοῖς
οὐρανοῖς (“your name have been written in the sky”).
25. Other reference in West, M. L., The East Face of Helicon: West
Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth, Oxford, 1997, p. 562 n. 36
and Marx, F., Plautus Rudens, Leipzig, 1934, pp. 57-58.
26. ETCSL 2.1.7 134-140 “The young woman [...] sheaves, who held a
stylus of refined silver in her hand, who had placed it on a tablet with
propitious stars and was consulting it, was in fact my sister Nisaba. She
announced to you the holy stars auguring the building of the house”.
27. West, 1997, pp. 561-562; cfr. Kittel, G., Theologisches Wörterbuch
zum Neuen Testament, vol. I, Stuttgart, 1933, p. 618. In reverse, the author
of the Apocalypse seems to have been influenced by Hellenistic and Oriental
book culture (so widespread through the libraries in Alexandria, Antioch
58 Fjodor Montemurro
and Pergamon) in the composition of chapter 5, where we find the
opistographos book and its sigils. But other influences from Biblical texts
are recognizable, as Dan. 7.20 for the chapter 20 quoted in the text (for
which see Lupieri, E., L’Apocalisse di Giovanni, Milano, 1999, p. 322).
28. See Burkert, 1984, pp. 33-38; Kramer, J., Von der Papyrologie zur
Romanistik, Berlin/New York, 2011, pp. 88-89; and see also Suidas α 4076;
and Aristoph. Plut. 323. The oracular responses seem also to have been
recorded on this particular parchment tablet, as we may infer from
Euripides, Pleisthenes fr. 627 Kannicht εἰσὶν γὰρ εἰσὶ διφθέραι
μελεγγραφεῖς / πολλῶν γέμουσαι Λοξίου γηρυμάτων.
29. For the importance on writing in Greek tragedy both on stage and
on plot see Torrance, I., Metapoetry in Euripides, Oxford, 2013, pp. 138 ff.
30. Anyway, it is not always simple to distinguish whether γραφή should
be referred to painting or writing (Sansone, D., Aeschylean Metaphors for
Intellectual Activity, Wiesbaden, 1975, p. 62, and see also n. 47).
31. Lobel, E., P. Oxy. XX 2256, Aeschylus, ‘Various Plays', P. Oxy.,
XX, Oxford, 1952.
32. Fraenkel, E., ‘Vermutungen zum Aetna-Festspiel des Aeschylus',
Eranos, LII, 1954, pp. 61–75.
33. Lloyd Jones, H. J., ‘Zeus in Aeschylus', JHS, LXXVI, 1956, pp. 55-67.
34. For an overall view of the problems related to the attribution of
this fragment see Poli-Palladini, L., ‘Some Reflections on Aeschylus'
Aetnae(ae)', Rheinisches Museum, CXIV, 2001, pp. 287-325; Patrito, P., ‘Sul
«frammento di Dike» (Aesch. frr. 281a-b Radt)', Quaderni del Dipartimento
di filologia A. Rostagni, 2001, pp. 77-95; Cipolla, P., ‘Il frammento di Dike
(Aesch. F 281a R.): uno status quaestionis sui problemi testuali ed
esegetici', Lexis, XXVIII, 2010, pp. 133-154; Totaro, P., ‘La fondazione di
Etna e le reliquiae delle Etnee', in A. Beltrametti (a cura di), La storia sulla
scena. Quello che gli storici antichi non hanno raccontato, Carocci, Roma 2011,
pp. 149-168 and related bibliography thereby quoted. Poli-Palladini, 2001,
pp. 313-314 notes: “First, the fragment is likely to belong to a satyr-play,
as the colloquial conjunction ὁτιή (l. 9) proves (occurrences in satyr-play
and comedy alone, but never in tragedy, nor serious poetry in general or
prose); moreover, Dike featuring as a character is unparalleled in tragedy
(and in drama outside this fragment), where she is rather at work behind
the events, or is invoked. Generally speaking, tragedy admits of gods on
stage, but not of more or less extemporary personifications of less
established anthropomorphic nature. These are rather at home in comedy:
see, e. g., Diallage, Spondai, Wrong and Right, Polemos, Kydoimos,
Theoria, Opora, Penia, Plutos. Yet, the whole apologue of the παῖς μάργος,
whoever he may be, is couched in a fairly plain school-teacher style,
which seems to become an exchange between Dike and the ignorant satyrs
better than two parties in tragedy. Indeed, it is hard to conceive a tragic
situation, however remote, whereby the chorus need to be taught who
Writing gods, writing into the tablets of the mind 59
Dike is and what her tasks are. Satyr-play, with a chorus of rather animal
beings, is a more satisfactory supposition”. On the other hand, we must
observe the presence of two words used only in tragedy, as πρέσβος (l. 15)
and ἀρταμῶν (l. 35); if the Chorus were made of Satyrs, we would find
ludicrous and obscene expression by them, but here they welcome Dike
very respectfully; yet, we wonder what the ἀνήρ and the πόλις (l. 28) deal
with a satyr play (Patrito, 2001, p. 87). At the present date, all these
questions still have no definitive solution.
35. See the parallels quoted above at n. 8 and n. 9.
36. The conception developed is that of Zeus as the special champion
of the rights of Dike. It is a typical Aeschylean idea, many times expressed
in different manners. In Lloyd Jones’s words (1956, p. 59): “At Supp. 143
ff., the chorus appeals to Dike as the daughter of Zeus; cf. Cho. 948 ff.,
where her name is probably etymologised as Διὸςκόρα, Zeus holds the
balance and dispenses injustice to the wicked and holiness to the law-
abiding (403 ff.); the power of Zeus is just (437); Zeus is implored to look
with hostile eye, 'in accordance with justice', upon the violence of the
pursuers (811 ff.). This connection also receives special stress in the Seven
Against Thebes; there we are repeatedly told that Zeus and Dike are on the
side of Eteocles and the defenders”.
37. Schwabl, H., ‘Zeus', RE Pauly-Wissowa, Suppl. XV, 1978, col. 1292.
One of the first picture of a writing Dike appears in a vase in Munich
dated to 480 BC (LIMC, Aa. Vv., Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae
Classicae, vol. II, Zürich 1984, s.v. Athena p. 1014). Unclear is the red-figure
scene on a vase preserved at the British Museum (n. 1873.0820.376)
painted by the Brygos painter: Iris is threatened by Satyrs and while in
her right hand she holds a kerykeion, in her left she has an “elongated
object filled with a dilute glaze wash” (so the official description on the
BM website). This object was interpreted by Birt, 1907, p. 707 as “eine
geschlossene Buchrolle” containing “die Botschaft, die sie von Zeus
bringt”, but we cannot say whether it was a rolled book or not.
38. Birth, 1907, p. 712; Fraenkel, E., ‘The Stars in the Prologue of the
Rudens', Classical Quarterly, XXXVI, 1942, p. 11.
39. As in the case of Nemesis in Callimachus says in Hymn. Dem. 56:
Νέμεσις δὲκα κὰνἐ γράψατο φωνάν, a passage taken back by Nonnus in
Dion. I 481 and Ovid. Epist. 19.19. Kaibel, G., ‘Aratea', Hermes, 29 (1),
1894, p. 84 claimed also for cases in which “Zeus auch nach alter
Auffassung nicht nur die Sünden, sondern auch die Guttaten der
Menschen auf Rechnung setzt”, quoting Nik. Damas. fr. 43 Müller and an
inscription from Argos Ep. Gr. 814 Kaibel; the idea is rightly rejected by
Marx, 1934, p. 58.
40. Cataudella, Q., ‘Tragedie di Eschilo nella Siracusa di Gerone',
Kokalos, X, 1964–5, p. 395; Patrito, 2001, p. 83; West, 1997, pp. 561-562;
Ceccarelli, P., Ancient Greek Letter Writing: a cultural history (600 BC-150
60 Fjodor Montemurro
BC), Oxford, 2013, p. 210: “It can actually be argued that Euripides is
here alluding directly to the Aeschylean passage, pushing to its
paradoxical limits the earlier formulation, felt as sufficiently new to attract
attention”.
41. The supposition that Euripides would have made a parody of Dike
as it is represented in Aeschulys' fragment 281a Radt would be more
realistic if we assume that fr. 506 Kannicht derives from Melannippe
Desmotis. This passage is necessary because if, as we can validly assert,
Melanippe Desmotis has been probably conceived and composed in Souther
Italy during Euripides’ travels (for this idea see Montemurro, F.,
‘Avventure del testo euripideo: il fr. 480 Kannicht della Melanippe Sophè
tra aneddotica e riscrittura'. In Austa, L. (ed.), Frammenti sulla scena.
Studi sul dramma antico frammentario, vol. I, Alessandria, 2017, pp. 119-150
and ‘La Melanippe Desmotis di Euripide: una tragedia di propaganda?'.
In Melis, V. (a c. di), Associazione Culturale Rodopis - Ricerche a Confronto.
Dialoghi di Antichità Classiche e del Vicino Oriente-Bologna-Cagliari 2013,
Zermeghedo (VI), [forthcoming]; and Stewart, E., Greek Tragedy on the
Move: The Birth of a Panhellenic Art Form c. 500–300 BC, Oxford, 2017), it
might have been simpler for Euripides being aware of such a drama like
the Aetnaeae. But this idea would involve so many circumstances that go
beyond our present paper.
42. Moreover, more than a contrast we may claim for a sort of
continuity in this popular and traditional representation of Dike. It is true
that she writes men’s sins in Aeschylus and she is simply next to men in
Euripides, but in both cases Dikes is operating delicately. In fr. 506, 8
Kannicht she is close to men with no intimidation, in line 20 of fr. 281a
Radt she chooses persuasion in a soft way: her intent is not punitive, but
she wants to act a sort of process of education for the παῖς μάργος (if
Ares or Herakles we do not know, see Di Benedetto, V. and Maltomini, F.,
‘Eschilo, P.Oxy. 2256, fr. 9a vv. 31 ss.' Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore
di Pisa. Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, Serie III, 6 (1), 1976, pp. 1-8).
43. For the subject, see the comprehensive study of Carr, D. M. Writing
on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature, Oxford, 2005.
44. As Sansone, 1975, p. 59 remarks: “I think it is not conclusive to
discuss whether the φρένες possess δέλτοι of their own or if the
expression δέλτοι φρενῶν plays for an identification of φρένες as δέλτοι.
The phrase ἐν φρεσὶ γράφου [Aesch. Choeph. 450] seems to support the
identification”.
45. The two lines before (989-990) τοιῶνδε τυγχάνοντας ἐκ πρυμνῆς
φρενὸς / χάριν σέβεσθαι τιμιωτέραν χρεών are corrupted but they contain
a mention of the φρήν that may justify the absence of the term “mind” in
991-992.
46. In Suppl. 944-949 there is a variation of the image: the king of
Argos describes the “democratic” decision of the citizens regarding the
Writing gods, writing into the tablets of the mind 61
daughters of Danaus: τῶνδ' ἐφήλωται τορῶς / γόμφος διαμπάξ, ὡς μένειν
ἀραρότως. / ταῦτ' οὐ πίναξίν ἐστιν ἐγγεγραμμένα /οὐδ' ἐν πτυχαῖς
βίβλων κατεσφραγισμένα, / σαφῆ δ' ἀκούεις ἐξ ἐλευθεροστόμου /
γλώσσης. The decision is hammered home like a bolt and is not hidden
away, because it will not be written down on an inscription or in some
archives, but “plainly spoken forth”, as the scholiast paraphrases the lines.
Sansone, 1975, p. 58 remarks: “In this case, the stress is not on the
importance of impress something indelibly, but on the unchangeableness
of the message, because a proclamation written on tablets or papers is
subject to amendment or alteration, while a spoken plainly one is
steadfast”.
47. In Philebus 38e ff. Socrates explains how the soul is similar to a book:
δοκεῖ μοι τότε ἡμῶν ἡ ψυχὴ βιβλίῳ τινὶ προσεοικέναι. [...] ἡ μνήμη ταῖς
αἰσθήσεσι συμπίπτουσα εἰς ταὐτὸν κἀκεῖνα ἃ περὶ ταῦτ᾽ ἐστὶ τὰ παθήματα
φαίνονταί μοι σχεδὸν οἷον γράφειν ἡμῶν ἐν ταῖς ψυχαῖς τότε λόγους: καὶ ὅταν
μὲν ἀληθῆ γράφῃ τοῦτο τὸ πάθημα, δόξα τε ἀληθὴς καὶ λόγοι ἀπ᾽ αὐτοῦ
συμβαίνουσιν ἀληθεῖς ἐν ἡμῖν γιγνόμενοι: ψευδῆ δ᾽ ὅταν ὁ τοιοῦτος παρ᾽ ἡμῖν
γραμματεὺς γράψῃ, τἀναντία τοῖς ἀληθέσιν ἀπέβη (H. N. Fowler’s transl: “I
think the soul at such a time is like a book. [...] Memory unites with the senses,
and they and the feelings which are connected with them seem to me almost to
write words in our souls; and when the feeling in question writes the truth,
true opinions and true statements are produced in us; but when the writer
within us writes falsehoods, the resulting opinions and statements are the
opposite of true”). Socrates then goes on enriching the metaphor by the
introduction of the figure of another workman in men’s souls, ζωγράφον, ὃς
μετὰ τὸν γραμματιστὴν τῶν λεγομένων εἰκόνας ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ τούτων γράφει, “a
painter who paints in our souls pictures to illustrate the words which the
writer has written”.
48. However, we have no certainty that Theophrastus preserved
Democritus’ original terminology without being influenced by the passage in
Theaethetus. Lastly, it remains not verifiable the link between the supposed
shape of the δέλτοι (recalling a delta) and the interpretation of φρένες as lungs,
instead of the traditional diaphragm (Onians, R. B., Le originidel pensiero europeo,
trad. it., Milano, 1996 [original title: The Origins of European Thought About the
Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate, Cambridge, 1951], p. 52 n.
6, who attempts to explain the δέλτοι φρενῶν as the Δ shape of the lungs).
49. Solmsen, F., ‘The Tablets of Zeus', Classical Quarterly, XXXVIII,
1944, p. 28: “the passage is legal in conception as well in phrasing”.
50. This is done for Dike-fragment by Stella, L. A., Eschilo e la cultura
del suo tempo, Alessandria, 1994, p. 82 and 132 but, as Patrito, 2001, p. 83
remarks, the legal practice of using tablet for a verdict is not attested
before 456 B.C.
51. Solmsen, 1944, p. 30.
52. Solmsen, 1944, p. 29. At p. 28 he had provocatively wondered: “Is
62 Fjodor Montemurro
not the god who writes on his δέλτοι the primary, his δελτογράφος φρήν
the secondary conception? Is not the idea of the god’s δελτογράφος φρήν
more complex than the other, and does not the complex conception
presuppose the separate existence of the elements of which it is made
up?”. This was the old opinion of Daube, B., Zu den Rechtsproblemen in
Aischylos‘ Agamemnon, Zurich and Leipzig, 1939, p. 168, n. 10, who made
reference to the Egyptian “scribe in the Underworld” to justify his theory.
53. Cfr. Henry Matthew short commentary at Jer. 17.1-4: “the sins
which men commit make little impression on their minds, yet every sin is
marked in the book of God; they are all so graven upon the table of the
heart, that they will all be remembered by the conscience. That which is
graven in the heart will become plain in the life; men's actions show the
desires and purposes of their hearts”.
54. Quoted at n. 24.
55. The syntax of the whole sentence sounds complicate so that Porson
conjectured πέμψει’ instead of πέμπειν (see the apparatus in Kannicht, R.,
Euripides, TrGF V, 2 voll., Gottingen, 2004).
56. Moreover, though Melanippe’s ῥῆσις, from which we believe the
fragment is extracted, has rationalistic and philosophical tones, an excessive
attack on Zeus’ reputation would appear out of place, since the father of the
gods is still her great-grandfather (fr. 484 Kannicht). See n. 63.
57. The sins of men are not flying, but disrespectful words, as the
Homeric ἔπεα πτερόεντα do fly up until reaching Nemesis, as Plato, Leg.
717d says: διότι κούφων καὶ πτηνῶν λόγων βαρυτάτη ζημία - πᾶσι γὰρ
ἐπίσκοπος τοῖς περὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα ἐτάχθη Δίκης Νέμεσις ἄγγελος (“for light
and winged words there is a most heavy penalty,—for over all such
matters Nemesis, messenger of Justice, is appointed to keep watch”). The
image is taken up by Matth. Evang. XII 36: “Every idle word that men
shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgement”.
58. Baynes, L., The heavenly book motif in Judeo-Christian apocalypses,
200 BCE – 200 CE, Leiden-Boston, 2011, p. 38.
59. As Lloyd Jones, 1956, p. 65 observes, in Aeschylus the overall
“representation of the gods could not be more patently anthropomorphic.
They have mouths, feet, arms and eyes; they have special means of
transport and use special weapons. Not only are the other gods often
introduced upon the stage, but in the Psychostasia Zeus himself figured as
a character. The gods constantly pursue mortal women, especially Zeus. If
Aeschylus had ever heard of Heraclitus or Xenophanes and their attempts
to inculcate a more refined notion of divinity, there is nothing in his
works to prove it”. This view is alien from a more mature and
rationalistic theology of the end of 5th century and makes Aeschylus more
close to Hesiod.
60. As we have seen, a direct polemic against Aeschylus’ Dike-fragment is
difficult to sustain. Similarly, it is quite difficult to read the Melanippe’s fragment
Writing gods, writing into the tablets of the mind 63
as a direct polemic towards Aesch. Eum. 272, as von Nägelsbach, C. F., Die
nachhomerische Theologie des griechischen Volksglaubens bis auf Alexander, Nürnberg,
1857, p. 447 (“Leugnung jeder übernatürlichen Strafgerechtigkeit der Gotter“)
and Ribbeck, O. Euripides und seine Zeit, Leipzig, 1899, p. 13 did. Rightly van
Looy, 1964, p. 232 asserts: “Euripides was zo doordrongen van de geest van
zijn tijd dat het ons steeds gewaagd voorkomt voor elke idee, of zelf onderdeel
van een idee, een bron aan te geven”.
61. Obviously, the argument against the use of written books in favour of
spoken words that Socrates exploits in Platonic Phaedrus is a different matter.
62. “Next, it seems to me, humans established laws / For punishment,
that justice might rule / Over the tribe of mortals, and wanton injury be
subdued; / And whosoever did wrong was penalized. / Next, as the laws
held [mortals] back from deeds / Of open violence, but still such deeds
(10) / Were done in secret,—then, I think, / Some shrewd man first, a man
in judgment wise, / Found for mortals the fear of gods, / Thereby to
frighten the wicked should they / Even act or speak or scheme in secret.
(15) / Hence it was that he introduced the divine / Telling how the
divinity enjoys endless life, / Hears and sees, and takes thought / And
attends to things, and his nature is divine, / So that everything which
mortals say is heard (20) / And everything done is visible. / Even if you
plan in silence some evil deed/ It will not be hidden from the gods: for
discernment / Lies in them” (trans. R. G. Bury, rev. by J. Garrett)
63. So Cataudella, 1965, p. 384.
64. Collard-Cropp-Lee, 1995, p. 279 suggest a parallel in the scene of
Menander’s Epitrepontes 1084-1099, where it is said “the gods are too
busy to think about the men’s affairs [...] and have installed in every man
a guardian who corresponds to our character”.
65. It is not otiose here to take briefly into account the origin of fr.
480 Kannicht, that stands as an incipitarian variant of the prologue of the
play reported in fr. 481 Kannicht. In fact, we dispose of the three different
starting lines of the play Melanippe Sophè: fr. 481 Kannicht Ζεύς, ὡς
λέλεκται τῆς ἀληθείας ὕπο, belonging to the prologue reported by
Johannes Logothetas, fr. 480 Κannicht Ζεὺς ὅστις ὁ Ζεύς, οὐ γὰρ οἶδα
πλὴν λόγῳ, transmitted by Plutarch and other texts derived from him, and
again a papyrological variant found in P. Oxy. 2455 (the so-called
papyrus of Euripidean hypotheseis). While the variant in P. Oxy. appears
to be a minor aberration, fr. 480 Kannicht would be, according to Plut.
Amator. 13 p. 756 B, the original line of the play, replaced by Euripides
himself after receiving another chorus, because this line had caused a
commotion in the public. The story belongs to a parody or an anecdote
(the anecdotic tradition on tragedians has Lucian and Plutarch as main
representative writers, together with the scholia), but preserves some true
motivations. In particular, the hint of atheism or, at least, of remarked
rationalism in the strong assertion at the beginning of the play in fr. 480
64 Fjodor Montemurro
Kannicht, either if the story is true or if it is false, can be justified and
well understood by considering the skeptical and far-from-god conception
of justice in fr. 506 Kannicht: if justice is on Earth and Zeus is away from
men’s life, a doubt on the effective reality and definition of the Father of
the Gods becomes highly comprehensible. In any event, if the line is
derived by an undeserved collage by Plutarch himself (collecting some
other Euripidean passages, as Troad. 887, HF 1263 ss., Or. 418, as
Wilamowitz supposed), the tone of fr. 506 Kannicht may well have
contributed to the creation of this tale. For the whole question see
Montemurro, 2017.
66. Quoted above respectively at n. 17 and n. 14.
67. See n. 18 above and further references in Harder, A., Euripides’
Kresphontes and Archelaos, Leiden, 1985, p. 256.
68. Hes. Op. 223; Sol. fr. 4.15 West; Eur. fr. 979 Kannicht; Adesp.
Trag. fr. 486 Kn-Sn and 493 Kn-Sn.
69. Biga 2010, pp. 138-145 makes a good analysis of the whole fragment
and stresses the separation between celestial and human worlds. I find however
not relevant her hesitations about ὁράω: she claims the verb would need an
object to complete the sense of the sentence (if you want to see …), and she
timidly suggests a reference to the twins evocated as a proof of the wrong
supposition they were τέρατα (p. 144 and n. 410).
70. See Harder, 1985, pp. 255-256.
71. Ibid., p. 254.
72. Fraenkel, E., ‘The Stars in the Prologue of the Rudens', Classical
Quarterly, XXXVI, 1942, p. 11.
73. Fraenkel, 1942, p. 12.
74. As Hunter, R. ‘Written in the Stars: Poetry and Philosophy in the
Phaenomena of Aratus', Arachnion, 2, 1995, p. 12 has remarkably pointed out:
“if Dike is to be made a star, as in Aratus’ myth, then perhaps Aratus 'read' or
'constructed' Hesiod's 'countless immortal watchers clad in air' as the countless
stars of heaven […] Just as, therefore, Aratus may have constructed Hesiod's
'countless guardians' as the stars, so I think the Dike myth shows us Aratus
reading Hesiod's Golden Age as the origin of the stars”.
75. See Marx, 1934, pp. 52-61; in his commentary the scholar athetizes
line 6-8 for metrical and syntactical oddities; this does not prevent us to
assign to the stars all the features the prologue clearly states: they are
half-star and half-human being, they walk among the people to observe
them (line 10 clearly shows it, though we delete line 6-7), they refer to
Zeus human deeds.
76. Arcturus is a very suitable person to tell us the prequel of the play.
During the night preceding the action, he has produced the storm which
is to bring about the denouement of the plot (Rudensll. 6 ff.).
Writing gods, writing into the tablets of the mind 65

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