Honest to Zeus
Christopher Gill
The Justice of Zeus Hugh Lloyd-Jones (University of California Press £4.05) What kind of god was Zeus for the Greeks? Was he an Olympian equivalent of a local chieftain, primarily concerned with his honour and privileges, but also the figure who could be invoked, because of his authority, in cases of perjured oaths, rejected suppliants and broken agreements? Or was he a cosmic moral force, a god who embodied justice, who of his own will punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous? Most recent scholars have thought that the Greeks adapted their ideas about Zeus as they developed. The Zeus of the Iliad was very much the divine chieftain, jealous of his own power, though personally responsive to certain appeals from below for help and intervention.The poet of the Odyssey, and later Hesiod, Solon and Aeschylus, evolved a Zeus who was more actively engaged in punishing injustice in the human world, and who was nearer to being a principle of divine justice. E. R. Dodds, Lloyd-Jones's predecessor at Oxford, in his own Sather Classical Lectures at Berkeley, The Greeks and the Irrational, argued that this change in the conception of Zeus corresponded to a sharpening of moral perception, the transition from a " shame-culture," in which ethics are imposed externally by social pressures, to a " guilt-culture," in which the individual, internalising his morality, finds its source in the idea of a god of implacable justice. Other Greek writers, like Xenophanes and Plato, instead of adapting traditional gods to increased moral requirements, rejected the Homeric gods in favour of their own ethical ideals. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Professor of Greek at Oxford, in this published version of his Sather lectures, takes a different line. In his view, Greek notions of Zeus remained very much the same throughout the Classical period. From Homer to Euripides, Zeus was the guardian of moral order, concerned to punish injustice wherever it occurred. Lloyd-Jones blames, for current misunderstanding of this point, the recent tendency to study only the moral vocabulary of the Greeks. We should look at the plot of a literary work, and at the myths which any one plot presupposes. If we do this, we can see how, in the Iliad for instance, both within the story presented and in the mythical framework assumed, Zeus acts against the criminal aggressor, whether this is Agamemnon or Paris, on behalf of the person suffering injustice. The reason why Zeus's operations are sometimes unobvious is that he is punishing the second or third generation for the evils of the first; thus Sophocles's Oedipus (a contemporary audience would realise) is being punished, not for anything he has done, but because of his father's homosexual rape of the beautiful Chrysip pus. Later writers who were apparently sceptics or innovators, like Protagoras and Thucydides, can be shown to be operating with traditional ethical-religious assumptions translated into sophistic or historical terms. There is methodological virtue in a scholar's stressing the continuity within a single culture; just as there is in his reminder that any one depiction of Zeus constituted, for the Greeks, a particular artistic act in a broad received context and not necessarily (as it is for us) a major statement of contemporary views. Lloyd-Jones is right to point out that Dodds's transition from shame to guilt culture is implausibly rapid; and that Dodds generalises from a limited and not unambiguous selection of remaining texts. But his kind of position has corresponding defects. Any argument which depends on supplying a myth or moral framework which the Greeks "must have" recognised behind an existing story is basically conjecture: More seriously, in Lloyd-Jones's discussion of what is in the text there is a striking lack of discrimination, of finesse. One looks in vain for a section in which the various
elements of the Greek notion of justice are separated out. It would not be inconsistent with Lloyd-Jones's distrust of purely lexicographical studies (or with his disbelief in development) for him to show in particular passages, with reference to the surrounding narrative, what kind of 'justice ' is meant; but it is only in discussion of the Iliad, and there to a limited extent, that this is done. Consequently, there is a certain lack of bite in the argumentation, and some over-statement in the setting-up of opposed positions.
Judged as a limited study, a reasoned presentation of references to Zeus with ethical overtones, this work is valuable to all those concerned with that subject But considered more broadly (as it invites us to consider it) as an attempt to rewrite our history of the relations between Greek ethics and mythology, this book is unlikely to replace, even if it in some respects supplements, current thinking.
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