Welcome to the new books network. Hello everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network and you're listening to an episode in Grinnell College's Authors and Artists podcast and today I'm very pleased to say we have Jerry Lalonde on the show and he is the author of Athena Etonia, Geography and Meaning of an Ancient Greek War Goddess.
Jerry, welcome to the show. I'm happy to be here. Thank you. Terrific.
As you know, I'm a graduate of Grinnell College. I graduated in 1984 and you were a professor when I was there. I think people would be interested to know a little bit about your background, how you became what you are and how you ended up with Grinnell. Okay.
In order to do that, I need to go back to my youth. I grew up in rural Washington state, a member of a large factory working family and as a child I entertained myself drawing and painting and I had the idea that I would go to college to study art or architecture but I was in a Catholic grade in middle school and the parish priest told us, acolytes, you all take the test to the seminary. It's not an application. Well, it turned out it was.
And I was afraid to say no and so I went off to six years of athletic and spiritual exercise around a liberal education, the large part of which was six years of Latin and four years Greek. And at the end of those six years, I came to a crucial turning point. The decision was whether I would go on to study philosophy and theology and be ordained in the priesthood. And at that point, being 20 years of age, I thought I should determine the direction of my life finally.
Oh, I've got three years of credit to the University of Washington. Being a naive rustic, I thought either you had money parents or the GI bill or you worked way through school. So I was working eight hours a night as a mechanic and riveter at Boeing making the 7472 hours of commitment or commuting for two hours and trying to carry a full load in commercial design. After two years of that, great physical and mental stress.
I decided to take my Greek and Latin credits to the classics department with the idea of teaching high school Latin. Well, one thing led to another after the degree. I was invited to graduate study and given a teaching assistantship and the University of Washington Classic Department got me on an archaeological excavation in Athens. Also, this rustic who had never been east of Spokane flew to Athens and the next day I was directing an excavation in the shadow of the Acropolis.
Wow. So I was able to add to mainly philological education art and art and art and archaeology. And I was also established in Athens with the American School of Classical Studies and the great libraries, museums and archaeological sites, which together with my philology became the focus of my research and teaching for my career. And my first appointment was at Grinnell College, at excellent colleagues, students and under their auspices and that of the American School.
I went into the career of research and teaching in classical studies. What year did you arrive at Grinnell? 1969. It was quite a very interesting year.
Rather chaotic. The great activism about the Vietnamese War. I claim that I learned more about my colleagues in that year than I could have learned in 10 normal years. I think that's probably right.
Yes, you see people's colors in crisis situations. Yeah, one of the mantra of that time was letting it all hang out. Yes, I can imagine what Grinnell was like in nineteen to do in the college closed briefly. Yes, there was no graduation that closed in the spring after the Cambodian invasion of the Kent State Killian.
Wow, that must have been quite an introduction to college teaching. I know this for a fact because when I was at Grinnell in the 80s, we did not let it all hang out. We studied a lot. So can you continue by telling us why you wrote this book, Athena, Etonia?
Yes, I have to talk about the progression of this book. Like most of my large research projects started with very small beginning. I was the editor of the Horace inscriptions. These are inscriptions that identified or set the boundaries of property in ancient Athens.
And one of these stone fragmentary inscriptions was the identifying inscription for a sanctuary of Etonia. So I became curious about this unusual by name, the word I use for the second name of God's. And then I found that there were three other fragmentary inscriptions, two inventories of the treasuries of the other gods, and also a sacrificial calendar that mentioned sacrifice to Athena Etonia. So I thought I would write an article on this unusual, this minor Athenian cult.
And that was soon overridden by the fact that I found that this cult of Athena Etonia was prominent in three other places in Greek antiquity, thessalie in the north of Greece, the OSHA, central Greece, and on the remote island of Arrogos in the Cyclades. Well, that led to the decision to write a comprehensive book about the cult of Athena Etonia, which had been touched on in articles and in small addition to books. And so what started out as a small curiosity turned into a major project, and along the way I became interested very much in this cult. And the title of the book is indicative of the progress of that interest, geography, the question of the origin of the cult, where did it start, and how was it propagated within large areas like thessalie Biosha, or from one area of Greece to another.
And also the meaning, that is the book pays a lot of attention to the attributes of Athena Etonia, what was her major character? And calling her an ancient Greek war goddess gives away what my conclusion was about that, but there was much controversy along the way about her character. So just a frame our discussion a little bit for the listeners. What period of time are we talking about here from the origins to the demise of the cult?
I contend that the cult originated in Thessalie, and that's the earliest evidence of the cult in the sanctuary that was excavated at Felia in Thessalie. Artifacts of this cult go back at least to the geometric period and perhaps before that even to my city in time. And the cult is manifested in these four places as late as the Roman imperial age. So it covers approximately 1000 BC to its latest the second century after Christ.
And I don't want to misspeak here, but this is a local cult or is it Panhellenic? Or what can we say about its geographic boundaries? Yes, it's only known in those four places that I mentioned. This is not to say that the cult did not exist in any number of other ancient Greek states.
We have to understand that there was no nation state of Greece as a whole until the independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. So Greece really was a huge diaspora of over 100 sovereign independent Polish city states. And the relation of religion that you define a Greek as someone who worshiped the gods, the Greeks and spoke the Greek language. But ancient Greek religion is very interesting being polytheistic.
There was no such thing as the separation of church and state. The politics, government and religion were deeply enmeshed with one another. There was also no single scripture theology or priestly hierarchy. Greek religion was a multitude of independent cults, often of the same gods in various places.
A multitude of sanctuaries for those cults and a multitude of priests and priestess who oversaw the operation of those cults and sanctuaries. And the gods had multiple attributes, like most religions. Greek religion was an exercise in rituals in which people tried to establish some relationship with supposed supernatures through the rituals of prayer, sacrifice, and photo offerings by which they established an affiliation that would give them some reciprocity about human problems of any sort that were in the attributes or the purview of those, that multitude of gods, goddesses and cults. I think maybe the listener, I don't want to get this wrong, but I read the Iliad a couple of years ago and there's a ritual I think it is called a hecatil.
Does that make any sense to you? I was a hecatilm. It's a mysterious word. Literally it means a hundred oxen and it would be a huge sacrifice.
We don't know of an individual sacrifice that resulted in the killing and roasting of a hundred. The only reason I mentioned it is that I thought the listeners might be from because it's mentioned many times. It happens a lot. But the Iliad is the result of long oral tradition and oral tradition is subject to all kinds of fantasy, mythology, exaggeration.
This actually gets me to write where I want to go. Well, I want to go in two directions. One is that as a medievalist myself, not a classicist, would it be fair to say that many of the sentences that you just uttered about this particular cult would be considered controversial among your colleagues? I know that in the medieval case if you say this was the case, you have five people who say that it wasn't.
I don't think they would argue with the general statements that I made about re-religion. No, I was thinking more about the particular time boundaries and geographies and this other yes. Also, it was a warrior cult. This is somewhat political.
That is that becomes political in some time and places that I deal with about the character. Yeah, the thing I'm trying to get at here is the degree to which there is a lot we do not know because of the fragmentary nature of the sources. So maybe we can talk about the sources a little bit. What are the main sources for the study?
The main sources are epigraphy, that is inscriptions, literary sources from antiquity from various times. So when you say epigraphy, you mean things scratched under walls and things like this? Anything edge scratched, even painted onto a two-dimensional surface. And so then literary artifacts, none of which come down to us in the original.
They've all essentially been copied and recopied and redacted and everything else imaginable to them. Yeah, they are the unresolved of a long history of transmission through the centuries and centiquity. There are some occasions where inscriptions contain fragments that also appear in literature, the literary sources. And then is there pneumismatics involved?
I just like that one of the ones that is a pneumismatics involved, especially about religion in the state because coinage was an expression of religious devotion, but it was also a manifestation of the power and the position of government. It often involved a degree of propaganda. So coins are an important source for ancient government and also for religion. There's also all kinds of iconography in the form of culture, those painting, many types of artifacts.
So each of these sources is a kind of world of interpretation in and of itself. In and of their not plain spoken, they don't just tell you something. No, it's a great kind of detective work in which you look at all the different types of evidence and see where they agree or disagree with one another and then you develop the narrative from that. Yeah, insofar as you can even construct a narrative with any confidence.
Yes, this book is really not a continuous narrative, but it's also not for completely independent works about the time and place where this cult is manifested. As I say in the introduction, there is a great opportunity for me as the author and also for the readers to make comparisons of the evidence from one place to another, the arguments about the cult in one place or one time from one to another. So one of the things that I'm calling on my knowledge as a medievalist is that a different scholar could look at these same sources and reach somewhat different conclusions. Is that true?
Yes, it is. Although your interpretation is definitely correct. Often the conclusions are tentative or hypothetical, but the problem with often with scholarship is that people who they want to be definite and therefore they use, they pass off the hypothetical and the speculative as being fact. And the problem with that is that then other propositions get based on those regulations.
Yeah, this is the problem of supposition being built on supposition. Right. There are several places in the book where I deal with these controversies. And I do not always end up with a definitive conclusion of my own.
In the first chapter of this book, for example, about the origin of the cult in Thessaly. In the 19th and early 20th century, most of the scholarship was directed to Eastern Thessaly in the area of Akhia theotis, which is near the Gulf of Pegasi in the Sea port entry into Thessaly. We have there two sources. One Homer talks about the city Eton in dealing with the catalog of ships in the Iliad.
Eton is one of the cities that's the subject of Protesaleos. Also, Stravo, the geographer from August time, mentions the city Etonos and the shrine of Etonia near it with considerable geographical reference points. Well, scholars, archaeologists, and photographers spent a great deal of time in that part of Thessaly, and they did not find Eton or the shrine of the Etonia. But in the 1960s, and there was some hint that in Western Thessaly, there might be some evidence of the cult of the Etonia.
Chance finds around this village, the modern village of Iliad began to turn up artifacts that the local people began to sell on the market. Finally, the three archaeological service intervened, and the Metrios Theocargus headed an excavation of that, and that is the only sanctuary of Etonia that is absolutely verified, and the artifacts go back to the geometric period. But this find created so much interest that they developed the idea that Eton and Etonos were not in Eastern Thessaly, as Homer and Stravo said, but they were this place with the village of Iliad. Well, that has developed all kinds of, I mean, so many people have hatched a, you know, grasp that argument, saying, well, there was an Eton or an Etonos in both places, but they do not base the fact that Homer's Eton, the mother of flocks, is only one of five places that are mentioned in the command of Protestaleus in the catalogue of ships of Homer's Iliad.
The other four places are well known in later Greek history, and they are all in the area of Eastern Eastern. But just so the listeners understand, we don't know where this place was, I mean, it does not survive as far as we know, there's no revenue of this place. No, you believe with those who now believe that Felia, yeah, even though there was no city there, actually, it was a religious center that was apparently what they call an M-50 only. That is a an area of devotion for numerous villages and towns that were in the area, but it was independent of all of them.
It was not under the supervision of a particular city. So this was probably a place name, probably. Yes, it was. And I agree with Martin Nielsen.
His idea is that Athena Etonia was a merger of the Olympian goddess Athena with a local heroine or goddess who had a cult in the place, Eton or Etonon, and she was the maiden of Eton or Etonos, hence the name Etonia. And at some point, she became combined with Athena in the cult of Athena Etonia. So one of the things that you argue in the book is that this is in fact a war goddess. Athena is the goddess of lots of things, at least, you know, to the general public.
Like weaving, I think, isn't it? The thing with the goddess of weaving? Yes, all kinds of hand. I don't really associate weaving with the martial arts, but whatever.
No, but like many Greek gods, Athena, if we take her out the whole of all of the cults of Athena, she has many attributes, but martial power is one of the most prominent. And that, at least in the theory of Nielsen, goes back, cleared to the Minoans and Mycenaean, she was some kind of palace god. And when she was adopted by the more more like Mycenaean, she became a military deity. Some of this probably is rooted in the fact that her father Zeus, King God's, and that she was born from the head of her father, even though Zeus supposedly swallowed wisdom and mantis.
This also accounts for an attribute of Athena as the god of wisdom. Yeah, yeah. But you're right, there are all kinds of other lesser attributes, handiwork, fertility. Yeah, the weaving is the one that sticks in my mind, and I don't know why, because it just seems so odd to me that you would have a goddess of weaving.
But what do I know? There's probably a saint of weaving. Well, even in Apollonius' epic about Jason and the Argonauts, Athena is, he makes Athena the guardian of Jason, Athena, Etrania, because he is from Bess Lee. But Apollonius adds some of these non-military attributes to that, Athena Etrania.
And one of them is weaving. She weaves the Scarlet robe that is given to Jason. She is also the architect of the shipbuilding of the Argonaut. So, well, we could ask a more general question from a kind of Christian perspective, if that's not silly.
No, it's not so. We have a hellfire in Brimstone Catholic. Yeah. The interest in ancient Greek religion was it's great difference from— Yes, well, this is a question I was going to ask.
So, I was with a Lutheran, and according to Lutherans, God is the God of love, and that's it. There's no more to say. We don't have a God of war in the Christian religion. Why was it that they had a goddess of war?
No. I think the answer is the great role of warfare in the history of Greece. Again, we go back to what it meant to be a Greek and what was Greek. Over a hundred independent sovereign city-states scattered around the literal of the Mediterranean.
Most of the wars of the Greeks were with one another, rather than against non-Greek forces. So, they could use the same God or goddesses against one another. But there was no such thing as a long-term and permanent intrinsic hostility among them. But the deities retained the attributes, even in peacetime.
It becomes a little bit like Homeric Avidads. I mean, swift-footed killings. Yeah. Yeah.
Still swift-footed even when he's sleeping. Yeah. Well, I think we can say as a generality that warfare was important for the identity of these people. Yes, it was.
It was because there was a constant rivalry, and sometimes that rivalry led to hostility. But it was a rivalry expressed in all kinds of other ways, economically, and politically. The Olympic Games are really an episode in Greeks coming together from all over the Greek world to compete with one another. And the bragging rights that resulted from victory in those games was very much like the celebration of victory in warfare.
Yeah, that's right. That's harmful. Their warfare with one another among the Greeks was somewhat different from the warfare with non-Greek peoples at the Alums. That is, HD of Kiddo wrote one of the best compandians of ancient Greek culture.
Used to describe the battle of two phalanxes of Greek heavy-arm troops as being like a rugby scrum. They came together, there were some casualties, but at the end they separated and went home. But the attitude of the Greeks about Persians in the Persian war was more like the chronic hostility and modern time between Greece and the Turks. And that is never going to end as long as those side-by-side with one another.
Yeah, I see what you mean. One of the things that occurred to me while I was looking at the book was that the story is not done. People are still digging around and uncovering fragments and new coins and different things in manuscript repositories. So there's more news to come as just information is uncovered, correct?
Yes, many of these controversies, for example, about where Etonos really was in Thessaly. Thessaly is a huge area and a great part of it has not been studied or excavated. So there's a great opportunity for more, for evidence that may solve some of these problems. How do you, this is a kind of a side question, but I'm thinking of it from the point of, I've been on an archaeological dig myself and I loved it.
I say sorry and it was just the most fascinating thing I've ever done. How does one get the opportunity to go dig around there? I mean, I suppose I have to go to school for 10 years, but not really. I mean, I never had any archaeological experience and when I went to the ancient Agora, I was assigned a great group of workmen, but of course it was just excavation of the last road that ran through the area of the Agora.
But I turned out to have the best quality that archaeologists can have and that is luck. You just got me to do this section of this road, a beautiful shrine, triangular shrine with a lovely inscription identifying it. And then the first day of the second summer, I found the richest tomb ever found in Athens. Yeah, that is luck.
Yeah. But the procedure is, I mean, you have to go through usually one of the academies in Greece. Most of them are administrative and financed by countries, the British school, the German school, French school, American School of Classical Studies is a private corporation. But if you want to an archaeological excavation, you have to apply it, apply for it through one of those school.
And the opportunities are quite limited and the criteria for permits are very strict. I mean, I'm glad to mention the excavation is very expensive. Yeah, I imagine. I was going to say, I'm glad that you mentioned the international character of this because really you're operating in a scholarly tradition that goes back at least hundreds, if not thousands of years, that involves people from really all over the world.
And one of the things that I know having read your book is the number of languages involved. How many ancient languages and how many modern languages did you access to write this book? Of course, Greek and Latin. And in some cases, the dialects of Greek.
I was going to say there's not just one kind of Greek. No, there are numerous dialects of ancient Greek and you have to be able to read them. There's different orthography and phonology, but also some of them are chronologically far afield. I mean, there are places in this book where I had to deal at least in a short range with linear B, the ancient mysevians.
But then you have to deal with modern scholarship. It is not like the field of medicine or lawyers where you have people who translate things for and the history of scholarship of classical scholarship outside of the German. And the German's really begins with the Germans. Most everything scholarly does begin with the Germans.
That's what I discovered. It's a break off from the logical and scriptural studies. So you have to be able to read German and French and Italian. And if you're dealing with archaeology or history in Greece, modern Greek, that's probably my strongest language because I spend a lot of time there.
But occasionally I have to sally into Spanish. And if you can read German Dutch is possible. It's possible for you. No, I even one of my students went to me from the university of Cincinnati saying, Jerry, I saw your name and some credit given to you in a work, a Dutch work on ancient toilets.
Well, this reminds me of one of my favorite anecdotes from graduate school. A graduate student is in a seminar with his professor and his professor says, I want you to read this book and report back on it next week. Hands in the book. The book is in Hungarian and the graduate student says, I don't read Hungarian.
And the professor says, have you tried?