IV. Regimes of Historicity and Oracular Logic: How To Re-Found A Colonial City?

It is a common opinion that Greek concepts of time are deeply marked by the image of the circle, that they refer to a fundamentally cyclical temporality. Historians of “Greek thought,” while applying this traditional idea for themselves, also introduced a whole series of nuances concerning its development. The idea of cyclical time, it is said, is based on the deified function of Memory which permits mortal man to come into contact with the divine, and its origins would be religious, attached to the belief that ritual funeral honors accorded to Lethe and to Mnemosyne allow one to escape the cycle of Becoming, even the cycle of (re-)birth. But in this train of thought the gradual abandonment of heroic values, in a “lyrical” consciousness more and more sharply aware of the vicissitudes of the life of the individual, would have had a twofold effect. On the one hand, it leads to a concept where the representation of linear time, subject to the unpredictable hazards of an existence which is by definition ephemeral, replaces human time modeled on cosmic time, in the succession of generations. And on the other hand, “sectarian” movements following Pythagoras and Orpheus tried to offer the soul, detached from the body, the mnemonic means necessary to leave the supposed cycle of births through anámnēsis, and by this abandonment of human time to attain the immortality of the gods. [1] But to make followers of Pythagoras and Orpheus into the precursors of Plato in Phaedrus or Timaeus is to make philosophers of these simple advocates of a more balanced life style; it is to make metaphysicians of time from those who practiced a certain way of life with the hope of a more pleasant post mortem existence (to which we shall return in the next chapter). And it especially ignores that accounts attributing a cyclical concept of time to the first Greek “thinkers” are from much later, and that they are easily recognized as influenced by neo-Platonic, even Christian, readings of the classical texts.

Khrónos agéraos, then, ageless Time as a mythical figure, like the serpent curled on itself, or like the Ocean river whose circular currents wind around the inhabited earth? In the classical era, only Critias, the sophist and sometime author of tragedies, introduces the figure of a “tireless time” which progresses by generating itself in a continuous and eternal flux. But its progress is not circular, as the expression perì-phoitâi (a tmesis) might lead one to conclude; it follows the vault of the sky, which obviously is only semi-spherical! These lines, pronounced by the chorus of initiates into the Eleusinian Mysteries in a fragment of a tragedy which is also attributed to Euripides, may well have been intended as parody. [2] Empedokles cited as witness to the belief in a cycle of reincarnations and the expiatory journey of the soul? Only if one reads the famous poetic fragment on the restless wanderings of “demons,” separated from the gods and through a series of mortal forms, in terms of a representation of the “cycle of ages;” there is actually nothing circular about this journey lasting three times ten thousand seasons, presented as taking place simply “through time” (dià khrónon). [3] The Iliadic reflections of Glaukos the Lycian, confronting Diomedes the Greek who has just learned at his own expense that a mortal should not attack a deity, then, as Homeric testimony recalling an ancient “cyclical” concept of the life of men, carried along in a “circular becoming?” Only if one interprets the comparison of the hazards of mortal lives with the deciduous nature of leaves, falling in autumn to be born again in spring, in terms of cycle, and not in terms of the simple alternation that occurs, for example, in Herodotus’ famous beginning reflections on the destinies of man’s cities: “those which formerly (pálai) were great have become small, most of them, and those which in my time (ep’ eméo) were great, once were small.” In a less well-known passage, Herodotus does indeed use the term kúklos to describe the alternations of good fortune, but the remark is placed in the mouth of Croesus confronting Cyrus, imperialist king of the Persians, and the circle image applies only to sudden reversals in human affairs. [4]

For that matter, even in those rare classical texts which seem to mention an eschatological perspective, neither the itinerary of the soul nor the space and time in which the journey takes place is circular.

Often cited is the promise made to Theron, the tyrant of Agrigentum, in Pindar Olympian 2: after a three-part stay divided between the world of mortals and the world below, the soul of the just man will accede to the final goal, represented by the Isles of the Blessed. In its alternation, this promise seems to recall the destiny assigned to Persephone, who divides her time between Hades and Olympus, near her mother Demeter; but the difference is that if the immortal residence of the goddess Kore is indeed organized according to the (cyclical) rhythm of the year, the journey of the soul detached from the mortal body ends, finally and not circularly, in a dwelling ruled by Kronos and his golden age. [5] Similarly, on one of the so-called “Orphic-Dionysiac” lamellae found on a skeleton in Magna Graecia and whose text will be introduced in the next chapter, the soul who pronounces the words written on the lamella sees the demise of his mortal shell as a passage toward an existence henceforth shared with the immortals, near Persephone. While a “circle” (kúklos) does indeed appear in the performative text written in this veritable passport for the great beyond, it designates the cycle of griefs and sorrows from which the soul has just been liberated, by death. [6]

This tension, even this contradiction, between the feeling of the irreversible fluidity of mortal time on the one hand and the permanence attributed to the world of the gods in this polytheistic system on the other, is far from being the product of any new “lyrical” consciousness: it marks the entire development of Greek culture. In their discursive representations, as well as in their social and institutional practices, Greek efforts to escape the unpredictable inconstancy of both the individual temporality of men and the collective temporality of cities were both numerous and varied. Rather than clinging to the over-interpreted meaning of a few words and metaphors, one of the best ways to grasp these indigenous representations and configurations of time as it relates to the spaces put forward by them is simply to pay careful attention to the use of verb tenses. The Greek narrative text, readily conceived not only as a crafted artisanal object but much more specifically as a weaving, is articulated through a temporal-spatial fabric which obviously is constructed by verb tenses and the localization of the actions referred to. Just like the lyric poem called húmnos, a name whose etymology recalls the verb huphaínein, “to weave,” the epigraphic text can assume a narrative form fashioned and structured by the same sort of spatial-temporal texture. [7]

This interweaving of spatial-temporal references, often combined with enunciative indices, is all the more interesting to unravel when the temporal and discursive configuration is displayed in a narrative concerning the founding of the city which produced it. Through an epigraphic text officially consecrated in a shrine, the community of citizens tries to give itself a memorial representation of its past, while also affirming this past institutionally (even ritually) in the city’s present, in order to orient its future. Through the dialectic of idem and ipse, it is thus a question of reformulating and reaffirming a temporal (but also spatial) community identity. Even a cultural identity based on a memory, if one allows that “culture is not something defined once and for all, nor is it a “real” practico-symbolic entity which develops based on its own “laws,” but rather something which results from interaction and agreement among communicating subjects.” [8] The temporal (and spatial) architecture constructed by means of discourse undoubtedly offers an identity-related political and social antidote to any possible feeling of the irremediable flight of human time with all its hazards, far better than could any supposed circular and cyclical image.

The inscription called the Stele dei Fondatori or Oath of the Founders was consecrated at the beginning of the fourth century in the great shrine of Apollo which the inscription itself calls Pythian (line 8), and was discovered in the 1920s on the site of Cyrene, the flourishing Greek colony in Libya. The stele had been re-used during the imperial era for constructing terraces for the southern basin of the frigidarium of the Lesser Baths, or Baths of Trajan. [9] This epigraphic text engraved on marble presents three main points of interest to anyone interested in Greek concepts of time and space. In a first section, the inscription presents the text of a popular decree on rights of citizenship. These provisions, sanctioned by a decision of the assembly of citizens in the fourth century and consecrated in the shrine of Apollo Pythios, refer to the founding decree of the city of Cyrene, in a narrative version which recalls that of Herodotus a century earlier. In a second section, the epigraphic text relates and describes the circumstances which long ago led the inhabitants of Thera-Santorini to send a colonizing expedition to the coast of Libya. Finally, at the end of this narrative and descriptive section, the text evokes the ritual which consecrated the solemn oath taken at the colonists’ departure. Alongside the modes of narration of a founding event and the tension established in the two sections between the legendary past and the political present, there is also the combining of the performative temporality of the oath that was sworn and the constituent time of the ritual act which accompanied it.

In this respect, the more specifically linguistic perspective adopted here, in a reading once again inspired by discourse analysis (as regards the enunciative aspect), requires a brief reminder of the distinctions made in the introductory chapter. From the point of view of the spatial-temporal putting-into-discourse of a basically narrative text, we must remember that the empirical time and space of the text’s enunciation, that is to say the extra-discursive spatial-temporal circumstances of its production, must be distinguished from the intra-discursive time and space of the enunciation as it often manifests itself in the text.

In the particular case of the Cyrene inscription, the effective time and space of the ritual (the political and religious consecration of the epigraphic text in a shrine) are indeed different from the time and space of the enunciation as they may appear in the text, especially through the enunciative indices of the hic et nunc (in the description of the popular decision in the assembly); they are also different from the time and space of the narrative (long ago, between Delphi, Thera, and Cyrene). And from the intra-discursive point of view of the utterance of the narrative, the tempo of the narration with its accelerations, its flashbacks, its projections into the future, and the spatial shifting which flows from that obviously does not accord with the linear time (erzählte Zeit) that may be reconstructed by reconstituting the chronology and thus the sequencing of the argumentation or of the narration. That means that the rhythm of the Erzählzeit of the inscription with the astonishing alteration of verb tenses in a narration which goes back from the present to the past is very different from the enunciated and narrated time, leading from preparations for the colonial expedition under the aegis of the oracle at Delphi to the consecration of the stele in the sanctuary of Apollo Pythios in Cyrene. [10]

Reading of the temporal framework of the epigraphic document and its putting-into-discourse will thus follow two divergent lines. First, from the internal point of view of the intra-discursive, the reading of indices of temporality and spatiality given especially by the use of verb tenses will lead from the time and space of the “uttered enunciation” (“énonciation énoncée”), to that of the narration itself, and then lead to a reconstruction of narrated time in its more or less linear chronology of succession. Then, in terms of pragmatics, it will be possible to pose the question of the relationship between, on the one hand, the temporality and spatiality of the enunciation inscribed in the text, and on the other, the (extra-discursive) exterior time and space of the document’s production and its circumstances. In the confrontation with other versions of this same narrative and religious relationship of the community with its founding past and its civic memory, a comparison which is not external, but rather internal to Greek culture, will allow us to grasp some of the identity-related issues of a very polymorphic poietics of history.

From the point of view of empirical history which always goes hand-in-hand with archeology, we should point out that scholars have tried to make the date of production of the Founder’s Oath text coincide with the historical moment of the Greek colony’s founding in Libya. Indeed, archeologists and historians have agreed to take seriously the latest date of foundation proposed by ancient chronographers; by reference to our own system of historic chronology, the colonization of Cyrene dates to 632 before the supposed moment of that other founding event, the birth of Christ, which contributed to giving Western chronology its strange and irrational double orientation. As for whether the text of the oath goes back to that date, the modern question of authenticity seems not to have much worried the ancients. [11] This difference in perspective constitutes one of the points of this reading.

From a concrete point of view, we note that the text presented by the marble stele is engraved in carefully traced letters; they are underlined in the famous scarlet paint which allowed the Greeks, in one of the etymological games they liked so well, to relate the origin of “scribe” (phoinikastás) and that of purple letters (phoinikḗïa grámmata) to Phoenicia and its alphabet! [12] In addition, the arrangement of the text graphically distinguishes the two sections of which it is composed. Introduced by a separate line bearing the title “Gods. To good Fortune,” the text of the fourth-century decree is cleanly separated from the somewhat longer text related to the founding act. This second section is also introduced and distinguished by a heading which labels it as the “Oath of the Founders”: from that comes the modern (and misleading…) name for the inscription.

Here is the translation of the epigraphic text, both of its sections marked by a specific heading: Founder’s Oath

The decree whose text is consecrated on the stele displayed in the shrine of Apollo Pythios in Cyrene concerns a decision for isopolity; that is to say it foresees giving to inhabitants coming from Thera, the city of the semi-legendary founders of the Greek colony in Libya, the citizenship that their ancestors enjoyed. [13] The wording of the decree approved by the people’s assembly is situated exactly in the center of the text (on line 11 of the 22 lines of this first part!). Dedókhthai tôi dámōi: the “popular” decision is presented in the traditional wording, but in a form of the perfect which definitively establishes its validity in the present.

The reader is led to this temporal core of the decree, which marks its content with the seal of permanence, through two embedded (and oral!) voices: the voice of Damis son of Bathykles, probably the próxenos who intervened before the assembly to formulate the adopted isopolitical proposal; and the voice of Kleudamas, the son of Euthykles, probably the spokesman for the Therans claiming this right of citizenship in Cyrene. The first voice, that of the intermediary, is situated by a form of the aorist (êipe, line 1) at the moment of the assembly; the second, collective voice manifests itself in a present (légonti, line 1) expressing in its duration the demands of the Therans, taken up before the assembly by the voice of Damis. Expressed in two oral speeches, one past and the other present, the demand itself is formulated in the infinitive, one of those infinitives with an imperative value which we shall also find in the wording of the decree itself; citizenship must be restored (apodómen, line 4) to the Therans. Under this infinitive form which makes of it both a requirement and a speech reported in indirect discourse, the “actual” proposal of the Theran people is situated temporally in tension between future and past. First the future: through the intermediary of a final proposal, the granting of citizenship aims to insure the prosperity of the pólis and the happiness of the Cyrenean people (dâmos, line 2); [14] then by reference to the past: they claim the tradition of the fathers (katà tà pátria, line 5), a memorial tradition which goes back to the very moment of the colonial city’s founding. With verbs in the aorist, the reference to the act of foundation of Cyrene takes a narrative phrasing: this is the tradition established by those who founded Cyrene from Thera and by those who remained in Santorini—in accordance with the privilege given by Apollo to Battos and to “the Therans who founded (toîs katoikíxasi, line 8) Cyrene,” the text reiterates.

We shall of course come back to the celebrated figure of the founding hero of Cyrene and to the oracles who directed the process of foundation from Delphi. For the moment, we will limit ourselves to three remarks, all intra-discursive. First of all, from the point of view of the enunciative modalization of the utterance, we notice that the aorist participle used to designate the act of foundation as a completed act places it either in the perspective of the decree’s speaker, or that of the utterance, and not in that of a subsequent intervention by Apollo continuing to protect the founders. Also, the good fortune (eutukhḗn, line 8) promised by Apollo merely anticipates the prosperity (eutukhêi, line 4) which should result from the Cyreneans giving citizenship to people coming from Thera. This relationship, woven by the promise of a prosperous life between future and past, echoes both the decision made by the assembly and the title of the text which publishes its content: the utterance of the decision and the title of the stele are both placed under the sign of Good Fortune—Túkha agathà (line 1) taken up again by agathâi túkhai (in the dative, line 11), in a chiasmus! Finally, the double use of the technical verb katoikízein to designate the act of foundation reinforces the historical character conferred on it by the final reference to the order (epítaxin, line 10; and not the oracle!) given by Apollo concerning the sending of the colonial expedition (apoikían, line 10), in the repetition of the spatial relationship between Thera and Cyrene. [15]

Through the regressive temporality of the uttered enunciation, we thus go back to the founding event: the order given by Apollo Archēgétēs. The word of the “chief founder” is thus situated at the beginning of the chronology of the recounted or enunciated time. Despite an epinician by Pindar (to which we shall return), and if we are to believe the text of the oath itself (line 27), this epiclesis is traditionally less that of the Apollo of Delphi and more that commonly attributed to Battos, venerated in Cyrene as founding hero! [16]

Just after the narrative reference to the act of foundation come the clauses of the decree which finally resulted from the order issued by Apollo, the “beginning author”. With one exception, they are formulated in the aorist infinitive as imperative, just as are the collective demands of the Therans. Not only do the Therans keep their citizenship once they are established in the colony, without any temporal limit, but all the Therans who emigrated to Cyrene also swear (in a present which could represent either reiteration or duration: (poieîsthai, line 13) “the same oath (hórkon, line 14) which the others once swore (potè diórkosan, line 14-15).” This return to the time of the narrative contributes both to providing a base for the identity of the terms of the oath by giving it historical legitimacy, and to situating its origins in an indeterminate “long ago” which we would call “the time of myth.” The result of this is the integration of the citizens of Thera enjoying isopolity in the political structure of the city: being assigned to a tribe, a phratry, and one of the nine hetaireîai. This political and social organization, which may go back no farther than the speech of the legislator Demonax in the middle of the sixth century, recalls not only that of Thera, the former mother-city of Cyrene, but also that of classical Athens. [17] All this as regards the decision of isopolity whose utterance appears at the exact physical center of the first section.

Rather surprisingly, the remaining two-thirds of the text of the decree (and thus of the first section of the inscription) are devoted to arrangements related to the engraving of the psḗphisma itself (line 16), to the consecration of the stele in the ancestral shrine of Apollo Pythios, and to related expenses, to be taken from the revenues of the god. The order to engrave the text of the oath is also placed in this sequence of prescriptions expressed by the aorist infinitive, paired with a final form in the imperative of the third person plural (komisásthōn, line 22): a pretext for a new incursion into the past time of the narrative with an allusion to the founders sailing (hoi oikistêres, line 19) with Battos to Thera in Libya. The pragmatic effect of this arrangement is twofold, since while it confirms the relationship already established between the past time of the founding act and a present to be carried out, it also furnishes the written consecration of the oral word of those who swore the oath; just as the inscription of the text of the decree itself sets in writing, on a stele of especially precious marble, the twofold oral speech mentioned at the beginning. There is a strong contrast between the initial forms êipe and légonti (line 1)—oral—and the triple repetition of katagráphen and katagráphan (line 14, 18, and 21)—writing down—at the end of this first section of the Cyrenean stele.

Oriented toward a future so near that it assumes the permanence of the present, the time of enunciation of the second sequence of utterances which radiate out from the center of the decree of isopolity thus also finds its foundation in the past of the founding act.

After the decree of Cyrene comes the text of the “oath” of Thera, whose title is doubly misleading: under such a title, utterances related to the text make up barely more than half of this second section of the stele, and the text does not coincide with the expressis verbis swearing of a true oath. Indeed, we have gone from the oath (hórkos, line 14) mentioned in the first section to a hórkion (line 24; already in line 18), to a word, often in the plural, which can take on the wider meaning of contract, treaty, or convention. And it is precisely this word in the plural (hórkia, line 40; with the same use in lines 47 and 49, but already in line 9, in a wording which recalls that of the end of the stele) which we find again at the beginning of the second part of the second section; there it designates oath-related practices guaranteeing that the barely-mentioned convention will be honored. Indeed, the end of the stele’s text is entirely devoted to those ritual gestures which confirmed the contract; all this in a narrative mode which is also used at the beginning of the second section, to recall the circumstances surrounding the drafting of the contract. [18]

The text cited in the second section of the stele is thus not the expected text of the oath, but rather corresponds to a decision made in contractual form, by the assembly (ekklēsía, line 25) of Thera—for us, an institution whose existence cannot be attested before the fourth century. [19] In contrast to the decree of the “people” of Cyrene mentioned in the first section and phrased in a form of the perfect which ensures its permanency in the present, the decision of the Theran assembly is presented in the aorist, as a unique fact in the past (dedókhthai, line 11, in contrast with édoxe, line 25), which is to say as a historical fact; but the utterance of its content, referred to the Therans in general, is given in the present (dokeî, line 26). It is as if the specific temporal effect of the perfect were broken down into its two constituent moments: a decision in the past, whose validity extends into the present. This enunciative split allows giving to the popular decision the essentially narrative turn that the second part of the stele will take.

The text of the decree begins by narrating the origin of the decision to send an expedition of Therans designated as hetaîroi (line 27) to Libya, led by Battos, who is both archēgétēs (founder, leader) and king: the origin is the oracle given spontaneously (automátixen, line 25) by Apollo to this same Battos and to the Therans, enjoining them to colonize Cyrene. And so there is a reappearance of nearly all the terms which concluded the first part, used in the description of the engraving of the stele and in the consecration of the “oath” (hórkion, line 18) to Apollo Pythios: Thera, Libya, Cyrene, Battos, Apollo. In this reappearance of terms belonging to the fourth-century decree in the supposedly more ancient Theran text, we must of course wonder about the explicit and precise naming of Cyrene, which obviously did not yet exist at the moment of the decision to colonize it…In other versions, the oracle simply indicates a direction, with no toponymic reference whatever!

Be that as it may, the alleged Theran decree details the composition and the line of conduct imposed on the colonial expedition, using the forms of the infinitive as imperative also present in the Cyrenean decree. It will include, on equal terms, one son from every household, as well as those who have reached adulthood and those who want to sail with the Therans and who have the status of free men [20] —depending on the preferred interpretation of this incomplete text. If the colonists succeed in establishing the settlement, the Theran who joins them later will enjoy the citizenship attached to the land given him. If they do not succeed after five years, colonists may return to Thera where they will recover both their property and their citizenship. These arrangements also have a constraining character given them by a final rule expressed in the imperative and in the future: confiscation of property, forfeited to the people, and the death penalty for anyone who refuses to go, and thus disobeys the city, as well as for anyone who protects him, even inside his own family.

From a temporal point of view, the contractual decision of the ekklēsía of Thera, stated in the present (dokeî, line 26), is situated exactly between the oracle of Apollo and the two scenarios imagined for what may happen with the colony. Expressed twice in wording which uses the jussive infinitive with its future temporal value, the arrangements concerning citizenship retained (either by Therans joining the colony or by colonists obliged to return to the main island) take on an obvious argumentative purpose in the fourth century, when the Therans of Cyrene request that their citizenship be restored. The provisions of the Cyrene decree can thus appear as the realization, centuries later, of those provisions made by the assembly of Thera.

As we have said, the text of the oath which sets out the convention agreed to by the citizens, announced in the title of this second section, and which one would expect to read just after the text of the popular decree of Thera, is conspicuous by its absence. In its place, and in the narrative aorist mode, is the simple mention of (language-related) gestures which marked the way it was carried out (hórkia epoiḗsanto, lines 40-41). These gestures were accepted by those “remaining here” (autêi, line 41) and by those preparing to depart to found the colony (oikíxontes, in the intentional future, says the speaker, who now places himself spatially in a Theran perspective (“here” is Thera!). As has been pointed out, the absence of performative expressions which should compose the oath is in some ways compensated for by the imprecations which follow its simple mention. [21] In the same utterance, the oath itself and the curses hurled by those who participate against those who would transgress, both among those citizens leaving for Libya and among those staying “here” (auteî, line 43—in Thera; in the position of a chiasmus, in a Gorgias-like figure of speech!) are both related in the same narrative mode, in the past.

It is as if it were left to the ritual gesture described at the end of the text to confer a performative dimension to an oath and to gestures whose expression is simply narrated in a form of the aorist which follows and echoes the form used to introduce the original decision of the assembly. This means that from a spatial point of view the fulfillment of the agreement is indeed situated in Thera and from a Theran perspective, while from a temporal point of view the reference is to the time of the decree at Cyrene in the fourth century! And the curse described is accompanied by the burning of molded wax images; the entire community—men, women, boys, and girls—participate in this ritual.

It is not too surprising to find kolossoí in a ritual imprecatory gesture which foresees performatively, through the melting of wax figures, the fate of anyone who would break the oath; in a metaphoric liquefaction (kataleíbesthai, line 47), he will disappear without a trace, eliminating any possible memory. The guilty party, his descendants, and his property will all disappear. On the one hand, in the song of reproach brought on by Helen’s betrayal, the chorus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon recreates the plaintive words of the prophets: the absent Helen in her home is only a phásma, a simple apparition; she appears to her spouse only in dreams, assuming the vain and elusive appearance (dóxa) of dream figures; and thus she is like one of those statues (kolossoí) whose grace ends up becoming an object of hatred, since Aphrodite’s erotic flux cannot emanate from lifeless eyes; a clever and elusive figure who attracts the eye, only to fade like appearances in dreams. In its inconsistency, the kolossós in this case is a visual illusion, like, for example, the eídōlon, the image of the dead Patroclus which Achilles sees before him in a waking dream, but which he cannot grasp. [22] The kolossós thus represents the “person,” and it can also fade away without leaving a trace. On the other hand, the famous “sacred law” of Cyrene itself, a set of rules governing purificatory practices found on another stele which dates from the fourth century, prescribes another use for kolossoí. When a suppliant is received within a host’s house, and cannot name the person who sent him because of that person’s death, he must invoke that nameless person as a human being, whether a man or a woman; after making male and female figurines of wood or earth, the suppliant’s host must serve them a portion of everything, and then after completing these rites (tà nomizómena) he must deposit the figurines and the portions served to them in a forest that has not been cut. [23] Ephemeral substitutes for an individual without renown and thus without civic identity, or representatives of a suppliant considered demonic because he can provide no one to vouch for him, these kolossoí are condemned to disappear in a wild place, with no grave and no memorial rite.

In these nearly contemporary inscriptions from Cyrene, the kolossós appears not only as ritual substitute for someone who has passed on, or who is destined to disappear leaving no memory, but appears also (in comparison) as the double of the word which must act on him. Following the narration of those ritual gestures which accompanied the composing of the oath of Thera and the curses which accompanied it, the text of the second section (and thus of the entire text of the stele called the “Oath of the Founders”) concludes with the utterance of the curses themselves. An ambiguous utterance if ever there was one, since its enunciation, while seeming to assume an indirect discourse form, takes up the imperative, expressed as an infinitive, of both the Cyrenean decree of isopolity and the Theran decree on founding the colony: [24] May he who breaks the terms of the oath dissolve and liquefy, assimilated to the wax figures, (hṓsper toùs kolossoús), while those who honor it, along with their descendants, will know great good fortune; both “those who sail to Libya and those who remain in Thera,” the document adds. This wording again uses that of the narrative part of the text; it refers the time and the “here” (autêi, lines 41 and 43) of the oath and the curse to the (present) moment preceding the departure, in Thera. Mentioned at the end of the imprecatory expression, and thus at the very end of the stele’s text, the good fortune (agathá, line 51) promised to both the Therans and the future Cyreneans recalls the prosperity mentioned at the beginning of the inscription; the same prosperity expected from the decree of isopolity (eutukhêi, line 4 and line 8) is inscribed in the text’s dedication to Good Fortune (Túkha agathá, line 1 and line 11).

The text plays on the hopes nourished by a divine being with well-defined responsibilities, quite independently of the epigraphic convention which leads to a number of decrees of this period being dedicated to the gods in general and the Agathḕ Tuchē in particular. Reigning over assemblies, this daughter of Ocean and Zeus himself, sister to Eunomia, distinguishes herself through abundance, which iconography from the fourth century on symbolizes with a horn of plenty; this symbol indicating prosperity is often accompanied by a rudder recalling the conduct of human affairs. [25]

Thus the temporal-spatial reference centered on Cyrene is added to the semantic echo which rests on the founding oracular speech, to make the first part of the stele, which carries the Cyrenean isopolitical decree, accord with the second section which enunciates and sets out the Theran colonization decree. But those are not the only discursive elements which insure the coherence of the whole text consecrated in the shrine of Apollo Pythios.

Once again from a temporal point of view, the mention of ritual gestures ensures a strong relationship between the first and second parts of the stele. The procedure which consists of a comparison related both to gesture and to language, used both to affirm the conclusion of an oath and to show its consequences, has an astonishing parallel in the oath sworn in the Iliad, between Achaeans and Trojans, to end the war by a single combat between Menelaus and Paris. [26] Not only is the ritual oath sworn on that occasion designated by the same plural term hórkia found in the narration of the decree of Cyrene (line 40) (which also corresponds to a solemn agreement); and not only does the oath sworn in Agamemnon’s address to Zeus foresee two possible situations based on the outcome of the duel, in the same terms the Theran decree uses in foreseeing two possible outcomes for the colonial expedition to Libya: the ei mén ken…ei dé ke of the Iliad is answered by the Theran decree’s expression ai mèn dé ka…ai dé ka (line 30 and line 33); but even more importantly the sacrifice of two lambs which consecrates Agamemnon’s language act is followed by a double ritual of language and gesture which strikingly recalls the procedure outlined in the “Oath of the Founders.” In a speech pronounced by each participant, both Achaeans and Trojans hurl an imprecation in which the libation of wine which accompanies the sacrifice is compared with the fate of anyone who would violate the contractual oath: may his brains be spilled on the earth like “this” wine (hṓs hóde oînos, line 300), and may his family and children suffer the same fate. Through metaphor, the ritual gesture thus gives a sort of material confirmation to the perjurer’s future, assigned to him by the imprecation. Between the past (configured by recounted time and time of narration) of the oracle of Apollo, the present of the decree (with its indices of uttered enunciation), and the near future of the different scenarios that the official text (between intra- and extra-discursive) imagines, it thus belongs to the (extra-discursive) ritual gesture to establish a relationship of tension which confers a form of material realization on the enunciatively-imagined future.

The same is true of the first part of the text where (as we have said) the engraving of the decree on a stele and its consecration in the shrine of Apollo Pythios confirm the permanence of the anticipated result of the (present) recognition of isopolity between Cyrene and Thera, by concrete and ritual gesture. This recognition is guaranteed by the return to the past of the Theran decree concerning colonization, and by reference to the role played by Apollo of Delphi and his oracular commands. The time of the narrative of past actions presented as motivations, especially through its use of jussive infinitives, also leads to the present of the uttered enunciation, even before the description of ritual gestures ensures the relationship with an extra-discursive time which corresponds to future social realization. With its two references to the spoken word, the enunciative speech which introduces the decree of the Cyrenean people by reference to the past act of colonization follows the same movement: the past words of Damis (êipe, line 2) introducing in the present the demands of the Therans and Kleudamas for the future good fortune of the city and the people of Cyrene.

Certainly, from the point of view of narration and consequently of the narrative putting-into-discourse of recounted time, the text of the first section of the stele is organized in what we call a Ringstruktur or ring structure. Like the “hymnic” relative, the relative pronoun tà (line 5) returns to the tradition of the ancestors and introduces the narrative of the colonization following Apollo’s order, in the aorist. From this founding past, the repeated evocation of good fortune ensures transition to the permanence of the decree’s present (dedókhthai), placed as we have said in the physical center of the text; from the near future of the decree and its engraving on the stele, the return through tó (line 19) of the allusion to the original oath refers us once again to the aorist of the colonial expedition. Similarly, the initial allusion to the past of Apollo’s oracle to the Therans concerning the colonization of Cyrene finds a ring-structure echo in the second section, with the final mention of the oath sworn both by those citizens leaving for Libya and by those remaining in Thera.

But from the spatial-temporal point of view, this mention is expressed in the very near future (êmen, line 50) expected from the imprecation ritual conducted “here” in Thera. But rather than following a ring structure, the utterances which make up the second section follow the chronological order of actions given in the narrative mode, in the aorist: decree of the assembly (édoxe, line 25), “oath” (hórkia epoiḗsanto, line 41; succession stressed by epì toútois), imprecations (aràs epoiḗsanto, line 42), wax figures consumed by fire (kolosòs ketékaion, line 44; in the imperfect tense). While the epoiḗsanto forms evoke forms organized similarly in ring structure in the first section, particularly striking in the second section are the three repetitions, through a series of participial constructions, of two distinct groups: those who stay “here” in Thera, and those who sail to Libya. The repetition of language here takes on an incantorial aspect which seems to correspond to the phrases pronounced in performing the ritual. This coincidence between time of enunciation and time of the ritual draws us from the intra- to the extra-discursive, by evoking the real prosperity expected from honoring the oath and by perpetuating the memory of those who are not reduced to wax figures, because they honor the oath. This oath was already evoked in the first section, where the Therans who founded Cyrene are distinguished from those who stayed in Thera! The structural circularity is broken, and leads to pragmatic realization in the near future marked by permanence.

Insofar as it may be pertinent, the question of the text’s “authenticity” (so often posed in terms of dialectal forms, lexical usage, and political institutions) may perhaps be made clearer through the semio-narrative, enunciative, and even anthropological views adopted here. Indeed, the coincidence between the narrative aspect of the exposition of ritual procedures accompanying an oath whose text is not mentioned in the second section, and the narrative forms through which old times are evoked in the first section, makes one think of a document, rewritten probably from a Theran perspective and designed to respond to the requirements of a political situation in fourth-century Cyrene.

In this, comparison with other accounts of the founding of Cyrene may prove relevant.

The question of the relationship between the intra- and the extra-discursive in this strange document whose temporal and spatial architecture we have just studied has been generally posed in terms of authenticity. As regards the “oath” of Thera, it was approached in terms of the relationship between the stele and history; more specifically, the relationship the text is supposed to have with an original assumed to date from the moment of founding has been examined. After an exhaustive study devoted to the question concerning the existence of the historical “source,” the historian comes to the conclusion that an allusion by Herodotus to the decree of Thera “is favorable to the hypothesis of a recorded decree at Thera and more favorable than not to the possibility that this is the decree produced with changes of wording at Cyrene.” [27]

In this quest for the original historical document, oracles play an essential role, while they also draw us into this comparative internal approach. Not satisfied with simply sending us back to the point of origin of the brief narrative plot opening onto the future presented by both sections of the stele, the oracles given by Apollo recall both the Theran and the Cyrenean versions of the narrative of Cyrene’s founding summarized by Herodotus. The spontaneous order (automátixen, line 25) given to Battos and to the Therans to colonize Cyrene, as claimed at the beginning of the Theran decree and as repeated in the Cyrenean decree as a simple injunction (epítaxin, line 10) from Apollo Archēgétēs, with its guarantee of prosperity for the Therans who founded Cyrene (line 8), must be compared to the repeated and connected orders mentioned by Herodotus’ lógos, in an investigative narrative whose meaning and direction are often provided by oracular responses.

In brief, the Theran narrative of Cyrene’s colonization as Herodotus presents it begins with two oracular answers. The first, given to the king of Thera who was consulting the Pythia on other matters, told the sovereign (and Battos who was accompanying him) to found a city in Libya; the second oracle is just a repetition of the first, after seven years of drought brought on by failure to honor the oracular injunction. The colonial expedition, chosen in the manner stated in the first part of the stele and led by Battos, named as commander and king, was organized only after a fruitless first attempt on the coastal island of Plataea. The Cyrenean version, on the other hand, is punctuated with no fewer than three oracles: the first is given directly to Battos whose stuttering, at the beginning of his question to the Pythia of Delphi, is changed through a play on words into an order to assume sovereignty over a colony founded in Libya; the misfortunes resulting from failing to understand this first oracle lead to a second question and a second answer which apparently gives the precise destination of the colonial expedition—Cyrene (!); after an unfortunate attempt to return, then a fruitless attempt on the island of Plataea, a third consultation at Delphi indicates that the colony must take hold in Libya, “feeder of flocks,” on the continent itself. [28]

Beyond the differences in the oracle’s answers, what is important to note here is the existence of two versions of the narrative of Battos’ colonization of Cyrene, even in the fifth century. Each offers a specific temporal and spatial perspective. One could point out that the Cyrenean version related by Herodotus and the text of the Cyrene decree in the first section of the stele are the only ones which name the exact destination of the expedition, contrary to the previously mentioned habit of the oracle at Delphi, which was to give only a direction, and even that often encoded. [29] Probably an indication that the lógos related by Herodotus and the text of the decree both refer to a document written a posteriori, whether an inscription or a narrative (depending on the oral tradition?). But it is very strange to find the explicit mention of Cyrene occurring also in the evocation of the first oracle in the decree of Thera (line 26); it appears in the second section of the epigraphic text, which is to say in the text of the “Oath of the Founders” itself, which is supposed to go back to the seventh century! One might find in this oracular mention of Cyrene an additional proof that, in spite of the Theran spatial perspective already mentioned, the decree of Thera is really a recreation by the fourth-century Cyreneans and Therans, possibly based on a more or less original Theran “document.”

The question becomes even more complicated when we notice that the spontaneous aspect of the oracle given to Battos (automátixen, line 25) recalls the most poetic version among those dramatized by Pindar: So it is worded in Pythian 4, in contrast to the allusion mentioned in Pythian 5, also an epinician composed in praise of Arkesilas IV, the king of Cyrene whose four-horse chariot won at the Pythian Games of 462. [30]

Inscribed within the process of constant poetic recreation which characterizes the narrative we choose to call mythic, especially in Greece, these reformulations of the founding event of Cyrene during the fifth century make vain any attempt to reconstitute the original document. These different narratives must be taken for what they are: discursive and symbolic representations of time and space from a certain historical situation (past and present) on which they speculate. It is through these fictional spatial-temporal configurations that community memory and tradition are formed and evolve, along with their ideological function.

From this point of view, it is no accident that the oracle of Apollo contributes heavily to integrating the temporal fabric of the (second) Theran section of the “Stele of the Founders” into the fabric of the (first) Cyrenean section. On the one hand, as narrative origin, the Pythian oracle determines the ritual acts which come to confirm and realize the Theran decree, and consequently the act of founding; on the other hand the “automatic” oracle given by the god of Delphi to Battos and to the people of Thera, in the form of the injunction by Apollo Archēgétēs, comes to guarantee the good fortune and prosperity promised to the people of Cyrene in the fourth century. Promises made in the first section thus follow the model of promises made to the colonists who honored the original founding contract. So there is a correspondence between the oracle pronounced by Apollo at Delphi which constitutes the axial point of time, and the reconfigured memory in the Cyrene decree with its central spatial position in the shrine in Cyrene itself, where the stele is consecrated to this same Apollo Pythios.

Narratively, it is essentially the Pythian oracle which ensures the transition between recounted time in the first section of the epigraphic text and the combination of recounted time and time of narration in the second section. Inscribed on the same stele, consecrated in Apollo’s shrine at Delphi, the Cyrenean decree (psáphisma, line 16) becomes a sort of copy of commitments made “long ago” (pote, line 14), in a time whose date is simply that of the god’s will. Granting isopolity to Therans who live in the city in the fourth century essentially comes down to refounding the colonial city, as concerns future prosperity and good fortune. In this, consecrating the stele (its permanence granted by being written within Apollo’s shrine) seems to be a ritual equivalent to burning the wax figures. Through antiphrasis, the ritual is meant to ensure the continued effectiveness of the original contract, and the harmonious development of the colonial community that the convention proposes to organize. But in contrast to the versions of Cyrene’s founding set forth by Herodotus and by Pindar in the fifth century, royalty no longer figures in the fourth-century text. Battos appears implicitly and paradoxically as the founder of a democratic regime! Between the two centuries, the Cyrenean dynasty of the Battiads had had to concede its power to the demos. [31] The political paradigm determining the memory of the civic community has changed!

Apollo who points the way, Apollo the ram-horned leader, Apollo walking, Apollo the surveyor and measurer, Apollo the architect, Apollo the civilizer—many ancient and modern epicleseis were devised to name the god of the oracle in his function as founder and archēgétēs. [32] Pindar himself is not untouched by the spatial organization of the “well-built city,” to refer to just one example of local representations of Cyrene’s founding. Assuming the responsibilities of the archēgétēs god, Battos-Aristoteles not only opened up full access to the deep sea for the colonists’ ships, but also traced out the paved street that would be taken by chariots and processions dedicated to Apollo, the protector of mortals; indeed, one of those teams of horses ensured the Panhellenic fame of the colonial city and of its sovereign, Arkesilas IV. In a poetic fiction which does not correspond exactly to what the archeologists have been able to reconstruct, the straight line of this avenue leads directly to the agora on the stern of which the founding captain, now transformed into an archēgétēs hero honored by the people, will have his tomb (Figure 5). In the metaphor woven here, maritime progress is transformed into the wide street which organizes the political and religious space of the colonial city. [33]

Figure 5. The agora of Cyrene, 5th century BC. In black, the area at the end of the regal period; in grey, the structures build in the second half of the century; shading indicated areas of subsequent occupation.

But in Pindar’s poem, the spatial progress of the founders develops in parallel with the extremely complex temporal development which leads from the act which founded its heroic origins, going back to the time of the Trojan War, up through ritual honors enjoyed by Battos and his successors. Its final stage is the celebration of the Pythian victory of the Battiad king Arkesilas IV, with performers singing and dancing (probably at the Karneia festival of Apollo) the epinician of a poet who claims to be related to the founding hero, through distant ancestors! The symbolic weaving which inserts the founding act into a narrative continuity placing the event in the perspective of the heroic age of the Trojan War thus undoubtedly shares affinities with the spatial line followed by the performers of Pindar’s poem: perhaps in a real processional route through the city, from the place of religious celebration of the winner, very probably near the Garden of Aphrodite placed inside the great shrine of Apollo, patron god of Cyrene, toward the tomb of the founding hero, on a straight path which forms the main axis of the urban space surrounding the agora.

In the hymnic poem dedicated to him by Callimachus, it is Apollo himself who “weaves” the founding of cities, which he contributes to creating by furnishing a model of this territorial and architectural “weaving,” the altar at Delos which the god “plaits” with the horns of goats sacred to his sister Artemis: this first act of founding is followed in the narrative logic of the Greek poem by the narrative of the founding of Cyrene and the establishment of the Karneia festival by Battos-Aristoteles. [34] The axial moment of the first founding by the god himself orients the entire chronological line which goes through Sparta and Thera to place Apollo and the Karneia in Cyrene and extends through successive celebrations of the festival; it is anchored in an architectural gesture conceived as a weaving.

As for the temporal interlacing woven in the “Stele of the Founders,” attention is focused on the founding gesture ordered by the god, first by the misleading central title which divides the text into two sections, and then by the reminder in each of the two parts of the oracle given by Apollo to Battos and the Therans, ordering colonization of a site specifically named Cyrene. Through the narrative and descriptive means discussed so far, and through the verbal expression of the twofold gesture of melting the wax figures and of religious consecration of a written document, displaying the stele in the shrine of Apollo Pythios constitutes a second gesture of founding the city; the fourth-century document takes over a contract originally made between colonizers and colonists, between the existing country and the future colonial city.

Like the founding act related by Pindar which opens with the sequence of kings descended from Battos and continues to the reign of the sovereign celebrated in the hic et nunc of the poem, like the narrative of founding taken up by Callimachus and which leads to the succession of annual celebrations of the Karneia, the act of establishing a colony represented by the stele and its decree reduplicates, through a written “performance,” the founding act desired by Apollo, while it also projects into a very near future the good fortune expected from the decision on isopolity.

While it is able to provide a passage from narrated time and time of narration to a time of active enunciation in the present (thanks to the oracle), the text of the decree shows none of the forms of “I” usually interpreted as strong indicators of the utterance of the enunciation. Forms of the third person are substituted for the expected first-person utterances; these forms credit first the decision on the decree of isopolity, and then the decision on the colonial expedition, to the dêmos of the people of Cyrene (dedókhthai tôi dámōi, line 11) and to the Theran assembly (édoxe tâi ekklēsíai, line 25). In their third-person wording, and as regards the text inscribed on the stele of sphragís, these traditional utterances assume the role of “signature” taken on by the last lines of Bacchylides’ Dithyramb 17, when it alludes to the choral groups of Keans. [35] And so the narrative identity which surfaces in the Cyrenean text consecrated in the shrine of Apollo merges with that of the community of citizens meeting in assembly.

By its response to the act of democratic foundation, and through decision and consecration procedures where the community claims the authority of the god of Delphi, the ipse-identity of the individual citizens of Cyrene with which the Therans hope to be associated must become stabilized in an idem-identity which is obviously community-related. This is less an ethnic identity than a political identity, religiously consecrated both in time, through reference to the founding oracle of Apollo, and in space, through the consecration of the text within the shrine of the god himself; an identity of a cultural and memorial sort which came out of an agreement made according to the rules of “democratic” debate, in a very Greek perspective. [36]

In the way in which a history (legendary in our eyes) is used, it is not the image of cycle, but rather the dynamic continuity established by the connection between the founding event and the performing of rituals which allows one to struggle against the feeling of the ephemeral nature both of the individual and of the community of citizens; in the repetition of recounted time and space through the rhythm of narration, the spatial-temporal configuration constructed in this epigraphic discourse plays a determining role as intermediary. In this transforming of a regime of historicity into a spatial-temporal logic and a regime of politically and culturally active truth in the present and the immediate future, it is not the profane time of history which is based in the atemporal permanence of myth, as one might expect if one adopts the Eliadian perspective. Rather Apollo and the heroic act intervene directly in the political present and in a central religious space (related to Delphi), in order to guarantee the validity and the permanence of a new founding act, thus establishing a determining pragmatic and memorial tension between the founding past and the near future. Community memory is mobile!

In our own eyes, a document is certified authentic if it has a date, location, and signature. For the community of citizens of the Cyrene of the fourth century, the authenticity of a document depends as much on its consecration in the temple of the city’s founding and protecting god as it does on the discursive fabric which places its utterances in the temporal and spatial perspective of the first act of founding. Quite differently from the traditional philosophical perspective, and far from the idealizing interpretations it has fostered even among our contemporaries, the representation of time underlying temporal and spatial configurations set forth in the epigraphic text from Cyrene is essentially political, in the widest sense of the term, as the Greeks themselves would have understood it.