Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece

Chapter 2: Sophistic Metis: An Intelligence of the Body

Z 2 Z Sophistic Mētis An Intelligence of the Body In his treatise on fishing, the 2nd-century CE writer Oppian offers a lucid description of a dramatic struggle between the octopus and the sea eel: There is always fishy war and strife between them, and one fills its belly with the other. The raging sea eel comes out from under a searock and speeds through the swelling sea in pursuit of food. Soon it sees an octopus creeping on the edge of the shore and rushes gladly on a welcome prey. The octopus is not unaware that the sea eel is nearby . . . Speedily she overtakes the octopus and thrusts her blood-red teeth in him. The octopus, of necessity but unwilling , puts up a deadly fight and twines around her limbs, using art, whirling about, now this way, now that, with his tangling whips, by any means throwing its nooses around [the eel], so that he might restrain it. . . . Quickly escaping, the sea eel with its slippery limbs easily slides through the embrace like water. But the octopus twines around the spotted back, around the neck, round the very tail, and then rushes into the orifice of her mouth and the recesses of her jaws. Even as two men skilled in strong-limbed wrestling too long display their strength against each other; already from the limbs of both pours the warm and abundant sweat and the shifty wiles of their art roam about and their hands undulate about the surface of the body: even so the suckers of the octopus, without order, undulate about, and labor in fruitless wrestling. (Haleiutica 2.260–80) 44 FIGURE 2.1 Detail: octopus on a fish plate: Toledo Museum of Art 77.30.© The Toledo Museum of Art. Oppian’s vivid account of the sea fight helps illustrate the mode of agonistic struggle, Protagoras’ ‘‘mixing in,’’ which, as suggested in the last chapter, operates in a matrix of response production. The twisting octopus ‘‘enfolds’’ the sea eel with its tentacles, attaching suckers to its surface, forming a bond between the two, as the sea eel plunges into the octopus’s watery flesh. The struggle produces a fluid mass of movement, a convergence of forces, which Oppian delineates when he moves into the wrestling motif: aside from oozing sweat, the ‘‘shifty wiles of their art roam about and their hands undulate about the surface of the body.’’ Here, art is ‘‘mixed in’’ with bodies, producing a swarming mass of cunning craftiness and flailing limbs. There are elements of chance, as the sea animals, like wrestlers, grapple wildly without order (ou kata kosmon) (281): the connection to wrestlers here lies mostly in the quick, furtive movements. Hands undulate; sea creatures’ bodies are thrust in mouths; the movement of bodies parallels, even exhibits, a roving technē, or art. In subsequent passages, Oppian goes on to detail the role of cunning SOPHISTIC MĒTIS 45 in the encounter between octopus and sea eel. The kind of craftiness described is a complex mode of intelligence, what the Greeks called mētis. The concept of wily cunning, crafty mētis, will be the focus of this chapter. As Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant point out in their book-length study of the word, mētis generally refers to instantiations of ‘‘intelligent ability,’’ all of which emphasize practicality, success, or resourcefulness in a particular sphere (1978: 11). Oppian’s passage therefore demonstrates the importance of mētis in struggle, but it also, at the same time, displays the corporeality of mētis: the octopus, with its resourceful mass of tentacles, was included in a distinguished group of figures designated as crafty—including, specifically , wily Odysseus, Athena, her mother Metis, and more generally, foxes, wrestlers, and sophists. As this chapter will detail, each figure displays a somatic cunning, and as such, each helps to understand how mētis infuses the arts of rhetoric and athletics with a kind of bodily intelligence. The only extended study of mētis is Detienne and Vernant’s Cunning Intelligence (1978), a protracted diachronic mapping of mētis, one which suggests convincingly that the concept itself remained unchanged from Homer to Oppian’s time, a span of about ten centuries. Since Detienne and Vernant’s study rests on the questions of definition—what is mētis? —and location—where is mētis important?—their study offers many opportunities for response, extension, and...