Traces of the Past. Classics between History & Archaeology by Karen Bassi (review)

Traces of the Past constitutes an ambitious attempt to reflect on the simultaneous presence and absence of the past through close readings of central texts of Archaic and Classical Greek literature. The introduction uses recent works in Museum Studies to lay out the framework of its coverage and argument. Put very simply, museums preserve and exhibit objects which the visitor can ‘read.’ There is thus a tension between “the fact of an object’s material existence” (6) and the interpretation, which assigns the object meaning and embeds it within a narrative. This very tension is at the heart of what Bassi labels “protoarchaeo-logical narratives,” namely “narratives in which the past is constituted out of or in response to what is visible (or not) in the present” (2). One of the things such narratives do is to “activate a competition between the possibility (or promise) of seeing the past and the act of reading (about) it” (2). Through an exploration of protoarchaeological narratives from Homer to Aristophanes, Bassi sets out to demonstrate how the past emerges in the interaction between empirical observation and linguistic representation. In disciplinary terms, she wishes to open up a dialogue between philologists, historians, and archaeologists.

The first chapter is titled “The Landscape of the Past in Hesiod’s Theogony.” Bassi discusses three material objects which illuminate the relation between objects and time. The scepter which Hesiod reports to have received from the Muses on Mount Helicon is a visible metonym for an event in the past. While linking the past to the present, the scepter also partakes in the uncertainty created by the ability of the Muses “to say many false things that are like true things.” The anvil, whose fall measures the time it would take to reach earth from heaven and Tartarus from earth, does not refer to a specific past event, but “the notion that time can be measured in the observation of a falling object is part of the more general notion that objects have a temporal dimension, even when they are not in motion” (32). Finally, the stone which Gaia makes Cronos swallow to save Zeus after his birth establishes a link to the enunciation of the poem in the present as it was later set up at Pytho “to be a sign thereafter.” All three objects, Bassi argues, refer “both to the reality of the past and to the passing of human time” and are therefore “part of the poem’s engagement with its epistemological dilemma, that is with the problem of telling the truth about events that happened in a distant and mythological past” (39).

Walls are simultaneously prominent archaeological remains of the past and salient “narrative plot devices” (40). In chapter 2, “The Hypothetical Past and the Achaean Wall in the Iliad,” Bassi teases out the significance of the Achaean wall in the Iliad. She first shows that the Achaean wall, which is described as a bearer of kleos though it is later dismantled, reflects the “principal conflict in the poem, that between what is possible for epic warriors (κλέος) and what is certain for all humans (θάνατος)” (48). Ethical issues of heroism are therefore entangled with the epistemological question of how the past can be known. Bassi then turns to Aristotle’s and Strabo’s comments on the wall and its destruction. Their discussion of the wall, she argues, is closely linked to Aristotle’s discussion of fictional poetry versus historiography. Straddling the line between fact and fiction, the Achaean wall in the Iliad embodies the tension between the visible proof on which archaeology as a discipline is premised and the linguistic representation on which narrative history relies.

The third chapter, “Blinded by Time. The Past ‘As If’ in the Odyssey,” which, like the two subsequent chapters, is significantly longer than the first two chapters, does not discuss visible objects, but vision in general as a source of knowledge about the past. In a first...