2022.12.05 | By Gregory Nagy
This essay is a pre-edited and pre-printed version of a paper I delivered on December 3, 2022, for the Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, at Session IX-10, “Premodern Fables and their Audience.”
A printed version of the papers presented at this session, edited by Neguin Yavari, is already being planned, to be published by the Ilex Foundation in a series distributed by Harvard University Press. Also planned is a pre-printed version of the papers, to be published online in Classical Continuum, likewise to be edited by Neguin Yavari.
In the Indic fable of “The Dancing Peacock,” mediated through the Buddhist traditions of texts composed in Pāli (as distinct from Sanskrit) and known as the Jātaka-s, the peacock is chosen as husband-to-be by the daughter of the Golden Goose, king of all birds. But the intended bridegroom disqualifies himself at the wedding celebration by dancing so ostentatiously as to expose himself, to the disgust of the king, who then shames the peacock into withdrawing from eligibility and departing from the celebration. The father then marries off his daughter goose to his nephew goose—a much safer choice as a husband. This fable has been compared many times and in many ways to a story famously attested in Classical Greek literature: it is an episode narrated in the Histories of Herodotus (6.126–130), where Kleisthenes, tyrant of the city-state of Sikyon, arranges for a competition among elite men from other cities to decide who will marry into his dynasty by winning as bride the girl Agariste, daughter of the tyrant. The number of published interpretations comparing the Indic fable with this narrative of Herodotus is so vast—and the studies themselves have been so inconclusive—as to discourage or even stifle any further attempts at comparison. A breakthrough, however, has now been achieved in an essay by Olga Levaniouk (2022). In the course of her conscientiously tracking and criticizing the many different received opinions about the value of comparing the Indic and the Greek narratives, Levaniouk offers a new insight by questioning the one convergent aspect of the many divergent interpretations that she criticizes. Each one of these interpretations, she shows, is based on an assumption: if there is a link to be found between the Indic and the Greek narratives, then one of the two narratives, it is assumed, must have been derived from the other. Resisting this assumption, Levaniouk argues insightfully that the comparing of these two narratives with each other need not presuppose a derivation of one from the other. This argument of Levaniouk has given me the confidence to engage here in an alternative form of comparison, where I analyze the Indic and the Greek narratives as cognates. My analysis will require a re-examination of the fable as a traditional form of discourse, where I need to take a closer look at various attempts to explain fables in terms of “high” and “low” cultural reactions to questions of wealth, power, and prestige. Also in need of a closer look are Greek as well as Indic traditions of telling fables in poetry as well as in prose.
In the narrative of Herodotus about the courting of Agariste by aristocrats converging from all over the Greek-speaking world, the leading contender, an Athenian aristocrat named Hippokleides, ‘dances away’ his chance at marrying this daughter of the tyrant Kleisthenes. That is because Hippokleides is perceived as behaving offensively in the course of exuberant dancing at a celebration attended by his father-in-law-to-be. It is generally assumed that the offense of Hippokleides had to do with his “exposing himself,” much as the peacock in the Indic fable exposes himself. There have been various attempts at deriving this Greek narrative from the Indic fable, and I cite here as a salient example the analysis of Leslie Kurke, Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose (Princeton 2011:412–426). But I disagree with the idea, as developed in that book and in most other relevant studies, that we are dealing here with “the migration to Greece of an Indian fable” (Kurke p. 14n42). And my disagreement will be relevant to questions about “high” and “low” forms of discourse in the telling of fables in general. Further, such questions will in turn be relevant to understanding various Greek as well as Indic traditions involving modes of differentiating poetry and prose.
I start with the topic of differentiating poetry and prose. This topic is relevant to understanding not only the Indic and the Greek forms of telling fables but also the corresponding Arabic and Persian forms that were inherited from Indic forms. In this regard, I will revisit a lengthy comparative study of mine about poetic as well as prosaic registers of telling fables, where my point of departure for a wide range of comparisons was the corpus of Greek fables attributed to the figure of Aesop.
The title of that comparative study was “Diachrony and the case of Aesop” (Nagy 2011), where I noted the relevance of another study of mine, published later (Nagy 2015.10.15), bearing the title “Homo ludens in the world of ancient Greek verbal art.” That other study was published only online, and I am now planning to merge it with a second edition of my earlier study. And I plan for such a second edition of “Diachrony and the case of Aesop” to be published both online and in print. The paper that I present here is a preview of the planned second edition.
In the earlier version of “Diachrony and the case of Aesop” (Nagy 2011), I started by considering only the internal evidence of the ancient Greek verbal arts in arguing that the Greek fable in the Classical period (and earlier) could be narrated not only as prose but also as poetry, and that the use of the fable was not at all confined to the lower strata of society. But then, at a mid-point in that study (§123), I extended the argument by examining the comparative evidence of fables as narrated in Indo-European languages other than Greek, especially in the classical languages known as Sanskrit and Pāli, which belong to the Indic language-family, a sub-group of the overall “proto-language” reconstructed by linguists as “Indo-European.” In the traditions of fables attested in Indic and in other cognate Indo-European languages, including the Greek language, I found evidence for “high” as well as “low” cultural registers in the representations of characters that figure in fables—and even in representations of the narrators who narrate their fables. Also, I found comparative evidence for a complementarity of poetry and prose in compositions of fables spoken in Indo-European languages. This evidence, then, led me to argue that such complementarity is a shared feature of fables transmitted in these cognate Indo-European languages.
Then, in the later study of mine that I have cited (Nagy 2015.10.15), I pursued my argumentation about shared features of fables transmitted in Indo-European languages by returning to my analysis of the Greek story, retold in the Histories of Herodotus (6.126–130), about an aristocrat who turned out to be a failed suitor—a story that can be viewed as an Indo-European cognate, in terms of my argument, with the Indic story, as retold in the Buddhist Jātaka-s, about a dancing peacock who likewise turned out to be a failed suitor. So, as I already said at the beginning of my paper, I disagree with the opinion that the Greek story was somehow borrowed from the Indic story.
That said, I now reformulate my argumentation as originally presented in “Diachrony and the case of Aesop” (Nagy 2011).
In the vast array of fables collected in such ancient Indic compilations as the Jātaka-s, the Pañcatantra, and the Hitopadeśa, we find a wide range of narratives fluctuating between lower and higher levels of discourse. And these Indic narratives of fables regularly show a mixture of poetry and prose, with the parts composed as poetry tending toward older and higher levels of discourse while the parts composed as prose tend toward newer and lower levels. In a typical Indic fable, the part composed in poetry tends to be the moral of the story, while the part composed in prose is the story itself. (For bibliography: Nagy 2011§122.)
The frame narratives of the three Indic compilations of fables I have mentioned indicate that a primary function of these fables, whether they gravitate toward higher or lower levels of discourse, was to provide instruction for the ruling classes. The same can be said about reported translations of such Indic fables into the Middle Persian language of the Sasanian Empire—a language known as Pahlavi to speakers of New Persian—as also about further translations, that is, from Pahlavi into Syriac, and then, from Pahlavi or Syriac into Arabic and from Arabic into New Persian.
A shining example is an Arabic version of Indic fables known as the Kalīla wa Dimna, which can be traced back ultimately to an Indic version that resembles most closely the attested Sanskrit transmission of the Pañcatantra. This first known Arabic version, apparently based on a Pahlavi text, was composed in prose by a Persian named Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ in the eighth century CE. As we see from the analysis presented in a paper by Olga Davidson at the same Session that I indicated at the beginning of this essay, the history of the later New Persian reception of this Arabic prose text of the fables makes it clear that the Persian prose retellings of these fables were not thought to be as prestigious as the Persian poetic retellings. For an example of this kind of thinking, Davidson cites two New Persian retellings commissioned in the era of the Sāmanid king Naṣr ibn Aḥmad, who ruled from 914 to 943 CE. One of these retellings, composed by the vizier of Naṣr, Abu’l-Fażl Balʿamī, was in New Persian prose while the other, composed by the poet Rōdaki, was in New Persian poetry. As Davidson points out, referring to what is said by Ferdowsi himself in his Shāhnāma, this poet’s own assessment of the two versions—one in prose and one in poetry—led him to judge the poetic version to be far superior to the prose version. Similarly, Ferdowsi says that he takes pride in claiming the superiority of his own poetic Shāhnāma in comparison to earlier versions of the Book of Kings written in prose.
I propose that there is room for thinking, on the basis of comparative evidence about fables, that early prose versions of the Kalīla wa Dimna composed in New Persian might have contained poetry, just as Indic fables contained poetry embedded within prose narration. Since the prose version of the Kalīla wa Dimna composed in New Persian by Balʿamī is lost, we cannot be certain whether even his text was lacking in embedded poetic elements. So I propose that there is also room for thinking that there had existed poetic embeddings even within the prose of Balʿamī. In any case, we can be certain that later New Persian prose versions did in fact make room for such poetic embeddings.
Relevant here, I think, is a general practice, historically attested in the textual transmission of fables, where individual fables are embedded within an overall narrative frame designed to instruct the ruling classes. Such overall embedding is definitely at work in the master narrative of the Kalīla wa Dimna tradition, for example. From a comparative point of view, the combination of these embedded fables and the narrative that frames them can be described by way of the conventional term speculum principum or ‘mirror of princes’. For background, I cite the book Global Medieval: Mirrors for Princes Reconsidered, edited by Regula Forster and Neguin Yavari (2015).
In the case of Indic traditions, we must also take note of situations where fables composed in verse are combined with a framing discourse composed in prose: this form, as we see it operate in the Indic compilations I have already mentioned, is known as prosimetrum. I should add that we can also find in Indic traditions some far earlier forms of prosimetrum where the variety of narratives ranging from lower to higher levels of discourse is even more pronounced. In this context, I note that both these terms speculum principum and prosimetrum are regularly used in the study of medieval European literature, with reference to both Latin and vernacular forms. I provide bibliography in the earlier work I have already cited (Nagy 2011 §124). In that work, I build on even earlier work, published in the book Pindar’s Homer (Nagy 1990; hereafter abbreviated as PH), where I compared the tradition of Aesopic fables in the Greek language with cognate traditions attested in other Indo-European languages.
On the basis of such comparative study, I argue that we would be wrong to assume that prose in Greek or in any other comparable tradition is by origin a lowly medium, or that poetry is by nature a more elevated medium. Such unjustified assumptions can be linked with another assumption, that prose is somehow the equivalent of ordinary speech. This assumption is likewise unjustified. True, prose can create the illusion of ordinary speech, but in many traditional forms of verbal art it is at two removes from ordinary speech, in that prose can be predicated on poetry, which is at one remove from ordinary speech (PH 1§§54–55 = pp. 46–47). We could even say that prose is at three removes from ordinary speech, in that song is also predicated on ordinary speech (PH 1§§23–24 = pp. 29–30), and it can be argued that poetry is predicated on song just as prose is predicated on poetry (PH 1§§54–55 = pp. 46–47). When poetry is the framing discourse for different forms of song, as in the case of Athenian drama, the form of the poetry can play the role of ordinary speech, as in the case of iambic trimeter (PH 1§56 = pp. 47–48)—just as prose can play the role of ordinary speech when it serves as the framing discourse for different forms of poetry, as in the case of ancient Greek narratives about the sayings of the so-called Seven Sages; such narratives take the form of prosimetrum (PH 1§54 = p. 47; 11§§33–34 = pp. 333–334). I elaborate on this point in the twin project “Homo ludens in the World of Ancient Greek Verbal Art” (Nagy 2015.10.15), where I explain my use of the expression “play the role” in referring to the imitative powers of both poetry and prose.
The form of prosimetrum, as attested in the ancient Greek Seven Sages narratives, is comparable with the medium of Herodotus, where we see parallel patterns in the framing of poetry within the prose of the narrative (PH 11§§32–36 = pp. 332–335, via Nagy 2011 §153). This medium of Herodotus, featuring poetry framed within prose, is a kind of prosimetrum in its own right, but the kinds of poetry that are framed by the prose are limited. Aside from the instances where the narrative of Herodotus frames oracular poetry, most of the expected poetic discourse that is being framed takes the form of prose, not poetry. Even the sayings of Solon, who figures as the most eminent of the Seven Sages, are formatted as prose rather than poetry within the framing prose narrative of the Herodotean Histories (PH 8§50 = p. 248, 11§32 = p. 332). And this alternative mode of embedding what is spoken in prose by a given Sage within the prose of the framing narrative is parallel to what we see in the Life of Aesop narratives, where the fables of Aesop are likewise spoken in prose by Aesop within the framing prose of the narratives about his life and times. I will now analyze further the significance of this parallelism.
The similarities between the media of Herodotus and Aesop are noted by Plutarch in his essay On the Malice of Herodotus (871d), where he notes wryly that the big difference between Herodotus and Aesop is that, whereas the fables of Aesop present us with talking apes and ravens, the Histories of Herodotus show more elevated talking characters who are humans—or even divinities, like the god Apollo himself in the act of speaking his oracular poetry (PH 11§19 = p. 322, 11§35 = p. 334). The talking humans in this negative reference correspond to characters in a genre of fable known as Subaritikoi logoi ‘discourse from Sybaris’ (bibliography in Nagy 2011 §154). Such Sybaritic fables are distinct from Aesopic fables in that they feature talking humans as the main characters, not talking animals (PH 11§21 = pp. 324–325, 11§35 = pp. 334–335).
The diplomacy of Herodotus in the use of fables is a topic that I have explored at length in Pindar’s Homer (Nagy 1990 chapter 11), and I return to this topic in the first of the two projects that I am previewing here (Nagy 2011 §153). Then I pursue the topic further in the second project “Homo ludens in the World of Ancient Greek Verbal Art” (Nagy 2015.10.15), especially with reference to the elements of fable inherent in the story about Hippokleides in Herodotus (6.126–130), which are cognate, in my view, with the elements of the fable of “The Dancing Peacock” as attested in the Indic Jātaka-s. Since I posit a cognate Greek tradition, not a derivative Greek tradition, my explanatory model has no need for exporting peacocks from India to Greece. Following the incisive argumentation of Levaniouk (2022), I think that Sybaritic aristocrats can thrive on their own in Greek fables, and there is no need to think that these fables required an awareness of peacocks as featured in fables from India.
But what is the full meaning of the story told by Herodotus about the dancing aristocrat Hippokleides as a failed suitor—if I am justified in viewing it as a stylized fable, cognate with but not derived from an Indic fable about the dancing peacock as a failed suitor? I return here to the euphemistic expression that I used at the beginning of my study, where I referred to offensive behavior that resulted in the failure of both suitors. In the case of the story about the peacock as a failed suitor, the offensive behavior had to do with what I described as a moment where the bird exposed himself. But how exactly are we to compare the offensive behavior of the preening peacock with the offensive behavior displayed by the preening aristocrat Hippokleides?
First I have to say more about the peacock. When we read reports by Classicists about the peacock in the Indic fable and how he “exposed himself,” I find it important to review the basic biological facts of courtship in the world of peafowl. When a peacock, in the process of engaging in his ritual courtship of a peahen, shows off his full plumage, this display is a dance that is meant to attract the peahen in a choreography of mating. But the dance shows off not only the beautiful plumage of the peacock. In reporting about scientific research centering on the mating practices of peafowl, Amina Khan (2013) writes:
The peahen would first check out the back (or side) of a peacock while the hopeful suitor would intermittently shake his wings in what the researchers termed a “backside display.” The peacocks would occasionally turn around and show off their brilliantly colored bodies from the front, too.
Similarly, in the story transmitted by Herodotus, most interpreters think that the aristocratic suitor Hippokleides shows off not only his beautiful dancing but also his genitalia or at least his “backside,” as it were. As the merriment of his dancing intensifies, Hippokleides proceeds to stand on his head, propping himself upside-down on top of a table and swinging his legs and feet in the air, as if they were his arms and hands. This description gives rise to obvious assumptions on the part of Classicists who are reminded of the Indic peacock: given that Greek men in ancient times did not wear underwear, Classicists tend to assume that such an exuberant display of choreography on the part of this aristocratic young man meant that he was showing off his genitalia and his “back side,” not only his dexterity in dancing.
But I agree with Olga Levaniouk (again, 2022) that we do not have to assume, on the basis of comparing the story about Hippokleides with the fable about the dancing peacock, that Hippokleides “exposed himself” in the eyes of Kleisthenes, just as we do not have to assume that Herodotus knew about a preening peacock in modeling his narrative about the preening Hippokleides. The preening and the dance can be cognate elements in the making of fable, so that we do not have to assume an exporting of the Indic fable about a dancing peacock in order to appreciate the elements of Greek fable that we see being woven into the narrative of the dancing aristocrat.
It remains to ask: what are the consequences for this preening aristocrat, who is described by Herodotus (6.127.4) as the best in good looks and wealth among all the suitors of the daughter of Kleisthenes? Surely we may expect the consequences to be most serious, since Kleisthenes, tyrant of Sikyon, was in his day the most attractive of potential fathers-in-law because of his wealth, power, and prestige. Predictably, Kleisthenes becomes enraged by the young man’s exuberant display, and he declares to Hippokleides that the young man has forfeited his chances of marrying into his dynasty. So, the punishment, for Hippokleides, son of Teisandros, is that he will not become the son-in-law of Kleisthenes, tyrant of Sikyon. I will now quote here the relevant wording of the original Greek text of Herodotus (6.129.4).
First, I quote what Kleisthenes says to Hippokleides:
«Ὦ παῖ Τεισάνδρου, ἀπορχήσαό γε μὲν τὸν γάμον.»
«Son of Teisandros! You have danced away your marriage.»
Next, I quote what Hippokleides says in response to Kleisthenes:
Ὁ δὲ Ἱπποκλείδης ὑπολαβὼν εἶπε· «Οὐ φροντὶς Ἱπποκλείδῃ.»
And Hippokleides, in response, said: «No concern [phrontis] for Hippokleides!»
And next, I quote what Herodotus says about this response:
Ἀπὸ τούτου μὲν τοῦτο ὀνομάζεται·
So, it is from this that this gets a name.
In other words, it is from this story, involving the name of Hippokleides, that this story “has made a name for itself”—to say it in colloquial English. As I interpret what Herodotus says here, the story is linked to the name of Hippokleides, since the fact that this preening young man referred to himself by name rather than simply by way of a first-person pronoun is the very fact that “makes a name for itself”—both for the story itself and for Hippokleides himself.
According to Maria Kazanskaya (2015), the words spoken here by Hippokleides as quoted by Herodotus were not proverbial at the moment when Hippokleides spoke these words, and the wording became proverbial only after later writers quoted the same wording that they had read and admired in the text written by Herodotus. Although I agree with Kazanskaya when she says that the wording, as wording, is not proverbial in and of itself, I suggest that the words of Hippokleides did in fact become proverbial, as words, precisely because the speaker of the words linked his name to these words instead of merely linking his words to ‘myself’, which is, as a first-person pronoun “I”, the foundation of subjectivity in language—if I may apply here the terminology of Émile Benveniste (1958). Further, such an “I” is what Roman Jakobson (1957) calls a shifter, that is to say, a shifting reference to whatever person is the subjective “I” speaking in the first person about “me” to a second-person “you” or to a collective second-person “you-all.” In earlier work (Nagy 2010 and 2017.02.09 with reference to 2013 21§§19–29), I summarize, with bibliography, the relevant formulations of Jakobson (1957) about “shifters” and of Benveniste (1958) about the “subjectivity” of language.
I have more to say about the linking, by way of naming, of the preening aristocrat’s quoted words to the name of Hippokleides. Such linking, I suggest, need not have started with the retelling of the tale by Herodotus. The historian leaves room for thinking that his retelling is preceded by earlier retellings that he has transmitted in his written text, so that his quoting of the words makes those words already proverbial.
That said, however, I can agree with Kazanskaya (2015) when she notes that later writers like Plutarch, who lived over half a millennium later that Herodotus, could trace back in time the textual transmission of the words quoted from Hippokleides only as far back as Herodotus himself, and no further back in time. That is why Plutarch can playfully blame Herodotus and no one else for quoting Hippokleides and for even telling a tale about Hippokleides. As Plutarch claims in his essay On the Malice of Herodotus (867b), the truth of the matter is that Herodotus, in telling the story about Hippokleides, who doesn’t care, shows that Herodotus himself, though he claims to be a historian, doesn’t care about the truth: Herodotus, observes Plutarch, might as well be saying οὐ φροντὶς Ἡροδότῳ, that is, «No concern [phrontis] for Herodotus!». For writers like Plutarch, then, what Hippokleides as quoted by Herodotus is saying has in fact become proverbial, and Plutarch himself here is now participating in the reception of what Kazanskaya calls a “ghost proverb.”
As far as Plutarch was concerned, such a tale as told by Herodotus was merely one of many examples of mean-spiritedness that he sees in the judgments of Herodotus as a narrator of world history. As I argue in Chapter 11 of Pindar’s Homer (Nagy 1990, especially at PH 11§4 = pp. 315–316), however, Plutarch in his essay On the Malice of Herodotus generally misunderstands the medium of historiā as mastered by Herodotus in his own time, which was an era when the telling of fables was still an integral aspect of this medium. As I noted earlier, the medium of historiā in the era of Herodotus incorporated a genre of fable-telling known as Subaritikoi logoi ‘discourse from Sybaris’ (bibliography in Nagy 2011 §154), and such fables, as I also noted. were distinct from Aesopic fables in that they featured talking humans as the main characters, not talking animals (PH 11§21 = pp. 324–325, 11§35 = pp. 334–335). And I must now add that such fables served the purpose of a mode of discourse that can be described generally as “mirror of princes.”
But why has this story named after Hippokleides made a name for itself? Here I return to what Hippokleides said as a speech-act in response to the speech-act of Kleisthenes, which had undone the planned marriage: «No concern [phrontis] for Hippokleides!». On the surface, the response here can be interpreted this way:
«It’s no concern for me!»
or
«I don’t care!».
But I find more depth in the use of the word phrontis here. Whether the preening aristocrat meant it or not, the meaning of phrontis is I think quite telling here. A moment ago, I translated phrontis as ‘concern’, which fits the immediate context superficially. But phrontis means, more fundamentally, ‘thinking’, not just ‘thinking with concern’ or ‘thinking with care’.
Maybe Hippokleides did not care. Maybe he couldn’t care less. But there is a more fundamental care or concern here, and it can be expressed as a question: does Herodotus care? Is the narration here by Herodotus, who is a thinking historian, worth thinking about? The rhetoric of fable-making that underlies this story as retold by Herodotus needs very much to be seen in the context of the events of world history that Herodotus is narrating. When Hippokleides missed his chance of marrying the daughter of Kleisthenes, tyrant of Sikyon, the marriage that was lost by the Athenian aristocrat Hippokleides was now won by another Athenian aristocrat, Megakles, descended from the lineage of the Alkmaionidai, and we read all about it in the continued narration of Herodotus (6.130.2). And here we come to a most telling detail: as we read further in Herodotus (6.131.1), the son who was born to Agariste—and thus the grandson who was born to Kleisthenes the tyrant—turned out to be Kleisthenes, whom Herodotus himself describes as the originator of Athenian democracy. Also descended from the family of Megakles, as we read still further in Herodotus (6.131.2), was another paragon of democracy, Pericles.
I think, then, that the story of the failed suitor Hippokleides, as retold by Herodotus the historian, is well worth thinking about—even if Hippokleides, who had made a name for himself as a main character in his part of the story, had no inclination to think about it. Maybe a thinking person who understands fables as mirrors for princes will think better. And maybe a historian who understands the historical context will think even better.
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PH. See Nagy 1990.