Early Christian Literature

The aetiological formulae observed throughout Greek and Roman antiquity remain well and alive even beyond the transition from Classical to Christian antiquity. In Prudentius’ Peristephanon 2, the aetion around which the poem is centred provides the site for the conversion of the poem itself and its turn towards heaven, but it no longer establishes an exclusive connection between past and present. It shares this function with typological parallels, which privilege similarity over chronological order. The aetion embodies the position of Prudentius and his fellow Christians in time: still bound to this world with its sense of chronology and beginnings, but already looking forward to the realm of God, when time in its usual sequentiality will no longer count and the true light of God will fully be seen. Orosius, by contrast, uses aetia as textual loci that encapsulate with particular clarity his vision of time and of God’s role in human history. They also become touchstones of faith, since they can only be fully understood by those who can see the truth and the working of God in this world. Aetia become powerful textual occasions on which Orosius memorably instructs his audience about the power of God, his wrath and constant punishment of sin. For him, aetia become part and parcel of his agenda as a Christian author.

Archaic aetia

The aetiological story of Ate, told by Agamemnon in Book 19 of the Iliad, establishes a connection between the crucial moment when the main conflict of the epic is resolved and an important moment of transition on Olympus. While tying the time of men and the time of gods together in a shared ‘ever since then’, the aetion also marks a growing divide between the two, providing a vivid stratigraphy of Iliadic time. In Hesiod’s Theogony, three aetia that explicitly invoke the poet’s present revolve around the central event of the work, the birth of Zeus: the origin of Hecate’s powers, Zeus’ marking the start of his reign by planting the stone that his father Cronus had swallowed instead of himself in the earth of Delphi, and Prometheus’ theft of fire. These aetia create a particularly meaningful present moment: one that testifies to the different types of divine time and its interaction with human time—including the complex model of time embodied by Hecate and the linearity of time introduced by Zeus—and implicates the audience in the stability of this new order of the world. Finally, in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, the aetion of how the lyre becomes a token of Hermes’ and Apollo’s friendship imbues the present with a strong sense of the connection with the divine sphere, even while the lyre itself as the instrument accompanying the performance of the hymn vividly enacts its own continuity.

Augustan aetia

Livy, in his ab urbe condita, makes it clear that origins are subject to change: to growth and development, or to decay and decline. This temporal framework is closely connected with the circularity of exemplarity, of deeds that can be re-enacted again and again. This draws attention to the fact that Livy himself, by writing this aetiological account, also acts in an exemplary way, exhorting his readers to do something similar for the city they see preserved ‘even now’. In Vergil’s Aeneid, the aetion of the Game of Troy in Book 5 brings home the message that what had been spoken as fatum in the remote past is now being fulfilled in the Augustan present. Yet with the so-called reconciliation of Juno, the aetion of the lusus Troiae appears in a new light: it becomes an act of naming that is not to be repeated—a thing of the past. The aetion, ultimately, signals both a strong sense of arrival, while also pointing to the fact that, eventually, time will have to move on. In Ovid’s Fasti, time becomes even more dynamic. In the constant sequence of the days of the Roman calendar, each new ‘now’ constructed by the poet is soon supplanted by a new day and a new ‘now’. However, another axis of time comes into play here as well: the eternity of the city of Rome, which is guaranteed by its closeness to the gods. Aetia form the points at which the passage of days, the time of history, and the eternal power of the gods are brought into contact.

Conclusion

While generic differences between different types of aetia are not as clear-cut as one might think, a more promising explanation of the differences between individual aetia is the period of literary history to which they belong. Aetia, in the specific ways in which they are narrated, are very much products of their time. They are also often told at crucial points of a narrative, and they provide privileged places for authorial self-reflection, both in terms of the larger agenda of a work and in terms of its aesthetics. Aetia are able to negotiate between different temporal frameworks, and their capacity to bridge the gap between the text and the world gives them the power to implicate the present in a very complex set of assumptions, beliefs, and convictions or exhortations for the future.

Hellenistic literature

In the Histories, the fourth-century historian Ephorus engages with one of the central aetia of the past: the story of how Apollo founded the oracle in Delphi (F 31b). Ephorus shifts the emphasis from the continuity of archaic time to the more dynamic time of the history of men on earth. In his discussion of the Spartan constitution and its origin (F 149), Ephorus uses aetia to give a nuanced picture of the interplay of continuity and change in human affairs. Callimachus, in the story of Acontius and Cydippe in his Aetia, juxtaposes the reference to the continuity of Acontius’ line with the eventful history of Acontius’ island of Chios, thus raising the question how stable the aetion can actually be. Rather than the aetiological formula, the beauty of the young couple, made immortal in Callimachus’ poetry, guarantees the story’s eternity. In Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo, aetia are prominent in creating an intense moment of the sacred presence of the god, in which the present moment of the performance is just as much involved as the historical past of the city of Cyrene and the mythical past of Apollo’s deeds on earth. The aetia employed in Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica function as hinges between the earlier foundational deeds of the Olympian gods and the new earth-bound time-frame of the Argonauts, which is carefully measured out in terms of the days and nights the Argonauts spend at sea or on land. Overall, however, the aetia of the Argonautica emphasize continuity and eliminate further change, creating a present that is remarkably stable, while being anchored in several layers of the past

Introduction

The Introduction begins with a brief survey of the scholarship on aetia and continues with an overview over the occurrence of aetia in ancient Greek and Latin literature, showing just how pervasive this phenomenon is and how many forms it can take, and setting the scene for the exploration of aetia from select texts in the main chapters. Aetia are then explored from a narratological perspective: what makes a story a story of origin, how does it relate to the narrative that surrounds it, and what are the temporal and commemorative processes that are at stake? The Introduction ends with a reflexion on the methodology adopted in this study and the choice of texts, as well as with an outline of the individual chapters.