ἦ θαύματα πολλά
Yes, truly, marvels are many …
μάλα γὰρ φιλοσόφου τοῦτο τὸ πάθος, τὸ θαυμάζειν· οὐ γὰρ ἄλλη ἀρχὴ φιλοσοφίας ἢ αὕτη.
This experience – wondering – is very much characteristic of the philosopher. There’s no other beginning to philosophy than this.
διὰ γὰρ τὸ θαυμάζειν οἱ ἄνθρωποι καὶ νῦν καὶ τὸ πρῶτον ἤρξαντο φιλοσοφεῖν, ἐξ ἀρχῆς μὲν τὰ πρόχειρα τῶν ἀτόπων θαυμάσαντες, εἶτα κατὰ μικρὸν οὕτω προϊόντες καὶ περὶ τῶν μειζόνων διαπορήσαντες.
Through wonder men now begin, and once first began, to philosophise: from the beginning they have wondered at strange things which were near at hand, and then progressed forward step-by-step in this way, raising questions about greater matters.Footnote 1
For both Plato and Aristotle, the value and place of wonder (thauma) is clear. Thauma comes first: without wonder, philosophical inquiry would not even begin to get off the ground. As the crucial spark that first stokes and then continually provokes intellectual curiosity, the importance of thauma in both philosophers’ conception of what philosophy is and does should not be underestimated. But it was not in the realm of philosophy alone that wonder occupied a significant conceptual place by the time Plato and Aristotle were writing. As Pindar’s famous, gnomic observation about the inherent multiplicity of marvels cited above suggests, conceptions of and responses to wonder and wonders in antiquity were both multiform and multivalent. In the same spirit, this book does not seek to impose singular, monolithic definitions of what wonder is and what it does in Greek literature and culture but instead endeavours to begin to open up the subject of ancient wonder as a more comprehensive and coherent field of inquiry in the modern world for the first time. Its main aim is twofold: to put thauma on the critical map and to demonstrate that wonder and the marvellous are concepts which we can – and should – take much fuller account of when considering Greek culture more broadly.
The Greeks are already engaged with the marvellous from the very beginning of their literary tradition. Homer presents a world full of visual marvels linked to the divine, from the Shield of Achilles to epiphanic appearances of the gods themselves before mortals. Already in the Homeric poems, the marvellous is linked to transgression of the boundaries that separate the human and divine realms, and also the natural and the artificial. Over time, certain continuities, complexities and differences in the treatment of and responses to wonder and the marvellous in the Greek world begin to emerge. For example, thauma becomes a paradigmatic response to visual art, music and poetry in the Greek world. It expresses the manner in which the realms of the human and divine interrelate with one another. It begins to occupy a central position in concepts of what philosophy and literature are and what they do. It evolves into a central concept in the articulation of relationships between self and other, near and far, familiar and unfamiliar. In the subsequent chapters of this book, these issues and many more will be explored. In the process, texts from a range of literary genres, such as early Greek hexameter poetry, tragedy, comedy, historiography, epigrams, philosophy and Hellenistic paradoxographical collections, will be examined, interrogated and juxtaposed to demonstrate that far from being a tangential concern of the Greek literary tradition, wonder and wonders constitute a constant and central theme in Greek culture.
Beginning with the terms the Greeks themselves most often used to describe and refer to the experience of wonder is one obvious starting point for any investigation seeking to build a firmer view of what wonder is and what it does in ancient Greek culture. By far the most important textual signpost pointing towards the Greek experience of wonder is the use of some form of either the noun thauma or the verb thaumazein, or one of their various cognates. One of the chief difficulties in studying Greek concepts of wonder springs from the inherent slipperiness of the noun thauma, which can refer both to objects which cause wonder and astonishment (cf. the use of ‘a wonder’ or ‘a marvel’ in English), as well as to a more general and often abstract feeling of wonder, surprise or astonishment.Footnote 2 A few examples picked at random make this particular distinction clear: in the Iliad, Achilles describes his old armour, an object which Hector has now stripped from Patroclus’ dead body, as ‘a marvel to see’ (θαῦμα ἰδέσθαι, Il. 18.83), while later in book 18 his famous new shield, an even more impressive object, is made into ‘a marvel’ (thauma) when Hephaestus’ wondrous artistic power makes the glittering depiction of a field upon its surface realistically appear as though it has been freshly ploughed.Footnote 3 In contrast to these uses of thauma as a concrete noun, the Odyssey provides us with a good example of its potentially more abstract use as a noun denoting a general feeling of astonishment or wonder. In book 10, Circe is ‘held by thauma’ when she notices that Odysseus is completely and unexpectedly impervious to her powerful drugs – a surprising and unprecedented incident which has never occurred before.Footnote 4 As these examples suggest, one of the most striking aspects of objects which are labelled as ‘marvels’ (thaumata), or of phenomena which inspire a more general sense of wonder, at least in Archaic poetry, is their visual appearance. This is unsurprising as it is highly likely that the word thauma and its cognates are derived from the verb theasthai – ‘to see, gaze at, behold’.Footnote 5
The appearance of thauma in reference to this kind of feeling is paralleled by the use of another term which is often applied to the effect of the marvellous: the noun ekplexis and its associated verbal form, ekplessein. Words from this root usually refer to a more extreme sense of wonder than thauma – something which Aristotle picks up on in his Topica when he explicitly defines ekplexis as an ‘excess’ of thauma.Footnote 6 This intensification of thauma can often spill over into a feeling of astonishment so strong that it causes both a cognitive and a somatic reaction. Rather than provoking curiosity, thought and inquiry, this type of wonder potentially leads to a stultifying mental and physical stasis – something that is hinted at by some of the more literal meanings of the verb ekplessein: ‘to strike out, drive away, expel from [i.e. the senses]’. Once again, a few examples help to make these specific nuances of ekplexis clearer. In Euripides’ Helen, for instance, the stultifying physical and mental effect of ekplektic wonder becomes apparent when Menelaus – who has been misled by a phantom of his wife Helen and has not yet realised that his real wife was in Egypt all along – finally recognises the authentic Helen and exclaims: ‘you have rendered me speechless with astonishment!’ (ἔκπληξιν ἡμῖν ἀφασίαν τε προστίθης, 549). Dumbstruck silence is also the response which the famous Sicilian sophist and rhetorician Gorgias associates with this type of wonder, as we see in one of his speeches when he notes that ‘ekplexis leads to being at a loss for speech by necessity’ (διὰ δὲ τὴν ἔκπληξιν ἀπορεῖν ἀνάγκη τῷ λόγῳ, Palamedes 4).Footnote 7 The potential of excessive ekplektic wonder to cause a sort of cognitive and somatic stasis which renders thought and speech impossible is something Plato emphasises as well in his Euthydemus, a work which strongly and repeatedly associates the potentially stultifying effects of too much thauma with Socrates’ two main interlocutors in the dialogue, the sophistic brothers Euthydemus and Dionysodorus. The astonishing and stultifying effect of the two sophists’ frequent and often absurd eristic arguments is succinctly summed up by the divergent responses of their habitual followers and those, like Socrates and his friends, who have not yet witnessed the brothers’ wondrous sophistic performances. When treated to a particularly stunning argumentative display, the former group, who were already very familiar with the brothers’ linguistic tricks, ‘laughed long and hard and cheered, admiring (ἀγασθέντες) the wisdom of the pair’, while Socrates and his friends ‘were astonished and stayed silent’ (ἡμεῖς ἐκπεπληγμένοι ἐσιωπῶμεν, Euthydemus 276d). The contrast between the raucous laughter of the sophists’ friends, who are filled with a reverential and admiring sense of wonder at the brothers’ cleverness (denoted by the use of a form of the verb agasthai – ‘to wonder at, admire’), and the dumbstruck astonishment of those unfamiliar with the spectacle before them points to the potential danger of falling prey to an ekplektic sense of wonder while engaging in philosophy, since in this case no further argument or inquiry is possible in the aftermath of the astonishing sophistic display. Unlike thauma, which has the potential to provoke curiosity, inquiry and dialogue, ekplexis thus has the potential to cause a debilitating mental, emotional and physical stasis.
Of course, thauma and ekplexis are not the only lexical terms which may explicitly signpost us towards wonder. Others, such as thambos and agasthai, will appear frequently in this study – though thauma in particular does seem to be the most powerful and frequent indicator of wondrous experiences. Nor is it the case that any of these terms absolutely needs to be present to denote the presence of wondrous experience in Greek literature. But as a starting point for inquiry it is useful (and necessary) to examine the presence and meanings of thauma as a means of initially mapping out the varied range and spectrum of responses to wonder and the marvellous which occur over time in Greek culture and to help avoid the risk of imposing anachronistic modern definitions and assumptions about the range and meaning of the marvellous onto the ancient material. This lexical approach is, however, only a starting point. This study does not depend on the appearance of particular words in any single case, though it has often proven useful and productive to begin with an examination of the use of certain terms across a given work, in order to establish how the construction of thought and theme works in those texts as a whole.
The approach taken here also builds upon the limited amount of work on thauma in Greek culture which has appeared to date.Footnote 8 Among recent studies, Richard Neer’s work on the place of thauma as an important aesthetic term in relation to Classical sculpture provides a particularly important model for my own study.Footnote 9 For the first time, Neer examines the significance of the creation and evocation of wonder in relation to the visual arts and concludes that as a term relating to aesthetic response in the Greek world ‘the importance of wonder can hardly be overstated’ and that ‘[t]hauma is, in fact, a basic and hugely neglected element of Greek thinking about depiction’.Footnote 10 In his introduction, Neer even writes that his own conclusions about the importance of thauma suggest that ‘[w]e need to make the Classical strange again, uncanny; we need to restore its wonder’.Footnote 11 This invocation to ‘restore the wonder’ of the Classical period is something my own study wholeheartedly attempts to achieve, especially since Neer’s work on the place of thauma in Greek thinking of depiction needs to be extended to Greek ideas about all sorts of literary, visual and cultural representation.
This study also builds upon work outside of the field of Classics, where the concept of wonder has assumed an increasingly significant place in critical theory and cultural history over the last few decades.Footnote 12 In recent years New Historicist critics have shown a special interest in the nature and function of wonder and the marvellous in relation to literature and culture. In particular, Stephen Greenblatt, the founder of New Historicism, has picked up on the potential of wonder as a useful theoretical concept which is able to mediate between inside and outside, subjects and objects, and texts and contexts in the practice of cultural poetics.Footnote 13 In his Reference Greenblatt1990 article, ‘Resonance and Wonder’, Greenblatt places wonder at the very heart of his own critical approach, stating that rather than necessarily seeking to approach works of art ‘in a spirit of veneration’ (as he perceives some Formalist critics to do), he seeks rather to approach them ‘in a spirit that is best described as wonder’.Footnote 14 The importance of approaching texts with a marvelling eye is reinforced when Greenblatt ends his article by affirming the place of wonder in the practice of New Historicism as a whole, declaring that ‘it is the function of new historicism continually to renew the marvelous at the heart of the resonant’.Footnote 15 Greenblatt’s theoretical approach to wonder is of great importance to my own study, not only because it provides a new way of thinking about the interactions between wonder and the effect of literature, but also because his work on wonder as a theoretical concept bears a complicated relation to the concept of wonder in antiquity which has not thoroughly been probed before. The year after the publication of ‘Resonance and Wonder’, Greenblatt returned to the place of wonder in both New Historicism and Western culture in his Reference Greenblatt1991 monograph Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. In this work, he focuses on the integral place of the marvellous in European responses to the New World, exploring how and why ‘[w]onder is … the decisive emotional and intellectual experience in the presence of radical difference’.Footnote 16 The influence of textual accounts of marvels from antiquity over later European responses to people and cultures perceived as radically other is drawn out at several points in Greenblatt’s study.Footnote 17 In particular, Herodotus’ Histories is named as the key text which ‘had instituted certain key discursive principles that the many subsequent attacks on his veracity and the ensuing oblivion did not displace’.Footnote 18 Greenblatt sketches out the importance of Herodotus as the figurehead of a long tradition of historiographical responses to the marvellous by drawing heavily on the work of François Hartog, in particular his Reference Hartog1980 monograph Le miroir d’Hérodote.Footnote 19 As the editor of the University of California Press series The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics, in which the English translation of Le miroir d’Hérodote first appeared, Greenblatt was well aware of Hartog’s pioneering approach to the concept of wonder in Herodotus’ Histories even as he conducted his own study of Renaissance attitudes towards wonder, and he is correct when he adduces that ‘Herodotus is at once a decisive shaping force and a very marginal figure’ in Marvelous Possessions.Footnote 20 But Herodotus is not the only pivotal figure in the development of a discourse of the Greek marvellous in antiquity, and the historiographer’s own attitude to marvels is itself shaped by a complex tradition relating to wonder which must be examined in more detail. It is one of the aims of this book to fill in some of the gaps left in this vision of the influence of ancient discourses of wonder on later approaches to wonder and the marvellous.Footnote 21
It is therefore because of the special place which wonder holds in recent historicising approaches to literature, and because of the influence which responses to the marvellous in antiquity go on to have on later responses to marvels and the marvellous, that a thorough examination of the place of thauma in the Greek world from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period is long overdue. My own double-edged interest in both the cultural poetics of Greek wonder and Greek wonder’s place in the practice not only of cultural poetics but in subsequent discourses of the marvellous more generally, will hopefully be clear throughout. But this is not my only focus; one of the most attractive aspects of working on the relationship between the marvellous and texts in antiquity is the fact that wonder is a concept that mediates between formalist and historicist approaches to literature.Footnote 22 One particular idea which I return to and re-examine through the lens of Greek wonder is Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of ‘defamiliarisation’, first outlined in his influential Reference Shklovsky, Lemon and Reis1916 essay ‘Art as Technique’. Shklovsky’s claim, in its broadest terms, is that ‘[t]he technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar’, due to the fact that over time our day-to-day perception becomes habitual and automatic, rendering objects overfamiliar and unremarkable.Footnote 23 In other words, the strangeness and wonder of objects is deadened over time, and it becomes the task of the artist to ‘reactivate’ these feelings in the reader, listener or viewer. It is this artistic phenomenon of ‘making the familiar seem strange again’ that Shklovsky calls ‘defamiliarisation’. He turns to Aristotle as a significant antecedent to his own ideas about the defamiliarisation effects which occur on a lexical level in poetry when he notes that ‘[i]n studying poetic speech … we find material obviously created to remove the automatism of perception … According to Aristotle, poetic language must appear strange and wonderful.’Footnote 24 Shklovsky is referring here to Aristotle’s comments at Rhetoric 1404b8–14 on the necessity of ‘making language strange’ (δεῖ ποιεῖν ξένην τὴν διάλεκτον) because such language provokes wonder, and ‘the wondrous is pleasurable’ (ἡδὺ δὲ τὸ θαυμαστόν). In this book, I probe the significant connection between defamiliarisation and wonder which Shklovsky hints at here, demonstrating that in antiquity there was a firm interest not only in the creation of defamiliarisation effects but in what I have termed ‘refamiliarisation’ effects as well: that is, making what is unfamiliar and wondrous actually seem extremely familiar.Footnote 25
This book is therefore an attempt both to outline the significance of thauma in Greek culture from the Archaic period onwards and to provide a history of early conceptualisations of the connection between wonder and literature which may be useful when considering the impact of wonder as a literary-critical and cultural concept in later periods and contexts. The study focuses predominantly on Greek literary texts from the early Greek hexameter tradition to the early Hellenistic period. Since it is impossible to begin to make sense of subsequent attitudes towards thauma without examining the associations carried by the marvellous from the early Greek hexameter tradition onwards, the Homeric poems are the earliest texts which are examined here with thauma in mind. The chronological end point of the study lies in the early Hellenistic period, with the emergence of a new and very different type of text: the paradoxographical collection. These texts are marvel-collections which attempt to astonish the reader through the juxtaposition of canonical literary texts of the past with contemporary scientific writing: they represent the first purely textual collections of Greek marvels which seemingly exist for no other purpose than causing the reader to wonder. Rather than following a strictly chronological arrangement, I instead take my cue in this book from the Greek paradoxographers by working thematically, deliberately juxtaposing texts from different contexts and genres and placing them in dialogue with one another to explore evolving continuities and ruptures in the discursive use and resonance of the marvellous over time. In this sense, the book enacts, in the form and arrangement of its chapters and themes, one of its own central discoveries concerning the aesthetic and emotional resonance of thauma as a concept in ancient literature and culture. It is an experiment in reading and writing ‘thaumatically’ through the juxtaposition of texts from previously disparate genres and periods in order to create unexpected connections, startling discontinuities and radical new perspectives.
The book falls into two main parts (Chapters 2 to 4, and Chapters 5 to 7). Chapters 2 to 4 concentrate on the varied ways in which a poetics of wonder is created and articulated in Greek literature, and explore the sustained development of thauma as a model for aesthetic response from the Archaic to the early Hellenistic period. Thauma is shown to be a paradigmatic response to visual art, music and poetry in Greek culture which is particularly associated with moments when the boundaries between humans and gods, inside and outside, and familiar and unfamiliar collapse. While thauma begins as a response to overwhelming visual stimuli, it rapidly comes to serve as a model for all manner of aesthetic responses, whether to the size of an impressive building, the movement of a tragic chorus, a mythical or geographical narrative, or a particularly beautiful performance of music or poetry.
In Chapter 2 (‘The Art of Thauma: Nature, Artifice and the Marvellous’) the complicated relationship between visual, verbal and textual wonder and wonders is explored. The chapter begins with a case study of Plato’s Charmides, a dialogue which demonstrates the complicated uses of thauma as a term of aesthetic response by the beginning of the fourth century BCE. In this dialogue the boundaries between the inanimate and animate are blurred as the beautiful Charmides is compared to a wonder-inspiring statue. The marvellous effect of Charmides’ beauty is emphasised in a way which allows Plato to draw out the potentially dangerous results of falling under the influence of visual spectacles which leave the observer open to the potentially stultifying and misleading effects of thauma. The power of thauma in the phenomenal realm is one of Plato’s prime concerns regarding wonder, and one which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 7. Here, however, Plato’s concerns about thauma provide a means of thinking about the strong connection between thauma and the visual, a connection which is particularly significant when the place of thauma in the tradition of poetic ekphrasis is considered. By their very nature, passages of ekphrastic description highlight tensions between the verbal and the visual and are often replete with the language of wonder. By concentrating on the relationship between ekphrasis and thauma from Homer onwards, it is also possible to see more clearly the transition from the conception of a marvel as a purely visual object or as an oral report to the sense of a marvel as something which is written down.
Chapter 3 (‘Reading Thauma: Paradoxography and the Textual Collection of Marvels’) turns to examine the way in which thauma gradually becomes an aesthetic response to purely literary form by re-examining the purpose and poetics of Hellenistic paradoxographical collections. The range, scope, generic roots and cultural context of paradoxographical collections are thoroughly reassessed to demonstrate that the production of such texts can be seen as a textual manifestation of a new and increasingly influential interest of Hellenistic monarchs in the collection of objects which inspire thauma. The relationships between paradoxography, previous traditions of Greek ethnographic writing and contemporary Peripatetic scientific writing are outlined. Herodotus’ treatment in the Histories of the marvels associated with the distant edges of the earth is examined as a case study to demonstrate that Greek ethnographic writing exerted particular influence over the precise form Hellenistic paradoxographical collections came to take. The influence of Peripatetic writing on early Hellenistic paradoxography is also examined, as are the extensive and hitherto underappreciated links between this mode of writing and various contemporary Hellenistic poetic genres.
Chapter 4 (‘The Sound of Thauma: Music and the Marvellous’) begins by examining certain aspects of Hellenistic paradoxography’s engagement with the poetry and music of the past, before turning to the significance of thauma in ancient conceptions of music, choral song and dance more generally. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes is examined as a case study in which the rich relationship between music, semata (signs) and thauma in the Greek imagination is particularly evident. The essential role of thauma in ancient religious thought as an effect which often accompanies epiphanic encounters between gods and humans is examined, as is the association of thauma with the collapse of strict boundaries between the realms of mortal and immortal, something that in the Archaic oral culture takes place especially within the ritual space created by song-performance, as the effects of music, dance and song allow the ritual space of performance to become for mortals, temporarily at least, equivalent to the kind of marvellous utopian existence available to the gods at all times on Olympus. This chapter outlines how Greek texts explore these effects of thauma from the Odyssey onwards and concludes with two further case studies, one on the thaumatic impact of the choreia of the Delian Maidens in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and one on the Apollonian epiphany of Arion in Herodotus’ Histories.
In Chapters 5 to 7, I build on the understanding of thauma as a category of experience outlined in the first three chapters by narrowing my focus and examining the significance of wonder and the marvellous in texts of the late Classical period to demonstrate that by the late fifth century BCE thauma was a vital concept in the articulation of encounters between the Greek and wider, non-Greek worlds, between the human and the divine, and between the natural and the artificial. These chapters also explore how ideas about the causes and effects of wonder began to shift along with various other boundaries of contemporary intellectual discourse. As a result, in various literary genres over the course of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE in Classical Athens, a distinctive rhetoric of wonder and the marvellous developed which established thauma not only as an instinctive reaction to difference but also as something which can be found closer to home. As thauma increasingly becomes a means of defamiliarising experience, of making the familiar strange again and worthy of renewed attention, we find, over the course of the Classical period, the development of a new and deeply ambivalent attitude towards wonder and its effects.
Chapter 5 (‘The Experience of Thauma: Cognition, Recognition, Wonder and Disbelief’) begins to map out the increasingly complicated status of thauma in the intellectual discourse of late fifth-century Athens by focusing on connections between thauma and concepts of cognition, recognition, belief and disbelief in that quintessentially Athenian genre: tragedy. After considering the relationship between thauma and recognition in Homer as a means of contextualising the interpretation of thauma and ekplexis as emotional and cognitive responses to scenes of anagnorisis in Athenian tragedy – a connection which Aristotle outlines in the Poetics – the chapter turns to Athenian tragedy itself and to the plays of Euripides in particular. The nature of thauma and its effects in Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians and Ion are examined to explore and illustrate the playwright’s interest in the potential of the tragic recognition scene to raise questions concerning the nature of thauma and (dis)belief in relation to broader questions of the contemporary relevance of the mythic tradition itself.
In these case studies of Iphigenia among the Taurians and Ion, another significant aspect of the way in which thauma is configured as a category of experience in this period is brought to the fore: wonder is something which is able to render the unfamiliar familiar and the familiar unfamiliar, in ways which destabilise boundaries and cultural oppositions that were previously clearly drawn. In Chapter 6 (‘Near and Distant Marvels: Defamiliarising and Refamiliarising Thauma’) the significance of this dynamic and its effects in texts from the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE is outlined in greater detail. In texts which comment upon Athens’ increasing imperial power during this period, it is notable that one way of expressing and implicitly interrogating Athenian dominance is by representing Athenian customs, practices, objects and people as somehow wondrous, and suggesting that the city of Athens herself may now be the greatest ‘marvel’ of all. The ambivalent attitudes which this new concept of specifically Athenian thauma provoked are explored further by concentrating on the place of marvels and the marvellous in Aristophanes’ Birds and Thucydides’ History.
In the Birds, Aristophanes approaches his contemporary society with the estranging eye of an ethnographer in order to defamiliarise the everyday world of Athens and potentially nudge the audience towards a reassessment of their place in the world. In doing so he picks up on the importance of the theme of distant wonders and untold riches at the edges of the earth in Athenian public discourse, hinting particularly at their capacity to incite a dangerous and over-daring sense of desire (eros) for imperial conquest – an issue which was in the air at the moment of the play’s first production in 414 BCE in relation to Athens’ campaign against Sicily. In his account of the Sicilian expedition Thucydides subjects the same idea – the place of thauma within the discourse of imperial Athens – to an even more brutal and disillusioned scrutiny. Whereas Aristophanes’ Birds hints at the potentially dangerous and deceptive power of marvels and the marvellous, Thucydides’ History emphasises this aspect of thauma much more strongly, explicitly showing the results of wonder’s ability to skew strategic perspectives and perceptions. As this chapter demonstrates, this potentially misleading aspect of thauma is, as the late fifth century turns into the fourth, attributed above all else to the power of language over its hearers. In both of these works, it is perhaps that most Athenian of all man-made products, rhetoric, which is now able to wield the greatest thaumatic power.
The idea that linguistic and artistic thauma may be double-edged, potentially deceptive or dangerous is explored further in Chapter 7 (‘Making Marvels: Thaumatopoiia and Thaumatourgia’). This chapter returns to the important and often ambivalent place of thauma in Plato’s dialogues and assesses the significance of conceptions of wonder as an affective and cognitive effect on individuals and collective audiences, especially in relation to mimetic artistic representations. The famous Cave Allegory in Plato’s Republic illustrates particular anxieties surrounding the manipulation of wonder: it is the very displays of shadowy marvels (thaumata) made by men who are described as being like thaumatopoioi (marvel-makers) that are said to captivate and mislead the bound prisoners. This chapter offers a new reading of this famous philosophical passage through the lens of thauma in an effort to open up new perspectives on both the Republic and Plato’s broader conception of what philosophy is and what it does. Moreover, a comprehensive overview of the evidence for thaumatopoiia/thaumatourgia (marvel-making/wonder-working), a specific form of Greek performance tradition, is presented here for the first time, as well as an examination of the power of thauma and thaumatopoiia in a philosophical text which offers an alternative yet complementary viewpoint on conceptions of the power of thauma and its relation to the formation of philosophy as a discourse in this period: Xenophon’s Symposium. The book then ends with a concluding epilogue consisting of three diverse case studies which both sum up many of the main continuities and differences in the treatment of thauma in Greek literature and culture from Homer to the early Hellenistic period and simultaneously point towards some further directions for the study of wonder in antiquity and beyond.
As this summary suggests, texts from many different genres are purposefully brought into dialogue with one another throughout this book. As the practice of the paradoxographers makes clear, the wondrous ability of texts to relate to each other and to talk with each other both backwards and forwards is one of the key ways in which the creation of a sense of wonder is itself created, as marvels became textualised and transformed into a sort of written Wunderkammer. It is in this respect that this book most truly embodies one of the key discursive practices connected with thauma in the period with which this study concerns itself: it is difficult to talk about thauma without slipping to some extent into the poetics of Greek wonder.
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