UC Berkeley

This dissertation is a study of the early meaning and epic discourse of the word κόσμος. I argue that the traditional semantics of the word is flawed and make the case that this error has obscured a great deal of the work which the word does for the epic tradition, being the one by which it conceives the whole of its diegetic world. After an introduction in which I contextualize this study as the first step in a larger genealogy of order as a political and aesthetic value in the Greco-Roman world, I proceed to make the argument in three chapters, a conclusion, and a fairly technical appendix.

The first of these chapters takes aim at the consensus view according to which κόσμος, by the time of its first appearance in Homer, has already as its basic meaning something so abstract and universal as our own notion of order. My basic claim is that this view retrojects a way of thinking that, while deeply familiar to us today, does not find clear expression in the Greek world before Plato and Aristotle. I argue that the linguistic context in which the word most often appears, the adverbial phrase κατὰ κόσμον, is falsely accommodating of an abstraction like order, and show how scholars, to account for the handful of cases in which the inadequacy of this translation is clearest, the cases, that is, in which the word refers unmistakably to something particular and concrete, import a secondary sense which has no more place in Homer than order: on the supposition that the Greeks have always thought that order is the cause of a thing’s beauty, they claim that κόσμος comes to be the word for an ornament of one kind or another.

I argue in the second chapter that κόσμος, so far from naming anything ideal, is just the word for a concrete tool or instrument of some complexity, the word for a machine, device, or apparatus which one or more people assemble and put to use pursuant to some end. In that majority of the word’s cases, the adverbial ones in which the conduct of characters is said either to accord or not accord with κόσμος, the instrument in question, I argue, is none other than the world that Zeus has made, the great political machine by which he, as lord of all gods and men, goes about the work of accomplishing his cosmic will.

With the third chapter, I provide a picture of the structure and working of this politico-cosmic machine, and try to show how it grounds all value in epic: one either does one’s part in the functioning of the world and is virtuous, or fails to do so and is vicious; there is no system of values transcending this instrumental principle. Sketching out this picture and arguing this point requires me to involve myself in one of the oldest and thorniest of Homeric controversies, the issue of his conception of fate, which he and his characters speak of using words like μοῖρα, μόρος, and αἶσα, each of which should mean portion, as in a portion of something concrete. Building on the work of R. B. Onians, I argue that these portions are the portions of a mystical thread by which Zeus is imagined to bind and yoke his subjects to perform their respective roles in his κόσμος; there exists in epic, in other words, no fate beyond the inevitability of Zeus’s will. This sketch of the world complete, I conclude the chapter by arguing briefly, taking as my case study an aphorism of Heraclitus, that the Presocratic philosophers, contrary to the consensus of historians of philosophy, were not the first to speak of the world as a κόσμος, and do not even conceive of it as such; rather, when they use this word, they are referring back to the Homeric world-concept and tinkering with it in order to articulate their own novel theories of reality.

I then consider in the conclusion what surviving epic has to say about the nature of epic. If, as I maintain, this is a poetic tradition which admits of no values beyond the instrumental ones that make the world cohere as a κόσμος, what good can there be in epic song? I argue that singers, working under the Muses, are the part of the κόσμος whose job it is to celebrate the κόσμος: the songs that they sing, these κόσμοι of words, are instruments of praise which perform their celebratory function by recording the past operations of Zeus’s κόσμος; these songs have value and are beautiful to the extent that they do this.

Finally, the appendix offers support on verse-technical grounds for a claim I make in the third chapter, namely, that the portion words usually regarded as terms for fate are in fact part of the discourse of κόσμος. I demonstrate that εὖ / οὐ κατὰ κόσμον and the very similar set of phrases built around the portion words (κατὰ μοῖραν, κατ᾽αἶσαν, ὑπὲρ μόρον, etc.) form a single system of metrically diverse phrases which the poet can reach for and use interchangeably according to convenience.