Catalogs and Culture

This chapter follows different forms of the Greek cultural catalog from the relatively simple (and probably historically prior) speeches of Palamedes and Prometheus to the more dramatically complex catalogs of Theseus in Euripides' Suppliants and the first stasimon of the Antigone. In all these texts, the chapter argues that the cultural catalog seeks to grasp the essential elements of human culture and understand the relationship to divinity. Yet instead of yielding a clear picture of human and divine agency, the rhetoric and staging of the catalogs have a tendency to complicate the theological issues they raise. Finally, the chapter turns for comparison to the “Sisyphus fragment” attributed to Critias, which shows an extreme form of such theological questioning. It also illustrates a major formal difference between the cultural catalog and developmental narratives of human civilization, which seem to have circulated around the same time.