Interchapter Query: Chapter 5 - 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
From The Observatory
Interchapter Query: Chapter 5
In Chapter 5: There are 3 mentions of Chapter 8, below.
Note: These are three of the known mentions of Chapter 8 (see this general query) that are (or were) in other chapters (as they were written in earlier edits). Some of these mentions were edited or were cut completely from other chapters but still provide a hint of what was intended to be added to Chapter 8, with your help. Mentions are indicated with code formatting (gray background with pink-color font on regular text, and normal blue-color font with gray background on links). This is an example of a mention of Chapter 8.
First Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 5
1. Most artists were public servants (Greek demiourgoi, literally “workers for the demos”), and as such dependent on the civil state, palace, or temple for their livelihood. Some were outright slaves.[1]
[The mention of Chapter 8 is in the footnote here; click the superscript numeral in this paragraph, or view the footnote text directly below:]
[Footnote text: The blind musician is a familiar character from the Bronze Age through classical antiquity (see Chapter 8). See Samuel Noah Kramer and John Maier’s Myths of Enki, The Crafty God, for Sumerian practice. This spread to classical Greece.]
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Second Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 5
2. Supervising them were various officials such as the choregos (originally in charge of the chorus, later the person who financed it), and the aesymnetes who beat the time for the choral dances. (I will discuss these officials in greater detail below,
and in Chapter 8.)
They were Greek demiourgoi, from the many blind men who were trained as musicians to the metic foreign “guest workers.”
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Third Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 5
3. How they built up their position as ideological and propagandistic advisers is instructive. Minar[2] (1942: pp. 23ff.) described how the Pythagoreans functioned much like political cult organizations (Greek “hetaireia”), a word which also meant conspiracy largely because of the Pythagorean use of such civic cults. They were secret organizations, with their own common meals and other cult practices (
as discussed below in Chapter 8). An allied type of association, the thiasos, was a mystical and secret cult “which quite soon falls into political activity and functions quite efficiently as the ruler of a large domain.” During the rule of the 400 in Athens (and again under the even more dictatorial 30 tyrants), these clubs joined together to seize power.
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- ↑ The blind musician is a familiar character from the Bronze Age through classical antiquity
(see Chapter 8). See Samuel Noah Kramer and John Maier’s Myths of Enki, The Crafty God, for Sumerian practice. This spread to classical Greece. - ↑ Edwin L. Minar Jr., Early Pythagorean Politics in Practice and Theory (New York, 1979, and Connecticut, 1942), pp. 23ff.
