| A supplicant (hiketes) enjoyed a special status. His body was sacrosanct. His requests carried a religious compulsion that made him hard to ignore and impossible to harm without moral opprobrium. In this dissertation I seek to uncover the political uses to which supplication was put, and the economic logic which determined who could become a supplicant.; My two main theses are: that supplication was a traditional, public and dramatic spectacle which could shape public knowledge; and that ultimately an economic logic underlay it. The ritual effected a conversion of material capital into "symbolic capital," in Bourdieu's sense, that is, capital whose economic basis is denied in order to permit it to do social work. The supplicant's worth was ultimately economic. Consequently, the people who would most needed supplication could not become supplicants. Mendicants could not become supplicants because they lacked the capital that was at the basis of supplication.; These theses are substantiated by the subsequent studies. In Chapter Two I discuss Telemakhos' reception of the disguised beggar Odysseus. Telemakhos, I argue, treats a beggar as a supplicant to dramatize his authority to define the status of those around him.; Chapters Three and Four look at supplication in Athenian politics. Chapter Three places supplication in the context of dramatic and theatrical performances that politicians staged in order to evoke sentiment and define public knowledge. Chapter Four suggests a shift in Athenian supplication in the 4th century. Starting in the mid-4th century, supplication also becomes a spectacle regularly staged in the Assembly. This chapter seeks to understand the factors that led to this shift, and what its consequences were for those who performed the ritual.; Chapter Five deals with the supplicants, who, indications suggest, were the most common in sanctuaries: runaway slaves. Scholars have not been able to determine why slaves went to sanctuaries. I argue that slaves hoped to "purchase" a new identity for themselves behind the veil of supplication.; This dissertation, in brief, is a study of the performances through which capital influences the social world without revealing itself. |
