1. Introduction
This article offers a comparative analysis of Babylonian and Greek poetry and theology. It focuses on two works: the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer or Ludlul bēl nēmeqi, ‘let me praise the lord of wisdom’, usually dated to the late second millennium BCE, and the so-called Elegy to the Muses (fragment 13 West), probably composed in the sixth century BCE by the Athenian statesman and poet Solon.Footnote 1 I am not concerned with tracing relations of historical influence between the poems or their respective contexts, even though this might well be a legitimate and potentially fruitful line of inquiry.Footnote 2 Instead, I propose to read them together as works of literature and theology, focusing on the ways in which they interweave literary form and a particular interpretation of the relationship between human life and the divine.Footnote 3 More specifically, I shall try to show that in the two poems, shifts in the identity and perspective of the poetic voice play a central role in theological argumentation, enabling the speaker to act out, or perform, a vision of humanity and the divine in a way that could intersect with, and potentially inflect, the beliefs and opinions of individuals. I am interested, in a broader sense, in what this can tell us about the relationship between literature and religion, understood not only – as often in classical scholarship – as cultic or ritual practice, but as a ‘flexible and inclusive mass of beliefs, representations and practices’ which included literary and philosophical texts and approaches.Footnote 4
My analysis is founded on a number of similarities between the two works, not only in thematic content, but in the ways in which this content is approached, formulated and communicated to audiences. Both Ludlul and the Elegy to the Muses reflect on fundamental questions of theology – concerning divine justice, human suffering and the possibility of knowledge and wisdom – within the framework of elaborate poetic structures, marked by sophisticated language and style. In this sense, they operate both as vehicles for theological thought, and as literary artefacts, and each of these dimensions is conditioned by the other; thus, I shall argue, it is precisely their ‘literariness’ that enables the two poems to engage their audiences and shape their perspective, and thereby to fulfil their didactic and religious objectives.Footnote 5
I suggest, then, that the two works lend themselves well to a close comparative reading because – beyond bare thematic parallels, and despite significant differences – they both instantiate, and shed light on, particular modes in which ancient literature and theology can interact, and how this interaction could affect audiences.Footnote 6 As I attempt to show throughout the article, moreover, while the two poems clearly derive many aspects of their formal structure and theological discourse from their respective literary and intellectual contexts, they modify and deploy these in specific and striking ways, so that both may be considered as unique, particularly sophisticated, representatives of their respective traditions.
We shall see that this approach yields insights into both texts, and particularly Solon's poem, which presents interpretative difficulties and has been a source of much controversy in scholarship, with some doubting its coherence and even its integrity.Footnote 7 Yet the kind of reading attempted here also has much wider implications, particularly for our understanding of literature and religion, and the relationship between them, in archaic Greece and Mesopotamia. Thus, I shall argue that analysing Ludlul and the Elegy to the Muses side by side can, among other things, contribute to a reconsideration of the theological dimension of archaic Greek poetry. Further, I shall suggest that such a reading encourages us partly to close the distance, both real and perceived, between the two poems and their respective contexts; in this way, it can contribute to the wider project of re-examining the relationship between Greece and Mesopotamia and their place in the ancient Mediterranean world.Footnote 8 I begin with an analysis of the hymn to Marduk in Ludlul, and then move to the Elegy to the Muses, following which I look at the two poems together.
2. The hymn to Marduk in Ludlul: suffering, salvation and wisdom
Ludlul bēl nēmeqi consists for the most part of a narrative told in the first person by a man named Šubši-mešrê-Šakkan.Footnote 9 Over the course of five (or possibly four) tablets of around 120 lines each,Footnote 10 he tells the story of how he was suddenly and inexplicably struck by a series of grievous evils, before being restored to his former status through the merciful intervention of the god Marduk, which is announced in a series of dreams. In the final tablet, the speaker travels to Esagil, the temple of Marduk in Babylon, where he takes part in a thanksgiving ritual. To some extent, Ludlul is a hybrid of various literary and intellectual forms, which it assimilates and fuses into a highly sophisticated whole. Several of the poem's formal and thematic characteristics – not least its principal ‘sufferer’ motif – are found, mutatis mutandis, in various types of prayers, incantations and hymns.Footnote 11 Its structure is also paralleled in a number of shorter, similarly composite poems, some of them much older – forerunners include Sumerian texts such as the so-called Man and his God and the song of Innana and Išme-Dagan, and the Babylonian Man and his God.Footnote 12 Ludlul can therefore be said to belong to a long tradition; as Oshima notes, its ‘key elements … were already in existence when the poem was composed in the Kassite period’.Footnote 13 I hope it will become clear, however, that Ludlul deploys these traditional elements in a unique manner, particularly in its interweaving of literary form and theological content.
The poem begins with a more or less self-contained hymn of praise to Marduk (1.1–40) which plays a central role in the establishment of the speaker's poetic authority, and has a programmatic function in the overall architecture of the work.Footnote 14 The opening lines are of particular importance in this respect (1.1–4):Footnote 15
Let me praise the lord of wisdom, the jud[icious] god, angry by night, relenting by day. Marduk, the lord of wisdom, the judicious god, angry by night, relenting by day.
Marduk is twice called ‘lord of wisdom’, an attribute which he and other gods are given elsewhere in Mesopotamian literature,Footnote 16 but which is especially salient in the context of the poem. The word nēmequ – much like the Greek σοφία, which is used at Solon 13.52 W to describe the technical skills and knowledge of the poet – may denote wisdom generally as well as the skills and abilities associated with the various spheres of human endeavour and knowledge, such as ritual, science, writing and art.Footnote 17 It has been suggested recently that the word here refers to Marduk's role in the poem as divine arbiter of universal justice.Footnote 18 Yet wisdom is not merely the god's possession; as Lenzi notes, the attribute bēl nēmeqi also identifies him as its dispenser.Footnote 19 The idea that humans receive wisdom from the gods is attested often in ancient Near Eastern literature and elsewhere;Footnote 20 for instance, in a royal inscription – closely related thematically, and possibly also chronologically, to our poem – the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar I is said to have received splendid wisdom (Sumerian nam-kù-zu) from Marduk.Footnote 21 Returning to Ludlul, one may argue that when the speaker praises Marduk as bēl nēmeqi, he is referring not only to the god's superior wisdom, but also to his ability or propensity to bestow it upon humans. In that sense, we might read the opening lines as alluding to the speaker's own claim to nēmequ. As he establishes personal contact with Marduk through his praise (ludlul, 1.1), he presents himself implicitly as the beneficiary of superior insight and skills which will enable him to provide instruction, to ‘teach the people’ ([l]u-šal-mid-ma nišī (UN.MEŠ), 1.39; see below).Footnote 22 In this way, even as he intones his respectful and emphatic praise of Marduk, the speaker discreetly sets himself up as a skilled composer, performer and teacher: a sage whose wisdom comes directly from his contact with the divine.
The nature of the wisdom which the speaker has acquired from the god is indicated already in the hymn, which is dominated by a sequence of regularly alternating verses reflecting Marduk's character and its ramifications for the world at large. Marduk is depicted as a god whose temperament oscillates between destructive anger and saving mercy.Footnote 23 The changing nature of his character is embedded not only in the almost mechanical organisation of the verse (anger and then mercy within a single verse in 1.2, 4 and 33–4,Footnote 24 and then in an ABAB pattern in the subsequent quatrains), but also in the use of images from the natural world which give the lines a universal quality: the shift from Marduk's anger to his relenting is as inevitable as the cycle of night and day (1, 4)Footnote 25 and the changes in the force of the wind and the water (5–7). The same pattern is then extended to all human life: death and salvation (13–14), suffering and healing (21–2, 25–6, 33–6), punishment and forgiveness (17–20, 23–4) all alternate according to a cosmic principle which reflects the changes in the god's temper. Marduk's sovereignty covers every sphere of the natural and human world; every event, decision and action taking place among humans and other gods can be traced back to him. Even if suffering and salvation are outwardly caused by other humans, gods or demons, these turn out to be intermediaries of, or secondary to, Marduk's authority (15–16, 23–8), as nothing happens without his intervention (35–6).Footnote 26 His universal influence is intimately linked to his superior perceptive abilities: he can see what is in the mind of the other gods (and presumably of humans as well), and is thus able to anticipate and control their thoughts and actions (29, 31). Conversely, however, it is not possible for other gods to know the way (alaktu) or learn (lamādu) the plan (ṭēmu) of Marduk (30, 32). That this restriction applies to humans is confirmed by 2.36–8, where the speaker laments the inscrutability not only of Marduk, but of all the gods: no human can learn (lamādu) their plan (ṭēmu), their counsel (milku) or their way (alaktu).Footnote 27
The hymn's final quatrain (37–40) is introduced by a first-person precative (lušāpi, ‘let me proclaim’, 37; see also lušalmidma, 39) which links the passage to the opening lines in ring composition.Footnote 28 The speaker again announces his intention to glorify Marduk, but this time he connects his ability and willingness to praise the god with his personal experience (37–40):
Let me proclaim his anger, I who ate mud like a fish when quickly he granted favour to me, just as he revived the dead. Let me teach the people how near his mercy is. May his favourable concern carry away their [sin].Footnote 29
The speaker himself has been the victim and then the beneficiary of the changing nature of Marduk's temper: he was made to ‘eat mud like a fish’, but was eventually saved by the god's favour. It is through this direct experience of suffering and release, culminating in his being brought back to life by Marduk, that the speaker has acquired the insights into the workings and nature of the divine which he develops in the hymn. He has learned that the evils which strike humans are not the product of arbitrary chance;Footnote 30 rather, they form part of a regular pattern of alternation between suffering and release which is reflective of the oscillation between Marduk's wrath and relenting. Because we cannot, as humans, understand the ways of the divine, the workings of this pattern of change elude us: we cannot necessarily perceive why, how or when we will suffer. Yet the fact – confirmed by the speaker's own experience – that even the most grievous pain is followed by salvation demonstrates the fundamentally orderly nature of the world administered by Marduk. Suffering is an inevitable and unpredictable part of human life, but we can place our hope in the god, whose mercy is always forthcoming.Footnote 31 For this we must be grateful, and the hymn opening the poem – as well as the thanksgiving prayer and ritual closing it – exemplifies the proper attitude to the divine.Footnote 32 By praising Marduk, the speaker acknowledges the god's power and his own corresponding helplessness, and is thereby able to entreat the god to take pity on other sufferers. The way in which we read ḫissatu dameqtu, ‘favourable prayer’, ‘mention’, or ‘understanding’, ‘cognisance’, at line 40 may be significant in this respect. Piccin and Worthington suggest taking it as referring to the hymn itself (as a prayer).Footnote 33 In this way, it would underline the potential ritual efficacy of the poem: the speaker hopes that his emphatic praise of Marduk, informed by his own god-granted wisdom, will hasten the salvation of his fellow humans, and encourage them to follow his example. We might also emphasise the cognitive connotation of the word and its relationship to the verb ḫasāsu, ‘be conscious of’, ‘think’, ‘remember’. Thus the line could perhaps be read as referring to the understanding or memory of the god which the poem will impart to its audience, and which will help to bring it to salvation.Footnote 34 In either case, the speaker, assuming a position of authority and knowledge based on his direct experience of Marduk's wrath and mercy, shares his wisdom with his audience by presenting himself to them as a man who exhibits the correct attitude to the god.Footnote 35
3. Solon's Elegy to the Muses: poetic knowledge and the limits of human reason
The Elegy to the Muses is made up of thirty-eight elegiac couplets dealing with the place of humans in the world and their relationship with the divine. In its diction and thematic concerns, the poem echoes a number of earlier and broadly contemporary works, such as Hesiod's Works and Days and the Theognidea.Footnote 36 An opening prayer leads on to a disquisition on the nature of wealth and divine justice (7–32), after which the speaker turns to humans, their hopes and desires and the deficiencies of their perception (33–62). The poem concludes with a short passage about the power of fate and the gods (63–76), the ultimate dispensers of good, evil and retribution, which strikes clueless humans in apparently arbitrary fashion. The prayer which opens the poem provides a parallel of sorts to the appeal to Marduk as ‘lord of wisdom’ at the beginning of Ludlul (13.1–4 W):Footnote 37
Resplendent daughters of Memory and Olympian Zeus, Pierian Muses, hearken to my prayer. Grant that I have prosperity from the blessed gods and a good reputation always from all men.
The speaker immediately establishes personal contact with the divine, requesting the benevolent intervention of the Muses in his pursuit of prosperity. The presence of the Muses in this particular context appears somewhat surprising at first glance,Footnote 38 but they do play an important, if largely implicit, role in defining the identity of the poetic voice.Footnote 39 By associating himself with them and with their parents, the speaker not only makes a claim to superiority in oral, symposiastic composition and performance;Footnote 40 he also locates himself on a higher epistemic plane which allows him insights into time and justice, the respective spheres of Memory and Zeus.Footnote 41 In Gagné’s words, ‘through his memory, [the poet] brings back echoes of divine knowledge to the world of men in order to make them remember the right path … and to inspire their virtue, their ἀρετή.’Footnote 42 As in Ludlul, the speaker characterises himself as a sage, whose divinely granted skills allow him partially to access higher truths, and to convey them to his audience.
It is this knowledge and memory which enable the poet to sing of transgression and divine justice, as he does following the prayer. We saw above that in the hymn at Ludlul 1.1–40, the wise speaker was able accurately to depict the workings of Marduk's sovereignty; similarly, the poet in the Elegy to the Muses is able to provide his audience with a panoramic vision of divine justice and of its telos (17), its end or fulfilment, which normally remains hidden to humans.Footnote 43 In this way, he demonstrates that Zeus's vengeance (τίσις, 25, 29, 31) – depicted at length in a beautiful storm simile (17–25) recalling a number of passages from epic – Footnote 44 does not strike at random, but operates in a wide temporal sequence which human perception cannot encompass. The pursuit of wealth – in which the speaker himself claims to be engaged (χρήματα δ’ ἱμείρω, ‘I long to have money’, 7) – can in itself constitute, or lead to, transgression. When granted by the gods, wealth can be beneficial and lasting (9–10), but when acquired unjustly (ἀδίκως, 7) and ‘venerated with violence’ ([πλοῦτον] ὃν δ’ ἄνδρες τιμῶσιν ὑφ’ ὕβριος, 11), it quickly becomes mixed with atē, the process combining disaster and the god-sent delusion leading to it.Footnote 45 Zeus, who ‘watches over every outcome’ (πάντων ἐφορᾷ τέλος, 17), sometimes punishes such crimes swiftly (29); yet divine justice can also take its time: sometimes, it is the transgressor's progeny who, though innocent (ἀναίτιοι, 31), pay for an ancient crime.Footnote 46 Retribution always comes in the end (8), and with it the ‘revelation’ of a transgression which had remained hidden or forgotten (27–8):
Anyone who has a sinful heart never escapes [Zeus's] notice, and in the end he is assuredly revealed.
Just as the god ‘reveals’ the transgressive nature of an individual's behaviour,Footnote 47 so the poet can expose what is hidden. Events which seem insignificant or pass unnoticed, and apparently undeserved prosperity or arbitrary suffering, are all shown in fact to participate in the fulfilment of a broader, underlying pattern of divine justice involving the entirety of the temporal spectrum. Like the speaker of Ludlul, the poet in the first half of the Elegy to the Muses can unveil the fundamentally orderly nature of the world ruled by Zeus.
Even the poet's skills and knowledge, however, are not equated with absolute, unfettered access to the higher epistemic realm of the gods. The second half of the poem powerfully exposes the limits of human reason and power (see below); yet this is already a central aspect of the first part, and one which is of great importance to our understanding of the opening prayer. In lines 9–32, the poet is able to reveal the workings of divine justice as if from the gods’ perspective,Footnote 48 yet he does not tell his audience if there is any way to avoid incurring the gods’ wrath. Solon does identify a human fault as the root of divine retribution, and develops it in the mechanism of the so-called ‘archaic chain’ which connects prosperity, greed, arrogance, delusion and disaster.Footnote 49 However, the guarantee that punishment always comes in response to a human transgression, and therefore that the ‘just’ order the world shall in the end be restored, does not provide any security. The problem lies partly in the unpredictability of the fulfilment of divine justice, signalled throughout the passage by a cluster of words emphasising sudden or quick action: atē comes swiftly (ταχέως, 13) upon humans and Zeus strikes suddenly (ἐξαπίνης, 17), like the wind which quickly (αἶψα, 18) scatters the clouds.Footnote 50 The victims of divine retribution, and particularly those who suffer for the crimes of their ancestors, have no way of knowing when and how the god will strike them. Further, the poet's statement at lines 7–8 makes it clear that transgressions are not always committed willingly or consciously:
I long to have money, but I am unwilling to possess it unjustly, for retribution assuredly comes later.
The lines pick up on the initial prayer (ὄλβον μοι … δότε, ‘grant [that] I [have] prosperity’, 3), whether or not one understands ὄλβος and χρήματα as synonymous.Footnote 51 The speaker asks for prosperity from the gods, and then discloses his desire for money, but recognises that the pursuit of wealth is inherently risky, even for the wise poet whom he impersonates. He is able to distinguish conceptually between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ wealth, but there is no guarantee that he will be successful in his bid to achieve divinely sanctioned prosperity; rather, if he acquires or receives wealth, it might turn out to be an unjust possession which warrants divine punishment.Footnote 52 That is why the poet's claim to superior poetic insight and memory is embedded in the particular invocation which opens the poem: he asks for guidance in his pursuit of prosperity, because he knows that it cannot be achieved or be secure without the help of the Muses who, by virtue of their association with Memory and Zeus, possess knowledge about the past, present and future,Footnote 53 and divine justice.Footnote 54 By praying to the gods, and putting the fulfilment of his wish in their hands, he implicitly recognises their superior knowledge and his concomitant weakness as a human being, thereby displaying proper deference towards the divine and exhibiting another facet of his wisdom.Footnote 55 In this way, too, he offers his audience a demonstration of the proper attitude to adopt towards wealth and the gods.
4. Human suffering and the performance of wisdom in Ludlul and the Elegy to the Muses
So far, I have argued that the poetic speakers of both works define themselves as sages endowed with divinely granted knowledge and wisdom, and present themselves as acting out this wisdom in a hymn of praise and a prayer respectively, thereby exhibiting the correct attitude towards the god. In their opening appeals to the divine, therefore, these poet-sages set themselves apart from their audience as figures whose authority is heightened by their privileged relationship to the gods; yet at the same time they include themselves in the collective by pointing to the partial nature of their knowledge, and the universal and exemplary nature of their experience. Thus, in both works, the poetic speaker is simultaneously a figure of superior authority and knowledge, and a short-sighted human who is entirely dependent on the god. In the final part of the article, I shall try to show that this double perspective is deployed more extensively in the two poems, creating striking dramatic effects which contribute powerfully to their respective theological argumentation.
Both works are marked by a major shift in perspective which occurs at a critical juncture, marked more or less clearly in the text. I begin once again with Ludlul (1.41–4):
From the day the lord punished me, and the hero Marduk became angry with me, my god rejected me and went up to his mountain, my goddess departed and moved away.Footnote 56
The speaker moves from the self-contained hymn to Marduk (1.1–40) to narrating the events which took place from the ‘day’ (ūmu) on which the god became angry with him and punished him.Footnote 57 The persona of the poet-sage shifts from singing a universal hymn of praise from his own present, enlightened, perspective, to depicting himself in the past, before he gained a deeper understanding of Marduk's sovereignty. This shift is clearly signalled by the repeated use, from 1.43, of the preterite to depict past events:Footnote 58 whereas in the hymn the poet-sage had been able to perceive the cyclical nature of the departure and return of the personal gods as a reflection of Marduk's anger and his relenting (15–16), at lines 43ff. the sufferer can only see one pole of this process of alternation, and describes it in absolute terms: ‘my god rejected me’, ‘my goddess deserted and moved away’ (43, 44), and so on. From this point on, the speaker portrays himself as a frail and blind human being who can only passively experience events, because any action he takes (including calling on seers, lamenters and exorcists) is in vain. He is a victim of grievous suffering which he will not be able to understand until he is saved. Marduk – whom the audience already know to be the cause of the sufferer's downfall – is not mentioned again until the third tablet; the sufferer of the narrative, unlike the speaker and his audience, is in the dark. From this point until the final salvation, the poet represents his former self as a paradigm of human limitations and suffering in which the audience can recognise themselves, and perhaps experience pity.Footnote 59 In this way, the poet of Ludlul is able to act out, or perform, the process through which he was saved and acquired the god-granted wisdom he displays in the opening hymn, in a way that involves the audience and strengthens his theological authority.
A similar change in perspective (though without the movement from present to past) occurs in the Elegy to the Muses. The opening prayer, with its clearly marked first person singular (2, 3, 7, 8), had given way to an analysis of divine justice from the higher perspective of the gods (9–32). Then, at line 33, there is a sudden shift into the first person plural (Solon 13.33–6 W):
And thus we mortals, whatever our estate, think that the expectation which each one has [is progressing well?] until he suffers some mishap, and then afterwards he wails. But until then we take eager delight in empty hopes.Footnote 60
The poet-sage merges his authoritative voice into the collective voice of humankind and the audience, thereby achieving a significant change of focalisation.Footnote 61 Whereas in the preceding lines the poet had adopted a higher perspective to reveal the patterns of justice at work in the world, he now observes it through normal human eyes.Footnote 62 The concrete ‘reality’ of the gods is replaced by mere ‘appearance’ (δόξα, 34; see also δοκεῖ, 39, 42), which is all that human perception or nous (νοέομεν, 33) can grasp.Footnote 63 The speaker thus acknowledges the fact that although the world is fundamentally just and orderly – as was demonstrated at 9–32 – we, as humans, do not experience it as such because of our limited perspective. To quote Nesselrath, the change of perspective at line 33 exposes ‘the great discrepancy between a “cosmic system of retribution” and humans’ first-hand experience and perception of it.’Footnote 64 Because of the deficiencies of their understanding, humans experience suffering (whether or not it is ‘just’ or deserved) as an unpredictable and arbitrary reversal, the negation of hopes or expectations which turn out to have been empty or ‘light’.Footnote 65 In the rest of the passage (37–62), the poet illustrates this idea with a series of examples of humans thinking and hoping to improve their condition, when in fact none of them (even seers, doctors and poets, 51–2) are ultimately in control of their existence.Footnote 66 He then steers the audience back to the theme of money which began the poem, but this time with an emphatic first person plural (ἡμέων, 72),Footnote 67 and ends by asserting with renewed emphasis that the pursuit of prosperity, like every endeavour, is inherently risky (65), because although the gods grant wealth to humans (74), they do not provide any guidance on how to avoid falling into transgression, atē and suffering (71–5). In the end, Zeus's punishment inevitably appears arbitrary, striking now one man, and then another (ἄλλοτε ἄλλος, 76). Thus, by shifting his perspective from an elevated, quasi-divine vision to that of a first person plural encompassing the audience and humanity as a whole, the poet is able to expose the bleakness of the human condition which forms the dark obverse of the orderly sphere of divine justice.Footnote 68
From the turning points which I have analysed above (Solon 13.33 W and Ludlul 1.43), the two poems’ respective audiences are presented with a mise en scène of human frailty and short-sightedness, achieved in Ludlul by the representation of the speaker's own past experience of suffering and ignorance of the gods’ designs, and in the Elegy to the Muses by the poet's adoption of the deficient perspective of the human collective. These fluctuations in the voice and perspective of the poems’ respective personae create dramatic effects whereby the chasm separating gods from humans and the unpredictability of seemingly arbitrary suffering are performed rather than simply described. The figure of the poet-sage is merged into another persona, that of the frail, bewildered human being at the mercy of divine reversal, in whom audience members can recognise themselves and reflect on their own human limitations and relationship with the gods. The two poems, therefore, deploy comparable literary mechanisms for their own specific theological ends.
5. Conclusion
I have tried to show that Ludlul and the Elegy to the Muses use shifts in the voice and perspective of the poetic speaker to perform a particular vision of the world, in which the fragility and suffering characterising human life are accommodated in the framework of a divine order which, although cruel and impenetrable, is essentially just. By alternating between the personae of wise poet-sage and frail, short-sighted human, the two poets are able to illuminate the question of suffering and divine justice from differing but complementary angles, involving audience members and allowing them access to profound insights into the nature of the divine and the workings of the world. In Ludlul, the speaker, presenting himself successively as a poet-sage endowed with god-granted authority and as a bewildered human being with whom the audience can identify, is able to demonstrate Marduk's justice, and the inevitability of his mercy even in the darkest of times. In the Elegy to the Muses, Solon, combining the perspectives of a poet-sage and of ordinary humans, is able to reveal the jarring disjunction between the essential justice of divine punishment and the fact that humans, because of their short-sightedness and weakness, can only experience it as unpredictable, arbitrary reversal. Both poets also exemplify and act out the correct response to the divine order of the world, which involves acknowledging the gods’ superiority through prayer and praise, and putting one's fate in their hands. At the same time, the comparison highlights a profound theological difference between the two texts: in Solon, adopting the correct attitude to the gods might ensure a measure of prosperity, but there is no guarantee; in Ludlul, the sufferer's salvation provides more concrete hope that human life might be transfigured by divine intervention.
In both works, literary sophistication is integral to the articulation and successful communication of theological arguments. Poetry functions in part as an ‘agent of religious thought’Footnote 69 which has the potential to operate a change in the audience's perspective and beliefs; and it does so in part through the use of intricate literary and dramatic devices. In this sense, the comparison between the Elegy to the Muses and Ludlul sheds valuable light on the ways in which literature and theology overlap and interact in ancient Greece and Mesopotamia. From a classicist's perspective, this offers an alternative to scholarly approaches which ignore or downplay the theological dimension of Greek literature, or seek to exclude it from the study of religion.
A further, more localised, benefit of the comparative analysis offered above is that it yields a better understanding of Solon's poem: reading the Elegy to the Muses together with Ludlul – specifically the key passages where the speaker's perspective shifts – helps us to reconstruct the logic underlying the overall structure of the work, and particularly the relationship between the two sections separated by lines 33–6. Thus, my interpretation suggests that the poem should be seen as an intricate, highly sophisticated attempt to articulate a coherent vision of divine justice and the human condition, rather than as ‘a chain of motifs, entirely devoid of formal conjunctive or disjunctive signals or allusions’.Footnote 70
Finally, the comparison attempted here has implications for our understanding of Greek and Mesopotamian literature, and the relationship between them. The differences between the Elegy to the Muses and Ludlul and their respective contexts should not be underestimated – the former was probably composed for performance in a sympotic setting and became popular throughout antiquity,Footnote 71 while the latter, whether or not it was initially performed,Footnote 72 is thought to have circulated in largely closed scholarly circles.Footnote 73 Yet a comparative reading suggests that they do have a number of common features, notably in their approach to, and formulation of, the great theological questions of divine justice, alternation and human suffering. We might attribute these similarities to shared human patterns of thought and modes of representing the world and the gods,Footnote 74 and to the (related) fact that both texts – like much Greek and Mesopotamian literature – are universal in orientation, largely eschewing strict identification with a precise historical moment.Footnote 75 The comparison encourages us to reflect on what these poems and their respective contexts have in common; in this sense, it offers further grounds to think of ancient Greece – and foundational figures such as Solon – less as a unique, isolated phenomenon than in terms of what it shares with other cultures in the Mediterranean and beyond.
