tradition
Although most people today might think that the
word tradition is a reference to things from the past
that are fixed and therefore must be replicated, the
English word tradition actually comes from the
Latin infinitive tradere literally meaning “to hand
across.” However, the same word frequently meant
“to surrender.” The various meanings of the Latin
tradere can also be found in Greek words that
translate as “tradition.” In both languages, the idea
of “tradition” is at once a handing on of customs,
rituals, expectations, and methods of doing things
outside of written documents and a rejection of such
customs or even a betrayal of them. This double-
sided meaning of the word, which gives a truer
picture of what tradition actually is, can be traced
throughout the Western literary canon.
From the earliest examples of literary art, the
issue of tradition can be seen. For example, in the
Babylonian poem Gilgamesh, the goddess Ishtar is
outraged that Gilgamesh dishonors her; to punish
him, she sends a bull to destroy him. This early
example of a god expecting “traditional” behavior
from a human, and the human responding by break-
ing the tradition, sets the stage for conflict found
in nearly all classical and biblical literature. Yet the
idea of tradition implies an appeal to stability, an
unchanging order of expectations and events that
makes human life possible because tradition pre-
sumes that tomorrow will be more or less like today.
If the breaking up of expectations is also part of the
idea of tradition, then one may question when such
rejection is warranted and when it will introduce
chaos into ordinary life.
This problem of tradition—knowing when to
maintain it and when to reject it—is a subject for
political philosophy. Plato’s dialogue The Republic
is structured around an argument in three waves,
each of which contradicts the argument presented
up to that point. The establishment of a proposition
that is then contradicted is very much like the idea
of a word, custom, or ritual handed down and then
rejected by another contradictory word, the basic
meaning of tradition. According to Plato, the wise
statesman is the one who knows when to maintain
a political order and when to initiate a change that
will cause the city to more closely resemble its ideal.
Thus, at the very beginnings of Western litera-
ture, in Gilgamesh and in The Republic, the idea of
tradition contains both a thematic and a political
meaning. A third meaning, of intertextuality, can
also be seen in ancient literature: the relationship
between an earlier writer and a later one. Intertextu-
ality is the influence of a set of written signs on later
literary productions; it is neither allusion, allegory,
nor a collection of earlier sources but a transposition
of elements found in earlier literature and “carried
across” to later compositions to create something
new. The best example of intertextuality is Virgil’s
use of Homer in The aeneid. Although The Aeneid^
is sometimes described as The odyssey first and
then The iLiad, with actions merely lifted from
Homer, in fact Virgil’s transposition of elements
found in Homer’s epics forces readers to reinterpret
meanings and thereby imaginatively create new
understandings from an epic poetic form that seems
“traditional.”
For example, the images on Achilles’ shield in
The Iliad signify the meaning of the war from the
Greek perspective: the city of war, governed by
Apollo and Athena; the city of peace, centered on a
human marriage, with no gods present; around them
plowing, harvesting, dancing, and the ocean. In The
Aeneid, the images on Aeneas’s shield also function
as symbols of the meaning of the battle about to
begin: Romulus and Remus; the Sabines; Manlius;
Catiline; Julius Caesar; Augustus; and, in the center,
the Battle of Actium, which ended the republic and
established the Roman Empire. The implication is
that these images represent the same civilizational
values for the Romans as the cities of war and peace
for the Greeks. Yet the changes in the images on
Aeneas’s shield do more than merely fit a different
plot; these changes affect the audience’s expectation
of the meaning of symbol because the entire poem is
meant to change their expectation of themselves and
their situation after the civil war.
Though both shields contain images important
for each civilization, those on Aeneas’s shield have
not happened yet as far as Aeneas himself is con-
cerned, but the audience knows they have happened
as they show the major events in Roman mytho-
logical history. The purpose of such double-sided
representation is exactly what tradition, in the formtradition 115