Christopher Pelling Space travel and time travel in Plutarch Abstract: One important insight of recent scholarship has been the importance of fi- guring space ‘hodologically’, as a lived experience as one travels through it, rather than (or, occasionally, as well as) through the vision of a bird’s-eye map. Plutarch’s own use of the Delphic Sacred Way in On the Oracles of the Pythia is a particularly clear and evocative hodological account, exploiting the suggestions of ‘place’ as well as ‘space’ (to adopt another useful modern distinction) to stimulate reflection on the entire course and rhythm of Greek history, with memories of internecine Greek con- flict giving way to the calm of the Roman present: the move from combativeness to more tranquil conversation also mimics this process. The chapter then explores Alexander and the differences made as the narrative moves eastwards and then back towards the west. Outlandish experiences certainly cluster towards the edges of the world, as we might expect, but is there evidence that these generate any change in Alexander himself? The chapter argues that the perceptible change in Alexander’s character has little to do with the east entering his soul; lieux de mé- moire are however relevant, again prompting reflections on the whole of Greek his- tory and provoking the sense of melancholy and even macabre that pervades the final chapters. Life as a journey: that particular cliché began its journey a long time ago. Space travelling is all the scholarly rage. There has been a lot of interest recently in how ancient authors figure space in their narratives; or ‘place’ rather than ‘space’, in the favourite theoretical distinction. Space is a matter more of nature, place of cul- ture: space is what is given us by geography, the facts of the physical landscape; place is what humans have done to it, building their cities and their monuments, en- dowing particular localities with associations and human liveliness. Spaces are co- vered by air, places embedded in ‘atmosphere’. It is important too that ancient texts often treat place and space in a ‘hodological’ way: that is, a journey tends to be described by the impressions as one goes, by visualising each stage in turn, rather than with the take-it-all-in-with-a-single-view image that we get from a bird’s-eye map. There were of course such bird’s-eye maps in antiquity: there is the famous story of Aristagoras wielding one in front of Cleomenes in Herodotus (5.49). But Cleo- menes is bewildered by it all, and it needs to be explained to him. It may be second nature to us to cry out for a bird’s-eye map to go with, say, a narrative like Caesar’s Gallic Wars, or even to start mapping one out mentally for ourselves on to that vague shape of France that we already have in our head. The ancient visualising equivalent would be more like a sat-nav reconstruction, once again seeing place as something travelled through sequentially. (Equally, one should not overstate the difference: if one is asked to describe a journey one knows well, say from one’s home to one’s of- https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110539479-002 Bereitgestellt von | De Gruyter / TCS Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 09.11.17 11:26