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Lost in lexicography? Kaîros as concept of order

Giovanni Fanfani

Introduction

‘Words survive better than cloth’ (Barber 1991: 260): Elizabeth Barber’s introductory motto to her exploration of the Greek terminology for textile technology holds generally true for her purpose of providing a consistent vocabulary for the chaîne operatoire of ancient weaving.1 But what can then be the purpose and scope of reframing the concept of ‘word excavation’ in cases when, in fact, words do not survive in the Greek literary record – and nor do, in terms of archaeological remains and iconographic sources, their material counterparts in weaving technology? My concern here is with the term and concept kaîros (καῖρος),2 unattested as such in the corpus of Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic literature, and only known from the later lexicographical tradition.3 The lexicographers’ accounts, prompted by the occurrence of a few (rather obscure) words apparently derived from kaîros in Homer and Callimachus, unambiguously connect the term with the mechanics and technology of the warp-weighted loom. More specifically, the definitions offered by ancient lexicography clearly situate kaîros within a constellation of terms pointing to a core operation of weaving on the warp-weighted loom, one that embodies order as both its condition and its result, namely, the setup and distribution of the warp in front of and behind the loom’s two horizontal bars: woven into a starting border, warp threads are arranged into two sets of alternating (even and odd) layers, their disposition on the bars generating the sheds and determining, through the mechanism of heddling, features of the pattern-to-be.4 A first aspect to reflect upon when pursuing the project of rethinking the category of ‘word excavation’ has to do with the nature of our textual sources for kaîros, which in turn seems to respond to the degree of (techno)logical engagement that certain operations at the loom afford and display. Where weaving as site of ordering is at its most apparent – as in the fabrication of the starting border and in the setup of the warp on the loom – language seems to defy its denotative power,5 lacking the clarity of an exact correspondence between object (or action, or process) and term. The dossier of kaîros represents, in this and other respects, a case in point: while the term may have eschewed the register of literature for its excessive technicality,6 its early currency is guaranteed by an elusive Homeric line (Od. 7.107). This means that kaîros (καῖρος) circulated alongside, or is at least as old as, the homograph and abstract kairós (καιρός), a concept (‘due measure’, ‘appropriateness’, ‘right time’) of significant ethical, aesthetic, and normative import in Archaic Greek thought.7 In fact, the intriguing hypothesis has been entertained by a few scholars that kaîros (καῖρος) and kairós (καιρός) may originally have been one and the same word, the different accentuation marking the development of two ramifications of sense (concrete and abstract),8 a further possibility being that the abstract concept of καιρός derives its broad semantic palette from the functions of the weaving device καῖρος.9

Notwithstanding other rewarding ways of investigating the semantics of kairós,10 this contribution seeks to look at the unitary concept of kairos (encompassing both καῖρος and, with due specifications and constrains, καιρός) as instantiating a mode of knowing through and as order that originates in the logic of weaving at the warp-weighted loom, and that, in different areas of Archaic Greek thought, shapes ways of engaging with kosmos and technē – i.e. with complex structures and patterns in nature and craft.11

The argument falls into two parts: in the first, which constitutes the bulk of the contribution, a survey of ancient lexicographical accounts of kaîros in context (including a few elusive καῖρος-related words in poetic passages) situates the term within a group of nouns and verbs associated with the crucial ordering operation of distributing the warp threads on the warp-weighted loom; the second part brings the term kairós into the discussion, and explores areas of its semantics in Archaic Greek poetry where an emerging notion of ‘order’ seems to connect the term to the homograph kaîros and, thus, to weaving technology. The conclusive remarks argue for an approach to the study of the concept of Archaic kairos (καῖρος and καιρός) that, transcending the remit of an archaeo-linguistics of ‘word excavation’, contributes a chapter in some sort of ‘archaeology of concepts of order’ in early Greek thought.

Kaîros as shed bar: modern scholarship vs. ancient lexica?

Barber’s (1991: 270–73) discussion of the Greek terminology for the warp-weighted loom and its parts draws on a reference article by Grace Crowfoot where iconography (especially vase painting), ethnographical data, and literary references are productively integrated with considerations of mechanical functionality.12 One such ‘technological’ remark, triggered by a comparative analysis of Greek depictions of warp-weighted looms, concerns the pictorial representation of two rods crossing the loom – providing the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ shed for the insertion of the weft into alternating crossings of warp threads – and the related question of the evidence for the existence and use of heddles.13 A particular case, though problematic in its representation of shedding, is the sixth-century BCE lekythos attributed to the Amasis painter,14 which has the lower and thicker rod, in the description by Crowfoot, ‘lashed to the side beams’ and having ‘cross ties along it over the warp threads’.15 Just this type of shed rod, ‘with its well-ordered warp threads’ crossed by ties to keep them in place, is the implement that Crowfoot matches with the term kaîros, providing in the notes two fairly vague references to lexicographical sources.16 In adopting this same identification, Barber specifies that kaîros, as shed bar, ‘serves also to regulate the warp’, and is ‘normally bound to every thread in the front half of the warp by a continuous spacer cord, as is so clearly shown by the row of X’s on the shed bar on the Metropolitan vase’.17 Although not unproblematic, the collocation ‘kaîros = shed bar cum bindings/ties keeping the warp threads in order’ may be seen as an attempt, economical and even elegant, at accommodating evidence from iconography and technological functionality – although, again, not in the fashion depicted on the Amasis vase, which fails to account for the alternating (odd-even, in front of-behind the shed bar) layers of warp threads; it furthermore would seem to incorporate at least a portion of the explanations that ancient lexicographers collected on the term καῖρος.

We find, in fact, just a single reference to kaîros as bar/rod in the entire lexicographical dossier of the term: Eustathius of Thessalonica (a major Byzantine intellectual of the twelfth century AD, collector of the Greek lexicographical tradition and commentator of Homer) informs us that ‘it is reported in a lexicon of rhetoric that, of the [loom] bars, the one that is attached [to the loom] under the kanōn is (the one which is) called kaîros’.18 On the other side, the notion of some binding/tie of the warp threads preventing their entanglement features prominently across textual sources (lexica, scholia, commentaria) on kaîros: it might well be the single most distinctive trait characterising the device – to the extent that καῖρος is often associated by lexicography with other bindings/ties/cords (heddles, starting border) at work in weaving on the warp-weighted loom. A synthetic review of our written evidence will eventually produce a few hypotheses about just how the warp-threads may have been interlaced to the kaîros – and why the term so often seems to overlap with those denoting the heddle-leashes and the starting border.

Obscure lemmata: remnants of kaîros in Homer and Callimachus

At the origin of the lexicographical tradition’s engagement with the technical term kaîros lies a line in Homer’s Odyssey (7.107). Framing the verse, in the wider context of the presentation of the blessed life of the Phaeacians in Scheria, is a passage praising the excellence of Phaeacian women in female virtues: they are ‘skilled at the loom’ (ἱστῶν τεχνῆσσαι, line 110), and have been gifted by Athena with ‘knowledge (epistasthai) of fair handiwork, and with understanding minds’ (line 111).19 A few lines before, following a detailed description (lines 86–102) of the technological marvels on display in Alcinous’ palace, household economy is introduced as we are met with fifty handmaids, some of whom ‘weave fabrics’ and ‘twirl yarns while seating’ (105–6); the narrator offers then a glimpse of a further stage of textile production: ‘from the kaîros-woven linen fabrics, moist olive oil drips down’ (καιροσέων δ᾽ ὀθονέων ἀπολείβεται ὑγρὸν ἔλαιον, line 107).20 The adjective kairoseōn (from the otherwise unattested kairoeis, as Eustathius notes) is perplexing on many levels, ^‌21 and its precise meaning seemingly opaque already for Greek lexicographers: whatever its sense in the Homeric line, the term represents a crucial pathway into kaîros. In fact, what lexica do is to provide fairly general explanations or paraphrases of kairoseōn, trace the term to the domain of weaving by clarifying its derivation from kaîros, and collect a number of technical descriptions of the weaving device καῖρος – the last being the material that concerns us the most here.

The Homeric term kairoseōn is glossed by lexica, scholia and etymologica as corresponding to ‘skillfully woven’ (εὖ ὑφασμένων and εὐυφῶν), in turn a paraphrasis of ‘skillfully kaîros-made’ (εὖ κεκαιρωμένων, participle of the denominative verb καιρόω and thus, on its own, of little help in determining the sense of καιροσέων) and of the allegedly synonymic ‘skillfully mitos-made’ (μεμιτωμένων, participle of the denominative μιτόομαι, from μίτος ‘heddle-leashes’).22 The logic of the interpretamentum – the obscure kairoseōn is to be connected to kaîros, which anchors it in the domain of weaving and, in turn, attracts the term mitos, perceived as equivalent in meaning – seems to imply that the erudite Greek lexicographical tradition, from Hellenistic to Byzantine times, had problems making sense of the semantic relation between the adjective kairoeis (from which the genitive plural feminine kairoseōn) and kaîros. Callimachus’ sophisticated allusion to the Homeric kairoseōn in his Victoria Berenices (Aitia book 3 fr. 383.13 Pf., where the adjective is kairōtous), all but confirms the linguistic idiosyncrasy and semantic opacity of the original term: picking up a single-usage word (hapax legomenon) in Homer is entirely within the archaeological-antiquarian practice of intertextuality that Callimachean poetics claims for itself.23 Interestingly, two more καῖρος-derived words are found in Callimachus: ^‌24 in these cases, too, lexicographers seem to suggest that poetic words etymologically rooted in kaîros are to be treated as semantically equivalent to plain hyph-derived terminology,25 i.e., as referring to weaving (hyphainein in Greek) in general. If not a case of generalisation or banalisation on the part of the compilers of lexica, this semantic stretch of kaîros-derivatives in poetic diction could be tentatively explained as pertaining to the domain of tropes: a sort of synecdoche, in this specific case, where a part stands for, or refers to the whole (pars pro toto).

There is, however, a further hypothesis that might be able to account for the fact that Homer’s καιροσέων (and Callimachus’ καιρωτούς) seem to associate the quality of what is ‘the product of kaîros’ – or what is produced ‘according to kaîros’ – with the notion of ‘well woven’; this has to do with the possibility that kaîros may indicate, rather than a specific device or function, a crucial arrangement of space and time at the loom, one that enables the very possibility of (skillfully) weaving: the specific configuration of the sheds, with the crossing of the two layers (odd and even) of warp threads, at the moment of the insertion of the weft, when a physical and temporal opening is graspable. The gloss ‘skillfully mitos-made’ (μεμιτωμένων), collected by Hesychius as a synonym of kairoseōn, might be making a comparable point: a fabric is ‘well woven’ when regulated by the function of mitos, the ensemble of heddle-leashes looped around individual warp-threads and attached to the heddle rod (κανών) to produce the ‘artificial shed’ and, when the kanōn is pulled forward, provide the opening for the insertion of the weft.26 While the hypothesis of seeing kaîros as also a spatio-temporal configuration will resurface in the course of the argument, so much for the semantically opaque sample of kaîros-rooted terms in Greek poetry.

Binding, separating, ordering: kaîros in the Greek lexicographical tradition

Things, in fact, become more intriguing when lexicography engages with the weaving device kaîros, offering revealing glimpses of ancient weaving technology and interesting details about how order is instantiated at the warp-weighted loom. The attempt to make sense of the descriptions of what καῖρος is and what functions it performs in the mechanics of the loom will show that the glosses of lexicographers seem just to conflate the two elements (object and function), often assimilating kaîros to other implements of weaving technology on the ground of functionality considerations.

One possible approach (among many others) to the lexicographical material, notwithstanding the impossibility of drawing any consistent and stable picture of καῖρος from the – often contradictory – interpretamenta, would be to order the glosses around three categories: a) nature of the device called kaîros, b) functions of the device, and c) cases where καῖρος is identified with other devices (often, as expected, bindings/ties or cords themselves).

A degree of oscillation between a few variants of the term (kaîros, kairōma, kairōsis, all equivalent in meaning)27 and between singular and plural forms (in particular kairōmata) – the plural underlying an emphasis on the individual bindings/ties interwoven to the warp threads, the singular on the thread/cord that contains them – is to be accounted for, and not only in regard to kaîros. Other recurring terms waving between singular and plural form are stēmōn, stēmones (with the first, a collective singular for ‘warp threads’, more frequent) and the cluster of terms for ‘binding/tie’ (diaplokē, diaplegma, plegma, syndesis) that ancient lexica so often identify with καῖρος.28 A further methodological caveat before listing and discussing the lexicographical material: given that much of the terminology at stake here only occurs in the glosses of late lexica, and these refer with various degrees of precision to technological realia,29 any rendering of the relevant Greek terms into English will be only tentative – the tool of semantic comparison with literary texts is severely limited, as we have seen for the term kaîros.

Starting from category a) above, the glosses of lexicographers define kaîros as:

some kind of cord or string (Gr. seira σειρά): ‘a cord (σειρά) in the loom through which the warp threads are inserted (διείρονται)’;30 ‘a cord through which the warp-threads are stretched down/descend (καθίενται)’;31

some kind of binding(s)/tie(s)/interweaving(s) (Gr. διαπλοκή, πλοκή, (τὸ) διαπλεκομένον, διάπλεγμα, πλέγματα, σύνδεσις): ‘the interweaving (diaplokē) in the diasma in which the warp threads are stretched down/descend’;32 ‘the interweaving/binding (diaplegma) that prevents the warp threads from entangling’;33 ‘kairōsis is to be called the binding together (of the warp threads)’;34 ‘kairōmata are the bindings that keep the warp threads separated’;35 ‘kairōma is the interweaving in the warp along/parallel to the heddle-leashes (mitos) so as to prevent the warp threads from entangling’;36

a bar: ‘it is reported in a lexicon of rhetoric that, of the [loom] bars, the one that is attached [to the loom] under the kanōn is (the one which is) called kaîros’.37

As for category b), the functions assigned to kaîros by our lexicographical sources can be ultimately integrated into the fundamental one of ordering the warp threads; this is afforded through a twofold action that kaîros exerts on the stēmōn as a whole and on each warp thread:

to keep the warp threads separated from one other and in due order, so as to prevent them from entangling;

the way kaîros maintains and imposes order on the warp threads operates through a sort of binding together and interweaving: the action of plekein (itself a sub-category of weaving) and of crossing and distributing (conveyed by the adverbial dia-).

In the complex operation of setting up the warp-weighted loom for weaving, the ordered distribution of the warp threads – divided into even and odd – is guaranteed by two other devices in addition to kaîros: these are the starting border (from which the warp threads hang down and which can in some cases have the appearance of a cord) and the heddle-leashes (loops of thread attached to the kanōn and tied to every thread of the even or odd half of the warp), diasma and mitos respectively.38

Collected in the category c) are lexicographical glosses where kaîros is either identified with, or its function as overlapping with, that of the starting border and (more often) that of the heddle-leashes (mitos):

kaîros as coextensive with, or a part of, mitos: ‘some call kaîros the mitos’;39 ‘others say that kaîros itself is mitos’;40 ‘kaîros is the binding/interweaving of the mitos’;41

kaîros as starting border: ‘others (say that kaîros is) the borders of the garments’;42 ‘the interweaving (diaplokē) in the diasma in which the warp threads are stretched down/descend’.43

The identification of καῖρος (kaîros) and μίτος (mitos) is especially revealing, as it is capable of accounting for the oscillation between the two in ancient lexicography while also lying at the root of one important modern reconstruction of the nature and function of kaîros.44 A crucial implement for ordering the warp,45 the mitos (‘heddle-string’, a collective singular indicating the set of individual heddles = heddle-leashes/loops, each tied to a warp thread) is attached to the kanōn and exerts its action on (one half of) the warp threads through leashes looped around individual warp threads, enabling the mechanical shed.46 While the ability to pull the warp threads towards the weaver, creating a distinctive crossing of the two halves of the warp and generating the artificial shed, is what characterises the function and mechanics of mitos,47 the heddle-leashes also serve the function of imposing order on the warp threads by keeping them in place. As ethnographic investigations on warp-weighted looms in traditional weaving communities in Northern Scandinavia have shown, a ‘spacing cord’ is chained across the warp, below the shed bar, to maintain an even space between warp threads: in a fashion partly similar to the operation of heddling, ‘a small loop was crocheted around each double end [of the warp threads]’, both those of the half lying in front of the shed rod and those of the other half lying behind the shed rod, with the ends of the two cords ‘tied together around the uprights’.48

Admittedly, the technology and function of such spacing cords resonate with the descriptions of kaîros offered by lexicographers, and provide an elegant solution for tracing the inconsistencies of the ancient glosses to a device that, in its appearance of a cord/string tied to the warp threads via loops, shares characteristics of the mitos and, at least in the practice of traditional twentieth-century Scandinavian warp-weighted loom weavers, also of the ‘heading cord’ – a typology of starting border described by Hoffmann (1964: 41).49 The existence of a chained spacing cord in the warp-weighted loom of ancient Greece is not confirmed by archaeological or iconographical sources – this being an element differentiating this case from that of heddles, whose currency in antiquity may be inferred by a few archaeological textile fragments.50

This being said, the spacing cord hypothesis, forcefully proposed by Blümner (1912: 145–6) and picked up by Gallet (1990: 22–29), seems to make good sense of the lexicographical evidence: however, projecting back into the technology of Classical antiquity, on the basis of technological functionality, a feature attested in modern practices of loom setup and warping (albeit clearly rooted in a very old tradition) may raise some questions. The integration of the spacing cord in the shed bar (the two together corresponding to kaîros), as possibly reflected in the Amasis painter’s lekythos in the Metropolitan Museum, is proposed by Barber, who draws on Crowfoot’s insights, as we have seen. This hypothesis is compelling, despite being grounded on a single lexicographical gloss identifying kaîros as a bar, and on a single piece of visual evidence (the Metropolitan lekythos) locating a string/cord leashed to the bar, itself problematic from the point of view of technological functionality.51

The orientation of this contribution is one that engages less with questions of reconstruction or correspondence of term and device than of exploration of the concept: in this perspective, what the interpretamenta of ancient and late antique lexica also seem to convey is the idea of kaîros as a configuration and site of order, a distinctive arrangement of warp threads in space and time that enables weaving. To make the latter point surface more clearly, a few further elements towards an ‘archaeology of concepts of order’ in ancient weaving have to be unfolded, and the abstract term kairós (καιρός) introduced into the enquiry.

Embedded order at the loom: kaîros and the setup of the weave in ancient Greek sources

One point emerging from the synthetic overview of lexicographical sources on kaîros above is how, unclear as the exact nature of the device may be, its functions are graspable with a certain degree of clarity. They seem to be solidly anchored in the context of the operation of setting up the loom and, in particular, the distribution of the warp threads – which hang from the starting border and are kept in tension by being attached to loom weights – along the two horizontal rods via two systems of binding/tying (one being mitos and the other kaîros) that keep the warp threads in due order, enable the creation of the sheds and provide the basic patterning structure. Interestingly, the constellation of Greek terms for the setup of the loom happens to reproduce the pattern that we have observed for kaîros: lexicographical glosses and a few (again, mostly fragmentary) passages from Classical and Hellenistic poetry integrate each other and shape a picture where some of the terms that we have encountered so far (diasma, in particular) gain in consistency and may throw back some further light on kaîros.52

Barber’s suggestion that diasma may refer to the starting border ‘with the long strings of warp hanging from it’ appears to make good sense from both the semantic and technological point of view, as does her explanation of the verb diazesthai as referring ‘either to the manufacture of the band cum warp or to the long process of binding the band onto the upper beam while dividing (‘shedding’) the trailing warp threads’ (Barber 1991: 271), a notion of distribution that the Greek prefix dia- (from the adverb and preposition διά ‘through, in different directions, separately’) appears to emphasise.53 A closer look at the textual sources reveals that, just like in the case of kaîros, occurrences of the series diasma/diazesthai in the Greek literary corpus have reached us only as citations by lexicographers: in search of an anchoring context for making sense of a terminus technicus, compilers of lexica and scholia revert to excerpts from poetry containing the relevant term. In the case at stake here, namely that of the Greek terminology for the operation(s) associated with generating and setting up the warp, two verbs (prophoreîstai and diazesthai), each with its own specialisation of meaning, appear to cover much of the technology situated in preparing and setting up the warp.54 Here are the facts:

prophoreîsthai (προφορεῖσθαι): the verb, originally rooted in weaving technology, underwent a semantic generalisation/banalisation already in fifth century BCE where it came to mean something like ‘to go back and forth’;55 a hint to the technical connotation of the term is provided by the scholia to Aristophanes’ Birds 4: ‘prophoreîsthai is said to be the operation of carrying/bringing forth the warp to those (women) who set it up (on the loom) (diazomenais)’;56

diazesthai (διάζεσθαι): a fragment by the fifth-century BCE comic poet Nicophon reads ‘one weave/warp (histos) is finished, another is set up (diazetai)’;57 the Suda lexicon, describing the ritual weaving performed by priestesses of Athena together with the two Arrhephoroi (aristocratic young girls consecrated to the cult of Athena Polias) at the Athenian festival of the Chalkeia, mentions the practice of diazesthai the peplon for the goddess, which might refer to the weaving of the starting border of the peplos.58 Diazomenai (διαζομέναι, ‘women who are in charge of the setting up of the loom’) are associated with the operation of preparing the warp, and thus also the starting border, also in Hesychius’ gloss of the obscure term arkanē: ‘the thread/band in which the diazomenai interweave the warp’;59

diasma (δίασμα): as a noun derived from the verb diazesthai, diasma should denote the result of the operation of diazesthai and may refer to the warp threads once distributed through the bars; this would align well with a fragmentary line by Callimachus, collected in the Etymologicum Magnum as an explanation of diasma: ‘if they ever bring forth (propherointo) the diasmata, beginning of the fabric’.60

A scholium to Odyssey 7.107, as we have seen, interestingly links diasma to kaîros: ‘καῖρος is the interweaving (ἡ διαπλοκὴ) of/in the diasma in which the warp-threads (οἱ στήμονες) are inserted’; the best way to make sense of this difficult interpretamentum is, I suggest, to move from the frame of ‘word excavation’ (where terms denote objects) into an archaeology of concepts, open to the exploration of connotations and configurations of words. Both kaîros and diasma may be seen as displaying more than a set of features of physical objects: they share and convey a distinctive notion of order, rooted in weaving technology and embedded in a number of material instantiations (a bar, a cord, a band, a layer of threads) or functions (the binding and interweaving of threads, the distribution and division of the warp) – a notion that we may call ‘order at the loom’.

From kaîros to kairós: archaeology of a notion

Once it is suggested that the operation of setting up the warp, and the crucial role played in it by kaîros and mitos, define weaving at the warp-weighted loom as a distinctive site of order,61 the obscure Homeric word kairoseōn at Od. 7.107 – glossed as ‘well-kaîros-made, well-mitos-made, skilfully-woven,’ (εὖ κεκαιρωμένων, μεμιτωμένων, εὐυφῶν) – becomes increasingly less opaque: καῖρος and μίτος guarantee the orderly disposition of the warp threads behind and in front of the bars and their orderly crossing when the sheds are ‘open’ for the insertion of the weft; it thus makes good sense that the synecdoche ‘kaîros = weaving’ is employed, and especially so in poetic contexts.

In fact, however, the isolated and hard-to-grasp kairoseōn may not quite prove the only anchor to kaîros that Archaic Greek literature has to offer us. The perspective shifts quite dramatically if we are ready to postulate an etymological and semantic association – in fact even an original identity – between kaîros (καῖρος) and kairós (καιρός), with the latter a fundamental notion of aesthetic, ethic, and intellectual import in ancient Greek culture and thought.62 Archaic and early Classical attestations of the term kairós (καιρός) conjure up a concept whose semantics may be, rather sketchily, traced back to the idea of ‘appropriateness’, with the spatial dimension (‘due measure’) predominant over the temporal (‘due season, right time, opportunity’), as research has increasingly brought to light.63

The abstract sense of ‘right measure, balance’, attested as early as Hesiod and Archaic wisdom literature64 – before emerging as the quintessential compositional principle of Pindar’s epinician poetics65 – does not do full justice to the richness of material imagery with which the notion of καιρός is imbued in Archaic Greek poetry. A significant sample of poetic images associates kairós with the mark or target of the archer;66 seeing in this motif the remnants of the material matrix of kairós anterior to the development of the notion of ‘due measure, opportunity’, R. B. Onians reframes and refines the notion as less ‘target, objective’ than ‘that at which archers aimed in practice’ (1951: 344),67 which he argues (drawing on the archery contest of Odyssey 19.573–76, 21.419–23) was for the Greeks ‘a penetrable opening, an aperture, passage through the iron of an axe or rather twelve axes set at intervals in a straight line’ (1951: 345).68 Such a conceit of kairós (‘what is right, the right aim, the right way’)69 is, according to Onians (1951: 345), capable of accounting for a good portion of the semantics of the term,70 and likely to lie at the origin of the development of the abstract concepts of space (‘due measure’) and time (‘opportunity’ as ‘opening in time’).

The next stage in Onians’ argument brings in kaîros and its lexicographical dossier into the picture: just as for kairós, what the technical term kaîros indicates is an opening – that provided by the counter-shed, which enables the insertion of the weft. Lexicographers, according to Onians, identify kaîros with ‘the row of thrums which draw the odd warp-threads away from the even, making in the warp a triangular opening, a series of triangles, together forming a passage for the woof’ (1951: 346);71 the consequence, in terms of semantic interaction between kaîros and kairós, would then be that ‘the use in weaving will better explain the sense ‘critical time’, ‘opportunity’ […] for there the opening in the warp lasts only a limited time’.72 While many of the logical (and philological) passages of Onians’ hypothesis could be, and have been, questioned, the idea that an original notion of kairos (encompassing both καῖρος and καιρός) may have indicated a distinctive arrangement or configuration of time and space, itself an instantiation of the order of weaving, is worth further consideration and it may explain a number of occurrences of kairós where the spatial and the temporal aspects seem to coexist.73

Whatever the extent of the rooting of kairós in kaîros,74 a defining aspect of the semantics of kairós which resonates with ancient lexicographical accounts of kaîros has been pointed out by Monique Trédé-Boulmer: the notion contains a polarity by integrating the two concepts of ‘distinction/separation’ (from the root *ker-, Gr. κείρειν), which in turn produces ‘(right) part, limit, measure’, and ‘junction/intersection/combination’ (from which the temporal-spatial sense of ‘juncture’).75 In a similar fashion, the prominent separating function of the implement kaîros in the glosses of lexicographers – e.g., Eustathius’ ‘kaîros: a cord (σειρά) in the loom through which the warp threads are kept separated’ – is counterbalanced by Pollux’s focus on the ‘binding together-action’ that kaîros exerts on the warp threads (‘binding together [συνδῆσαι] the warp threads is to be called kairōsai [καιρῶσαι]’);76 it is probably worth noting that another weaving implement, the kerkis (‘pin beater’, ‘shuttle’, ‘spool’), embodies these two concepts in its functions.77

Integrating and reinforcing a recognisable pattern of Archaic Greek terms associated with the notion of order, and especially resonating with the order of weaving (two remarkable instances are poikilia and kosmos),78 kairos (as the notion keeping together καῖρος and καιρός) exhibits a capacious and fluid semantic spectrum in pre- and early-Classical Greek literature, one that provides rich material for exploring the mechanisms by which abstract concepts are created. For the present purpose, particularly rewarding is an effort at capturing aspects that the order of weaving – and especially those aspects triggered by the functions of kaîros – may have cast on particular usages of the term kairós. Especially intriguing, therefore, are Archaic occurrences of kairós in literary contexts that seem to engage with weaving – even more so when the notion of καιρός addresses modes of poetic composition, suggesting ways in which order and balance regulate practices of literary selection: the fragile equilibrium between abundance of topics and necessity of conciseness. Two gnomic passages in Pindar seem to do just that:

in the first (Pythian 1.81–2) the chorus caution themselves against excess in celebration: ‘If you should speak according to kairos, stretching out (as to connect) the strands of many things in a short interval of time and space, less criticism follows from men’;79

crucial to the interpretation of the passage is the correct understanding of the verb syntanuein (‘stretch out as to join together’; the verb is a hapax) and of peîrata (‘boundaries, cords, bands, bonds, strands’): it is tempting to relate the semantics of the verb to the function of kaîros as the string that keeps the warp threads separate and in tension (one could say also ‘stretched out’ along the width of the warp) through joining them together (see the series of terms transmitted by the lexica: diaplokē, symplokē, etc.); peîrata should thus refer to ‘strands of warp threads’, and the notation of brevity/shortness/conciseness (en bracheî) may point to the idea of width (many warp threads in a short width = a denser fabric) or to the brevity of the time slot within which, at the opening of the counter shed, kaîros exerts its action on the two layers of warp threads;

more explicitly rooted in weaving imagery is another gnōmē (Pyth. 9.76–79) exhibiting again the tension between abundance of material for song and necessity of a careful selection from myth: ‘Great achievements are always worthy of many words; but to in-weave ancillary themes (βαιὰ) into the structure of the main themes (ἐν μακροῖσι) of the ode is appreciated by wise men (sophoi); kairos conveys the climax/essence of the whole just as well’;80 the occurrence of the verb poikillein (a denominative from the key term poikilia) reinforces the impression that Pindar is purposely suggesting a layer of reading that draws on weaving technology while at the same time expressing a paradigmatic statement of epinician poetics: to highlight moments of brilliance within an abundant repertoire of noble deeds is what a learned audience appreciate,81 and kairos is the supreme notion of order that instantiates such a balance.

Further investigations into the ways in which the order of weaving may emerge in occurrences of kairos in Archaic Greek literature have the potential to enrich the semantic spectrum of the term with a layer of meaning that could bring together the spatial and the temporal dimensions of καιρός, and shed new light on the elusive term καῖρος and its technological implications; in fact, early Greek thought and Archaic Greek poetry represent a privileged vantage point for exploring a refreshing interaction of technology and concepts – and the text of Pindar an ideal terrain of observation.

Concluding remarks: for an archaeology of notions of order

Recent work by Leslie Kurke and Richard Neer reframes the concept of spatiality in Archaic and early Classical Greece as less a question of identifying realia, places, and objects than of exploring the preconditions for the ordering of ‘larger relational fields, the gaps or spaces between things’, which is how ‘an insider’s take’, in the specific case Pindar’s choral song, makes sense of space.82 By refreshingly reconsidering art, architecture and song as ‘crucial technologies in articulating Classical spatiality’, Kurke and Neer resort to Foucault’s considerations on the ‘propinquity of things’ and the ‘common ground’ of concepts as embedding order,83 and reverse his spatial metaphors to claim that ‘conceptual propinquity might cash out as, or even determine, spatial relations’, as they explore ‘the imbrication of concepts and technologies in the emergence of a notion of ‘common ground’ that subtended both Greek song in performance and the environment of Greek cities and sanctuaries’.84

Such imbrication of concepts and technologies is a distinctive trait of Archaic Greek thought, and the semantics of kaîros/kairós a case in point for addressing weaving as a technology that produces and projects concepts of order in a number of domains. Especially relevant for positioning weaving within the epistemic landscape of pre-Classical Greek thought is Kurke and Neer’s characterisation of early technologies of space (for instance geographical maps) as pre-metrological, pre-standardised ways of conceiving of and manipulating measures and distances through drawings and algorithms;85 in a comparable fashion, weaving technology generates order as a pre-scientific (but fully technical) mode of existence through the manipulation of threads as numbers, and by letting patterns emerge through algorithms. It is tempting, in situating such order, to resort once again to Michel Foucault’s preface to The Order of Things, and project his ‘middle region’ – also described as ‘the pure experience of order and its modes of being’ – onto Archaic Greek thought, as in some sense ‘the epistemological field […] in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or to its objective forms, […] manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility’.86

Endnotes

Note on abbreviations and conventions

The following abbreviations for reference editions and modern lexica are used:

PCG: Poetae Comici Graeci. 8 vols., R. Kassel and C. F. L. Austin, eds, (Berlin–New York: W. de Gruyter, 1983–1998).

DELG: Chantraine, Pierre. Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue Grecque (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968–1980).

DELL: Ernout, Alfred and Meillet, Alfred. Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue Latine. Histoire de Mots (Paris: Klincksieck, 2001 [first edition 1932]).

The texts of the lexicographers are cited according to the following editions:

Hesychius: Hesychii Alexandrini Lexicon. Volumen IIa Ε–Ι. Recensuit et emendavit Kurt Latte. Editionem alteram curavit Ian C. Cunningham. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020).

Suda: Suidae Lexicon. Pars III Κ–Ο. Edidit Ada Adler (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1967).

Eustathius: Eustathii Commentarii ad Homeri Odysseam. Tomus I. J.G. Stallbaum, ed. (Leipzig: J.A.G. Weigel, 1825).

Pollux: Pollucis Onomasticon. Fasciculum Posterior Libri VI–X Continens. E. Bethe, ed. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1931).

Etym. Magn.: Etymologicon Magnum. T. Gaisford, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1848).

Schol. Hom. Od.: Scholia Graeca in Homeri Odysseam. Tomus I. Wilhelm Dindorf, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1855).

Schol. Hom. Od.: Scholia Graeca in Odysseam, IV, scholia ad libros η–θ.

Filippomaria Pontani, ed. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2020).

Schol. Arist. Av.: The Scholia on the Aves of Aristophanes. John Williams White, ed. (Boston–London: Ginn and Company, 1914).

Passages from ancient works follow the abbreviations of The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, Franco Montanari, ed. (Editors of the English Edition: M. Goh & C. Schroeder) (Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2015).

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