Back to the Future? De ontstaansgeschiedenis van een Griekse mythe

This article examines the widely held belief that the ancient Greeks conceptualized the past as lying before them and the future as being behind their backs. Drawing on linguistic analyses of Dunkel and Zanker, among others, it shows that this idea does not reflect an authentically archaic Greek experience of time, but originates in late antique commentaries on Homer – most notably a scholion on Iliad 18.250 and the Iliad-commentary of Eustathius. The key terms πρόσσω and ὀπίσσω, and related adverbs, express, not an ego-oriented spatial metaphor, but a relational opposition of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ within a sequential ordering of time. The article contributes to the discussion by proposing that the misreading of the Homeric formula by late antique and Byzantine scholars may be connected to a broader shift in the practice of textual cross-referencing – a shift reflecting the transition from an oral to a written conception of literary texts, in which the reader’s position, rather than the abstract order of the sequence, becomes the anchor of spatial deixis.