Bryn Mawr Classical Review

2010.03.43

2010-03-20T10:27:00.001-04:00

Version at BMCR home site
Margarita Gleba, Textile Production in Pre-Roman Italy. Ancient Textiles Series 4. Oxford/Oakville, CT: Oxbow Books, 2008. Pp. xxv, 269. ISBN 9781842173305. $70.00.
Reviewed by Anthony Tuck, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Preview

Were one to construct a Venn Diagram of archaeologists interested in Pre-Roman Italy and scholars of ancient textiles, the resulting union would be, to say the least, rather intimate. The relative scarcity of scholarship on textiles and their production is curious since the evidence is abundant and the implications of that evidence are profound. Yet in spite of the relative inattention given to the materials associated with textile production in early Italy in the past, this volume manages to compile and synthesize a remarkable amount of data, frequently collected and preserved in publications and excavation storerooms, but often somewhat neglected in the interpretative framework of the sites from which that evidence comes. Textile Production in Pre-Roman Italy, a maturation of a Bryn Mawr Ph. D. treatment of the same subject, is a foundational effort that fills an important void in our understanding of this ubiquitous industry of the ancient world.

Gleba's volume differs from works that have considered the region's textiles in the past, such as L. Bonfante's Etruscan Dress (Johns Hopkins 2003), in that her concern is not with costume and the functions of social identity it creates, but rather with the textiles themselves and their modes of manufacture. The volume shares much with more broadly conceived studies such as E. Barber's Prehistoric Textiles (Princeton 1992). However, Gleba's narrower focus allows for a considerably deeper and more nuanced consideration of the social and industrial circumstances of textile manufacture in Italy during this period and thus will prove to be essential for future consideration of the subject and others to which it is related throughout the region.

The volume consists of seven sections, the topical range of which reflects the challenge the author details in her introduction: conceiving of a volume that satisfies the interest of scholars of textiles --unfamiliar with the archaeology and topography of early Italy-- and of those of early Italy -- unfamiliar with the technical processes of textile manufacture. As a result of this structural difficulty, a few elements of the book are necessarily somewhat simplistic for experts in Italian prehistory while others are rather perfunctory for people already versed in the language and mechanics of textiles. This minor reservation is quickly rendered irrelevant when one considers the scope of the enterprise and its role in filling a long neglected void in the scholarship of the region.

Part 1: Geographical and Chronological Context

This chapter is largely for the benefit of scholars interested in textiles as Gleba briefly breaks down the nomenclature associated with the various cultural phases of Italic development from the Bronze Age onward. The importance of this chapter becomes apparent throughout the subsequent sections of the volume, as the author presents data from a wide range of sites and across a broad chronological spectrum, causing some degree of potential confusion for scholars unfamiliar with the archaeology of the region. The chapter concludes with a critical note, pointing out that the roughly six centuries of evidence considered fall within the chronological spectrum of other profound sociopolitical shifts occurring in Italy. In so doing, the 'quick and necessarily uneven overview' pays the dividend of placing textile manufacturing squarely within the dynamic and rapidly evolving cultural framework of the peninsula, even as those cultural processes impact various regions differently.

Part: 2: Sources

Given the implicit difficulty of a survey of an artifact type that only rarely survives in the archaeological record, this section reflects the resourcefulness and careful data collection of the author. Here, Gleba briefly surveys the scant references in the ancient literary record to the craft of weaving but cautions against an over-dependence on such sources given their chronological discrepancy with her subject and the frequent misunderstanding of the technologies involved on the part of the ancient authors themselves. In expanding the available pool of data, Gleba appeals to sources such as representation of textiles and garments from the painted tombs of Etruscan Tarquinia or the depictions of looms on a range of other types of artifacts. She notes, however, that the most obvious and well preserved source of information concerning textile production is paradoxically only rarely explored: the physical equipment of textile manufacturing and the rare instances where textiles themselves are preserved.

In much the same way as Chapter 1 is largely for the benefit of textile scholars unfamiliar with Italic Archaeology, this section will likely benefit scholars of Early Italy who have yet fully to consider how such types of evidence can be utilized to better understand the nature and role of textile production in these early Italic communities.

Part 3: Fibres and Textiles

The complete textile is the sum of the technologies and activities of its making. In this section, Gleba provides a representative catalogue of examples of surviving textiles, mineral preserved organic pseudomorphs and textile impressions of this period of interest. Total numbers are impressive despite archaeological and climatic conditions that are usually unfavorable to the preservation of such materials. The remainder of the chapter integrates this catalogue into historical and archaeological sources for fibers, dyes and uses of finished textiles. While some elements of this survey depend on logical inference rather than direct evidence, the total weight of the argument serves to remind us that the ubiquity of such cloth underscores the enormous economic and social significance of the industry and its practitioners throughout the period.

Part 4: Techniques and Tools

This section begins with a brief treatment concerning the processing of fibers that, like the preceding part, is based on plausible inference as much as on direct evidence. However, Gleba quickly moves into an arena where the abundantly surviving implements associated with spinning and weaving have long been collected but rarely analyzed effectively. It is here that the thoroughness of her review truly begins to reward the reader. The dizzying array of whorl types, spool forms, weights, clasps and spacers reflects not the creativity in the manufacture of these artifacts, but rather the diversity and range of possible applications of them in the textile and garment industry. The wealth of surviving evidence associated with textile manufacturing is sufficient to conclude that the population of so many communities of pre-Roman Italy not only produced cloth in a variety of forms, but consented to committing an enormous amount of time and energy to the task.

Part 5: Contexts

This section rises above the details of specific evidence to consider the overall environment in which textiles are produced. As with the categories detailed above, textile-related materials, when given meaningful consideration in past publication, were treated in a manner that all too often lacks sufficient standardization. Even with the site of Poggio Civitate, which is sufficiently well preserved to allow Gleba to construct a case study of textile manufacture, important details such as relative weight of spindle whorls and loom weights are not readily available to scholars. In this case study, however, she notes that the remarkable volume of spools and spindle whorls stands in stark contrast to the relatively small number of loom weights, suggesting that one of the major commercial enterprises of the site involved not the production of textiles, but rather of thread. This observation, among many others throughout the volume, raises some provocative questions concerning the nature of the primitive economies in which these early settlements operated. The section then considers the funerary and votive contexts in which textile implements are also found. It also posits broader questions about the various kinds of textile production demonstrated by the evidence presented earlier and their relationship to the social status of the women engaged in them. From the daily practice of textile manufacture, we see the emergence and expression of community structure, of social organization and the careful negotiations of gendered behaviors among the various actors of these communities.

Part 6: Technology: Production and Trade

Here, Gleba details the evolution of textile manufacture from a limited, subsistence based craft enterprise into one of significant economic importance to communities of the Late Iron Age and Archaic periods. However, it is also here that the direct evidence for precisely how technologically associated forms of textile production moved between communities becomes especially ephemeral. Trade and exchange in textiles as commodities in their own right are certainly likely, but the movement of materials and fashions may equally be an effect of small- scale population movement or intermarriage between communities that provokes changes in both the technology and the products of that technology within the communities that receive them. It is here that we reach the limits of evidence, but certainly not the implications of what we do possess. One of the great virtues of a study such as this is the manner in which it compels us to consider the complexities not just of settlements in general but of their constituent households and the role of women within the economic dynamic of the domus.

Part 7: Coda: Textile Production in its Social Context

This brief but satisfying final section concludes by noting again the parallel trajectories of the development of technologies associated with textile manufacture and that of the urbanizing social systems in which they flourished. No form of manufacturing is more closely connected to the ancient household of Italy than spinning and weaving and it stands to reason that the physical and socio-political evolution of that domestic space would affect and direct the nature of textile manufacturing. Gleba however is also right to argue that, even though our evidence is sometimes difficult to comprehend fully, textile manufacturing likely played an important role in economic networks far greater than those of the domestic sphere and factored into ritual circumstances that marked social status and elite behaviors within these developing communities.

This is an essential book. It is every bit as illuminating in its small details as it is in its broad scope. Through a focused presentation of all available forms of evidence, the full stature and importance of textile manufacturing in ancient Italy are made abundantly clear. Gleba constructs a clear methodology for the organization and analysis of textiles and the equipment used in their production that will serve as a model for future scholarship on the subject. Moreover, she also lays the foundation for the future resolution of a number of critical questions associated with those data. But what is perhaps most exciting about this volume lies not merely in the revealing insights it presents, but in the challenge it poses to archaeologists of pre-Roman Italy to more effectively report and consider the nature of the evidence for this pivotal ancient industry. If this challenge is met, the broader academic community will soon rightly place textile manufacture among the most important industries of the ancient Mediterranean.

2010.03.42

2010-03-20T10:21:00.000-04:00

Version at BMCR home site
T. Corey Brennan, Harriet I. Flower (ed.), East and West: Papers in Ancient History Presented to Glen W. Bowersock. Loeb Classical Monographs; 14. Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 2008. Pp. ix, 208. ISBN 9780674033481. $24.95.
Reviewed by Julien Aliquot, Institut français du Proche-Orient

Table of Contents

Ce volume réunit huit communications présentées en hommage à Glen Bowersock (ci-après G.B.) à l'occasion de son départ de l'Institute for Advanced Study de Princeton, en 2006. Ses éditeurs, en nous épargnant heureusement d'épais Mélanges, ont opté pour une sélection d'études historiques autour d'un thème fédérateur, celui des rapports entre Orient et Occident. Le sujet pourrait sembler mal défini à première vue. À la lecture de l'ouvrage, il s'avère être au contraire à la mesure de l'oeuvre du savant honoré, dont la bibliographie (non établie) comprend plus de trois cent cinquante titres. Les contributeurs, tout en lui témoignant leur amitié, ont su tirer parti de ce choix ou s'en démarquer dans le cadre d'essais courts, mais denses, où ils ne manquent pas de signaler ce qu'ils doivent à G.B., tant sur le plan méthodologique et académique (Aldo Schiavone) que sur des sujets aussi variés que ceux de l'historiographie hellénistique (Walter Ameling), de la carrière politique et de l'attitude religieuse de Sylla (Andrea Giardina), de la critique de l'impérialisme romain sous la République (Miriam T. Griffin), des derniers développements de la sophistique sous l'Empire (Christopher Jones, Robert J. Penella), des donations pour les âmes chrétiennes dans l'au-delà à la fin de l'Antiquité (Peter Brown) et de l'hellénisation comparée des Juifs et des Arabes du Proche-Orient hellénistique et romain (Maurice Sartre).

Le chapitre introductif d'A. Schiavone, sous un titre emprunté à E.M. Forster, "Only connect" (p. 1-11), esquisse une biographie intellectuelle de G.B., qu'il présente comme un passeur soucieux de mettre en évidence les points de rencontre entre les différentes cultures qui coexistent dans le monde romain, en particulier au cours de l'Antiquité tardive. Il rappelle que G.B. n'a eu de cesse de s'interroger également sur les évolutions les plus récentes de l'hellénisme, jusqu'aux écrits du poète grec contemporain K. Kavafis (1863-1933), et sur les questions historiographiques. Sur ce point, A. Schiavone souligne au passage qu'il serait aujourd'hui enclin à réviser son désaccord avec l'idée chère à G.B. et à P. Brown d'une transition longue et imperceptible entre l'Antiquité et le Moyen Âge, sans solution de continuité.¹

W. Ameling (p. 13-59) s'intéresse à l'oeuvre d'Agatharchide de Cnide d'un point de vue méthodologique. On sait peu de choses de ce grammairien contemporain de Polybe, sinon qu'il était influencé par la philosophie péripatéticienne et épicurienne et qu'il s'était établi à Alexandrie, où il paraît n'avoir joué aucun rôle officiel dans la vie publique, mais où il était en contact avec l'entourage des Ptolémées et les savants du Musée. Agatharchide est l'auteur d'un ouvrage communément (et improprement) appelé Périple de la mer Érythrée, dont le contenu nous est connu pour l'essentiel par Photius et par Diodore de Sicile. Comme l'a montré D. Marcotte (suivi par W. Ameling),² les cinq livres de ce traité formaient le début d'une histoire universelle (perdue) en quarante-neuf livres. Confronté à l'élargissement du monde grec à la suite des conquêtes d'Alexandre, Agatharchide se tourne vers les régions australes du monde habité pour retrouver les premières étapes du développement des sociétés humaines. Refusant les spéculations des poètes et des mythographes, il se fonde sur des memoranda royaux conservés à Alexandrie. Son apport, comme le souligne W. Ameling, procède moins de l'exactitude des renseignements qu'il transmet (en partie obsolètes, voire fantaisistes) que de l'attention teintée d'empathie qu'il accorde aux Mangeurs-de-poissons et à leurs contemporains d'Éthiopie et d'Arabie. Agatharchide est le premier à utiliser l'ethnographie pour appréhender l'époque des origines de l'humanité dans le cadre d'une histoire universelle. On peut aussi lui reconnaître le droit qu'il revendique à être le premier à conserver la mémoire des confins méridionaux de l'oecumène. Par son originalité, la méthode d'Agatharchide illustre le rôle d'Alexandrie dans le renouveau de l'historiographie hellénistique.³

A. Giardina (p. 61-83) propose une interprétation originale des songes de Sylla et s'efforce de réhabiliter la piété du dictateur romain. Dans un passage célèbre, Plutarque indique que, deux jours avant sa mort, Sylla avait arrêté de rédiger le vingt-deuxième livre de ses mémoires (perdus), où il évoquait l'oracle chaldéen qui lui avait prédit qu'il finirait ses jours au faîte de la gloire après une vie honorable, ainsi que son fils apparu en songe pour l'inciter à mettre un terme à ses tourments et à le rejoindre auprès de sa femme en toute quiétude (Sylla 37, 1-3). A. Giardina distingue ce témoignage des deux autres textes relatifs à ce qu'on a pris l'habitude d'appeler "le dernier rêve de Sylla" (Appien, Guerres civiles 1, 105; Pline l'Ancien, Histoire naturelle 7, 138). Il suggère que Sylla, à la fin de son autobiographie, n'évoquait pas ses dernières heures, mais l'époque où il avait décidé de renoncer à la dictature. Selon lui, les raisons de ce retrait seraient avant tout de nature religieuse. En plaçant son action sous le signe du kairos, Sylla démontrerait sa piété plus que son impulsivité et son opportunisme politique. À la suite de sa victoire dans la guerre civile, en 82, l'adoption du cognomen grec Epaphroditos et le choix du latin plus neutre Felix attesteraient qu'il avait attribué sa felicitas à la déesse Aphrodite. Sur ce point, il existe un autre témoignage fameux, celui d'Appien, Guerres civiles 1, 97: au début des campagnes contre Mithridate, l'oracle de Delphes aurait encouragé Sylla à consacrer une hache à l'Aphrodite d'Aphrodisias, en Carie, ce qu'il aurait fait, expliquant que la déesse lui était apparue en songe, marchant à la tête de son armée et combattant avec les armes d'Arès. A. Giardina estime que l'Aphrodite de ce rêve serait l'interprétation propre à Sylla de Vénus, la déesse de l'amour et de la mêtis, mère d'Énée et figure tutélaire de l'origine troyenne des Romains. Bien que séduisante, l'hypothèse ne rend peut-être pas entièrement justice au texte d'Appien: même si les représentations d'Aphrodite armée sont rares,⁴ Aphrodite, Arès, une armure et la bipenne apparaissent sur les monnaies de bronze frappées par Aphrodisias conjointement avec Plarasa, au premier siècle avant Jésus-Christ, Arès lui-même possède son propre sanctuaire dans la cité, d'après une inscription du tournant de l'ère chrétienne, et le couple d'Aphrodite et d'Arès reparaît dans le monnayage d'Aphrodisias sous les Sévères.⁵ Il semble du reste très plausible que Sylla ait rendu hommage aux divinités de la cité carienne à l'époque où celle-ci s'est ralliée à Rome.⁶ Le "rêve grec" du dictateur apparaît donc comme une glose pieuse et savante des traditions locales.

M.T. Griffin (p. 85-111) revient sur la question de la critique de l'impérialisme romain à la fin de la République. Dans le De officiis, Cicéron regrette l'époque où Rome exerçait un sain protectorat sur le monde et pointe du doigt les infractions au code de bonne conduite que la classe dirigeante romaine était censée observer de son temps à l'égard des peuples de l'Empire. Devant la décadence du mos maiorum, il conclut (2, 28): "nous sommes justement punis." On pourrait croire que l'idéalisation des principes romains de fides vis-à-vis des alliés et de clementia vis-à-vis des vaincus n'est ici que le ressort rhétorique d'une critique implicite de Jules César. En fait, la défense de ces principes est récurrente dans le débat public depuis le deuxième siècle avant Jésus-Christ et elle sous-tend une critique en règle de l'impérialisme romain, non seulement chez les ennemis de Rome, mais aussi chez les sénateurs, qui ont pu être troublés par l'incurie de certains magistrats autant que par l'injustice de la domination romaine sur l'Empire. M.T. Griffin décèle les traces de cet examen de conscience dans les traités de philosophie morale de Cicéron (De re publica, De officiis, influencés sur ce point par les propos tenus à Rome par Carnéade en 155) et, de manière plus surprenante, sous la plume des historiens romains (Salluste, Tite-Live, Tacite, Lucain, Florus) et même dans la Guerre des Gaules de César, en particulier dans les discours attribués aux chefs barbares occidentaux. En dernière analyse, l'explication de l'autocritique romaine de l'impérialisme romain résiderait selon elle dans le constat, devenu inévitable à l'issue des guerres civiles (aux yeux de Cicéron, du moins), que l'accroissement de l'Empire impliquait la perte de la liberté républicaine pour les Romains.

C.P. Jones (p. 113-125) aborde le problème de la mémoire et de l'évaluation de la seconde sophistique dans l'Antiquité tardive. Le concept et le palmarès de la seconde sophistique, tels que Philostrate les présente dans ses Vies de sophistes, ne se sont guère imposés auprès de ses successeurs, même si ces derniers ont volontiers utilisé son ouvrage pour en tirer des informations biographiques. L'une des raisons de ce désaveu apparent tient sans doute au snobisme de Philostrate, qui privilégie Athènes et Smyrne en dénigrant les autres cités. Les documents repris par B. Puech dans ses Orateurs et sophistes grecs dans les inscriptions d'époque impériale (2002) permettent de prendre la mesure du décalage entre les goûts de Philostrate, ceux de ses contemporains et ceux des générations plus récentes. À propos d'un certain Nicostratos de Macédoine que Philostrate ne tenait pas en estime, la Souda mentionne l'existence d'un groupe de dix rhéteurs contemporains de Dion Chrysostome et d'Aélius Aristide et jugés dignes de succéder aux plus grands orateurs de l'époque classique. Ce nouveau canon a pu être établi au quatrième ou au cinquième siècle. S'il diffère de celui de Philostrate, c'est que les critères d'appréciation de la rhétorique ont évolué. Philostrate préférait le genre des déclamations publiques improvisées. Or, la tradition de ces déclamations a connu un déclin concomitant aux transformations de la cité grecque à partir de la fin du troisième siècle. Du temps de Philostrate, on peut d'ailleurs déceler l'émergence d'une nouvelle manière d'évaluer les sophistes: l'oralité et l'improvisation cèdent la place à l'écriture et à la préparation, par exemple chez Phrynicos, dont le traité d'atticisme, rédigé dans les années 160-170, semble plus fiable que les Vies de sophistes pour apprécier les goûts de l'époque, dans la mesure où les auteurs qu'il disqualifie sont ceux dont les oeuvres sophistiques ne nous sont pratiquement pas parvenues alors que l'on conserve leurs traités techniques et leurs autres écrits. Parmi les rhéteurs qui ont survécu au naufrage de la seconde sophistique telle qu'elle était vue par Philostrate se trouvent Dion Chrysostome, loué pour son style dès le quatrième siècle (ce qui lui a valu son surnom) et probablement apprécié pour le ton moral de ses écrits philosophiques, Philostrate lui-même et ses parents, estimés pour le contenu des oeuvres qui leur sont attribuées, et surtout Aélius Aristide, dont le succès n'a pas attendu le jugement réservé de Philostrate et s'est même mué en triomphe à la fin de l'Antiquité, lorsque son style, sa rigueur logique, sa dévotion sans borne à la rhétorique et son austérité supposée ont pu séduire ses lecteurs chrétiens de l'Antiquité tardive.

R.J. Penella, à qui l'on doit une traduction et un commentaire récents d'Himérius,⁷ se concentre sur les discours adressés à ses étudiants athéniens et aux déclamations (meletai) prononcées dans un cadre scolaire par ce sophiste du quatrième siècle originaire de Prusias, en Bithynie (p. 127-144). Les premiers constituent environ la moitié du corpus rhétorique himérien. Ils fourmillent d'anecdotes sur la vie de la classe. Le corpus de Libanios contient quelques pièces du même genre et la Souda rapporte que le sophiste du troisième siècle Généthlios de Pétra (en Arabie et non en Palestine) avait adressé un discours d'adieu à deux de ses étudiants (ou anciens étudiants devenus assistants, hetairoi). On peut supposer que les discours de ce type étaient plus courants qu'il n'y paraît. Les meletai prononcées dans un cadre scolaire, quant à elles, sont peu nombreuses parmi les oeuvres conservées d'Himérius (cinq). On en conserve cinquante-et-une de Libanios. Ces déclamations à caractère délibératif ou judiciaire portaient sur des sujets fictifs, tirés de la mythologie et de l'histoire, mais elles avaient indéniablement une valeur pédagogique et pratique. R.J. Penella insiste sur le fait que c'était également le cas des discours adressés par Himérius et Libanios à leurs étudiants, puisqu'ils concernaient le monde académique dans lequel évoluaient les maîtres et les élèves. Il suggère que ces discours apportaient un complément à l'enseignement classique de la rhétorique: en traitant de sujets propres à l'univers scolaire, le maître fait de sa classe une projection de la cité où ses futurs ex-étudiants auront à prendre la parole en tant que sophistes; la multiplication des références mythologiques et historiques dans ses discours, obsessionnelle chez Himérius, plus feutrée chez Libanios, aurait elle aussi une vertu pédagogique en ce qu'elle permettrait au maître d'inviter ses étudiants à dépasser l'exemple glorieux des Anciens.

P. Brown (p. 145-158) rappelle les raisons qui portent à croire aujourd'hui que le manichéisme s'est répandu depuis la Perse dans l'Empire romain comme une forme particulière, radicale, du christianisme, à la fin du troisième siècle et au quatrième siècle après Jésus-Christ, et que certaines caractéristiques de ce courant religieux illustrent des évolutions plus générales: outre l'institution d'un clergé spécialisé et rétribué pour porter la parole de Dieu, outre l'essor en Orient d'un mouvement ascétique itinérant et mendiant, on peut évoquer la croyance en l'obtention de bienfaits spirituels en échange de richesses matérielles offertes à l'Église. P. Brown se concentre sur un aspect de cet "échange spirituel" fondateur des nouveaux rapports entre les fidèles et les membres de la hiérarchie ecclésiastique, celui des offrandes charitables faites à l'Église pour les âmes des morts dans l'au-delà. En l'absence de Purgatoire, les manichéens comme les chrétiens orthodoxes pouvaient légitimement s'inquiéter du sort de leurs parents et de leurs amis défunts ni tout à fait bons, ni tout à fait mauvais, et se poser la question suivante: les prières et les offrandes faites ici-bas pour le salut de leurs âmes sont-elles efficaces? "Dieu seul le sait et il se tait," selon la réponse aussi élusive que symptomatique d'Augustin (Manuel 29, 110). Des propos plus rassurants et explicites se trouvent dans les Kephalaia (87, 92, 115, 144, 158), vaste questionnaire adressé à Mani par ses catéchumènes, peut-être composé peu de temps après la mort de Mani en 277 et connu à travers un manuscrit copte des environs de l'an 400. Tout l'intérêt du témoignage manichéen est de briser le silence des Écritures et des Pères de l'Église sur ce que les fidèles ont pu attendre d'un rite fondamental du christianisme.

M. Sartre (p. 159-181) se livre à une étude comparée de l'hellénisation des Juifs et des Arabes nabatéens entre le troisième siècle avant Jésus-Christ et le quatrième siècle de notre ère, renouvelant les remarques formulées dans ses ouvrages de synthèse récents.⁸ Tout en conservant des particularismes culturels et religieux forts, les royaumes hasmonéens et nabatéens empruntent des traits caractéristiques des monarchies hellénistiques. Dans le contexte d'une émulation réciproque entretenue, au deuxième siècle avant Jésus-Christ, par la déliquescence des Séleucides, deux nouveaux États se forment autour de Jérusalem et de Pétra. Dotés d'un territoire propre, ils frappent monnaie, leurs souverains portent le titre grec de basileus, peut-être dès le troisième siècle pour les Nabatéens, à la fin du deuxième siècle pour les Hasmonéens, et leurs institutions apparaissent profondément influencées par les pratiques helléniques. Les sociétés s'hellénisent également, même dans les milieux qui apparaissent à priori plus réfractaires à la culture grecque (l'absence de concours grecs constituant une exception remarquable). Même si M. Sartre passe parfois un peu rapidement d'une époque à une autre, au risque paraître négliger pour le non spécialiste les évolutions propres au Haut-Empire et à l'Antiquité tardive, la comparaison est éclairante et l'étude suggère salutairement de ne pas considérer le Proche-Orient comme un isolat indifférent aux phénomènes d'acculturation à l'oeuvre dans le monde hellénistique et dans l'Empire romain, jusqu'aux bouleversements consécutifs à l'avènement de l'islam.

La présentation d'un ouvrage aussi éclectique n'appelle pas de conclusion particulière, si ce n'est que le plaisir que l'on prend à le lire constitue une invitation à redécouvrir les travaux de Glen Bowersock (voir bibliographie).

Notes:

1.   Pour une position moins nuancée, cf. A. Schiavone, La storia spezzata, Bari et Rome, 1996, trad. par M.J. Schneider dans la collection 'Revealing Antiquity,' que dirige G.B., sous le titre The end of the past, 2e éd., Cambridge, Mass., 2002.
2.   D. Marcotte, Historia 50/4, 2001, p. 385-435 (fondamental).
3.   Contra P. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, Oxford, 1972, p. 514.
4.   A. Giardina évoque l'Aphrodite de Sparte, d'après Pausanias, 3, 15, 10. Voir aussi Plutarque, Moralia 239a, cf. Lactance, Institutions divines 1, 20 (Sparte); IG 5.1, 602 (inscription honorifique de Sparte pour une prêtresse d'Artémis Orthia et d'autres dieux, dont Aphrodite armée, au début du troisième siècle après J.-C.); Pausanias, 2, 5, 1 (Acrocorinthe) et 3, 23, 1 (Cythère).
5.   Monnaies: D. MacDonald, The coinage of Aphrodisias, Londres, 1992, en particulier les types 27, 29-32, 37 et 89, avec un commentaire peu convaincant aux p. 28, 67 et 94. Inscription: J.M. Reynolds, Archeologia Classica 49, 1997, p. 423-428 (IAph2007 12, 201).
6.   J.M. Reynolds, Aphrodisias and Rome, Londres, 1982, p. 11-20, nos 2-3 (IAph2007 8, 3 et 8, 2), avec les remarques de G.B., Gnomon 56, 1984, p. 51, et de C.P. Jones, AJPh 106, 1985, p. 263-264.
7.   R.J. Penella, Man and the Word. The Orations of Himerius, Berkeley, Ca., 2007.
8.   M. Sartre, D'Alexandre à Zénobie , 2e éd., Paris, 2003, partiellement traduit dans The Middle East under Rome, Cambridge, Mass., 2005.

2010.03.41

2010-03-16T14:31:00.001-04:00

Version at BMCR home site
Kiichiro Itsumi, Pindaric Metre: 'The Other Half'. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xix, 464. ISBN 9780199229611. $190.00.
Reviewed by Andrew Kelly, University of Melbourne

With this work Kiichiro Itsumi sets out to reconfigure the landscape of Pindaric metre. The 'other half' in his title are the non-dactylo-epitrite poems of the corpus that having long ago shed the designation logaoedic now usually go by the name of 'aeolic.' This, if it at least points to something real (asymmetric cola and sometimes actually aeolic ones), has been a very broad church for the range of metrical sequences it has had to cover. It has been a term more of convenience than of understanding. We may, Itsumi suspects, have been hoodwinked by the uniformity of the dactylo-epitrite (D/e) half into putting up with a single name for the rest.

He posits two 'metres', aeolic and freer dactylo-epitrite, which are combined in three 'styles.' In place of the familiar twins the corpus is to become a lopsided foursome. Alongside D/e Itsumi posits three classes:

Class I: Aeolic
(e.g. Olympian 9 strophe, Isthmian 7 epode)

Class II: Freer Dactylo-Epitrite
(e.g. Olympian 9 epode, Olympian 10)

Class III: Amalgamated Style
(e.g. Olympian 1 strophe, Nemean 7 epode)

There is no question that in these groupings Itsumi has put his finger onto threads of significant commonality.

The category of freer D/e may well be one of the book's most important contributions. His preliminary summary of its differences from standard D/e runs as follows (p. 23):

i) the basic phrase of double-short movement is not D (- u u - u u -) but d (- u u -);

ii) other less common phrases are extensively used;

iii) link anceps is not used so frequently as in D/e, especially within the verse, rather phrases tend to be juxtaposed without a link between them;

iv) verses in freer D/e tend to be shorter.

The scheme as a whole is subtle and multi-layered, inevitably: otherwise someone would have come up with it before. It rests on a vast enterprise of observations, comparisons and statistics generally presented with exemplary clarity. Whether or not it catches on as a way of naming, in presenting and justifying his scheme, and above all with his metrical portraits of each poem, Itsumi has opened a new window on Pindar. The work is an incomparable resource.

The book is divided into three parts. The introduction that constitutes Part I is not the gentle survey that the word often suggests but a full scale induction into his method: 108 pages, not including the substantial appendix attached to it. This, twenty-six pages long and printed in small type to discourage the faint-hearted, is a test case study of modern emendations in relation to metre of, in his notation, N6s6-7, that is, lines 6-7 of the strophes/antistrophes of Nemean 6.

Part II, much the largest, contains his analyses of what he calls the eighteen Majors, that is, the eighteen non-D/e poems long enough to provide sufficient responsions to reach plausibly reliable conclusions. Appendices to this Part treat those that are not, his four Minors and a series of longer fragments.

These metrical portraits run from anywhere between a few pages up to almost twenty. They come with seven features: a metrical scheme accompanied by the Greek text for the first strophe and epode; a roster showing which verses are secured by hiatus/brevis in longo; separate metrical discussions focusing in turn on the poem as a whole, then the strophe and epode, and then line by line. This zeroing in is a particularly effective piece of organisation. Preceding the line-by-line comment sits a discussion of any text-critical issues that interact with metrical considerations.

Apart from postponing the four minors until after the eighteen majors, the poems are presented in their traditional order rather than in one of Itsumi's exposition. This orients the work as one of reference rather than simply a study. Thus the introduction can be studied before turning to poems of current interest. Or indeed, if you are willing to take him on trust, the discussions of individual poems are quite comprehensible on their own without following the systematic justifications of the introduction. Or for a fuller engagement one can work on poems class by class. Follow that trail and the book becomes an invitation to re-experience Pindar.

Part III entitled Miscellanea is in effect a long run of appendices, namely six short essays on some key metrical phenomena and five lists tabulating statistics, both sets on features that have cropped up piecemeal though the course of the study.

Itsumi contrasts what he dubs static and dynamic approaches to the analysis of Pindaric metre. Static refers to an approach where the essential thing is to name: with little regard to context, fixed sequences are given labels drawn from the cavalcade of cola that come to us in the ancient metrical handbooks and the further proliferations of modern enumerators. This caricature is never realised absolutely, but Itsumi points to the polymetric analyses of Turyn where names drawn from unrelated types of metre can make them seem, to those of dynamic inclinations, like 'an assorted box of chocolates.' The risk in this style is that (and here Itsumi invokes A. M. Dale) it can lead to 'inorganic dissection.' On the other side dynamic analysis aspires, in a phrase Itsumi quotes from Martin West, 'to follow a train of thought.' Already suggested by the generative permutations of aeolic cola outside Pindar, this approach reads very much like structural criticism of classical music. It is effectively a narrative analysis and thereby generates a good narrative in itself (as in the appealing expositions of West and Dale), and it certainly gives the impression of deeper engagement than a point-and-name metrics. It can be seen at a glance in the schemas given by Snell in the Teubner editions where verses are set out in broken spacings to line up the 'choriambic nuclei', driving columns of affinity down through the centre of the stanza, with the other material dangling off either side, or in pits in the middle if the scheme applies, as it often does, to more than one column of aligned positions.

The static approach can seem mechanical and barren, but the unease about the dynamic alternative is that it is ad hoc, shedding only vague illumination over the generic background from which an individual occurrence emerges.

Itsumi presents himself as a sort of neo-static, albeit evidently a dynamic or organic one: his own analyses in Part II are anything but insensitive to context. Fundamental are his Rules for consistent analysis (p. 10) through which he seeks to set phrase division onto an objective basis: phrase division is to precede analysis, not be produced by it. (He prefers the term phrase to colon for Pindar, and verse to period.) He asserts the principles that phrase boundary should fall 'automatically and exclusively' between true (non-anceps) longs (... - | - ...) and before anceps flanked by longs (... - | x - ...). Based on these 'and other principles' he sets out eight rules for fixing phrase boundary. What those other principles are we are not told, and while it is not hard to think of justications for the first two principles above, it would have been better for the reader's ease of mind if these crucial pages had set out more explicitly how he decided to proceed as he did. But the proof in the end must of course be in the eating. In any case, the eight rules are to guard against the temptation to divide, on the spot as it were, to come up with comfortingly familiar sequences. So for instance, by the first principle above mid-verse phrases with pendant ending (...u - - | ...) become impossible: so a pherecratean (oo - u u - - ) will only be found at verse end. One overall result is that he is much more cautious than Snell at labeling sequences as the standard aeolic cola, even where a stanza belongs to his Class I Aeolic. Another is that his verses can end up longer and shorter than page decorum or practicality would invite: Alexandrian colometry, he suggests, was sometimes just chopping up for layout.

Itsumi characterises Pindaric metre at three successive levels: phrase, verse and 'stanza-form' (by which is meant the metrical pattern underlying the actual strophes/antistrophes or epodes in responsion within a particular poem). Phrases (cola) can be categorised as aeolic or as freer D/e. These then combine variously to produce verses that are either pure or composite aeolic or freer D/e. Aeolic verses are composite when they contain D/e phrases, most commonly the shorter d and e style phrases attached as suffix or prefix. Of the 235 verses, as Itsumi enumerates them, that make up the eighteen majors, 62 are pure aeolic, 72 composite aeolic and 101 freer D/e. As expressed on these two levels aeolic and freer D/e constitute the two 'metres' deployed in the non-D/e half of Pindar.

Then, up onto the final level, that of the stanza-form, where the two metres combine to form the three Classes. (Stanza-form not poem, since epode does not necessarily follow strophe/antistrophe; and occasionally a stanza-form is itself mixed.) The Classes can be thought of as styles: so they are numbered and tagged rather than simply named. Notably too, each Class has more or less certain instances and Class I comes with ambiguous cases (which might belong to III). With the two 'metres' feeding into the three Classes the assignment of stanza-forms to Classes is not always a straightforward affair. Itsumi sets up a roster of twenty-one factors, helpfully tabulated on a chart on p. 107, that are used to shepherd a stanza-form into the most appropriate Class. For instance, 'aeolic base of two longs' is a feature of Class I, 'longer verses' occur in Classes I and III, and 'reversed dodrans with a tribrach opening' occurs in Classes II and III. One notable factor of statistical subtlety is 'RSS,' the ratio of short to long syllables expressed as a percentage, lowest in Class I, highest in Class III. Of the twenty-one factors about half point only to one Class (and overridingly these refer to the uncontroversial Class I Aeolic) while the rest are common to two Classes (and likewise overridingly these commonalities are shared between Classes II and III.) As Classes I and II share no features in common, the question is always between membership in either I or III or II or III.

Even if it is an accurate account of the state of affairs there is something a little disconcerting about the recycling of names up through the three levels. There are aeolic verses that contain D/e phrases and stanzas of the freer D/e class that can contain aeolic verses. Presenting this system in a classroom might not be a happy chore. It's a pity we couldn't have ended up with kiichironics and itsumians.

Many readers will be comparing Itsumi's treatments in the first instance with the schemas set out by Snell in the Teubner editions. The divergence in the case of stanzas belonging to Itsumi's Class I aeolic tends naturally to be more modest as these have always been relatively unproblematic. But especially in terms of labelling it can seem as if hardly a line is unchanged. Some of the changes are of course more significant than others. Here is a sample of the difference that meets the eye:

Isthmian 7 strophe line 2

Snell: ^gl ia cr
Itsumi: tel u e e

Pythian 2 epode line 3

Snell: gl pher ia
Itsumi: gl rdod e2

Pythian 5 strophe line 11

Snell: ba cr ia
Itsumi: ^e - e3

Pythian 5 epode line 6

Snell: cho (^chodim) cr
Itsumi: d rdod e

Gone is Snell's practice of bracketing variant cola, where gl means glyconic but (gl) something resembling one in a glyconic-plausible context; or worse ((^chodim)) where an already dubious colon is supposed to be seen lurking behind further layers of perturbation. Thankfully, choriambic dimeter (oooo - u u -, rejected elsewhere by Itsumi as a bogus format¹) is replaced by the Wilamowitzianum (o o - u - u u - ) or, with the base reduced or removed, the reversed dodrans (rdod) or the heptasyllable. This brings the sequence into cleaner relation with the glyconic. Itsumi prefers gl + 3 to Snell's gl ba, giving us an organically extended pendant phrase rather than suggesting a further entity has been plugged on to the end. In general Itsumi finds fewer aeolic phrases than Snell: in their place sit freer D/e phrases. Similarly, Snell's cretics, choriambs and iambs are now also covered by Maasian notation, which allows a more fluid visualisation of the play of single and double shorts and has the effect of bringing these sequences into relation with the D/e half of the corpus.

Some readers may regret that in the initial graphic layout of each of his metrical schemes Itsumi drops Snell's practice of aligning the 'choriambs.' He does in fact make frequent use of the practice in the discussions following, often combining it with a variety of alterations (as for instance by removing the resolutions) which allow it to become a supple exploratory tool. But in the first full laying out he uses space breaks to show phrase boundaries, rather than the punctuation marks performing the same task in his Greek text. There are no doubt good reasons for this abstention, but in terms of reader fatigue it seems a pity that where, especially for the simpler aeolic cases, the column of phrase labels shows such clear patterning, as for instance his O9s3-9,

gl reiz
gl reiz
gl reiz
wil reiz
gl
reiz,

the layout does not manifest this with quite the same ease of recognition. Instead the eye has to delve to see where exactly this order sits in the rows of notated positions.

On the other hand, in the frequent cases where clusters of neighbouring lines share a common character Itsumi numbers them as subsections of the stanza. This, like so many others throughout this book, is an extremely helpful feature.

Itsumi is a master at clear exposition. Where the risk with metrical studies (especially ones nearly 500 pages long!) is losing the forest for the trees, he sketches beforehand and summarises afterward; and the elaborate signposting makes it an easy work to navigate in. The reader can choose between studying the data and reasoning, or simply making off with the conclusions. The index is a little on the skimpy side. This is not a real defect in such a methodically arranged work. But on the other hand, there are so many intriguing observations along the way and it would nice if the index could be used to draw them together: entries on composition and performance would have been welcome. His use of English is very occasionally unidiomatic, but this is more than compensated for by the verve and colour of much of the writing.

The whole way through I wanted to hear Itsumi, or his understudy, reading the verses as he understands them, aloud. It may be unfair to complain that a book is not more than a book. Earlier books on metre have not spoken aloud to their readers, though they not infrequently invite them to hum English nursery rhymes or Scottish ballads. But the technological situation has evolved: a companion website, a recording available on iTunes. The elucidation of acoustic phenomena on the silent page alone has begun to seem an anomaly.

Of course there can be no question of authentic reperformance. And what we need is not the full boxed set, but exploratory demonstrations. What is at stake in one metrical analysis as against another? Is a labelled sequence to be heard and felt as an event, or is it more an historical-generative building block, or nothing but notational brevity? The difficulty in holding apart categories like these on the page plagues many metrical disagreements that are never going to be resolved in a footnote: as in note 11 on page 5 of the present work where the link anceps is either "a revolution in the history of metrical study" (Itsumi) or "merely a convenient method of notation" (West).

Itsumi frequently draws attention to points of doubt relating to the articulation of sequences: Is the final syllable of catalectic clausulae a triseme? (If so, as he is inclined to believe, then the aeolic reizianum sounded different from the freer D/e phrase x d x, both of which might transcribe as - - u u - -.) Is the double short of the resolved aeolic half-base different from the double short in the following 'choriamb?' What is the pronunciation of a long anceps as against a true long? These are uncertainties rather than pits of absolute unknowing: there would be no harm, in fact great benefit, in multiple and opposed renditions. Vocal illustration is really the only way to make clear what is and what is not at stake.

We can ask what is metre for, now? The nearest thing to an explicit comment on this is the book's very first sentence: 'Some understanding of metre is necessary for the full appreciation of poetry', which does not take us very far. If no more than an aid to textual criticism, metrical study can be left on the other side of a veil of silence. But this is clearly not the end of Itsumi's engagement. He tells us that sequential resolutions have a bright, dazzling effect. He uses words like beautiful, astonishing, sophisticated. In these he does not seem to be speaking from a cerebral realm sundered from sensory experience, or as someone for whom metre is only for the solving of metrical problems.

Long ago Paul Shorey wrote about metre and Greek verses: "If, on the other hand, one does not or cannot read them at all one is free to say what one pleases about them on paper. But what does it mean?"² The statistical apparatus Itsumi brings so revealingly to bear refutes any recrimination of arbitrariness. But I, like my students, want to hear, and we would like to refine our own efforts against those provided by metrical experts. In and of itself this book is going to be a tremendous resource for engaging metrically with Pindar, but I wish it conducted its investigations not only in silence. Of course metricians of choral lyric face an added danger and may be well advised to keep their lips sealed in case someone asks them to dance as well.

Notes:

1. "The 'Choriambic Dimeter' of Euripides," The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 32, No. 1 (1982), pp. 59-74.
2. "The Issue in Greek Metric," Classical Philology, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Apr., 1924), p. 172.

2010.03.40

2010-03-15T10:05:00.001-04:00

Version at BMCR home site
Robert Harris, Lustrum. Blinded by Ambition. Seduced by Power. Destroyed by Rome. London: Hutchinson, 2009. Pp. 454. ISBN 9780091801304. £18.99.
Reviewed by Andrea Schuetze, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München

"The body of a child was pulled from the River Tiber, close to the boat sheds of the republican war fleet". He was felled from behind by a hammer, his throat was cut and his body eviscerated. A dense atmosphere full of mystery and horror wafts through the opening of Robert Harris' Lustrum, the second part of his trilogy about the life of Marcus Tullius Cicero, the man from Arpinum, the homo novus, the pater patriae.

For those who know the story of Cicero's life, the story-line of this trilogy can be told very easily: Imperium, the first part, described the hard and stony way of Cicero's career, Lustrum, the second part, broaches the issue of Cicero's rise and fall, his consulship and exile and the third part will one day treat the last years of his life. Harris doesn't just write a biographical romance, he offers his reader a special mixture of historical truth and historical possibility. In the manner of Graves' "I Claudius" Tiro puts down his memory at the end of his life and gives a look through his old eyes into a past that had disappeared a long time ago. History becomes alive in rich (and accurately developed) atmosphere: The character of the homo novus Cicero appears to be quite modern, resembling very much one of John Grisham's lawyers. But this also turns out what Cicero actually is -- a lawyer and politician, always ready for good deals, able to catch and capture people with the power of his words. Maybe Harris suggests a bit too much the modern self-made man. On the other side Harris shows a man working all night in his office, vomiting after great speeches and leaning on his strong wife Terentia.

Those of the upper-class with less talent and genius, but more family-tradition and connection try not only to dim his brilliance by spite and neglect at every opportunity, they also try to use him and rope him into sinister political intrigues. Harris provides through Lustrum great insight into this exciting period of Roman history not only by echoing historical sources but by numerous psychologic zooms: a glimpse or a blink of an eye here, a whisper or a rumor there, and over all the ancient truth of evil omen.

2010.03.39

2010-03-15T09:56:00.005-04:00

Version at BMCR home site
Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, Jonathan Barnes (ed.), Lire les stoïciens. Philosophie ancienne. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009. Pp. vi, 234. ISBN 9782130573739. €15.00 (pb).
Reviewed by Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan

[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

The small size and cost of this dense book should not be taken to suggest that it is not rich and of high scholarly profile. The contributors are experts and their treatments -- although limited to providing overviews and preparing readers ("like an appetizer", 2) for the Stoics' often difficult technical works -- are rigorous and clear, and sometimes original. They disclose the complexity of the Stoic philosophical system and reflect different approaches.

The book's structure is based on a synchronic view of the system, although diachronic developments are also taken into account. After an introduction, the book consists of two parts, which are based not on the traditional division of Stoicism into Old, Middle, and New (Roman Stoicism), which is problematic, especially for the demarcation of Middle Stoicism, but on a division into Hellenistic and Imperial Stoicism respectively. Nevertheless, the editors warn readers that periodizations, absent as they are from ancient sources, are "une fiction commode" (7). Within each part, individual chapters focus on the main branches of Stoic philosophy.

In the introduction, the editors rightly highlight the paradoxical nature of Stoicism and observe that the Stoics are the first philosophers who conceived their philosophy as a system and expounded it in an elaborated systematic form, but also insisted, following in Socrates' footsteps, on the necessity of practicing philosophy. The editors correctly remark that the division of the system into logic, physics, and ethics is not originally Stoic, but the Stoics had a peculiar way of explaining it, basing it on a division of virtue. The statement that the true Stoic extirpates his/her emotions (7) is correct in that it translates the Stoic idea of ἀπάθεια -- inherited by several Patristic philosophers --, but it should be borne in mind, with Margaret Graver,¹ that Stoicism did not advocate the extirpation of προπάθειαι (which are not evil), or, even less, of εὐπάθειαι (which are good).

Gourinat and Barnes underline the fact that orthodoxy was less important for Stoicism than it was for Epicureanism, and that there were doctrinal developments over time; however, the Stoic system has constants, well summarized for the fields of logic, physics, and ethics (8-9). Gourinat and Barnes provide a history of the school and an outline of its representatives, with notes on the progressive disappearance of Stoic writings by the sixth century. For imperial Stoicism, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius are included, but not "minor" Stoics such as Hierocles, Musonius, Cornutus, Persius, Lucan, or Chaeremon; some of these briefly appear later in the book. Finally, Gourinat and Barnes expound the main sources, distinguishing literal quotations from paraphrases and allusions. Separate treatments are devoted to the authors from whom most fragments in SVF come.

Gourinat treats epistemology (the part of logic that deals with the criterion of truth),² rhetoric, and grammar. These all belong to 'logic', which has to do with λόγος (word, argument, and reason). Gourinat points out that the dialectic / rhetoric distinction was introduced by Zeno, but it is Chrysippus who shaped Stoic logic. Gourinat's exposition is clear and accurate. In the treatment of grammar (33), he tentatively accepts the Suda's characterization of Crates as a Stoic. He interprets the word κριτικός, by which Crates designated himself, as referring to a philologist devoted to the edition and study of texts. This is right, provided that this study is understood as involving wide-ranging exegetical issues, including philosophical interpretation.

Crivelli provides a careful account of Stoic dialectic, including propositions, arguments and modes, syllogisms, and sophisms. This is a difficult task given the catastrophic state of sources on Stoic logic. Gourinat offers a survey of Stoic physics, i.e. the investigation into the world and what is therein. The Stoics have no metaphysics; their physics includes ontology, since their "supreme genus" includes being and non-being, i.e., bodies and incorporeal realities. Gourinat argues that the Stoics arrived at the conception of incorporeal realities as non-beings because they transferred Plato's characterization of a being, as that which is susceptible to action and passion, to bodies.³ The exposition of palingenesis, ἐκπύρωσις, and ἀποκατάστασις is very good; Gourinat has already published on this.⁴ Origen is opportunely adduced as an important source.⁵ One more interesting point: on the basis of a study by David Sedley,⁶ Gourinat mentions the paradox known as "the growing argument", which involves the criterion of identity of a person: a person, during his/her growth, becomes a different individual, since his/her size changes.⁷

Sedley focuses on theology. Stoic cosmology is a rereading of Plato's Timaeus, with a momentous difference: the immanence of the Stoic god, which entails that theology is coextensive with physics. Sedley interestingly highlights the fact that Zeno took up Plato's argument in the Timaeus concerning the intelligence of the world, seen as a living being, only changing "intelligent" into "rational". For Plato and the Stoics, the world is animate. In his cosmological discussion, based on an analysis of Diogenes Laertius 7.65, Sedley raises an important question: the moral character of a person may be seen as a datum, a part of a situation ("external"), which one cannot change, rather than something that depends on one's choice ("internal"). This issue is pivotal to the fate / free will relationship, and the suggestion outlined seems to me close to the objection raised by Brennan in his review of Bobzien's book.⁸ The latter includes a detailed exposition of Chrysippus' compatibilism, according to which everything happens in accord with fate, but the moral agent is responsible for his/her deeds insofar as these are not forced by external coercion. The weak link in Chrysippus' argument is the question of what should be considered as external coercion: psychological factors, whose coercion can be regarded as external to the moral subject just as other external factors, may influence one's assent.

Bénatouïl, who has published a volume on Stoic ethics, and one related to it on some imperial Stoics,⁹ discusses ethics in his chapter on virtue, happiness, and nature. Stoic ethics is naturalistic and rigorous, a combination deemed paradoxical already in antiquity. The rigor was expressed in systematic expositions and demonstrations, following a methodical order. It is this (Chrysippean) order that Bénatouïl, unlike most modern scholars, aptly decides to follow. He thus treats impulses (touching upon the doctrine of οἰκείωσις); goods, evils, and ἀδιάφορα, relating respectively to virtue, vice, and what is neither virtuous nor vicious; passions (πάθη); virtue; the τέλος (moral end), i.e. living in accord with nature; the value ascribed to ἀδιάφορα and the selection (ἐκλογή) of what is preferable (ἀδιάφορα); and actions.

Husson too examines ethics, with a different focus: on καθήκοντα (of which a table is provided: 118) and κατορθώματα, which are perfect καθήκοντα; on passions, with the relevant classification, aetiology, and therapy; the wise, who, as Husson opportunely remarks, feel emotions which the Stoics called εὐπάθειαι and Husson translates "bons affects" (125), and are liable to προπάθειαι; the rarity of the sage; the possession of all good qualities and abilities by the sage alone; and the city. Thus, the essay covers politics as well. Attention is paid to Zeno's Republic, Platonic and Cynic influences upon it, and later developments in Stoic political thought. Husson renders πάθη as "passions". Terminology is important: "emotions" and "émotions", although widely employed to translate πάθη, may be misleading, in that they tend to cover εὐπάθειαι and sometimes προπάθειαι, and therefore suggest that the Stoic, who pursued ἀπάθεια, was called to extirpate these as well as πάθη, which is not the case. The Stoic sage is not without emotions, but does have good emotions, and extirpates bad emotions, i.e. passions.

Barnes deals with grammar, rhetoric, epistemology, and dialectic in Imperial Stoicism. He challenges the assumption that in this period there was no interest in logic. The main focus was ethics, but Epictetus and others cultivated logic; Epictetus recognized that logic is the basis of all philosophy. Moreover, logic was taught at school in every philosophy program. What is lacking in this period are true developments in logic, rhetoric, or grammar. The section on epistemology is almost entirely concerned with Epictetus. Barnes pointedly questions the idea that he changed the traditional theory of "pre-notions", but this is not a necessary interpretation of the scarce sources available. Epictetus is again the protagonist of the section on dialectics, but Barnes is quick to remark that he, like Seneca, followed the Peripatetic line in deeming it an instrument of philosophy, not necessary per se.

Algra treats cosmology and theology. As I mentioned, it makes good sense to consider them together, given Stoic immanentism and pantheism. As for physics, after remarking upon its close relationship to ethics in Stoicism, Algra focuses on its treatment in Seneca's Naturales Quaestiones (aetiology) and Cleomedes' Caelestia (cosmology), rightly underscoring the necessity of studying physics according to Seneca; Manilius also, I think, may deserve a mention: his poem is a Stoic hymn to the Logos and nature.¹⁰ Concerning Stoic theology, Algra accurately remarks that it is a mix of pantheism and theism: Marcus Aurelius emphasizes the former, Epictetus the latter. Another question dealt with is the soul's immortality: Epictetus is negative on this score, Seneca and Marcus are deemed more ambiguous. Algra also examines the critique of traditional cults in Seneca, who recommends that the wise participate in them, but with the awareness that they are prescribed by positive laws rather than pleasing the gods. I add that Cornutus, who disagreed with Seneca on the use of allegory in theology, also prescribes participation in cultic acts, in Compendium 35, after interpreting cults, myths, iconographical representations of deities, and the deities themselves allegorically.

Long studies how Stoic ethics evolved in the imperial age and in which respects it shows continuity with preceding theory. He observes the prevalence of ethics -- moral theory and practice -- in imperial Stoicism. Its common characters are identified with its being descriptive, hortatory, and therapeutic. The οἰκείωσις doctrine is finely expounded; the main text adduced is a fragment of Hierocles using the image of concentric circles. Long then treats the soul, the rejection of its tripartition in Old Stoicism, and the probable acceptance of Plato's tripartition by Posidonius, and examines Seneca, Letter 92, denying that the depiction of the soul's structure therein depends on Plato. The notion of προαίρεσις in Epictetus, he argues, does not contradict Chrysippus' determinism. In Marcus Aurelius, the use of πνευμάτιον to distinguish the human being's intellectual essence from its vital soul is interpreted as a rhetorical expedient rather than a Platonizing trait. Seneca's love for technical details of Stoic doctrine is rightly highlighted, just as Epictetus' choice of Socrates as a model (I observe that he was the disciple of "the Roman Socrates", Musonius), and Marcus Aurelius' cosmopolitanism.

Gourinat examines the wise in imperial Stoicism and philosophical exercises. Cato the Younger is adduced by Seneca as a model of the wise person, which leads to a discussion of suicide in Stoicism, admitted by Epictetus in case of a sign from the deity. Gourinat stresses Seneca's distinction (against Aristo) between decreta and praecepta, and Epictetus' and Marcus Aurelius' insistence on philosophy as ἄσκησις. Gourinat explains well how, among ἀδιάφορα, Epictetus seems to deprive "preferables" of value, but for him detachment does not mean insensitivity: exterior things are meaningless, but relationships with people must be cultivated according to καθήκοντα.

Veillard offers a good survey of Stoicism and politics at Rome. Among Stoic opponents to Nero, Thrasea, Burrus, Seneca, Musonius, Agrippinus, and Helvidius are listed (201 n. 4), to whom I add Cornutus, who was exiled by Nero, and arguably his disciple Lucan, whose death was caused by Nero. The point of departure of the essay is the philosophers' embassy of 155 BC and Diogenes of Babylonia's and Antipater of Tarsus' divergent views on politics. I agree with Veillard that their disagreement cannot simplistically be projected onto the opposition between the aristocrats and populares (who both had Stoic allegiances: Panaetius and Blossius). The evaluation of marriage by Antipater, followed by Hierocles and Musonius, is rightly underlined by Veillard, who draws on Gretchen Reydams-Schils' work,¹¹ albeit with minor disagreements. Finally, Seneca's and Marcus Aurelius' political thought and praxis are examined. Seneca's De Beneficiis and De Clementia are discussed, as well as Marcus' success in applying Stoic principles to his political action, including his care for public education and dislike of gladiatorial combats. Veillard observes that an exception to his philanthropic practice was his persection of the Christians, deriving from his disapproval of Christian martyrs' irrational conduct. I note that he was probably influenced by the excesses of Montanism (which also explains the difference between his and Epictetus' judgment), and might have ceased from persecution.¹²

This is a complete survey of Stoic philosophy. A special treatment should perhaps have been devoted to allegory, which in Stoicism assumes a philosophical stance and is part of philosophy itself, as I have argued; in particular, it belongs to theology, according to Chrysippus' theorization.¹³

Notwithstanding this very partial shortcoming, this is a laudable and useful book, which excellently serves its declared purpose -- and exceeds it. This is more than an introduction for non-experts; it is also a clear and insightful synthesis for scholars in Stoicism, providing a comprehensive view of one of the most coherent and stable philosophical systems of antiquity (with a rich afterlife in modern times: this is the object of Gourinat's work elsewhere).¹⁴ This is a careful work: I found extremely few typos.¹⁵ Gratitude is due to the editors and authors of this rich book.

Table of Contents

FIRST PART
Jean-Baptiste Gourinat - Jonathan Barnes, "Introduction"
Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, "Épistèmologie, rhétorique et grammaire"
Paolo Crivelli, "La dialectique"
Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, "Le monde"
David Sedley, "Les dieux et les hommes"
Thomas Bénatouïl, "La vertu, le bonheur et la nature"
Suzanne Husson, "Le convenable, les passions, le sage et la cité"
SECOND PART
Jonathan Barnes, "Grammaire, rhétorique, épistémologie et dialectique"
Keimpe Algra, "Cosmologie et théologie"
Anthony A. Long, "L'éthique: continuité et innovations"
Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, "La sagesse et les exercises philosophiques"
Christelle Veillard, "L'empreinte du stoïcisme sur la politique romaine"

Notes:

1.   Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007).
2.   προλήψεις are treated, on which see Henry Dyson, Prolepsis and Ennoia in the Early Stoa (Berlin / New York: de Gruyter, 2009).
3.   This, I note, is not the only example of how the Stoics received and transformed Plato's thought; to cite another, I mention their notion of νόμος ἔμψυχος: see my Il βασιλεύς come νόμος ἔμψυχος tra diritto naturale e diritto divino (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2006).
4.   "Éternel retour et temps périodique dans la philosophie stoïcienne", Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger 127 (2002) 213-227.
5.   I only add that Origen is also clear in underlining the differences between the Stoic conception of apokatastasis and his own. See my Apocatastasi (Milan: Vita and Pensiero, 2010), introduction.
6.   "Le critère d'identité", Revue de métaphysique et de moral 94 (1989) 513-533.
7.   This still constituted a problem for a Christian philosopher steeped in Platonism and Stoicism, Gregory of Nyssa. When he supports the identity of a person's earthly body with the same person's resurrected body in De Anima, the "growing argument" is a threat to the continuity of individual identity. See my commentary in my Gregorio di Nissa Sull'Anima e la Resurrezione (Milan: Bompiani-Catholic University, 2007); reviews by Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Vigiliae Christianae 62 (2008) 515-523, and Mark Edwards, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 60 (2009) 764-765.
8.   Susanne Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy (Oxford: OUP, 1998); review by Tad Brennan, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 21 (2001) 259-282: 268ff.
9.   Faire usage (Paris: Vrin, 2006); idem, Les Stoïciens III: Musonius, Épictète, Marc Aurèle (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2009).
10.   On Manilius see my Stoici Romani Minori (Milan: Bompiani, 2008), 1-688; Alexander MacGregor, "Which Art in Heaven", Illinois Classical Studies 29 (2004) 143-157, esp. 143-144; Katharina Volk, Manilius and His Intellectual Background (Oxford: University Press, 2009). That the study of physics is necessary according to Seneca, and necessary to ethics, is now also illustrated by Brad Inwood, "Why Physics?" in God and Cosmos in Stoicism ed. Ricardo Salles (Oxford: University Press, 2009) 201-233.
11.   The Roman Stoics (Chicago: University Press, 2005). For further demonstrations of how positive marriage was for Hierocles and Musonius, and associated by them with true goods not merely "indifferents", see my "Ierocle Neostoico in Stobeo," in Stobaeus: The Implications of His Doxographical Method, ed. G. Reydams-Schils (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010).
12.   As I argued in, respectively, "Montanismo e Impero Romano nel giudizio di Marco Aurelio" in Fazioni e congiure nel mondo antico, ed. M. Sordi (Milan: Vita and Pensiero, 1999), 81-97, and "Protector Christianorum (Tert. Apol. V 4)", Aevum 76 (2002) 101-112.
13.   See Allegoria (Milan: Vita and Pensiero, 2004), chapters 2 and 9, and Allegoristi dell'etá classica (Milan: Bompiani, 2007); see also Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, "Explicatio fabularum," in Gilbert Dahan-Richard Goulet (éds.), Allégorie des poètes, allégorie des philosophes (Paris: Vrin, 2005) 9-34.
14.   "La disparition et la reconstitution du stoïcisme," in G. Romeyer Dherbey and J.-B. Gourinat, Les stoïciens (Paris: Vrin, 2005) 13-28; F. Ogereau, Essai sur le système philosophique des stoïciens (1885) (reprinted Fougères: Encre Marine, 2002); Théodore Colardeau, Étude sur Épictète (1903) (reprinted Fougères: Encre Marine, 2004).
15.   E.g. ἄργος λόγος for ἀργὸς λόγος (96).

2010.03.38

2010-03-13T10:47:00.001-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
William Wians (ed.), Logos and Muthos: Philosophical Essays in Greek Literature. SUNY Series in Ancient Greek Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. Pp. vii, 281. ISBN 9781438427355. $75.00.
Reviewed by Christopher Moore, The University of Texas at Austin

[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

This book's cover wonders whether literature and philosophy "are in fact two rival forms of discourse mutually opposed to one another." But really its dozen essays take on less programmatic issues. Each submits an early Greek text--frequently the Homeric epics or the Agamemnon, but also archaic poetry and classical tragedy--to the sort of careful reading such texts, by themselves, occasion. As a loosely coordinated collection of readings, a couple of which I would recommend to others, this collection proves satisfactory. As an argument about the position of philosophy in works outside the philosophical canon, it proves less so.

The book, according to its editor, means to "explore philosophical dimensions of literary authors." This goal gets haphazardly glossed across the first several pages as, e.g., (i) to "consider philosophical issues and ideas as they arise from or can be applied to literary... texts"; (ii) to "challenge [the] assumption ... that literary texts are somehow lacking when measured against standards of philosophical reasoning and argument"; or (iii) to "demonstrate that the poets... exhibit a high degree of critical self-awareness and reflection on issues more typically associated with ancient philosophers" (1-2).

The last of these glosses best reflects the success of the book: the poets come out looking highly well-worth reading by people concerned about their own self-knowledge and all those topics such a concern could entail. The second gloss, about the relative rigor of argument, is never addressed, and struck me as almost by definition impossible (if a philosophical text is called so just because of its preponderance of explicit argument). The first gloss, with no attention to what would make an "issue" philosophical, as opposed simply to what reasonable people would think about, struck me as vacuous.

By leaving "philosophy" undefined, or, at best, by treating it as claiming things about knowledge, or identity, or the soul, or the four elements, the book forewent a chance, I think, to ask as seriously as possible what role the appreciation of literature could have played in a classical Greek philosophical life. Assume, for instance, that philosophy is an activity that involves bringing ourselves to have only those commitments (i.e., about truth and value) for which we can find good reasons to maintain. Or assume that it's a practice meant to achieve self-knowledge, whatever self-knowledge might be. From either of those perspectives, the question about the philosophicality of a text would be a question about how that text could contribute to living rationally or to developing self-recognition. Homer's or Aeschylus's occupation with problems of ignorance or fate or virtue could then be judged perspicuous or not, mature or not, persuasive or not, rigorous or not, from some common viewpoint. The analysis of will this text give me a productive site for philosophizing? seems to me often more fruitful (as, in part, the question is answered mainly by trying) than does this text have a high philosophical quotient? In most of the cases developed in this book, the answer to the first question is "yes," and to the second question, so it seems to me, is "I'm still not quite sure what's being asked."

The collection's first essay, J.H. Lesher's "Archaic Knowledge," shows, perhaps accidentally, how to use ancient literature as a corrective to philosophy's habit of undue simplification. The opening page identifies the key terms of Greek epistemology--epistêmê, gnôsis, sophia, nous (13)--and goes on to catalogue their most telling uses in archaic poetry. Lesher takes this catalogue to justify working out an "'early Greek concept of knowledge'" (14), and begins this project by establishing three big themes: humanity's limited awareness, our trials in gaining comprehensive understanding of the past and future, and the poet's special access to divine wisdom. But, it seems to me, the real benefit in acknowledging the synonyms for "to know" might not be in their systemization. Lesher's reminder that "early Greek poets spoke often and in different ways of individuals who discover, notice, realize, and come to know about various matters and, perhaps more often, of those who fail to do so" (14) recalls that there is not just one epistemological activity or attitude. To understand the theoretical relationship between humans and the world we need to attend to the variety of those relationships. Further, by remembering the range of mistakes or limitations to which our familiarity with the world is liable or bound, we might better appreciate the sources of traditional philosophical aporia. And because most poetry has interests beyond conceptual analysis, we may come to see the ethical relevance of such epistemic puzzles, and especially the relevance to living one's life well, in concrete rather than generic "don't be epistemically hubristic!" cases. The poetry Lesher cites could help an everyday thoughtful reader by putting into excellent wording worries about certainty that he or she may have barely begun thinking about, or may expand the scope of what seemed a minor puzzle, or may legitimate one's worries by putting them in the mouth of ideal personages. For the philosophical reader, Lesher's work should provide an antidote to those who without proper grounding conflate all kinds of epistemic attitudes and states, or who assume prematurely that ancient philosophical authors who use epistemic language must themselves be making such conflations.

Fred D. Miller Jr.'s "Homer's Challenge to Philosophical Psychology" calls Homer's poems "aporetic," especially in the tricky relationships between autos, kradiê, thumos, phrenes, and between fate and responsibility. But I was not convinced that something's aporeticity--the fact that a long work seems to include incompatible positions about interesting subjects--is a criterion of philosophicality. After all, its opposites--clarity, or ease of inquiry, or coordination--don't seem very counter-philosophical. It's true that the epics prompt Miller to ask interesting questions (e.g., 33, 39, 42)--"a careful reading of Homer reveals serious aporiai" (43)--but this seems mostly to reveal something about Miller's curiosity, practice interrogating texts, and uptake of a long history of "careful reading." It would perhaps be more interesting to establish whether any of the poems' characters recognize, worry about, or try to eliminate in a thoughtful way the aporiai. Or one could ask what kind of readers would be benefited from the discovery--in Homer--of such apparently incommensurable psychological claims. After all, we're already accustomed to hearing seemingly inconsistent claims being made about souls or selves, given the range of occasions we have for talking about them. Sometimes Miller does recognize what I say: "Homer's purpose was of course not to present a theory of agency and responsibility, but to tell a story in the course of which many characters--mortal and divine--seek to justify their actions or excuse themselves, attempt to change the course of fate, and reconcile themselves to unexpected misfortunes" (39, cf. 45). But it might've been better to continue by wondering whether Homer (therefore?) doesn't dogmatically misrepresent the range of ways we view the actions of ourselves and of others, or by showing whether to understand the plot we have to make some acute (and perhaps not text-constrained) distinctions between types of responsibility.

Rose Cherubin's "Alêtheia from Poetry into Philosophy: Homer to Parmenides" inquires into the meaning of lêthê's apparent opposite by looking at its use in Homer, Pindar, and Bacchlyides (53-58). Cherubin's useful analysis shows that alêtheia means not just "true" or "revealed" or "not false" but instead something like "a comprehensive account," whatever omits all "lies, mistakes, errors, misapprehensions, gaps, or other inaccuracies [, and being sure not to] distort, conceal, omit, or ignore anything pertinent to the topic at hand" (58). She applies her analysis to questions about Parmenides' to eon (59-67). This essay exhibits how the complexity of actual word-use should inform one's philosophical interpretation.

Ramona Naddaff's "No Second Troy: Imagining Helen in Greek Antiquity" details Helen as a shifting exemplar, from the Homeric Helen's strategic or normative self-censure, to the blameless victim of erotic desire, to the wife unfailingly faithful to her husband. This essay might suggest a clever sort of syllabus for an ancient philosophy and literature class.

Gerard Naddaf's "Allegory and the Origins of Philosophy" describes the relatively seamless transition from Homeric-Hesiodic poetry to Milesian physiology thanks to the allegorists' "saving of the appearances." Emphasizing the role of Theagenes (108-111), the essay shows that Xenophanes' and Heraclitus's clumsy dismissal of epic yielded to others' (sometimes self-legitimating) claims that the poets should not be taken so absurdly literally. Drawing on Tony Long's distinction between strong and weak allegorization, Naddaf lays out some ways the stories about clashing heroes and gods got read as (intentionally or accidentally) metaphorical for clashing cosmic elements. He admits that we still don't know much about the theological or mythopoetic commitments of the pre-Socratics, but seems justified in thinking that early conceptions of philosophy involved attempts at systematizing or naturalizing the reading of authoritative literature.

Catherine Collobert's "Philosophical Readings of Homer: Ancient and Contemporary Insights" looks more broadly at the practice of appropriating Homer to "philosophy." The chapter's bulk sets out, later to dismiss, three interpretative positions: that Homer writes allegorically; that he is somehow a philosopher; and that we can understand the West or ourselves, which is a project of philosophy's, only by or through understanding Homer. As a replacement Collobert urges "collecting and gathering elements in a text and making sense of them in a coherent way"; she ends up sketching a claim about "epic immortality... as the negation of time's destructive force." Reading an epic, for Collobert, gives one material to theorize about the human condition. She is not very clear about what in Homer's text accommodates such fruitful reflection, but would presumably accept that it's unusually clear-eyed and forceful about certain aspects of the human condition: the desire for glory, the possibility of heroism, and so forth. A weakness of this chapter is its failure adequately to distance itself from the language of the interpreters it discusses; it includes, with neither scare-quotes nor definitional gloss, "philosophers['] discourse," "philosophical assertions," "philosophical doctrines," "philosophical rationality," "disclos[ing] a philosophy," "an implicit philosophy," "under[standing] reality dialectically," "an unconscious protophilosopher," "philosophical properties in epics," and "imputing... philosophical meaning." I got no sense for what the authors to whom she's responding--or she herself--thought the family of "philosophy" terms meant, delimited, or added to a sentence.

Sara Brill's "Violence and Vulnerability in Aeschylus's Suppliants" gives a useful reading of the Danaids' inner conflict and their strategic use of myth's legitimating power, especially the myth of Io.

William Wians's "The Agamemnon and Human Knowledge" argues that Aeschylus displays a pessimism about the limits of human knowledge deeper than that of Homer or the archaic poets, and quite opposed to the optimism of the Ionian natural philosophers. We see this especially in people's attempts to read and interpret and to know ta megista. "Human knowledge depends not simply on what we experience, but on what the gods allow--or force--us to experience. ... There is no method of patient inquiry a la Xenophanes, no Heraclitean unveiling of hidden nature. The ignorance of the fate of Menelaus is a potent reminder that human beings know nothing that is not taught to them by the gods" (192). But this epistemological skepticism might not wholly moot human rationality: it's possible that "memory of what has been suffered ... teaches human beings the limits of their humanity and the necessity to be moderate." And the poet may help people not by mobilizing his special access to the divine but by writing of the past: "Muthoi ... trace patterns and purposes of what was previously experienced without full comprehension" (193). Of course we might not want to see in Aeschlyus's plays warnings against philosophical optimism, but rather lessons about the usual sort of human overconfidence.

P. Christopher Smith's "Poetic Peithô as Original Speech" argues that people have not always tried to move others to action through rational, articulated argument. Its main example is Cassandra's speech in the Agamemnon, and the paper shows how highly equivocal, temporally jostled, and linguistically innovative it is. Aeschlyus, Smith argues in this "Heideggerian" interpretation, is trying to show us what persuasive speech might really have sounded like.

C.D.C. Reeve's "Luck and Virtue in Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles" gives perceptive readings of the eighth Nemean, Agamemnon in the Agamemnon, and Creon in the Antigone, asking in what way virtue is susceptible to luck, and in what cases luck might neutralize one's responsibility. Reeve differentiates between four kinds of assault on virtue. (i) Chance may overpower underdeveloped virtues; resulting harm ought not to be blamed on happenstance but on the immature or thoughtless person with such bendable dispositions. (ii) A person might, because of mere accidents of birth, fail to have the requisite starting materials for virtue. (iii) Unfortunate institutional arrangements could be so powerful as to prevent virtuous action. (iv) One might exercise virtue but, due to ill luck, reap no benefit. Pindar, Reeve argues, observes that the poet's job is to ensure virtue receives its benefit; virtue causes happiness through the mediation of recognition by friends and gods. Aeschylus shows that Agamemnon's apparent compulsion, his seeming victimization by fate, in fact reflects his easily-overcome sense of morality; he is weak, and the doom that comes to him reflects his childishness. Sophocles' Creon fails both to minimize his exposure to luck and to maximize his control over affairs. His frustrations reflect his own unsympathetic, defective character. Overall, this is the most pleasantly written article, and Reeve puts his texts to a good 'philosophical' use: seeing whether he can develop, on the basis of his reading, some consistent judgment about particular moral qualities.

Paul Woodruff's "Sophocles' Humanism," also finely written, argues that "for every action [Sophocles] puts on his stage he shows a human cause" (234); and that, unlike Thucydides, "Sophocles was able to satisfy humanistic criteria without any disrespect for the background of divine sovereignty" (242). Sophocles depicted only human causes because doing so makes for a better play. But this did not require abandoning the gods, or his "reverence"; they were simply retired to the foundational myth or to ensuring oracular truth.

The final essay, Michael Davis's "The Fake That Launched a Thousand Ships: The Question of Identity in Euripides' Helen," suggests a promising view of tragedy, that it could foster self-recognition and self-knowledge, and shows--in a sort of neat elaboration of Naddaff's earlier paper--how attention to Helen, as phantom, as mistaken, as doubled, prompts rich questions about what it means to be someone.

Disappointingly, given the overlap in ancient authors under consideration, Logos and Muthos contains no subject or passages index; and despite the bulky endnotes for each chapter, and consequent difficulty finding the full information for an abbreviated reference, there is no bibliography.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: From Muthos to . . .
William Wians

I: Homer and the Philosophers

1. Archaic Knowledge
J. H. Lesher

2. Homer's Challenge to Philosophical Psychology
Fred D. Miller Jr.

3. Aletheia from Poetry into Philosophy: Homer to Parmenides
Rose Cherubin 4. No Second Troy: Imagining Helen in Greek Antiquity
Ramona Naddaff

5. Allegory and the Origins of Philosophy
Gerard Naddaf

6. Philosophical Readings of Homer: Ancient and Contemporary Insights
Catherine Collobert

II: Philosophy and Tragedy

7. Violence and Vulnerability in Aeschylus's Suppliants
Sara Brill

8. The Agamemnon and Human Knowledge
William Wians

9. Poetic Peitho as Original Speech
P. Christopher Smith

10. Luck and Virtue in Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles
C. D. C. Reeve

11. Sophocles' Humanism
Paul Woodruff

12. The Fake That Launched a Thousand Ships: The Question of Identity in Euripides' Helen
Michael Davis

About the Contributors
Index of Ancient Passages
Index of Names

2010.03.37

2010-03-13T10:34:00.001-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Marcus Junkelmann, Hollywoods Traum von Rom: "Gladiator" und die Tradition des Monumentalfilms. Kulturgeschichte der antiken Welt; Bd. 94. Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern, 2004. Pp. viii, 462. ISBN 9783805329057. €34.90.
Reviewed by Filippo Carlà, Ruprecht-Karls Universität Heidelberg

Table of Contents

Gli studi di ricezione dell'antico--ed in particolare quelli relativi al cinema--hanno avuto negli ultimi anni, come è noto, un grandissimo successo. Il volume di Junkelmann si inserisce con originalità e in modo fruibile da un ampio pubblico in un florido filone, che ha accompagnato per così dire dal lato accademico la "rinascita" del genere del film storico di antichità. Proprio questa rinascita--e il desiderio di trovarne le ragioni--costituisce la causa scatenante della riflessione di Junkelmann, come appare chiaro dal primo capitolo, Wiedergeburt eines totgeglaubten Genres.

Il film di ambientazione antica, dopo un quarantennio di quasi scomparsa, in seguito agli insuccessi di Cleopatra e de La caduta dell'Impero romano è infatti tornato con il XXI secolo a nuova vita. Primo esempio di tale rinascita è naturalmente Gladiator di R. Scott, film che costituisce in sostanza l'oggetto dell'analisi dell'autore: gli altri riferimenti sono tutti concepiti in relazione ad una migliore contestualizzazione e comprensione di questo lungometraggio, analizzato in alcune parti sequenza per sequenza.

L'autore si dedica così esclusivamente alla ricezione dell'antica Roma, seguendo in questo senso le impostazioni di ricerca più recenti, che superando la più generale formula "ricezione dell'antico" si sono impegnate a ricostruire le specifiche caratteristiche, nell'immaginario popolare, del mondo greco e del mondo romano.¹ Questo aspetto è messo in luce dall'autore piuttosto brevemente nel corso del secondo capitolo, Das Bild der Geschichte in einer postliteraten Welt, ove sottolinea come non si possa parlare di un genere "film storico", dal momento che il film di ambientazione antica--e quello di ambientazione romana in particolare--mostra, rispetto agli altri, caratteri del tutto specifici. Su questo punto la riflessione può essere ancora condotta oltre: è possibile infatti identificare sostanzialmente in tutti i film "romani", che si riferiscano all'età monarchica, repubblicana, tardo imperiale, alcune costanti, che andrebbero studiate approfonditamente per arrivare alla vera e propria definizione di un genere.

L'immagine di Roma, nella sua oscillazione tra un polo "positivo" ed un polo "negativo", è analizzata dall'autore nei capitoli settimo, "Wir fürchten keine Konkurrenz"--Vom Aufstieg und Niedergang des schwierigsten Filmgenres, una vera e propria completa storia del film storico romano, e quindicesimo, Rom als Traum und Rom als Alptraum. La ricostruzione proposta dall'autore è accurata e convincente, anche se restano aperte alcune domande. Manca ad esempio qualsiasi riferimento a produzioni cinematografiche di ambientazione tardo imperiale, che pure sarebbero di grandissima rilevanza nel definire se la tematizzazione di questa epoca è letta nella luce dell'indipendenza dei popoli dall'Impero universale e sopraffattore o invece in quella del collasso della civiltà.² Basti pensare all'elevato numero di produzioni ruotanti intorno alla figura di Attila (primo tra tutti il film omonimo di P. Francisci del 1954).

L'analisi del significato simbolico di Roma permette di spiegare almeno in parte il declino del successo del genere negli anni '60-2000: l'A. mette in luce come con Spartacus e Cleopatra si sia verificata una sorta di inversioni di ruoli, che ha portato da un immagine di Roma "polo del male" ad una identificazione Roma-America, che al pubblico americano non poteva piacere. La spiegazione sembra troppo netta: tentativi di rappresentazione di questo genere già erano stati fatti in passato, ma non erano andati a buon fine (si pensi al travagliato rapporto di collaborazione tra Gore Vidal e William Wyler nel Ben Hur del 1959). Il cambiamento politico interno americano va dunque messo in stretta relazione con il cambiamento nella produzione cinematografica, e nella sua accoglienza presso il pubblico, nonché, forse più banalmente, con un cambiamento di mode e di gusti.

Lo stesso tipo di analisi andrebbe condotto anche per il primo decennio del XXI secolo, completamente trascurato verosimilmente per ragioni di tempo dall'autore, che si limita a menzionare il nuovo Quo vadis? polacco del 2001. Eppure sarebbe necessario analizzare e comprendere perché il film romano dopo Gladiator sia in sostanza di nuovo finito nel dimenticatoio (un unico annunciato Memoirs of Hadrian, tratto dal romanzo della Yourcenar, con A. Banderas nel ruolo principale, è sparito nel nulla), di contro all'enorme successo, post 11 settembre, del film greco, che ha portato sugli schermi blockbuster come Troy, Alexander, 300,³ e di quello tardo imperiale, pur se con assai inferiore successo di pubblico (The Priestess, Agorà). Allo stesso modo l'ultimo decennio ha visto, in contrasto con il cinema, il grande successo di Roma in televisione, con le due serie della Rome targata HBO e con i film per la tv Imperium: anche questo sarebbe un tema da investigare approfonditamente.

Al di là di questo aspetto, l'autore tocca due altri punti della ricezione dell'antico. Il primo, il più originale e il più interessante, è il tentativo di definire non solo gli sforzi intellettuali di autori, registi e consulenti storici (cui è dedicato il quarto capitolo, Die Leiden des historischen Beraters, accompagnato da un'interessante lettera di K. Coleman, che tale funzione ha svolto per Gladiator), ma anche le aspettative del pubblico e le sue reazioni, in particolare in rapporto al tema della verosimiglianza e dell'accuratezza della ricostruzione, anche attraverso sondaggi e inchieste.

Risiede proprio nel discorso pubblico--verosimiglianza--consulenza storica il punto più discutibile della posizione dell'autore, che rischia talora di scadere nell'antiquaria solipsistica. Se Junkelmann nel secondo (Das Bild der Geschichte in einer postliteraten Welt) e terzo (Past Imperfect) capitolo scrive che si possono tollerare alcune libertà nel film, una volta ammesso che anche l'opera dello storico non è ricostruire la verità, egli passa poi a sostenere che non bisogna esagerare in questo senso, e che non si può accettare qualsiasi falsificazione. È vero che tali immagini "falsate" restano poi nella cultura popolare per lungo periodo e che i film successivi devono rispettarle come topiche, ma il punto vero da discutere sarebbe se tutto questo ha poi grande importanza. Il pubblico sa benissimo che ciò che sta vedendo è un film, sa benissimo che esso non ha aspirazioni alla precisione storica, ed è spesso bombardato dalla critica, che a più riprese sottolinea tutti gli "errori" di queste pellicole. In sostanza, mi sembra eccessivo riconoscere a questi film una responsabilità nella diffusione di una disinformazione storica, così come mi sembra del tutto utopica l'aspirazione ad un maggiore coinvolgimento dei consulenti--come la Coleman stessa evidenzia nella menzionata lettera. L'auspicio che l'immagine di Roma diffuso nel XXI secolo non sia figlia di quella del XIX e XX ma una nuova, nata dalla popolarizzazione della scienza archeologica (pp. 293-294) finisce così per essere una sorta di invito ad abbandonare il film per il documentario. Più importante per gli studi di ricezione è invece definire cosa suscita nel pubblico determinate reazioni, come mostra ad esempio un esemplare recente studio di M. Lindner.⁴

Sembrerebbe inoltre necessario, ancora una volta, distinguere tra film e film, tra sottogenere e sottogenere, scopi e scopi: realismo, identificazione con il protagonismo, satira, comunicazione di un messaggio morale e / o religioso seguono naturalmente strade molto diverse e sarebbe del tutto assurdo pensare che Life of Brian, Ben Hur o Cleopatra abbiano lo stesso approccio al dato storico-archeologico e la stessa aspirazione alla verosimiglianza.

In sostanza l'autore mostra su questo aspetto una certa rigidità, che lo porta anche a prese di posizione preconcette nei confronti degli spettatori: si sostiene così che scene topiche e irrealistiche come le corse delle bighe (p. 37) vengano riproposte continuamente (ed all'elenco sarebbe da aggiungere quella della Teodora di R. Freda, tralasciata come tutti i film tardo antichi) solo perché gli spettatori se le aspettano e sarebbero delusi dalla loro assenza. Oppure critiche di inverosimiglianza che dimenticano completamente che stiamo parlando di cinema, come quando contesta il finale di The Fall of the Roman Empire perché nessun nuovo Imperatore avrebbe lasciato in vita la figlia di Marco Aurelio e suo marito per paura di moti legittimisti (p. 346).

Tre capitoli sono quindi dedicati interamente alla valutazione da un punto di vista antiquario delle incongruenze e degli errori dei film, nelle scene di battaglia (il dodicesimo), nelle scene dell'arena (il tredicesimo), nella rappresentazione di Roma e dei suoi monumenti (il quattordicesimo). Questi capitoli appaiono i meno interessanti del volume, nel loro essere in sostanza un elenco di elementi inappropriati, solo a tratti illuminato da alcune comparazioni con la pittura o altre arti figurative.

In questo costante confronto con le altre figurative, ed in particolare con la pittura Ottocentesca è l'altra grande ricchezza del libro. Il tema dell'influsso della pittura storica neoclassica e romantica sull'immaginario collettivo dell'antico, ancora nel XX secolo e nella sua trasposizione cinematografica, era infatti finora piuttosto trascurato, ed è affrontato con grande ricchezza di dettaglio nel capitolo sesto, Kino mit unzureichenden Mitteln--Das Erbe des 19. Jahrhunderts. Interessante è in particolare il caso dell'influsso di Siemiradzki sul Quo vadis? di Sienkiewicz, e quindi sulla sua versione cinematografica polacca del 2001, che apre il problema, ancora tutto da affrontare, delle "scuole nazionali" al di fuori del cinema americano e di quello italiano. Ancora da approfondire sarebbe anche la reciproca influenza cinema-teatro o più in generale spettacolo, vistosa, per fare solo un esempio, nell'influsso della Teodora di Sarah Bernardt e Victorien Sardou su tutti i film relativi all'Imperatrice bizantina.⁵ Anche i cosiddetti toga-plays, giustamente ricordati dall'autore, sono ancora troppo poco presi in considerazione negli studi di ricezione dell'antico.⁶

Il volume è corredato di un ricchissimo apparato iconografico, di grande qualità, tanto nella scelta delle immagini quanto nella loro riproduzione grafica, che è certamente da segnalare come modello da imitare per future pubblicazioni sul tema.

Notes:

1.   Per la Grecia si vedano ad esempio E. Cavallini (ed.), I Greci al cinema, Bologna 2005; G. Nisbet (ed.), Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture, Bristol 2006 e I. Berti--M. Garcia Morcillo (edd.), Hellas on Screen, Stuttgart 2008.
2.   Sulla ricezione del V secolo nel teatro si vedano le mie considerazioni in "Il modello di ogni caduta: il V secolo d. C. nelle sue riduzioni teatrali tra XIX e XX secolo", in M. J. Castillo--M. Garcia Morcillo--S. Knippschild (edd.), Imagines. La Antiguedad en las artes escénicas y visuales, Logronntilde;o 2008, 91-114.
3.   D. S. Levene, "Xerxes goes to Hollywood", in E. Bridges--E. Hall--P. J. Rhodes (edd.), Cultural Responses to the Persian World. Antiquity to the Third Millennium, Oxford 2007, pp. 383-403. Su 300 un'interessante relazione, "Hollywood versus Ahmadinejad: conquering the east in the third-millennial western cinema" è stata tenuta da E. Hall nel convegno "Classical Empires in Contemporary Culture" (Londra, 23 maggio 2008).
4.   M. Linder, "Zwischen Anspruch und Wahrscheinlichkeit--Legitimationsstrategien des Antikfilms", in M. Lindner (ed.), Drehbuch Geschichte. Die antike Welt im Film, Münster 2005, pp. 67-85.
5.   S. Ronchey, "Teodora Femme Fatale", in S. Ronchey (ed.), La decadenza. Un seminario, Palermo 2003, pp. 19-43.
6.  D. Mayer, Playing out the Empire: Ben-Hur and Other Toga-Plays and Films, 1883-1908. A Critical Anthology, Oxford 1994.

2010.03.36

2010-03-12T09:43:00.001-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Seth Schwartz, Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society?: Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010. Pp. x, 212. ISBN 9780691140544. $29.95.
Reviewed by Benedikt Eckhardt, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

Preview

In this monograph, Seth Schwartz attempts to give one answer to what may well be the two questions most discussed by scholars who study the history of the Jews in Second Temple times and Late Antiquity: 1. What was the relationship between "Judaism and Hellenism"?; and 2. Why did the Roman Empire fail to integrate the Jews? As could be expected by any reader familiar with his last book Imperialism and Jewish Society,¹ Schwartz covers a very broad range of time (ca. 200 BCE until ca. 370 CE), follows a complex methodological approach (see below), makes up the lack of evidence by in-depth readings of the texts we do have, and never wastes a word. The analysis is confined to 177 pages of text. As with Imperialism and Jewish Society, the result may well be one of the most thought-provoking books written on the period in recent years.

Schwartz starts with stating his aims (p. 1-20). He seeks to uncover in what respect the Jews were "in their social relations, discourse, imagination, and even cultural practice, 'normal' inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean world" (p. 5). He therefore focuses on the way social relations are conceptualized in a given society. The dichotomy used is called "Reciprocity and Solidarity". Taken as ideal-types, the two concepts describe different approaches to gift-giving and exchange. While the first concept demands that a gift is reciprocated, thereby establishing relations of social domination and dependence (vassalage, debt bondage, patronage), the second does not. Solidarity-based societies would describe themselves as standing in opposition to reciprocity-based societies: The gift should not establish dependencies, in fact, should not actually be seen as a gift in the way the reciprocity-theory would demand. In contrast, an ideal of "corporate solidarity" would obligate the members of a given society to love (and support) all its members, not just patrons, clients, "friends". While charity is obligatory, charity should not turn into a "dependency-generating gift" (p. 18). Such counter-models Schwartz finds in Classical Athens and in the Torah, while he attributes to the ancient Mediterranean world in general a culture of "institutionalized reciprocity". He does, however, acknowledge that both concepts cannot exist in purest form and need each other to be effective.

The second chapter defines more clearly what is meant by "Mediterranean". Contrary to anthropological claims, "Mediterranean culture" (thought to be marked by institutional reciprocity, honour-shame mentality, female sexuality perceived as dangerous, and more) is not a cultural reality, but a heuristic model. As such, it is useful despite its shortcomings. This is mainly because, although there may not have been an actual "Mediterranean culture", the Torah still reads like describing a "Mediterranean counterculture", denying the validity of exactly the values and institutions anthropologists have defined as typically Mediterranean. Thus, honour only resides with God, not with men. An Israelite cannot be in a position of dependence on anyone; therefore, even the family is not imagined as an entity creating social dependency (Schwartz mentions the lack of a concept of legitimate vendetta). The Torah knows no real aristocracy. Land is to be returned to the original owners every 50 years (Lev. 25.8-12). "Connectivity" is expressly forbidden: Israelites shall avoid even small-scale contacts with other peoples. These prescriptions react to widespread practices and constitute a (partly utopian) "counterculture". This is of some relevance for the Jews' integration into the Roman Empire, because Schwartz argues that Roman rule depended largely on exactly those aspects of reciprocity-based societies which the Torah regarded as illegitimate. By co-opting local systems of dependency and extending the patron-client relationship to include the emperor as the greatest benefactor, Rome managed to make use of the widespread praxis of institutionalized reciprocity. Schwartz therefore sees a structural problem in Roman-Jewish relations, because Jewish traditions did not allow this strategy to function (p. 33-42).

After having stated his general argument, Schwartz turns to three textual corpora in order to examine Jewish attitudes towards reciprocity and solidarity: The apocryphal (deuterocanonical) book of Ben Sira, the works of Flavius Josephus, and the Palestinian Talmud. Schwartz attributes to Ben Sira (ca. 190 BCE) a theory according to which there exist three types of law given by God, one for nature, one for mankind, one for Israel. This is based on a controversial reading of Sir 16:24-17:23 and would provide a solution for the curious fact that Ben Sira does, on the one hand, identify Torah and wisdom, and on the other hand gives (wisdom-based) advice how successfully to prevail in social contexts the Torah does not regard as legitimate. That Ben Sira does give much advice about how to behave in situations which may generate social dependency or shame shows that his wisdom aims at providing a method for dominating without being dominated. What others have regarded as mere expressions of piety is read by Schwartz in the light of his model. Charity is a social strategy (the poor won't hurt the one who gives); piety is a condition for social domination. In Schwartz's reading, Ben Sira tries to do justice both to the anti-reciprocal ideology of the Torah and to the fact that it is impossible to avoid the situations banned by this ideology. His aim is "to provide a Jewish, Torah-based justification for a set of social and cultural norms that in reality were radically at odds with the norms and ethos of the Torah" (p. 78).

The works of Josephus are very different; therefore Schwartz focuses on different aspects: Euergetism and memorialization (understood as the normal way of reciprocating benefactions in the Graeco-Roman world). Josephus does not present euergetism as a part of Jewish social life. Jews have their own way of life based in all respects on piety; charity is an obligation, which leaves little room for euergetism. While Schwartz is careful not to generalize (thus, Moses and Josephus himself appear as models of good euergetism), he emphasizes that Josephus regards monumental tombs and other forms of thankfulness as alien to Judaism. Even Herod's temple causes the people to thank not him, but God. In contrast, Jews do memorialize their benefactors (marked primarily not by deeds, but by arete) by inscribing them into texts (whether orally recited or written). Schwartz here incorporates archaeological findings from Jerusalem. While Josephus' claim that Jews never have monumental tombs does not stand the test, his general argument is judged to be correct: Where tombs are to be found, they are private buildings, and it is indeed remarkable that there are no inscriptions from Jerusalem commemorating the deeds of benefactors, quite in contrast to Greek cities or, for that matter, to Rome.

Turning to (Palestinian) Rabbinic texts, Schwartz presupposes the theory for which he argued in Imperialism and Jewish Society and which has caused considerable debate: That the Rabbis were a marginal group who sometimes claimed in their texts, but did not possess in reality authority over a majority of Jews. He does not, however, engage in polemics² and occupies himself instead with the Rabbis' rejection of Roman values. He often finds them exploiting the values of reciprocity and memorialization for their own, Jewish purposes. Thus, while for the Rabbis memorializing honours conveyed by humans are void, they may be used to convince non-rabbinic Jews to practice charity. Schwartz further investigates how honour is treated in inner-Rabbinic debates. Discussions about pupils citing their teachers (is it because they have to convey honour to them?) and rising for elders or those higher in rank (is someone higher in rank necessarily worth rising for?) show that the Rabbis asked some of the same questions as Ben Sira and Josephus. In sum, they do acknowledge the importance of honour, but regard the Roman way of achieving it as alien to Judaism.

In the end, Schwartz argues for a general adaptability of his model for scholars working on the history of (especially) pre-modern Judaism. He even sees a continuity of some anti-Mediterranean elements today (p. 171). In two appendices, relevant texts of Ben Sira and Josephus are printed in translation. While in the latter case the translations are adapted from LCL, for Ben Sira Schwartz gives his own. As he acknowledges early on, Ben Sira is most difficult to translate, partly because of considerably different versions (Hebrew, Greek, Syriac), partly because the parts of the text which have come down to us in Hebrew are not well preserved and sometimes incomprehensible. Not surprisingly, some decisions taken by Schwartz may be debated. In 7:18 he understands "Do not exchange a friend for money or a dependent [?] brother for the gold of Ophir", noting that talui ("dependent") "makes little sense here". He does not mention Ginzberg's solution which relates the verse to the praxis of weighing gold ("ausgewogen"); it is accepted in the most recent commentary by Sauer, which has also escaped the notion of Schwartz.³ 10:28 is given by Schwartz as "my son, in modesty honor yourself and He will give you political power as you deserve", but the reference to God is not necessary; it is based solely on MS A (wjtn), while both MS B (wtn) and the Greek (dós) leave the son in control. There will be other instances where different decisions are possible, but in general, this reviewer has found the translations to be helpful and accurate.

This is a great scholarly work, exemplary for the methodological caution and theoretical proficiency applied to texts often studied in the most conservative of ways. It is what Schwartz once says about Bickerman: "refreshingly nontheological" (p. 77 note 75). Often this reviewer has found himself admiring the originality and complexity of Schwartz's thought. Some observation, however, do seem in order.

While it is of course impossible to cover every possible aspect of the topic on 177 pages, an obvious weakness of the argument is the general limitation of the evidence. Arguments from silence (as in the case of the non-existence of certain inscriptions) do have some force. But the fact remains that Schwartz can hardly do more than to read texts and deduce culture from them. This is, to be sure, much more fruitful than the "materialist" approach which draws up inventories, mistaking artefacts for "culture".⁴ Schwartz has grown ever more sceptical about this concept of "Hellenization", which is indeed too simple. But if, as this reviewer believes, the only reasonable definition of "culture" takes it to be a mode of observation, which allows to treat perceived differences as information,⁵ even Schwartz might sometimes not be radical enough. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that he can show for Josephus and the Rabbis that they are actually observing matters alongside the lines Schwartz's theory requires; thus his model is certainly a powerful one. It also helps to read Ben Sira in an entirely new light, which has its merits. One wonders, however, if the same model would have been applicable to other texts. While Schwartz's claim that the family is not a prominent social network in the Pentateuch is counterintuitive but possibly correct, it is hard to see how a text like the book of Tobit (usually thought to be contemporary with Ben Sira) would fit in here. What is more, the advantage of analyzing Ben Sira and Josephus (and not, say, Tobit, Judit, the Books of the Maccabees) is that we know at least something about the people who wrote these texts; this, however, raises the problem of how representative they are. Josephus is certainly an unusual man in many regards. The fact that, compared to archaeological findings, his statements about Jewish memorialization are "not completely wrong" (p. 106) provides a rather unstable basis for explaining the lack of Jewish integration into the Roman Empire. And although Schwartz has expressed caution against comparing Jewish ideals with Roman praxis⁶, one sometimes wonders what else it is when he compares Ben Sira's advice or Rabbinic discussions with the euergetic praxis of the Graeco-Roman world.

There are also some omissions which might affect the argument. For example, Herod (p. 99-102) could have received a more extensive treatment (apart from the question what Josephus thinks about him); it does not become clear why his attempts to integrate Judea into the Roman oikumene were not successfully continued by his successors, and why his euergetism seems to have functioned better than theirs (after all, Josephus claims the opposite). The discussion of different views on money (p. 70-74) could have been extended - Ben Sira does not provide a negative perspective on money; is this because the impersonal character of money stands against the dependency-generating personality of the gift? One could have incorporated the Dead Sea Scrolls (1QS v 14-20: All contact with outsiders is to be avoided, except where money is involved). More serious is the lack of reference to the Hasmoneans. Schwartz creates the impression that the Roman conquest brought about confrontation with euergetism, a praxis formerly alien to the Jews. But the Hasmoneans actually posed as benefactors already in the second century BCE. 1 Maccabees 14 transmits the honorary decree for Simon, which shares many characteristics with the kind of honorary decrees Schwartz did not find in Jerusalem. Note also that the Hasmoneans did build monumental tombs and may have influenced broader parts of the Judean aristocracy to do the same.⁷ Hasmonean propaganda at least seems to anticipate developments Schwartz sees at work only later. Also problematic is the sharp differentiation between mneme achieved through texts or through monuments. Certainly Romans were also keen on being inscribed into texts; suffice it to point to Pliny's correspondence with Tacitus.

Despite these objections, there can be no doubt that Schwartz's book is essential reading for anyone working in the field. The attempt to answer two big questions at once is laudable, the analysis is carefully done, and the conclusions are complex. We need more studies operating on such a high level of abstraction. I only fear that there are not too many scholars able to write them.

Notes:

1.   S. Schwartz: Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E., Princeton/Oxford 2001.
2.   Note the conservative reactions labelling him a "fundamentalist": H. I. Newman: The Normativity of Rabbinic Judaism: Obstacles on the Path to a New Consensus, in: L. I. Levine, D. R. Schwartz (ed.): Jewish Identities in Antiquity. Studies in Memory of Menahem Stern, Tübingen 2009, 165-171; M. D. Herr: The Identity of the Jewish People Before and After the Destruction of the Second Temple: Continuity or Change?, 211-236 in the same volume.
3.   L. Ginzberg: Randglossen zum hebräischen Ben Sira, in: C. Bezold (ed.): Orientalische Studien. Theodor Nöldeke zum 70. Geburtstag (2.3.06) gewidmet, Giessen 1906, 2:609-625, at 617; G. Sauer: Jesus Sirach / Ben Sira, Göttingen 2000, 90. Sauer's commentary clearly falls into the category of "pietistic, theologically oriented scholarship" justly criticized by Schwartz, 77.
4.   As in the magisterial study by M. Hengel: Judentum und Hellenismus. Judentum und Hellenismus. Studien zu ihrer Begegnung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Palästinas bis zur Mitte des 2. Jahrhunderts v. Chr., 3rd ed. Tübingen 1988.
5.   Along the lines of N. Luhmann: Kultur als historischer Begriff, in: id.: Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft, vol. 4, Frankfurt am Main 1995, 31-54.
6.   Forcefully argued in his review of Goodman, see S. Schwartz: Sunt Lachrymae Rerum, Jewish Quarterly Review 99 (2009), 56-64, at 62.
7.   Cf. O. Tal: Hellenism in Transition from Empire to Kingdom: Changes in the Material Culture of Hellenistic Palestine, 55-73 in the volume cited above, no. 2.

2010.03.35

2010-03-12T09:32:00.001-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Frédérique Biville, Daniel Vallat (ed.), Onomastique et intertextualité dans la littérature latine. Actes de la journée d'étude tenue à la Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée - Jean Pouilloux le 14 mars 2005. Collection de la Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée 41. Série linguistique et philologique 5. Lyon: Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée - Jean Pouilloux, 2009. Pp. 233. ISBN 9782356680068. €27.00 (pb).
Reviewed by Anne Sinha, Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille III

This book collects ten papers presented at a conference called "Onomastique et intertexualité dans la littérature latine" organised on the 14th of March 2005 at the Université Lumière-Lyon II. Though the topic of intertextuality has been already well studied and analyzed, the question of onomastics offers a new and a very rich angle. A brief but dense introduction of the volume shows the importance of bringing the two questions together and proposes a historical panorama in which the two major steps are two verse genres borrowed from the Greeks: comedy (first half of the second century B. C.) and classical poetry (second half of the first century). From its earliest appearance, in the comedies of Plautus, Latin onomastics is characterised by two phenomena, intertextuality and bilingualism, and is entirely dominated by Greek culture. This exchange takes place in only one direction, as there are almost no Latin names in Greek literature. The success of the palliata over the togata, which differ mostly in their use of Greek or Latin names, has to be interpreted not in terms of taste for exoticism or a need for cultural distance to allow real laughter but as an important mark of the real bilingualism of the Romans.

With the poets of the first century B.C. writing under the influence of both Callimachus and their Alexandrian contemporaries, the use of Greek names becomes one of the signs of the preciosity that is a trademark of Latin poetry. Similarly, later authors use those names in reference to major Latin works and no longer to Greek culture. In this way Greek onomastics became a tool for writing Latin poetry.

The introduction also proposes different directions of research. In a diachronic perspective, one can analyse the use of a name not only from one author to another (e.g., from Theocritus to Virgil's Bucolics) but also in different works of the same author, especially when their genres differ. Second, in a generic perspective, a name can refer to different types of works and therefore show a complex network of influence (in Virgil's Bucolics can be found names from epics or epigrams). The use of names can also be studied in reference to the characters to which they refer to see how the same name can be used for different characters or how a literary type changes. In the same perspective the question arises of the construction of a historical or mythical figure through its diverse mentions in texts. Intertextuality also has an axiological dimension, as a name can be reused to praise or denounce, therefore introducing a question of manipulation.

This book is divided into three parts. The first proposes two transversal approaches; the other two collect more focused papers: on the theatre and poetry in the second and on erudite and late literature in the third.

First part: transversal studies

Frédérique Biville (Université Lumière-Lyon 2); "Onomastique et intertextualité dans la littérature latine. Perspectives". Analyzing examples and evidence from Latin literature, the author uses two approaches to study the relationships between proper names and history . In the first, which is onomasiological, one starts from the person and sees which linguistic signs are used to refer to him (for example, the different ways in which Cicero refers to himself in his correspondence). The second, semiological, approach concentrates on the name itself, seeing its historical variations (for example, the Romans used both the Greek name Ganymedes and its Etruscan version Catmite). The use of a name must be placed on scales of notoriety (from being unknown elsewhere to being general in antique culture) and intertextuality (from referring to the immediate context to referring to the whole of Greco-Latin literature).

Daniel Vallat (Université Lumière-Lyon 2) : "La métaphore onomastique de Plaute à Juvénal". Studying a wide range of authors, this paper shows how the metaphorical use of a proper name has a strong oral dimension, whether the author or a character is speaking, as well as an axiological value. From the Plautine theater, where it was a burlesque tool, it becomes a way of attack in rhetoric, a fact that might have influenced its use in the epigram. For the Augustan poets it is mostly an ornament. Martial and Juvenal inherit all these different traditions, combining poetic, flattering and aggressive uses of proper names.

Second Part: theater and classical poetry

Matías López López (Université de Lleida, Espagne) : "Etymologies ouvertes chez Plaute". This paper distinguishes five levels of ratio, that is, types of relationship between the etymologies of the proper names of the characters and their roles in Plautus' plays. The interpretatio nominis itself is the first one, in which the name of a character is clearly explained in the play. The closed ratio, is the second, in which the explanation is given without specific introduction. The third , the open ratio, associates different levels of explanation for a name. The fourth is an implicit ratio, in which a name in itself carries a meaning. The fifth one is an antiphrastic ratio, in which the nature of a character is the opposite of what his name means. Some examples of the third, or open ratio (the names Agorastocles, Callicles, Colaphus, Libanus, Stalagmus, and Stratophanes) show how subtly Plautus interweaves different levels of reference in choosing the names of his characters.

Jean-Christophe Jolivet (Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille 3): "Questions d'onomastique homérique dans la poésie augustéenne". The Augustan poets seem to have taken into account the philological questions of the Hellenistic critics, especially their researches on the anonymous characters in Homer's works. Virgil responds in that way to the list of thirteen (or fourteen) unknown Thracian warriors killed by Diomedes in Iliad 10 by systematically naming the Rutulian warriors in Aeneid 9. In the same way, Heroides 13 answers the question, left pending in the Iliad, of the identity of Protesilaus'murderer. One can also find traces of the hellenistic etymological debates, as in Heroides 5 (131-132) about Iphigeneia and in Aeneid 7 (14) for Circe.

Emmanuel Plantade (Université Lumière-Lyon 2): "Heu... Theseu ! Le nom propre et son double (Catulle 64, 50-250 et Ovide Her. 10". In writing Heroides 10 (Ariadne to Theseus), Ovid has to emulate carmen 64 of Catullus and more precisely his famous paranomasia eheu/Theseu, the accentuation of which Plantade discusses in the last part of the paper. Although Ovid often uses the vocative, he avoids the exclamation eheu that appears in other poems, showing in this way a new system of significance based on metrics. The different places of the name in the verse symbolically modulate the distance between the hero and Ariadne.

Christian Nicolas (Université Jean Moulin-Lyon 3) : "La signature masquée du poète des Héroïdes." This paper investigates the strategies used by Ovid to sign his Heroides even though they were supposed to have been written by male and female heroes of Greek mythology. As he could not use the technique of sphragis, which the author illustrates by examples, Ovid may have hidden his name following a cryptographic code (that needs to be read from right to left and without breaking the words). More convincing is the suggestion that Ovid used intertextual allusions to other authors but also to his own works, allusions which are a kind of enigma inviting readers to find the real author.

Olivier Thévenaz (Université de Lausanne, Suisse), "Auctoris nomina Sapphus: noms et création d'une persona littéraire dans l'Héroïde XV ovidienne." Studying the construction of the identity of the author of He roi des 15, the author shows how Ovid uses names of characters from Sappho to create an effect of authenticity and, at the same time, underlines the difference in poetics between archaic poetry and his own through other intertextual echoes and the introduction of Sappho's signature. This investigation leads to a very interesting new proposition on the well known debate about the authenticity of the poem. The exiled Ovid could have rewritten this text and brought into it his new poetical conceptions.

Daniel Vallat (Université Lumière-Lyon 2) : "L'onomastique du genre bucolique." The onomastics of the bucolic genre is studied within its two major periods: the acculturation of the genre from Greek to Latin literature when Virgil deeply rewrites Theocritus and the imitation of Virgil by later Latin writers. The use of proper names (sometimes massively borrowed from Theocritus and sometimes totally different) perfectly illustrates Virgil's poetics, between imitation, underlined by the poem itself, and innovation. These names, which in Theocritus' work often came from the real world, are in Virgil's Bucolics not only foreign but therefore only poetical. Later Latin authors borrowed from the stock that by their time had become properly Latin but also played with the tradition by giving particular names to other characters or inventing new names.

Third Part: scholarship of late antiquity

Michèle Béjuis-Vallat : "Servius, interpres nominum Vergilianorum (ad Aen. 1)". This paper analyses all the commentaries made by Servius on the onomastics of Aeneid 1 to show the subtleties of the etymologies he suggests (eponymic, significant and often bilingual). Servius' interpretations (for example, when he rejects the idea of a 'cruel' Juno or of a fratricidal Romulus) have to be understood as determined by his project of defending the moral values of pagan Antiquity. Servius, by convincingly considering that Caesar...Iulius in Jupiter's prophecy refers to Caesar and not to Augustus, also goes against the idea of Virgil as court poet.

Marie-Karine Lhommé (Université Lumière-Lyon 2) : "De Mutinus Titinus à Priape: la métamorphose d'un dieu mineur". Mutinus Titinus is a minor god whose name is mentioned by Varro (Ant. div. XVI) and whose recently disappeared sanctuary is located by Verrius Flaccus. These texts are known to us only from later Christian writers who have used the nuptial rite devoted Mutinus Titinus to denounce the immorality of Roman pagan cults. This paper, through a linguistic study of the two names of the god, shows that Varro and Verrius, by using etymology, might have themselves reconstructed the identity of this half-forgotten god, who ironically owes his survival to the enemies of the religion that worshipped him..

This book, the presentation and editing of which must be praised, reaches two major goals. First it brings a real new approach to a major, and therefore well known, question. Secondly, it proves the importance of that approach through the variety and the high quality of the collected papers and invites us to further stimulating works.

2010.03.34

2010-03-11T08:59:00.001-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Anne Pippin Burnett, Pindar. Ancients in Action. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2008. Pp. 175. ISBN 9781853997112. $23.00 (pb).
Reviewed by Maria Pavlou, University of Cyprus

[Table of Contents is listed at the end of the review.]

Burnett's new book on Pindar is a welcome addition to the Duckworth Ancients in Action series, the aim of which is 'to introduce major figures of the ancient world to the modern general reader, including the essentials of each subject's life, works, and significance for later western civilisation'. The book includes an Introduction and Conclusion, four chapters, a shortish Bibliography and an Index.

The Introduction opens with a biographical note on Pindar's life and oeuvre, followed by a brief sketch of his reception in antiquity and, especially, in modern times, and a tiny list of thorny issues which have troubled students of Pindar within the last century such as his elitism, and the unity and performance (choral or monodic) of his odes [Needless to say that Burnett, and Chris Carey, have been the...χορηγοί of the so called 'choral group']. Even having regard to the restrictions imposed by the book's purpose, as an introductory handbook for novices, this section is extremely compressed and, most importantly, marginalizes dominant current trends in Pindaric scholarship (e.g. re-performance, new historicism etc). In my view, a more extensive and informative treatment of Pindaric criticism, as well as a short section on the epinician genre, its forms and conventions, would have been expedient here.

Chapter 1 opens with an overview of the festivities held for victorious athletes upon their return to their homeland. Burnett prefers to see these celebrations as closed and private gatherings among members of the elite rather than as banquets open to the whole city (21), in spite of the fact that scattered evidence in the Epinicians testifies to both contexts (see e.g. Ol.13.49). She underlines the social and political dimensions and implications of athletic distinction in the crown-bearing Panhellenic games for the victor and his family; and she does not omit the importance of praise song for the preservation of one's name and κλέος. As she remarks, the victory song was 'an act of genial reciprocity. On behalf of victorious hosts, it offered to share the gods' gift of κῦδος with equals and friends, and through them with the whole locality, while on behalf of those who received it, the ode voiced the praise that would repay such an exalted benefaction' (20-21). The chapter closes with an inspection of Pindar's poetic arsenal and briefly discusses some of the epinician conventions and Pindaric techniques, such as the pretence of spontaneity, speech-acts, opening invocations to gods, prayers, proverbial wisdom, reminders of immortality and fragmentary mythical episodes. All this, Burnett emphasizes, served to turn each performance into a unique experience both for the victor and the celebrants.

The second chapter focuses on epinicians composed for boy victors. It opens with a brief note on the boys' education, supervised training and participation in institutionalized contest sports, while special mention is made of the four trainers that we come across in the Epinicians: Orseas (Isthm.3/4), Ilas (Ol.10), Menander (Nem.5) and Melesias (Ol.8). Nevertheless, Burnett is reticent about the complexities and problematic nature of references to these professionals, a topic which has been extensively dealt with by Nigel Nicholson in a recent book - surprisingly not included in the bibliography.¹ Burnett classifies 16 of the 45 epinicians as odes for victors between 12 and 18; and she assumes that all Aeginetan odes are for boy athletes, a contested thesis which she put forward more rigorously in her 2005 book Pindar's Songs for Young Athletes of Aegina. As she observes, songs for boys share many features with songs for men in terms of scale, form and function (39). At the same time, however, they display some distinctive features such as: a) invocations to female deities/powers; b) adjectives describing youth; c) a playful air of juvenility indulging in child-like exaggeration; d) references to trainers (40). Even though Burnett fleetingly admits that in the odes for boys the implication of the victor's entire familial line is more apparent (47), she makes no further comment on the unequivocally more prominent role that family, and especially the victor's father, plays in this group of odes.

Chapter 3 opens with a sketch of the four crown-bearing games at Olympia, Delphi, Nemea and Isthmus, laying particular emphasis upon the ability of festival contests to control and temper raw violence and aggression immanent in many sports - especially combat sports. Burnett briefly discusses how this 'civilizing aspect of victory' is played out in the Pindaric myths by looking closely at Pyth.9 and Ol.9. According to her, one of the features which distinguish poems for men from poems for boys is the notion of envy, in so far as athletic distinction of a well-known mature athlete is more liable to evoke the envy of his peers, even the envy of gods. Ol.7 for Diagoras of Rhodes is offered as an apt example of Pindar's attempt to respond to this challenge with gnomes and references to the contingency and vicissitudes of human life sprinkled throughout the poem (81-88). The rest of the chapter deals with equestrian events, showy elitist sports accessible only to the powerful and rich. Burnett declares that 'equestrian events were less meaningful than the trials' (88) - a controversial thesis if we consider the prestige of such events, as well as the significance which powerful rulers laid upon their equestrian achievements - and underlines their political dimension. Based on the fact that out of the six odes celebrating equestrian victories of ordinary citizens (Ol.4; Ol.5; Ol.6; Pyth.7; Isthm.1; Isthm.3) only two (Ol.6 and Isthm.1) are on a grand scale, she contends that non-rulers usually chose to celebrate their winning horses, mule-carts and chariots with a certain reserve in order to prevent any suspicion of tyrannical aspirations. (90).

In the final chapter Burnett discusses the odes for the tyrants of Sicily, Theron, Hieron and his general Chromius, as well as the two Pythians which Pindar composed for Arcesilas, king of Cyrene. As she points out, these celebrations differed from those of ordinary athletes both in terms of form (guests were greater in numbers and the choruses more numerous (104)) and function (here the song is not offered to the victor's peers 'to be shared as their due' (104)). In terms of themes and structure, for Burnett there are two main traits which distinguish the odes for rulers: a) that they did not 'reflect the same joyous exchange of glory given and praise returned that regularly enlivened songs made for athletes of the mainland' (104); b) that they 'were less prodigal in leveling maxims and self-deprecating jokes; they still pretended to spontaneity, but generally they give up the trade-mark suggestion of error' (105). In the analysis of the 10 odes, which occupies most of this chapter, Burnett also identifies differences in the way in which Pindar approaches and treats each of these rulers: for instance, she notes that in the odes for Hieron the praise is 'more urgent and purposeful' because 'the ruler and his court recognized the bitter possibility of civic dissatisfaction' (117), while in the more genial court of Theron the praise has a different tone and flavor (106-117).

The book closes with a few general remarks on commissioned poetry, the notions of envy and praise, the importance of Pindar's song in the preservation of one's name and good reputation, as well as with a note on the way in which aristocracy is portrayed and presented in the epinicians.

Burnett's book is readable and accessible to the general reader. Her clear and elegant style, however, is blemished by the way in which she organizes and structures her material. Whereas the chapters encompass a wide range of issues, many of these are not fully developed, while other themes are scattered throughout the book, thus making it difficult for the reader with no previous experience in the area to form a comprehensive and relatively coherent idea of Pindar's style, and the rhetoric, form and function of his encomiastic poetry. Although many samples of Pindar's work are included, their brief and superficial treatment, although informative, does not manage to communicate their force, vehemence and kaleidoscopic nature. It would have been preferable if Burnett had included fewer poems followed by more comprehensive and detailed analyses that would enable the reader to grasp their complexity, richness, density and dexterity. Moreover, even though the book targets the 'general reader', I would expect that at least some key terms which point to recurring themes in the epinicians (such as φυά, ποικιλία, σοφία, ἡσυχία) would be given in Greek as well. There are only 10 Greek transliterated words throughout the book, all found in the Conclusion. Last but not least, I appreciate that in an introductory handbook bibliography cannot and should not be extensive and exhaustive; but the bibliography is deficient. Important and thought-provoking recent books on Pindar are conspicuously absent.² The aforementioned objections aside, however, this book provides a good introduction to Pindar for undergraduate neophytes and the general reader. Whereas it offers only a few new insights to readers familiar with Pindar, Burnett's idea of classifying the odes into the three aforementioned categories and the identification of the differences among them in terms of function and style can be potentially fruitful and contribute to a better understanding of Pindar's victory songs, inviting us to think and reflect more carefully on pragmatics and the codes that Pindar uses in order to convey his meaning successfully.

Table of Contents

Introduction 9

Chapter 1: Praising a Victorious Athlete 16

Chapter 2: Celebrations for Boys (Pyth.10; Nem.7; Isthm.8 Nem.3; Nem.8) 34

Chapter 3: Celebrations for Men (Pyth.9; Ol.9; Ol.7; Isthm.1; Ol.6) 69

Chapter 4: Celebrations for Rulers (Ol.3; Ol.2; Pyth.6; Ol.1; Pyth.1; Pyth.2; Pyth.3; Nem.1; Pyth.5; Pyth.4) 101

Conclusion 161

Select Bibliography 167

Notes 169

Index 173

Notes:

1. N. J. Nicholson, Aristocracy and Athletics in Archaic and Classical Greece (Cambridge 2005).
2. See, e.g., B. Currie, Pindar and the Cult of Heroes (Oxford 2005); C. Mann, Athlet und Polis im archaischen und frühklassischen Griechenland (Göttingen 2001); A. D. Morrison, Performances and Audiences in Pindar's Sicilian Odes, BICS Supplement 95 (London 2007); Nicholson (n.1).

2010.03.33

2010-03-11T08:48:00.001-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Hans-Joachim Schalles, Susanne Willer (ed.), Marcus Caelius: Tod in der Varusschlacht. Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 2009. Pp. 188. ISBN 9783896788085. €19.90.
Reviewed by David Colling, Université Catholique de Louvain

[La table des matières se trouve en fin de compte-rendu.]

L'année 2009 aura connu un nombre particulièrement important de publications concernant la bataille de la forêt du Teutoburg, à l'occasion des deux mille ans de l'événement. La parution d'ouvrages tantôt scientifiques, tantôt destinés au grand public, ont côtoyé la mise sur pied de manifestations en tous genres en Allemagne : expositions, reconstitutions historiques, conférences, et même émission d'un timbre-poste à l'effigie d'Arminius. Les commémorations étaient à la mesure de la bataille elle-même, qui eut déjà un profond retentissement dans l'Antiquité, aussi bien parce qu'elle mit un frein à la poursuite de l'expansion romaine en Germanie, que parce qu'elle contribua à la construction d'un sentiment identitaire (pan-)germanique. Des auteurs comme Y. Le Bohec n'hésitent pas à comparer la bataille du Teutoburg à la guerre des Gaules, comme point de départ de la formation d'une identité. C'est dire l'importance du sujet et le nombre de traitements dont il a fait l'objet, au fil des époques.

Au milieu de cette tradition cependant, cet ouvrage se démarque à plus d'un titre. D'abord, parce qu'il ne s'agit pas d'un énièeme livre sur le déroulement des événements, sur la localisation exacte de la bataille ou sur les causes et conséquences. Pour bien comprendre l'intérêt et la portée de cet ouvrage, il convient de ne pas perdre de vue le but pour lequel il a été rédigé : il va de pair avec la mise sur pied de l'exposition homonyme, réalisée grâce à l'action conjointe du Römermuseum im Archäologischen Park Xanten et du LandesMuseum Bonn. L'exposition débuta d'abord à Xanten (23/04/2009-30/08/2009) avant de prendre la direction de Bonn (24/09/2009-24/01/2010). Et c'est Marcus Caelius qui constitue la pierre angulaire autour de laquelle toute l'exposition--et donc aussi le livre--gravite. Le cénotaphe y est radiographié de a à z, tant du point de vue de sa composition matérielle qu'au niveau des informations qu'il recèle. Rien n'est négligé, et le moindre détail permettant de retracer ce que furent la vie et la mort du centurion est exploité. Il en résulte une analyse exceptionnelle, que peu de monuments funéraires romains peuvent se vanter d'avoir subie. Et le fait que cette analyse soit rendue accessible au grand public est véritablement remarquable.

Après une courte fiche descriptive du relief (p. 9-10) comportant les informations relatives, entre autres, au lieu de découverte, à la datation, à l'édition ainsi qu'à la traduction du texte, les trois premières contributions se rassemblent autour de la thématique Politique et Société. La premìere contribution de Hans-Joachim Schalles (p. 12-15) se penche sur la notion de rang social et sur les différences entre hommes libres, affranchis et esclaves. En effet, le monument de Marcus Caelius stipule que ses deux affranchis doivent être enterrés à ses côtés; ils sont d'ailleurs représentés en buste de part et d'autre de Marcus. Dirk Schmitz explique ensuite ce qu'est la tribu, à partir de la mention de la tribu Lemonia, présente dans l'épitaphe (p. 16-20). L'article de Konrad Vössing (p. 21-26) parle ensuite de la mention cecidit bello Variano--tombé à la guerre de Varus et propose une réflexion sur la notion de propagande. En effet, les Romains avaient souvent l'habitude de désigner les guerres ou batailles du nom des adversaires (bellum Gallicum, bellum Jugurthinum, bellum Mithridaticum, etc.); or ici, c'est le nom du général romain vaincu qui sert de référence.

Les six contributions suivantes s'agencent autour d'une thématique que l'on pourrait traduire par L'environnement de la vie quotidienne. Ulrike Theisen propose un article sur la ville de Bologne (p. 28-32), d'où Marcus est originaire. Hans-Joachim Schalles (p. 33-37) met ensuite en regard les sources antiques parlant de la clades Variana c'est-à-dire du désastre de Varus, avec les écrits des humanistes allemands qui, au XVIe siècle, érigent Arminius au rang de gloire nationale de l'identité allemande. Jennifer Komp propose ensuite une présentation du concept de cénotaphe (p. 38-43) et compare le monument de Marcus avec quelques autres, connus ou non. Marcus Reuter s'intéresse quant à lui à l'âge du décès indiqué sur la pierre tombale (p. 44-48). Le centurion de Bologne dit avoir vécu 53 ans et demi. Cette approche permet une réflexion sur l'espérance de vie d'un soldat durant la période impériale. Sous le titre Tombés pour Rome : pierres tombales des soldats romains (p. 49-53), le même auteur précise que si le cénotaphe de Marcus Caelius est le plus ancien connu en Allemagne, il annonce la multiplication de reliefs du même genre durant les siècles qui suivirent. Hans-Ulrich Nuber s'attarde sur la figure de Varus (p. 54-58).

Les cinq articles suivants traitent des aspects militaires. Marcus Caelius ayant fait partie d'une des trois légions décimées lors du désastre, Martin Müller propose d'abord quelques rappels concernant l'organisation de la légion romaine (p. 60-62). Alexander Reise (p. 63-68) présente ensuite plus en détails les trois légions (XVII, XVIII et XIX) qui ont été anéanties en 9. Marcus ayant été centurion, Marion Nickel analyse donc cette fonction, de même que les carrières et possibilités de carrière qui s'offraient aux recrues (p. 69-72). L'article de Peter Noelke porte ensuite sur la représentation figurée des centurions sur les monuments funéraires (p. 73-79), ce qui est est très intéressant dans la mesure où l'on découvre toute une série d'attributs parmi les plus utilisés pour représenter ce type d'officier. Marcus Caelius est richement décoré de torques, couronnes et phalères; Hans-Hoyer von Prittwitz und Graffon explique la raison d'être de ces différents dona militaria (p. 80-84).

Les onze contributions suivantes portent sur des aspects de présentation purement matérielle du monument funéraire. Il y est essentiellement question des motifs iconographiques, des techniques, des décors et des typologies. Hans G. Frenz replace ce type de monument dans le contexte des reliefs rhénans du Ier s. ap. J.-C. (p. 86-92). Anke Seifert présente ensuite quelques exemples de monuments funéraires aussi bien romains que grecs, ou égyptiens, parfois même contemporains, en mettant en avant le rôle que ces reliefs jouent dans la formation d'une mémoire(p. 93-97). Sur base de l'analyse des bustes de Marcus Caelius et de ses affranchis Privatus et Thiaminus, Susanne Willer explique l'importance du portrait dans l'iconographie funéraire romaine et son intérêt en raison des renseignements qu'il révèle sur la physionomie, les vêtements et les attributs des défunts (p. 98-103). Le même auteur poursuit avec une présentation typologique de l'édicule funéraire (p. 104-109); cette pratique dérive de ce que l'on pouvait trouver déjà dans l'art grec. Précisant davantage les arguments présents dans l'article de Susanne Willer, Anke Seifert s'attarde sur les représentations privées des "piliers aux bustes" (p. 110-113). Stefan Schepp s'attèle, quant à lui, à expliquer la forme du cadre de l'inscription du monument, qui représente une tabula ansata, forme très courante dans l'épigraphie romaine, spécialement militaire, mais qui trouve son origine dans la culture grecque (p. 114-117). Hans-Joachim Schalles fait ensuite preuve de pédagogie, à destination d'un public non averti, en exposant une des principales difficultés inhérentes au travail de l'épigraphiste : la résolution des nombreuses abréviations qui composent toute inscription (p. 118-121). Pour ce faire, il évoque des exemples dans des textes officiels, mais également dans desécritures cursives, montrant que, comme c'est encore le cas aujourd'hui, les abréviations sont omniprésentes dans le monde romain. La stèle de Marcus Caelius, comme c'est souvent le cas, comportait également un décor floral dans lequel les feuilles d'acanthe occupaient une place de choix : Marianne Hilke étudie cette tradition iconographique (p. 122-125). Romina Schiavone présente ensuite une contribution sur les étoffes décoratives, en partant des ornements du haut du monument de Marcus Caelius (p. 126-129). Gerhard Bauchlenβ attire l'attention du lecteur sur le fait que les sculptures antiques étaient généralement peintes, en donnant l'exemple de quelques fragments antiques ayant conservé des traces de polychromie; une reconstitution du monument de Marcus Caelius en couleurs est suggérée en fin d'article (p. 130-135). Le même auteur propose ensuite une petite contribution relative à la composition et aux limites du champ iconographique (p. 136-140).

Les trois derniers articles de l'ouvrage, les plus importants quantitativement, retracent l'histoire du cénotaphe, depuis sa découverte jusqu'à la réalisation de l'exposition de 2009. Ainsi, Wilhelm Diedenhofen présente-t-il des copies de dessins de chroniques et annales ayant évoqué ou étudié peu ou prou la pierre, tout en revenant sur les heurs et malheurs qui l'ont conduit jusqu'au musée de Bonn (p. 142-153). Reiner Sörries propose ensuite un court article dans lequel il compare les inscriptions funéraires antiques et modernes, sur le territoire de l'actuelle Allemagne (p. 154-157). Enfin Heidi Gansohr-Meinel explique la place de la pierre de Caelius dans les collections du musée de Bonn (p. 158-164).

Nous ne pourrons pas passer sous silence la manière tout à fait originale dont la bibliographie est présentée. Une première partie bibliographique renvoie vers les ouvrages utilisés pour chaque chapitre, une seconde renvoie vers la littérature générale concernant Marcus Caelius. C'est dans la première partie que réside toute l'originalité. Pour chacun des chapitres présentés ci-dessus, le monument funéraire de Marcus Caelius est reproduit en grisé avec à chaque fois un halo de clarté sur la partie de la pierre évoquée dans le chapitre. Ainsi, pour le chapitre relatif aux tribus, les deux abréviations LEM apparaissant dans l'inscription sont mises en évidence. De même, le chapitre sur les dona militaria permet de faire ressortir la couronne, les phalères, torques et autres médailles du défunt représenté. Et ainsi de suite. Si cette première partie bibliographique se limite en moyenne à une demi-douzaine de titres par chapitre, la seconde partie est plus nourrie.

En présentant un ouvrage richement illustré, facilement maniable, adoptant un langage didactique et visant l'exhaustivité des angles d'approches, les éditeurs ont certainement rempli leur objectif de rendre accessible un savoir scientifique au citoyen lambda. Ce livre recèle fort heureusement la mémoire d'une exposition réussie autour de la bataille du Teutoburg et d'un de ses protagonistes.

Table des matières :

Milena Karabaic, Ein Leben: Marcus Caelius, p. 5
Table des matières, p. 6-7
Ulrike Theisen, Steckbrief: Der Grabstein des Marcus Caelius, p. 9-10
Hans-Joachim Schalles, Soziale Schranken: Freie, Freigelassene, Sklaven, p. 12-15
Dirk Schmitz, Die Tribus: Politische Pflichten, politische Rechte, p. 16-20
Konrad Vössing, Propaganda: der "Varuskrieg", p. 21-26
Ulrike Theisen, Heimat Bononia: Bologna um die Zeitenwende, p. 28-32
Hans-Joachim Schalles, Fremde: Die Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald, p. 33-37
Jennifer Komp, Leere Gräber: Das Kenotaph, p. 38-43
Marcus Reuter, Wie alt man wurde: Die Angaben auf Grabsteinen, p. 44-48
Marcus Reuter, Gefallen für Rom: Grabsteine römischer Soldaten, p. 49-53
Hans-Ulrich Nuber, Die Tragische Figur: Publius Quinctilius Varus, p. 54-58
Martin Müller, Die Legionen: Roms militärisches Rückgrat, p. 60-62
Alexander Reis, Wege in den Untergang: die Varuslegionen, p. 63-68
Marion Nickel, Der Centurio : Karrieren und Aufstiegschancen, p. 69-72
Peter Noelke, Habitus und memoria : Centurionendarstellungen auf Grabsteinen, p. 73-79
Hans-Hoyer von Prittwitz und Graffon, Dona militaria: Gekrönt und hoch dekoriert, p. 80-84
Hans G. Frenz, Kunstlandschaften: Herkunft und Werkstatt, p. 86-92
Anke Seifert, Ein Erinnerungsbild: Das Grabrelief, p. 93-97
Susanne Willer, Menschenbilder: das Porträt, p. 98-103
Susanne Willer, Die Ädikula: Das Tempelchen als Grabdenkmal, p. 104-109
Anke Seifert, Private Repräsentation: Die Büstenpfeiler, p. 110-113
Stefan Schepp, Gehenkelte Schrift: Die Tabula Ansata, p. 114-117
Hans-Joachim Schalles, TF LEM BON: Die Abkürzungen, p. 118-121
Marianne Hilke, Pflanzen in Stein: Der Akanthus, p. 122-125
Romina Schiavone, Versteinerter Stoff: Die Tänie, p. 126-129
Gerhard Bauchlenβ, Nicht nur weiss: Antike Skulptur war bunt bemalt, p. 130-135
Gerhard Bauchlenβ, Den Rahmen Sprengen: Grenzüberschreitungen, p. 136-140
Wilhelm Diedenhofen, Von Xanten nach Bonn, p. 142-153
Reiner Sörries, Ruhe in Frieden: Grabinschriften gestern und heute, p.154-157
Heidi Gansohr-Meinel, Standorte: Der Caeliusstein im Museum, p. 158-164
Bibliographie par chapitre, p. 166-179
Bibliographie sur la Pierre de Caelius, p. 180-185
Les prêteurs, p. 186
Les auteurs, p. 187
Crédits photographiques, p. 188

2010.03.32

2010-03-11T08:26:00.001-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Selene Psoma, Chryssa Karadima, Domna Terzopoulou, The Coins from Maroneia and the Classical City at Molyvoti: A Contribution to the History of Aegean Thrace. Meletemata 62. Athens: Diffusion de Boccard, 2008. Pp. lxxxvi, 297; 70 p. of plates. ISBN 9789607905482. €96.00 (pb).
Reviewed by Gonda Van Steen, University of Florida

This exemplary and very readable study presents all of the Greek and Roman provincial coins that came to light during excavations at Maroneia and "the Classical city at Molyvoti," both located on the Aegean coast of Thrace. This book also takes into consideration the larger number of surface finds of coins that is now being held in the museum of Komotini and that can be traced back to the two sites or to their immediate vicinity. The authors (and in particular Selene Psoma, who did the lion's share of the research and writing) offer far more than a revision of the long-time standard work by Edith Shönert-Geiss (also a dedicatee of this book).¹ The authors do due diligence to the twenty years' worth of new materials that has surfaced since the publication of Schönert-Geiss to deliver a comprehensive study of the local coinage of Maroneia and Molyvoti that includes and makes relevant all available physical and historical evidence.

This book begins with a history and overview of the excavations that Georgios Bakalakis carried out at the sites of Maroneia and Molyvoti and that E. Pentazos continued at Maroneia. These surveys are contributions by the co-authors Chryssa Karadima and Domna Terzopoulou. Then follows the in-depth numismatic component of the book, in which the authorship reverts to Psoma. Psoma first presents a conspectus and summary of the Greek coins of Molyvoti and Maroneia, a strong introductory chapter, and catalogues of coins from the same sites. After some 200 pages of precise documentary evidence and factual catalogues, the narrative chapters of this book commence, all of which were written by Psoma. Psoma reconsiders the bronze and silver coinage of Maroneia (chapters one and two, respectively), the numismatic iconography (chapter three), issues of monetary policy (chapter four), the history of the Macedonian foundation of Orthagoreia and its connections with Maroneia (chapter five), and the history of Agathokles and Maroneia that led to the refoundation of Maroneia as Agathokleia (chapter six). The subsequent chapters treat specific types of coins from Maroneia (chapter seven) and Paroreia (chapter eight). Then Psoma delves into matters of historical, military, and prosopographical importance (the Second Syrian War, chapter nine, and the numismatic evidence for the Hellenistic rulers in Thrace and in Maroneia, in particular, chapters ten to eleven). In chapter twelve, Psoma presents her most significant contribution to the history of Aegean Thrace based on the documentary evidence provided by the coins. The book concludes with carefully organized lists of the coin "retrievals, chance finds, and coins handed in," concordances, indices, and seventy pages of high-quality plates.

Psoma discusses all the known types of coins from Maroneia and Molyvoti, first in the chapters reconsidering the silver and then the bronze coinage and, in later chapters, in focused studies of several specific coin series. Her work is informed by coin finds from the two sites and also by knowledge from all available published sources. The plates, however, focus on the excavation coins and illustrate only those found at the two sites and not any other known types (about which one can still read in the text). Other organizational and structural decisions are again well motivated but bear some consequences for the reader and especially for the cataloguer and researcher. Psoma decided to present the catalogues and plates documenting the coinage of the two sites separately and to organize the coins according to her chronology, rather than arranging them by type. This choice helps the reader to follow the chronology without any difficulty. However, this organization makes it more challenging to use the catalogue for identifying and attributing coins (for instance, the reader seeking to catalogue a bronze coin of the Dionysos/grape bunch type must compare the coin to multiple sections of the catalogue with coins of this type). Admittedly, numismatists can continue to use, along with Psoma, the work of Shönert-Geiss, who organizes the coins by type. Thus it made sense for Psoma not to duplicate those defining aspects of the work of Shönert-Geiss. Also, while Psoma provides a comprehensive table of all the types of silver coins with a concordance to the catalogue of Shönert-Geiss (p. 173), she does not offer an equivalent table for the various types of bronze coins.

Psoma makes extensive use of the coins from other cities that were found at the sites of Maroneia and Molyvoti to support a study of the local history and to document monetary circulation in the region during Hellenistic and Roman times. Thus she extends the reach of her book into other and often pioneering directions. For example, she presents the four coins from Delos that were found at the site of Hellenistic Maroneia as evidence that complements other sources demonstrating regular contacts between Maroneia and Delos, such as several fragmentary inventories from Delos and another Delian inscription bearing a decree honoring a citizen of Maroneia. Psoma also engages in a thought-provoking socio-economic history of the region and lays the foundations for further research in this exciting area. Some of Psoma's conclusions will, undoubtedly, spark some debate. For instance, she uses the evidence of the bronze coins that bear the name and types of Adaios and that were found at Maroneia and in other Thracian cities to identify Adaios as a Macedonian general operating in the region, thereby subverting the traditional identification of Adaios as a local dynast. Also, following Picard, she concludes that certain bronze coins of Maroneia circulated in inner Thrace carrying the face value of silver coins (p. 151).²

As John H. Kroll notes in the brief preface to this book (ix-x), Psoma masterfully succeeds in telling the history of the city of Maroneia through its coinage: "Psoma demonstrates how the [numismatist] aggregates documents and reflects . . . other political or military vicissitudes of this community over time, especially as it was caught up in the power struggles for the control of Thrace and the Northern Aegean in the Hellenistic era. Such is the continuity provided by coins as historical artifacts that the author's survey of the coinage excavated at Classical and then Hellenistic Maroneia becomes in effect a history of the city itself". As Kroll also points out, Psoma's book is only one of a handful of publications (and one of even fewer studies in English) to present a complete corpus of coins from excavations carried out in Greece. Indeed, much of the excavated numismatic material that could enrich the wider socio-economic picture of the ancient Greek world remains unpublished. Psoma's book can serve as a model of organization, clarity, and depth for the hoped-for future studies.

Psoma's close study of the coinage from the sites of Maroneia and Molyvoti (the latter formerly thought to be ancient Stryme) has important implications for the topography of the region: she proves beyond any reasonable doubt that Maroneia was located on the site of Molyvoti during the Archaic and Classical periods and that, during Hellenistic times, it was moved to the site on the south slopes of Mount Ismaros near Komotini. Based on the 243 coins from the previously unlocated site of Orthagoreia that were found at Hellenistic Maroneia, Psoma also proves that Orthagoreia, which has traditionally been called a Macedonian foundation based on the coins' types, formerly occupied this Thracian site. She thereby rehabilitates the authority of Pliny, who made this identification of Orthagoreia as the original name of Maroneia in his Natural History (4.42-43). Lysimachos likely renamed Maroneia "Agathokleia" in honor of his son, but the city reverted to its original name after the execution of Agathokles in 283/282 BCE. The name of the city remained Maroneia throughout Roman and Byzantine times, and it lives on as the name of the modern town located on this site.

Let me conclude by restating the important and secure findings that emerge from Psoma's path-breaking work and that prove their importance far beyond the field of numismatics: Psoma presents significant revisions to the chronology established by Shönert-Geiss. She also proposes attributions for several series of previously unattributed bronze coins and shares important new insights on several other coin series found at the two sites (e.g. the coinage from Paroreia). Psoma invites the historian and archaeologist to rethink the history of the habitation of Maroneia: "The Classical City at Molyvoti" must be identified as Archaic and Classical Maroneia, which, in the Hellenistic era, was relocated to the slopes of Mount Ismaros near Komotini, which had originally been the site of Orthagoreia. Psoma has succeeded in organizing the large mass of coins from Maroneia into a compelling chronology. Her book will become the standard reference work for the coinage of this city and offers a lasting model for the study of the region's economic history as well.

Notes:

1. Edith Shönert-Geiss, Griechisches Münzwerk: Die Münzprägung von Maroneia. Two vols. (Berlin: Akademie -Verlag Berlin, 1987).
2. Olivier Picard, "Innovations monétaires dans la Grèce du IVe siècle," CRAI (1989): 673-687.

2010.03.31

2010-03-11T08:17:00.001-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Cornelia B. Horn, John W. Martens, "Let the Little Children Come to Me": Childhood and Children in Early Christianity. Washington, D.C: The Catholic University Press, 2009. Pp. xv, 438. ISBN 9780813216744. $44.95 (pb).
Reviewed by Dennis P. Quinn, California State Polytechnic University, California

[Table of contents is provided at the end of the review.]

Through an exhaustive analysis of nearly every quote pertaining to children in the canonical New Testament, with some references from early patristic texts and some extracanonical, especially the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the authors attempt to answer a basic and important question: what "significant differences Christianity made in the lives of children, historically, sociologically, and culturally" in the first few centuries (2)? The answer they posit is that "Christianity made life better for children" (346). Through the multitude of biblical and select early Christian texts, the authors support their answer. However, when they attempt to place the texts within the larger cultural context of the Greco-Roman world, their thesis is a bit less assured.

Chapters of this work are set up topically and it contains an excellent bibliography, index of biblical references and ancient authors, and an index of subjects and modern authors. Thus, it serves as a useful resource for students and scholars on the main biblical texts and some important works on children in ancient Christianity. Chapter One, "What is a Child?" begins with the central notion: "The significant differences Christianity made in the lives of children, historically, sociologically, and culturally" (2). Although only hinted at this point in the work, in the conclusion we find the authors' main answer: "Christianity made life better for children" (346). This assessment will be taken up later in the review. Suffice it to say the thesis that Christianity was a moral force for the good for ancient children is a recurring theme throughout the work. As the chapter proceeds, it sets out a careful description of the construction of the child in Philo, the Mishnah, and Greek and Roman Childhood. The differences between Jewish views and treatment of the child are compared with and at times distinguished from that of Greek and Roman attitudes.

Chapter Two, "The Christian Framework: From 'Child of God' to 'Son/Daughter of the Church'", analyzes the concept of child of God in the relationship between the people of Israel and then the canonical Christian context. From the Old Testament through the New, the authors trace how the idea of the Son of God influenced and was influenced by ancient conceptions of childhood. The theme of obedience to the father dominates the narratives, demonstrating that "Jesus is God's son because he does the work of the father, just like the child of any father in the ancient world was expected to do" (54). After the Gospel accounts, the work examines Pauline literature as well as some Post-Apostolic works and demonstrates that the metaphor of the Son of God, which arises from the ancient conception of the dutiful son, permeates the overall vision of how Christians should be obedient to God.

Chapter Three, "Christian Family Life and the Christian Household" and Chapter four, "Children and Daily Life: Christian Children's Education" address the early life of the Christian child through early adolescence. Here again, the authors are well versed in the Jewish and early Christian context of the construction of childhood. Close scrutiny of these sources is the model which continues through this chapter, and to great effect. For example, the excellent summary and analysis of John Chrysostom's On Vainglory and the Right Way for Parents to Bring up their Children is exemplary for how they position the text within Jewish and Christian learning (149-59). Some reference is made to how the main parts of the chapter fits within Greek paideia (141-43); however, it is more apparent at this point that the Greco-Roman context is rarely eluded to, treating many of the Jewish and Christian attitudes toward childhood in isolation from the larger ancient cultural context in which these groups are embedded.

Chapter Five, "Children and Daily Life: A Time to Work and a Time to Play," is a fascinating chapter which shows the latest research on toys and play in antiquity. It is also more even-handed when it comes to the Greco-Roman context, including a useful, though short, summary and analysis of Columella's insights on childhood and work (167-69). The information included about how children played, their toys, music and games are some of the highlights of the book. Chapter six, "Exposing Children to Violence," shows the opposite end of the spectrum. Outlining the physical and sexual abuse common to children shows that their life was not at all fun and games, and doubly so for slave children. The main thrust of the chapter deals with Jewish and Christian teachings against such atrocities being inflicted on children. Although the authors admit that Christians were not immune to inflicting violence on children themselves, they stress that "Christian criticism of practices of abuse, infanticide, abortion, and exposure led to improved lives for numerous children, in significant part because the Roman state embraced the Christian moral code in the course of the fourth and fifth century" (251). From the opening of the chapter which equates abortion with violence against children, the authors hope to continue the thesis that Christianity was a blessing to children.

Chapter Seven, "Children and Worship in the Early Christian Church," and Chapter Eight, "Children and Christian Asceticism," which are the last chapters of the work, address how children fit in with liturgical and ascetic impulses of burgeoning Christianity. Here the authors show how children were present and participants in nearly every aspect of the development of the orthodox Christian tradition. Christian focus on the child's innocence and honesty become models for the righteous Christian. They even become idealized as "signs of the myth of the First Humans" (300). The great value Christians placed on children was also expressed in the ascetic tradition, for this purity of childhood throughout life and idealized virginity become standard tropes.

Although there is much to be praised in the present work, with its attention to Jewish and Christian sources and well-researched accounts within those traditions, it is not without some considerable limitations. The chapters generally follow a biblical structure: Old Testament, then the Gospels, and then the Pauline epistles. Then it uses a few extra-canonical works, especially the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and then moves to early patristic authors. It is curious that the authors decided to use the Infancy Gospel at the exclusion of other extra-canonical texts, especially without placing it first within its peculiar historical and geographical context. In fact,the Christian texts are never dealt with as products of a particular milieu but rather homogeneously, as part of a single Christian culture. The particular contexts in which the individual writings arise is rarely addressed. Also, the omission of Gnostic and other "heretical" Christian texts is unfortunate, since it limits its vision of early Christianity as a whole.

Perhaps even more problematic is how the authors position Christian views of children vis-à-vis the larger Greco-Roman world from which they sprang. Its goal of placing the Christian understanding of children and childhood within the ancient Greek and Roman context falls a bit short. One example that is illustrative of this is how the authors treat abortion. Placing the section on abortion in the chapter entitled "Exposing Children to Violence" is telling enough. "It is only when Christians became fully engaged in Greco-Roman culture that their opposition to abortion, exposure, and infanticide was stated outright" (222). The authors maintain that Christians were "rather uniform" in their condemnation of abortion, and then goes on to quote the Didache 2.2, Barnabas 19.5, Clement of Alexandria's Paedagogus 3.3, and Justin Martyr's Apologia 1.29 to show where they all opposed abortion. The assumption is that this was a Christian innovation in the Greco-Roman world, influenced by "Jewish moralists and biblical teachings" (222). What the authors fail to note, however, are the several Roman pagan authors who were opposed to abortion for various reasons before Christianity as well as alongside the development of the religion, such as Cicero, Pliny, and Musonius Rufus. These views are not mentioned in this book, but Greco-Roman views on abortion were varied and complex (for a more nuanced view, see Beryl Rawson, Children and Childhood in Roman Italy, Oxford, 2003, 114-15). Thus, it appears that the impulse to show that Christianity was the savior of children in antiquity, working to protect them from immoral treatment by their pagan neighbors may have obscured the authors' vision of many of the pagan moralists who actually influenced Christian thought on the protection of children. Of course, it also makes the assumption that all early Christians opposed abortion and that abortion itself is akin to violence against children.

This is not to take away from the larger importance of the work. As a study of predominantly orthodox Christian views of children and childhood, its level of learning and attention to detail is brimming with merit. As a work which tries to envision children in the larger Greco-Roman cultural context, or the other varieties of the ancient Christian expression, this book may provoke more questions than answers.

Table of Contents

Preface
Abbreviations
1 What Is a Child?
2 The Christian Framework: From "Child of God" to "Son/Daughter of the Church"
3 Children and Family Life in the Christian Household
4 Children and Daily Life: Christian Children's Education
5 Children and Daily Life: A Time to Work and a Time to Play
6 Exposing Children to Violence
7 Children and Worship in the Early Christian Church
8 Children and Christian Asceticism
Conclusions
Bibliography
Index of Biblical References
Index of Ancient Authors
Index of Subjects and Modern Authors

2010.03.30

2010-03-09T10:23:00.001-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Giancarlo Movia (ed.), Alessandro di Afrodisia e Pseudo-Alessandro, Commentario alla "Metafisica" di Aristotele. Milan: Bompiani, 2007. Pp. 2516. ISBN 9788845259920. €41.00.
Reviewed by Adrian Mihai

Alexander of Aphrodisias -- the Aristotelian chair holder in Athens under Severus and Caracalla -- was known in Antiquity as "the second Aristotle" or the "commentator" (ho exegetes) par excellence, because of the accuracy and acuity of his commentaries on Aristotle's esoteric works (the school writings which we now possess).¹ We have six extant commentaries by him and know of another nine through fragments and indirect reports. He was also the author of the oldest and still extant commentary of Aristotle's Metaphysics . This commentary is the major source of evidence for Aristotle's now lost treatise De Ideis (In Arist. Metaph. 79.3-98.24) and was extensively used by the Neoplatonists, and by Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes). The received text of the commentary is in 14 books, of which only the first 5 are by Alexander.² The identity of the author of the remaining 9 books -- Pseudo-Alexander -- is unknown, although most scholars ascribe the work to the late Byzantine commentator Michael of Ephesus (c. 1070-1140).³ Although the work was thus written by two authors, who lived during two very different epochs, it is characterized by a surprising degree of uniformity. This seems to be owed to the intermediary role played in its creation by Syrianus (the teacher of Proclus), who relied heavily on Alexander's exegesis (though he diverged from him wherever Aristotle attacked Platonism-Pythagoreanism)⁴, and who was followed in turn by Pseudo-Alexander.⁵

Movia's edition is the first complete translation of both Alexander of Aphrodisias' Commentary to Aristotle's Metaphysics (books I-V) and the remaining nine books. As is customary for series from Bompiani, the book provides the Greek text on one side with the Italian translation printed on the facing-page.

The editor's 120-page introduction is a patient analysis of both Alexander's and Pseudo-Alexander's arguments, supplemented with summaries of the individual books. Alexander's views are hard to extrapolate from the commentary because his method is to analyse Aristotle's text paragraph by paragraph and often sentence by sentence, and he often prefers to give various explanations of the same point rather than choosing one.⁶

But it is clear that Alexander of Aphrodisias adhered faithfully to Aristotle's view that first philosophy has two dimensions, one sensible (since it includes the principles of mathematics, logic and physics) and the other suprasensible. Moreover, the commentary on Bk. IV confirms Alexander's unitary thesis that the Aristotelian metaphysics, no matter the name Aristotle used to denote it -- wisdom, philosophy, first philosophy, theology, science of being as being, doctrine of first principles and causes --, refers to the same discipline (p. LIX). It is unfortunate that the introduction does not have a section on the digressions or excursus of the two commentators from the main theme of the chapter or sentence being analyzed, since these interruptions in the Metaphysics commentary give us a glimpse of the commentator's individual projects.

The actual translation (pp. 1-2374) was accomplished by ten translators. Bks. I and III: Paola Lai; Bk. II: Maria Caterina Pogliani; Bks. IV and IX: Marcella Casu; Bk. V: Alessandra Borgia; Bk. VI: Norma Cauli; Bks. VII and X: Silvia Loche; Bk. VIII: Enrico Carta; Bk. XI: Paolo Serra; Bk. XII: Rita Salis; Bks. XIII and XIV: Elisabetta Cattanei. Each book consists of a short introduction, followed by the Greek text -- which uses the edition of M. Hayduck (1891), with reference to the one of H. Bonitz (1847) -- and the Italian translation on opposing pages and end-notes, dealing with philological, explicative and interpretative issues. In addition, Aristotle's sentence or paragraph is included in the text (in Greek and Italian) and then followed, in brackets, by a comment of the translators, giving the context of the main text and outlining the author's argument.

Although certain individual peculiarities remain, the translations read very smoothly and possess terminological and stylistic uniformity. The printing seems to be accurate.

A word must be said about the layout of the book. Given its size (more than 2500 pages, as voluminous as Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu), this volume is a remarkable achievement. There is as usual a bibliography (pp. 2393-2414) and a very useful Greek-Italian index of concepts (pp. 2417-2489), as well as an index locorum (pp. 2490-2503), which includes references to major editions. It also has an index of names (pp. 2504-2513).

There are a few slips in the bibliography: the names of Richard Sorabji, Han Baltussen and Ilsetraut Hadot are missing; several articles are omitted: J.L. Ackrill, "Aristotle's definitions of psukhe" [1979], in J.L. Ackrill, Essays on Plato and Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 163-178 and G. d'Ancona, G. Serra (eds.), Aristotele e Alessandro di Afrodisia nella tradizione Araba (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2002); and F. Romano, D.P. Taormina (eds.), Hyparxis e Hypostasis nel Neoplatonismo is repeated twice, on pp. 2410 and 2412.

All in all, this is a very important contribution for scholars interested in Alexander of Aphrodisias, in the ancient philosophical commentary and in the tradition of the ancient commentaries on Aristotle's Metaphysics.

Notes:

1.   On the alleged rediscovery and publication of Aristotle's esoteric books by Andronicus of Rhodes, see P. Moraux, Der Aristotelismus bei den Griechen von Andronikos bis Alexander von Aphrodisia, vol. 1 (Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyer, 1973), pp. 45-141. J. Barnes has aptly remarked though that Andronicus' edition offered nothing new to the scholarly public, and hence cannot be referred to as a 'canonical edition'. His work was part of a continuous and complex editorial process. See J. Barnes, "Roman Aristotle", in J. Barnes and M. Griffin (eds.), Philosophia Togata II: Plato and Aristotle at Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), in particular, pp. 21-66; this essay was reprinted also in G. Nagy (ed.), Greek Literature. Greek Literature in the Roman Period and in Late Antiquity, vol. 8 (Routledge, 2001), pp. 119-188. But these are still matters of current debate.
2.   The first five books have been translated into English by W.E. Dooley and A. Madigan, Alexander of Aphrodisias on Aristotle's Metaphysics I-V (London: Duckworth, 1989-1993).
3.   On the identification of Michael of Ephesus as Pseudo-Alexander, see K. Praechter's review of M. Hayduck's edition of "Michaelis Ephesii in Libros De partibus animalium, De animalium motione, De animalium incessu. Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca XXIII 2", Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen CLXVIII (1906), pp. 861-907 and C. Luna, Trois études sur la tradition des commentaires anciens à la Métaphysique d'Aristote, pp. 59-65 and pp. 197-212. On the other hand, L. Taran has argued that Pseudo-Alexander is earlier than Syrianus ("Syrianus and Pseudo-Alexander's Commentary on Metaphysics E-N", in L. Wiesner [ed.], Aristoteles. Werk und Wirkung: Paul Moraux gewidmet II [Berlin, 1987], pp. 215-232). While most scholars now accept the identification of Pseudo-Alexander with Michael of Ephesus, whether Michael was a 'forger' or not is still controversial.
4.   Syrianus' commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics covers only books III, IV, XIII and XIV, because he thought that Alexander of Aphrodisias' commentary explained all the other books sufficiently. See D.J. O'Meara, Pythagoras Revived: Mathematics and Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 119-123.
5.   Many scholars have emphasized Pseudo-Alexander's dependence on Syrianus. See e.g. C. Luna, Trois études sur la tradition des commentaires anciens à la Métaphysique d'Aristote (op. cit.).
6.   E.g. In Arist. Metaph. 141.21; 159.9; 162.6; 164.24; 165.4; 169.11; 220.24; 337.29. See R.W. Sharples, "The School of Alexander?", in R. Sorabji (ed.), Aristotle Transformed: The Ancient Commentators and Their Influence (Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 95-101. See also, P. Hoffmann, "What was Commentary in Late Antiquity? The Example of the Neoplatonic Commentators", in M.L. Gill, P. Pellegrin (eds.), A Companion to Ancient Philosophy (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 597-624.

2010.03.29

2010-03-09T10:05:00.001-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Daniele Federico Maras, Il dono votivo: Gli dei e il sacro nelle iscrizioni etrusche di culto. Biblioteca di "Studi Etruschi" 46. Pisa/Roma: Fabrizio Serra editore, 2009. Pp. 514. ISBN 9788862270861. €495.00 (pb).
Reviewed by Ingrid Edlund-Berry, The University of Texas at Austin

The study of votive offerings continues to give important insights for our understanding of ancient cultures and religion, in particular for the Etruscans and the peoples of central Italy. As can be expected, inscriptions, whether isolated words or longer sentences, form an important element of the votive material, but they are often treated primarily as texts, with little or no attention paid to the archaeological context. The book discussed here is therefore of particular importance in that it presents the formulas of votive dedications as well as a catalogue of important inscriptions from major Etruscan sites. As indicated in the preface, the author claims no attempt at completeness, but has chosen to focus on examples which illustrate the variety of inscriptions within a chronological framework.

The first section of the book covers a classification of the inscriptions and an analysis of their translation and contents, whereas the second section includes a selection of 326 inscriptions, arranged in order of provenience.

The introductory chapter in the first section deals with the thorny subject of typology of the inscriptions categorized as 'sacred'. Although ideally the find context and contents of an inscription should point to a sacred use, there are many variables due to Etruscan usage as well as the difficulties of interpreting the language and the find context. The basic element of the gift ('dono') inscriptions is that they express exactly this, that something is a gift, but a gift does not necessarily have to imply a sacred act. Other inscriptions refer to acts of consecration, including divination, ownership, and various forms of rituals. In defining these categories, Maras supplies examples from the catalogue and comments on regional usage wherever relevant.

The second chapter presents the ritual of gift-giving in which Maras applies sequences of production, forms of inscriptions, and purpose according to the period and the location. Here the choice of words and their order may indicate where and under what circumstances a gift was presented, including the practices at harbor sanctuaries such as Gravisca or Pyrgi.

Since the precise translation of Etruscan words and sentences often remains uncertain, the study of inscriptions may seem vague and arbitrary to the novice. In the third chapter, Maras addresses this issue by defining the types of words included in an inscription (offerant, object, divinity, action, etc.). Obviously, not all types appear in all inscriptions discussed in this book, but it is helpful to be able to identify common terms indicating, for example, the action of giving (mul-, tur-). By far the most frequent in the inscriptions are general references to deities (for example, ais-, flere) as well as their names (discussed in chapter four), but the object given is also important, as shown by the use of the personal pronoun mi- referring to the object speaking (l'oggetto parlante). Words indicating sanctity (for example, tincsvil inscribed on the Chimera from Arezzo) and indication of place or time add to the basic formula of gift and giver.

The pantheon of Etruscan deities is discussed in chapter four, and here we recognize many of the names from the Piacenza liver and other texts. Maras presents the names in chronological sequence by centuries thereby providing a progression of types of deities and the locations where they occur, ranging from the seventh to the first century B.C. This interesting approach allows Maras to introduce the earliest documented names (for example, Menerva and Uni), followed by names such as Fufluns and Selvans. In addition to these local names, translations from Greek names appear early, as shown in the form Aritimi, followed by Aplu and Hercle. Variations include references to parentage (father, daughter) and groups of deities.

Of utmost importance for our understanding of Etruscan religion is the type of offering and the circumstances in which it was presented to the deity. In chapter five, Maras analyzes the different media of offerings, including pottery, local and imported, and figurines of terracotta and bronze. Numerous charts help to clarify the distribution of gifts and inscriptions, but unfortunately the lack of illustrations prevents the reader from visualizing the objects and their place in the wider context of votive offerings, well documented in studies of votive terracottas and bronzes.

In chapter six Maras summarizes the evidence from the inscriptions to identify the names of the individuals mentioned and the family names recorded. Although women are cited as dedicants, their number is surprisingly small.

The second section of the book contains a catalogue of the inscriptions used to analyze the language of dedications. Each catalogue item is identified by origin (Arretium, Clusium, etc.) and the description includes the findspot, if known, the type of object, the reading of the text, with bibliography and comments. Some entries include a line drawing of the inscriptions, but there are no illustrations of the objects.

An appendix presents the inscriptions arranged by modules or formulas, indicating the combination of words and the order in which appear. Particularly useful features are the chronological analysis, and the provenience of the inscriptions illustrating each module.

Maras has provided much valuable material for the continued study of Etruscan religion and of votive inscriptions in particular. Because his interests are mainly philological and the system of presenting the texts is linked to the accepted format of Etruscan epigraphy, a reader with a different background and interested in more general issues of Etruscan culture and religion may find it difficult to locate the relevant information included in the individual catalogue entries. As new discoveries appear, this volume will provide a useful tool for a synthesis of the importance of inscriptions in Etruscan sanctuaries. For now, Maras' study deserves to be available to all as a reference work, but the price (and poor binding) may unfortunately prevent individual purchases as well as library acquisitions.

2010.03.28

2010-03-09T09:58:00.001-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Francesco Camia, Roma e le poleis. L'intervento di Roma nelle controversie territoriali tra le comunità greche di Grecia e d'Asia Minore nel secondo secolo a.C.: le testimonianze epigrafiche. Tripodes 10. Atene: Scuola Archeologica Italiana di Atene, 2009. Pp. 263. ISBN 9789609839730. €50.00.
Reviewed by Andrea Raggi, Università di Pisa

Table of Contents

Il volume, nato dall'ampliamento e dalla rielaborazione di una tesi di specializzazione discussa presso la Scuola Archeologica Italiana di Atene nel giugno 2004, presenta una selezione di documenti epigrafici relativi all'intervento diretto o indiretto di Roma nelle controversie di natura territoriale sorte tra le comunità greche in Grecia e Asia Minore nel II secolo a.C. Si tratta, come lo stesso Autore avverte nell''Introduzione' (pp. 13-16), di una scelta di documenti, in quanto sono stati esclusi i casi attestati dalle fonti letterarie¹ e i casi che, 'pur avendo implicazioni anche territoriali, si inseriscono in realtà in contrasti più generali' (p. 14), come quelli tra Sparta e la Lega achea.²

Nel volume sono analizzati in dettaglio dodici casi, sette provenienti dalla Grecia (nrr. 2-6, 10-11) e cinque dall'Asia Minore (nrr. 1, 7-9, 12); altri otto casi, nei quali la presenza di Roma o la natura della contesa è incerta, sono inclusi e analizzati in maniera più sintetica nell'appendice finale (Addenda et incerta A-H, pp. 148-163), per un totale di venti casi ('Parte I. Le testimonianze epigrafiche', pp. 17-163). Chiudono il volume: una 'Tabella riassuntiva' delle controversie esaminate (pp. 217-222); una 'Bibliografia' (pp. 223-236); utili 'Indici' delle fonti letterarie, delle fonti epigrafiche, dei nomi, dei luoghi e delle parole greche divise per nomi, toponimi ed etnici, divinità e termini notevoli (pp. 237-251); 12 mappe illustranti le regioni e le località menzionate nel testo (pp. 253-260).

Ogni singolo documento epigrafico preso in esame è corredato di un lemma iniziale (descrizione del supporto lapideo, edizioni del testo e bibliografia aggiornata), di un apparato critico, di una traduzione italiana e di un commento storico-epigrafico. I modelli ai quali si riallaccia Camia sono sicuramente da individuare nella nota raccolta dello Sherk³ e nel recente lavoro sull'arbitrato interstatale della Ager (già menzionato alla nota 2). Tuttavia, il lettore deve tener conto del fatto che Camia (come a suo tempo la Ager) non ha ricontrollato autopticamente i documenti analizzati (l'edizione di riferimento è indicata nel lemma con un asterisco, come nel volume della Ager) e che quindi l'apparato critico prende in considerazione le diverse letture o proposte di integrazione avanzate dagli editori precedenti senza una discussione della loro validità.

Lo scopo dell'Autore, proprio in considerazione del fatto che raccolte recenti hanno già preso in esame molti dei casi qui esaminati,⁴ non è tuttavia quello di rieditare o ristudiare i documenti, quanto piuttosto quello di valutare il peso della presenza di Roma nella risoluzione delle controversie territoriali greche e, inoltre, di stabilire se le autorità romane avessero inteso servirsi dell'istituto dell'arbitrato per incrementare la potenza di Roma in Oriente. Nella 'Parte II. Il ruolo arbitrale di Roma: analisi storica' (pp. 165-215), Camia analizza le richieste di appello al senato romano da parte delle poleis greche, individuando due modalità di richiesta (in alcuni casi le parti si appellavano insieme a Roma, in altri casi uno solo dei due contendenti prendeva autonomamente l'iniziativa di rivolgersi al senato), e il modo in cui il senato rispondeva all'appello (si possono individuare tre modalità: quasi sempre il senato assegnava il ruolo di arbitro a una terza città ex senatus consulto; altrimenti poteva affidare l'opera di mediazione della controversia a legati; più raramente, il senato si occupava direttamente del caso).

Quando l'incarico di dirimere la controversia veniva affidato a una terza città, il senato fissava una sorta di formula alla quale doveva attenersi la città arbitro; questa formula si ispirava alle formule interdittali del diritto civile, in particolare alla formula dell'interdictum uti possidetis (pp. 199-200); a questo proposito, Camia non sembra aver utilizzato il lavoro di A. Bignardi,⁵ in particolare le pp. 163-171 per il caso nr. 3 (controversia territoriale tra Sparta e Messene) e le pp. 147-163 per il caso nr. 7 (controversia tra Priene e Magnesia sul Meandro).

Le conclusioni (in particolare pp. 210-215), alle quali l'Autore perviene dall'analisi dei casi discussi sulle modalità di intervento e sul ruolo arbitrale di Roma nelle controversie territoriali del II sec. a.C., mostrano come Roma provasse scarso interesse nei confronti delle dispute locali greche e non volesse impegnarsi direttamente nella risoluzione dei casi; in generale, Roma operava 'nel segno della conservazione dello status quo' (p. 177) e adottò un approccio minimalista (p. 193), non snaturando l'istituto dell'arbitrato. Roma, in definitiva, non parve approfittare del suo ruolo di arbitro come mezzo di potere e di limitazione della libertà delle città greche; lo dimostra il fatto stesso che in questo periodo continuarono a esserci arbitrati giudicati senza l'intervento del senato romano e che furono le stesse città greche a rivolgersi a Roma per risolvere le dispute che sorgevano tra di loro.

Oltre a questo lavoro di sintesi, che ha portato l'Autore a formulare le conclusioni appena esaminate, apprezzabile è anche la traduzione italiana dei testi, in quanto per molti di essi non risultava ancora disponibile, per altri migliora quella già esistente.⁶ La traduzione, come giustamente nota l'Autore nell''Introduzione' (p. 15), è 'indispensabile, in quanto essa è già una forma di interpretazione del documento'; sarebbe stato comunque opportuno segnalare per i documenti presi in considerazione le traduzioni disponibili in lingua moderna.⁷

Si lamenta purtroppo la mancanza, nel testo delle traduzioni, del numero delle linee, che avrebbero facilitato al lettore il raffronto tra il testo greco e la traduzione. Inoltre, sempre nelle traduzioni in italiano, i termini integrati nel testo greco non sono inseriti tra parentesi quadre, in questo modo presentando come esistente un testo che invece è ricostruito. A titolo esemplificativo, si confrontino il testo e la traduzione della lin. 113 della controversia tra Mileto e Priene degli anni 90 a.C. (caso nr. 12: Ager, Interstate Arbitrations, cit., nr. 171) sottoposta all'arbitrato di Eritre e poi successivamente all'arbitrato di Sardi. Sarebbe stato opportuno editare la traduzione 'né il Senato ha fatto alcuna concessione ai pubblicani' (p. 140) nella forma seguente: 'né [il Senato] ha fatto alcuna [concessione] ai pubblicani' in quanto i due termini sono stati integrati dal primo editore nel testo greco (e probabilmente anche in maniera non appropriata: estraneo all'uso greco, o quanto meno senza riscontro, è sia il significato proposto per ἐξουσία, 'concessione', sia la sua costruzione con la preposizione εἰς).

Queste considerazioni mi portano a rivolgere un altro appunto al lavoro di Camia: sicuramente una maggiore dimestichezza con i termini dell'amministrazione romana resi in greco nei documenti ufficiali⁸ avrebbe giovato a evitare alcune sviste. Non è infatti possibile tradurre come 'al pretore' (p. 98) l'espressione τῶι στρατηγῶι presente nel decreto di Claro (caso nr. 9) riguardante Menippo, Col. II, lin. 5; il termine στρατηγός in questo contesto indica 'governatore provinciale'.⁹ La stessa imprecisione si riscontra nella traduzione del documento nr. 12 (controversia tra Mileto e Priene), dove Camia indica come 'pretori' (p. 141) quelli che sono in realtà governatori (lin. 135 e lin. 136).

Seguono ora alcune osservazioni sui singoli documenti presi in esame nel volume. Il caso nr. 1 (I. Mylasa, nr. 134), un frammento di iscrizione che potrebbe riferirsi a una controversia tra Milasa e Stratonicea, in realtà rimane incerto, come ammette lo stesso Autore (p. 21), in merito a cronologia, contesto storico, modalità di coinvolgimento di Roma e, infine, autorità emittente.¹⁰ Il caso nr. 2 si riferisce alla soluzione di una controversia tra Sparta e Megalopoli (163/146 a.C.) affidata probabilmente al giudizio arbitrale degli Achei (Ager, Interstate Arbitrations, cit., nr. 137; ma cfr. anche i nrr. 135 e 136, non segnalati dall'Autore); il documento era già stato studiato dall'Autore in una precedente pubblicazione.¹¹

Il nr. 3 è il giudizio arbitrale di Mileto (Ager, Interstate Arbitrations, cit., nr. 159) su una controversia territoriale tra Sparta e Messene (probabilmente del 138, più che del 140 a.C.); la lettera dei Milesii a Elide contenente una copia del verdetto arbitrale (linn. 29-40) è edita anche in Milet VI.3, nr. 1054. Nella discussione della datazione di tre documenti,¹² Camia si basa sulla presenza nel testo del nome di pretori romani, ma manca di far riferimento ai preziosi volumi di Brennan sulla pretura a Roma;¹³ in particolare, a proposito di P. Cornelio Blasione nel caso nr. 4, va notato che Brennan a p. 343, nt. 31 accetta la datazione ribassista proposta da Mattingly e che anche Camia fa sua (pp. 49-50).

Nei testi inclusi e commentati al nr. 6 (controversia tra Delfi e Fligonio-Ambrisso), Camia avrebbe potuto inserire anche D. Rousset, Le territoire de Delphes, cit., nr. 6 (datazione: ca. 117 a.C.; Camia accenna brevemente a questo documento a p. 68, nt. 161). Il testo riguarda una controversia relativa alla delimitazione della hiera chora d'Apollo, limitrofa ai territori di Anticira, Ambrisso, Delfi e Anfissa, affidata al giudizio arbitrale degli ieromnemoni sulla base di un senatoconsulto di cui fu relatore Manio Acilio.

Su I. Priene, nrr. 37 e 38 (cfr. Ager, Interstate Arbitrations, cit., nr. 74), a più riprese citati dall'Autore nel commento al caso nr. 8 (controversia fra Priene e Samo¹⁴) si veda ora l'esauriente monografia di A. Magnetto, L'arbitrato di Rodi fra Samo e Priene, edizione critica, traduzione e commento, Pisa 2008, che ripropone con nuove argomentazioni (pp. 75-80) la datazione tradizionale (metà degli anni 190 a.C.), mentre Camia (p. 93) si allinea alle posizioni di Bresson e Habicht preferendo una datazione nella seconda metà degli anni 180 a.C.

A proposito dei due decreti, rinvenuti nel santuario di Claro e pubblicati nel 1989 dai Robert (vd. nota 9), che onorano due concittadini di Colofone, Polemeo e Menippo, e testimoniano una serie di controversie tra la polis e le città vicine, tra cui Metropoli, negli anni 130-120 a.C. (caso nr. 9), l'Autore aderisce alla tesi della Ager, Interstate Arbitrations, cit., nr. 162, ritenendo alla fine più verosimile che in questo caso l'intervento del senato romano si sia configurato nelle forme di un vero e proprio arbitrato (p. 105). Tuttavia, come è stato correttamente precisato da Gauthier,¹⁵ le ambasciate di Menippo a Roma 's'insèrent malaisément dans une étude sur l'arbitrage international (L. e J. Robert, dans leur commentaire, ne prononcent pas le mot)'. Alla bibliografia citata a p. 97 si aggiunga ora lo studio delle clausole più propriamente giudiziarie da parte di U. Laffi.¹⁶ Lo stesso Laffi ha in corso di pubblicazione una monografia dedicata interamente a un riesame approfondito di I. Pergamon, nr. 268 (Ager, Interstate Arbitrations, cit., nr. 170),¹⁷ che è il caso G della sezione Addenda et incerta (pp. 158-160): questi documenti, che si datano al governatorato d'Asia di Mucio Scevola e non riguardano una controversia territoriale, vanno sicuramente esclusi dai casi raccolti da Camia

Il volume si fa apprezzare per la precisione e la chiarezza nella distribuzione del materiale esaminato. Interessanti e ben articolate sono le conclusioni raggiunte dall'Autore. La raccolta rappresenta uno strumento di lavoro indispensabile per gli studiosi italiani, in quanto, come già osservato, fornisce la traduzione completa dei 12 casi analizzati in dettaglio; ripropone inoltre all'attenzione degli studi di epigrafia alcuni documenti ormai da troppo tempo non più esaminati nel testo (come il nr. 12) e che meriterebbero certamente una ripresa da parte degli specialisti del settore.

Notes:

1.   Tuttavia, una fonte letteraria (Polyb. 22.15) è inclusa tra gli Addenda et incerta, C, p. 151.
2.   Ad es. S. L. Ager, Interstate Arbitrations in the Greek World 337-90 B.C., Berkeley 1996, nrr. 96, 111 e 147: BMCR 97.10.06.
3.   R. K. Sherk, Roman Documents from the Greek East. Senatusconsulta and Epistulae to the Age of Augustus, Baltimore 1969.
4.   Ager, Interstate Arbitrations, cit.; A. Chaniotis, Die Verträge zwischen kretischen Poleis in der hellenistischen Zeit, Stuttgart 1996; ISE, III; D. Rousset, Le territoire de Delphes et la terre d'Apollon, Paris 2002.
5.   A. Bignardi, 'Controversiae agrorum' e arbitrati internazionali. Alle origini dell'interdetto 'uti possidetis', Milano 1984.
6.   Una traduzione italiana dei documenti nr. 1, 4, 9 e 12 si trova rispettivamente in ISE III, nr. 175 (p. 133); ISE II, nr. 91 (p. 53, solo A); ISE III, nr. 178 (pp. 142-144); ISE III, nr. 182 (pp. 171-172).
7.   Come quelle di R. K. Sherk, Rome and the Greek East to the death of Augustus [TDGR, 4], Cambridge 1984, nr. 38 (controversia fra Melitea e Nartacio, caso nr. 5) e nr. 34 (lettera del pretore Marco Emilio e senatus consultum nella controversia tra Magnesia sul Meandro e Priene affidata al giudizio arbitrale di Milasa, caso nr. 7, II).
8.   Su questo, ancora utili P. Viereck, Sermo Graecus quo senatus populusque Romanus magistratusque populi Romani usque ad Tiberii Caesaris aetatem in scriptis publicis usi sunt examinatur, Gottingae 1888, e D. Magie, De Romanorum iuris publici sacrique vocabulis sollemnibus in Graecum sermonem conversis, Leipzig 1905; fondamentale H. J. Mason, Greek Terms for Roman Institutions: a lexicon and analysis (American studies in papyrology 13), Toronto 1974 (citato a p. 152, nt. 389, ma non inserito nella 'Bibliografia'); vd. ora anche l'analisi di É. Famerie, Le latin et le grec d'Appien. Contribution à l'étude du lexique d'un historien grec de Rome, Genève 1998.
9.   Vd. la traduzione di L. et J. Robert, Claros I. Décrets hellénistiques, fasc. I, Paris 1989, p. 90; cfr. l'ampia discussione del temine in Mason, Greek Terms, cit., pp. 155 ss., part. pp. 156-158.
10.   Vd. Ph. Gauthier, Compte rendu di Ager, Interstate Arbitrations, cit., in τοποι 8 (1998), p. 313: 'apparemment un décret de tribu, et non un décret de la cité de Mylasa, cf. l. 3'.
11.   F. Camia, L'intervento di Roma nella controversia territoriale tra Sparta e la Lega achea, in ASAtene 82 (2004), pp. 477-484.
12.   Il nr. 4 (controversia tra gli Ambracioti e il koinon degli Atamani affidata al giudizio arbitrale di Corcira: IG IX2 1, nr. 796), il nr. 5 (controversia fra Melitea e Nartacio: Ager, Interstate Arbitrations, cit., nr. 156) e il nr. 7 (controversia tra Priene e Magnesia sul Meandro affidata al giudizio arbitrale di Milasa: Ager, Interstate Arbitrations, cit., nr. 120).
13.   T. Corey Brennan, The Praetorship in the Roman Republic, Oxford 2000: BMCR 2001.08.21.
14.   Recentissima l'edizione di É. Famerie, Une nouvelle édition de deux sénatus-consultes adressés à Priène (RDGE 10), in 'Chiron' 37, 2007, pp. 89-111.
15.   Ph. Gauthier, Compte rendu di Ager cit., p. 321.
16.   U. Laffi, Cittadini romani di fronte ai tribunali di comunità alleate o libere dell'Oriente greco in età repubblicana, in B. Santalucia (a cura di), La repressione criminale nella Roma repubblicana fra norma e persuasione, Pavia 2009, pp. 127-167, part. pp. 131-143 e pp. 154-163.
17.   U. Laffi, Il trattato fra Sardi ed Efeso degli anni 90 a.C., Studi Ellenistici XXII, Pisa-Roma 2010. Ringrazio il prof. Laffi per avermi consentito di leggere in anteprima il volume, dal quale ho tratto numerosi spunti per la redazione di questa recensione.

2010.03.27

2010-03-09T09:47:00.001-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Philip Rousseau, Emmanuel Papoutsakis (ed.), Transformations of Late Antiquity: Essays for Peter Brown. Farnham/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. xx, 345. ISBN 9780754665533. $124.95.
Reviewed by Shawn W.J. Keough, K.U. Leuven

Table of Contents

[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

In this volume Philip Rousseau and Manolis Papoutsakis have gathered essays that focus on a specific dynamic, which they and the contributors suggest represents the 'essence' of Late Antiquity: "the taking on of a heritage, the variety of changes induced within it, and the handing on of that legacy to new generations." By focusing on this "mechanism that inherits, transforms and bequeaths" the contributors inevitably confront the notion of 'transformation', a notion which they favour over the traditional notion of 'decline' as characterizing Late Antiquity. Certainly the thematic focus is appropriate for this volume, a book the editors describe as a quiet birthday gift offered to Peter Brown as a token of their gratitude, respect and affection. Not only has 'the transformation of the classical heritage' been a central focus of Brown's own work, but the considerable contribution Brown has made to the study of Late Antiquity has likewise transformed the conditions under which such study now operates. The editors thus fittingly position Brown within a genealogy that extends from his mentor Arnaldo Momigliano to Edward Gibbon and includes such luminaries as Syme, Marrou, Baynes, Bury and Mommsen. In both respects this collection of essays undoubtedly succeeds; not only in honouring a scholar who "has instructed us all in one way or another", but also in contributing to a scholarly discussion that has been ongoing since Gibbon.

The opening essay by Robert Markus ("Between Marrou and Brown: Transformations of Late Antique Christianity") surveys traditions of historiography in the study of Late Antiquity since the 1950s, especially the move away from notions of decline, deterioration and decay toward the notion of transformation--"without thereby implying either any deterioration or catastrophic mutation". The recognition that Late Antiquity, regardless of its precise chronological boundaries, represents a period "with its own positive character" is seen by Markus as the generative impulse in this historiographical seachange, which resulted, among other things, in the increasing convergence and interdependence of the study of Christian history and Roman history. Following a survey describing the ways in which his own work interacted with that of Brown's, Markus identifies what he considers to be the most central and significant of Peter Brown's insights into Late Antiquity, namely, that Christianity has always been subject to innumerable factors affecting its transformation and that the historian should therefore learn to envisage "a succession of distinctive 'Christianities' spread out in time" (quoting Brown's essay "Gloriosus Obitus: The End of the Ancient Other World", in W.E. Klingshirn and M. Vessey [eds], The Limits of Ancient Christianity [Ann Arbor, 1999] p.290).

Two subsequent essays by Averil Cameron ("Old and New Rome: Roman Studies in Sixth-Century Constantinople") and Glen Bowersock ("Old and New Rome in the Late Antique Near East") address the notion of Roman identity and its transformations. Bowersock's essay examines the process by which Roman identity was transferred from Old Rome to New Rome, and demonstrates the extent to which this 'transfer of tradition and nomenclature' was sufficiently comprehensive in the Late Antique Near East to result in the increasingly pervasive loss of Rome's association with a city situated by the Tiber. Cameron's essay masterfully problematizes the notion of 'cultural identity' as it relates to Roman self-identity in sixth century Constantinople. Providing ample evidence of considerable Constantinopolitan interest and investment in 'Romanness'--knowledge of Latin, Roman tradition and Roman history--Cameron notes that it is nevertheless quite difficult to conclude what such interest and investment actually meant for the people inhabiting Constantinople in the sixth century. Cameron points to Justinian as a symbolic representation of precisely the simultaneous synthesis and tension that characterized sixth century Constantinople's reception of Roman and Greek traditions of cultural identity, concluding that there was likely both more and less interest in Roman cultural identity in the age of Justinian than is generally acknowledged, and that this ambiguous tension ought not be hastily resolved but rather the diverse contradictions of human existence ought to be given their due.

Sebastian Brock ("Regulations for an Association of Artisans from the Late Sasanian or Early Arab Period") and Sidney Griffith ("Crosses, Icons and the Image of Christ in Edessa: The Place of Iconophobia in the Christian-Muslim Controversies of Early Islamic Times") provide more detailed case studies that build upon the thematic foci of Cameron and Bowersock, taking up instances in which Roman tradition underwent a variety of transformations in the post-Roman Orient. Brock's essay focuses upon a ninth century compilation of civil and ecclesiastical laws put together by Gabriel bishop of Basra. Brock translates and introduces a section of this text entitled 'Concerning the ordering and regulation of associations of the crafts called [N]', which lists regulations for the conduct of the association and its members ranging from entrance fees, penalties levied against members whose wives disturb and disrupt the association's meetings, and arrangements for funerals. Brock's contribution is offered in the hopes that it might provoke further study on this little known text, especially in the light of its potential significance: the evidence provided by this Syriac text of "a definite link between the associations of the Greco-Roman world and those of the Arab world" goes against the traditional scholarly consensus on the matter. Griffith's essay addresses issues raised by the early dialogues and controversies between Christians and Muslims focused upon religious images. Griffith helpfully moves the focus of the Muslim position in this debate from the objective status of icons and crosses to what Christians did when honouring icons and crosses: the act of prostration was a gesture that a Muslim could not imagine being legitimately offered to anything or anyone but God. In this way Griffith stresses that Byzantine iconoclasm and Muslim 'iconophobia', while certainly related, remain "noticeably different social phenomena".

Three subsequent essays by Rita Lizzi ("Alle origini della tradizione pagana su Costantino e il senato romano"), John Matthews ("Four Funerals and a Wedding: This World and the Next in Fourth-Century Rome") and Susanna Elm ("Family Men: Masculinity and Philosophy in Late Antiquity") take up aspects of the transformation of traditional Roman values in Christian society. Lizzi's detailed and lengthy contribution examines a particular aspect of Constantine's career that has relatively little documentation in the sources, namely, his institutional and social reforms--specifically regarding the senate and the equestrian order--which radically altered the composition and size of the senate in Rome, and, in the process, radically altered the terms of political participation for its members and their relationship to the emperor. Matthews' entertaining and insightful essay compares the historian Ammianus Marcellinus to the monk Jerome by way of an analysis of their treatment of certain matters of public interest, namely, the funerals and a wedding of prominent members of fourth century Roman society. The deaths of the senator Vettius Agorius Praetextatus in 384, the Roman prefect Junius Bassus in 359, and the Christian senator S. Petronius Probus a generation later are taken up in turn, and are followed by the death of the Roman bishop Damasus and Jerome's telling of the marriage, widowhood, and death of Blaesilla, the young senatorial woman whose death mourners claimed was the result of her ascetic deprivations. Matthews' comparison of Ammianus and Jerome on these 'four funerals and a wedding' demonstrates ways that the Christian conversion of the Roman aristocracy accommodated rather than rejected the fundamental social, economic and cultural values of traditional Roman society. Elm also compares two central characters in the contest for the authority to shape culture, or paideia, in the fourth century: Gregory of Nazianzus and the emperor Julian, and articulates the manner in which each constructed their own philosophical genealogy and transformed traditional notions of paternal authority in their respective attempts to frame and occupy new models of leadership.

Two essays look to Augustine: Claude Lepelley ("Les réticences de saint Augustine face aux légendes hagiographiques d'après la lettre Divjak 29*") and Philip Rousseau ("Language, Mortality and Cult") examine Augustine's treatment of miracles and of the pagan past. Lepelley's essay opens with a statement of warm personal appreciation for the work of Peter Brown, arguing that his writings--'varia, multiplex and multiformis'--have been often misunderstood and caricatured, just as were the bishop of Hippo's. Lepelley goes on to argue that Augustine's response to the request of the deacon Paulinus (well-known as Ambrose of Milan's secretary and confidante) that he edit the acts of martyrs reveals that the bishop of Hippo clearly distinguished between the more factual martyr acts derived from official documents and eyewitness reports from more pious hagiography. Lepelley's analysis demonstrates that this distinction does not simply indicate Augustine's concern for factual integrity in the narration of historical events but rather displays Augustine's religious interest in the authentic words and deeds of the saints and martyrs, a perspective that was little pursued in Augustine's own time and subsequently. Rousseau's essay focuses upon books VI and VII of the City of God and clarifies how Augustine could simultaneously look to Varro as a forebear as much as a foe, especially when the question is viewed against the backdrop provided by the responsibilities of Augustine's episcopal oversight, pastoral aims and public liturgical performance.

Three more essays look to the role of sacred texts and the negotiations between exegesis and doctrine. Charlotte Roueché ("A World Full of Stories" ) provocatively suggests that theatrical performances in late antiquity may have drawn from a "far wider range of mythologies and stories than we have tended to imagine". Drawing on a wide range of material and literary evidence Roueché demonstrates that, as one example, "the story of Tobias would offer an excellent choice for a play," especially when the "lives and adventures of the saints" offered an exciting store of theatrical material: the Roman Empire's need for theatrical plots may well have drawn from and propagated "a new genre of stories" recounting the exploits of Christianity's heroes. Judith Herrin's essay ("Book Burning as Purification") provides a stirring description and analysis of the diverse testimonies to the burning of books in late antiquity as a means by which deviant theology was ritually suppressed in dramas of purification orchestrated by a persecuting regime or in spontaneous outbursts of censorship. Claudia Rapp ("Safe-Conducts to Heaven: Holy Men, Mediation and the Role of Writing") insightfully demonstrates the interdependence of the significance of writing, the encumbrance of sin and the intercessory power of a holy man in relation to both, even beyond the grave. Stories in which the sins of a penitent recorded in writing are miraculously erased by means of a holy man's (posthumous) intercession leads Rapp to the idea of heavenly tollgates and their gatekeepers and the Book of Heaven--whether the Book of Fate or the Book of Justice--and the written prayers of one's spiritual father intended to offer safe conduct to heaven for the deceased. The development of these traditions is insightfully analysed by Rapp in relation to the importance placed upon the holy man's intercession and the miraculous properties of writing, particularly the writing of holy men, which are almost magical in their efficacious ability to effect a permanent and binding heavenly obligation.

Gregory the Great is the central figure in two essays. Lellia Cracco Ruggini and Giorgio Cracco ("Gregorio Magno e i 'Libri dei Re'") provide a description of the fortunes of Gregory's Expositio de Libris Regum in a fascinating tour extending over a millennium before concluding with a table outlining the twenty-five citations from Gregory's work appearing in Rabanus Maurus' Commentaria in Libros IV Regum alongside parallels appearing in Paterius' Liber de expositione Veteris ac Novi Testamenti and other works by Gregory. Peregrine Horden's essay ("The Late Antique Origins of the Lunatic Asylum?") takes as its point of departure the incredulity of Gregory's preeminent biographer, Frederick Homes Dudden, in the face of Gregory's report of a priest miraculously curing a madman [mente captus] by the laying on of hands and prayer. Horden takes this report as "the earliest clear attestation in European history, if not exactly of a lunatic asylum, then of a hospital in which a lunatic was based ... as a progenitor of those fully-fledged madhouses which will loom so large in the history of mental illness." Horden's analysis proceeds by means of an extended examination of Gregory's report against the broader backdrop of the history of houses for the mentally insane, concluding with the apt recognition that, for the student of late antiquity taught by Peter Brown, "evidence of what was thinkable can be as illuminating .. as evidence of what happened."

The final two essays by Julia M.H. Smith ("Radegundis peccatrix: Authorizations of Virginity in Late Antique Gaul") and Peter Garnsey ("Gemistus Plethon and Platonic Political Philosophy") venture into territories more clearly marked by the 'transformation of the classical heritage' than the preceding. Smith evaluates Radegund of Poiters against the backdrop of late antique virginity literature, and in the process not only describes the emergence of her cult but also demonstrates the manner in which late antique and mediaeval episcopal authority is indecipherable apart from a view to its relationship to this and other examples of "non-episcopal, feminine, forms of leadership." The volume's final essay looks to the political philosophy of Gemistus Plethon, the "crypto-pagan" whose life straddled the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Following an introductory discussion of Plethon as a religious syncretist hoping to present the world with a new religion founded upon Zoroastrianism, Pythagoreanism and Platonism, Garnsey contrasts Plethon's political philosophy with that of Plato and Proclus before demonstrating Plethon's influence upon Thomas More.

This is a wide-ranging collection of stimulating essays that certainly succeeds both as an homage to its honouree and as a contribution to the ongoing discussion that he has revitalized and shaped in such significant and diverse fashion.

Between Marrou and Brown : transformations of late antique Christianity / Robert Markus

Old and new Rome : Roman studies in sixth-century Constantinople / Averil Cameron

Old and new Rome in the late antique Near East / Glen Bowersock

Regulations for an association of artisans from the late Sasanian or early Arab period / Sebastian Brock

Crosses, icons and the image of Christ in Edessa : the place of iconophobia in the Christian-Muslim controversies of early Islamic times / Sidney H. Griffith

Alle origini della tradizione pagana su Costantino e il senato romano / Rita Lizzi Testa Four funerals and a wedding : this world and the next in fourth-century Rome / John Matthews

Les reéticences de saint Augustin face aux légendes hagiographiques d'après la lettre Divjak 29* / Claude Lepelley

Language, morality and cult : Augustine and Varro / Philip Rousseau

A world full of stories / Charlotte Roueché

Safe-conducts to heaven : holy men, mediation and the role of writing / Claudia Rapp

Book burning as purification / Judith Herrin

Gregorio Magno e i 'Libri dei Re' / Lellia Cracco Ruggini e Giorgio Cracco

The late antique origins of the lunatic asylum? / Peregrine Horden

Family men : masculinity and philosophy in late antiquity / Susanna Elm

Radegundis peccatrix : authorizations of virginity in late antique Gaul / Julia M.H. Smith

Gemistus Plethon and Platonic political philosophy / Peter Garnsey

2010.03.26

2010-03-08T10:32:00.002-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Laura Maniscalco (ed.), Il santuario dei Palici: un centro di culto nella Valle del Margi. Collana d'Area. Quaderno n. 11. Palermo: Regione Siciliana, 2008. Pp. 423. ISBN 9788861640573. €30.00 (pb).
Reviewed by Ingrid Edlund-Berry, The University of Texas at Austin

The sanctuary of the Palici (Palikoi) in southeast Sicily has a long history filled with a great deal of mystery. According to texts such as Diodorus Siculus and Macrobius, twin deities, the Palici, controlled the sulphur-smelling lakes that existed here, and the place was known as an asylum for run-away slaves as well as a place where oaths could be tested by different rituals. Remains of the sanctuary exist today, but, unfortunately, the town above has been badly looted, and modern exploitation of the land has eliminated the lakes.

But in spite of the vicissitudes of modern times, recent archaeological investigations have yielded important results, presented here by Maniscalco and her collaborators. The first chapter provides a useful overview of the history of the sanctuary, as recorded in the historical and other texts (discussed further in the conclusions, pp. 129-136), as well as a description of the location as a point of contact between the coast and inland.

The setting of the sanctuary includes a wide cave fronted by an open flat area holding remains of several buildings. In the second chapter the description of the different areas is arranged by identifiable features such as the Hestiaterion, edificio A, and stoa B, but also by excavation units such as saggio XX and vano B 1. Although each area is described in detail, with accompanying photographs and drawings, there is unfortunately no overview of how they relate to each other.

For ease in understanding the layout of the site, the next chapter more helpfully gives a chronological overview, starting with the Neolithic period (primarily pottery), Copper Age (pottery, terrace [?] wall), and Bronze Age (pottery, hut, tombs). The Archaic period (7th-6th c. B.C.) witnesses a sudden building activity with buildings F, E, A, D and others, preserving remains of small rectangular structures with one or more rooms. These were constructed at the same time as a rectangular building on the peak of the hill above the cave, the settlement later known as Palikè, founded by the Sikel leader Ducetius around 450 B.C. The function of the buildings in front of the cave is difficult to pinpoint, but the form suggests that they had a sacred function, for which parallels exist from other indigenous sites in Sicily.

The peak of building activity takes place in the 5th c. B.C., with evidence of a hestiaterion (dining-hall) and two stoas, B (replaced by complex P, a large terrace) and FA. The features of stoa B are described in this chapter, but for a complete analysis of the buildings, the reader needs to turn to the second half of the book which includes a section by Brian McConnell on the "Monumental Architecture in the area of the Grotto."

Maniscalco concludes that it is likely that this site had a religious function already in prehistoric times, and that its closest parallel is the Italic sanctuary of Mefitis at Valle d'Ansanto. Although the site is mentioned only sporadically in the ancient texts (for example, the reference by Hyppis of Rhegion that the sanctuary was founded in the 36th Olympiad, that is, 636-632 B.C.), the sequence of activity, including buildings, suggests that its history is closely tied to events in the Greek colonies of Sicily, in particular to Leontinoi and Gela. It is the setting for a lost play by Aeschylus, The Women of Aetna, and reaches a new level of importance when the Sikel leader Ducetius founds the town of Palikè as the center of a federation of indigenous towns. As a result of this event, the hestiaterion and two stoas (B and FA) are erected, and the sanctuary takes on a role as a meeting place for the united Sikels. Although it is possible that the custom of sharing meals at the sanctuary dates back to the Archaic period, the monumental architectural display emphasizes the Greek influence on Sikel traditions, as shown also in the architectural terracottas from the site (discussed by McConnell in this volume, but also in "Terracotta architectural fragments from ancient Palikè," in Deliciae Fictiles III, eds. I. Edlund-Berry, J. G. Greco, and J. Kenfield [Oxford 2006] 426-432).

In the following centuries, the town Palikè disappears from history, but the sanctuary continues to flourish, and a large terrace (complex P) is built in front of the hestiaterion. As indicated by both the archaeological remains and the description by Diodorus Siculus, the sanctuary is in use at least through the 1st c. A.D., but gradually the area becomes occupied by a farming settlement.

The second half of the book is devoted to specialized studies on a variety of topics, arranged by chronology and types of material. Valeria Motta presents the lithic objects and pottery from the Neolithic period and Copper Age, Ivana Alfina Arcidiacono the imported and indigenous pottery from the Archaic period, and Maria Randazzo the finds from stoa B. The votive terracotta figurines, including fragments of molds, are discussed by Giovanni Altamore, the variety of small finds from the Hellenistic period by Daniela Midolo, and the Roman material by Claudia Cirelli. Lucia Arcifa presents the structures and finds from the Byzantine era to the 11th century A.D., and, as noted above, Brian McConnell discusses the monumental architecture.

To complete the understanding of the evidence from the site, Elisabetta Castiglioni deals with the botanical remains, and Carolina Di Patti and Francesca Lupo summarize the evidence for the fauna. Specialized analyses of the lithic material (by G. Pappalardo and others), the geology (by Sebastiano Fazzina and others), and the plans for public access to the site (by Cornelio Tripolone) conclude the contents.

This is an important publication for anyone interested in the history of Sicily, ancient religion, and the interaction between Greek and indigenous traditions. All types of evidence are presented, and the text is illustrated with excellent photographs and drawings. No doubt future volumes on the area will add to the picture presented here, preferably organized in such a way that a reader new to Sicily will be aided by a succinct overview of the historical sources and the areas and topics discussed, keyed into the photographs and plans, with an index of names and features. Although the site has been badly damaged throughout the years, it is extremely important, and the current excavators may want to be more forthcoming in clarifying the historical and cultural significance of the location, the site, and its many centuries of religious and political activity.¹

Notes:

1. For additional information on the site, see L. Maniscalco and B. E. McConnell, "The Sanctuary of the Divine Palikoi (Rocchicella di Mineo, Sicily): Fieldwork from 1995-2001," American Journal of Archaeology, 107:2 (2003) 145-180.

2010.03.25

2010-03-08T10:27:00.001-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Otto Zwierlein, Petrus in Rom: die literarischen Zeugnisse. Mit einer kritischen Edition der Martyrien des Petrus und Paulus auf neuer handschriftlicher Grundlage. Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte, Bd. 96. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009. Pp. xiii, 476; 4 p. of plates. ISBN 9783110208085. $137.00.
Reviewed by Pieter W. van der Horst, Zeist, The Netherlands

Otto Zwierlein, well-known for his important work on the Roman dramatists, argues in this provocative and well documented study that the apostle Peter never visited Rome, did not undergo martyrdom there, was not buried there, and certainly was not the first bishop of Rome. Although Zwierlein does not say much about what his thesis implies for the historical power claims of the Vatican (but see pp. 334-5), these implications are clear enough: the claims are completely unfounded. Yet this is certainly not a theological 'Streitschrift,' it is rather a very sober and thorough philological and historical analysis of all the literary documents from antiquity that are commonly supposed to underpin the Vatican myth.

First, Zwierlein persuasively argues that the reference to Babylon in 1Peter 5.13 cannot be regarded as a metaphor for Rome but only for the (Jewish and Christian) diaspora mentioned in 1.1. Then he demonstrates that, contrary to what is often assumed, the first Epistle of Clement has no knowledge about Peter's life other than what the author could garner from the canonical Acts of the Apostles, and hence he does not know anything about a stay, let alone a martyrdom, of Peter (and Paul) in Rome. The first Christian documents that do mention such a stay and martyrdom (apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, Dionysius of Corinth, etc.) all date from the final two or three decades of the second century and are not based upon historical knowledge; their information can be demonstrated to be based upon a (wishful) misreading of earlier literary sources (e.g., John 21.18-19; Acts 12.18-19).¹ Moreover, Peter's activity in Rome is incompatible with the information given in the New Testament about the division of tasks between Peter and Paul according to which Peter was to be the 'apostle of the circumcised' (Gal. 2.8) while Paul was the apostle to the gentiles; and Paul certainly did visit Rome (Acts 28). The fact that early Christian legends had it that Simon Magus, who had been refuted by Peter in Samaria according to Acts 8, moved to Rome where Nero befriended him, necessitated a visit of Peter to that city for a frontal collision between the two to take place (thus the Pseudo-Clementines and Eusebius). This legend was created in the period of the church's struggle with Gnosticism, of which heresy Simon was believed to be the founding father and that, for that reason, had to be refuted again by Peter. The origin and development of the legend of Peter's activities and death in Rome are described in minute detail by Zwierlein who extensively quotes from the relevant sources in the original languages and shows his critical acumen on every page. He proves how in this process of anti-Gnostic struggle, which went hand in hand with the consolidation of the monarchic episcopate, developments that took place in the second half of the second century were retrojected to the middle of the first century (as happened so often) in order to provide them with apostolic authority.

Since the first Letter of Clement and the Letters of Ignatius play a dominant role in the debate about the historicity of Peter's stay and martyrdom at Rome, the question of the date and authenticity of these letters is of paramount importance, and Zwierlein devotes some 150 pages to it. He agrees with the growing number of scholars that regard the Ignatiana as spurious and not dating from the second decade but from the final decades of the second century. The Ignatian corpus bases its theory of a stay of Peter in Rome upon a misunderstood passage from the first Epistle of Clement, a document that itself, too, is spurious and does not date to the final decade of the first century but to the third decade of the second century since it shows obvious knowledge of most, even the latest, New Testament writings;² and there is little doubt that some of the late New Testament writings were composed in the first two decades of the second century. In this section of the book, Zwierlein demonstrates a considerable familiarity with debates in biblical scholarship. As regards the first Epistle of Clement, he concludes that 'Clement' (the author) is not identical with the third bishop of Rome called Clement, a man who probably never existed (since in the years around 100 CE Rome did not yet have a monarchic episcopate) but whose existence was postulated on the basis of Paul's remark in Phil. 4.3. The upshot of all these - sometimes very technical - arguments is that there is not a single piece of reliable literary evidence (and no archaeological evidence either) that Peter ever was in Rome.

A very important part of the book that follows (337-449) is a new critical edition of the Greek text of the Martyria of Peter and Paul, presented with a full and meticulous critical apparatus and accompanied by a German translation on the facing pages. The importance of this new edition is that for the first time a manuscript from Ochrid (Macedonia, 11th cent.), which is of a higher quality than most other mss., could be used (some photoes are provided at the end of the book). Among many other things, this codex confirms that in the famous 'Quo vadis' scene the original wording was not ποῦ ὧδε = quo vadis? (where are you going?), but τί ὧδε = quo venis? (why do you [Jesus] come here [to Rome]?). The manuscript evidence for both martyria is discussed at great length and a stemma is given at p. 360. Indices locorum et rerum conclude this impressive book.

Zwierlein presents a strong case and his conclusions have a great historical plausibility (although orthodox Catholic scholars will certainly try to disprove them). The reader should know that this book is not an easy read. It is full of technical details. The many hundreds of quotations in Greek and Latin are sometimes provided with translations, sometimes not, and it is unclear what is the guiding principle here, if any (sometimes only a translation is presented). The style of the many footnotes is infelicitous in that only in the first mention of a publication are the full details given, later on only the author's name, which is awkward in the many cases where the first mention was hundreds of pages back and no longer easy to find; and there is no cumulative bibliography. Also the arrangement of the material is sometimes a bit rambling. But to anyone interested in early Christian myth-making this is certainly an indispensable book.

Notes:

1. Another case of glaring misreading is Justin Martyr's remark that Simon Magus, once in Rome, even received divine honour in the form of a statue on a bridge over the Tiber with the inscription 'Simoni sancto deo,' but when this inscription was found it turned out to read 'Semoni Sanco deo' (CIL VI.567), being dedicated to the old Italic god Semo Sancus (the case is discussed by Zwierlein at pp. 129-133).
2. Not all instances of Clement's use of New Testament writings adduced by Zwierlein are equally convincing.

2010.03.24

2010-03-08T10:20:00.001-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Christos Simelidis (ed.), Selected Poems of Gregory of Nazianzus: I.2.17; II.1.10, 19.32: A Critical Edition with Introduction and Commentary. Hypomnemata Bd. 177. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprech, 2009. Pp. 284. ISBN 9783525252871. €56.90.
Reviewed by Edward G. Mathews, Jr., St. Nersess Armenian Seminary, New Rochelle

Gregory of Nazianzus is one of the most consistently celebrated of the early Christian writers. In just the last decade, the appearance of several volumes of selections of his works,¹ two recent--and important--monographs,² and a collection of significant essays³ bear witness to his ongoing popularity. However, this sustained popularity was generally due to his theological acumen and his extraordinary rhetorical skills, not to his poetry, which both Jerome and the Suda numbered at 30,000 verses (only about two-thirds of them have actually survived). Read with great admiration by such modern poets as Constantine Cavafy, it is only in the last two decades that the vast oeuvre of his poetry has received any critical scholarly attention: editions and translations of his autobiographical poems and of the so-called Poemata Arcana appeared just over a decade ago.⁴ In this same time period, a number of dissertations on the life and/or writings of Gregory have appeared; the work under review here is the second of these that was specifically dedicated to Gregory's poetry.⁵

Simelidis' work is a revised version of his Oxford doctoral dissertation. It offers a lengthy introduction to Gregory's poetry (pp. 21-102), critical editions of the Greek texts -- no translations -- of four of Gregory's poems: I.2.17, II.1.10, II.1.19, and II.1.32 (pp. 103-115; one gnomology, two autobiographical poems, and one lament, respectively), together with extensive commentary on each (pp. 117-246; see detailed table of contents below). The four poems that constitute the focus of this volume had previously existed only in the nineteenth century edition of Dom Caillau as preserved in J.-P. Migne's Patrologia Graeca, vol. 38.⁶ Simelidis consulted twenty-nine manuscripts in compiling his edition, although none of the four poems exists in all twenty-nine of the manuscripts: II.1.32 is found in twenty-five of the manuscripts, I.2.17 in twenty-two, while II.1.10 and II.1.19 are each found in only twenty of the twenty-nine (see Simelidis' table on p. 100).

This is an extraordinarily detailed and erudite study that ought to lay down the path for any future study of Gregory's poetry. Gregory stands as a unique transitional point between classical/hellenistic poetry and Byzantine poetry. Previous scholarship, which had long considered Gregory's poetry to be turgid, imitative and uninspired, has been satisfied with a general acknowledgement of Gregory's debt to classical poetry, or with a simple notation of a few obvious borrowings; even such a rich commentary as that of D.A. Sykes in his otherwise stimulating study of Gregory's Poemata Arcana only notes parallels and borrowings from Stoic philosophy and hellenistic poetry. Simelidis is really the first to go beyond this "footnoting" to make the first serious attempt at fleshing out Gregory's sources in far more precise detail. He even highlights, by locating a number of heretofore unnoticed examples, a particular penchant----he labels it 'obsession'----on the part of Gregory for the poetry of Callimachus. Simelidis notes clear examples of Gregory's knowledge of "less traditional" literature such as the Sibylline Oracles, Manetho's Apotelesmatica, and even finds a clear allusion to a Hymn to the Pantocrator, that is otherwise preserved only in a fourth-century magical papyrus, P. Gr. Ludg. Bat. J 384. Even more importantly, perhaps, he demonstrates how Gregory uses and transforms his sources for his own purposes. These usages range from a simple transformation of Callimachus' invocation to Demeter ἵλαθί μοι, τρίλλιστε (Callimachus, Hymn to Demeter, 138) to an invocation to the Christian trinity, ἵλαθί μοι . . ., τριάς (Gregory, Carm. I.2.14.119), to adopting some clearly erotic imagery (probably also from Callimachus) to parallel physical human intercourse with his own spiritual union with God (Gregory, Carm. II.1.34.85-86), to a remarkable adoption of a phrase from Euphorion, fr. CA 98, referring to the myth of Mopsus and Amphilochus who killed each other, that Gregory applied to Christ's triumph over death (Gregory, Carm. I.1.33.8), all of which Simelidis sets out in far greater--and more convincing--detail than possible here.

Within his own tradition, Gregory becomes almost the sole model for later Byzantine literary style, especially rhetoric and poetry. Simelidis even goes so far as to refer to the Byzantine "obsession with" and "worship of" Gregory. A large number of later panegyrics on Gregory, composed by the most eminent of Byzantine scholars, speak of his immense importance for contemporary Byzantine style. Simelidis adduces dozens of examples from Byzantine writers to demonstrate how a great deal of Byzantine poetry makes use of Gregory's poetry much as he himself made use of classical/hellenistic models. Perhaps the most famous example is the lengthy poem known as the Christus Patiens which was long considered to be an actual composition of Gregory. There also survive a considerable number of school exercises. For his purposes, Simelidis reproduces three different versions of anonymous paraphrases of his four poems (pp. 247-264) that seem to be schoolroom attempts at imitating Gregory's poetical style.

It is Simelidis' great contribution in this volume that, under the guise of an edition of four relatively short poems, he so clearly sets out Gregory's unique position as transitional figure between Classical and Byzantine literature. For these four poems that he has edited, he has fleshed out Gregory's sources in far greater detail than heretofore ever attempted while, at the same time, setting out in nearly equal detail his subsequent influence on later Byzantine literature. Ironically, however, it is this very deep and detailed nature of Simelidis' introduction and commentary that best reveals how much more study there remains to do on Gregory's poetry.

Contents:

INTRODUCTION

1. Gregory's Poetry
i. Gregory's Poetry and Modern Scholarship
ii. The Case for Christian Poetry
iii. Gregory and Hellenistic Poetry
iv. Language and Metre
2. Gregory's Poetry in Byzantium
i. Reputation and Influence
ii. The Poems and the School Curriculum
iii. The Anonymous Paraphrases

II. TEXT of Carmina I.2.17, II.1.10, II.1.19 and II.1.32

III. COMMENTARY
IV. APPENDIX: Three Byzantine Anonymous Paraphrases

Notes:

1.   Translations into English alone, in chronological order, are: Peter Gilbert, On God and Man: The Theological Poetry of St. Gregory of Nazianzus. Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2001; Jennifer Nimmo-Smith, A Christian's Guide to Greek Culture: The Pseudo-Nonnus Commentaries on Sermons 4, 5, 39 and 43 by Gregory of Nazianzus. Translated Texts for Historians, 37. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001; Frederick Williams and Lionel R. Wickham, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius. Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2002; Martha Vinson St. Gregory of Nazianzus: Select Orations. Fathers of the Church, 107. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2003; Brian E. Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus. Early Church Fathers. London/New York: Routledge, 2006; Nonna Verna Harrison Festal Orations by St Gregory Nazianzus. Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2008. Recent translations into other languages can be found in the bibliography.
2.   John Anthony McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography. Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2001; and Christopher A. Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
3.   Gregory of Nazianzus: Images and Reflections. Jostein Børtnes and Tomas Hägg, eds. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006.
4.   Carolinne White, ed. and tr., Gregory of Nazianzus: Autobiographical Poems. Cambridge Medieval Classics, 6. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996; C. Moreschini, ed., and D.A. Sykes, tr., St. Gregory of Nazianzus: Poemata Arcana. Oxford Theological Monographs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Two volumes of translations of Gregory's poems have appeared in both French and Italian, and a translation of the entire poetic corpus, in four volumes, has appeared in Modern Greek; see Simelidis' bibliography for details.
5.   The first was S. Abrams Rebillard, Speaking for Salvation: Gregory of Nazianzus as Poet and Priest in his Autobiographical Poems. Ph.D. Thesis; Providence: Brown University, 2003.
6.   Carolinne White, Gregory of Nazianzus: Autobiographical Poems, text of II.1.19, on pp. 154-163, simply reproduces the text found in Migne.

2010.03.23

2010-03-08T10:12:00.001-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Isabelle Boehm, Pascal Luccioni (ed.), Le médecin initié par l'animal: animaux et médecine dans l'Antiquité grecque et latine. Actes du colloque international tenu à la Maison de l'Orient de la Méditerranée-Jean Pouilloux les 26 et 27 octobre 2006. Collection de la maison de l'orient et de la Méditerranée 39. Série littéraire et philosophique 12 . Lyon: Maison de l'Orient de la Méditerranée-Jean Pouilloux, 2008. Pp. 260. ISBN 9782356680020. €29.00 (pb).
Reviewed by Philippe Charlier, Hôpital Raymond Poincaré, Garches, France

[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

Ce volume constitue les actes d'une rencontre tout à fait intéressante organisée à Lyon (Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée) les 26 et 27 octobre 2006. Elle comprend les contributions d'une dizaine d'auteurs qui sont tous rattachés à une université française.

Dans un court avant-propos, les deux éditeurs de ces actes posent le cadre de cette publication dans la continuité d'autres interrogations sur l'histoire de la médecine, notamment sous l'impulsion du Centre Jean Palerne (Saint-Etienne). Souhaitant mêler, comme le faisaient praticiens et médecins antiques, connaissances anatomiques, thérapeutiques et zoologiques, Boehm et Luccioni ont véritablement réussi leur pari. Ces contributions sont remarquablement riches et variées, d'un haut niveau universitaire tout en restant accessibles au profane. Chaque article de ces actes est précédé d'un résumé en français et en anglais, et suivi par une bibliographie circonstanciée.

Danielle Gourevitch propose en guise d'introduction une sorte de voyage initiatique dans le bestiaire de Galien, parfois fabuleux, dont on peut se demander s'il ne sert pas plutôt de faire-valoir au maître de Pergame que de véritable catalogue à but pratique.

Véronique Boudon-Millot s'intéresse à la définition et à la position de l'homme au sein de l'ordre animal, fondant son discours sur le De usu partium I,2 de Galien.

Armelle Debru reste dans l'oeuvre de Galien en analysant l'usage fait par ce médecin de la torpille notamment dans le cadre de la prise en charge des céphalées, mais aussi d'un point de vue toxicologique.

Jean-Marie Jacques reste dans le domaine de la toxicologie en poussant assez loin (mais jamais trop) une relecture de l'oeuvre de Nicandre de Colophon montrant l'implication des animaux dans l'apprentissage aux hommes des fonctions toxiques de son environnement direct. La position des serpents y est prépondérante, de même que le cadre de vie souvent vécu comme malsain de ces êtres vivants aux vertus empoisonnantes (un thème qui sera repris plus loin par Jean Trinquier).

Arnaud Zucker change d'angle d'attaque en choisissant de décrire les maladies communes à l'homme et à l'animal. Dans ce discours, il est dommage que la paléopathologie (et notamment la paléoparasitologie, l'animal étant un important pourvoyeur de parasites pour l'homme) soit tenue hors de course, l'auteur ne se cantonnant qu'à un point de vue philologique... Néanmoins, sa démonstration de l'auto-médication de certains animaux (par la diète, par le régime, voire par l'ingestion volontaire et dirigée de plantes avec principes actifs), source d'inspiration pour la thérapeutique humaine, est impeccable.

Jean Bouffergue reprend ce même thème d'enseignement médico-thérapeutique des animaux à l'homme (qui n'est rien de moins qu'un réel talent d'observation de l'esprit humain) en fondant son discours sur le livre IX de l'Histoire des animaux d'Aristote.

Suzanne Amigues s'intéresse, elle, à la contamination des humains par l'ingestion de viande d'animaux contaminés par des toxiques: les effets délétères sont-ils réels? Quel apport la médecine moderne peut-elle porter sur ces phénomènes a priori observés et décrits par les praticiens antiques? Comme exemple principal, elle a choisi le coturnisme, intoxication bien particulière consécutive à la consommation de caille (cortunix).

Florence Bourbon et Sébastien Barbara explorent un autre aspect de cette co-existence homme-animaux avec l'utilisation d'espèces à fort potentiel symbolique dans des recettes médicinales et principalement gynécologiques (crabe de rivière, poulpe de mer). Plus qu'une véritable efficacité de ces espèces, ne faut-il pas plutôt y voir une préfiguration de la théorie des "signatures" propre à Paracelse, l'animal se muant par sa forme à l'organe malade?

Sébastien Barbara (seul, cette fois-ci) s'intéresse ensuite à deux entités particulièrement rares et recherchées dans la pharmacopée antique: castoréum et basilic. D'où vient leur réputation? Comment expliquer leur fréquence dans les recettes et prescriptions malgré une cherté et un coût prodigieux?

L'article de Jean Trinquier est probablement l'un des plus intéressants et des mieux fournis de ces actes. En une cinquantaine de pages, l'auteur décrit de façon complète les conditions d'apparition, de développement, d'expansion, de dangerosité, de contagion, de pestilence des faunes des marais. Le caractère exhaustif de cette présentation, de même que l'aisance avec laquelle on navigue d'une source à une autre sont autant de preuve que l'auteur domine son sujet. La lecture n'en est que plus facile et l'information plus aisément transmise.

Marie-Claude Charpentier et Jordi Pàmias centrent leur approche sur l'animal comme révélateur d'une catastrophe imminente.

Enfin, clôturant cette suite de regards croisés médico-zoologiques, Valérie Gitton-Ripoll remonte le plus loin possible dans l'origine de cet être fabuleux qu'est Chiron? (et, à travers lui les centaures): ces êtres hybrides ne préfigurent-ils pas l'apprentissage de l'art médical par l'intimité unissant espèces humaines et animales?

Remarquablement utiles, une suite d'index (noms d'animaux, lieux, plantes, noms divins, noms propres, notion et passages cités) et les coordonnées des différents auteurs sont enfin délivrés à la fin de l'ouvrage.

En conclusion, on ne saurait trop recommander la lecture de ce passionnant ouvrage qui amène de multiples regards et de nombreux échanges de compétences sur ces rapports parfois intimes entre animaux et humains dans le domaine de l'anatomie et de l'art médical.

Isabelle Boehm et Pascal Luccioni, Avant-propos

Danièle Gourevitch (EPHE, Paris), Le bestiaire de Galien

Véronique Boudon-Millot (UMR 8062, CNRS, Paris), L'homme, cet animal doué de sagesse et seul être divin parmi ceux qui vivent sur la terre (Galien, De usu partium I,2)

Armelle deBru (Université René Descartes-Paris 5), Les enseignements de la torpille dans la médecine antique

Jean-Marie Jacques (Université Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux 3, émérite), L'animal et la médecine iologique: à propos de Nicandre de Colophon

Arnaud Zucker (Cépam UMR 6130, Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis), Homme et animal: pathologies communes et thérapies partagées?

Jean Bouffartigue (Université Paris 10 Nanterre, émérite), L'automédication des animaux chez les auteurs antiques

Suzanne Amigues (Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3), Remèdes et poisons végétaux transmis à l'homme par l'animal

Florence Bourbon (IUFM de Paris / Université Paris Sorbonne-Paris 4), Poulpe de mer et crabe de rivière dans la Collection hippocratique

Sébastien Barbara (Halma-Ipel, UMR 8164, Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille 3), Castoréum et basilic, deux substances animales de la pharmacopée ancienne

Jean Trinquier (Halma-Ipel, UMR 8164, Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille 3), La hantise de l'invasion pestilentielle: le rôle de la faune des marais dans l'étiologie des maladies épidémiques d'après les sources latines

Marie-Claude Charpentier et Jordi Pàmias (Université de Franche-Comté, Université Autonome de Barcelone), Les animaux et la crise de panique en Grèce antique

Valérie Gitton-Ripoll (Université Toulouse 2-Le Mirail), Chiron, le cheval-médecin ou pourquoi Hippocrate s'appelle Hippocrate

Isabelle Boehm et Pascal Luccioni, Index (noms d'animaux, de lieux, de plantes ; noms divins, noms propres ; notions ; passages cités)

Coordonnées des contributeurs (décembre 2008)

2010.03.22

2010-03-07T13:41:00.001-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Rodney Merrill (trans.), Homer, The Iliad. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Pp. viii, 464. ISBN 9780472116171. $35.00.
Reviewed by Jamey Hecht

Preview

Rodney Merrill has offered the world a very musical Iliad, one which pays full homage to the trance-inducing powers of Homeric meter. Among the midwives of this work listed in the acknowledgments are some of the foremost scholars in Homeric studies, not least Gregory Nagy of Harvard and Stephen Daitz, the great performer of Homer whose striking reconstruction of ancient rhapsodic technique is the best available. Merrill's Iliad is in general a mighty success as a scholarly rendering and as a literary work of English poetry. My discussion of what I regard as its limitations should not diminish the eagerness of prospective readers; the book delivers a week's rich reverie in an armchair, and surely makes an excellent classroom text. It is musical, muscular, generally quite accurate, and suffused with the passion of a genuine lover of Homeric poetry.

Translation is an affair of spectra; for meaning, there is a spectrum connecting the ultra-literal (e.g., Jebb's prose Sophocles) on one side to mere adaptation without concern for accuracy on the other. For meter, another spectrum ranges from the daunting and no doubt wrong-headed ambition to render the Greek meter as instantiated in the Greek poem beat for beat, over to the other extreme where one simply forgets all about it and goes for prose. There are many other such spectra (e.g., diction, from the more archaic to the less), but these are the big two, and Mr. Merrill is ambitious for both accuracy of sense and an English metricality as Homeric in spirit as he can find. The difficulty is that dactylic hexameter has not had much of a natural life in English literature hitherto, apart from various achievements in the translating of Homer and Vergil. There are also normative moments of irregular hexameter poetry in Whitman, whose long line sometimes has six stresses ("My TONGUE, every ATom of my BLOOD, FORMED from this SOIL, this AIR,"), but in English, hexameter has not flourished as the iambic pentameter has. So an English hexameter Homer is a somewhat rare animal whose literary norms would seem rather flexible and ambiguous.

Merrill is admirably committed to the rule that each line's final foot must be a spondee; his III, 3 ends "up toward heaven," and though the stress is much stronger on the first syllable of "heaven," convention in either language easily rounds it out to a fairly spondaic sound (indeed the Iliad's first four Greek lines end in short syllables). But here are lines 10-11: "As in the peaks of the mountains the south wind spreads a mist over, / not to the shepherd a friend, to the thief much better than nighttime--" Not bad, but "spreads a mist over" seems to me troublesome: either you put the natural, strong stress on "mist," in which case "over" pales into a rather stressless pyrrhic and violates the rule, or you keep "mist" very light and stress the first syllable of "over." Whatever you think of the two outcomes, the trouble is that in order to reach one you have to stop and choose, rather than be swept along in the flow. That is inevitable in a work of this size and type, and each reader will judge whether or not this kind of brief metrical impasse occurs so frequently as to limit the excellence of the result.

Merrill has a tendency to end enjambed lines with semantically weak elements like prepositions and linking verbs, which does not happen very often in good English-language verse. At I, 346-7 we have "out of the cabin the fair-cheeked daughter of Briseus he led and / gave her to them to take back..." To be sure, the feminine ending "and" gets picked up smoothly by the strong opening monosyllable of the next line's main verb, "gave." The trouble, if there is one, is that ending a line of English poetry with the word "and" is jarringly contrary to familiar artistic practice; part of the reader's attention may now be diverted to the question whether this is a bad choice within old rules or perhaps a good one within the special new constraints of an idiosyncratic project. While Homer does end some lines with the conjunction "te," one does not find him ending lines with "kai".In Act III scene ii of Hamlet, the Player King says "Faith, I must leave thee, love, and shortly too." English "too" resembles Greek "te" in that these conjunctions tend to occur after both of the elements they conjoin (so their occurrence in the final position at the end of a line is perhaps weak, but not awkward). But "and" resembles "kai," in that these are conjunctions that tend to occur between the elements they conjoin. So ending a line in "and" (which I can't find Shakespeare doing) or "kai" (which I can't find Homer doing) seems disadvantageous.

Not all of Merrill's semantic choices are entirely clear to me in their motivation. At I, 461, the verb ὠμοθέτησαν is translated "fastened upon," whereas the form only seems to warrant a notion of placement without attachment: to "place" or "lay" raw pieces of flesh on the fat of the sacrifice. At VIII, 398, we have the construction "aroused up," where the preposition "up" seems redundant after the prefix "a-"; the translator should perhaps choose one but not use both. At IX, 17 a vocative begins with "Oh" instead of "O." Some English words occur that struck this reader as odd: "currish" (VIII, 483), "clandestinely" (VI, 161), and "outpowers" (XI, 558). At XXVII, 6, we have "So now over Patroklos bestrode light-haired Menelaos," which is lovely, but I think it oddly redundant to make "bestride" take the preposition "over," whose sense it already includes. Like the abundant use of the demonstrative pronoun "that" and the conjunction "also," it suggests metrical padding. So does the construction "inside of," when it is used adverbially (e.g., I, 432) and not as part of a noun phrase. At II, 798 the disguised Iris says, "Certainly many the battles among men which I have entered." This will do, but it feels strange that there is time for "certainly" and "which" but no time to state the understood main verb.

Then there are the moments of what might be called excessive faithfulness, as at the start of the Catalogue of Ships: "Now will I tell those leaders of galleys and all of the galleys." That is exactly what the Greek says: ἀρχοὺς αὖ νηῶν ἐρέω νῆάς τε προπάσας. But this repetition of the Greek word for "galley" is colored and alleviated by its change in noun case, whereas the repetition in this English line sounds merely strange and artless.

All this is of little importance compared to the two great strengths of the Merrill translation: its theoretical integrity, and its many beautiful plumes of elegant problem-solving. By "theoretical integrity" I mean a set of choices that includes: to translate into hexameters; not to translate the names in the Catalogue of Nymphs, but to transliterate them instead, preserving their awesome music; to scan "-eus" as one syllable (except in over-familiar forms like Achilles); to render Homer's formulaic repetitions (and his anaphora, e.g., II, 382-4) undiminished; and so on. The gems are worth the price of the book:

summoning quickly to lofty Olympus the hundred-handed
Creature the gods Briareus call, whereas all men name him (I, 402-3)

nor of the Muses, who sang in lovely antiphonal voices. (I, 604)

As at its coming the west wind stirs the deep grain to commotion (II, 147)

holding aloft the magnificent aegis, immortal and ageless (II, 447)

hither and thither are flying, as they in their wings are exulting;
clamorous, ever advancing they settle, the meadow reechoes-- (II, 462-)

Hektor, advancing to stand near Ajax, struck at the ash-wood
shaft with his great sword under the spear-point close to the socket
utterly cutting it off, and the scion of Telamon Ajax
futilely shook in his hand that stump of the spear, and the brazen
spear-point onto the ground faraway from him plummeted clanging. (XVI, 114-)

also the rage that arouses a man, though prudent, to raging,
anger that, sweeter by far than the honey from honeycombs dripping,
waxes to rage like smoke from a blaze inside of a man's breast (XVIII, 108-10)

One could go on and on; the point is that this translation can boast a long list of excellent lines and blocks of lines. The text flows, but it also stumbles on some infelicities, especially when lines end with loose conjunctions, prepositions, or linking verbs. Merrill's Iliad is generally alive and striding, but it sometimes seems conspicuously fitted together, paced by a somewhat artificial repertoire of verbal padding techniques whose important metrical workings might be better concealed behind the poetry. On the whole, a remarkable achievement, deserving of a place on the shelf with Lattimore and the other heavyweights.

2010.03.21

2010-03-07T13:30:00.002-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Rex Winsbury, The Roman Book: Books, Publishing and Performance in Classical Rome. Classical Literature and Society. London: Duckworth, 2009. Pp. xii, 236. ISBN 9780715638293. $33.00 (pb).
Reviewed by Robert A. Kraft, University of Pennsylvania

[For an expanded Table of Contents, see the end of this review.]

The simple title on the cover The Roman Book is deceptive; the lengthy subtitle is more revealing. This book is as much about oral performance as about written books, arguing that a major step in publication for some (most?) types of Roman literary works was the recitatio, the reading out of all or part of a composition by the author and/or a chosen proxy, often a trained slave. The period chosen for analysis is roughly the first two centuries of the Common Era (p. 101 specifies 80 BCE to 170 CE), and the starting point is a strong critique of modern theories about publication and the book trade during Roman times. The author attempts to recreate the socio-literary world from which "classical" Latin "literary" works emerged--especially, but not exclusively, poetry. He argues that oral performance played the major role in creating interest and demand for these works.

The author is trained in the classics (this book began as his Ph.D. thesis at London University) and has pursued a successful career in journalism, which makes for a very informed and readable presentation. Ancient sources are cited in abundance, almost always accompanied by standard translations or even new and lively English renderings by the author, along with a plethora of modern works (see the book's valuable bibliography, pp. 223-229; internet resources are also sometimes mentioned). The text is also amply annotated, although the notes are inconveniently located as a separate section at the end of the work (pp. 181-222; fortunately those page headers specify the pages to which the notes apply) rather than as footnotes. A further frustration is that the index (pp. 231-236) is to the main text only, and does not cover the notes, which frequently add important information to the discussion. Nor is there an index of the ancient passages cited. Two brief appendices deal with the interesting side issues of the origins of Latin tachygraphy (perhaps Tiro was significantly involved at some point), and the claim made by some ancient authors that their works were "known throughout the world" (judged unlikely). See the Table of Contents at the end of this review, to which the numerous sub-headings in each chapter could be added for more detail. It is not difficult to thumb through the book and follow the argument.

With regard to evidence often cited for "publication" and "book trade" (based on modern analogies popularized by Theodor Birt and similar authors since the late 19th century), Winsbury is a minimalist. If no clear claim exists in the ancient references, no inferences are accepted as evidence. "There was no developed marketplace, no substantial book trade, no technology, no high rate of literacy through which written texts could have been 'commodified'" (p. 170). On the other hand, for the author's theories about the significance of performance in the issuance of classical works, various inferences are allowed that go far beyond the "firm" evidence. While Winsbury would not limit ancient Roman publication to what was performed orally, "orality" is clearly emphasized as the essential element leading to dissemination for much Roman literature: "The recitatio was therefore the pivotal event in the life of a new work with literary pretensions (though not necessarily of all works that have come down to us), the event to which all the efforts and concerns of its author were directed. The recitatio followed by editio if the new work warranted it, was in effect publication for most genres, even if libraries may have been an alternative route for some others" (p. 110). What he does not discuss at any length or in any depth are the admitted exceptions to such a generalization (e.g. lengthy histories, letter collections, reference works, medical texts, commentaries--see pp. 104-106, 132f.).

Winsbury is also highly selective in his choice of evidence. He attempts to focus on "Roman" materials, with Latin at center stage, but also recognizes the close relationship of "Greek" developments as both prior to and parallel with the Latin. Sometimes he appeals to the Greek materials (e.g. Galen and Lucian on books), but often he does not, even when his presentation could be strengthened.(e.g. Homeric textual reconstruction by Alexandrian critics is not even mentioned in his section on recognizing errors in transmitted copies, pp. 130f.). Indeed, on Winsbury's reading it is partly in conscious imitation of the Greeks that Romans abandoned word division and punctuation, "from about the time of Hadrian" (p. 46), "the Graecophile emperor" (p.139): "It is this prestige status that largely explains why the Romans maintained for so long the format of the scroll...in preference to the ultimately successful codex format, and why they discarded spaces between word[s] and retained texts as river-of-letters without any system of punctuation, in the Greek manner. It was all part of keeping the book as a specialist upper-class possession, to be mastered only by the few" (pp.164f). This sort of socio-cultural explanation of Roman intentionality runs throughout the book, but without any systematic exploration of the Greek side of the same issues.

On technical aspects of book production, Winsbury is caught between some older and newer views and approaches that are sometimes somewhat problematic. He argues that cultural factors were more influential than practical considerations in the long survival of papyrus (not leather) and scroll (not codex) in the period under examination, despite the knowledge that both leather and codices were available choices in that period (pp.16-25, citing Martial among others), He then proposes that "the victory of the codex, and the victory of Christianity, became one and the same. ... The codex 'piggy-backed' to success on Christianity, and its success arose from the need to 'mobilise God' in a particular way using particular texts. Thus the final choice between papyrus and parchment, scroll and codex, was largely a religious, i.e. cultural, one rather than a technical choice" (p. 25; see also p. 134). And yet further: "Once a precise set of texts or body of literature gathered sacred Christian canonical status, then these texts had to be contained within one sacred book...in a format that could be repeated with exactitude from edition to edition and place to place. The codex was, one might say, an inspired choice for this purpose" (pp. 25f.). This despite the fact that few Christian codices of the entire Bible (pandects) have survived, and even those are far from identical, and also that codices of particular genres of "pagan" literature are increasingly well attested prior to or apart from the "victory" of Christianity.

I have a few other more pedantic quibbles with Winsbury's treatment of the technical matters pertaining to book production. At a couple of places, the picture captions identify as a "pen" what is almost certainly a stylus used to write on wax tablets (pp. 28 and 34--in general, the role of the wax tablet notebook as a proto-codex is underplayed, despite the pictures and the brief discussion on p. 103). In describing how a copyist would have written, he fails to invert mentally the picture based on Egyptian models (where writing went right to left) and thus states that for the Roman copyist, "the left hand held the unwritten scroll and the right hand wrote"--which would indeed be an "awkward position" for right to left writing (p. 37). In discussing the relationship between scroll format and textual "structuring" (pp. 47f.), Winsbury fails to explore questions of "book" lengths (in terms of content, not physical measurements) in relation to genres and to multiple "volumes" attributed to a work (that is, the extent to which "structuring" of a work into multiple "books" is a reflection of how many scrolls were needed for the task). This oversight is reflected in the attempt to compare the number of "books" in scroll collections with those in codex collections (e.g. p. 70 and its n. 29, with the claim that "Roman imperial libraries were...huge by medieval standards--the Cambridge library of 1424 had a mere 122 volumes"; but how many scrolls would that represent? If Trajan's imperial library had 20,000 scrolls, and if a robust codex could hold the equivalent of 50-100 scrolls of various sizes, the comparative capacities of the libraries might not have been so disparate).

In general, the book is well written and edited, with only an occasional lapse (see the list at the end of this review). And it is an enjoyable read, with dashes of humor (including clever sarcasm) interjected here and there. Winsbury raises interesting issues about socio-cultural control over literary production that seem to me to be problematic, or at best one-sided. To his credit, he is well aware that matters are more complex than his treatment allows, but that does not stop him from tending to simplify the picture of elite Roman "literature" (with all the ambiguities of that anachronistic term--see p. 183 n. 26) and literary production, or of the historical developments and processes involved (e.g. Greek parallels, or the later role of Christianity). Still, he provides an interesting and instructive romp through a wide range of "Roman" materials that are related in one way or another to the production of a certain type of "Roman book"--and to some of the associated processes (e.g. theatrical venues, oral performance, role of slaves, distribution and control). I am pleased to have read and learned from it.

Table of Contents, with narrative summary statements from p. 11 interwoven:

1. Myths and anachronisms: the need for a new look at Roman publishing.

What was the Roman book?

"to establish and discuss the manufacture, format and aesthetics of a Roman 'book', and their merits and demerits"

2. Format wars: scroll v. codex, papyrus v. parchment, pagan v. Christian
3. Don't mess up the aesthetics: marching columns and rivers of letters
4. Did the medium shape the message? Deciphering the author's intent

Deconstructing the Roman book trade

"the myths and realities around 'publishers', bookshops and libraries at Rome"

5. Atticus and Co.--Roman publishers?
6. Bookshops and copyshops: a trip to Rome's Argiletum and Sigillaria
7. Books for looks: the library shelves as imperial patronage

What the Latin tells us

"a close look at the terms used by the Romans themselves to describe their activities, to see how this terminology paints a truer picture of what they did, including their reliance on slaves"

8. Slavery as the enabling infrastructure of Roman literature
9. Getting into circulation: from private space to public space

Texts in an oral/aural society

"to place the Roman 'book' within a context of a primarily oral society"

10. Effecte! Graviter! Cito! Nequitur! Euge! Beate!: the recitatio as act of publication
11. Literature of the voice: 'toss me a coin and I'll tell you a golden story'

The perils of publishing

"explores the many hazards that Roman 'books' and authors had to endure and survive (or not)"

12. The battle for survival: mice and worms, plagiarism and posterity
13. Bookburning and treason: 'a time of savagery even in peace'

Gluing it all together

"the social and cultural landscape into which Roman 'books' fitted, and which is itself illuminated by a better understanding of Roman 'publishing.' The objective is to construct a new picture of both the practicalities and the sociology of Roman publishing that is as rounded as the limited evidence allows. This will help to explain why and what the Romans did when they did what we today would call 'publishing,' in accordance with their own, very different, scale of literary, social and political values and traditions--and in accordance with the raw materials, people skills and means of distribution available to them."

14. Scripts for all classes: the theatre of Rome, Rome as theatre
15. A unitary culture: elite self-definition and Romanitas for all
Postscript(s) (174)
Appendix A: Roman shorthand: a note on Tiro
Appendix B: Poetic postures: toto notus in orbe?

Errata: I noted the following typographical errors and/or slips in the editing process:

pp. 21 and 25 "only...only" where only one is needed; p. 44 "reference" for preference, p. 62, "who" for whom; p. 138 and 164, "an" for a; p. 164 superfluous "it" in "what it is still a common presumption"; p. 165 "word" for words; p. 193 n. 31 "CED" for CE; p. 214 n. 24 "spend" for spent; p. 217 n. 68, Josephus War 19.94 (War does not have 19 books).

2010.03.20

2010-03-07T13:18:00.001-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Luca Graverini, Le Metamorfosi di Apuleio. Letteratura e identità. Arti Spazi Scritture, 5. Pisa: Giardini Editori e Stampatori in Pisa, 2007. Pp. x, 260. ISBN 9788877818690. €16.00 (pb).
Reviewed by Juan Martos, Universidad de Sevilla

Table of Contents

[Original publications are listed at the end of the review.]

[The reviewer apologizes to the author and readers for the extreme delay in submitting this text.]

This volume brings together material already published by the author on the Metamorphoses of Apuleius combined with new ideas developed in a number of its chapters; it therefore does not belong to the familiar genre of compilations of scattered articles but aims to be an original contribution with the incorporation of previous studies. In a brief introduction the author gives an account of the previous publications (pp. viii-ix) and of his intentions in the present volume, which he presents briefly.

The previous studies are not simply reprinted but have been reworked to varying degrees. Nevertheless, although it is true that several details as well as the way in which the ideas are set out are new, the reader who has followed the production of Graverini to date will observe that the basic lines of reflection set out in chapters 1, 3 and 4, as well as in part of chapter 2, are familiar.

It is no easy matter for a book of this sort to give an impression of unity; however, Graverini has managed to insert his previous works into a set which, if not homogeneous, is at least coherent, since the basic aim of his studies, in very general terms, remains the same: the interpretation of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius. Or perhaps, since it is obvious that the author's purpose is not to offer a new global interpretation of the work but to present ideas and data for a better understanding of it, making occasional use in doing so of revised versions of older critical arguments or else following other approaches to find new lines of research, it might be more accurate to say that almost the whole book is aimed at reconsidering our ideas about the novel and, in particular, about the author's intention when writing it. Both for this reason and because of the original sections and the revision of already-published material it contains, the volume deserves to be studied, and the ideas featured in it, though they may seem at times too personal or questionable, are, in most cases, of the greatest interest.

The whole of chapter 1 is devoted to the prologue (Met. I 1), a section of the work which has traditionally attracted the interest of critics concerned with the interpretation of the novel and which has even had a complete book published on it.¹ Of great interest is the analysis of the possible implications of the opening at ego as a genre-defining element and one setting the tone of the whole work. Graverini goes on to study the stylistic and literary connotations of certain expressions such as rudis locutor, lepidus susurrus and permulcere aures in the light of other texts taken from very different genres such as eclogue (Theocritus and Virgil), oratory or Platonic dialogue. Graverini's research goes from a consideration of the ego of the prologue as a siren call or the ambivalent invitation to be amazed, ut mireris, as a possible philosophical reminiscence to the study of the prologues of the Greek novel, concluding that the latter clearly forms part of what is dulce. He finally reaches the terrain -- a necessarily slippery one owing to the lack of information -- of Apuleius' dependence on his models, especially, needless to say, the Milesian Tales of Aristides. The conclusion (p. 55), inevitably, is that the prologue announces a fantastic tale like those told to children by old women, based on a prose that is dolce. Although this conclusion was only to be expected, the connection established between the words of Apuleius and other literary categories and genres is, at the very least, stimulating.

Chapter 2 is probably the most important one in the book, and this for several reasons: it is the longest; it is the most original, since only one previous publication has been used in one of its sections (2.7 anilis fabula); and it is also undoubtedly the most ambitious, as it addresses the global interpretation of the work from various angles. After a study of the images and ideas evoked in the prologue, Graverini announces his intention to demonstrate that the novel, contrary to what is stated in its opening words, is not only a pure aesthetic and musical divertimento (p. 57). The key to understanding the motivation behind the novel and the intention of the author is, as is obvious from all the studies, the connection between book XI, added by Apuleius himself, and the rest of the work; indeed, Graverini's study opens with the comparison of the "prologue" to the transformation of Lucius (Met. XI 14, 1-2) and the prologue of book I, and almost immediately the author pauses to consider one of the most influential and transcendental books ever written on the subject, that of Winkler.² Winkler's ideas have in large measure become the vulgate of Apuleian studies; they are, at the very least, the starting point for anyone attempting to delve into the meaning of the novel. From this point of view, the fact that Graverini questions several of the ideas on which Winkler bases his whole conception of the work is remarkable and truly interesting, even if one simply does not agree. Graverini's revision affects first and foremost book XI and, more specifically, those aspects through which, according to Winkler, Apuleius provided the reader with keys towards an ironic interpretation of Lucius' whole conversion to the religion of Isis: the paradoxical name of the priest Mithras, for example, the payments to be made by Lucius for each initiation ceremony or the ridiculous final image of the protagonist and narrator with his head shaven. However much Graverini attempts to strip these and other details of decisive meaning - and he devotes a significant part of the chapter to the task - it is difficult not to continue to share the idea that Apuleius thus left open a possibility for his readers to mistrust the credulous words of Lucius himself and, in short, that he left it to the judgement of the reader to decide how to interpret the conversion to Isis, in contrast with the clear religious manifestations of books VIII and IX and, consequently, how to conceive the work as a whole. The lack of parallels for an aporetic reading in the cultural ambience of the 2nd century as alleged by Graverini (pp. 100-1) is not decisive: there are several ways to interpret other works and our ignorance of both the Latin and Greek narrative which might have served as Apuleius' model is obvious, because the texts have not come down to us. To offer one small example, is it not possible to apply to the novel as a whole the same uncertainty expressed in the words of Braund, reproduced by Graverini himself a few pages later, on p. 113, with reference to Horatian satire?

The following section of the chapter (2.7), which has appeared previously, deals with another key moment for the exegesis of the novel, as it is in all likelihood a part added by Apuleius himself in his recreation of the book: the tale of Psyche and Cupid and, more specifically, the expression anilis fabula with which the same old woman who is about to tell it describes the story. Graverini explores the different meanings of this iunctura and the contexts in which it is used in various authors, such as Plato, Quintilian, Horace, Phaedrus and Aesop, and concludes that certain terms that are in principle pejorative reveal, when used with obvious self-irony, the mixed comic-serious nature of a work (p. 122). Be that as it may, according to Graverini, this is not a defining characteristic when it comes to assigning the novel to a specific genre (p. 139).

Chapter 3 explores the relationship between the Metamorphoses and other literary genres: philosophical dialogue, historiography, epic. The comparison of the different criteria of veracity applied to the novel and these or other genres such as history is interesting, although at times the parallels between Lucius and Socrates or Ulysses (even in spite of Met. IX 13, 4) seem somewhat forced and perhaps contribute little to the understanding of our protagonist. The last part of the chapter is devoted to the vision of the narrative as dramatic representation.

The final chapter recovers a text with which I concerned myself in these same pages (BMCR 2003.10.01) and which analyses spaces in the novel from a two-fold perspective: the places between which Lucius moves and the regions where Apuleius might have written the work and at whose inhabitants he might have aimed it. As regards the opening sections, Graverini describes how, taking the Onos as reference, the localities through which the protagonist passes changed, paying particular attention to two cities whose by-no-means-coincidental presence is indubitably the product of our author: Corinth and Rome. The former, famous for its destruction in 146 B.C., had become a symbol of relations between Greece and Rome, while the latter is a sign, perhaps the most striking but by no means the only one, of a fundamental process in the construction of the text: the Romanization of all the preceding material. But this Romano-centrism, according to Graverini, should not necessarily lead us to locate the work's audience in Rome, as proposed by Dowden ³: a significant part of this section is therefore given over to rebutting this scholar's arguments. Consequently, Apuleius carried out a real Latin adaptation of the Greek model, but this adaptation cannot be consigned to any specific part of the Empire, either the capital or any province in particular.

The book is very carefully produced; typographical and other errors are practically nil.⁴ In short, even taking into account the differences in originality and solidity of argument in its different sections, the work as a whole is undoubtedly worthwhile: it is a collection of studies full of stimulating suggestions and intertextual associations which will be of interest to any reader captivated by the brilliant novel of Apuleius.⁵

Premessa

1 Una poetica 'dolce':

"Sweet and Dangerous? A Literary Metaphor (aures permulcere) in Apuleius' Prologue" in Harrison, S. J. - Paschalis, M. - Frangoulidis, S. (eds.), Metaphor and the Ancient Novel (Ancient Narrative suppl. 4), Groningen 2005, 177-96.

"A lepidus susurrus. Apuleius and the fascination of poetry", in Nauta, R. R. (ed.), Desultoria Scientia. Genre in Apuleius' Metamorphoses and related Texts. Caeculus 5, Leuven - Paris - Dudley (MA) 2006, 1-18.

"The Ass's Ears and the Novel's Voice: Orality and the Involvement of the Reader in Apuleius' Metamorphoses" in Rimell, V. (ed.), Seeing Tongues, Hearing Scripts: Orality and Representation in the Ancient Novel (Ancient Narrative suppl. 7), Groningen, 2007, 138-167.

2 Storie da vecchie e piaceri servili:

"An Old Wife's Tale", in W. H. Keulen - R. R. Nauta - S. Panayotakis (eds.), Lectiones Scrupulosae. Essays on the Text and Interpretation of Apuleius' Metamorphoses in Honour of Maaike Zimmerman, Groningen, 2006, 86-110.

3 Metamorfosi dei generi:

"La scena raccontata: teatro e narrativa antica" in Mosetti Casaretto, F. (ed.), La scena assente. Realtà e leggenda sul teatro nel Medioevo, Alessandria, 2006, 1-24.

4 Grecia, Roma, Africa:

"Corinth, Rome, and Africa: a Cultural Background for the Tale of the Ass", in M. Paschalis--S. Frangoulidis (eds.), Space in the Ancient Novel, Ancient Narrative suppl. 1, Groningen 2002, 58-77.

Abbreviazioni bibliografiche

Indice dei brani citati

Notes:

1.   Kahane, A. - Laird, A. J. W. (eds.), A Companion to the Prologue of Apuleius' Metamorphoses, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001.
2.   Winkler, J.J., Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius' The Golden Ass, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985.
3.   Dowden, K., "The Roman Audience of The Golden Ass" in J. Tatum (ed.), The Search for the Ancient Novel, Baltimore-London, 1994, 419-434.
4.   There is an extremely curious exception: on p. 155 the old woman should be referred to as telling the tale to Charite, and not to Psyche.
5.   I am deeply grateful to J. J. Zoltowski for his English translation of this review.

2010.03.19

2010-03-07T13:01:00.001-05:00

Version at BMCR home site
Stephen Instone (ed.), Greek Personal Religion: A Reader. Oxford: Aris & Phillips, 2009. Pp. vii, 119. ISBN 9780856688980. $50.00 (pb).
Reviewed by Louise Bruit Zaidman, Universités Paris I-Paris VII

Ce petit livre s'intéresse à la religion "personnelle" des Grecs, par opposition à la religion civique ou poliade, plus souvent et plus systématiquement étudiée ces dernières années. L'auteur s'y interroge sur la façon dont les Grecs se représentaient les relations entre chacun d'entre eux et leurs dieux, à partir de quelques situations emblématiques. Il rassemble des témoignages empruntés aux domaines de la poésie épique, de la philosophie, de la littérature, du sport, de la médecine, qui montrent des hommes ayant recours en leur nom propre aux dieux pour leur demander une aide personnelle pour gagner, pour guérir, pour obtenir leur salut après la mort ou encore pour avoir raison d'un ennemi.

Le livre se présente modestement comme une "lecture" (a reader), comme le sous-titre le précise, une introduction à un choix personnel de textes significatifs plutôt qu'un recueil exhaustif des "sources". Il se propose d'offrir une approche de la religion grecque qui complète les grands livres récents sur le sujet qui, soit n'abordent pas la religion personnelle, soit se contentent de citer les textes sans les commenter.

Chacun des quinze textes retenus est présenté dans une brève introduction et précédé d'un commentaire général d'une ou deux pages au plus. Une brève bibliographie (trois ou quatre titres) précède la traduction, elle-même suivie de notes assez abondantes. Le texte grec est rejeté à la fin du volume.

D'un passage du premier chant de l'Iliade à quelques fragments de defixiones, l'auteur balaie toute la littérature, toutes les traces écrites de la Grèce antique, depuis Homère jusqu'au IIe siècle ap. J.-C., pour montrer la permanence, à toutes les époques, de ces liens personnels établis sous des formes diverses entre les Grecs et leurs dieux.

Une première série de textes rassemble des références à des formes diverses de littérature (p. 8-32) et de relations entre hommes et dieux. Le recueil s'ouvre sur un passage du chant I de l'Iliade (v.188-222) qui met en scène l'intervention d'Athéna auprès d'Achille pour le retenir d'agresser physiquement Agamemnon lors de la scène dramatique qui les oppose et conduira Achille à se retirer du combat. L'auteur s'interroge sur la nécessité de cette intervention. Pourquoi Achille ne se résout-il pas de lui-même à renoncer à la violence? Il conclut que la divinité intervient quand la passion interdit à l'individu de prendre une décision raisonnable. Plus généralement, l'homme, dans sa faiblesse, a besoin d'une force extérieure pour s'accomplir ou répondre à une situation qui le dépasse. Ce sera la divinité. C'est ce que montrent les autres exemples, empruntés aux différents domaines de l'expérience humaine.

La longue citation d'Hésiode (Les Travaux et les Jours, v.1-85) conduit l'auteur à s'interroger sur l'importance de la superstition dans ce texte et sur ses rapports avec le religieux. Faut-il considérer que toutes les instructions qui ne semblent pas "rationnelles" relèvent de la superstition? Ou peut-on considérer que les règles de la pureté peuvent relever d'une autre logique que la nôtre? L'auteur semble hésiter parfois entre les deux interprétations (p. 11 et 14-15). Il confronte au texte d'Hésiode celui de Théophraste (plusieurs siècles plus tard) pour montrer l'évolution de la notion de superstition, clairement établie chez le philosophe avec la valeur négative attribuée au mot deisidaimonia absent de l'oeuvre du poète archaïque (Caractères 16). Hérodote est sollicité (VI, 105-16) pour son récit de l'épiphanie du dieu Pan devant Phidippides, le coureur athénien envoyé demander l'aide de Sparte lors de la première guerre Médique. L'idéologie de Pindare (Dixième Pythique) fait dépendre le succès de l'athlète de l'aide des dieux et son immortalité glorieuse du chant du poète inspiré par les Muses.

La suite du volume offre deux ensembles qui rapprochent des textes de nature comparable ; une série de textes philosophiques, comprenant des extraits d'Empédocle, de Platon puis d'Aristote (p. 33-51). Un ensemble de trois textes "orphiques" (p. 69-82). Entre ces deux ensembles, deux passages de la Lex Sacra de Sélinonte, sur le traitement de la souillure. Le recueil s'achève sur quelques tablettes de défixion. Les fragments d'Empédocle présentent, à côté d'une cosmologie fondée sur l'opposition de deux forces, l'Amour et le Conflit, une vision éthique qui permet à l'individu de se purifier à travers des réincarnations successives jusqu'à se confondre avec la sphère de l'Amour. Ainsi, l'homme participe du divin.

C'est aussi de la nature de l'amour qu'il est question dans le discours de Diotime que nous restitue le Banquet de Platon (209e 5 - 212a 7). L'amour est un intermédiaire entre les mondes humain et divin. L'amour humain, s'il est véritable, est une initiation qui prépare à la rencontre du divin. Pour Aristote (Ethique à Nicomaque 1177b 26 - 1179a 23), le vrai bonheur réside dans la contemplation (theoria) qui est une activité divine résultant de l'existence en nous d'une parcelle du noos, l'intelligence universelle et divine.

Le rapport au divin est encore au premier plan dans le traité sur la Maladie Sacrée (1-6). L'auteur du traité dans un premier temps attaque violemment l'usage de la magie et de la religion que font les charlatans pour apaiser le dieu censé être à l'origine de la maladie. Mais après avoir renvoyé à la recherche rationnelle des causes et de la guérison, il en revient malgré tout à la notion de purification et à l'idée que les causes naturelles sont elles aussi divines : "La soi-disant maladie sacrée provient des mêmes causes que les autres maladies..." et l'auteur hippocratique conclut : "elles sont toutes et divines et humaines". Le texte suivant traite lui aussi de purification, mais il s'agit cette fois d'une inscription et d'une loi sacrée, c'est-à-dire d'un ensemble de prescriptions destinées à répondre à une situation de souillure. L'intérêt de la Loi Sacrée trouvée à Sélinonte, malgré les incertitudes liées à l'état fragmentaire du texte et à son contexte, "réside dans les rituels que les gens concernés sont invités à accomplir pour entrer en contact avec des puissances supérieures qui peuvent écarter les dangers de la souillure" (p. 64). Il semble s'agir d'un homicide qui, au-delà d'un oikos particulier pourrait menacer l'ensemble d'une communauté.

Dans les trois textes suivants rapprochés par l'auteur lui-même, il est question de l'orphisme, d'abord à travers l'aventure malheureuse du roi scythe Skylès, mis à mort par ses concitoyens pour avoir pratiqué publiquement le culte bacchique de Dionysos (Hérodote IV, 78, 3-4 - 80, 5). Le document suivant présente la tablette d'Hipponion et celle de Thurium en Lucanie.

Il s'agit de deux parmi la trentaine de feuilles d'or collectées de la Grèce du nord à la Sicile et à l'Italie du sud. Elles portent toutes des formules qui font référence à des cultes qui promettent aux initiés une nouvelle vie après la mort. Leur particularité consiste entre autres dans le fait de s'adresser à des individus qui, à travers des purifications, pourront accéder à un salut personnel. Le troisième texte présente quelques extraits du papyrus de Derveni. Parmi les hypothèses formulées à propos de ce document unique en son genre et fragmentaire, l'auteur retient celle d'un membre d'une secte orphique qui aurait eu pour fonction d'exposer aux initiés la poésie orphique traditionnelle en la transposant dans les termes de la philosophie présocratique.

Le choix de textes s'achève sur quelques tablettes de plomb (défixions) introduisant à une autre forme de relation directe et individuelle avec le divin dont on a retrouvé (le plus souvent dans des tombes) plus de 1.500 exemplaires, les premiers datés du Ve siècle av. J.-C. Il s'agit d'invoquer une divinité et de faire appel à son aide contre un ennemi personnel qu'on tente de réduire à l'impuissance par des liens (katadesmoi), destinés à l'empêcher d'agir.

Le livre de Stephen Instone offre une introduction commode et bien présentée à un ensemble de textes qui couvrent une longue période de l'histoire de la Grèce antique et se réfèrent à des pratiques et croyances couvrant des domaines bien différents. Il donne aussi tous les éléments, notamment bibliographiques, pour approfondir et compléter l'information en fonction des intérêts de chacun.

Il appelle cependant quelques remarques sur les présupposés de l'auteur et sur son interprétation de la religion grecque. Et d'abord, quelles sont les relations entre cette religion "personnelle" et la religion de la polis? Faut-il les opposer? sont-elles exclusives l'une de l'autre? comment fonctionnent-elles l'une part rapport à l'autre? Les réponses sont sans doute aussi variées que les exemples choisis qui sont eux-mêmes de nature très différente. Faut-il ranger sous le même vocable les représentations cosmologiques des philosophes et les pratiques magiques clandestines des "faiseurs de sorts"? L'auteur reconnaît que l'expression "religion personnelle" est une catégorie moderne et que l'approche proposée est essentiellement philosophique (p. 2). Ce ne sont pas seulement les pratiques religieuses qui sont concernées, mais la conception même des rapports entre l'humain et le divin. Les deux mondes sont-ils radicalement séparés, comme semblent l'affirmer des textes fondateurs, comme le récit du sacrifice de Prométhée dans la Théogonie d'Hésiode? Ou faut-il considérer qu'un contact étroit et personnel avec la divinité pouvait exister, et que l'homme pouvait, dans certaines circonstances s'approcher lui-même de la condition divine? Il semble que l'auteur se range plutôt à cette hypothèse. Cependant, l'épiphanie du dieu Pan est-elle le signe d'une religion personnelle, ou n'entre-t-elle pas plutôt dans un modèle de situations préparant l'instauration d'un nouveau culte? On peut ainsi penser à l'installation d'abord privée du culte d'Asclépios à Athènes. L'introducteur du culte ne témoigne pas d'un modèle différent de religion. C'est bien en son titre de citoyen qu'il introduit dans la cité une divinité qui va se trouver intégrée au panthéon civique pour le plus grand bénéfice de la communauté. De même, si la faveur du dieu est nécessaire à l'athlète pour obtenir la victoire, faut-il y voir la manifestation d'une "religion personnelle"? Peut-on abstraire cette victoire individuelle de l'ensemble festif religieux qui fait de la victoire un élément du culte rendu à l'occasion de la panégyrie, c'est-à-dire de la rencontre de tous les Grecs venus participer à cette rencontre panhellénique? Il me semble qu'il faut donc se défier de cette tentation d'opposer religion civique et religion "personnelle", comme le faisait déjà A.J. Festugière en 1954 (Personal Religion among the Greeks). Quid de l'orphisme et de ces tablettes d'or qui introduisent à une approche particulière du religieux? L'auteur oppose aux manifestations massives, à date régulière, de la religion civique, l'adresse de ces cultes aux individus auxquels ils promettent un salut individuel. Mais il en reconnaît en même temps la dimension publique aussi bien que privée (p. 69). W. Burkert dans Les cultes à mystères (Ancient Mystery Cults, 1992) à propos des Mystères d'Eleusis, rappelait déjà que parler de "religion des mystères" risquait de fausser le regard sur des pratiques qui faisait toutes partie de la même "religion grecque".

Ces quelques réflexions n'avaient pour objet que de rappeler le contexte dans lequel se situe cette catégorie moderne de "religion personnelle", et les problèmes qu'elle pose, ce dont l'auteur paraît bien conscient par ailleurs (cf. p. 2 citée supra). Son livre a le mérite de rassembler des textes qui ne sont pas toujours d'accès facile. Il sait les éclairer par des indications précises et les notes apportent de nombreux compléments utiles à leur compréhension. On appréciera de pouvoir se référer au texte grec donné dans les éditions de référence. En somme le livre de Stephen Instone tient ses promesses, et on ne peut que regretter que l'auteur soit décédé alors que son livre était chez l'imprimeur. On attachera d'autant plus de prix à cet ouvrage qui introduit avec bonheur à la lecture de textes qui appellent tous à une réflexion sur la religion des anciens Grecs.