book reviews

BOOK REVIEWS

Philip Thibodeau and Harry Haskell (eds.), Being There Together: Essays in Honor of Michael C. J. Putnam on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (Afton, MN: Afton Historical Society Press, 2003), XII + 301 pp.

As preparation for writing this review article of Being There Together. Essays in Honor of Michael C. J. Putnam on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, I looked at my shelves. There I found no fewer than nine of Michael Putnam's books, including his earliest, The Poetry of the "Aeneid" (1965), and his most recent, his edition and translation of Maffeo Vegio's short epics (2004). Michael's long career has seen--and has contributed to--a phenomenal shift in the study of Latin poetry. Thanks to him and others who, like him, took Latin poetry seriously as poetry, the range of questions it was possible to ask about these texts was opened up. The practice of close reading, such as Putnam does brilliantly, revealed patterns of imagery and layers of ambiguity in Latin literature. Perhaps the swing of the pendulum carried too far in this direction at the expense of other skills and methods; certainly some of his acolytes are unable to follow their master's example. But it seems to me that without Putnam's work we would not now see the current privileging of ideological readings and cultural contextualisations in the study of Latin poetry, whether these arise as extensions of or correctives to Putnam's version of New Criticism. The editors of another volume honouring Putnam, the special 2004 issue of Materiali e Discussioni 'Re-Presenting Virgil' (edd. Glenn Most and Sarah Spence), encapsulate his perception of both 'the formal perfection and the anguished humanity ' in Latin poetry: Putnam, they say, managed 'not only to discover but also to produce a creative tension between verbal mastery and moral perplexity, between the joys of poetic power and the horrors of political power' (pp. 11-12). I think they are correct; Putnam has been remarkably consistent in this vision of Latin poetry and in his articulation of that vision.

I first met Michael Putnam on the page. It was the mid 1970s and I was a second year undergraduate at Cambridge, with assignments to read Tibullus, which I did through the perspective provided by Putnam's commentary, and to analyze Catullus 64 in the light of Michael's 1961 article. | suspect that Tibullus has always been for me Putnam's Tibullus; and I know that nothing has shaken me from his argument for the unity of Catullus' poetic output. It was in the 1990s that I finally met him in person, at an APA Meeting. I was doing eye-glide badge-check in the elevator and found myself ascending with this Famous Name. I mumbled to him that his books had had a great influence on me. He replied in a kind and humble way, as if he were surprised--and that seems to me typical of the man. I cannot say I know him well, but I have enjoyed all the contact I have had with him, and I appreciate his continuing intellectual generosity towards me, since he knows that I do not agree with his position on the significance of the end of the Aeneid. A telling token of Michael's humanity was in the spring of 2004 when Shilpa Raval, my then Yale colleague, and Michael's former student, was in hospital, rapidly overtaken by the cancer that would soon kill her. Michael, clearly distraught, took the time to come down from Providence to visit her.

Being There Together is a beautifully produced volume edited by Philip Thibodeau and Harry Haskell. It consists of sixteen essays by junior and established scholars of clas-

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sical, English, and comparative literature, and art history, covering a range of texts and topics that reflects well Putnam's own range of interests and skills, from Hellenistic poetry, through Latin epic and elegy, to the reception of antiquity in medieval and Renaissance literature. The title of the volume is drawn from Wallace Stevens' poem 'Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour' and its aptness is well explicated by Thibodeau (pp. 6-10). The volume is framed by an Introduction and Bibliography. The Introduction by Philip Thi- bodeau maps Putnam's career and assesses the importance of his contribution: 'Putnam's work represents one of the most extensive and influential appropriations of New Critical techniques by classicists of his generation' (p. 6). The Bibliography demonstrates Put- nam's phenomenal output, consisting of nine books (plus further edited volumes), more than seventy articles, and many, many reviews. Since then, of course, Putnam's wonderful translation of Maffeo Vegio's short epics, including the thirteenth book of the Aeneid, has appeared in the invaluable I Tatti series (2004); I found Michael's fifty page introduction exactly what it needed to be.

Writing a review of a Festschrift is a delicate business. One wishes to share the spirit of celebration that led the editors and contributors to work together in this way to honor a great and influential scholar. But, like all collections of essays, the results are inevitably uneven. I have decided to limit extensive comment to the best of the essays here. The remainder have flaws that might best be characterized as trying to do what Michael Put- nam does so well--produce close readings that take the poetry seriously as poetry--but actually falling short of the Doktorvater's method and results or, worse, overreading, going way beyond what the text will support in the search for ambivalence or metapoetics or sexual symbolism. Pupils of eminent scholars often try to emulate them when what they should do is listen and learn and then find their own voice and their own way.

Absolutely appropriately, many of the contributors implicitly or explicitly take a particular piece by Putnam as their starting-point or inspiration. Putnam's 1998 book Virgil~ Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid, lies behind the papers by Pamela Bleisch, Ruth Rothaus Caston, Antony Augoustakis and Raymond Marks, while Matthew Munich's essay on Catullus 64 honors Putnam's first major paper, from 1961. Stephen Foley returns to Putnam's commentary on Tibullus in his note 'Unhinging Tibullus' and Lowell Bowditch harnesses Putnam's paper on Horace Odes 2.9 to her discussion of Propertius 2.10. Stephen Scully describes his starting-point as Putnam's illumination of the paral- lels between Dido and Pallas in Virgil's Aeneid: Interpretation and Influence (1995), while Sarah Spence makes her focus Putnam's many discussions of the close of the Aeneid. The strongest engagement with Putnam's work comes in James Whitta's paper which he offers as a 'completion' of the 1991 essay on Virgil and Dante, 'Virgil's Inferno'. Other contributors--Julia Gaisser, Stephen Tracy, Shilpa Raval, Vassiliki Panoussi express their debt to Putnam as a teacher and a communicator: both Gaisser and Raval describe study- ing with Michael as 'a turning point', while Alex Sens vividly recalls his captivating 'animation and engagement with the text and with the class' (p. 87) to whom he was teaching Georgics 4. I am certain that Michael will especially appreciate Shilpa Raval's fine paper 'Stealing the Language: Echo in Metamorphoses 3' in which she deploys a care- ful close reading to tease out the implications of applying a feminist reading to Ovid's text. As she demonstrates how Echo's responses transform the meaning of Narcissus' words (p. 211), I seem to hear her voice again, and her own words about Echo are eerily rendered true when she talks of 'the immortality and indestructibility of the voice in opposition to the ephemerality of the body' (p. 214).

The volume gets off to a great start. Thibodeau and Haskell knew what they were doing when they placed Julia Gaisser's superb essay, 'Reading Apuleius with Filippo

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Beroaldo', in prime position. Gaisser elucidates the aims and methods of the 15th century scholar Beroaldo, by focusing upon the characteristic features of his commentary on Apuleius' Golden Ass. She sees the multifarious digressions in Beroaldo's work as part of a project 'to make of the humanist commentary a literary genre in its own right' (p. 31). She gives as examples the three long digressions on the tale of Cupid and Psyche, of which 'the first is an essay in hermeneutics, the second an ekphrasis, and the third an autobiographical idyll that functions as a sphragis' (p. 32)--all of them 'metaliterary and self-referential' (p. 32). This paper is, like all of Gaisser's work, thoughtful and acute. She attributes her skill in close reading to the influence of Putnam. Indeed, she starts with a telling analogy: as Putnam's teaching was to her and other students at Brown in the 1960s, so Beroaldo's teaching must have been to his students in fifteenth century Bologna. She conveys vividly the excitement she felt in Putnam's 'revolutionary' (p. 24) approach to ancient poems as poetry. While such tributes are only to be expected in such a volume, this theme is remarkably consistent: contributor after contributor names Michael Put- nam's expertise in close reading as key.

The final essay seems equally well positioned. In ' "A Curious Appearance in the Air": Lyric Irreducibility and the Cheshire Cat', Sarah Spence focuses upon the element of Putnam's scholarship which seems the most enduring and to which he has recurred repeatedly in order to restate and defend in the light of differing views: his interpretation of the end of the Aeneid. She argues that 'what is wrong with the end of the epic is that it's no longer epic, but lyric, as it shifts its emphasis from inevitability and contingency to ambiguity and paradox' (p. 286). While Spence does not convince me that the Aeneid modulates into elegiac mode at this point, she does offer a fine articulation of a phenomenon that has troubled readers of Virgil in recent decades. Moreover, it is a delight to find here Rosanna Warren's poem Turnus, which is dedicated to Putnam, though I did not feel that the essay gained from the discussion of Mark Strand's poem 'A Piece of the Storm', which Spence also discusses. Rosanna Warren's skill is to refocalise the closing moments of Aeneid 12 from Turnus' perspective by 'engaging in an elegiac struggle of love and loss that mirrors Aeneas' own' (p. 278). Spence sees and articulates perfectly the nature of Warren's engagement with Putnam's scholarship through multilingual levels of allusion. This closing essay, then, offers a double tribute: Spence's own, and the reminder that this scholar has had a poem by a leading poet dedicated to him.

In between these two bookends is an array of essays chiefly on epic and elegy (my favorite and unfavorite genres of Latin poetry respectively). There are two excellent essays on ekphrasis in Punica, which treat Silius with the intelligence and respect that he deserves. In 'Ekphrasis and Gender-Role Reversal in Silius Italicus's Punica 15' Antonios Augoustakis argues that in the narrative of the defeat of Hasdrubal in Punica 15, Silius gradually strips Hasdrubal of his male characteristics: by the ekphrastic figures embroi- dered on his cloak, by the comparison with an emasculated beaver, and by his beheading at the hands of the Roman consul (pp. 110-11). Augoustakis offers a reading fully sensitive to details neglected or misinterpreted by other critics. He sees Hasdrubal 'as a substitute for Hannibal' (p. 119) and this entire narrative as an anticipation of the vivid corporeal language used of Carthage in Book 17 (p. 125).

Raymond Marks makes a similar point concerning anticipations of Book 17 in 'Han- nibal in Liternum', a reading of Punica 6. His central argument is that when Hannibal visits Liternum he confronts two pasts: the past of the First Punic War, depicted in paintings on a temple there, and the past of Aeneas' visit to Juno's temple in Carthage in Aeneid 1. He proceeds to demonstrate how 'Hannibal stands in an antagonistic relationship to both of these pasts' (p. 128). But, according to Marks, these pasts also anticipate

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the future, looking ahead to Hannibal's defeat, the destruction of Carthage and the tri- umph of Scipio (pp. 128-9), so that the monumenta that Hannibal sees are both 'reminders' and 'warnings' (p. 135). These two papers on Silius seem to me to do precisely the job that literary criticism should do.

In another fine study of ekphrasis, Pamela Bleisch discusses the description of Picus' regia in Aeneid 7. She observes that there is no internal viewer to act as intermediary, which renders Virgil's own readers as the viewers. She persuades me that this ekphrasis is an interpretive crux: the Latins are 'reassuringly already Roman' and at the same time 'the Italian resistance' (p. 89). Bleisch marshals a fine array of evidence to make the case that the ekphrasis incorporates Saturnian, neoteric and elegiac features into an epic frame- work (see pp. 89 and 109).

Stephen Tracy's is one of several papers that proceed by detecting and interpreting allusions and intertextualities, in this case the function of Theocritean allusions in Eclogue 3. Tracy calls the paper 'Palaemon's Indecision' in reference to the happenstance judge of the singing match declining to name a winner. This he attributes to Palaemon's inability to really hear the difference between the singers Damoetas and Menalcas: 'the poetic niceties which they find all-important do not much concern him' (p. 75). He concludes that Virgil uses this poetic contest 'to characterize the potential sterility of neoteric poetry' (p. 76); if correct, this is important: it sets Eclogue 3 alongside Eclogue 6 in terms of metapoetics. In his beautifully crafted paper 'Asclepiades, Erinna, and the Poetics of Labor', Alex Sens demonstrates how the epigrammatist associates the prema- turely dead poetess Erinna with her creation Baucis in her poem, the Distaff, in order to appropriate for his own poetry 'the same sort of glory that even her brief corpus deserved' (p. 87). In 'Rivaling the Shield: Propertius 4.6', Ruth Rothaus Caston offers a rather complicated reading of Propertius 4.6. She sees the central section of the poem as an ekphrasis written in aemulatio with Aeneid 8, an aemulatio which emerges in Proper- tius' contrastive handling of movement and stillness. She ingeniously harnesses to her argument the representation of Apollo in Callimachus Hymn 4 and she closes, more convincingly, by making a connection with two statues of Apollo that stood outside and inside the Palatine temple.

James Whitta's paper on the appearance and function of Bernard of Clairvaux in Paradiso 31-33 is explicitly offered as a 'completion' of Putnam's discussion of the imagery of paternity in Virgil and Dante in his article 'Virgil's Inferno'. This seems to me a mar- velous essay, though I can claim no expertise on Dante. Whitta powerfully makes the case that Bernard of Clairvaux is the final one of a series of father figures for Dante in the Commedia: 'In his role as consummate teacher of the importance of surrender to the puri- fying vision of Love, Bernard guides Dante-pilgrim up the final gradus of the rose' (p. 254). My only reservation about this essay concerns the editors' placement of it in the volume: with its discussion of aposiopesis and ineffability, I would have thought this the ideal paper to precede Sarah Spence's lovely invocation of the grin of the Cheshire Cat, the final paper in the volume.

The essay that is surely the most remote from Putnam's (published) interests, but undoubtedly the most fun, is Bruce Redford's study of the rise and fall of The Society of Dilettanti in London during the eighteenth century. (I am guessing that the choice of this topic to honor Putnam somehow connects with Thibodeau's reference to him 'cavorting about the broad lawns and colonnades of the American Academy in Rome (p. 14)--but that, of course, is just my guess.) This is a wonderful piece of cultural history which explores attitudes to antiquity, including collecting and amateurship, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I commend to readers Redford's discussion of Sir William

596 International Journal of the Classical Tradition /Spring 2006

Hamilton (husband of Nelson's Emma)'s claim to have discovered " ' the Cult of Priapus in as full vigour, as in the days of the Greeks and Romans, at Isernia in Abruzzo'" (p. 262). This alone is surely enough to justify reception studies.

The dedicatory poem by Raymond Marks celebrates Michael Putnam as amicus et magister; Alex Sens ends his essay with an apt image: 'like a bee himself, Michael has had a busy and productive career, and the results of his labors have been sweet' (p. 87). These combined tributes make a fine summation of a fine career--and, I hasten to add, a career that is far from over, as Michael continues with his amazing energy and productivity. I look forward to future manifestations of his scholarship and I fervently hope that he will continue to apply his readerly and writerly skills to texts beyond the canon, such as he has recently done with his monograph on Horace's Carmen Saeculare (2000) and his edition and translation of Maffeo Vegio's Aeneid XIII (2004).

Susanna Braund Department of Classics

Stanford University

Daniel Mendelsohn, Gender and the City in Euripides" Political Plays (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), XV + 257 pp.

Daniel Mendelsohn's book is concerned with the feminine elements in Euripides' extant 'political plays ' --a term which in the Athenian context has a distinctly masculine ring. As he notes in his introductory discussion, previous interpretations of Children of Heracles and Suppliant Women have not successfully accounted for their peculiar blending of scenes of political discourse with scenes of bold and decisive female intervention. His own analysis builds on the modern view that questioning Athenian self-definitions and the ideology of the democratic polis was a central function of fifth century tragedy, so that interventions by women, and the impacts of these interventions on the behaviour of men, might function as metaphors and have a symbolic impact, problematizing the tendency of the male-dominated polis towards excessive discipline and uniformity, assert- ing the value of diversity and tolerance, and suggesting "a healthy middle term in the ongoing competition between masculine and feminine values in civic debate" (35).

M. reasonably claims support for this approach in the fact that Euripides almost certainly invented the female interventions in both plays, and also in the plays' structural similarities: each presents an intervention with positive value (the self-sacrifice of Hera- cles' daughter Makaria, Aithra's persuasion of Theseus), followed by one with negative value (Alkmene's insistence on killing Eurystheus, Evadne's suicide) which illustrates the costs and the instability of the political unity achieved by the first. In Children of Heracles, Iolaos and Demophon are seen by M. as associated initially with old-fashioned heroic- aristocratic values (individualism, eugeneia, family kinship, hetaireia). These values have left Iolaos and the Heraclids separated from their own polis and preoccupied with individual survival, and Demophon responds in kind when he refuses to save the suppliants at the cost of sacrificing one of his own daughters. The self-sacrificing intervention of Heracles' daughter shows "the incompleteness of [Iolaos' and Demophon's] male heroism" and "the necessity of integrating 'otherness' into the definition of aid6s and the heroic ethos it represents" (91). Her discourse recognizes democratic community values, "freely seeking death to preserve both family and city" (101). Yet her display of 'male' heroism seems undercut by the absence of any recognition of it later in the play (although

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on p. 6 n. 8 M. favours the idea that her recognition through cult was announced in the play's lost ending), and by the counter-example of Alkmene, whose reversion to genos ethics and defiance of polis-authorised religious custom indicates "the potential to sub- vert the polis that is always implicit in women's ungoverned action" (125).

In Suppliant Women M. sees a contrast between excessive endogamy in Thebes, city of Oedipus, and excessive exogamy in Argos, where Adrastos has rashly married both his daughters to foreign exiles; this in turn symbolizes a contrast between (masculine) political isolationism and (feminine) interventionism. Like Demophon in Children of Heracles, Theseus first responds to Adrastos' request for aid in isolationist terms, but he is swayed towards a more open response by the mediation of his mother Aithra, herself an example of properly controlled exogamy in her marriage with the Troezenian Pittheus. Aithra, like the daughter of Heracles, is promptly returned to female subordination, but the 'feminiz- ing' effect of her brief intrusion into politics is seen in Theseus' support for the bereaved mothers and in his extraordinary attention (rightly emphasized by M.) to the tending of the bodies of the Seven (Supp. 762ff.). The play's closing scenes are read by M. as ironic elaborations of the same themes, with Adrastos' funeral speech celebrating unregenerate masculine individualism, Evadne compounding bacchic femininity with a transgressive attempt to share her husband's misdirected heroism, and Athena's speech obscuring the enlightenment Theseus has reached and "valoriz[ing] the vengeful and self-interested ethos that has brought ruin to all of the play's characters save Theseus" (221).

M.'s schematic analysis includes some exaggerations and distortions which tend to undermine rather than reinforce his case. For example, his account of Iolaos' position in Children of Heracles seems to me to give too little weight to the fact that Iolaos has not acted freely--he has been driven into exile by a tyrannical usurper whose claims to legit- imacy (presented in the Herald's sophistic speech) are clearly bogus, and he must in the circumstances devote himelf to protecting Heracles' family. At the level of detail, M. reads the play's first two words as meaning "Long ago, back when . . . . " and as "indicat[ing] that the gnome that follows belongs to a bygone era" (68); but the sentence only means "I have long held the op in ion . . . " . M. also insists that by refusing to go into the palace with Demophon (Hcld. 344ff.) Iolaos gives "further proof of the old man's rejection of the polis in favour of the genos . . . " (79); this hardly follows from Iolaos' words (with my italics): "I will not leave the altar; rather, we will stay here as suppliants and pray for your city's success in the battle; and when you have completed it successfully, then we will enter the palace." On p. 100, "the G i r l . . . dismisses the behaviour that Iolaos has thus far dis- p l ayed . . , as 'worthy of r idicule ' . . , and unsuitable for men who call themselves khrfstoi (507-10)"; this misrepresents her rhetorical argument, which dismisses the idea that the children of Heracles, having used supplication to impose risks on others, should now refuse to face the necessity of the sacrifice themselves. On p. 102 M. sees the Chorus's comment at Hcld. 535-6 as including a suggestion of transgressiveness in the Girl's decision: "What am I to make of the presumptuous speech of the Girl, who desires to die before her brothers?"; the translations here of megan as 'presumptuous' and thelei as 'desires' (rather than 'consents') seem tendentious, and M.'s interpretation is undercut by the remainder of the comment which he does not quote: "Who could speak words more noble than these, and who perform a deed more noble?" On p. 110 M. argues that "[e]arlier, the Athenian k ing . . , claimed to be unable to save anyone but the philoi constituted by his immediate family and the oikos of Athenian citizens (413ff.); to do so, he claimed, would have incurred the charge of folly, mdria (417)"; but Demophon's point was simply that it would be unacceptable to try to save foreign suppliants at the cost of sacrificing one of his own daughters or compelling any Athenian to do so--and the suppliants accept this.


Similar problems arise with Suppliant Women. M. suggests "that Adrastos' fatal error in selecting his daughters' husbands was characterized by a typically feminine lack of self-control, a tendency to incontinence, and indeed a willingness to be manipulated by hitherto unknown bridegrooms" (149); but what the text insists on are Adrastos' misunderstanding of Apollo's oracle and his neglect of the advice of his seers in the face of pressure from his young warriors (Supp. 134-61, 216-37). M. later comments (199) on Evadne's breaking out of her house (Supp. 1040ff.) as an illustration of women's confine- ment in Athenian society, but the dramatic situation is clearly abnormal since Evadne has been threatening to kill herself (and incidentally the phrase phylak~s andka means "I relaxed the watch", not "1 have set guards"). In pp. 219-23 M. gives a very negative account of Athena's closing speech: she " a p p e a r s . . . in order to ensure that the cycle of revenge will continue into a new generation", has "a ferocious attitude", is "single- minded in her endorsement of warfare and revenge", and so on. But Athena is surely more detached than this, however dark the implications of her statement may be. All she really does is instruct Theseus to require a non-aggression pact from the Argives and announce that the sons of the Seven are destined (ouk estin all6s, 1224) to sack Thebes. Her reference to the songs of later generations need not be seen as a "promise of heroic praise" or an "inducement to heroic deeds": compare for example, Hecuba's comments on the Trojans as subjects of epic song in Trojan Women (1242-5).

M.'s line of enquiry is promising, and the attention he gives to spatial and religious symbolism (especially the Eleusinian context and the figure of Demeter in Suppliant Women) is also welcome. But the book leaves room for a more carefully nuanced investigation of the significance of female political action in these plays.

Martin Cropp Department of Greek and Roman Studies

University of Calgary

Euripides, Alcestis, with Notes and Commentary by C. A. E. Luschnig and H. M. Roisman, Oklahoma series in classical culture 29 (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 2003), XV + 284 pp.

Alcestis is ideally suited to serve as an introduction to Greek tragedy for students at the intermediate level. The play is short enough to read in its entirety over the course of a semester; alternatively, it can be read in part and paired with a prose text such as Plato's Crito. Its interpretation has been endlessly debated, and by sampling the secondary literature students will be introduced to controversies over genre and tone that have application to the entire Euripidean corpus. The play's rich reception history offers another avenue of approach: the play inspired adaptations by Robert Browning, T.S. Eliot, and Thornton Wilder, not to speak of operas by Handel and Gluck.

In what version, though, are intermediate students to read the play? First published in 1954, Dale's Oxford commentary has barely dated, but it is too austere to serve as the main resource for students who are encountering Greek tragedy for the first time. The Bryn Mawr commentary of Hamilton and Haslam (1980), provides the right amount and the right kind of help with the Greek, but it eschews literary criticism and lacks a Greek text. There is thus an opening for a full-scale student's commentary on Alcestis, an opening that Luschnig and Roisman fill with some success. The volume aims to offer students an essentially self-contained experience, with syntactical explanation, review of forms

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and grammar, vocabulary, and interpretation all included within its covers. The introduction discusses the plasticity of Greek myth, Euripidean realism, the date and production of the play, and the problem of its genre. It also lists the characters, outlines the structure, and explains the role of the chorus and the staging of the play. The introduction concludes with a brief and not very helpful section on meter; it would have been better to refer students to one of the standard metrical handbooks, such as Raven's (revised edition 1968) or West's (abridged edition 1987).

It is good to have a Greek text included with the commentary, but less good that it is Gilbert Murray's of 1902. In some places Diggle's replacement Oxford Classical text (1984) offers a clear improvement, and it is a pity these were not at least mentioned in the commentary. At 122-126, for example, the apodosis of the conditional sentence begins (in the reading of the manuscripts, retained by Murray) with "[Asclepius] alone" in the nominative, but then breaks off, and when the clause resumes Alcestis has become the subject. Roisman and Luschnig try to finesse the problem as an effect of characterization: "The a n a c o l u t h o n . . , conveys the bewilderment of the Chorus . . . they move rapidly from confidence to despair with no middle ground" But Diggle's emendation of monos to mona, of "[Asclepius] alone" to "[Alcestis] alone," greatly improves the sense, and obvi- ates the need for tortured explanation.

Even at the intermediate level, students can benefit from a full and clear discussion of textual issues. At 636-39 Admetus makes a series of statements to the effect that Pheres is not "really" his father--or, in another interpretation, poses a series of sarcastic questions. Luschnig and Roisman print Murray's text, which punctuates the lines as questions, but note in the commentary that they "prefer to keep the lines without the question marks." I agree, but it would have been helpful if they had laid out the implications of each choice and explained the rhetorical thrust of the passage (well discussed by M. Grif- fith, "Euripides Alkestis 636-641," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 82 [1978], 83-86-- an item that is missing from the bibliography).

On occasion the authors include textual commentary, but banish it to an obscure location. At 1118 Admetus observes that he stretches out his hand to the veiled woman whom Heracles has entrusted to him "as if beheading the Gorgon" (so Murray, reading Lobeck's karatom6n for the karatom6i of the manuscripts, "as if to a beheaded Gorgon"). The commentary clarifies the reference, enabling students to understand that Admetus ' fear of this unknown woman is analogous to Perseus' fear of the Gorgon. But on p. 215, n. 30 the editors reveal that they prefer the manuscript reading, as more consonant with their imagined staging of the scene ("a slapstick routine of Heracles trying to hide Alces- tis from her inquisitive but dense husband," p. 210). This discussion, or at least a cross- reference to it, would have been better placed in the commentary.

Writing a commentary entails constant decisions about balance--what amount of space to devote to what aspect of the text. On the whole this commentary is carefully thought out, although there is an occasional irrelevant excursus (on 158, for example, on the assigning of a kurios or male guardian to Greek women, when the text speaks of h@meran t~n kurian, "the decisive day"). Students will be grateful for the on-site sum- maries of topics such as conditions (p. 104) and imperatives (p. 129), and the opportunity to review the declension of third-declension nouns like cheir (p. 55) or the principal parts of ball6 (p. 118). Instructors will appreciate the decision to incorporate translations of the choral odes into the commentary, and to include short passages from other tragedies that are suitable for sight translation. The editors also provide valuable thematic prompts, as when they ask students to learn words having to do with the house and with death (p. 67). Ingenuity and experience are reflected in these pedagogical aids.


More debatable is the decision to include vocabulary help in the commentary--an uneconomical use of space, since the same information appears in the inclusive vocabulary in the back. The space saved by omitting redundant vocabulary could have been devoted to additional grammatical explanations: on 64, of the future middle used as a passive; on 167-68, of the jussive infinitive; on 176, of the inceptive aorist. More help could also have been offered on dramatic conventions: the use of Doric alpha in lyrics, for example, or the recycling of words and expressions in stichomythia from one speaker to the next.

The bibliography contains general works on Greek tragedy as well as items specific to Alcestis. It sensibly emphasizes works in English, but also includes important foreign- language works like Seidensticker's Palintonos Harmonia, Hypomnemata 72 (G6ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982) and Riemer's Die Alkestis des Euripides: Untersuchungen zur tragischen Form (Frankfurt am Main: Athenaum, 1990). Items that are particularly accessible to students are marked with an asterisk. In the vocabulary words that appear more than five times in the text are marked in bold--another thoughtful touch. There is also an index to help students navigate the different sections of the commentary.

The most innovative, and also the most problematic, aspect of the commentary consists of its "Discussions." This sixty-page section offers a critical consideration of the play episode by episode, often (though not invariably) with contrasting interpretations advanced by each editor. The topics include staging, themes, and characterization, and every discussion begins by posing questions about the episode that students are encour- aged to answer on their own.

Since each editor has written separately on the play, it is understandable that each brings her own perspective to its interpretation. The divergence of viewpoints can be fruitful and illuminating, as when Roisman proposes that Apollo in the prologue "may still be wearing his herdsman's rags when he first emerges from the palace. Nonetheless, at the same time he is carrying his bow on his shoulder" (p. 169), whereas Luschnig envisages an Apollo "attired in his traditional costume, as we typically see him in vase paintings, as a handsome young man in a short chiton" (ibid.). It is their points of agree- ment rather than their divergences that sometimes give me pause. At the outset of the Discussions section the editors state, "We have widely differing interpretations of the Alcestis, but one thing we agree on is that Admetus is the biggest problem" (p. 163). Indeed, their very first study question is: "What kind of man is Admetus?" (p. 164).

Whether consciously or unconsciously, the editors are here in dialogue with A.M. Dale; both take the approach to the play that Dale had in mind when she warned against "our inveterate modern habit of regarding a drama almost exclusively in terms of its characters" (1954, xxiv) and added (xxvi), "So far from considering the Alcestis a full- length study of naivetd, weakness, hysteria, egotism, character-development, and so forth, I do not believe t ha t . . . Euripides had any particular interest in the sort of person Adme- tus was." Whether Greek tragedy in general and Alcestis in particular should be analyzed in terms of character or in terms of action and theme is a controversy of long standing; it can only benefit students to be informed of this fact, and to see the editors engage explicitly with the alternative point of view.

Not only do the editors adopt a character-based approach to the play, they also take it for granted (as they state in the introduction) that Euripides is a realist, which to them suggests that Admetus responds just like a person in real life. To them, his use of allitera- tion at 346 "supports the feeling that [his] grief is artificial" (p. 103), and his recourse to Ji'gura etymologica at 1064-65 reveals that his "outburst is not motivated by genuine suf- fering--a person in real pain does not think of complicated figures of speech" (p. 212).

Book Reviews 601

Comments like these reflect a misunderstanding of the fictional universe that even a real- istic dramatist creates and populates, and fail to take account of the convention of Greek drama whereby every character with few exceptions, whatever his /her social status or emotional condition, employs the same grave, stylized, and elevated diction.

Genre is another vexed topic that is treated with a certain nonchalance by the editors. In the introduction they explain that the fourth-place production of Alcestis, in the spot where the audience would expect a satyr play, means that it "borders on both tragedy and satyr play" (p. 4). But they go on to state that "the playwright weaves an unsettling comic relief into the tragic components"--as if other tragedies, such as Aeschylus' Liba- tion Bearers and Sophocles' Antigone, did not also feature comic relief. When they return to the question of genre in the "Discussions" section they suggest that the play has affini- ties with comedy (p. 166). Students should be told whether "comedy" is being used in its ancient or modern sense; they should also be informed that a Greek tragedy can be funny and end happily without ceasing to be tragedy.

One of the "Discussions" includes an exemplary acknowledgment of differing scholarly views. In connection with the ending, the editors propose alternative futures for Admetus and Alcestis: Roisman sees an unhappy marriage fraught with tension and bit- terness, whereas Luschnig envisages a happy continuation of the life they had enjoyed before. Before proposing these outcomes, however, they take note of the Aristotelian distinction between what lies inside and outside the play (Poetics 1453b and 1454b), and defend their hypotheses by appealing to the instinctive responses of audiences and the practice of playwrights such as Shaw. They also relate the ending of Alcestis to general considerations of closure (see especially p. 217, n. 32 and p. 218, n. 33). This contextualiz- ing adds weight to their subsequent predictions.

We still await the ideal intermediate commentary on Alcestis. In the meantime there is much to appreciate in this one.

Justina Gregory Department of Classical Languages and Literatures

Smith College

J. Peter Euben, Platonic Noise, ser. Princeton Paperbacks (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), XII + 210 pp.

I. Einleitung: Der Titel von J. Peter Eubens (Eu.) Werk, Platonic Noise, birgt in kom- primierter Form das Hauptanliegen des Buches in sich: Er adaptiert den Titel eines Kult- romans der Postmoderne von Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985), in dem es um das ~weisse Rauschen~ geht. Mit diesem Ausdruck aus der Informationstheorie sind jene unzahligen Hintergrundger~usche gemeint, welche die Kommunikation st6ren und uns immerzu berieseln. Der Titel Platonic Noise kann nun derart verstanden werden, dass er drei Haupt- anliegen des Werks andeutet: Wie kann antikes Gedankengut f6r die L6sung oder zumindest das bessere Verst~indnis von aktuellen Problemen, insbesondere bezLiglich Politik und Tod, fruchtbar gemacht werden? Wie k6nnen literarische Texte fur die L6sung oder zumindest das Verstandnis von wissenschaftlichen Fragen, insbes, der Politiktheorie, fruchtbar gemacht werden? Wie kann Platon heute rezipiert werden, ohne dass seine Dialoge zu einem ~weissen Rauschen~ verkommen?

II. Kurze Inhalts(ibersicht: Beinahe alle Kapitel des Buches sind bereits anderswo als Aufs~tze erschienen und wurden ftir das vorliegende Werk mehr oder weniger stark


abgeandert. Indes lassen diese Kapitel sowohl in sich als auch im Kontext der restlichen Kapitel eine einsichtige Struktur erkennen. Nach der Einleitung (Kap. 1) wird in Kapitel 2, ~(On the Uses and Disadvantages of Hellenic Studies for Political and Theoretical Life,~, anhand von Nietzsches zweiter ((Unzeitgemasser Betrachtung~, ~Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie ftir das Leben-, f~ir eine Methode der Antikenbetrachtung pl~idiert, die nicht ((antiquarisch~ ist, sondern in der Antike Antworten auf drangende Fragen der Gegenwart sucht. In den restlichen Kapiteln wird kaum mehr ftir diese Methode argumentiert; es wird vielmehr exemplarisch vorgeftihrt, wie eine solche Symbiose aussehen k6nnte.

In jedem Kapitel wird ein klassischer Text (oder mehrere) einem modernen (oder mehreren) gegentibergestellt. Kapitel 3, ((Hannah Arendt at Colonus-, verbindet die So- phokleische Trag6die Oedipus in Kolonos mit Hannah Arendts Schriften tiber die griechische Polis. Obwohl sich Eu. mit Arendts (~Hellenismus~ nicht einverstanden erkl~irt und es zum Ziel dieses Kapitels macht, ~Arendt von ihrem Hellenismus und die Griechen vor Arendt zu retten~ (S.10), stimmt er einer ihrer Hauptthesen zu und versucht, diese neu zu begr6nden: Die Pol i t ik /das Leben in der Polis kann eine erl6sende Kraft haben gegentiber der niederschmetternden ((Weisheit des Silenos~: ~(Not to be born is best of alh / when life is there, the second best / to go hence where you came, / with the best speed you may~ (Oedipus at Colonus, 1224-27 [Eu. 1411-14], David Grene's Obersetzung).

Kapitel 4, ~(Aristophanes in America~,, untersucht die Relevanz der (Aristophani- schen) antiken Kom6die fiir die politische Bewusstseinsbildung und stellt die Frage, ob TV-Comedy-Serien heute eine ~ihnliche Rolle wie Aristophanische Kom6dien spielen k6nnten. Trotz einer scharfen Kritik an der Fernsehunterhaltung beantwortet Eu. die Frage mit einem vorsichtigen ,,Ja~). Er schliesst mit der nicht bitterernst gemeinten These, dass Aristophanes, wtirde er heute leben, Drehbuchautor f6r The Simpsons ware.

Kapitel 5, ~(The Politics of Nostalgia and Theories of Loss~,, erforscht die Frage, wie das Bewusstsein von Verg~inglichkeit und Verlust die Menschen einerseits zu (politi- schem) Theoretisieren veranlassen, aber andererseits genauso eine Gefahr darstellen kann: Es erm6glicht namlich, einer passiven Nostalgie anheim zu fallen. Ausgehend yon einer Antikriegsbewegung, die von der Mutter eines durch ~friendlyjqre~ gefallenen Vietnam- soldaten initiiert wurde, untersucht Eu.: das ber(ihmte Chorlied aus Sophokles' An tigone, Teile aus Homers Ilias, Platons Staat und dem ((Siebten Brief,~ sowie aus Machiavellis II principe.

In Kapitel 6, ((The Polis, Globalization, and the Citizenship of Place~, wird die heute immer drangendere Frage untersucht, was der Begriff des Weltbtirgertums bedeuten kann: BOrgertum war n~mlich Ober Jahrtausende hinweg mit der Zugeh6rigkeit zu einem bestimmten Staat oder der Sesshaftigkeit an einem bestimmten Ort verbunden. Eu. versucht eine Parallele zu ziehen zwischen der heutigen Erfahrung der Globa- lisierung einerseits und der antiken Erfahrung der ((politischen Dislokation~ (S. 10) nach dem Niedergang des klassischen Athen anderseits. Zur Sprache kommen dabei das ((demokratische Ethos,~ (S. 114), wie es etwa von Aristoteles entwickelt wurde, und die kynischen und stoischen Versuche, B/irgertum neu zu definieren. Den Ubergang in die Moderne vollzieht Eu. mit Martha Nussbaums neuer Artikulation des Stoizismus in ihrem Buch The therapy of desire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), die er jedoch als in wichtigen Belangen defizitar qualifiziert. Deshalb geht er zu anderen Denkern und zur Idee der ((parallelen Polis~ 6ber. Dieses in totalit~iren Systemen entstandene Konzept bedeutet, dass demokratische Praktiken und Institutionen kultiviert werden, die dem bestehenden Staat zwar parallel laufen, ihn aber (&onterkarieren)~. Kapitel 7 tr~igt densel- ben Namen wie das gesamte Werk und verbindet den platonischen Dialog Phaidon

Book Reviews 603

(um 389-347 v. Chr.) mit Don DeLillos Roman White Noise (1985). Es stellt eine Art von Gesamtschau dar, insofern viele Themen der vorherigen Kapitel neu zur Sprache kommen, insbesondere Sterblichkeit und Verlust im Zusammenhang mit politischer Gesin- nung und Theorie. Im Folgenden kann aus Raumgr6nden nur auf dieses Kapitel n~iher eingegangen werden.

III. ~Platonic Noise,s: Im Schlusskapitel beschaftigt sich Eu., ausgehend vom Pla- tonischen Dialog Phaidon und Don DeLillos Roman White Noise, mit der Frage nach der Beziehung zwischen Sterblichkeit, Politik und politischer Theorie. Dabei geht Eu. von zwei Annahmen aus: 1. Es gibt eine enge Beziehung zwischen Literatur und politischer Theorie. Fiir diese Annahme wird nicht argumentiert. Stattdessen soll der Text dieses Kapitels die Annahme indirekt rechtfertigen, insofern dort solche Beziehungen hergestellt werden. 2. Die Dialektik zwischen Phaidon und White Noise hilft uns, i~ber Sterblichkeit und deren Beziehung zu Politik und politischer Theorie nachzudenken. Diese Annahme rechtfertigt Eu. insofern, als er seine Auswahl erklart. Denn so offensichtlich sich beide Texte mit dem Tod auseinandersetzen, so scheinbar apolitisch sind sie auch. Eu. beginnt damit, Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen den beiden Werken zu ermitteln. Im Dialog Phaidon glaubt er unerf611te Versprechen, problematische Gewissheiten und ein Gemisch von Mythos und Argument auszumachen. Diese Unterbrechung von Koharenz und vern6nf- tigem Argumentieren nennt Eu. ~Polyvokalit~b~ (S. 143). Eine ~hnliche Struktur weise auch White Noise auf, da der Roman nicht nur von unentzifferbaren Codes handle, sondern selbst ein solcher sei (S. 144). Eu. macht eine Reihe von gemeinsamen Bezugspunkten zwischen den beiden Texten aus. So sieht Eu. etwa in Jack Gladney (JG), der Hauptfigur von White Noise, die sokratische Tradition ad absurdum gef6hrt. JG beschaftigt sich wie Sokrates ausgiebig mit seiner Sterblichkeit, allerdings anders als jener mit einer krankhaften Rastlosigkeit. Die sokratische Suche nach Wahrheit und Bedeutung sieht Eu. bei JG dadurch pervertiert, dass dieser seine akademische Karriere sichere, indem er die von ihm geschaffene ~Professur fi~r Hitler-Studien~ ~bernehme. Diese Spannungen zwischen antikem und postmodernem Text seien es, die der Hauptthese dieses Kapitels und des Werks 6berhaupt Plausibilitat verleihen, namlich dass es gewinnbringend sei, ~mit den Griechen zu denken~.

In der Analyse des Dialogs Phaidon beschaftigt sich Eu. vornehmlich mit zwei Prob- lemfeldern, namlich mit dem (im Gegensatz zur Apologie) apolitischen Charakter des Textes und der vermeintlichen sokratischen ~Misologie~. Es f~illt auf, dass sich Sokrates in der Apologie als ein B~irger unter anderen darstellt, der sich in der Offentlichkeit vor seinen Richtern zu verteidigen versucht. Hingegen ist der Schauplatz des Phaidon das vonder Offentlichkeit abgeschottete Gef~ngnis. Man k6nne den Dialog denn vorschnell auch so lesen, dass er die Politik zum Tode verurteile (S. 153). In den ber(ihmten letzten Worten des Sokrates, der Aufforderung an Kriton, dem Gott Asklepios einen verspro- chenen Hahn zu opfern, sieht Eu. gleichwohl einen vers6hnlichen Ansatz: Die Worte k6nnten dahin gedeutet werden, dass Sokrates sich hier als pflichtbewusster Bi~rger unter anderen Btirgern zeigt, was den Graben zwischen Philosophie und 6ffentlicher Politik zwar keineswegs nichtig mache, aber die beiden Pole doch einander n~iher bringe.

Was die ~Misologie~ des Sokrates betrifft, l~isst Eu. die Leserinnen und Leser drastisch sp6ren, was hiermit gemeint ist. In textnahen Wiedergaben referiert er zuerst die sokratischen Argumente, wie etwa f~ir die Annahme einer unsterblichen Seele, nur um danach deren Zirkularit~it zu kritisieren. Die Argumente seien bestenfalls f~ir jene nachvollziehbar, welche bereits die Grundannahmen der pythagoreischen und orphischen Weisheitslehren akzeptierten. Mit solchen Argumenten - und deren Infragestellung - sti~rze Sokrates seine Gespr~ichspartner in Verwirrung und Zweifel, was leicht zu Misologie und gar Misanthropie


f fhren k6nne. Allerdings sieht Eu. die Rolle des Sokrates auch in einem positiveren Licht und unterstellt ihm zwei wichtige Grundanliegen: Erstens wolle er seine Schfiler dazu bringen, weniger ihm, der die (offensichtlich schlechten) Argumente vortr~igt, Vertrauen zu schenken, als vielmehr der Kraft des Arguments und der Vernunft selbst. Diese Distanz zum ,,MeisteD~ identifiziert Eu. als eine unabdingbare Voraussetzung, um vom J finger zum Sch~iler zu werden. Zweitens gehe es Sokrates, wie sp~iter auch Aristoteles (vgl. Eth. Nic. A 1.1094b12-14), darum, aufzuzeigen, dass nicht jeder Gegenstand dieselbe Art von Argument fordere und zulasse. Geht es um den Tod, dann seien zwingende wis- senschaftliche Argumente weder m6glich noch nftig; vielmehr gehe es datum, Trost zu spenden in der Zuversicht auf ein Leben danach. Das ist etwas, was der T~tigkeit einer Mutter entspricht, die ihrem Kind ein Lied vorsingt, um ihm die Angst vor dem Dunkel zu nehmen (vgl. Phd. 77e-78a). Entsprechend Eu~ Grundannahme, der Dialog Phaidon sei in seiner ~,Polyvokalit~t~ zu lesen, liefert Eu. verschiedene, auf unterschiedlichen Ebe- nen angesiedelte Interpretationen von Sokrates' Schlussworten. Neben der erw~hnten versfhnlichen Deutung steht jene, welche den Bogen zu Don DeLillos White Noise zu schlagen versteht: Der Dialog sei aporetisch, und Sokrates wolle die Welt als seltsam und erschreckend aufzeigen.

W~hrend Sokrates angesichts seines bevorstehenden Todes gelassen bleibe, k6nne man dies nicht von Jack Gladney, der Hauptfigur aus White Noise, behaupten. Vielmehr sei JG's Leben ein einziger rastloser Versuch, dem Bewusstsein der eigenen Sterblichkeit zu entfliehen. Eu. sieht zwei Gri~nde ftir dieses Verhalten: Erstens stellt der Tod ffir JG eine grosse Verunsicherung dar: Woher kommt er, und wie kann man ihn ins Leben integrieren? Verschiedene Versuche JG's, diesem Mysterium gewaltsam zu entkommen, scheitern, so etwa der Mordanschlag auf einen ehemaligen Wissenschaftler, der ironi- scherweise eine Droge entwickelt hat, die den Menschen die Angst vor dem Tod nehmen sollte. Das Gef~ihl, Herr fiber Leben und Tod zu sein, das JG w~hrend des Anschlags befallt, weicht bald der Ernfichterung, als er erf~hrt, dass sein Opfer durch sein Lebenswerk selbst ein Mahnmal f f r die unausl6schbare Pr~senz des Todes darstellt. Zweitens stellt der Roman in Eu.s Lesart die Durchl~ssigkeit derjenigen amerikanischen Mythen und ErzShlungen dar, welche die B(irger fiber ihre Kultur und Herkunft versichern und ihnen Geborgenheit vor dem Faktum der Sterblichkeit liefern k6nnten. JG's Besuch der meist- photographierten Scheune Amerikas etwa wird von Eu. derart interpretiert, dass hier das Historische zu einem augenblicklichen Ereignis, dem Herstellen einer Photographie, verkommt. Der in Amerika feststellbare ~Prasentismus,, und der Drang, sich immer neu zu definieren und von seinen Wurzeln zu 16sen, stellt ffir Eu. einen Grund daf f r dar, dass der Tod seine unheilvolle Macht entwickeln kann: Wer nicht weiss, woher er kommt, weiss auch nicht, wohin er geht. JG's Konsumverhalten interpretiert Eu. dahingehend, dass hier das Scheitern des Traums, mit Hilfe der Technik auch die letzte Hfirde, den Tod, zu meistern, dargestellt wird: Als JG erfahrt, dass er an den Folgen einer chemischen Katastrophe sterben wird, kehrt er sein obsessives Konsumverhalten ins Gegenteil um und gibt seinen Besitz weg, so als wfirde er einsehen, dass auch das ausgekl~geltste Arte- fakt gegenfber dem Tod machtlos ist.

Eu. liest den Roman White Noise, ~hnlich wie den Dialog Phaidon, derart, dass er eine Krise darstelle, mit der wir uns konfrontiert sehen. Eine Krise, so Hannah Arendt, mache uns klar, dass wir die Antworten auf Fragen verloren h~tten, von denen wir zuvor gar nicht gewusst haben, dass sie sich i~berhaupt stellen. Erst wenn man mit Vorurteilen auf diese Fragen antworte, werde die Krise zur Katastrophe. Eu. versucht im letzten Teil des Kapitels, diese Fragen zu stellen: Welche Art von Leben ist es wert, gelebt zu werden, angesichts der immer gr6sseren M6glichkeiten, das Leben zu verbessern und zu ver-

Book Reviews 605

1/ingern? Wie beeinflusst unser Verh/iltnis zum Tod unseren Handlungs- und Politikbe- griff? Wie kann man ,,zum Tode leben>>, ohne sich von der Verunsicherung durch den Tod zu sehr in Aufruhr versetzen zu lassen? Mit dieser Frage verbunden ist auch das Problem, wie man den Graben LiberbrLicken kann zwischen der existenziellen, aber auch l~ihmenden Frage <<Wie soll ich leben?,> und dem Anspruch, jeden Tag Entscheidungen zu f/illen und entsprechend zu handeln. Die letzte Frage entnimmt Eu. der Aussage einer Nebenfigur in White Noise, die JG vor der Droge, welche die Angst vor dem Tod nehmen solle, abr/it: Ist der Tod, der unserem Leben eine Grenze setzt, nicht eine unabdingbare Voraussetzung dafLir, dass in unserem Leben/iberhaupt etwas Sinn und Sch6nheit hat?

Eu. interpretiert die Texte oft eigenwillig, ohne dass die Interpretationen v611ig unmo- tiviert w/iren. Was jedoch fehlt, ist die Auseinandersetzung mit anderen mOglichen Deu- tungsans/itzen. Es lohnt sich allein schon des schOnen Textes wegen, dieses Kapitel zu lesen. Wenn jedoch mehr als dreissig Seiten Text zur Konklusion ftihren, dass sich Amerika mit einer Krise konfrontiert sieht und daher auf lange verdr/ingte Fragen zu antworten hat - etwa, ob der Tod dem Leben nicht erst einen Sinn gibt -, dann scheint dies ein etwas dtirftiges Ergebnis. Man darf die Vermutung wagen, dass man auch mit anderen Metho- den als der yon Eu. vorgeschlagenen Gegen/iberstellung von antiken und modernen Texten zu/ihnlichen Ergebnissen gekommen w~ire.

IV. Kritik: Eu.s Platonic Noise ist ein reichhaltiges, anregendes Buch, das 6berraschende Bez/,ige zwischen Schriften herstellt, die in der Regel nicht zusammen gelesen werden. Es besitzt einen ausf6hrlichen Index (Personen und Sachen), verzichtet aber auf eine Biblio- graphie. Eu. schreibt elegant und fl/issig. Was den philosophischen Gehalt des Buches betrifft, muss die Beurteilung differenzierter ausfallen. Zu fragen w/ire etwa nach der Methode, gem/iss der Eu. verf~ihrt, und ihrer Rechtfertigung. Mit <,Methode~> ist in diesem Fall das Verfahren gemeint, Antworten auf aktuelle Fragen durch die Gegentiberstellung von modernen und antiken Texten zu gewinnen. Zwar betont der Autor in der Einleitung, er verzichte bewusst auf eine Rechtfertigung dieser Methode. Denn deren erfolgreiche Anwendung in den nachfolgenden Kapiteln stelle eine solche Rechtfertigung dar. So redlich dieser Hinweis auch ist, 1/isst er das Bed/irfnis nach einer solchen Diskussion nicht verschwinden; denn offensichtlich ist die erfolgreiche Anwendung einer Methode in einzelnen F/illen noch keine Rechtfertigung derselben. Bestehen bleiben etwa ein ,dnduktionsproblem,~ (Was garantiert, dass die Methode auch im n/ichsten Fall/ in alien F/illen Bestand hat?), ein <~Kausalit/itsproblem,> (Ist es wirklich die erfolgreiche Anwen- dung der Methode, welche den Erfolg bewirkt, oder sind es andere, unbekannte Faktoren, die in den einzelnen F~illen mitgewirkt haben?) und ein <<Ausschliesslichkeitsproblem>> (Ist die Anwendung der Methode auch notwendige Bedingung for den Erfolg oder gibt es alternative Methoden, welche dasselbe leisten?). Dies sind Fragen, die freilich nicht nur Eu.s Text, sondern jedes Argument der folgenden Form betreffen: <<Die erfolgreiche Anwendung einer Methode rechtfertigt die Methode.>, Dies allein stillt aber das Bed6rf- nis nach einer Antwort auf diese Fragen nicht.

Dadurch, dass sich Eu. dieser Diskussion entzieht, bleibt etwas unklar, welchen Status er der Besch/iftigung mit antiken und literarischen Texten fLir die Beantwortung dr/ingen- der Fragen im Bereich der politischen Philosophie beimisst. Zweifellos haben die Texte den Autor dazu inspiriert, die im Werk dargelegten Bez/ige herzustellen. Allerdings wtirde Eu. wohl noch weitergehen zu der Behauptung, diese Erzeugung von Erkenntnis m6sse auch bei anderen Personen (etwa den Leserinnen und Lesern) statffinden oder sogar, es gehe gar nicht um die Erzeugung von Erkenntnis, sondern um die Rechtfertigung eines Erkenntnisinhalts. Beide weiterfLihrenden Behauptungen bedtirften einer ausftihrlichen BegrLindung. Der Verzicht des Autors auf die Beantwortung dieser Fragen 1/isst die Ergeb-


nisse Eu.s etwas arbitr~ir und pers6nlich erscheinen. Eu. geh6rt noch einer vielleicht ausster- benden Generation an, die glaubt, mit den <<Griechen,, Antworten auf dr~ngende Fragen der Gegenwart zu finden. Nicht zuletzt die Gegen6berstellung von Platons Phaidon und DeLillos White Noise zeigt, dass die kulturelle Kluft zwischen den <<Griechen,, und uns vielleicht gr6sser geworden ist als je zuvor.

Thomas Hiltbrunner - Rafael Ferber Theologische Fakultht

Universitat Luzern, Schweiz

Steven K. Strange and Jack Zupko (eds.), Stoicism: Traditions and Transformations (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), XI + 295 pp.

As the editors of this collection of twelve essays observe in their introduction, the goal of its contributors is largely, but not exclusively, to investigate the ways in which Stoicism has been appropriated up to the present, primarily by philosophers treating ethics. Some theologians are included; but no one involved in this collaboration is interested in literature as a vehicle of Stoic influence and attention to science and political theory is marginal. Only one contributor cites the school tradition of the liberal arts as a source of post-classical Stoicism. Five of the contributors--A. A. Long, Troels Engberg- Pedersen, Brad Inwood, Richard Sorabji, and Lawrence C. Becker--provide brief sum- maries of arguments they develop more fully in recently published books. One, Martha Nussbaum, reprints a paper already published in The Journal of Political Philosophy 8 (2000). The aim of addressing Stoic influences up to the present is not actually reflected in the volume's contents. Four of the papers treat Stoicism in antiquity, only one of which deals with its influence; three treat Stoic themes in the patristic and medieval period; three focus on figures in the early modern neo-Stoic revival. The influence of Stoicism from the eighteenth through the twentieth century receives no attention. The remaining two essays deal not with how previous thinkers have been influenced by Stoicism but rather with the authors' own views, positive or negative, on its current viability. Within these largely self-imposed constraints, the results are uneven with respect to the contributors' address to pertinent data and to their originality.

Within the first subset of papers, Long offers a highly original assessment of the influence of Socrates on Epictetus, not only regarding particular moral doctrines but especially in the use of dialectical arguments, notwithstanding the fact that Epictetus did not employ the genre of dialogue. Long finds the Gorgias particularly significant here. Addressing the topic of moral judgment in Seneca, Inwood builds on previous scholarship but takes it further, showing how Seneca invokes forensic metaphors in describing moral judgments, both the moral agent's judgments of the behavior of others and his consequent treatment of them, and his own conscience as a judge of his personal behavior. In each context, Inwood shows, forensic reasoning also informs Seneca's analysis of the conditions under which light or heavy penalties should be imposed. On the other hand, basically recycling an already known point, Steven K. Strange observes that Galen erred in arguing that Chrysippus departed from Zeno in defining the passions as false intellectual judgments and in viewing our consent to passions, or not, as an act of will.

In the fourth essay on Stoicism in antiquity, Engberg-Pedersen draws heavily on recent New Testament scholarship in arguing for the influence of Stoic ethics on St. Paul. Reflecting the view that Hellenic and biblical ethics formed a single culture in Paul's day,

Book Reviews 607

he uses as his comparanda Philo's Every Good Man is Free and Galatians 5:13-26. The Stoic themes he thinks Paul takes from Stoicism are the view that material goods are adiaphora and apatheia as yielding freedom from the conflict of flesh and spirit. Thus far, Engberg- Pedersen's argument would raise no eyebrows among New Testament scholars. But he goes on to claim that, for Paul, faith is analogous to wisdom, for the Stoic sage. However, faith as certitude about non-empirical realities known through a glass darkly does not square with the wisdom of the Stoic attained by the kataleptic grasp of data provided by the senses. Further, the author's analysis ignores the differences between Stoic and Pauline anthropology and the fact that the Apostle factors divine grace into his moral equation.

Within the next set of papers, Sorabji deals with early Christian theologians while Sten Ebbesen and Calvin Normore focus on twelfth-century figures. Discussing first motions in the early Christian writers, Sorabji means by "first motions" the initial step in what the Latins called passio, propassio, and consensus or suggestio, delectatio, and consensus. The moral agent experiences, first, an involuntary reaction. Then, he subjects it to intellectual consideration. Finally, he either consents to it or rejects it. It is his arrival at the third step that makes his moral stance virtuous or vicious. After reprising this doctrine as taught by Seneca, Sorabji traces it in Origen, Evagrius, Jerome, and Augustine. The key reformulation of first motions, turning them into evil thoughts inspired in the face of temptation, was made by Augustine as a result of his dependence on Aulus Gellius, who got it wrong, instead of Seneca.

While Sorabji makes his case handily, Ebbesen and Normore are less successful. Nor- more discusses the influence of Stoic intentionalism on Peter Abelard. Noting that information on Stoic ethics was widely available in Latin classical and patristic authors, especially Augustine, he yet treats Abelard's view that sin can be defined as the intention to act in contempt of God as the critical means by which intentionalism entered the Scholas- tic mainstream. While he mentions in passing Peter Lombard's report of Abelard's position, Normore does not note that the Lombard largely supports it (Sententiae 2. d. 35. c. 2.3; d. 40. c. 12 [citing Augustine, Contra mendacium]), and that he, rather than Abelard, was the authority studied by all would-be doctors of theology in the high Middle Ages. Moreover, in a work Normore does not cite, (La doctrine du p~ch~ dans les ~coles th~ologiques de la premiere moitid du XIIe si~cle [Louvain, 1958]), Robert Blomme has shown that ethical intentionalism was the consensus position in the twelfth century.

While Ebbesen refers to Stoic ethics, both intentionalism and the doctrine of the sage, agreeing that there was a good deal of information about it in classical Latin texts and in St. Paul, insofar as he can be read as a crypto-Stoic, his chief interest lies in the history of logic. In this area, he argues, Stoicism was everywhere and nowhere. Ebbesen rarely acknowledges ancient and patristic transmitters in accounting for the incidence of Stoic ideas in twelfth-century writers, preferring to treat them as manifestations of parallelism and affinity rather than as the influence of standard sources. In physics, a case in point is Thierry of Chartres' description of God as the ignis artifex. Ebbesen ignores the fact that Marius Victorinus (Commentary on Cicero's De inventione: Explanatio in Rhetoricam Cicero- nis, ed. C. Halm, Rhetores Latini Minores, p. 215) describes nature, which he equates with God, as the ignis artifex. And, Cicero himself describes God as the vis caloris (De natura deorum 2.9.23-2.12.32), an idea cited positively by Novatian (De trinitate 2.1, 8.9) and neg- atively by Augustine (Contra academicos 3.17.38-39). So there were clear, and available, precedents for Thierry's description.

In his chosen field of logic, the only Stoic idea found in the Middle Ages for which Ebbesen finds an available Latin source is the doctrine of the lekton, rendered the dicibile and found in Augustine's De dialectica. But, unnoticed by Ebbesen, this is not the only


place in his oeuvre where Augustine treats that theme. He discusses it repeatedly (De quantitate animae 32.66; De magistro 1.2-2.3-4, 4.7-5.16, 7.19) and it forms the basis of the inner word /ou te r word distinction that he uses to explain the eternally generated Word/Word incarnate distinction, most fully, but not only, in his De trinitate. Augustine's own likely source was Aulus Gellius, who also discusses the dicibile (Noctes atticae 11.12.1). Much of what medieval thinkers learned about Stoic logic and semantics they acquired through the texts in the school tradition and through the transmitters. Ebbesen mentions only one such author, Boethius. He states that Boethius deliberately avoided transmitting Stoic ideas in these fields. At the same time, Ebbesen recognizes that some of Boethius' logical commentaries did transmit Stoic ideas, even if inadvertently. This last point is one he declines to elaborate, but much more can be said in its support. In his two commentaries on Aristotle's De interpretatione, for instance, Boethius conveys some important Stoic principles later picked up by medieval logicians. Boethius notes that logic can be viewed as propositional and that logical necessity can be (and should be) unshack- led from causal necessity (ed. 1, 3.9; ed. 2, 3.9). As a curtain-raiser for what would later be called syncategoremata, he observes that words such as prepositions and conjunctions signify, but only in particular propositional contexts (ed. 1, 1, 1-2; ed. 2, 1.2-3, 2.4). He agrees that a negative particle placed before an entire proposition negates the proposition more globally than a negative particle placed before the verb (ed. 2, 4.10, 5.10), a point also made by Martianus Capella (De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii 4.402). Boethius also gives an account of the debate between proponents of the natural vs. conventional theories of verbal signification reported in Plato's Cratylus (ed. 2, 1. praefatio), a point noticed earlier by Augustine (De doctrina christiana 1.2.2, 2.1.1-2.3.45; Contra Faustum 22.28; De civitate dei 22.30.3; De trinitate 5.7.8). And, Boethius reports a number of the forms of the Stoic hypothetical syllogisms (ed. 2, 3.9; De hypotheticis syllogismis, De differentiis topicis, Commentary on Cicero' Topica). His own sources included not only Cicero and Marius Victorinus but also Augustine's discussions of the nature and practical application of hypotheticals in argument (Contra academicos 3.11.24, 3.13.29; De doctrina christiana 2.34.52). Fuller accounts of the hypotheticals are found in other transmitters ignored by Ebbesen, such as Martianus Capella (De nuptiis 4.414-422) and above all Cassiodorus (Institutes 2.3.13). The presence of so many of these Stoic notions in available and author- itative sources, not to mention the classical authors on whom they drew, belies Ebbesen's claim that "nowhere" belongs in a historically accurate description of the influence of Stoic logic in the twelfth century.

The next three papers, dealing with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers, all consider the influence, increasingly mitigated, of Stoic ethics. Jacqueline Lagrde focuses on the theme of constancy as found in Michel de Montaigne, Justus Lipsius, Guillaume du Vair, Joseph Hall, Yves of Paris, Simon Goulart, Urban Chereau, and Jean-Francois Senault. The neo-Stoicism of the first three figures is well known, as is their appeal to Seneca for help in confronting evils public and private without recourse to theology in an age of religious wars. Less well known are the other five figures. As Lagr6e helpfully shows, they progressively Christianize Stoic constancy. They see in Seneca an extrinsic support for the austere Christian morality they advocate. They invoke the theme of constancy in urging their readers to hold fast in the face of religious novelties. The more Christianizing they are, the more they criticize Stoic autarchy as a form of pride. In pro- moting charity as the greatest of virtues they refuse to view all passions as harmful. And, they conclude, constancy itself is acceptable only if we recognize that, like all virtues, its possession requires the grace of God. Lagrde's findings, for these Christianizers, are gen- uinely fresh.

Book Reviews 609

The departures from Stoicism in the figures treated by Donald Rutherford and Firmin DeBrabanda, on the other hand, spring not from religion but from fundamental principles of their philosophies. Rutherford analyzes Ren6 Descartes on Seneca's doctrine of the happy life as found in his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. As he shows, Descartes supports Seneca on constancy, on tranquillity of mind, on reason as the path to virtue, and on virtue as sufficient for happiness. However, for Descartes, reason does not go the distance in telling us how to act; and in uncertain cases we should follow custom. The summum bonum is not our moral end but a means to the achievement of con- tentment. In Descartes' estimation, Seneca made two basic errors. Seneca's psychological monism fails to square with his own mind /body dualism. And, the passions arise from the body, not from false intellectual judgments. Rutherford concludes, convincingly, that despite the appeal of Seneca to Descartes, his critique of Seneca is based on his anthropology and his view that ethical judgments lack the clarity and distinctness required for certitude.

DeBrabanda deals with Baruch Spinoza's consideration of Stoicism on the happy life and the philosophical reasons for his departures from it. It should be noted, although the author does not say so, that in this analysis "Stoicism" means ancient, not middle or Roman Stoicism. For Spinoza, one sticking point is the Stoic notion that we can attain rational control of the passions. In his view, emotions can only be counteracted by equally strong emotions. To be sure, reason yields understanding, which yields joy. And joy can do battle against the passions. But complete joy results only from the highest mode of knowledge. Different, and lower, modes of knowledge yield differing, and weaker, degrees of joy; thus they are less effective in the combat. Reason's victory over the passions is thus never total. While Spinoza shares with the Stoics the view that the universe is governed by rationally determined laws, his second departure from Stoicism reflects his view that the universe is neither providentially ordered nor androcentric. DeBrabanda sees this last point as placing Spinoza on the cusp of modern philosophy.

The last two papers take a totally different tack, arguing either for or against Stoicism as a philosophy meeting present needs. Nussbaum approaches her negative assessment through a consideration of Cicero on justice, whose influence she finds to have been both extensive and pernicious. While he adopts the maxims of suum cuique tribuere and alterum non laedere in dealing with all others, including enemies in a just war, Cicero is anticos- mopolitan when it comes to granting material aid, and illogically so, in Nussbaum's estimation, extending aid, first, to relatives, then to one's household, and then to fellow citizens, but stopping there. In addition to providing no theoretical rationale for transnational material aid, Cicero also errs in adopting the Stoic view that material goods are adiaphora in any case. The fact that Cicero's position may have made sense in his own historical context is irrelevant, to Nussbaum.

By contrast, Becker wants to rehabilitate Stoic ethics. He offers two main reasons why this would be a good idea and why it is well-grounded scientifically. On the first point, he thinks that Romantic critics of Stoicism, in their attack on the doctrine of apatheia as cold and dessicated, fail to acknowledge the importance of the doctrine of eupatheia. Following Posidonius as our chief guide, he argues, we should recognize that the passions cannot be extirpated. But, with rational management, they can be converted into eupatheiai that are conducive to mental health and to good social relations. And now is a good time to make this case, since Posidonian ethics and anthropology coincide with modern neuroscience and psychology. Becker confines himself to views of the human psyche that regard it as material and hard-wired, with emotional reactions driven by chemistry, and to rational emotive behavior therapy, which regards behavior modifica-

610 h zternational Journal of the Classical Tradition /Spr#zg 2006

tion as sufficient to the attainment of mental health. }te admits that the neo-Stoicism he proposes would have to deal with two kinds of emotion flagged by modern psychology that are not found in the classical canon, non-referential affect and threshold affect. The former includes feelings like free-floating anxiety, not derived from or directed toward anything in particular; the latter involves emotional distress so vague that persons suf- fering from it cannot name their state or imagine what is causing it. Becker is not forthcoming on how his proposed revival of Stoic ethics will find a way of converting such feelings into eupatheiai.

Whatever one thinks about the strictures and prescriptions proposed by Nussbaum and Becket, many of the other contributions in this volume shed fresh light on the Stoics themselves and on some of the ways in which selected aspects of their philosophy have been appropriated, adapted, and criticized up through the seventeenth century. In a few cases, especially in the contributions of Normore and Ebbesen, more could have been done to tell the stories they convey with greater historical accuracy. Collectively, all the contributors reflect the fact that there have been signal gains in our understanding of the Nachleben of Stoicism, and also that there is more work to be done before it can be delin- eated fully.

Marcia L. Colish Department of History

Yale University

Sarah Scott and Jane Webster (eds.), Roman hnperialism and Provincial Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), XVI + 256 pp.

Issues of Romanization and provincial art were re-examined in a session of the Roman Archaeology Conference at the University of Nottingham in 1997, and this volume is the publication of the conference session. Five of the original papers are included in this volume, while six others were commissioned especially for the publication. The theme is a large and important one to scholars in the field of Roman art and archaeology today. Conventional attitudes that dismiss local production as derivative and second-rate in comparison with the classic~zing art of the capital, for example, are questioned: were these Hellenic aesthetic standards, commonplace in contemporary art history textbooks, current in Britain and Gaul of the late first century c.~.? If the elegant forms of the Ara Pacis had any influence on the provinces, would it have been transmitted through the culture of their local elites, who were more in touch with Rome and eager to assimilate its values? The contribution of this volume lies in the rigor and subtlety of the responses to these questions. The failure of traditional scholarship to grapple adequately with evidence of local variants, autonomy or even the rejection of classical styles has allowed another generation of scholars to ponder questions of civic identity, politics and religion as integral to culture and the making of monuments.

The essays are loosely-connected, and range in topics from triumphal arches to ceramic wares, and in geographic focus from western Europe to Asia Minor and north Africa. The chronology spans the periods of the late republic through the late empire. That the authors mostly view art as a form of material culture supports their arguments about the social functions of the imagery, whether the glorification of local elites or the commemoration of the dead. Definition of context is key in the discussions that focus on production or reception, and the more astute essays discuss context in terms of social

Book Reviews 611

processes of identity formation and social or religious expression. Jane Webster, both a co-editor and a contributor, in her article ("Art as Resistance and Negotiation," pp. 24-51) rejects the standard notion of domination and resistance and, instead, turns to concepts of cultural assimilation from New World archaeology, especially that of creolization (p. 25). Rather than a one-way model of influence from imperial capital to colony, creolization posits an exchange in which only certain aspects of the dominant style are adapted to indigenous purposes. Furthermore, Webster proposes that mimicry of styles can be seen as an attempt to master the imperial culture, to resist its stranglehold by manipulating its imagery into something with a different inflection for local viewers (pp. 33-35). This concept stands the traditional model of influence on its head through its insistence on the intelligence of the provincial artists or patrons and their creative reworking of themes and styles to suit their own ends. It also dovetails nicely with a broad reconsideration of the phenomena of the copy in antiquity that has also moved away from the tracing of the lost original from the variants and looks to the reconfiguration of the copy in its second life.

Catherine Johns' contribution, "Conceptualizing Provincial Art" (pp. 9-51), comple- ments the introduction by Sarah Scott ("Provincial Art and Roman Imperialism: An Overview," pp. 1-7) in its evaluation of the previous scholarship but also provides a suc- cinct and thoughtful analysis of craftsmanship and manufacture. Her consideration of artistic materials, the local stone used for sculpture in Roman Britain in particular, demonstrates how style can be dependent on material: red sandstone or coarse limestone does not allow for the type of finish that can be gotten on fine-grained marble (p. 15). Her point that soft stone could have been carved by amateurs allows us to wonder whether the distinction between sculptor and client was relevant (p. 15). In this case of worshippers cre- ating their own devotional images or votives, for example, we could imagine a greater range of invention and a personal relationship with the deity represented or invoked by the image. This supports Greg Woolf's thesis about provincial cult imagery constructing a personal religious identity (p. 142). Woolf's essay, "Seeing Apollo in Roman Gaul and Germany" (pp. 139-152), suggests how the imagery diverges from myth and texts, and exploited relationships with cults in Rome without resorting to direct imitation.

Ian Ferris' "The Hanged Men Dance: Barbarians in Trajanic Art" (pp. 53-68), notes the differences in the representation of the victims of empire on the Column of Trajan, the Arch at Benevento, and the Tropaeum at Adamklissi. The comparison among the Trajanic monuments suggests the complexity of the nature of propaganda that was modulated to reach its audience in the capital or abroad. Another essay also looks at elite art in the form of tombs erected in Ghirza in Libya in the fourth century. David Mattingly ("Family Values: Art and Power at Ghirza in the Libyan Pre-Desert," pp. 153-170) observes that the most important families commemorated their dead with imagery redolent of power and pres- tige. The motivation to display status, of course, is Roman but the specific forms of commemoration reflect the local culture. The analysis of the tombs and their relief sculpture indicates the "ways in which the adoption of Romanized style also facilitated the continuation of indigenous traditions" (p. 154). Thus the concept of imitation has been refined so that it embraces a variety of cultural processes beyond that of mere copying.

Two essays look to the Roman east and explore the decoration of private and public architecture, houses and theaters. Shelly Hales ("The Houses of Antioch: A Study of the Domestic Sphere in the Imperial Near East," pp. 171-191) analyzes the role of the Greek heritage for the elite of Antioch who saw themselves as guardians of Alexander's empire. Zahra Newby ("Art and Identity in Asia Minor," pp. 192-213) questions the meanings of the Greek past under Roman rule in her essay on the theater reliefs at Nysa. In the east-

612 International Journal ~ the Classical Tradition / Spring 2006

ern empire, differences between Greece and Rome were exploited although the common ground between the two was constantly being accommodated. Gender is also explored in the contributions by Ren6 Rodgers ("Female Representation in Roman Art: Feminising the Provincial 'Other," pp. 69-93) and Miranda Aldhouse Green ("Poles Apart? Percep- tions of Gender in Gallo-British Cult-lconography," pp. 95-118). The former begins with the concept of "the other" in representations of barbarians (also covered by Ferris [see above]), and moves to a discussion of Cleopatra and feminine personifications in Roman art, all of which locate the female on the fringes of empire. Miranda Aldhouse Green argues that cult imagery in Gaul and Britain expressed resistance to Rome, and discusses images of deities associated with Romanitas and "'Gallitas'" that may have subverted traditional notions of masculinity and authority. Finally, Martin Henig ("The Captains and the Kings Depart," pp. 119-138) provides a historical account of Roman Britain and an epilogue to the volume that relates his personal and professional involvement in this rapidly developing field. Although some of the contributions are uneven in treatment or depth, the volume as a whole is recommended to anyone interested in provocative thinking about Roman art in the empire and its provinces.

Eve D'Ambra Department of Art

Vassar College

Kevin Butcher, Roman Syria and the Near East (London: The British Museum Press/l ,os Angeles: Getty Publications 2003), 472 pp.

Zielpublikum des Autors ist nach eigenen Angaben (7) der ,interested non-specialist'. Dabei handelt es sich um ein bescheidenes understatement. Denn dieses Buch mag sich nicht zuletzt durch seine lebendige sprachliche Darstellungsweise in der Tradition sog. popul~irwissenschaftlicher Literatur verstehen, ist aber ft/r jeden Spezialisten, der sich mit der Geschichte und/oder Arch~iologie des antiken Syrien besch~iftigt, eine Fundgrube anregender Ideen und n6tzlicher Querverweise. Dies gilt umso mehr, als es bisher zwar eine F611e detaillierter und z. T. entlegen publizierter Untersuchungen zu einzelnen The- men gibt, aber eigentlich keine zusammenfassende Darstellung einer Kulturgeschichte des r6mischen Syrien. Genau letzteres aber ist das Anliegen und das groge Verdienst dieses Buches.

In einer Einleitung definiert und begrenzt der Autor sein Thema: Unter ,r6misch' versteht er die Zeit vonde r Einrichtung der r6mischen Provinz Syrien durch Pompeius (64 v. Chr.) bis zur muslimischen Eroberung (Schlacht am Yarmuk 636 n. Chr.). Dabei gilt als ,early Roman' die Zeit von Augustus bis Diocletian, als ,late Roman' die Zeit danach. Als ,Syrien' versteht der Autor den grogsyrischen Raum, d. h. im Kern das heutige Syrien und den Libanon, abet auch Teile der Ttirkei und des Iraq sowie Jordanien und Israel/ Palestina. Dieser Raum ist geologisch-geographisch in drei grotRe Zonen gegliedert: den Ktistenstreifen mit den dahinter liegenden hohen Bergketten, die das Hinterland wie eine Barriere abschirmen, dann die nord-s~id verlaufenden fruchtbaren Stromebenen des Jordan- bzw. Orontesgrabens und als drittes schlief~lich 6stlich davon die Steppenzone bis zum Euphrat. In diesem Raum, den der Autor mit Recht als die Grundlage historischer Wirklichkeiten versteht, und in dem oben eingegrenzten Zeitraum hat sich eine Vielfalt lokaler, regional ganz unterschiedlicher Einheiten entwickelt. Auf diese haben drei ausw~ir- tige Grof~m~ichte besonders eingewirkt: Rom, die Parther und die Sasaniden.

Book Reviews 613

Vor dieser zeitlichen, geographischen und politischen Folie breitet der Autor seine detaillierten Beobachtungen und Uberlegungen zu einer Kulturgeschichte Syriens aus, wobei er den arch~ologischen Quellen besondere Bedeutung zumisst. Da kommen nicht nur Denkm~ler der monumentalen Architektur und Urbanistik zu Wort, wie Kult-, Grab- und Profanbauten, sondern auch j/ingste Ergebnisse von Ausgrabungen und Surveys, augerdem Erzeugnisse der Mosaikkunst und Wandmalerei, der Stein- und Terrakottaplas- tik, der Keramik- und Glasproduktion sowie insbesondere der Miinzpr~gung.

In vier grogen Abschnitten mit insgesamt 10 Unterkapiteln sp/irt der Autor sensi- bel der Auseinandersetzung zwischen r6mischer Herrschaft und einheimischen Klien- telfiirsten bzw. Stadtstaaten nach und zeigt die Reaktionen bzw. Folgen auf, die sich daraus ergeben, und die sich in Infrastruktur und Wirtschaft, in Handel und Verkehr, in Kunst und Architektur, in Religion und Kult bis hin zum Aufstieg des Christentums, sowie in anderen sozio-kulturellen Bereichen bis hin zu Trachtgewohnheiten ablesen lassen. Die Darstellung folgt nicht der regional-geographischen Gliederung des Raumes, auch nicht einer chronologischen Abfolge. Vielmehr sind die Abschnitte und Kapitel the- matisch nach inhaltlichen Fragestellungen strukturiert. Dabei sind alle Kapitel vom Autor als inhaltliche Einheit verstanden, was schon durch die verschrankte Nummerierung der Abschnitts- und Kapiteliiberschriften zum Ausdruck kommt.

Eines der Hauptanliegen des Buches ist die Sensibilisierung des Lesers auf ein in den verschiedenen Regionen des r6mischen Syrien zu unterschiedlichen Zeiten ganz unter- schiedliches lokales Identit~tsbewusstsein der Menschen. Dieses Identit~tsbewusstsein ist in der Polaritat bzw. Symbiose von Wandel einerseits und Kontinuitat andererseits, von lokaler Tradition und zugleich Hellenisierung bzw. Romanisierung verankert und wird in allen Bereichen historischer Wirklichkeiten sichtbar. Dutch die subtile Analyse historischer Quellen und archaologischer Denkmaler zeigt der Autor die Hintergr/,inde auf, warum von einer ,syrischen Kultur' und einer ,syrischen Identitat' in dem untersuchten Zeitraum eigentlich nicht die Rede sein kann, dass sich vielmehr lokale Identit/iten in unterschiedlichen Bereichen zu erkennen geben. Die Alternative ,East or West' stellt sich eigentlich nicht, vielmehr werden die Hintergr/inde deutlich, warum die agierenden Menschen ,,aktive Teilnehmer in einem Netzwerk sozialer Beziehungen sind mit der Fahigkeit, kulturelle Elemente unterschiedlicher Herkunft ftir sich selbst zu adaptieren" (S. 17, Ubersetzung des Rezensenten). Ganz/ihnlich hat Paul Veyne kiirzlich lokales Iden- tit~tsverstandnis im kaiserzeitlichen Palmyra beschrieben (vgl. Paul Veyne, ,,Pr6face', in: G6rard Degeorge, Palmyre, m~tropole caravani~re, 2. Aufl. [Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 2001] 22; vgl. auch A. Schmidt-Colinet, ,,Palmyrenische Grabkunst als Ausdruck lokaler Identitat(en): Fallbeispiele", in: ders. (Hrsg.), Lokale Identitditen in Randgebieten des rOmis- chen Reiches. Symposium Wiener Neustadt 2003 [Wien: Phoibos Verlag, 2004] 193f.).

Auswahl und Gewichtung der Themen und Fragestellungen sowie des zur Argu- mentation herangezogenen Materials sind notgedrungen subjektiv, was den Wert des Buches keineswegs schmalert. Dass der Autor bewusst vor allem Denkm~iler heranzieht, die ihm auch durch Autopsie bekannt sind, macht einen besonderen Reiz aus. Die zahlrei- chen Abbildungen und Karten verstehen sich nicht nur als Illustra~ionen zum Text, son- der erganzen diesen, nicht zuletzt dutch die ausf6hrlichen Bildunterschriften.

Bei dem nach Themen geg|iederten Gesamtaufbau des Buches ergeben sich vielfache Querverweise und lassen sich Wiederholungen nicht vermeiden. Folglich werden auch verschiedene Aspekte etwa eines Denkmals an unterschiedlicher Stelle im Text behandelt und so aus ihrem urspriinglichen ,kontextuellen' Zusammenhang gel6st. Als Beispiel seien nur die Skulpturen und die Architektur des Belheiligtums von Palmyra zitiert: 282 Abb.122; 312 Abb. 142; 349 Abb. 159; 361f. Abb. 170.171.


Zu den einzelnen Seiten bzw. Kapileln finden sich am Ende des Buches Anmerkun- gen mit einer Auswahlbibiiographie. Dieses System macht dem Leser eine rasche Orien- tierung zu einzelnen Orten nicht leicht. Die bibliographischen Hinweise spiegeln in der Regel die communis opinio der Wissenschaft auf dem neuesten Forschungsstand wider. Kontroversen werden aufgezeigt. Erg/inzend seien am Beispiel ,Palmyra' nur einige Mar- ginalien nachgetragen: Zu 59 Abb. 18: FOr die Existenz eines Palastes der Zenobia unter den sp/itantiken Thermen gibt es nach wie vor keine arch/iologische Evidenz. - Zu 184ff. (Karawanenhandel nach indien/China) und 211f. (Textilien): A. Schmidt-Colinet - A. Stauffer - Kh. al-As'ad, Die Textilien aus Pahnyra. Neue und alte Funde, Damaszener For- schungen 8 (Mainz: Philipp yon Zabern, 2000). - Zu 245ff: Die Chronologie der S/iulen- strat~e yon Palmyra ist nach wie vor kontrovers. - Zu 330: Spindel und Spinnrocken in den H/inden der Frauen auf palmyrenischen Loculusreliefs sind nicht einfach als ,,den hel- ]enisierten Betrachfem ganz vertraute Zeichen der weibIicbe Rolle im Haushalt" zu verstehen, sondern als Zeichen der Herrin des Hause, die buchst~iblich die Produktionsmittel f6r die Textilherstellung in der Hand halt; vgl. Schmidt-Colinet - Stauffer - al-As'ad, Textilien a. O. 51 mit Anm. 198. - Zur palmyrenischen Grabarchitektur (299ff.): A. Schmidt- Colinet, Das Tempelgrab Nr. 36 in Pahnyra. Studien zur Pahnyrenischen Grabarchitektur und ihrer Ausstattung, Damaszener Forschungen 4 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1992).

Das Buch ist das Gegenteil vort einem ReisefLihrer, der knappe Information schnell liefern will. Dieses Buch will in Ruhe und aufmerksam gelesen werden. Es ist ein gro~ar- tiger und sehr komplexer Entwurf einer umfassenden Kulturgeschichte des r6mische Syrien.

Andreas Schmidt-Colinet Institut for Klassische Archaologie

Universit/it Wien

Louis H. Feldman, "Remember Amalek!'" Vengeance, Zealotry, and Group Destruction in the Bible According to Philo, Pseudo-Philo, and Josephus, Monographs of the Hebrew Union College 31 (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2004), X + 272 pp.

Amalek and the Amalekites play a relatively small part in the Hebrew Bible. But that part has a powerful resonance, and it poses some painful questions. The Amalekites ambushed the children of Israel when they were weary and weak in the course of the exodus, thus rousing the fury of the Lord. As a conseqv, ence, God announced to Moses that he would blot out the memory of Amalek forever. The directive was implemented when the Lord spoke to Saul through Samuel demanding that the Amalekites be destroyed root and branch, every man, woman, and child, cattle, sheep, and other ani- mals (Exod. 17:8-16; Deut. 25:17-19; I Sam. 15:3). The god of Israel, in short, issued an order for genocide.

The implications for an understanding of the Hebrew deity are large. And the forebodings for modern instances of genocide are chilling. Louis Feldman, the most senior and distinguished scholar of Jews in the Greco-Roman period, does not draw out those implications, nor does he call attention to the forebodings. But the messages can be read between the lines. Amalek, though its appearance in the biblical text is brief and relatively inconspicuous, serves as a metaphor for wickedness and a prod for the most dras- tic of divine injunctions, one that calls God's own justice into question. It did at ieast trouble subsequent Jewish commentators in ancient post-biblical writings. That constitutes

Book Reviezos 615

Feldman's principal subject in this new book. How could one recast dreadful pronouncements of this sort so as to render them acceptable, legitimate, and justifiable?

Feldman dwells primarily on Philo and Josephus, to a lesser extent on Pseudo-Philo's Biblical Antiquities (the relevant material is fairly brief), and occasionally on rabbinic writers, all of whom sought to make genocidal pronouncements more palatable. The Amalekite topic itself forms just a part of the work. Feldman treats other comparably troublesome acts by the god of Israel, like the Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the killing of first-born Egyptians, and the directive to eliminate the seven nations of Canaan-- all of which elicited tortured efforts by Philo, Josephus, and others to salvage the reputa- tion of divine justice.

As Feldman shows, the efforts varied in scope and form, often requiring delicate bal- ancing acts, dodges, or mere silence. The book supplies a valuable examination of the means whereby later Jewish writers endeavored to clean up messy and embarrassing biblical episodes.

Is there consistency in the manner in which these writers endeavored to soften the impact of genocidal stories upon the repute of Israelites and their god? One would be hard pressed to find any. Philo, for instance, provides his most comprehensive treatment of the Amalekite episode in the De Vita Mosis, but avoids the term Amalekites altogether, substi- tuting instead "Phoenicians," a vague reference to those dwelling in Canaan (pp. 18-20). That would hardly seem to be the most effective rebuttal. Pseudo-Philo, by contrast, unabashedly delivers God's horrific command for destruction and does not bother to offer a justification (pp. 23-25). Josephus even sharpens the order by having it direct Israelites to slaughter everyone, regardless of age, and to begin the massacre with women and infants. No defense is offered apart from God's hatred of the Amalekites (pp. 38, 43). Sim- ilarly, Josephus gives an unsatisfactory explanation for the insistence on wiping out the seven nations of Canaan: to maintain the ancestral constitution of Israel (pp. 145-146). Would it not have been easier to omit the episode?

Feldman tries to find a recurrent motif in the rewriting of these troubling incidents: they served to counter hostile perceptions of Jews. Josephus in particular kept a wary eye on his Roman patrons. The interpretation, however, seems strained and forced, is Jose- phus' emphasis on the booty acquired by the Israelites in their crushing of the Amalekites really designed to answer pagan charges that contemporary Jews were beggars (p. 35)? That is a real stretch. Did Josephus allude to the Sodomites' anti-social behavior as reason for their obliteration in order to reassure pagans who otherwise perceived Jews as mis- anthropic (pp. 125-126)? It is hard to imagine much effect in such an indirect reassurance. And Feldman himself has to concede that no gentile writer ever mentions the directives to eliminate Amalekites or Canaanites (p. 62). Philo and Josephus may have been embar- rassed by such directives--but hardly because of pagan criticism.

Much in this reconstruction depends on the equivalence in Jewish writings of Esau, grandfather of Amalek, with Rome. If that identification prevailed in public conscious- ness, then it might indeed be incumbent upon Josephus to moderate the image and walk a fine line in order to avoid offending Romans. So, in Feldman's view, Josephus mitigated criticism of Esau to appease Romans and even underscored Esau's filial devotion to play upon the Roman notion of pietas (pp. 71-73). Would Roman readers really have noticed? That Jewish writers even equated Esau and Rome in this period is itself highly dubious. The first attestation of that equation comes in rabbinic writers ascribing it (and even here obliquely) to Rabbi Akiva of the late 1 st or early 2nd century c~ (pp. 65-66). We do not know that Josephus even knew of it, let alone felt the need to deal with it (p. 67). The con- struct runs into particular difficulty when Feldman seeks to account for Josephus' rela-


tively generous t reatment of Esau (a nod to the Romans) on the one hand and his pejora- tive reference to him as a bastard (to reassure Jews that he had not complete ly sold out to the Romans) on the other (p. 217). Are we really to believe that Josephus expected each segment of his readership to find only what he wanted it to find in his text?

Other specifics can also be questioned. Does manipula t ion of the Amalekite tale bear any relation to the issue of intermarriage (pp. 23, 220)? it is not easy to see. Did rewrit ings of the biblical massacre of Shechemites by Israelites who avenged the rape of Dinah really arise out of desire to fend off pagan criticisms of Jewish proselytism (pp. 161-164)? Such an unders tanding of the text would demand both very perceptive and very malleable readers. Feldman presumes too readily that Philo and Josephus framed their biblical interpretations while peering nervously over their shoulders for possible gentile reactions.

Readers of this journal might wish for more explicit reflections upon the long-term significance of justifying genocide. But the book displays once again Louis Feldman 's keen insights into the remolding of texts by authors who t r immed their sails to the shift- ing winds of history.

Erich S. Gruen Depar tment of Classics

Universi ty of California, Berkeley

Gideon Nisbet, Greek Epigram in the Roma, Empire: MartialE Forgotten Rivals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), XVIiI + 237 pp.

Gideon Nisbet 's Greek Epigram in the Roman Empire: Martial's Forgotten Rivals joins a spate of recent books and articles that exhibit renewed interest on the par t of classicists in Greek epigram. This phenomenon is linked in large part to the appearance in the last two decades of Peter Allan Hansen 's Carmina Ep(~,,raphica Graeca, Stauber and Merkelbach 's Steiuep~e, rat,me l , tS dem y, riechischen Osten, and the publicat ion of P Mil Vogl VIII 309 by Bastianini, Gallazzi and Austin.l However , scholarly exci tement over Greek epigram has been restricted largely to that period between circa 300 B.C. and 100 B.C., the first two centuries when epigram is thought to have established itself as a literary, as opposed to merely epigraphical, genre. This is a result, in part, of scholars ' a t tempts to discover the links and ruptures in the epigrammatic tradit ion as it passes from stone to book, and to the excitement generated by the d i scove ry - - and now, pub l ica t ion- -of P Mil Vogl VIII

1. Carmina Epi~,,raphica Graeca Saeculorum VIII-V a.Chr.n., ed. Peter Allan Hansen, Texte und Kom- mentare 12 (Berolini; Novi Eboraci: W. de Gruyter, 1983).--Carmina Elu~,,raphica Graeca Saeculi IV a.Chr.n., Carmina Epigraphica Graeca 2, ed. ldem, Texte und Kommentare 15 (ibid., 1989).-- Steinepi~,,ramme aus dem ,~riechischen Osten, eds. Reinhold Merkelbach and Josef Stauber (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1998).--Editio Maior: Posidippo di Pella: Epis, r,unmi (P.MiI.Voy, l. VIII 309), eds. Guido Bastianini e Claudio Gallazzi con la collaborazione di Colin Austin, Papiri dell'Universit5 degli studi di Milano 8 = II Filarete: Pubblicazioni della Facolta di Lettere e filosofia dell' Universith degli studi di Milano 200, Sezione di papirologia (Milano: Edizioni Universitarie di I,ettere Economia l)iritto, 2001); Editio Minor: Posidippi Pellaei quae supersunt omnia, eds. Colin Austin and Guido Bastianini, Biblioteca classica 3 (ibid., 2002). (On the latter see, in this journal, the review by Hugh 1,1oyd-Jones, IJCT 9 [2002-2003] pp. 612-616, and cf. the review article by Frank Nisetich, "The Pleasures of Epigram: 'New' and 'Old' Posidipp- pus," IJCT12 [2005-2006] pp. 245-268.)

Book Reviews 617

309, a Hellenistic-era papyrus that seems to contain many once-missing epigrams of the famous first- or second-generation literary epigrammatist Posidippus of Pella. If nothing else, Nisbet's book reminds us that the literary history of Greek epigram reaches far beyond the Hellenistic period and that it in fact flourished in the Roman empire, even as Martial was composing and performing his own epigrams in Latin.

Nisbet, however, does much more than remind us of this important fact. Greek Epi- gram in the Roman Empire, in fact, gives us a fresh reading of Lucillius, Nicarchus, Ammi- anus, and Lucianus, as well as some lesser epigrammatic lights from the first and second centuries A.D. Equally importantly, Nisbet calls into question received opinion about many facets of these epigrammatists--biographical detail, poetic ability, their place in the tradition, to mention but a few--and often successfully replaces that received opinion with a case for reading these epigrammatists in a new light, one that is more receptive to the kind of gaffs and gambits that, apparently, appealed to a certain readership of their age. As Nisbet often points out in his treatment of these poets, if professional classical philologists didn't kill Homer, they sure managed to beat the Roman-era Greek skoptic epigrammatists to within an inch of their lives by robbing their poems of the humor they contain and posing literary-critical questions of them more appropriate to the poetry of another age. By asking a new set of questions, one more commensurate with the social, cultural, and political Sitz im Leben of the skoptic poets, Nisbet not only restores their humor, he achieves what too few of us ever achieve in our scholarly output, a work whose light-hearted, often cutting, but always purposeful, humor matches that of the subject of his book. Nisbet's discourse is sprinkled with hilarious quips like this--

"Epigram as literary genre and epigram as inscriptional form are no longer an item, but they still cast knowing glances at one another in public, and enjoy the occasional one-night stand for old times' sake" (47-48)--

which not only reflects the rollicking humor of skoptic epigram, but also makes his book a fun (gasp!) read. Even if someone's scholarly interests bear little or not at all on skoptic epigram, Nisbet's Greek Ep~%,ram is worth reading "just to see how it could be done."

Important to Nisbet's argument is his location of skoptic epigram in the male-dominated world of the symposium where humorous and cutting jibes tossed off between fellow symposiasts create a "social bonding." This social cohesion expresses itself, in the case of skoptic epigram, in a certain male bravado cum scurrilousness that goes after character types--skinny intellectuals, drunken women of ill repute, cowards, misers, brown- nosers and emperors' pets--using "tricks" that the epigrammatists "steal" (16) from Aristophanic Old Comedy, including "surrealism, parodic intertextuality, populist anti- intellectualism, mucky jokes." (15) But since we must despair of earlier scholars' opti- mistic location of the skoptic epigrammatists within a specific biographical narrative (more on this below), this is about all we have to go on as a beginning point. But even that has its problems.

Nisbet characterises his treatment of the epigrams as a suspicious reading, and this type of suspicious reading, he contends, is what is lacking from earlier handling of the epigrammatists. Put another way, "Where reference to 'tradition' is not enough to explain the features of a poem--and it rarely is enough--we have to get ingenious." (5) Of course, ingenuity can go overboard--and Nisbet is aware of this (5~)- -but on the whole, Nisbet's avoidance of over-determination from over-reading results in interpretations that, if we might quibble with a detail here and there, are by and large compelling. Take, for instance, his interpretation of A[nthc)logial P[alatina] 9.572 (Lucillius). (37-47) The


reader of this opening poem for Lucillius' second book of epigrams will certainly recog- nise i t--and congratulate himself for this coup of recognition--as containing a typical Alexandrian gambit that eschews Homer (and knock-offs of him), showing a preference for the Hesiodic. But the suspicious reader must look for something else. It couldn't be that simple; and it isn't. Lucillius is playing a trick, and it's this, that he "has reinstated the epic mode only to make its reversal more pointed; what we have experienced here is a small masterpiece of misdirection." (46) The reader, trapped into understanding the poem as a typical Alexandrian priamel, finds out in the last line that the poem is about nothing more than chump-change, a mere chalkdn, and the poet implicates both himself and Nero in the cheap literary value of skoptic epigram. Those of a suspicious bent derive reading pleasure from guessing the game that Lucillius is up to as he toys with the naive reader, and from "watching a textual ambush unfold." (47)

What of the often tasteless and, frankly, outright disgusting epigrams of the skoptic poets? While Nisbet acknowledges how repulsive they are, he does a good job, 1 think, of not letting his lack of comfort with them get in the way of his readings even though it leaves one feeling less comfortable about the whole skoptic project. In other words, Nis- bet is perfectly happy taking the poems at face value and not rereading them in such a way as to fit the epigrammatists and their readers into a bowdlerized mold. One such perfectly tasteless poem is Nicarchus' tripartition poem (A.R 11.328), in which a Hermo- genes, Cleobulus and an 'T' voice, as Poseidon, Hades, and Zeus, divide up for sexual purposes the body of an old woman, whose sexual organs are described by Homeric terms for the various parts of the kosmos inhabited by the three divine brothers--a creative but nasty borrowing from Homer. In the poem, we recognize the stock-figure of the old woman and the over-the-top surrealist comedy of Aristophanes. So what to make of the poet and his audience? Are they, too, being type cast? One could only wish it. How- ever, in Nisbet's reading, where the reader, co-opted as the 'T' voice of the poet shifts "from passive to active complicity," (86) filling successively the roles of "accessory, voyeur, and finally choreographer," (87) there is no room for such a kind reading; and Nicarchus "constructs his reader as plain filthy-minded (and male)." (90)

One problem that arises from time to time in Nisbet's treatment of the epigrammatists is the inevitable tension between his rejection of earlier scholars' location of the poets in specific times and places and the necessity of reading at least some of their poems (such as A.P. 11.230 and 11.180, both by Ammianus) as speaking from real biographical situations. This gets Nisbet into trouble, for example, when on the same page he rejects attempting to "fill out Polemon's 'unauthorized biography' from hints and snippets such as these" and states that !t "makes sense to see [Ammianus] as Polemon's contemporary." (159) On the next page he answers his question directed at A.P ll.229, "Is it Polemon?" with a confessed aporia, only to continue by interpreting the poem as speaking of Pole- mon's gout. As attractive as it is to have things both ways, a decision has to be made, and in spite of his rejection of the biographical, Nisbet finds himself time and again constructing real-life situations to which the skoptic epigrams and their authors correspond.

As a last point--and this, unfortunately, may be viewed more as a comment about the book that Nisbet did not set out to write--there are a handful of places where a too breezy approach to the epigrammatic tradition (14-15) leads to a short-shrifting of important Hellenistic precedents. Two such passages occur on page 16, where Nisbet is attempting to demonstrate the novelty of skoptic epigram. A reference to Callimachus' famous poem (53 Glow]-P[age] = 23 Pf[eiffer] = A.P. 7.471) on the suicide of the Ambraciot Cleombrotus would surely establish an epigrammatic-canonical connection for the skoptic poets' use of the "borrowed devices" of "paradox, typology, delaying tactics." Indeed,

Book Reviews 619

while what Nisbet says about the skoptic poems' capture of the mood of the Second Sophistic is true, there's also a way in which they build on an established epigrammatic tradition. And the late second-century B.C. Messenian Alcaeus' poem on Philip (1 G-P = A.P. 9.518) already contains the germs of what's observable of skoptic epigram: its existence as "an accessible and responsive form--perhaps even a popular form and, on occasion, a political one." Finally, literary epigram's on-again, off-again dalliance with inscriptional epigram could be used, for example, in the discussion of Lucillius' poem on Numenius (A.P. 11.388) (77). The poem plays nicely off the sepulchral-inscriptional commonplace of children as an ~:)~r~ for old-age.

That said, the freshness of Nisbet's approach compounded with a humorous approach to his subject make Greek Epi~,ram in the Roman Empire a thoroughly enjoyable book, one that makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of skoptic epigram.

Jon Steffen Bruss The University of the South

Sewanee, TN, USA

D. Magnus Ausonius, Mosella, Bissula, Brie~vechsel mit Paulinus Nolanus, Herausgegeben und tibersetzt von Paul Dr/iger, ser. Sammlung Tusculum (D6sseldorf; Z6rich: Artemis & Winkler Verlag, 2002), 320 pp.

Ce choix dans l'oeuvre vaste et trhs diverse d'Ausone est fort restreint, et il n'est nulle part justifi6. Que la Moselle en fasse partie n'est pas 6tonnant, car c'est 6videmment l'oeuvre de loin la plus connue de ce pohte. Le bref cycle de Bissula (une introduction en prose de moins d'une page et six pi6ces ne totalisant mame pas 50 vers) a la r6putation 6pic6e d'6voquer la passion d 'un barbon pour une jeunesse exotique. Quan ta l'6change 6pistolaire avec Paulin de Nole, il constitue l'une des places dans le riche dossier du conflit entre la culture paienne agonisante et le christianisme triomphant.

Selon l'usage de la collection, le volume s'ouvre directement sur l'original latin et la traduction allemande, face ~ face, des trois textes retenus (pp. 8-141). Un bref Appendice (pp. 145-148) enregistre les variations du texte latin adopt6 par rapport aux 6ditions de base utilis6es (Peiper pour Ausone, Hartel pour Paulin), et ne remplace 6videmment pas un vrai apparat critique, ffit-il tr6s maigre. L'appareil de notes est en revanche important (pp. 149-250). Vient pour finir l'introduction, ~ savoir une pr6sentation g6n6rale d'Ausone, de sa vie et de ses oeuvres, avec ensuite une focalisation sur les trois ouvrages retenus, et une bibliographie (pp. 251-320; il y manque l'6dition de Souchay, 1730, la meilleure des anciennes, la seule qui ait conserv6 de la valeur dans la collection ,,ad usum Delphini-, et dont la num6rotation est a la base des citations dans le Thesaurus).

La traduction allemande est qualifi6e de ,,Kernstiick der vorliG~enden Ausgabe>, (p. 308). Elle est en prose, l'6diteur s'6tant oppos6 a la reprise d 'une traduction en vers publi6e ant6rieurement par D(r/iger). Elle se caract6rise avant tout par une grande fid61it6. Les textes retenus ne sont le plus souvent pas faciles, Ausone et Paulin 6tant l'un et l'autre de grands maitres du style amphigourique qui passait pour le summum de l'616gance a leur 6poque. Bien des passages peuvent laisser perplexe. Avec une grande honn~tet6, D., dans ces cas-lh, cite les traductions de ses pr6d6cesseurs, et justifie ses choix. On apprend du reste que les endroits d61icats ont tous 6t6 discut6s au cours d 'un s6minaire sp6cialis6 qui s'est poursuivi pendant plusieurs semestres ~ l'Universit6 de Tr6ves. Les notes 6toff6es 6clairent les innombrables allusions litt6raires, historiques, mythologiques dont Ausone,


atteint d ' une forme suraigu6 d 'a lexandrinisme, 6maille ses vers. Le catalogue des poissons est comment6 avec une minutie qui ne laissera rien h dOsirer au plus passionn6 des ichtyologistes, celui des villas bordant la Moselle au plus minut ieux des architectes, celui des affluents du fleuve au plus 6rudit des g6ographes.

qui sont destinOes cette t raduct ion et ces notes? je doute q u ' u n lecteur m o d e r n e cultiv6, mais ignorant le latin et les convent ions stylistiques de l 'antiquit6 tardive, puisse v ra iment goOter une t raduct ion don t le m6ri te p remier est de gu ide r dans sa lecture un latiniste un peu perdu dans les hyperba tes faisant le grand 6cart, les emplois lexi- cographiques risquOs, les images insolites, les pOriodes souvent interminables, pour ne rien dire des subtilitOs techniques en tout genre, qui caractOrisent la Moselle. Les textes retenus dans le vo lume sont, chacun en leur genre, typiques de leur temps, mais n 'en consti tuent guOre les plus sOduisants fleurons. L'extraordinaire virtuosit6 d 'Ausone , sa maltrise parfaite de tous les enseignements de la rhOtorique, ne cachent pas son m an q u e de souffle po6tique, son incapacit6 d ' expr imer des sent iments m@me sincOres en se dOpartissant des lieux communs les plus 6cul6s, qui s 'enchainent avec une implacable rOgularitO. De l'ars, il en a h revendre, quan t~ l'ingenium, il n 'y en a pas plus chez lui que de l 'eau dans le dOsert. Le dossier des 6changes 6pistolaires entre Ausone (7 lettres) et Paulin (2 lettres), centr6 sur un vrai dObat, est aussi dOcevant. Ausone ne se d6part i t pas de gracieusetOs trop prOvisibles, Paulin expr ime sans s'en expliquer un engagement chr6- tien qui tOmoigne davantage d'intOgrisme que de charitO: c'est un dia logue de sourds, qui n 'est mOme pas argumentO, comme l'est le dObat entre S y m m aq u e et Ambroise. Bref, je ne vois pas ce livre utilis6 ailleurs que dans des sOminaires universitaires, et lh encore, j'ai rues doutes. En tan temps oh les 6tudiants en latin sont de plus en plus rares et mal prO- paros, est-ce lh une nourr i ture apte h les sOduire? Pour ne rien dire des grands classiques, il y a dans l 'antiquit6 tardive bien des textes plus at t rayants que ceux-ci, du moins ~ notre gofit actuel.

Pour ses contemporains en revanche, et durant la fin de l 'antiquit6, tout le moyen fige et assez rOcemment encore, Ausone a pass6 pour le phOnix des h6tes de ces bois (cf. pp. 300- 307: Rezeption; dans l'Ore prOfuhrmanienne, on disait Nachleben). Symmaque pousse la flagornerie jusqu'h le comparer h Virgile (~t~ist. 1,14,5), et t rouve a ses 6crits le charme d 'un miel tullien (ibid. 1,31,1). Mais peut-@tre se moque-t-il quand mOme un peu de lui quand il dit qu'il a trouv6 plus des poissons dans sa Moselh' qu'h sa table (ibid. 1,14,4). Longue est la thOorie des admirateurs de ce poOme, considOr6 par les gens du pays comme leur 6popOe nationale, dont quelques vers sont gravOs dans l'escalier de l 'h6tel de ville de Metz. La correspondance d 'Ausone et de Paulin constitue un ,<must,~ dans tout travail consacr6 au conflit religieux de la fin de l'antiquitO, e t a fait l 'objet d 'une 6dition sOparOe (Labriolle) et de nombreuses 6tudes. Quant au cycle de Bissula, il attire et en mOme temps dOqoit les amateurs de gauloiseries: Souchay ne l'a re@me pas class6 dans son appendice, avec pagi- nation spOciale, intitul6 ,obscoena e textu Ausoniano resecta,, chari tablement compil6 pour faire gagner du temps aux adolescents bou tonneux et aux vieillards libidineux. Mais il a inspir6 un roman ~t un d6nomm6 Felix Dahn (1834-1912) intitul6 Bissula, que D. range dans le ,Trivialgenus Professorenrornan, (? p. 305). Ausone y est rajeuni, et la jeune SuOve campOe en Lolita avant la lettre.

Je suis ainsi amen0 h ment ionner pour finir deux interprOtations nouvel les proposOes par D. A) II cherche h montrer que le cycle de Bissula a un caractOre priapOen (pp. 282-286). Les arguments qu'il allhgue n 'ont pas tous la mOme force. Le plus f rappant est sans dou te que les deux premiers vers du second poOme d 'Ausone imitent de trOs pros les deux premiers vers du premier pobme de la collection des Priapea. Qu 'Ausone fasse une, ou sans doute mOme plusieurs allusions h ce genre poOtique parait certain, mais il serait excessif

mon sens de pousser le parallOlisme trop loin. Dans les Priapea, la mentula est omni-

Book Reviews 621

prasente, son aspect, ses divers rales consti tuent l 'essentiel de la matiare. Rien de tel chez Ausone, les vers de son cycle sont dapourvus d'obscanitas, ~ moins qu 'on veuille en dacouvrir une, bien cachae, dans le nom mame de la jeune Suave (place 4). D. considare comme certain qu 'un accident macanique nous a privas de la suite du cycle: hypothase certes possible, et surtout commode, qui permet de supposer dans cette pra tendue lacune la prasence d'616ments plus typiquement priapaens, par exemple une piace en vers dits priapaens, comme Catulle 17, aux sous-entendus obscanes transparents. B) Plus convain- cante est sa damonstrat ion de la structure -hebdomadique - de la Moselle: le nom du fleuve compte sept lettres, sept villas sont dacrites en quatorze vers, sept architectes sont nommas en vingt et un vers, le nombre total de vers du poame, 483, est divisible par 7, ce qui donne 69, or 6+9~15, tout comme 4+8+3=15 , etc. etc. 11 est impossible d 'anumarer ici toutes les combinaisons septanaires que D. est parvenu ~ d6celer (pp. 265-271). On sait par ailleurs Ausone amateur de ce genre de petits jeux. I1 montre du reste le bout de l'o- reille en citant comme source les Hebdomades de Varron (305-307). Uastuce la plus amu- sante se cache sans doute dans l '6numaration des quinze poissons: si l 'on dessine de gauche a droite en quinze colonnes atttant de petits cercles rapartis autour d ' un axe central que le nombre de vers consacr6s ~ chaque poisson (3+1+1 +1 + 6 + 9 + 9 + 5 + 5 + 1 + 1 + 1 +3+-4 + 15 [= 65, soit 85-1491), on obtient la s i l h o u e t t e . . , d ' u n poisson!, cf. p. 178. Cela ne prouve cependant pas que la Moselle est de la grande poasie!

Encore une remarque quan t a l 'aspect matariel du volume: son apparence extarieure est la mame que celle des livres de l 'ancienne ~<Tusculum Bacherei,, de Heimeran, mais le papier fin de jadis a fait place a un papier beaucoup plus grossier et raide aboutissant un 6paisseur de 3 cm pour 320 p. (par comparaison, l'Anthologiegrecque I a 1, 2 cm d'apaisseur pour 700 p.). En outre, les pages, du moins celles de l 'exemplaire dont je dispose, sont mal centraes, avec des marges intarieures de 1,8 cm et extarieures de 0,6 cm. C'est dire que la sarie a perdu son aristocratique 616gance.

Francois Paschoud Dapartement des sciences de l 'antiquit6

Universit6 de Genave

Jennifer Speake and Thomas (;. Bergin (eds.), Encyclopedia qfthe Renaissance and the Refor- mation, Revised Edition (New York: Facts on File, Inc. 2004 [orig. 1987]), X ,- 550 pp.

There have been a number of recent, important, and useful reference tools for scholars and students of the Renaissance and Reformation, including the monumenta l six- volume Encyclopedia c!f the Renaissance, ed. Paul Grendler (New York: Scribner, 1999), the four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of the Refi~rmation, ed. t tans J. Hillerbrand (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), and the single-volume Oxford Dictionary of the Renais- sance, ed. Gordon Campbell (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). They all have inevitable weaknesses but they are strong in different respects and complement each other. The encyclopedia under review is particularly strong on music and the Refor- mation. It also has a number of interesting and sometimes unusual entries, such as on glass, clocks, costumes, cryptography, numismatics, manuscripts, libraries, furniture, gar- dens, herbals, and food and cooking. Unfortunately, it is riddled with factual errors and inaccuracies and lacunae. It is not clear what audience the encyclopedia is meant to serve. Of its forty contributors, less than half have Ph.Ds and very few have any professional expertise in the Renaissance and Reformation, which becomes abundant ly clear in many of the entries and appended bibliographies for further readings.


The entry on "Humanism," for example, contains a bibliography of thirteen very odd books for further reading. The most glaring absence are any of the classic works on humanism by Paul Oskar Kristeller, who along with Eugenio Garin and Hans Baron (also not listed) defined twentieth-century scholarship on humanism. Only one of Anthony Grafton's books is included. Instead of his Defenders of the Text (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) or Commerce with the Classics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997) or his other books that specifically deal with humanism, we are told to look at his recent collection of essays, Bring out Your Dead: the Past as Revelation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), which contains mostly reprinted reviews from the New York Review of Books that have little to do with humanism. The short entry discusses the dignity of man, textual criticism, history and religion. Among other things, there is no mention of humanist interest in style, rhetoric, or language. A typical sentence is: "The term humanismus itself seems first to have been used by Petrarch and his contemporaries to express the spirit of intellectual freedom by which man asserted his independence from the authority of the Church." (246). The term "humanismus," as Kristeller demon- strated, was first coined in 1808 by a German scholar and never actually used in the Renaissance. ~ It denoted the learning from Greek and Latin Classics in opposition to the practical skills then becoming popular in secondary education. Petrarch himself took lower orders and was very religious. While he criticized corruption in the Church and pompous scholastic philosophers, he lived off of Church benefices and never would have seen himself as a free spirit against the Church.

The entry on "Italian Language" starts off well with an account of the transition from Latin to vernacular constructions but the author then slips into the long outdated nineteenth-century nationalist condemnation of Latin literature. After we are told that Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio assured Tuscan primacy in the vernacular, the next sentence states: "A temporary setback occurred in the first half of the 14th century, however, when humanist devotion to I,atin radically depreciated the vernacular in all fields of learning." Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio's love of Latin certainly did not stop them from writing the Divine Comedy (1306-1321), the Canzoniere (1330-1350), the Filocolo (1336), and other classics of Italian literature. The relationship between Latin and the vernacular is a complex and important subject that demands greater care. 2 As in the humanism entry, this is sloppy and outdated research.

The sections dedicated to art and the illustrations in particular leave much to be desired. Of the sixteen color plates, there is only one Michelangelo: a detail from the Sistine ceiling that is pre-cleaning. In the I,eonardo entry, the author explains how his Last Supper "exemplifies the ideals of High Renaissance Art." No illustration of Leonardo's Last Sup- per is provided, but there is a color image of Andrea del Sarto's version, under which is written: "Less dramatic than Leonardo's version . . . . " There is a separate short entry on the Mona Lisa without cross-reference. The "Mannerism" entry is short and unhelpful. This important style deserves better treatment. John Shearman's foundational Mannerism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967) is also not in the bibliography of further reading. In general the choice of illustrations is extremely eccentric. For example, there is a later

1. Paul Oskar Kristeller, "The Humanist Movement," in: idem, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains, Harper Torchbooks, 1048 (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), 9.

2. On this, see two recent studies: Paul Botley, Latin Translatio~z in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice qf Leonardo Bruni, Gianozzo Manetti, Erasmus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Simon Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence (lb., 2005).

Book Reviews 623

engraved portrait of Raphael rather than one of his works. There are also no illustrations for such a major artist as Titian, whereas we are given a large color plate of Sebastiano del Piombo's Portrait of Clement VII. The historical value of Piombo's portrait would not have been diminished in a smaller black and white picture. The illustration for the perspective entry does not actually explain Alberti's method for constructing perspective but instead shows a mechanical technique for obtaining foreshortening.

The index is limited to proper names. An index of topics would have made it easier to find particular information, which is often only included in indirect entries. For exam- pie, there is no entry for women or marriage. Instead these topics are discussed in one entry on "families." There is no entry or sign post for "disease" but a decent discussion on this topic in the medicine entry. Many of the entries on Italian thinkers focus more on their reception in England than oil them and their works. The short entry on "Machiavelli," for example, does this. Surely, the father of modern political science deserves a little more. Castiglione also receives only one and a half short paragraphs, as do Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici. Cross-references are surprisingly lacking in many places. For example, none of the short entries on Machiavelli, Cervantes, and Castiglione refer to the separate entries on the Prince, Don Quixote, and the Courtier with any cross references.

The short bibliography of "landmark studies" and recent scholarship in the field at the end of the encyclopedia has no organization apart from being alphabetized and offers no explanation of why particular works were chosen. Encyclopedias, textbooks, collections of primary and secondary sources, and specialized studies are listed all together as if the same. It also does not include many essential works. Gordon Campbell 's The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) and J. R. Hale's Concise Encyclopedia of the Italian Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) are listed but more useful research tools, such as Grendler 's Encyclopedia and Hillerbrand's (see above), are not there. The dated New Cambridge Modern History, vols. I-II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957-1958) are listed but not the much more important 1990-91 revised editions with new essays. Mistakes are also rife in the bibliography. Margaret King's Women of tire Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) is not an edited volume but a book she entirely wrote. It is not clear how anybody is supposed to use this bibliography.

Although it has serious problems, the encyclopedia still offers much useful information in a concise and accessible format. The entry on medicine, for example, discusses many popular medical theories of disease and the problem of hygiene. Melancholia is also a detailed entry. "Racism" is an unexpected and informative entry, in which among other things the author discusses Sepulveda and Las Casas' debate over native rights. The entries on "antisemitism" and the "inquistion" are also useful. The encyclopedia's strength seems to lie in the entries on the Reformation. Luther and Erasmus receive sub- stantive treatment, as do the Counter-Reformation and the Jesuits, although Heiko Ober- man and John O'Malley's works are strangely absent from the bibliographies. An interesting feature of the encyclopedia is the inclusion of classical topics, such as "sibyls, "cupid," "Venus," "Hercules," etc. The entry first offers the classical origin and definition, then talks about the topic in Renaissance literature and art. Similarly useful is the inclusion of numerous classical authors and their reception in the Renaissance. There are also decent entries on literary genres, such as comedy, epic, and tragedy.

They obviously put money into this encyclopedia and had some good ideas. But its value is drastically limited by the fact that experts in the fields did not contribute and were not consulted. A "facts on file" encyclopedia should not have been so sloppy and at the very least should have checked its "facts." Students cannot depend on it for consis-


tent coverage of important subjects, accurate entries, illustrations of major monuments, or essential bibliography. Teachers and scholars will still benefit from the convenience of its information but should read that information with a critic's eye and a skeptic's pen.

Anthony E D'Elia Department of History

Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario

Owen Gingerich, The book nobody read: chasing the revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus (New York: Walker & Company 2004), XII + 306 pp.

The book nobody read reminds one of books like Tyrannosaurus rex and ttre crater of doom by Alvarez or Ttre wisdom of bones by Walker and Shipman. It falls in the genre of memoirs of researchers who explain their work and findings to a larger audience. That is, they are not just popularizing their scientific or scholarly results, but also convey a sense of the spirit and flavour of doing research. Gingerich tells with enthusiasm about the excitement of tracing and reading books and manuscripts which have been forgotten for centuries; about the difficulties of gaining access to rich libraries which ward off visitors, for instance the library of the former Soviet Academy of Sciences at Leningrad (presently St. Petersburg); about the puzzles posed by strange handwritings, watermarks, fake bindings, Latinised names, and so many other questions. At times, Gingerich's book even takes on the air of a true detective story, when the copies he is interested in appear to be stolen and his investi- gations help in identifying the thief. All this serves to provide scholarly research with a romantic aura which surely must make it appear attractive to the common reader, even if in real life sources are becoming ever more accessible and research hence ever less exciting.

To readers of this journal, the vagaries of scholarly research will be less of an eye- opener. To them, the book may appeal rather as a report about a for most scholars rather forbidding field: mathematical astronomy. The book makes clear the relevance of such a discipline to general cultural history. The research Gingerich is reporting on is his "great Copernicus chase," his cataloguing of all extant copies of the first and second editions of Nicolaus Copernicus' epoch making work De ivvolutionibus orbium coelestiunt (1543, resp. 1566). In this book, Copernicus offered an emulation of the great classical work on astronomy, M~gali' syntaxis or Ahnagest by Klaudios Ptolemaios. Copernicus' book has remained a milestone in science because of his defense of a heliocentric system, whereby the earth is moving on its axis and around the sun. This theory, which to contemporaries of course appeared rather bizarre, was the starting point of a huge debate in astronomy and in natural philosophy and in this way contributed considerably to the growth of modern science. One should not forget, however, that Copernicus offered considerably more. On other points as well, he completely revised ancient astronomical theories.

What makes Gingerich's cataloguing enterprise worth the effort is that many owners annotated their copies. These annotations concern not just owner's names, motto's or general statements. De revolutionibus is a work of mathematical astronomy, primarily read by practicing astronomers. Working on and with the book, they added all kinds of calcu- lations and corrections. Often, the manuscript notes of important teachers of astronomy were copied into many other copies. Hence, a detailed investigation of extant copies and their annotations is revealing not just about who read the book and how widely it was known, but also on the question of how Copernicus' work was read and interpreted during the first half-century after its appearance. In many cases, it was not heliocentrism which was deemed to be the central issue of the book. Circular motion, cosmic harmony

Book Reviews 625

and all kinds of corrections on classical theories took pride of place. Besides, the way annotations were copied or added gives a unique insight into the workings of scholarly networks in the sixteenth century--and into the effects of censorship as well. Another typical form of annotations are the corrections which were added on the order of the Congregation of the Index from 1620.

Gingerich's Annotated census appeared in 2002 at Brill's. It is foremost a treasure- house for researchers. The present book is rather an entertaining history of Gingerich's researches. More or less in passing, it also rehearses the state ot the art of Copernican scholarship in an accessible way. This is most welcome as it may drive home the relevance of this kind of subjects within general culture. In the sixteenth century, astronomy was part of scholarship rather than of science.

Rienk Vermij University of Utrecht

Institute for History and Foundations of Science

Barry Coward (ed.), A Companion to Stuart Britain, ser. Blackwell Companions to British History (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), XXIV + 564 pp.

School children of a certain generation (the reviewer included) will have learnt their polilical history of seventeenth-century England from the first edition of Barry Coward's The Stuart Age, 1603-1714, ser. A History of England (London and New York: Longman, 1980; reprt. 21994, 32003). While new editions of this admirable textbook continue to emerge, the perceived need to publish an edited 'companion' to the period reflects not oniy the current popularity of this genre with publishers like Blackwell but also the remark- able explosion in seventeenth-century scholarship over the last twenty years. Assimilating and synthesising developments in social, gender, cultural, economic, 'British', imperial and literary history--never mind the history of constitutional and religious politics--is no doubt beyond the ken of a single scholar, even one as game as Barry Coward. The 'companion' offers a sensible and efficient alternative; and the result in this instance is a superior collection of essays that provide an invaluable introduction to a complex and voluminous historiography.

That is not to say the book is without its problems and idiosyncrasies, the most significant of which is its structure. Part 1 contains three essays dealing with 'Stuart Britain and the Wider World' and Part II contains eight essays examining 'the changing face of Britain'. The subjects covered are wide-ranging and establish the book's credentials as a genuine companion. Somewhat oddly, the book then changes from being thematic to chronological, with Parts IlI to V each containing essays that examine politics, religion, political thought, and political events between 1603-1642, 1642-1660, and 1660-1714 respectively. Though the quality of the contributions does not alter, the assumption of political narrative inevitably makes for a degree of repetition: this despite the welcome emphasis in many of the essays on themes such as the British and Irish context and /or the relationship between political language and practice. More seriously, it also serves to give the unfortu- nate impression that the social, economic, cultural, and intellectual issues covered in the first two parts of the book are necessary diversions before the 'real' historical business gets underway. This is despite Coward's introductory plea that social and economic history should reclaim its position ill the firmament of Stuart historiography (p. xx).

A second problem, less avoidable on the part of the editor, is the kind of essay that a volume such as this attracts. While all the contributors are, to lesser or greater degrees,


leaders in their respective fields, not all of them have provided essays that satisfy the didac- tic needs of the 'hard-pressed schoolteachers' for whom the volume is intended (p. xiii). This is not, it should be stressed, a reflection on the quality of the writing so much as its pitch and intent. For example, students and readers without specialist knowledge are unlikely to follow with any degree of certainty the path taken by Allan Macinnes on the 'British Problem'. Sean Kelsey likewise devises possibly the most cryptic title for any essay ever written about the Republic and Commonwealth of the 1650s: 'Unkingship, 1649- 1660'. However, as with many of the other essays in the volume, Kelsey's subsequent discussion is incisive, provocative, and verging on the definitive insofar as the current historiography is concerned. Certainly the next generation of schoolchildren and undergradu- ates would do well to read Michael J. Braddick on the fiscal state, lan Atherton on popular public opinion, Steve ttindle on crime and popular protest, Craig Muldrew on economic and urban development, Elizabeth Foyster on gendel, Michael Hunter on scientific change, Toby Barnard and Nicholas Canny on Britain, Ireland and Empire, Tom Webster, Ann Hughes and John Spurt on religion in the seventeenth century, and Malcolm Smuts, J. C. Davis, Mark Knights and Justin Champion on the period's political language and thought.

What readers will struggle to learn is the reception of strains and elements of the classical heritage in Britain during the seventeenth century. There is no essay on humanism in the first, thematic section of the book; and individual essays only deal obliquely with the subject thereafter. Malcolm Smuts and J. C. Davis assume rather than explore the classicism of political thought before and during the English Revolution; Tom Corns in his essay on 'Literature and History' restricts his interest to noting the neo-classicism of Ben Jonson (p. 173); and Tom Wilks suggests that, insofar as elite taste in art and architecture was concerned, 'Britain was a late and somewhat desperate claimant to the Renais- sance' (p. 211). Given what we now know about the widespread and often contested appropriation of classical culture within various aspects of British politics and culture during the period, this neglect must be regarded not simply as a missed opportunity but a serious misrepresentation. This is never more so than in the essay by Macinnes, who contrives to contrast the classicism of the eminent Scottish humanist George Buchanan with what he styles the 'Gothicism' of English political culture: its common lawyers, its parliamentarians, and its revolutionaries (pp. 7, 11, 15, 16). By 'Gothic', Macinnes seems to mean an overriding concern with Anglo-Saxon antecedents, developed in the context of three kingdoms, in order to refute alternative conceptions of 'Britain'--Buchanan's aristocratic republicanism, and the Scottish Covenanting movement it inspired, among them. While any recognition of Buchanan's enormous contribution to the political culture of the period is always welcome, the conceit that he exposes contrary, anti-classical tendencies south of the border is ill-informed and deeply misleading. English lawyers, clerics, antiquarians, pamphleteers, gentlemen, citizens, and soldiers were as saturated in classical learning--or, increasingly, vernacular appropriations of that learning--as their Scottish or Irish equivalents. It was the common cultural currency of the age, providing, among other things, the tools with which to forge and justify other forms of identity (national and imperial included). The problem with this otherwise admirable Companion to Stuart Britain is that, from reading its essays, Coward's hard-pressed schoolteachers and their pupils would hardly know it.

Phil Withington School of History

University of Leeds

Book Reviews 627

Gunilla Florby, Echoing Texts: George Chapman'; Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron, Lund Studies in English 109 (Lund: Lund University, 2004), 181 pp.

The first words of the main character in Tire Conspiracy of Charles Duke of Byron (1607), the opening half of George Chapman's "double play" about an episode in recent French history, express his dazzlement at the court of the archduke Albert in Brussels:

What place is this? What air? What region In which a man may hear the harmony Of all things moving? Hymen marries here Their ends and uses, and makes me his temple.

We are in the play's second scene. In the first we heard of a plan to seduce Chapman's proud hero "with praise of his perfections" to betray his king, Henry IV of France; the events set in motion will lead, in the second play, to Byron's execution for treason. Here the prospect of that treason has begun to function in Byron's bloodstream like a drug, a feeling that he is coming into contact with something grand and beautiful beyond his experience. He is also, knowingly or not, quoting Seneca's Hercules furens: "Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga? / ubi sum?" (11. 1138-39). Chapman's Englishing of the Latin is both expressive in itself and a powerful dramatic omen; Hercules speaks on the border of derangement and sanity, as he emerges from madness and is about to know that he has killed his wife and children. The force of the Senecan topos was not lost on Chapman's fellow playwrights in the early seventeenth century. John Marston used it at the beginning of a fit of madness in Jack Drum's Entertainment; Shakespeare, indelibly, used it to dramatize Lear's humbled waking after his time on the heath: "Where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight?" The relevance of the Senecan subtext here is precisely the difference between Hercules' situation and Lear's; this king is about to know that the daughter he had every good reason to think was lost to him is astonishingly right there, alive and more, the loving angel of his rescue. The Latin text makes its way into English Renaissance dramatic speech as a shared convention that can also be hauntingly resonant.

It is also a cautionary example, should one be needed, against thinking that the simple scholarship on matters like this--the simple noticing, even--has by now been adequately done. The Latin passage does not figure in J. W. Cunliffe's Tire Influence of Seneca on Eliza- bethan Tragedy (l~ondon and New York: Macmillan, 1893), despite the fact that Cunliffe cites another passage from ttercules furens in connection with Chapman's second Byron play, and even though, as later sceptics pointed out, Cunliffe was hard up for examples from playwrights functioning at their best. The example from Lear would serve this latter turn handsomely, and E S. Eliot put Seneca's Latin into modern educated currency, and in a Shakespearean context, by using it (unattributed) as the epigraph of his poem "Marina" (1930); but to my knowledge the Senecan dimension to Lear's waking was not discussed in print until 1992, by Robert S. Miola (Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy [Oxford: Clarendon], pp. 165~6). Miola gathers examples from other Renaissance drama- tists, including Marston, but not on this point including Chapman. Nor, despite well established interest among Chapman scholars in the "Herculean" dimension of his tragic heroes, does the eerily Senecan aura of Byron's look about the archduke's palace appear to have been properly highlighted until now, on p. 41 of Gunilla Florby's study of the two Byron plays.

628 International Journal of tlre Classical Tradition / Spring 2006

By Florby's own account, her book "has been a long time in the making" (p. 11); her lengthy involvement with Chapman's plays and the scholarship on them (she published a book on his other pair of matched tragedies in 1982) is probably the source of her main virtue, the ease and unfussy clarity with which she handles and organizes the legacy of information on Chapman's classical sources (information mostly compiled in the early twentieth century) and can spot some of the gaps in it. Chapman and Ben Jonson were the most conspicuously learned playwrights of their milieu, and the most ambitious about putting their learning to use; Chapman if anything goes beyond Jonson in his con- viction that classical literature is a repository of a secret wisdom that it is his mission to decode and transmit through his own writing. The mystical dimension of this is most openly on view in Chapman's non-dramatic poetry, but it manifests itself in the drama in an un-Jonsonian concern with heroic transcendence, the nature and vexations of which Chapman is ceaselessly trying to articulate. Florby's book is a deft new contribution to following that enterprise.

In an extreme example, Chapman finds what he needs in one of Plutarch's scientific essays ("On the Principle of Cold," Moralia 945F-55C), from which he takes a technical discussion of the nature of privation and an account of the metereology of tall mountains to craft a speech in which Byron (soon after marvelling at the archduke's palace) hears his own loftiness of spirit enticingly described. The details of this borrowing were identified almost a century ago by Franck Schoell, who was not sure they did not represent "pure jonglerie"; Florby, rehearsing the same evidence at patient length, is more forthcoming as to just what, by way of a "splendid simile, emerging miraculously from fragments ingeniously pieced together" out of scattered sites in Plutarch, ends up subversively happen- ing in the process: "The transposition from the field of theoretical physics to the moral sphere entails a complete shift of meaning. Remarks innocent enough when applied to the principles of heat and cold acquire a completely different colouring when applied to the quality of loyalty" (pp. 63-64). Florby is also fresh and interesting on the more obvious relevance of Homer. Behind Chapman's long recognized appropriation of a simile from the opening of Book V of the Iliad she convincingly detects an ongoing linkage of Byron and Diomedes; exploring that linkage leads her to locate some previously unre- marked points of textual intersection, and also meshes with her exploration of the references to Hercules: "Diomedes' rage led to impious deeds; still, it was a 'sacred rage.' Her- cules slew wife and children in his fury, caused by Juno . . . . With these ill-boding intertexts as a background, Byron's rebellion stands out as a kind of inspired madness, doomed to a fatal outcome" (p. 44).

All of this is excellent and welcome. The book's other agendas are, I think, less successful. Florby also canvasses Chapman's use of the historical information in Edward Grimeston's General Inventorie of tire History ~ France (London: George Eld, 1607); she is alert and thorough noting what Chapman copies and what he changes, but probably through no fault of her own is less interesting than when dealing with more artful sources. It is also not her fault that as she moves on to the second Byron play she begins to k)se her best subject matter:

The 7)'agedy c~f Charles Duke of Byron does not have the same intertextual density as the Conspiracy. If we compare the two plays the number of echoes emanating from the ancients would seem to be more or less the same, and yet the classical influence is less far-reaching in the sequel . . . . Instead it is the historical material from Grimeston's chronicle that dominates. (p. 81)

Book Reviews 629

Much of the work of the last part of the book is devoted to tracing the fairly obvious par- allels between Byron and the Earl of Essex (to whom Chapman dedicated the first of his Homer translations), and locating Chapman's plays in "the general interrogation of state power that cultural materialist criticism has unveiled in English Renaissance drama" (p. 132). Doing so contests some older assertions about Chapman's politics, but in the present day amounts largely to restating the on dit of current critical practice, with little in the way of surprises.

The book is also bracketed with a discussion of the theoretical problematics of source study, with Florby in effect declaring that she is going to have things both ways:

I am adopting an intermediate approach, neither orthodox source study, if by this is meant a marshalling of evidence in order to prove or disprove the author's or ig inal i ty . . , r~or fully-fledged intertextua~ reading, if this is taken to mean a wholly reader-oriented approach, treating the text as 'a worldless and authorless object' and positing the reader as the site of confluence of any number of cultural utterances a la Barthes. (p. 14)

I sympathize, but Florby seems to be talking theory out of a felt obligation to do so, rather than from having something specific to say. She does later round back to the topic with a vivid metaphor of her own devising:

I find myself thinking in terms of tectonic plates: the heavy slab of recent history from the Inventorie, pro-Henrician and structured to fit the purposes of the absolute state, collides with a classical-epic value system whose bottom strata were formed during an earlier heroic era reflected in Homer's Achilles and Plutarch's Alexander . . . . When the two systems come into contact the result is an eruption of rhetorical energy, a landscape of volcanoes and jagged fault lines and fissures. (p. 161)

Memorably put, but not in itself a decisive theoretical position. The real aretO of the book is elsewhere.

Gordon Braden Department of English University of Virginia

Phillis Wheatley, Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings, Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Vincent Carretta (ed.) (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 224 pp.

Vincent Carretta, professor of English at the University of Maryland, has done readers everywhere good service with his handy Penguin edition of the complete works of Phillis Wheatley. Assembled in one slender volume is everything known to us at this time that issued from her pen: her poems, both published and unpublished along with their textual variants, her correspondence, ancillary materials such as notices concerning the purchase of her books by subscription as well as the engraving that appeared as the fron- tispiece to her book, Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral (London: Printed for A. Betl, bookseller, Aldgate, 1773). These are augmented by several useful appendices con-


taining poems written by her contemporaries, Lucy Terry Prince, Jupiter Hammon and Francis Williams, three 18th-century poets of African descent who also lived in the western hemisphere. 1

Born somewhere in West Africa about 1753 Wheatley is today heralded by Carretta "as the mother of African American literature." Around 7 or 8 years of age she was carried to Boston on the slave ship, Phillis, and was sold to a local couple named John and Susanna Wheatley. A Wheatley relative would later attest that Phillis was "supposed to have been about seven years old, at this time, from the circumstances of shedding her front teeth." The pair brought the young girl into their home and treated her with kindness. To their amazement, under the tutelage of the Wheatley's daughter, Mary Wheatley, she quickly gained a powerful command of English and began to read challenging texts both sacred and secular. These deeply influenced the poetry that she would soon begin to write.

How much Latin she actually knew has not been determined. Her owner John Wheat- ley wrote in November, 1772 that "she has a great Inclination to learn the Latin tongue, and has made some progress in it." Rufus Griswold declared in 1848 in his Female Poets of Amer- ica that "she studied Latin so as to read Horace. "2 Carretta is not so sure about that and says that "none of Wheatley's surviving writings" shows "a familiarity with classical sources that could not have been gained from translations alone." The evidence, however, suggests that she in fact did learn Latin and it will fall someday to a sensitive Latinist to carry out the close philological study needed to resolve this question.

Her first well-known poem, "On the Death of the Rev. George Whitefield," was published as a broadside printed first in Boston, and later on in other cities including New York and Philadelphia. The 47 line poem was written after Whitefield, an evangelist well- known in the New England area, was overcome by what Wheatley calls "a Fit of the Asthma" in Newburyport , Massachusetts on September 30, 1770. Whitefield had been preaching in Boston the week before and because his patron, Selina Hastings, the Count- ess of Huntingdon, was also known to the Wheatleys, Carretta suggests that Whitefield might have lodged with the Wheatleys while in Boston, thus providing Phillis with the means, motive and inspiration to write.

Her ability to create poems and their subsequent appearance in print brought her both celebrity and notoriety. Like the result of a bizarre experiment in social science and genetics, her work was taken as evidence by some that people of African descent were capable of reaching the highest levels of refinement when educated and Christianized. To others her work and her very person (black, female and enslaved) represented an upsetting challenge to the widespread belief that the Negro was an inferior race, a sub- human type originating in Africa and meant for servitude. Under such charged conditions, her writing became a proving ground and was called into question. Could someone like Wheatley write good poetry? Or was this some sort of a hoax? Proof would have to be gathered.

In his book The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003), delivered first as the Jefferson

1. [On Jupiter Hammon cf. Margaret Brucia, "The African-American Poet, Jupiter Hammon: A Home-born Slave and his Classical Name," IJCT 7 (2000-2001), pp. 515-522; on Francis Williams cf. Michele Valerie Ronnick, "Francis Williams: An Eighteeth-Century Tertium Quid," Negro History Bulletin 61 (1998), pp. 19-29. - W.H.]

2. See Rufus Wilmot Griswold, "Phillis Wheatley Peters," in: The Female Poets of America (Philadel- phia: Cary and Hart, 1848; reprt. New York: James Miller, 1873), p. 30.

Book Reviews 631

Lecture in the Humanities at the Library of Congress in 2002, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. gives us a vivid depiction of the oral examinations Wheatley was forced to undergo in Boston in October of 1772 in order to prove that she was indeed who she said she was- -a learned and capable poet of African descent:

The s takes . . , were as high as they could get for an oral exam. She is on trial and so is her race.

She would have been familiar with the names of the gentlemen assembled in this room. For there, perhaps gathered in a semicircle, would have sat an astonishingly influential group of the colony's citizens determined to satisfy for themselves, and thus put to rest, fundamental questions about the authenticity of this woman's literary achievements. Their interrogation of this witness, and her answers, would determine not only this woman's fate, but the subsequent direction of the antislavery movement, as well as the birth of what a later com- mentator would call 'a new species of literature,' the literature written by slaves.

Gates further tells us that there is

no transcript of the exchanges that occurred between Miss Wheatley and her eighteen examiners. But we can imagine that some of their questions would have been prompted on the classical allusions in Wheatley's poems. "Who was Apollo? .... What happened when Phaeton rode his father's chariot? .... How did Zeus give birth to Athena? .... Name the Nine Muses." Was she perhaps asked for an extemporaneous demonstration of her talent? What we do know is that she passed with flying colors. Indeed, five among the group--[James] Bowdoin, [Reverend Samuel] Cooper, [Thomas] Hubbard, [Reverend John] Moorhead, and [Andrew] Oliver--would be immortalized in verse by the young woman herself, either in elegies or in occasional verse.

This interrogation which also included luminaries such as the governor of Massa- chusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, Samuel Mather and John Hancock, was aptly described as "a primal scene in African American letters" by Gates. At its conclusion, the examiners signed the following attestation which was required by the printer Archibald Bell in Lon- don in 1773 as a condition to publishing her first book of poems, Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral:

We whose Names are underwritten, do assure the World, that the Poems speci- fied in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa, and has ever since been, and now is, under the Disadvantage of serving as a Slave in a Family in this Town. She has been examined by some of the best judges, and is thought qualified to write them.

This statement was included in the front pages of the volume as demanded by Bell and from it we can measure the mettle of Phillis Wheatley. So too can we measure the nature of Vincent Carretta's new edition of her work. For it reflects qualities that philologists of every kind appreciate, namely an editor who has gained insight and maturi ty over years of study and who has carefully built upon the work of his predecessors, the earlier Wheatley editors, William H. Robinson, John C. Shields and Julian D. Mason, Jr.

632 International Journal qf the Classical Tradition /Spring 2006

This reviewer's sole suggestion for improvement would be to add an index, and thereby relieve the reader of the time-consuming process of paging back and forth to locate some remembered, but lost point. In the best of all possible worlds a concordance to her poems (or at least a key to significant words and phrases) should be prepared as well. But these await the next edition of this important American poet.

For now we should be grateful to have this fine edition of the writings of a young woman who was not destroyed by the unjust circumstances of her birth and see her today as she really was--an embodiment of the idea of liberation through learning. Her liberation came through her command of the classics. One need look no further than the poem "Niobe in Distress for her Children Slain by Apollo," or "To Maecenas," to see that Phillis Wheately stands squarely amid the confluence we call the classical tradition. Breaking through barriers of color and gender, Wheatley's life and her work transform our concept of classical humanism.

Michele Valerie Ronnick Department of Classics, Greek and Latin

Wayne State University

Stephen L. Dyson, EugL;nie Sellers Strong. Portrait of an Archaeologist (London: Duckworth, 2004), X + 244 pp.

Eug6nie Sellers Strong was one of those intelligent, strong-minded and confident English women of the late Victorian age who were able to make a name for themselves as reputable, even distinguished scholars despite the obstacles opposed to their pursuit of professional careers by cultural attitudes that restricted the advancement of the "fair sex." Jane Harrison may have been the best known and most controversial of these redoubtable women for her work on Greek myth and ritual; hers was an anthropological approach deeply influenced by James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Reli- gion (London: Macmillon, 1890). 1 l larrison's P~vle~omena to the Study of Greek Rel~qon (1st ed. Cambridge: The University Press, 1903) and her Themis: a study of the Social Or~ins of Greek Religion (1st ed. Cambridge: The University Press, 1912) developed the topic of "myth and ritual" through an examination of the visual evidence offered by Greek vase- painting and monuments, t ter work constituted a form of interpretive archaeology that exercised considerable authority in the early years of the Twentieth century. 2

Eug6nie, n6e Sellers, later Strong, was Harrison's contemporary and friend, drawn to the particular study of ancient works of Greek and later Roman art, but not treated instrumentally. Sellers enjoyed a long career as a semi-independent scholar, fully described by Dyson who thereby has rescued her from undeserved oblivion. Sellers was a classical archaeologist in the old sense, that is as a humanist exploring the past by reference to works of art rather than as a field archaeologist excavating ancient sites. In this respect

1. See Mary Beard's intellectual biography, The Invention t~Jane Harrison, Revealing Antiquity 14 (Cambridge, Mass.: t tarvard University Press, 2000) (reviewed in this journal by Hugh Lloyd- Jones, I]CT 9 [2002/20031, pp. 339-343).

2. See Walter Burkert, Griechische Religion der archaischen umt klassischen Epoche, Die Religionen der Menschheit 15 (Stuttgart; Berlin; K61n; Mainz: Kohlhammer, 1977), pp. 24-26 (Greek Reli- g/on, transl, by John Raffan [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985], pp. 2-4).

Book Reviews 633

she followed the model of art historical practice developed by German scholars, especially Adolf Furtw~ingler, whose influential Meisterwerke der ~r Plastik: Kunstgeschichtliche Untersuchuny{en (Leipzig: Gieseke und Devrient, 1893) she translated (Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture: A Series of Essays on the History of Greek Art [London: W. Heinemann, 1895]), and whose interest in Greek classical art she actively pursued in her early years. Sellers also paid close attention to matters of connoisseurship and style, long associated with Bernard Berenson and his circle in Florence, of which she was a sporadic member. Her ability to discriminate among the various styles of the survivors of ancient art during her many years at Chatsworth (Dyson, pp. 91-110) and later at the British School in Rome (pp. 111- 127), is notable.

Eug6nie Sellers (1860-1943) was regarded as a beautiful woman, much admired for her physical beauty and her brains during her long life, a life worthy of interest in evalu- ating the historiography of Greek and Roman art as indicated by Dyson's subtitle, "Portrait of an Archaeologist." Here, Dyson has plotted the trajectory of her career from London to Girton College, Cambridge, to travel in the Mediterranean, to her fruitful encounter with German scholars and their scholarship, to her years in Rome as Deputy Director of the British School. This record manifests Sellers' strengths as a scholar and personality, as well as the limitations imposed upon her as a woman who still managed to publish widely and gain the respect of her "fellows," if not the academic positions they occupied. Indeed, her marriage to Arthur Strong in 1897 (d. 1904) imposed further limitations because of repressive social conventions and his inability to match her vigor and intellect.

Notwithstanding these professional boundaries, Sellers led a brilliant social life, num- bering among her friends Jane Harrison, Vernon Lee, Sidney Colvin, Katherine Jex-Blake with whom she published The Elder Pliny's Chapters on the History ~ Art (London; New York: Macmillan, 1896), Charles Thomas Newton, Charles Waldstein, Lawrence Alma- Tadema, Edward Bourne-Jones, Bernard Berenson and Mary Costelloe, Salomon Reinach, Ludwig Curtius, Adolf Furtw/ingler, George Santayana, Gertrude Bell, Lady Ottoline Morell, Henrietta Hertz, Thomas Ashby, H.S. Stuart-Jones, Giacomo Boni, Rodolfo Lanciani, Alessandro della Seta, Arthur Darby Nock, J6r6me Carcopino, Michael Rostovtzeff, Ernst Robert Curtius, Gisela M.A. Richter, Ludwig Pollack, Jocelyn Toynbee, Giulio Giglioli, John Buchan, and many others. The vast network of her friendships extended from cura- tors, connoisseurs, and collectors to ancient historians, art historians, field archaeologists, and topographers, and then to artists, aesthetes, philosophers, and socialites. The list of names reads like a cultural who's who, spanning two generations in England and on the continent, while including several nationalities and diverse religious affiliations. Dyson is not always clear which friendships were more than casual, and his book seems padded from time to time with digressive information about these once famous "characters," inhabiting the art and academic world from the 1890s to World War II. He does, however, give the reader the flavor of those personal associations important to Sellers and to the development of her views on the history of ancient, especially Roman, art to which she made her most important scholarly contributions.

t ier involvement with Roman art began with the publication of Pliny the Elder's chapters in his Natural History related to ancient art and the textual evidence provided for works no longer in existence (see above). Especially valuable was her translation and commentary, written with K. Jex-Blake, indicating inter alia the nature of the reception of Greek artworks by Romans who were avid, if not always discriminating consumers of those works and of the artistic traditions that had brought them into being. Of even greater importance is her translation of Franz Wickhoff's Roman Art (London: W. Heine- mann, 1900), an extract from his study of the Vienna Genesis, published five years before


(Die Wiener Genesis [Wien: F. Tempsky, 1895]). One may say that the modern historical study of Roman art began with Wickhoff, even if his emphasis on pictorial illusionism in Flavian and Trajanic art is no longer accepted as normative (Dyson, pp. 94ff.). In Sellers' own words, she credited Wickhoff with giving us "what is so far unique in the criticism of ancient art, namely a book in which the historical survey is supported throughout by a searching analysis into aesthetic causes and conditions of artistic change" (p. viii, her italics).

This introductory effort was soon followed by her Roman Sculpture from Augustus to Constantine (London: Duckworth, 1908, reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1969), the first survey of its kind in any modern language, and only recently superseded by Diana Kleiner's Roman Sculpture, ser. Yale Publiations in the History of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Sellers' Roman Sculpture was based on lectures, deeply influenced by Wickhoff and further informed by her extensive knowledge of contemporary activity in Roman archaeology and by the theories of Alois Riegl on the increasingly visual nature of late Roman artistic production. Riegl's views were especially evident in her detailed and focused treatment of Roman portraiture as a distinctive Roman artistic achievement (pp. 347-386), restricted in this book to sculpted portraits but considered in evolutionary terms both with regard to style and to the changing character of its imagery.

Sellers' Art in Ancient Rome (New York: Scribner, 1928, reprinted Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970) extended the chronological range of her subject over more than a thousand years, and included in its purview, in addition to sculpture, painting, mosaics, and the minor arts. She, also, incorporated the work of Wickhoff, Riegl, Pericle Ducati, Guido von Kaschnitz-Weinberg, Gerhart Rodenwaldt, and many other contemporary scholars, all duly acknowledged. In a sense she wrote an original handbook on Roman art, illustrated it by 584 figures, and provided her chapters with an up-to-date bibliography. As a result, she brought before an English-reading public a more comprehensive treatment of Roman art than Gerhart Rodenwaldt's Die Kunst der Antike. Hellas und Rom, Propylaen-Kunstgeschichte 3 (Berlin: Propyl~ien-Verlag, 1927).

In these three volumes Sellers maintained an active defense of Roman art, no longer to be taken as a decadent manifestation of late antique classical culture but aesthetically significant in its own right, and particularly "Roman. "3 What constitutes the particularly "Roman" aspects of Roman art may still be a sensitive critical issue among scholars no longer convinced of nationalistic or ethnic conceptions of the intrinsic relationship between a "people" and its art. Eug6nie Sellers Strong was herself convinced of the uniqueness of Roman art as a special, identifiable manifestation of the will to art (if not exactly in those terms), an art possessing great value. If she was influenced by the leading critical scholars in this matter, who were almost exclusively German, she was also moved in this direction by the growing nationalism of Fascist Italy in the 1920s and 1930s (Dyson, pp. 179ff.), by her conversion to a form of conservative Catholicism, and by her association with Ital- ian scholars, especially Giulio Giglioli, imbued with nationalist fervor and the patriotic spirit of "Romanit~."

Her extensive publishing record on Greek and Roman topics, as Sellers and /o r as Strong, has been fully listed by Dyson in his bibliography (pp. 211-212, 213-216). His

3. See Otto Brendel, "Prolegomena to a Book on Roman Art," Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome XXI (1953), pp. 7-73, here 28-33 (cf. Idem, Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art. Expanded from "Prolegomena to a Book on Roman Art," Foreword by Jerome Pollitt [New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1979], pp. 40-49).

Book Reviews 635

devotion to the cause of rescuing this pioneer from relative obscurity is to be compli- mented, although the task could have been accomplished more concisely. As an anglo- phonic pioneer in the study of Roman art, bringing the latest results of Italian and Ger- man scholarship and archaeology to the notice of a British and American audience, she retains her historiographical significance during the period when the field began to find its own evolutionary path and attained respectability. Although her translation of Wick- hoff's Roman Art may be her most important critical achievement, however derivative, and her synthetic treatments of Roman sculpture and of Roman art in general were useful to beginners for decades, Eug6nie Sellers Strong remained an acolyte, following the lead of others, constrained, perhaps, by her sex and the repressive genderized culture of her times, whether Victorian, Italian Catholic, or Fascist.

Richard Brilliant Anna S. Garbedian Professor in the Humanities (emeritus)

Columbia University

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