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Obbink, D., Rutherford, R. (eds.) 2011. Culture in Pieces: Essays on Ancient Texts in Honour of Peter Parsons. Oxford, Oxford University Press. x, 342 pp. Pr. £80.00 (hb). ISBN 9780199292011.

Originating in a 2006 conference honoring Peter Parsons on his seventieth birth-day, this volume, like many Festschriften, offfers a wide assortment of topics; many essays, however, discuss literary papyri. Rather than a unity of subject, the editors opt for a thematic one: how new evidence illuminates the old. This theme appro-priately honors Parsons’ many important contributions to literary papyri. It also can, so long as it is construed sufffijiciently broadly, contain nearly anything. This broad thematic unity will hardly prevent most readers from raiding the collection for the individual essays that interest them. These readers will be pleased to fijind that bibliographies follow each essay. The composite character of the collection does not detract from its usefulness since the individual contributions are wide-ranging, informative, often provocative, and uniformly of high quality.

The volume contains a dedicatory poem composed by Colin Austin, a list of contributors, an introduction, sixteen essays, a bibliography of Peter Parsons, indi-ces and sixteen pages of plates. The diverse nature of the collection renders more than a brief discussion of the essays impossible.

The introduction has two parts. In the fijirst, Rutherford provides an engaging verbal portrait of Parsons’ development and activities as scholar along with a few brief notes on his personal life. In the second part, Obbink reviews the collection, relating individual essays to the work of Parsons.

1. In ‘Vanishing Conjecture: The Recovery of Lost Books from Aristotle to Eco,’ Obbink illustrates some rules and procedures for working with fragments. This essay mirrors the collection as a whole in its richness and its unusual mixture: Obbink provides basic background for those new to fragments (e.g. how works were lost) while also making heavy demands on his readers (e.g. he prints a resto-ration of Lollianos’ Phoinikika without comment as an illustration of the process of restoration, a process that readers must infer from the results); he engages in lofty theoretical speculation (e.g. on blank spaces as fragments of interpretations) and he presents a detailed and complex argument for reconstructing a lost poem of Sappho that may have preceded Sappho 1 in some Hellenistic collections; and he prints a new fragment of Philodemus’ On Piety from the Herculanean Papyri. This selective summary gives a sense of the richness of the essay (and the collection), but I couldn’t help wonder at times just what sort of reader Obbink had in mind.

2. Martin West (‘Pindar as a Man of Letters’) examines Pindar’s allusions to his predecessors to paint a picture of Pindar as a poeta doctus who constructs an early generic theory, who engages in literary history, and who was comfortable not only in oral poetics but in written as well.© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/1568525X-12341258

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3. Stephanie West (‘The Papyri of Herodotus’) considers what the papyri tell us about the reception of Herodotus. She concludes that many readers in the Helle-nistic and Roman era encountered the historian in an unhistorical way, either as extracts for teenage students or as exempla to provide a veneer of hellenism. She also discusses places where the papyri raise textual issues.

4. Richard Rutherford (‘The Use and Abuse of Irony’) skillfully traces the pit-falls involved in dealing with ancient irony. The central idea is context, broadly construed to include both textual and extra-textual evidence. The reader’s context is also important because of its influence on interpretation: modern perspectives can suggest irony where none was intended. Loss of context explains why irony is difffijicult to recognize in fragmentary texts.

5. Adrian Hollis (‘Greek Letters in Hellenistic Baktria’) illustrates Hellenic cul-ture on the periphery of the Hellenistic world through a fragment of an unknown tragedy and several metrical inscriptions.

Menander provides the subject of the next three essays. 6. Heinz-Günter Nes-selrath (‘Menander and his Rivals: New Light from the Comic Adespota’) examines the attribution of comic adespota. Beginning with the evidence papyri provide for the rise of Menander’s status as ‘the’ New Comic poet, he soberly discusses the criteria used to attribute adespota. These criteria are illustrated by reviewing Arnott’s inclusion or exclusion of a number of unassigned fragments in his Loeb edition. Although Nesselrath skeptically reviews attributions of adespota to Menander, he admits that there is often no fijirm basis for attributing adespota. In that light, he considers two fragmentary adespota that he attributes (tentatively, of course) to Menander’s rivals. 7. Eric Handly (‘The Rediscovery of Menander’) traces the history of Menander’s rediscovery from the late 19th century and the picture of the author that gradually emerged from the literary and visual discover-ies. At the end he includes a text of fijive possibly Menandrian lines on a 6/7 century vellum codex. 8. Colin Austin (‘My Daughter and her Dowry: Smikrines in Menander’s Epitrepontes’) supplements and corrects the fragments of Menander’s Epitrepontes. These will be of interest to anyone working on that play or to anyone who is eager to witness a master of restoration at work.

Hellenistic poetry, especially Callimachus, provides the subject for the follow-ing four essays. 9. Annette Harder (‘More Facts from Fragments?’) directs our attention to the fragments of didactic poetry found in the Supplementum Hellenis-ticum. The topics of these fragments are not limited to astronomy or medicine, topics found in the better known poems. Harder’s essay shows how much more remains to be learned about Hellenistic poetry from the Supplementum Hellenisti-cum. 10. Susan Stephens (‘Remapping the Mediterranean: The Argo Adventure in Apollonius and Callimachus’) takes us on a voyage through the mythological

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tradition of the Argo as reworked by Apollonius and Callimachus. These poets build offf the mythological tradition to set Alexandria in the center of the Greek Mediterranean. 11. In ‘Theudotus of Lipara (Callimachus, fr. 93 Pf.),’ Giulio Massi-milla adds some new readings to a fragment from Aetia 4.12. Richard Hunter (‘The Reputation of Callimachus’) analyzes three moments of hostile reception of Callimachus in antiquity. The neoplatonist Severianus, who values inspiration over technical ability, philosophically spits on the text of Callimachus. The hostil-ity aroused by Callimachus and his status as a third century classic can also be observed in the literary context for a difffijicult distich mocking Callimachus and in the silence of Longinus.

13. Gregory Hutchinson (‘Telling Tales: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Callima-chus’) combines narratology and intertextuality to examine Ovid’s Metamorpho-ses. The methodology is complex and revolves around a pair of axes: one axis connects the world of the story (‘story world’) and the real world of the author (‘writing world’). The ‘writing world’ appears to me to be equivalent to what Wayne Booth called the ‘implied author’, a fijigure reconstructed by the reader. This recon-struction arises from the poet’s use of sources, the axis of intertextuality. Hutchin-son illustrates his approach with three episodes with internal narrators (Coronis, Leucothoe, Cephalus and Procris). The results are rewarding, and the focus on the reader’s construction of the poet’s world prevents the narratological apparatus from becoming a sterile formalism.

14. Michael Winterbottom (‘On Ancient Prose Rhythm: The Story of the Dicho-reus’) modestly characterizes his contribution on prose rhythm as “footnotes to books that might be written (by someone else)” (263). He illustrates the relation-ship between metrical and accentual clausula, fijinding a spectrum rather than an opposition.

15. Christoph Riedweg (‘Alexander of Aphrodisias, De prouidentia: Greek Frag-ments and Arabic Versions’) discusses the establishment of a text of De providentia by means of a comparison of Arabic translations and Cyril’s habits of quotation. He provides an edition and translation of the fragments discussed.

16. Albert Henrichs (‘Missing Pages: Papyrology, Genre, and the Greek Novel’) reviews the chronology of the Greek novel while also touching upon the issue of genre. After a few reflections on some attempts to defijine the novel, he shows how papyrus fijinds radically changed the dating of Achilles Tatius (and to a lesser extent, Chariton) and, consequently, the story of the ancient novel’s development. As Henrichs is aware, many problems still remain. Although Henrichs subscribes to the view that Persius refers to Chariton’s work in his fijirst satire, I do not think that reference is at all certain, and if that fijixed date is lost, the efffects ripple outward to the dating of other authors, such as Petronius. The fijinal section looks at the Greek

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comic novels such as the Phoinikika of Lollianos as well as fragments of one version of the Ass story, one which involves bestiality and iambic trimeters.

Although the articles are all of high quality, some like Martin West’s are more focused and coherent while others offfer a less unifijied set of observations; some are aimed at specialists; others are more introductory. Although they all testify to the warm and profound influence of Parsons, the most memorable is Michael Winter-bottom’s note that he and Parsons made a ‘pilgrimage’ to southern Turkey in the late seventies to examine a rhythmic inscription discussed by Eduard Norden. The apt title, Culture in Pieces, derives from Barthes’ discussion of the pleasure of the text. A modifijication of another expression of Barthes might be also appropri-ate: this volume is for all ‘lovers of fragmentary discourse.’

Vanderbilt University Max Goldmanmax.l.goldman@vanderbilt.edu