I was very excited to get my hands on what was promising to be a magnificent and extremely helpful Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, and my expectations were matched – and exceeded!Footnote 1 This handbook contains no less than sixty contributions written by eminent experts and is divided into six parts. Each section opens with a brief orientation essay, tracing the development of rhetoric in a specific period, and is followed by individual chapters which are organized thematically. Part I contains eleven chapters on ‘Greek Rhetoric’, and the areas covered are law, politics, historiography, pedagogy, poetics, tragedy, Old Comedy, Plato, Aristotle, and closing with the Sophists. Part II contains thirteen chapters on ‘Ancient Roman Rhetoric’, which similarly covers law, politics, historiography, pedagogy, and the Second Sophistic, and adds Stoic philosophy, epic, lyric address, declamation, fiction, music and the arts, and Augustine to the list of topics. Part III, on ‘Medieval Rhetoric’, covers politics, literary criticism, poetics, and comedy; Part IV, on the Renaissance contains chapters on politics, law, pedagogy, science, poetics, theatre, and the visual arts. Part V consists of seven essays on the early modern and Enlightenment periods and is decidedly Britano-centric: politics, gender in British literature, architecture, origins of British Enlightenment rhetoric, philosophy (mostly British, too), science, and the elocutionary movement in Britain. With Chapter 45 we arrive at the modern age section (Part VI), with two chapters on feminism, one on race, and three on the standard topics (law, political theory, science), grouped together with those on presidential politics, New Testament studies, argumentation, semiotics, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, social epistemology, and environment, and closing with digital media. The volume also contains a glossary of Greek and Latin rhetorical terms. As the editor states in his Introduction, the aim of the volume is not only to provide a comprehensive history of rhetoric, but also to enable those interested in the role of rhetoric in specific disciplines or genres, such as law or theatre and performance, to easily find those sections in respective parts of the book and thus explore the intersection of rhetoric with one specific field in a chronological sequence.
Individual articles I managed to read were clear and helpful (even the sixtieth, on digital media, which I approached with trepidation yielded unexpected Lesefrüchte: apparently Isocrates features as a poster-boy in some recent theoretical work on digital communication). In a work of this scope and magnitude, sections on ‘further reading’ and bibliographies tend to be very valuable and it is a pity that not every chapter contains the ‘further reading’ section alongside the bibliography. However, the editor should be applauded for his herculean effort. This book easily fulfils its stated goals and represents a very valuable resource – so much so, that I am even prepared to forgive MacDonald (who is a professor of English language and literature) for calling Callimachus ‘the Roman poet’ in his Introduction.
Similar in chronological scope but on a narrower topic is the edited volume on Persianism in Antiquity.Footnote 2 The editors have assembled a collection of twenty-one papers in a volume which investigates the reception of ideas and associations revolving around the Achaemenid Empire from Greek antiquity to modern Europe and Iran. In the Introduction, the editors explain the concept of Persianism as a shorthand for ‘various forms of reception of, and references to, the Achaemenid Empire in the Ancient World that are distinct from direct Achaemenid cultural influence’ (sc. Persianization) (10). The first part of the volume elucidates the way in which the idea of Persia was understood in the Achaemenid commonwealth and from its periphery contemporaneously with the Achaemenid Empire (c.550–330 bce) by considering how ‘Iranian’ identity was conceptualized within the Achaemenid commonwealth, and by discussing fifth- and fourth-century bce Athenian discourse on Persia. Three further papers chart the Western ‘discovery’, revival, and local reception of Achaemenid art in nineteenth-century Iran, and examine the place of Persia in Oswald Spengler's philosophy of history. Part two of the volume illuminates the way in which Persianism evolved in the Hellenistic period after the collapse of the Achaemenid Empire: whereas the first generations of the Seleucids avoided the use of the indigenous or oriental royal titles, the Ptolemies were eager to forge an association between the Seleucids as their political rivals and the emblematic enemies of Greece, the Persians. Conversely, the dynasties of the late Hellenistic Iran enthusiastically embraced their Iranian identities and represented themselves as the ancestors of the Achaemenids, especially after the fall of the Seleucids. The third part of the volume provides a series of discussions of the Roman, Arsakid, and Sasanian perspectives on Persianism in the first centuries ce. The focal points are Persian cults and the representation of the Achaemenids in Greek, Roman, and Jewish literature, and in the Sasanian sources.
The hypothesis that this collective volume puts forward is that the idea of Persia as a coherent concept evolved in the Hellenistic and early Roman eastern Mediterranean and Near East, in the process of appropriating the Achaemenid past for the forging of local identities, both as a positive and as a negative foil. In broader terms, the aim of the book, like much recent scholarship on the Achaemenid Empire and its legacy, is to sidestep the dreaded orientalism and East–West dichotomy by demonstrating that the very notions of East and West were fluid even in the ancient world. The papers fit together remarkably well and do amount to a unified whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Similar in geographical scope, but firmly rooted in the ancient world is the new cross-cultural study of ancient prophecy from Near Eastern, biblical, and Greek perspectives by Martti Nissinen.Footnote 3 In terms of method, the book is exceptionally well conceived: Nissinen investigates the intuitive, non-inductive divination delivered by a prophet who is understood to be communicating with the divine, but is not in possession of technical knowledge of interpreting specific signs and omens (such as bird divination or astrology). Such inspired intermediaries are attested in Akkadian, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic sources. The book offers a comprehensive, clear, and well-structured overview of non-inductive divination, starting with a methodological introduction, which sets out the history of research on prophets in each culture, analyses the Greek, Hebrew, Akkadian, and West Semitic designations for prophets, and puts forward its comparative agenda: in the first instance, prophetic activity will be discussed independently in each culture by relying on the study of the sources in the original languages. The ‘big picture’ will be assembled in the second step, not in order to trace the origins of a phenomenon, or to detect cultural interactions, but for the purpose of elucidating similarities and differences in practice and concepts and so throw more light on divination as phenomenon in each culture. This goal may appear modest, but its advantages crystallize ever more clearly as the book progresses. For me, the most illuminating aspect of the book has been to realize that practices one might see as logical or reasonable become more difficult to rationalize once we see them done very differently in a separate tradition. Nissinen's method allows an expert in, say, Greek oracular practices to step away from her material and see it in a different light when compared to Near Eastern and biblical prophetic practices. The first part of the book is a meticulous and judicious discussion of the sources in their generic and cultural context, starting with the Near East, turning to ancient Greece, and finally to the Hebrew Bible in three separate chapters. The next part of the book analyses specific divination-related phenomena: prophetic ecstasy, temples, prophets and kings, and gender. Each topic is discussed separately for the ancient Near East, Greece, and the Hebrew Bible. In the final part of the book, Nissinen turns to a comparative discussion of each topic. There are far more differences than similarities between the cultures, and Nissinen is careful to note that some differences might be a result of very different types of evidence for prophecy in each culture, but, nevertheless, he notes that the social function of prophecy, the socio-religious context of the prophets in temples and sanctuaries, the political significance of prophecy for kingship, and the altered state of consciousness are some of the large-scale similarities across cultures. Some notable differences include questions concerning individuals, which are frequently attested in Greek sources and are rare in Near Eastern sources, and the presence of female prophets in Greek and Mesopotamian sources in comparison to the rarity of female prophets in biblical and West Semitic texts. A sceptic might argue that there are three separate books under one roof here, but even that sceptic would have to agree that these three books are excellent. The book is brimming with lucidly presented information and is full of insight, whether one reads it for cross-cultural comparison or in order to find out more about the role of prophets in each of the areas under discussion.
One of the exciting recent developments in the study of Hellenistic culture is a re-evaluation of the court and royal patronage as institutions. The relationship of intellectuals at court with the kings is no longer perceived as unidirectional and marked by subservience, as an increasing number of scholars conceptualize the court as a social network and redefine the patronage relationships along the lines of Hellenistic royal philia. Two recent publications represent an attempt to contextualize the literary and scientific production in the third century bce along these lines and, since they appeared in the same year (apparently without consulting each other) and are discussing the same phenomenon, a synkrisis is in order.
Rolf Strootman has presented his innovative ideas about patronage of arts and sciences at the Ptolemaic court in several papers, and now also in a monograph.Footnote 4 His main claim is that ‘writers and scientists at court participated in the same social system as other philoi did’ (41) and that the production of poetry at court is best appreciated in the context of royal xenia and philia, whose most conspicuous characteristic was the reciprocal gift-giving. He provides a succinct discussion of the Ptolemaic patronage and court society, which he conceptualizes as a dynamic competitive system in which the proximity to the throne served as a marker of prestige. Building on recent scholarship on royal xenia and gift exchange, he sees the relationship of royal patrons and their intellectual clients as a specific form of cultural patronage, in which the ruler's status was bolstered by the physical presence of intellectuals at court, but also by their refined and challenging output which indirectly represented the king and his court as sophisticated consumers of Greek paideia. In his words, ‘famous men at royal households were living status symbols’ (86). Whereas artists and scientists competed among each other for prestige at court, in the competition of kings among each other, the number, brilliance, and cultural impact of their intellectual clients served as markers of prestige. In Strootman's view, this competitive drive was an essential characteristic of Hellenistic court culture, and it was competition at court that decisively contributed towards the creation of the specific Hellenistic literature and science, which is often characterized as innovative, sophisticated, learned, playful, and, yes, difficult. He argues that the literary and scientific texts which originated in the Ptolemaic cultural milieu are best understood in the context of the gift-exchange dynamics which characterized royal philia and represented the courtier's presents for the kings. These gifts were so valuable for the king's standing and prestige, that artists, scholars, and poets aspired to and could attain the rank of philos, which was the highest title that courtiers outside the immediate circle of royal family could receive. Strootman's main focus is the first half of the third century bce and the poetry of Theocritus, Callimachus, and, to a lesser extent, Apollonius. His discussion of philosophy and science is extremely brief (five pages) and, despite the title, the focus is really on the court of Ptolemy II Philadelphus. Strootman writes clearly and lucidly, but this slim volume is unfortunately riddled with slips and the ancient Greek contains many typos. Nevertheless, his ideas about the position of the intellectuals at court are important and timely.
In a serendipitous coincidence, Marquis Berrey's book essentially picks up where Strootman's ends, and deals with the genre of texts that Strootman did not discuss at length: Hellenistic science.Footnote 5 Berrey's arguments about the position of scientists at court, the social value, and the specific character of their work are a mirror image of Strootman's:
my central contention is that the scientific persona at court was but a subspecies of court friendship. By ‘court friendship’ I mean a cultural attitude of equality, esteem, reciprocity, and loyalty toward furthering the interest of the king. This description is a careful statement of social codes. Court friendship is both a way of speaking and a practice of exchange. The title to which courtiers aspired above all was philos ‘friend’. (92)
Berrey does not go as far as Strootman in claiming that the scientists were philoi, but he persuasively argues that the courtiers and primarily the kings were the main audience for the works of scientists such as Eratosthenes, Andreas of Carystus, and Herophilus, and that the social setting of the court played a decisive role in shaping the nature of court science, whose main characteristics were interdisciplinarity, the aesthetics of performance, belatedness, and hybridization. The book opens with a general discussion of the term ‘science’, and the social dynamics of the court, followed by a prosopography of 158 persons active at the court of Ptolemy III Euergetes and Ptolemy IV Philopator. The first chapter is a thick description of the court as the social network where the scientists also acted like the courtiers. The second chapter details the economy of gift exchange and places the scientific discoveries within this economy. In the third chapter, scientific writing as a genre of court literature is placed in the tradition of a letter offering service (elaborating on Fraser's arguments). Berrey argues that, in extant court treatises, scientists tend to praise the king as ‘friend of science’ and shape their authorial personae as expert advisors, while investing every effort to make their texts both instructive and entertaining. The second half of the book consists of case studies of texts describing discoveries: Eratosthenes’ instrument (organon) for the doubling of the cube and Andreas of Carystus’ machine for the reduction of joints are analysed as cross-disciplinary science and as objects of court spectacle. Herophilus’ discovery of the pulse and the presentation of this discovery, with its aesthetic features of performance and hybridity are placed in the context of the early Ptolemaic court society. Archimedes’ Method, a treatise about the slicing, balancing, and weighing of mathematical objects, which he sent to Eratosthenes is also discussed, since Archimedes was associated with the royal house at Syracuse. In the end, Berrey returns to his argument that scientific interdisciplinarity arose in the specific court culture of the Hellenistic age. While I sheepishly admit that some of the actual science under discussion went over my head, the general argument that the scientists participated in court culture and that their work was shaped by it is very persuasive. The book is brimming with illustrative anecdotes (very comforting for me was Euclid's alleged dictum ‘there is no royal road to geometry’) and presents a lively and vivid image of the Ptolemaic court society. Like the scientists he studies, Berry makes every effort to clarify and contextualize the more complicated discoveries. This book is a very valuable contribution to the general understanding of Hellenistic literature and culture. In terms of topics, Strootman's and Berrey's books are almost perfectly complementary; in terms of general argument, they are almost identical, but Strootman allows for intellectuals to actually rise to the status of a philos, whereas Berrey argues that this was their aspiration, but in his prosopography, he distinguishes between the king and his family, philoi, bureaucrats, military officials, priests, poets, prose authors, scientists, and so forth. This delineation seems needlessly pedantic to the point of actually being erroneous: placing Callimachus among poets and not prose writers is a matter of textual transmission; we know that the king's closest relatives who occupied the highest positions at court also served as priests; and so on. Strootman places more emphasis on the element of competition, whereas, for Berrey, performativity, spectacle, and entertainment value were the essential aspects of court culture which decisively shaped the work of resident scientists and secured social acceptance for them.
Moving back in time to archaic and classical Greece, Konstantinou's slim volumeFootnote 6 aims to be a contribution to the study of space and gender in ancient Greece. It does not attempt to provide yet another analysis of the freedom of movement of historical women, but rather addresses the ways in which space and female movement are represented in myth, mostly in early Greek epic, and in tragedy, in order to compare and contrast the goddesses’ and heroines’ ability to move with the position of historical women. The first chapter deals with virginal goddesses: Hestia, Athena, and Artemis. Even though all three are unmarried, and thus equal in status, their relationship to space and movement are very different: whereas Hestia stays fixed, Athena and Artemis are free to roam and here we find a significant difference between the lives of historical upper-class maidens and their divine counterparts. The second chapter looks at the movement of Olympian wives and mothers: Aphrodite, Demeter, and Hera, but also Persephone and Demeter's human hosts in Eleusis. Hera is the most ‘fixed’ among these, but even this limited mobility has nothing in common with the seclusion of historical women. Rather, it is interpreted as a signal of Hera's queenly status among the goddesses; it is precisely her ability to stay sitting on her golden throne while delegating tasks to other goddesses that marks her off as socially superior. Particularly illuminating is the analysis of Persephone's maturation in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter: by focusing on the movement and means of movement, Konstantinou shows how Persephone is initially different from all other goddesses, because she only travels in a chariot. At the end of the hymn, Persephone gains the ability to cross the boundary between the underworld and the upper world on her own. In this instance, the discussion of the images helps to elucidate the attitudes towards divine movement, which is a strategy one wishes had been employed more frequently across the volume. The discussion of the goddesses and movement as represented in early Greek epic reveals the existence of a whole spectrum of different modalities of and attitudes to movement. Konstantinou concludes that the goddesses do not represent a divine foil to human female movement. Rather, goddesses’ attitudes to movement and fixity should be analysed as directly dependent on their specific timai.
Although descriptive at times, the first part of the book contains many insightful observations. The second part of the book turns to female heroines. Owing to the selectivity of examples discussed and the narrowing of focus to tragic heroines, the second part of the book is less innovative and it also tends to overlook the visual material. Also lacking here is a more thorough engagement with ritualized female movement. Chapter 3 looks into the tragic representations of Io and the Danaids and situates their mobility within the complex of rituals associated with marriage and the movement away from the paternal and towards the husband's oikos. Chapter 4 attempts to link myth and ritual. A discussion of human and divine maenads in the Bacchae leads to the conclusion that the mountain can become a female ritual space and is thus gendered. The discussion then turns to the hunting heroines and the cult of Artemis at Brauron, with no specific conclusions reached. In the final chapter, Konstantinou returns to the issue of historical female movement and proposes to conceptualize the partition between the male and female space in ancient Greece as a ‘glass wall’, which refers to the socially constructed barrier of lateral mobility. There are no such walls in the world of the goddesses, but the mobility of mortal heroines is more obstructed and their ‘glass walls’ bear more resemblance to the social obstructions to female movement of historical women.
Yet another book on movement as elucidated through the lens of texts is the study of dance discourse in the Graeco-Roman world.Footnote 7 Karin Schlapbach is particularly interested in the way that ancient authors juxtapose dance practices with their own writing as comparable, and yet very different, forms of mimesis. Plutarch's Table Talk 9.15 is the point of departure: the setting of the dialogue is the competitive pyrrhichē and the discussion revolves around the three elements of dance: phora (phrase), schēma (pose), and deixis (pointing). This ‘grammar of dance’ is meticulously analysed, drawing on a wide range of Greek writing about language, dance, and mimesis. Why is dance compared to language and poetry and to what extent are they similar? It is suggested that the notion of mimesis as pictorial and the assumed psychological effect of images operates as the connective point between poetry and dance, whereas dance deixis differs from verbal insofar as it ‘can to some extent transcend the domain of signs and show things themselves’ (72). From language and grammar as points of reference for the theory of dance, the discussion moves to the relationship of dance with rhetoric and figurative arts. The use of gestures and the solo performance render an orator comparable to the pantomime dancer, and passages from rhetorical handbooks about acceptable and unacceptable gestures are placed side by side with Lucian's interpretation of the myth of Proteus as a particularly skilful dancer. The similarities between the orator and a dancer are probed in a series of close readings, amounting to a conclusion that a wide range of artists, from poets and orators to dancers, were expected to be able to impersonate any subject matter in order to elicit the appropriate reaction from the audience. In the third chapter, the discussion returns to Lucian's On Dancing, a dialogue ostensibly on the merits and the shortcomings of pantomime, but actually a spirited encomium of dance as a technē. The Platonic and ritual, especially mystic, background of Lucian's arguments in favour of the dance as a road to self-knowledge through watching are discussed – ideas with a long and complicated history of reception, which leads Schlapbach to investigate the motif of the dance of the stars from Plato to Dio Chrysostom and Plotinus. This discussion is rounded off with an analysis of the motif of dance in the Acts of John, which is plausibly situated in the ancient tradition of mystery rites. The unifying motif of these chronologically and generically disparate texts is the analogy between the dance as an element of mystery rites and philosophy: what one achieves by harnessing emotions and physical movement, the other achieves by the means of intellectual insight. The second part of the book turns from dance discourse to descriptions of dances, and particular emphasis is placed on the way in which these texts deal with the physical and emotional – that is non-representational – aspects of dance. The famous closing scene from Xenophon's Symposium featuring a dance of a couple impersonating Dionysus and Ariadne is interpreted as a (surprisingly positive) commentary on New Music. The following discussion reveals how the ideal of authenticity as the highest form of praise for a pantomime dance was appropriated in a discourse on spectacles in imperial epigram. Dance and its interpretation in Longus, Apuleius, and Nonnus’ Dionysiaka close the book. The individual analyses of dance discourse are valuable and insightful, but the chapters are only loosely connected and the book as a whole does not represent a unified argument.
For this issue's General Review I have selected four books by EU (non-UK based) publishers, and one OUP volume, and I will open with a pitch: since the late 1980s, Kernos, the Revue internationale et pluridisciplinaire de religion grecque antique,Footnote 1 hosted and published by the University of Liège and its Presses Universitaires (soon to be taken over by de Boccard in Paris), has established itself as one of the prime venues for publication of top-class research on Greek religion, and as a beacon of methodological advancement and theoretical explorations in the field. Truly international, and truly interdisciplinary, the journal has been covering a vast amount of ground and providing perspectives on Greek religion from the viewpoint of written sources and material culture alike, as a matter of course paving the way for many, and establishing tested criteria for methodologically sound research. A further strength of the journal is its regularly featured Epigraphic Bulletin of Greek Religion (EBGR), introduced in 1991, and now an indispensable research tool, providing a quick, reliable, and exceptionally informative overview of countless contributions of epigraphy for the study of Greek religion. EBGR presently covers around thirty years of research, and it is easily and intuitively navigable both in print and online thanks to its indices and lists of keywords, so that anyone interested in finding out about the most recent epigraphic finds relevant for the study of Greek religion, such as the absolutely spectacular new ritual norm from Marmarini,Footnote 2 or in assembling a bibliography on a given topic can do so effortlessly. Two further exceptionally useful bulletins, one dedicated to archaeology, and another one to bibliography, are regularly published in the journal (‘Chronique archéologique’ and ‘Chronique bibliographique’), making it effectively a one-stop service point for any scholar working in the field. But the journal is welcoming not only to scholars. What is, without doubt, just as important is that an advanced high-school pupil, or a student at a university with no access to mercantile-minded, for-pay-only digital databases, or a teacher of Classics looking for the latest insights on Greek religion, can do so for free: hosted on an opendedition.org platform, the full text of all previous issues (save for the latest two issues, as the moving wall is currently with issue 29, of 2016) is available to anyone, without any geographical restrictions or requests for institutional affiliation.
Simultaneously, some of the most illuminating recent studies of Greek religion, magic, and theology have been published in the Kernos Supplements, the series of edited volumes and monographs accompanying the journal. Replacing the practice of the early issues of the journal by which journal issues would occasionally consist of selected proceedings of thematically coherent conferences (such as issue 3 of 1990, which printed the papers from the conference ‘Oracles et mantique en Grèce ancienne’, now a standard point of reference), the journal expanded its range by introducing Kernos Supplements in 1992. This series, now totalling thirty-one issues,Footnote 3 is home to some of the most influential and memorable recent explorations, such as Pierre Bonnechere's on human sacrifice, Gunnel Ekroth's on sacrificial rituals in Greek hero cults, or Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge's on Aphrodite and, in another volume, on Pausanias and religion, to mention but a few.Footnote 4 Strangely, however, while very well known, consulted, and taken as the key point of reference in continental Europe, the journal and even more so, and puzzlingly so, the series of supplements have attracted far less attention and critical engagement in the Anglophone world than these volumes deserve – at least until relatively recently. I do not know whether the relative lack of attention paid to these publications has to do with the profile of the publisher and its distribution network and visibility (one will not find a stand of the University Press of Liège at a CA, AIA, or SCS meeting – thus possible), or with the fact that many contributions are written in languages other than English (admittedly depressing, yet not improbable), but it is for this reason that I decided to feature here two excellent recent volumes published in the Kernos Supplement series, one in English and one in (highly readable) French.
Incubation rituals are having a field day. In the General Review of a previous issue, Ivana Petrovic reported on Gil Renberg's splendidly thorough investigation of dream incubations, and I turn now to Hedvig von Ehrenheim's Greek Incubation Rituals in Classical and Hellenistic Times, published two years before the appearance of Renberg's study.Footnote 5 Von Ehrenheim's is a clear, reasonably argued, and well-documented account of incubation, which starts with an exploration of terminological issues before providing the anatomy of the ritual itself, answering many of the questions that must have tormented the ancient visitor: when going to the Asclepieion at, say, Epidaurus, how should I prepare? What should I bring? What do I wear? The investigation provides answers to these questions, making excellent use of epigraphic sources that detail precisely the rules of incubation, and it relies simultaneously on a judicious analysis of literary accounts. The layout of the volume roughly follows the chronological progression of the rite: von Ehrenheim first discusses the preliminary rituals associated with the preparation for the visit, such as abstinence from intercourse, and other purity regulations, such as dietary regulations, and issues associated with physical purifications, and then also the purity of mind (whereby I have to point out my disagreement with the author on the issues of purity of mind and the date, but this is a detail in von Ehrenheim's otherwise scrupulous study). From physical preparation, we move to preliminary sacrifices (libations, incense, blood sacrifice, bloodless sacrifices), the dress code in the sanctuary (white, in some places at least, was de rigueur), and the setting (where do I sleep: rushes, skins of sacrificial animals, or a kline?). An interesting section deals with incubation by proxy – that is, with situations in which the sick man or woman was for some reason unable to incubate in person (whether because the sick belonged to a particular group excluded from the sanctuary, or because they were too ill to travel), and had a friend, a relative, or a priest do so in their stead. Following a discussion of the aftermath of the ritual, including interpretation of the dreams, remunerations, and dedications, the author mobilizes several hermeneutical models to provide a theoretical framework for her interpretations of the ritual as a whole (here, inter alia, she relies partly on traditional Olympian/Chthonian and low-intensity versus high-intensity ritual dichotomy, and on the concept of liminality). The final section engages with the origin and development of Greek practices, paying particular attention to the Egyptian and Mesopotamian rites, and bookending the discussion with an interesting survey of the question of ritual's presumed uniformity across cults (there is none, as the author demonstrates), and the development of the rite's inclusive nature. The book closes with an appendix of primary sources (original and in translation), a bibliography, and a set of three thorough indices (epigraphic evidence; literary testimonials; general index). Like all volumes in the Kernos Supplements series, von Ehrenheim's book is handsomely produced, and comes at a very reasonable price.
While talking about steals: when was the last time you bought a book published by an established academic press, featuring more than 150 (mostly) colour illustrations of excellent quality, for 40 Euros? I don't remember either. Hélène Collard's Montrer l'invisible, a study of the representation of the divine on vase-paintings from Attica is a beautifully illustrated and elegantly argued exploration of the imageries of the divine on ancient vases.Footnote 6 The publication stems from a PhD thesis, supervised by Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge and François Lissarrague, and I mention the names of the esteemed supervisors, household names in the study of Greek religion, because Collard has managed to fruitfully combine sophisticated readings of the visual evidence with nuanced application of ritual studies in order to raise the questions of strategies of divine ‘presentification’ in vase-painting (présentification, a term adopted by phenomenologists, is in French somewhat less of a mouthful than it is in English). Following a short and informative introduction in which Collard touches upon the history of similar undertakings (from Vernant, via Lissarrague, to Mylonopoulos) and sketches her methodological principles, four chapters engage with divine images and their interpretations. The first chapter tackles the issue of images in which divinity is depicted in the moment when it is ritually addressed. Here, Collard traces changes in representations of divine statues depicted behind sacrificial altars on black-figured and then on red-figure pottery, stressing the differentiation between the gods and their statues, but also highlighting the intentional ambiguities in such scenes. Similarly, Chapter 2 discusses the agency of the gods in ritual as represented on the vases, including famous scenes from vase-paintings in which gods are depicted as intervening in human rituals. The following chapter then turns to constructions of divine presence more broadly, and contains a particularly interesting and well-informed section on the ritual installation of divine statues (the so-called hidrysis of a cult statue, that is, the ritual through which a worked inanimate object becomes a religiously acceptable potential receptacle for the divine). The final chapter, wrapping up the most important corollaries in a clear and coherent fashion, discusses the wide-ranging implications of the study, namely the issues of divine visibility and invisibility: how does one visualize what is normally invisible? For which kinds of stand-stills does one opt? How are human figures represented to ‘read’ divine presences, and how does the external observer read both the divine figure and the human figure's reading of the depicted divine figure? Some of these questions are familiar, of course, but the merit of the study is not just in its systematic and methodologically stringent approach to the material, but also in the author's eye for detail and the analytical sophistication: a wonderfully informative and thought-provoking debut.
Above I briefly mentioned a highly interesting new ritual norm from Marmarini, so I return to it now with a quick explanation: this is a recently published, long inscriptional text detailing rituals for an unknown (in fact, unidentifiable) Eastern female divinity, referred to by her epithet Phylake (‘She-guardian’), who had a cult in Thessaly during the Hellenistic period, a text which, along with instruction for a series of rites and purifications, contains an explicit reference to a sacrificial ritual being conducted ‘after the Greek law (nomos)’. Discussing this text in one of his recent talks, Robert Parker rightly spoke of a ‘bombshell’ from Marmarini. A bomb of a comparable force detonated twenty-five years ago, when a ritual norm from Selinus in Sicily dating to the first half of the fifth century bc was published, an opistograph text carved on a lead tablet with fixture holes on the left and right margins, enabling rotation of the tablet and reading of the text when flipped (an intriguing feature for a ritual norm). The text is now kept in the small provincial museum of Castelvetrano – I remember vividly the excitement I felt the first time that I saw it there. Everything about this text was intriguing: it mentions superhuman agents we had not known about before, and it prescribes, in considerable detail, a sacrifice to chthonian divinities, and instructs on how to perform a purification from Elasteroi, vindictive demi-gods or gods who, on the widely accepted interpretation, follow the murderer: it is easy to see why the text was immediately superbly interesting not only to historians and epigraphers but also to scholars working on drama and fifth-century bc literature more broadly. Equally intriguing was the text's provenance: the lead tablet with the lex sacra ended up being donated by a private donor to the J. Paul Getty Museum in the Pacific Palisades in the early 1980s; the same museum also acquired the now published Getty hexameters, from the same donor, who, in turn, got them from the same dealer.Footnote 7 The text garnered immediate attention: after the publication of the critical edition in 1993,Footnote 8 a flurry of articles followed almost instantly, and large portions of authoritative books were dedicated to this text and its implications. In his slender study of the text (eighty-six pages of main text), Krešimir Matijević provides an edition based on the editio princeps, a German translation, and an interpretation of the inscription,Footnote 9 juxtaposing it to the lex sacra of Cyrene (LSS 115), an often adduced parallel, another very well-known and much discussed text. In terms of the force of its argument, this volume can be understood as a scattered response to some of the recent and not-so-recent interpretations of the Sicilian lex sacra: it critically engages in particular with Noel Robertson's elucidation of the text and the rituals in terms of fertility rituals, rather than purification rites,Footnote 10 and it discusses the manipulation of supernatural forces by means of figurines, as attested in the Cyrenaean sacred regulation, and also discussed in much detail by Robertson. Following comparative reading and interpretation of the two texts, Matijević provides an intriguing overview of the ritual manipulation of figurines (sometimes referred to as ‘voodoo dolls’ in Anglophone scholarship, Zauberpuppe in German) in ancient Mesopotamia, before taking a sharp turn to the age-old question of the channels of the eastern (especially Mesopotamian) influences on Greek culture. The final chapter reverts to the issue of the manipulation of spirits by means of statues and figurines in early Greek sources. The concise conclusion is, unsurprisingly, largely negative, and puts to rest several minority views, before reminding us that, in the ritual context, figurines and images can represent both living and dead persons, in both the public and the private sphere (86). The bibliography is relatively full,Footnote 11 the index is short but helpful, and most of the images (all reprints) are sufficiently clear as to be helpful. This is a study which is intended for a narrow circle of experts, a contribution reinforcing interpretative entrenchments, as a rule going down well-trodden paths, and owing to the negative character of its argument, it aims to sweep aside the twigs and twiglets from the trail, rather than to achieve a major leap in our understanding of the text or its wider implications.
Remarkable and exciting throughout is Michael Erler and Martin Andreas Stadler's edited volume on Platonism and late Egyptian religion:Footnote 12 is it really true that Plutarch (or Porphyry, or Iamblichus) had no knowledge of the languages in which Egyptian texts were written? How did they access their Egyptian sources? What happened to Egyptian religious concepts in the course of their cultural translation into Greek? The volume stems from a conference organized by Hellenists and Egyptologists in Würzburg in 2014, a conference that principally aimed at bringing the two disciplines together into a mutually comprehensible dialogue regarding those texts of the Hellenistic and Imperial period that both disciplines regard as relevant for the understanding of the other one. The short foreword written by the two editors reveals vividly some of the key entropies associated with cross-disciplinary communication and illustrates various topical situations in which colleagues from one discipline trip up on assumed truisms of the other, but it also offers some practical solutions. This volume is at its very best on occasions when contributors attempt to make their expertise as accessible as possible, or when they dare to raise questions directly targeting basic axiomatically accepted tenets. Take, for instance, Stadler's spirited contribution on the reception of Egypt in the Greek literature of the Imperial period, an essay sparkling with scholarly enthusiasm throughout (my favourite statement being: ‘A difference between Plato and me is that Plato certainly had no ambition of becoming an Egyptologist’ [31, my translation]). The author, an Egyptologist indeed, asks the commonsensical question of the mode of communication between Greeks and Egyptians at that time, challenging the assumption of the impenetrable linguistic barrier by looking at Plutarch's potential Egyptian sources (among others, Imhotep-Papyrus, known to Classicists interested in Isism), and concluding on the basis of the parallels that Plutarch must either have had some recourse to writing systems (hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic) or was able to communicate in some fashion with the Egyptian priests. This is an illuminating essay, and particularly instructive in reminding us how much comparative work is yet to be done with the Egyptian sources of the periods that we, Classicists, call the Hellenistic and Imperial. Yet, the tension between Egyptologists and Classists remains palpable throughout the volume: reconcilement between Plutarch and Egyptian sources is our, rather than Plutarch's, project (215). That is what Geert Roskam effectively posits: Plutarch should be read along the lines of his intellectual programme, his zetetis.
The rest of the essays, here only quickly sketched, tackle a number of intriguing topics: an interesting short piece by Océane Henri looks at Greek theonyms used for Egyptian gods (especially at Artemis), while Frederick E. Brenk investigates Plutarch's philosophical attitude towards ancient religions as potential sources of wisdom (or not) – an interesting contribution which is, in a way, complemented by Christian Tornau's piece, which reads techniques of allegory in Plutarch's De Iside and the Corpus Hermeticum against each other. Svenja Nagel's essay deals with Middle Platonist concepts of Isis in Plutarch and Apuleius and compares them to contemporary Egyptian sources. This is a rewarding and interesting piece, one of the most substantial in the volume, arguing clearly and convincingly that the representation of Isis in both Plutarch and Apuleius corresponds to the contemporary realities of the Isis cult inside and outside Egypt. In fact, Plutarch, as well as a number of other Neoplatonists of the Imperial period, appears to have been sensible to regional differences and variations in Egyptian religion, and it seems that their quest for the authenticity of wisdom concerning the Egyptian creator god led them to the most conservative and most traditional of temples, those of Egyptian Thebes: this is the reason why, as David Klotz argues, Neoplatonists often include details stemming from distinctly Theban theologies. These two essays, together with Herwig Görgemanns’ opening anatomy of Plutarch's three-faced Isis (Greek, Egyptian, Philosophical) provide much food for thought for anyone interested in Isis cult more generally.
Joachim Friedrich Quack looks at the Egyptian background of Iamblichus’ On Mysteries of Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians, and calls into question the previously accepted view that Chaldean oracles represented the main source for Iamblichus’ work; the key themes of On Mysteries, along with telling details such as personal names of the quoted Egyptian authors, are suggestive of a significant Egyptian influence. From Iamblichus we move on with Jan Tattko's piece to Aelius Aristides to stress that reception of Egypt is a phenomenon not limited to the works of Imperial Platonists of various ilks, but is also present among authors of the Second Sophistic. Alexandra von Lieven, in another substantial contribution, takes up the joyless work digging through Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica to excavate and examine afresh Porphyry's De cultu simulacrorum fr. 10, a text dealing with an Egyptian demiurge called Kneph, and to illuminate Porphyry's sources of information on Egyptian religious beliefs. In the penultimate piece, Andreas H. Pries discusses the Greek perception of hieroglyphs (this is a sequel to the author's previous piece on the same topic, with the same title, published elsewhere). The volume closes with Rene Pfeilschifter's contribution, an engaging discussion of Synesius’ (fourth-century bc) Egyptian Tales, demonstrating that the author forges original narratives with imaginaries of Egypt as a distinctly literary foil. A set of good indices follows.
This is a welcome collection that should be commended for its ambition and honesty, and for the fact that nearly all the authors have genuinely engaged with cross-disciplinary questions, making a significant effort to understand the issues at stake in the other discipline, and to jointly think about future challenges and synergies. Publication and translation of more Egyptian texts from Hellenistic and Imperial Egypt is bound to make these conversations all the more urgent, fertile, and exciting; to paraphrase an old truism, cross-disciplinarity is impossible, until it is inevitable.
I started this review with a pitch, and with a pitch I will end: if you like the outdoors, and are interested in animals, do yourself a favour and get a copy of one of the most beautiful, most engaging, and simply most delightful books I have read in a long time – Jeremy Mynott's Birds in the Ancient World. Winged Words.Footnote 13 In spite of not being much of a birdwatcher myself (save for the hummingbirds that gather in our backyard from May onwards), I thoroughly enjoyed every moment I spent with this book. At a time in UK academia when administrative exercises have placed the notion of ‘impact’ on a pedestal, Mynott has offered a masterclass in writing a work that popularizes Classics and explains the discipline's relevance authoritatively, clearly, and memorably to outsiders, while adhering to rigorous scholarly standards. This volume tackles the big issue of the relationship between humankind and nature, by providing a highly readable cultural history of birds in Greco-Roman antiquity. Explaining the manifold aspects of birds’ relevance in everyday life, the author zooms in on six distinct foci. First, ‘Birds in the Natural World’ paints a vivid picture of ancient birds as indicators of seasons, weather, and time, before allowing his reader to listen to birds whistle, chirp, and squeak. Throughout the book, Mynott lets a plethora of original texts, regularly presented in new and elegant translations, tell the story: every page is brimming with wonderful excerpts illustrating the main themes, while the author's voice, coming from a place of lived experience, true mastery, and ornithological expertise, illuminates the passages. Take this as an illustrative sample – after producing a passage from Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris (lines 1089–95), in which the chorus mentions that halcyon sings a song of sorrow, Mynott remarks (p. 53):
It's true that the kingfisher does have a song of sorts – a jumble of high-pitched whistles, which could be thought of as a kind of keening. But the song is very rarely heard, and it seems unlikely that even the bird's much commoner shrill fight calls could explain the many literary references. However that may be, it is interesting that such a visually striking bird should be mythologized mainly for its dissonant voice, and categorized along with the melodious nightingale as the voice of mourning. (53)
Observations of this kind are the hallmark of the entire work, which is characterized by its learnedness paired with an excellent command of sources: there is much to gain from each page, for experts and non-experts alike. Experts will be grateful for the endnotes, in which Mynott points to relevant literature and offers further guidance, while non-experts will be grateful also for footnotes in which the author quickly explains terms or issues on which non-Classicists might trip. In the next large section, ‘Birds as a Resource’, one will find discussions of hunting and fowling, birds on the menu of the ancients, and a section on farming. Here, too, one learns many fascinating details, such as that the tongue and brain of a flamingo were considered a particular delicacy, served with a special flamingo sauce, or that ibis was an Egyptian speciality. ‘Living with Birds’ tells an often moving story about birds as pets, as exhibits, and as familiars, and their roles in the home, sports, and entertainment. Substantial sections deal then with birds in medicine (including diet!), folk-tales, and science (‘Invention and Discovery’), and religion, magic, and risk management (‘Thinking with Birds’ and ‘Birds as Intermediaries’). The volume is rounded off with an ‘Epilogue: Then and Now’, an account of historical shifts in the perception and significance of birds, and a useful and interesting appendix providing bird lists from ancient sources. The work closes with concise biographies of quoted authors that will be of great help to non-Classicists, bibliography, endnotes, and good set of indices. Among many splendid features of this volume, I wish to highlight its illustrations: there are over one hundred images, the vast majority in colour, and of excellent quality – if you cannot tell your turtledoves from your pigeons, worry not, you will be helped. To sum up: this is a splendidly learned and superbly interesting account of the manifold ways in which birds and humans interacted in antiquity, but it is more than that: this is a book which incites one to ponder upon fundamental ecological and environmental issues and to re-examine our own relationship to the natural world. And here I will stop for this issue – I think I just saw a bluebird in our back yard.
