Some words are battlegrounds: Greek philosophy is rife with duelling definitions of φύσις and εὐδαιμονία. Others – λόγος, ἀρχή – are used differently by different thinkers, but are not themselves sites of debate: usage is determined by commitments in other domains. Κόσμος leans in the latter direction: different views about (the) κόσμος emerge from disagreements in physics, theology and ethics more often than from squabbles over the word itself. Consequently, a study restricted to the word κόσμος would be incomplete: its fortunes are tied to developments centred not on word but world. Yet a study of ‘the world in antiquity’ would sprawl far beyond a single volume. Cosmos in the Ancient World navigates these difficulties by taking κόσμος as broader than the word and narrower than the world. Horky's introduction understands it as ‘an order that is somehow arranged through forces of opposition, equilibrium or measure’ as well as a conceptual tool, descriptive and normative, for arranging reality (p. 3).
The first chapter (by Horky) investigates when κόσμος came to mean ‘world-order’. One classic view holds that before the Timaeus the word means only ‘heavens’, never the totality of heavens and earth (see A. Finkelberg, HSCP 98 [1998]). Against this, Horky notes the comprehensive use of κόσμος attributed to certain ‘wise men’ at Gorg. 507e–8a. These wise men hold that the κόσμος hangs together by friendship, orderliness, temperance and justice, relations Socrates glosses as ‘geometrical equality’. This hints at an early Pythagorean background for κόσμος as world-order.
A. Macé argues that Parmenides uses Homeric κόσμος language to make an epistemological point. In Homer these words denote deliberate arrangement by human beings, of world (marshalled soldiers) and words (well-ordered narrative). When Parmenides’ goddess promises us a ‘deceitful arrangement of words’, she alerts us to ‘the conditions for truth in epic poetry’: arranging words, the cosmologist arranges – and distorts – the world.
M. Schofield surveys responses to this dismissal. He reads Heraclitus’ puzzling claim that ‘this κόσμος none of gods or humans made’ (DK 22 B 30) as a rejoinder to Parmenides: the world-order is no human arrangement. Schofield sees Leucippus’ Μέγας διάκοσμος as another response to Parmenides, and Leucippus’ language is adopted to new teleological purposes by Anaxagoras, prompting Democritus to polemicise in turn against this misappropriation. Together, these chapters give a novel account of κόσμος in the fifth century, clearing new paths for future research.
Scholars of early Greek thought should flip ahead here to C. Atack's excellent chapter on the development of κόσμος and (δια)κοσμέω in political discourse. Atack shows that in pre-Platonic analogies between πόλις and κόσμος the latter term rarely means the natural world, but rather the political order of the gods. The human ruler or lawgiver is analogised to Zeus, conceived as the orderer of a community more than the master of nature. Atack traces the analogy from military applications in Homer, through a short-lived democratic version in fifth-century Athens (every citizen is his own Zeus!), to monarchic and oligarchic versions dominant from the fourth century. It is a surprising result of the volume that the disputes discussed in Chapters 1–3 went on in seeming independence of this contemporaneous development.
M. Johnson shows that Aristotle rejected a περὶ κόσμου ἐπιστήμη with its own special objects and principles. The phenomena others allot to the study of the κόσμος belong, for Aristotle, to the science of nature and the subordinate science of the heaven (οὐρανός). This is not news to scholars of Aristotle, but they should still be interested in how Johnson gets there. Aristotle typically uses the word κόσμος when discrediting theories of cosmogonesis and multiple worlds. His strategy, which Johnson shows spans exoteric and acroamatic works, is always to argue that the behaviour of the simple bodies precludes a temporal origin for the world or any world beyond our own. Aristotle's rejection of ‘cosmology’ as such is rooted in his theory of the simple bodies.
Every historian of Greek philosophy will wish to read G. Boys-Stones's chapter. Boys-Stones argues against a standard interpretation of Plato according to which the invisible ‘inner beauty’ of the soul is contrasted with the visible beauty of the body. Through a careful and compelling treatment of Alcibiades and Diotima in the Symposium Boys-Stones shows that we see virtue in the activity of virtuous agents. This enables a cleaner homology between the human being and the κόσμος. It makes no sense to talk about the ‘inner’ or ‘hidden’ beauty of the κόσμος; its physical body is visibly beautiful, and so are its activities. Plato, Boys-Stones shows, holds the same of people.
L. Brisson takes up Plato's tripartite homology of world, city and person in the Laws, showing how the study of the κόσμος inculcates both personal and civic virtue. P. Remes looks at Plotinus’ take on the homology – and disanalogy – of world and person in Enn. 3.2 and 3.3, a pair of ethical treatises unusual for their focus on inter-agent relations.
In Chapters 9–11 the volume departs from philosophy, and the theme slips slightly out of focus. R. Gagné explores astral choruses in Marcus Argentarius, Nonnus and Euripides; G. Sauron surveys Roman astral architecture. Each chapter illuminates its material (Gagné's reading of Argentarius is wonderful), but both take for granted that to represent the heavens, in dance or marble, is to engage with κόσμος. Since earlier chapters problematise this assumption, it is frustrating that neither author argues the case.
R. Germany's chapter, also a bit of a misfit, reminds us what scholarship lost with his death in 2017. Germany uncovers an association in Latin literature between the temporary stage of the early Roman theatre and the ad-hoc templum built for taking auspices: as the templum was a mundus in miniature, so Roman theatre goers practised an augural contemplatio mundi. This rich essay traces the association through many authors and genres, and it will delight any Latinist.
The volume returns to philosophy with W.H. Shearin's chapter on ‘cosmological sublimes’ in Lucretius and Seneca; the focus is sublimity more than κόσμος. Another chapter by Horky tracks cosmic respiration from fifth-century Pythagoreanism through Middle Stoicism and Philo to the New Testament. Finally, an afterword by V. Wohl attempts to braid together the many threads of the preceding chapters.
No book can cover everything, but the chapters dealing with astral representations cry out for a treatment of κόσμος in astronomical texts. Later Aristotelianism would be welcome too: Johnson touches on Alexander of Aphrodisias and the De mundo, but I longed for a chapter on Alexandrian Platonism; one wonders how Platonic, Aristotelian and Plotinian perspectives were harmonised in late antiquity.
Prehistory of the Greek word is oddly absent. No author mentions the etymology currently preferred by linguists (< PIE *k̂óNs-mo-). This is a shame twice over: first because this etymology is ripe for review, and second because, if it stands, some claims in the volume need revision. For instance, Atack's chapter assumes that an original sense of ‘orderly military formation’ was extended to well-ordered speech (pp. 166–9, repeated p. 299). But this probably gets it backwards: since non-Greek descendants of the root *k̂ens- have to do with elevated speech (Lat. cēnseō, ‘proclaim an opinion’; Ved. śáṃsati, ‘praise’; Av. saŋh-, ‘proclaim’), the original semantic field of κόσμος should be sought in the κόσμοι ἐπέων of Solon and Parmenides (fr. 1.2 W, DK 28 B 8.52), Thersites’ failure to speak κατὰ κόσμον (Il. 2.213–14) and Demodocus’ ἵππου κόσμον … δουρατέου (Od. 8.492). A linguist might have helped elsewhere: Germany's chapter places too much stock in one of Heidegger's etymological musings (I doubt templum is related to τέμενος; *temp- ‘stretch’ is a likelier root than *temh1- ‘cut’, and *tem- as printed on pp. 215 and 296 is definitely wrong).
Carping aside, Howard Hawks said a good movie is three great scenes and no bad ones. Something similar goes for edited volumes: Cosmos in the Ancient World has some gems and no duds. Its primary audience will be ancient philosophers, but it is written for all scholars of Graeco-Roman antiquity, and anyone interested in κόσμος, word or world, will profit from it.
