The Poetics of Phantasia is a damning indictment of the blinkers of disciplinary formation in contemporary classics.

The volume claims to investigate ‘the wider concept of phantasia in Greek thought’, to look at how phantasia is understood in ‘Greek writing’, and even to analyse the ‘techniques and effects of realism, ancient and modern’. Its structure promises much: to explore how the idea of phantasia developed in Plato and Aristotle, and then to trace how this critical language became central to aesthetics through three broad themes: ‘Visualization, Vividness and Realism’, ‘Mathematical Projection, Copying and Analogy’ and ‘Prophecy, Inspiration and Allegory’. These are indeed huge, important and interrelated topics, which go to the heart of ancient rhetoric, regimes of the visual, religious polemic and art theory – and which few would dare to take on together, let alone in the space of what is not much more than an extended essay of just over a hundred pages (with notes).

What we get, however, is an extremely brief – if clear – account of Plato and Aristotle, followed by a discussion dominated almost exclusively by a very narrow selection of mainly late philosophical commentators. Proclus and Iamblichus in particular loom large in the second and third chapters – and for those who are not familiar with S.'s fundamental work in this area, these sections will feel the most original contribution. It is indeed a significant gesture to think about the notion of mathematical imaging in the context of discussions of enargeia and phantasia, and few art historians or literary theorists have broached such a connection in classics, although the fine work of Bender and Marrinan on the culture of diagrams in the Enlightenment shows how productive such an idea can be over a longer time span. S.'s discussion is also larded with occasional, very brief discussions of modern material: Wordsworth, Kant, Auerbach, Tolstoy, for example. But these are systematically embarrassing. Not only is there no apparent justification for the highly selective version of modernity on offer, but also the discussion of each of these diverse writers is thin, disjointed and without reference to the extensive relevant modern bibliography – both on large topics like the Romantic concept of the Sublime and on each of the specific authors. Perhaps, if the analysis of classical material itself had fulfilled its own announced aims, such trivial engagement with later thinking and its intellectual and political contexts could be forgiven, as offering no more than protreptic hints towards a larger story. But it is precisely with the classical materials that the blinkers of disciplinarity are so damagingly evident.

The first extended chapter on ‘Visualization, Vividness [enargeia] and Realism’ will cue for many readers of CR a vibrant contemporary debate in classics. It will summon above all a word which unaccountably does not once appear in this volume, ecphrasis. After all, for rhetorical and broader intellectual writing in antiquity, vividness starts with Homer, and starts with his poetic ability to ‘bring before the eyes’ – which leads via enargeia inevitably to his strategies of ecphrasis. This set of interlinked terms becomes part of rhetorical theory and practice (which takes in historiography), part, too, of aesthetics – and becomes a familiar part of Hellenistic culture above all. There has been so much discussion in the contemporary academy, much of it of a very sophisticated nature, of how Hellenistic regimes of viewing and writing about viewing perform a particular and intense cultural role. There is in this book no discussion of Hellenistic epigram, Hellenistic epics, the ancient novel, Greek or Latin, the ecphrastic works of Lucian, and bar a trivial page on Philostratus and another on Dio, nothing on how late prose in general engages with philosophical and rhetorical writing on ‘visualization, vividness and realism’. As there is no mention of this multiform and crucial set of ancient texts, so there is no mention of a lengthy relevant bibliography in this area. Thus visualisation and realism is discussed without reference to the work of J. Elsner, S. Goldhill, V. Platt, M. Squire, A. Rouveret, F. Zeitlin, C. Vout, H. Morales, K. Gutzwiller – and one could go on. Many of these authors have discussed phantasia with real insight and flair, introduced underappreciated texts, and explored the relation between philosophy, literature and culture precisely through ‘vividness, visualization and realism’ – the discourse of phantasia. This is a book which looks at a tiny fragment of material relevant to its proclaimed subject, and does not even appear to be aware that it has such an extraordinarily restricted view. What is so very disappointing is that the readers for the press, the author's colleagues and, perhaps worst of all, the discipline, seem to be willing to be complicit in such a bizarrely blinkered engagement with antiquity and with modern scholarship.

S. is an expert in Neoplatonic philosophy, and when she turns to these figures she has plenty of interesting observations to make – on material which has not adequately entered the debates I have referenced above. But even here the question of perspective or scope or, simply, the big picture, raises its head worryingly. In the chapter on ‘Prophecy, Inspiration and Allegory’, she introduces Synesius of Cyrene as a Neoplatonic philosopher writing on dreams – ‘not a systematic thinker’, she declares, before tracing the influence of Porphyry on his argument about how dreams depend on a form of phantasia. It is striking that S. never mentions that Synesius is also a father of the church – to our mind, perhaps a rather dodgy one, happy to do ‘Philosophy at home and myth in public’ as he scandalously put it, but, eventually, a Christian none the less. I do not know whether his Christianity has any place at all in his writing on dreams – but it is telling that when it comes to allegorical reading S.'s framework does not stretch from Philo to Gregory of Nyssa (where ‘prophecy, inspiration, and allegory’ might be thought to find a privileged field), and neither Christianity nor Judaism has any place in her account of late-antique imagination, even when Neoplatonism might be thought to have found a particular root in such religious texts, specifically when prophecy, inspiration and allegory are the express topics of concern. This, of course, is territory brilliantly outlined by D. Dawson in Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Hellenistic Alexandria (again not cited) and by P. Struck in The Birth of the Symbol (cited once without discussion). Again, the blinkers of philosophy keep the argument from seeing the importance of technical thinking about phantasia for a cultural world beyond the self-selected elite of a subset of Greek philosophers – and make S.'s project look thin and ill-considered.

This is a particular pity when it comes to the work on mathematical projection. For Proclus especially shows in a fascinating way how key terms of a familiar discourse of projection, visualisation and understanding take on a new shape and purchase when used to analyse Euclid's commitment to mathematical diagram and the understanding of things through geometric principles. It has become familiar to see the technical language of optics and the discourse of phantasia entering the language of the novel, say, in a case such as Achilles Tatius (another text not noticed by S.). With Proclus, we see a quite different style of appropriation and extension, which deepens our sense of how the regime of the visual develops its technical purchase over time. The wholly insufficient discussion of realism as a literary mode (for example) or the casual and unsophisticated treatment of Auerbach or Wordsworth will occlude the parts of the book which contribute more tellingly. The book appears to be written for a more general audience than just card-carrying philosophers – and there is certainly a need for such a book. But such an audience will be sadly let down by this volume.