We are living through a time of crisis. Klooster and Kuin's edited collection, which considers ‘crisis-narratives’ (p. 10) in Greek and Roman literary and material sources, has been published in a climate even more apposite than the year of the conference from which this book arose: 2016. In fact, crisis, in the everyday political, cultural and social sense by which it is understood by many today, is a modern invention. The choice to utilise such a weighty and irreducible concept to read events of the Classical past is a welcome one, as the ubiquity of trouble and trauma in Greco-Roman history justifies continuous comprehensive attention with a view to understanding pivotal events as public and/or private crises. (For instance, ‘The ancient world has been relatively neglected by trauma studies’, writes M. Thorne in ‘Speaking the Unspeakable: Engaging Nefas in Lucan and Rwanda 1994’, Thersites 4 [2016], 82.)
Klooster and Kuin, along with their contributors, adopt an appropriately modern approach to the concept, informed by recent scholarship such as R. Koselleck's influential article ‘Crisis’. Koselleck notes that the predominant meaning of ‘crisis’ in the West until the seventeenth century was that of medical diagnosis; the association with political upheaval was adopted later in its early modern application to the ‘body politic’ (‘Crisis’, trans. M.W. Richter, J. Hist. Ideas 67 [2006], 357–400, at 362). In its classical Greek context, krisis implied ‘judgement’, in the sense of both decision-making at a critical turning point and the issue itself. As signalled by the ‘After’ of the title, Klooster and Kuin stipulate that this is a book about the response, the remembering, of crises as a quality retroactively applied (pp. 10–11). The volume's prevailing research questions therefore concern how crises function as catalysts for social or political transformation and what their retelling reveals about the contemporary status quo (p. 3); for example, we gain perspective on the mutable idea of ‘revolution’ in T. Whitmarsh's opening chapter. The editors tell us, ‘the rhetoric of crisis organizes the world into what is normal and what is not’ (p. 6).
New and dynamic readings are conducted of some well-trodden arenas in Ancient History: one period in particular presides, with most chapters dedicated to first century bce Roman political and civil turmoil, a period that warrants inclusion for bearing the label ‘crisis’ almost universally in scholarship (most famously in C. Meier, Res publica amissa. Eine Studie zu Verfassung und Geschichte der späten römischen Republik [1966]). The crises of the late antique Roman Empire, however, are absent (consider P. Allen and B. Neil, Crisis Management in Late Antiquity (410–590 ce) [2013]). The contributors, sound in expertise, make confident and compelling cases concerning responses to crises across variant source materials. These include some under-treated texts, most commendably in L. Hau's chapter on the fragmentary third- and fourth-century bce ‘champions of alternative history’, Duris and Phylarchus (p. 64); also, A. Gallia's discussion of the elogium-inscription (p. 191), where a husband praises his wife for her financial support during wartime. The book's five parts lead the reader first through conceptual frameworks, then crisis case studies from classical Athens to Flavian Rome; the fourth and fifth parts focus solely on Roman civil strife.
The volume's methodology opens up a new avenue of exploration in terms of how the Greeks and Romans processed events as crises through narrative, for instance, L. Grillo convincingly argues for Julius Caesar's ‘emplotment’ of the 40s bce civil wars within a broader context of intra- and extra-state discord (pp. 122–34, with reference to H. White, Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe [1973]). The brevity of each chapter (averaging 16–18 pages) ensures focused and accessible essays, but some call for more explanatory space, such as A. Eckert's reading of the Sullan proscriptions through the lens of R. Vierhaus’s ‘historical crisis’ theory (1978; pp. 88–90), summarily paired with J.C. Alexander's ‘cultural trauma’ (2004; pp. 91–2).
Discussion tends towards the posthumous narrativising of crises by ancient writers, as indicated in the editors’ introduction. This approach lays fertile ground: for instance, in M. de Bakker's detailed and engaging reading of Agrippa's attempt to advise a tyrant on recovery from civil war in Cassius Dio's Roman History 52.1–41: ‘Scholars have framed the debate as a text of crisis’, he writes (p. 151). Post-disaster coping strategies are at the fore in A. Ambühl's sophisticated and theoretically-challenging treatment of temporalities in Lucan's Civil War, a ‘laboratory’ text (p. 105) whose style and subject matter make it a worthy inclusion in any conversation about catastrophe (also in Gallia, pp. 183–6).
The book's contribution to the scholarship is most apparent where discussion prompts the reader to reassess the idea of crisis itself, through an analysis of how crises were conceptualised by classical communities. This is admirably done in A. Erskine's reading of Polybius’ response to changing relations between Greece and Rome in the second century bce. Erskine describes ‘crisis’ as a ‘necessarily (and usefully) imprecise’ term (p. 65), and Klooster and Kuin note in their introduction that ‘the crisis of one group can be the desirable “normal” of another’ (p. 3). Yet, the book could have more readily and overtly engaged with this equivocality of the word ‘crisis’ in its performance within narratives, in order to work towards a fresh understanding of the concept in the classical world, informed by today's concerns.Footnote 1 Both M. Lowrie's and C.H. Lange's chapters open by contextualising the event of civil war within modern War Studies, thereby laudably aiming to broaden the analysis of one specific conflict to consider the phenomenon of war in general. However, in some chapters, the ‘crisis’ of the matter under discussion is too readily assumed rather than explicitly reasoned: while war is by any argument a ‘crisis’, the term does not feature at all in Lange's discussion of civil discord during the Second Triumvirate. Underlying disparities in the semantic function of ‘crisis’ might have been productively addressed through more dialogue between contributors across chapters, especially given the tight overlap of events and materials.
The editors defend their choice to focus on crisis at the state-level in military-security and political narratives, explaining that phenomenology or the ‘history as experience’ approach (p. 11) broadly conflicts with the aims of the volume. Yet, even within that narrow definition, the book incites us to ask what makes a disruption to the status quo of enough magnitude to warrant the application of ‘crisis-terminology’ (p. 11)? Erskine's chapter pitches the idea that crisis distinctly entails a loss of control (p. 68), which must occur in the bodies of the polity as well as in the mechanisms of the body politic. These case studies can encourage us to reflect on the nature of ‘crisis’ as something public that necessitates a personal reaction to earn the designation.
Nevertheless, this reader could not help thinking that the limited scope of the events under discussion hampered the exploration of crisis-narratives in a book about ‘Ancient Greece and Rome’ more broadly. It would have been rewarding to see the question of ‘whose crisis’ more thoroughly explored throughout, given the emphasis on recovery and re-anchoring within communities (pp. 11–12). The ground has long been prepared for a healthier discussion of how crises impacted parties beyond the main players (for example, in J. Fabre-Serris and A. Keith [edd.], Women and War in Antiquity [2015]; D. Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire [2014]). Hau and Erskine, respectively, provide satisfactory contributions in this regard by showcasing ‘the history of the victims, not the victors’ (p. 52). However, domestic, including female, responses to crisis are relegated to the last section, and Gallia's otherwise insightful chapter on crisis as both a public and private affair still only considers the ‘value of family’ in the context of the Roman elite (p. 191). The discourse concerns women ‘crossing boundaries’ in extraordinary times in order to aid their husbands (pp. 186–91), rather than exclusively ‘female’ responses to crisis.
As Klooster and Kuin note, ‘history is always the history of crises’ (p. 7), but if ‘the making of a crisis is … in the telling or framing’ (p. 10), then the validation of an event-as-crisis must be similarly qualified. Many current socio-political struggles are precisely about crises that are never narrativised as such in ‘mainstream’ historiography, never recognised as ruptures to the status quo (the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, respectively, spring to mind).Footnote 2 It feels like the responsibility of the twenty-first century historian to ensure words like ‘crisis’ are unpacked to a full, if problematic, degree when used to read and reconstruct history. Can crises ‘exist’ outside of the telling of history (p. 11)? This reader would have liked such a pertinent question re-examined in a conclusion (which the volume lacks).
Finally, while most chapters mirror each other in sub-headed introductions and conclusions, the collection suffers from some formatting and editorial inconsistencies (‘Cassius Dio’ becomes ‘Dio Cassius’ on p. 122). When passages of translation are provided, the Latin or Greek seems somewhat arbitrarily present or absent, while a few chapters warranted lengthier quotations to contextualise close analysis, for instance, Cicero's Pro Sextio Roscio on pp. 93–6. It could also have been more reliably clear throughout where translations were the contributor's own or otherwise (for instance, Tacitus’ Histories, p. 187).
The chapters offer exempla for state-level and collective recovery, designed to filter down to the plane of the personal through narrative framing and cultural memory. Some crises do pass, and the study of history can help to achieve this. As Polybius writes at the opening of his Histories: ‘the most vivid, in fact the only, teacher of the ability to endure nobly the changes of fortune is the recollection of the reversals of others’ (1.1.1–4, trans. I. Scott-Kilvert [1979]).
