The term ‘voice’, and ‘voices’, has become a heuristic tool in Classics that has been indispensable in discovering and discussing nuances of texts by enriching the complex notion of authorship and literary characters, with an eye in most cases to historical audiences, readers and consumers of the ancient literary production. This volume arose out of the Orality and Literacy XI conference in Atlanta, Georgia, under the careful editorship of S., who has put together an engaging volume that offers many compelling insights to the intersections of literacy and orality and the exciting prospects and perspectives of a focus on voice. The editor's illuminating introduction explains the choice of the focus on ‘voice’, looking back in a welcome and fruitful manner at the genesis of the Brill sub-series Orality and Literacy. The volume is divided evenly in four parts following a generic thread: (1) ‘Epic Voices’ (E. Minchin, O. Cesca, D. Beck, R. Scodel and J. Gaunt); (2) ‘Lyric and Dramatic Voices’ (C. Lattmann, M. Foster, A. Bierl and N. Kaloudis); (3) ‘From Singing to Narrative Voices’ (A. Willi, G. Bakewell and R. Person); (4) ‘Voices of Prose’ (A. Buster, T.A. van Berkel, J. Kenty, J. Fisher, A. Kirk and A. Koenig). This review highlights some of the most important aspects and themes in the contributions that seem the most pertinent to the topic of ‘voice’.
In Part 1 Minchin investigates the making of a distinct voice through long-term memory that activates indexing mechanisms of oral performance. A story such as the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodameia or stories about Heracles could be retrieved in consistency with the character that delivers them and the narrative in which they are placed. Poets use memory techniques and have their characters construct their voices in complex ways. Cesca focuses on messengers' speeches and considers the voice of the messenger and that of the poet, as both are preoccupied with being reliable media of transmission; messengers are ‘vectors’ of focalisation, and multiple layers of focalisation can endanger the reliability of the message through distance from the authoritative source. Oral poetry is conscious of this and carefully transmits messengers’ voices. Beck illustrates how the Homeric poems capture subtleties in the references to seers: by juxtaposing μαντ- and θεοπροπ- words, the latter, she argues, is a marked term in contexts of doubt towards a seer, anger or conflict and, as such, carries a different nuance, one that makes us more sensitive to a different tone in the Homeric voicing. Scodel's chapter, one of the most focused on the topic of voice, uses as a starting point for its analysis a comparison with contemporary oral epic, where singers are known to have a distinctive ‘voice’ as in the south Slavic tradition. With that as her basis and theoretical angle she looks at moments of eccentricity in Hesiod's counsel in Works and Days. She traces this more individual voice in some of the less quoted and known passages, all of which were carried in the canonised bigger epic; this angle helps us to see some of the more sui generis advice and character(s) that voiced it. Gaunt goes beyond epic and looks at contexts of the description of Nestor's cup in Iliad 11, one that evokes Near Eastern descriptions of cauldrons. Athenaeus describes it about 1,000 years after its known Iliadic reference, while almost 2,000 years later contemporary readers can enjoy the Pithekussai skyphos, which suggests that it must have had a literary and material career in antiquity with later Hellenistic reproductions. This is a welcome and original paper about visualised, inscribed voice that seeks to bridge the heroic past with its own past and future.
In Part 2 Lattmann locates self-reflexivity in Pindaric epinician odes with an intratextual perspective: this contribution argues convincingly that the komos festive performances purported as impromptu songs praising the victor have left a vestige on the epinician poet, not to be conflated with the historical Pindar. The Pindaric ‘I’ is a more multivocal source of voice, combining fictional, idealised and historical voices, and extends beyond the poet Pindar. Foster tackles Pindaric echoes in Horace and the treatment of heroic figures: Neoptolemus in Paean 6 and Achilles in Horace, who inserts Apollo in his fourth ode of Book 3. Achilles is the negative exemplum of Horace's poetic ego constructing an interesting case of intertextual constructions of poetic voices and identities. Bierl looks at the audible effect and the creation of spectacle and sight through sound. The presentation of Cassandra in Aeschylus' Agamemnon with her piercing, raw voice (through tonality, expression, as the product of a moving body on stage) can add to the spectacle that enhances the experience of pain and tragic pathos. This paper presents an ensemble of voices, extends the definition of ‘voice’ and creates a much more subtle understanding of tragic creativity. Kaloudis, in one of the most intriguing pieces in the volume, argues, based on Epicurean euphonist approaches, that much of Hellenistic poetry as showcased in her study on Theocritus could be read aloud in ways that sound like music: poetry is to enthral an audience and, as such, the song of Thyrsis in Idyll 1 was a textual performance reinterpreting the euphonist approach, in which text both absorbs and becomes music.
In Part 3 Willi studies the historical present in a cognitive frame, as it is the feature of ‘oral’ grammar. Where Homeric discourse had an augmented ‘past’ tense, this becomes the historical present in later Greek, creating an oral feature within written text. The Homeric augmented past becomes the immediate effect: different authors chose different voices. This paper productively moves the discussion on ‘voice’ to a subtle understanding of grammatical choices that go much deeper than one thinks. Bakewell moves to a different direction by analysing the prominent role of Aeschylus in the Socratic refute of poetry in the Republic. Tragedy is dismissed as mimetic, yet Socrates quotes Aeschylus. Quotation is not the same as a full-scale performance, and Socrates takes the role of the eponymous archon deciding which tragedies are to be performed and quoting for his own good both showcasing and minimising mimesis. Person's comparison with Moses and Deborah in the Hebrew bible examines the relationship between poets and characters, and how they merge in an authoritative self-representation.
Continuing with a comparative mode, the first paper of the fourth part by Buster explores citizen voice in the Athenian and Judaean community and the many evolving attitudes, bringing a new subtlety to the term ‘voice’ as an aspect of the formation of cultural memory. Van Berkel turns to the Greek oratorical usage of oral mathematics. By juxtaposing examples of Lysias' more empathetic usage versus Demosthenes' insistence on accuracy, this paper considers the appropriation of accuracy as a rhetorical tool that serves the democratic value of transparency. Kenty counters the Ciceronian representation of a community in De oratore as a medium of philosophical dialogue in which Cicero reconciles anxieties with Roman values through the mimetic recreation of the classroom. As oratorical skills in the mid 50s bce were challenged with regard to their impact, imitating educational settings gave an outlet. In Cicero's works this outlet could also be adapted to readership, as Cicero knew very well the difference between oral delivery and published form. Fisher examines the hybridisation of Roman and Gaulish cultural elements in the bronze fragments of the Coligny calendar that appears to have been engraved at the end of the second century ce. The calendar is an amalgam of Roman and Gallic, oral and written voices. Despite divergences from the Roman fasti, this calendar offers a unique view, as Fischer persuasively puts it, to see voice as an expression of cultural identity. Fischer presents an exciting case of application of the term voice as recorded on a calendar where we have the traces of Gaulish ‘language’ with a Latin ‘accent’. Kirk offers a fresh view into interspecies and animal communication as recorded in the ancient Greek literary tradition with a study that compares the Odyssey with Plutarch's De Gryllo and opens up the topic of voice to include an original discussion on sound, logic, dialectics, virtue and mind behind the term ‘voice’ with philosophical undertones. Koenig considers Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon, identifying the symbol of the rose as a central feature in the novel signalling moments when the encounter between oral and written voice is uneasy and when the heroine's voice is ultimately silenced in its representation. By countering the Platonic intertext and tracing the presence of the sense of smell through the representation of fragrance throughout the novel, Koenig makes an intriguing case about the fragility of voice through the constructions of narrative microcosms that intensify the gap between text and voice and highlights the artificiality of the world in the novel. The image of the rose lacks scent, and, as the character of Clitophon proclaims, the voice is a ‘shadow of the soul’. With this contribution the volume ends, with a profound thought about what ‘voice’ is doing and whether readers and scholars of the ancient world engage in a shadow play. The final pairing of shadow with voice through another Platonic touch leaves the reader asking critical questions with an articulated connection about voice and voices.
Although the theoretical and critical engagement with the term ‘voice’ is uneven, and the contributions are divergent in their approaches to the term, the volume offers new insights and threads for further thought and illuminates the term ‘voice’ and ‘voices’ as a category worthy of further research as a result of the complexity and plurality of approaches. With its consistent treatment of the oral and the written voice and the addition of themes that explore textures of time and literary space, cultural memory and vestiges of a distinctive voice, fragility and fragmentation of voice, this volume offers a broad scope that will benefit studies in arts and humanities.
