If you still haven't chosen a book to take with to the desert island, I have a suggestion: L'encyclopédie du ciel.Footnote 1 At 1,202 pages, it will keep you occupied day and night: what you read as text by day will help you read by night in the sky. This wonderful and extremely useful book is as difficult to classify as it is to put down. Essentially, it is a compendium of Greco-Roman discourse on the stars and planets, divided into three parts. The first (‘Les images: histoire et mythologie: voir et raconter’) is about the constellations and the planets. It opens with a catalogue in which each constellation is illustrated, explained, and accompanied with appropriate quotations from Eratosthenes’ Catasterismoi and Hyginus’ Astronomica. There follow essays about the names of the constellations, on the Sun, Moon, and the planets, and one on Greek and Roman creation myths. All are accompanied by long passages of appropriate Greek and Latin texts in translation. The second part of the book (‘Les lois: l'astronomie: observer et calculer’) is about the ancient attempts to make sense of and explain the stars and planets as a system, about calendars, and about ancient astronomical instruments and objects. This part of the book also contains a complete translation of Hipparchus’ Commentary on the Phaenomena of Eudoxus and Aratus. It closes with an account of Greek star catalogues. The third part of the book is concerned with various attempts to interpret the celestial phenomena (‘Les messages: signes et influence: interpréter et prédire’). It includes, but is not restricted to, astrology; philosophical ideas are also discussed, such as astral apotheosis, the ascent of the soul through the sky, and the music of the spheres. There is a dictionary of astronomical and astrological terms and a dictionary of ancient astronomers and authors dealing with astronomy. The book closes with parallel star catalogues of Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy.
Turning our gaze from the loftiness of the heavens to the earth and human culture, where the only constant thing is the change itself (as memorably outlined at the outset of Herodotus’ Histories), a remarkably wide-ranging volume addresses the human reaction to catastrophic loss – the commemoration of the fall of cities.Footnote 2 The volume opens with a foreword by Margaret Alexiou, whose monograph The Ritual Lament in the Greek Tradition is the starting point of many chapters in this volume. Alexiou was the first to ague that city laments are a subgenre within the broad category of lamentation in Ancient Greek tradition, with examples ranging from tragedy, through epigram, to the speeches of the second sophistic. Alexiou's hypothesized ‘unbroken tradition of historical…lament’ looms large over the volumeFootnote 3 – some contributions support it wholeheartedly and add new texts to Alexiou's collection; a few question it. This book traces the genre of city laments from its origins in Sumer, through its Mesopotamian and Anatolian manifestations, and its impact in Ancient Greek and Roman cultures, and beyond, all the way to the Byzantine and modern laments for cities.
Ann Suter's Introduction provides the methodological and theoretical grounding for the individual chapters. John Jacobs’ essay, ‘The City Lament Genre in the Ancient Near East’, discusses the earliest attestations of the genre in the Western tradition, the five canonical Sumerian laments, three complete (laments for Ur, for Sumer and Ur, and for Nippur) and two fragmentary (for Uruk and for Eridu). He summarizes the scholarship on these texts and explores the relationship between structure and theme in the three complete laments, ultimately arguing that ‘the city lament ritually reenacts the death and the (hoped and prayed for) rebirth not only of the city per se but also of the house/temple-city-universe for which that city stands and falls’ (16). Jacobs isolates three main motifs in these laments: the storm of the god Enlil, the weeping goddess (patron of the city), and the prayer, roughly corresponding to the movement from death through lament to rebirth. He then charts the evolution of the genre from Sumerian laments, through the Bible and Hellenistic Greek poetry, to Agathias’ early Byzantine laments for Troy, noting that the initial form of lament entails an address of a poet or a compassionate city-goddess to a city, which then changes to an address by a personified city (which merges with its patron goddess) lamenting its own fall.
Mary R. Bachvarova's essay, ‘The Destroyed City in Ancient “World History”: From Agade to Troy’, explores the possible influence of the Mesopotamian city laments on the Greek and pre-Greek narratives about the fall of Troy and ultimately argues that the Iliad was ‘a Greek response to a nearly 2000-year-old Near Eastern historical tradition framed as the serial demise of important cities’ (37). She discusses specifically the Sumerian King List, the Curse of Agade, the Cuthean Legend of Naram-Sin, the Hurrian-mediated oral epic tradition, and the Hurro-Hittite Song of Release. She posits that the Iliadic epic tradition was initially created by the local non-Greek-speaking residents at Troad, which explains the channels of influence of Near Eastern plotlines. The fall of Troy was initially part of the Anatolian epic tradition, and the story was eventually adopted by and adapted by the Greek-speakers between 1160 and 1050 bc. Furthermore, Bachvarova sees the Eastern influence as much wider than merely an introduction of a new plotline or individual episodes such as the ruined temples and city walls, or the patron god mourning and/or abandoning the city, and argues that
when the Achaeans are given the glory of destroying this great city, the Greeks are engaging in an exercise analogous to that of the Hittite kings, newcomers to the world stage enshrining in inscriptions and epic their defeat of various key cities in order to establish their right to be part of world history. (53)
This is a stimulating and thought-provoking essay, which merits reading and re-reading. Together with Dorota Dutsch, in the fourth chapter (‘Mourning a City “empty of men”’), Bachvarova turns to the stereotypes of Anatolian communal lament as reflected in Aeschylus’ Persians and the lost plays of Phrynichus (Capture of Miletus, Phoenician Women, and/or Persians). The authors provide an outline of Greek attitudes towards Anatolian culture of laments, especially the Carian and Phrygian, and a detailed analysis of the lamentations in the Persians, identifying the influence of specific motifs of Near Eastern city laments.
Greek tragedy is also the focus of the fifth chapter (‘Seven Against Thebes, City Laments, and Athenian History’), where Geoffrey Bakewell adopts a sceptical stance and warns against over-enthusiastic categorizing of Aeschylus’ Persians and Seven Against Thebes among Greek city laments. After all, he points out, even if some elements of Persians are influenced by the Near Eastern laments for cities, Persepolis did not fall and the Persian Empire survived. Thebes, too, survives, both in Aeschylus’ myth and in Athenian reality. His view of the tradition of the Greek city lament is prudently cautious and he allows for what he calls ‘reduced’ lament elements in Iliad 6 and the Persians, but ultimately posits that the genre declined in popularity at Athens, ‘whose citizens had seen too much of the real thing’ (124).
The next four chapters turn to the Roman world: In ‘Lament for Fallen Cities in Early Roman Drama’, Seth A. Jeppesen seeks and finds lament for fallen cities in Plautus’ comedies: Amphitruo features a victorious general who is placed in the same situation as the captives from the city he sacked when Jupiter takes his wife, his house, and his identity; in the Bacchides, the clever slave delivers a long monologue comparing his success with the sack of Troy (925–48). Ultimately, these comedies merge the motifs of triumph and city lament, probably under the influence of the palliatae and praetextae. Bearing in mind their performative context (some were staged together with tragedies as part of the triumphal celebration), and their mixed audience (Romans and Greeks, masters and slaves, the conquerors and the conquered), the parody of tragic lament and triumphal motifs in Plautus’ comedies gains even greater significance. Jeppesen points out that, judging on the basis of the titles, the fall of Troy played a major role in the plots of lost Roman tragedies, and Alison Keith continues to explore the resonance of Troy in Roman epic in Chapter 7 (‘City Lament in Augustan Epic: Antitypes of Rome from Troy to Alba Longa’). In Augustan epic, Rome is enshrined as the eternal city which cannot fall, and the devastation of a city can be reflected only as either paving the way for Rome's future greatness (Troy, Alba Longa) or the confirmation of Rome's absolute supremacy (Carthage). Troy looms large in the following chapter, too (‘The Fall of Troy in Seneca's Troades’). Here Jo-Ann Shelton considers Seneca's treatment of the sack of Troy as a cautionary tale and sees the laments of the Trojan women as an exploration of the paradoxical theme of death as a blessing, since it offers a termination of suffering and the possibility of being commemorated by the survivors. The victorious Greeks, in contrast, can be seen as a foil of the Romans and provide an opportunity for the audience to consider their own behaviour as victors. In ‘How to Lament an Eternal City: The Ambiguous Fall of Rome’, Catherine Conybeare juxtaposes two responses to the unthinkable event, the Gothic invasion of Rome in ad 410: Augustine's De civitate dei and Rutilius Namatianus’ De reditu suo. Augustine refuses to lament the city and asks ‘What is Rome, if not the Romans?’ He compares the relationship of the citizens and their city to that of the soul and the body and insists that, as long as the Romans praise god, they will not perish. Namatianus’ elegy charts the stages of his mournful retreat from Rome to Gaul in 417. Conybeare expounds the poem's references to Ovid's exile poetry and its presentation of Rome as a beloved mistress whom the poet must desert in order to return to his plain wife, Gaul. Both Augustine and Namatianus draw on the Aeneid, especially on Anchises’ prediction of the future position of Rome as the world police. Neither author laments Rome, as the literary tradition bequeathed the idea of Roma aeterna to generations of Romans, an idea that looms too large to leave any space for the mourning of the sacked city.
In ‘Messengers, Angels, and Laments for the Fall of Constantinople’, Andromache Karanika discusses the literary and oral poetic responses to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453. She argues that these poems draw on the long Greek literary tradition of laments for cities, but form a new genre by introducing a new motif, the angelos. Both literary and folk-lament poems represent the city as feminine and its destruction as a violation of the female body. The last paper in the volume (‘“A sudden longing”: Lamenting the Lost City of Smyrna’, by Gail Holst-Warhaft) completes the geographical circle and returns to Asia Minor in order to discuss the burning of Smyrna in the Greco-Turkish war of 1920–22 and the forced relocation of its Greek population. When more than a million refugees flooded Greece, they brought with them their own musical culture and introduced a new genre of music in Greece which is still referred to as ‘Ta Smyrneika’ or ‘Ta Mikrasiatika’. The songs were mainly about personal sorrow, but the genre itself, significantly influenced by Turkish music, became symbolic of the communal suffering of Greek refugees.
This volume is an excellent contribution to the understanding of lament as a genre and all papers are well researched and thought-provoking. Even though they are chronologically and geographically disparate, thematically they fit together and elucidate each other well. By focusing on different cultures and literary genres, the book enables us to gain an overview of various groups and individuals who came together to lament and commemorate cities, and to appreciate the ability of lament as a motif to infiltrate a wide range of literary genres: epic, tragedy, comedy(!), philosophical treatise, rhetoric, historiography, epigram, folk-poetry, and popular music. The volume poses (and answers) some pertinent questions about what constitutes the essence of a city, and what about it is worth lamenting and commemorating.
One activity which is rooted in looking at the essence of things and also involves selecting those worth highlighting and commemorating while lamenting things lost is the writing of a commentary of an ancient text. After Glenn Most (Commentaries = Kommentare, 1999) and Roy Gibson and Christina S. Kraus (The Classical Commentary. Histories, Practices, Theory, 2002), Christina S. Kraus and Christopher Stray have edited a third major volume on this quintessential Classics genre.Footnote 4 Commentaries are not only the earliest and foundational philological genre, but they tend to be our first guides through the classical world, as we move from grammar books to reading texts. Our relationship to the commentary evolves almost in the same way as our attitudes to a parent: we start with blind trust, go through a phase of irritation and frustration, and finally come to terms with the fact that commentators are just human beings – imperfect, yes, but ultimately a product of their own time and trying their best.
This edited volume opens with the editors’ preliminary remarks on the genre and on the aim and scope of the volume, and is followed by a section on the individuals who, each in their own way, have not only shaped the field, but came to be associated with the works and authors they commented on: Jebb (Sophocles), Fraenkel (Agamemnon), Page and Austin (Virgil), Dodds (Bacchae), Kiessling and Heinze (Horace), and Horace's more recent commentators, Nisbet, Hubbard, and Rudd. Part 2 is dedicated to the discussions of tendencies in commenting on specific authors, texts, and genres, namely Tacitus’ Annals, Ennius’ Annales, Greek lyric, the ancient philosophical commentary, Italian commentaries on Lucretius, and, on a broader note, the genre of historical commentary and the quotations of Ovid in ancient commentaries on Virgil. Part 3 (‘Material: Form, Series, Markets’) opens with a discussion of the marketing value of Terence commentaries in Italy from the 1470s to the early seventeenth century. The second contribution in this section is about the Renaissance commentators of Latin erotic poetry, with a particular focus on Propertius. There follows a paper on Alexander Pope's translation and commentary of Homer, one on the Anglophone commentaries on Tacitus’ Agricola, and an essay on the ‘Orange’ series (Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries). Part 4 (‘Reception: History of Commentary’) contains essays on Hipparchus (the ancient commentator on Aratus’ and Eudoxus’ Phaenomena), the ancient commentaries on Theocritus and Virgil's Eclogues, the expansion of Servius in the twelfth century, Christian Gottlob Heyne's commentaries on Tibullus, Virgil, and the Iliad, and Jean-François Vauvilliers’ commentary on Pindar. Part 5 is forward-looking, and considers the merits and shortcomings of web-based commentaries. This is not a volume which lends itself easily to cover-to-cover reading, but those interested in particular authors and their ancient and modern commentators will benefit from individual chapters. Even though the sections are helpful for initial general orientation, the authors of individual papers in the sections do not address the same sets of issues and the quality of individual contributions is uneven.
Moving on from the most conservative and traditional field of Classics to the latest call for rethinking the field, yet another edited volume demands an intervention, no less. Shane Butler's edited volume proposes reconsidering Classical Reception and is ‘intended foremost as an intervention in the field of Classical Reception Studies’ (15).Footnote 5 In the Introduction, Butler presents ‘Deep Classics’ as a third perspective, an approach different from the concepts of tradition and reception, and yet not entirely new. The reason why this book appears in the general review section is Butler's assertion that we have all been doing Deep Classics all along. We are reminded that ‘antiquity’ is a word for a depth of time; the term ‘Deep Time’ looms large over the volume and refers to the
jarring juxtapositions of distant past and immediate presence, such as evolutionary time, which leaves pieces of the genetic code for our pre-human ancestors embedded in the DNA in our own bodies, or cosmic time, more dizzying than any earthly abyss but still connecting everything in and around us to the matter with which the universe burst into being. (4)
Butler continues:
no less than geologists, evolutionary biologists, and astrophysicists do, archaeologists and other classicists also stare into abysses of time… A basic aim of ‘Deep Classics’, therefore, is to re-propose Classics as an early species, and partial origin, of Deep Time thinking itself. (4)
Butler is reluctant to take sides in the Martindale–Goldhill debate on reception; indeed, he side-steps it by proposing ‘Deep Classics’ as a ‘third perspective’. In the Introduction, Butler is reticent about what precisely ‘Deep Classics’ is and how exactly is it good to think with. He does, however, enlighten us on how it should be abbreviated (DeepC, pronounced ‘deep sea’ [15]). Classics simply is deep, Butler asserts, since it cannot be otherwise, and reception studies are not a detachable postscript to Classics but its very core.
The fifteen essays in the book invite us to ponder on the depth of time which separates us from our research material, and are varied in ambition and scope. Butler's own essay, ‘Homer's Deep’, opens the collection and is programmatic in several ways: it was circulated beforehand to the participants of the conference which took place at the University of Bristol in November 2014 and gave rise to the volume; it dwells on the concept of Deep Classics; and it announces its hero founder and a model representative. Butler chooses (or rather constructs) a surprising adversary: Marco Fantuzzi's acclaimed monograph Achilles in Love. Intertextual Studies (Oxford, 2012). The ‘problem’ is Fantuzzi's fourth chapter, ‘Comrades in Love’, wherein he discuses the relationship of Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad and its spicy Nachleben in the classical literature. Fantuzzi is nothing if not a careful and perceptive reader and his innocuous and perfectly correct conclusion – that Homer depicts the two as close friends and does not offer ‘explicit evidence that Achilles and Patroclus were bound by an erotic bond’ (3) – is quoted among other passages from his book as the starting point in a puzzling and confusing attack, in which Butler protests against the specific language that Fantuzzi uses to express this conclusion, assembles an array of modern interpretations of the relationship of Achilles and Patroclus, and proclaims that the Victorian scholar and writer John Addington Symonds was the exemplary Deep Classicist, and Homer's Achilles the first. In the course of this essay, Butler quotes and discusses six lines from the Iliad; but he engages far more closely with the seventeen quoted lines from Fantuzzi's book which he occasionally subjects to ridicule (for example, ‘Fantuzzi's anxious efforts to work out when Achilles and Patroclus began having sex…’ [34]). Butler's ‘intervention’ is an invitation to read ‘the tradition as a whole (the ‘whole depth” of the tradition itself)’ (39) and he repeatedly implies that Fantuzzi's shortcoming is that he did not engage with the modern readings of Homer. Fantuzzi sets out to provide an analysis of the ancient responses to the Achilles–Patroclus relationship and succeeds brilliantly. One might ask ‘Who is truly able to engage with the tradition as a whole?’; unless, of course, one does as Butler and selects his or her own representatives of this entire tradition, obliterating whole nations and cultures in the process. What about the Byzantine, Serbian, Chinese, or Brazilian readers of Homer? Even more pertinently, because of the nature of the culture he investigates and the textual tradition, Fantuzzi's ancient readers happen to be elite white men, but Butler chooses his privileged white male readers selectively from a much more diverse and exciting pool. This is not to say that Butler's observations on Symonds as a ‘renegade reader’ are not pertinent and interesting; I merely fail to understand why it was necessary to launch a vicious attack of Fantuzzi's work in the process.
Other essays in the book are not aggressively polemical and present a series of distancing approaches to (mostly) Ancient Greek culture, predominantly to texts. In a continuation of Butler's essay on the first ‘Deep Classicist’, Achilles on the beach, Joshua Billings discusses a series of paradigmatic expressions of (mostly German) philhellenism which curiously tend to take place on the shore where a figure longingly watches the sea (‘The Sigh of Philhellenism’). Alex Purves (‘Feeling on the Surface: Touch and Emotion in Fuseli and Homer’) continues the theme of desperation with a tactile spin – from Homer's Polyphemus, who touches his beloved ram and imagines the animal grieving for his master's eye, to Henry Fuseli's depiction of this particular scene from the Odyssey and his compositionally similar drawing The Artist Despairing over the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins. Purvis focuses on the figures’ inability to access and fully understand what has been lost and on their resulting desperation. In the second part of his paper, Purvis brilliantly demonstrates Homeric epics’ ability to depict the fleeting moments of breaking the surface, be it of the sea, the spring, the surf, even of skin, in highly emotional passages, indicating the depth ‘which lies on the surface of Homer's poem, both literally and litorally’ (82). Helen Slaney's ‘Perceiving (in) Depth: Landscape, Sculpture, Ruin’ continues the haptic theme and discusses Herder's essay Plastik, Beckford's Grand Tour journal, Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, and de Staël's novel Corinne, ou l'Italie, looking specifically at their attempts to perceive the invisible but tangible ‘innerness’ of antiquity. Joshua Katz's ‘Etymological “Alterity”: Depths and Heights’ is a spirited and highly entertaining discussion of some aspects of historical (deep) linguistics and its ‘shallow’ pendant, the folk and poetic etymologies. According to Katz, the latter, being often dismissed by the linguists as false, is in fact often profound, whereas the former's ‘dirty little secret’ is that some of the most central words, such as the Homeric mēnis, have multiple and competing modern explanations. Katz's paper, one of the highlights of the volume, reminds us of the consequences of the modern trends in Classics: while we are now (commendably) interested in the way in which Classics have been read and interpreted in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Modern Age, Classics programmes no longer offer training in historical linguistics, and the younger generations of Classicists are not even able to comprehend, let alone evaluate, the etymological arguments put forth by the linguists.
Adam Lecznar's essay, ‘Shut Your Eyes and See’, turns to Nietzsche's and Joyce's very different attempts to productively harness their immediate wonder at the classical texts and objects. Nietzsche exalts wonder as both the immediate response and the starting point of comprehension, juxtaposing this ‘intensity of the present moment’ with the ‘walking encyclopedia’-type culture he sees as the hallmark of modernity. Joyce's Ulysses ‘made a virtue of this information overload’ (133) and brought antiquity to life by integrating the structure, characters, images, and even individual words of the Odyssey in a remarkably detailed vision of Dublin, often embedding Homeric images in vivid depictions of contemporary immediate moments. ‘The Loss of Telos: Pasolini, Fugard, and the Oresteia’, by Sarah Nooter, starts with an assertion that Aeschylus’ Oresteia best exemplifies the Greek notion of telos (many would disagree), since it features an ending ‘imbued with a sense of intentionality or purpose’ (145), and proceeds to ask what happens with one such telos when the trilogy is interpreted or staged in the twentieth century. She discusses the ways in which Pasolini's Notes Toward an African Oresteia and Athol Fugard's Orestes refrain from reproducing the finality of the original play. ‘Kings of the Stone Age, or How to Read an Ancient Inscription’, by Stephanie Ann Frampton, is about classics as objects. Frampton discusses ancient inscriptions and texts on or about them in an attempt to elucidate the Ancient Greeks’ and Romans’ engagement with what they themselves perceived as classics or history, since they also engaged with their own past through its physical traces.
Sebastian Matzner's lucid, playful, and thought-provoking essay ‘Queer Unhistoricism: Scholars, Metalepsis, and Interventions of the Unruly Past’ delves into the status of comparative studies and reception studies within the broad field of Classics. He asks: if ‘traditional’ Classics is ‘straight’, is reception the ‘queer’ and the Other? He invites us to compare the discourse of chronological development and progress and its role in propping up the Western imperialist project to the ‘Queer unhistoricism’ which seeks ‘to productively disturb’ these schemas of development. Starting with these observations, Matzner discusses metalepsis in two novels (José Luis de Juan's Este latente mundo and Jeremy Reed's Boy Caesar). In both novels, metalepsis merges the ancient and contemporary narratives, and both are examples of historiographical metafiction with queer scholars as protagonists. Following the lead of one of the novels’ protagonists, Matzner presents us with a collage of an essay: his quotations are a tad too long to represent typical scholarly practice; the piece opens with a quote which turns out to be a personal note; polished scholarly prose is interrupted by free verse: ‘Have a look at this essay’ (186).
Giulia Sissa's ‘Medea's Erotic Jealousy’ tackles a difficult, unruly, and embarrassing emotion, arguing ultimately that ‘the jealousy of the ancients was a protest against ingratitude, a call for a reaffirmation of reciprocity and dignity’ (212), and she sees Euripides’ heroic and outspoken Medea as the prime representative of this emotion on the tragic stage. She traces ‘a stoic turn’ in the perception of jealousy and discusses Seneca's theorizing about suppression of passions and his Medea as the embodiment of the failure of Stoic wisdom. Sissa asserts that the stoicism had a decisive impact in the history of jealousy, insofar as it created the idea that this emotion should be left unspoken. We too, she argues, are heirs of Seneca when we are ashamed of our own jealousy.
Summoning the ghosts is the topic of two very different papers: in ‘Ghostwritten Classics’, Edmund Richardson provides a breathless account of Classicists (some of them highly distinguished) who, with various degrees of commitment, explored their own or others’ psychic powers: Gilbert Murray and E. R. Dodds were Presidents of the Society for Psychical Research and, while Murray seriously claimed to possess psychic powers, Dodds managed both to hypnotize a lady against insomnia and to soothe a couple scared by a poltergeist by reciting Greek poetry – experiences he described with considerable hilarity. Spiritualists took the scholarly idea of a ‘conversation’ with the dead very seriously and tried to make Classics less deep by collapsing the boundaries of time and space. ‘Circulation of Spectres: Ghosts and Spells’, by Davide Susanetti, is about summoning the ghosts as a metaphor and a model for our relationship with the past.
In ‘Relic / Channel / Ghost: Centaurs in Algernon Blackwood's The Centaur’, Mark Payne argues that Blackwood refers to Apollonius’ Argonautica to express the sense of the loss of the primordial. Brooke Holmes's contribution, ‘Cosmopoiesis in the field of “The Classical”’, is a manifesto of ‘postclassicism’.Footnote 6 Holmes invites us to rethink comparatism as scholarly and intellectual practice, which she sees as productive insofar as it questions and redefines the conventional boundaries of the field. She understands comparatism
as an ethos and a method that can help us start thinking about modes of engaging with Greco-Roman antiquity that neither presume the unity of their object not even its fragmentation, but instead self-consciously and actively participate in the formation of their objects. (272)
This model is not interdisciplinarity; its ambitions are wider (‘cosmopoetic’) and it ideally results in world-making. The final essay in the volume, ‘Borges and the Disclosure of Antiquity’, by Laura Jansen, addresses the issue of unknowingness: even if we were able to reconstruct the ancient world in its totality, we would still not be able to comprehend this totality. In his oeuvre, Borges constantly ponders on the human inability to grasp the totality of knowledge and Jansen proposes his approach to literature and reading as a model for Deep Classics:
Borges offers a model for plotting classical antiquity which…neither focuses on the point in which it is said to originate nor attempts to account for its uses at specific points of reception, but instead directs our attention to the texture Greco-Roman literature and culture acquire in time. (293)
There is much food for thought in this volume, and it does raise some important questions, but the telos-loving reader might be frustrated by the reluctance to answer them.
From food for thoughts to thoughts about food: a new edited volume in Collection Latomus aims to provide a cross-cultural perspective on food and identity in the Ancient World.Footnote 7 This slim paperback contains seven papers and an introduction written by the three editors. After a brief overview of research on ancient food and its implications on identity and culture, the editors announce the aim of the volume:
to show how ancient Greece and Rome, though great civilizations, were strongly influenced by foreign cultures and incorporated exogenous elements to make life easier. Foreign cuisine, foodstuffs and customs could also be re-contextualized, given a new sense in the welcoming culture. We will study how this was done and how people justified it. (12)
The first essay (Robin Nadeau, ‘Chicken à la perse’) argues that, contrary to communis opinio, the domestic chicken was not introduced to Greece from India via Persia at the time of the Persian Wars. Although the bird was called ‘Persian’, this was not its universal designation and the first testimonies for this name come from Old Comedy. Furthermore, archaeological evidence attests that chicken was eaten in places such as Rhodes, Crete, and Laconia in the Late Neolithic and the Bronze Age, and vase images of roosters pre-date the Persian Wars. Emmanuel Botte (‘The Exploitation of Tuna in Greek Sicily during the Classical and Hellenistic Periods: Cultural Transfer of Punic Origin or Technological Innovation?’) reassesses another scholarly consensus, namely that the process of conservation and transformation of fish in salted fish and sauces originated in the East, probably in Phoenicia. He discusses the fish conservation sites in Sicily, where Punic workshops can be compared to the Greek, and concludes that the evidence does not enable us to discern which culture started the fish production first on this island, but that Greek workshops had circular vats for fish salting, whereas the Punic did not. Scott Gallimore's paper (‘Creticum vinum excellens? Reassessing the Role of Wine in Crete's Identity’) is yet another corrective of the scholarly consensus. Yes, Crete's identity was strongly tied to its wine in antiquity, and massive quantities of Cretan wine were exported, but it was not highly regarded for its quality. Rather, the good reputation of Cretan wine was based on its medicinal use. Laure Passet (‘La perception des denrées étrangères à Rome au IIe siècle av. J.-C.: l’évolution des représentations’) argues that there was a shift in the perception of foreigners, especially the Greeks, in Rome in the second century bc. She discusses the leges sumptuariae, laws introduced in this period in order to curb the public display of wealth and limit the use of foreign luxuries at feasts, which had an impact on the perception and use of foreign food and especially wine. Food and identity is also the topic of Wim Broekaert's essay, but he looks into the possible influence of Roman soldiers on the local cuisine, and vice versa (‘The Soldiers’ Kitchen along the Limes: Fish Sauce Consumption and Economics’). He provides an analysis of the dining habits on the northern limes and concludes that the local population was significantly influenced by the food of the soldiers. The multi-ethnic Roman army ‘did not provincialise its cuisine, but clung on to the alien consumption habits as introduced by soldiers with a dominantly Mediterranean origin and eventually developed a common cuisine’ (p. 86). This is the most illuminating and wide-ranging paper in the volume and it demonstrates well just how much we can learn about identity constructions by looking at the role of food in cultural exchange. In ‘Cultural Exchange and Greek Dietetics in Galen’, John Wilkins demonstrates that Galen was very much opposed to introducing foreign foods to the diet of those already healthy and that he advised the use of foreign foodstuffs mostly as a medicine, in order to restore the lost balance of a patient. In the final, brief paper (‘Dining with the “Other” in Earliest Christianity’), Dennis E. Smith discusses the meal gatherings of early Christians, which took the form of the Greek symposium, and concludes: ‘hospitality at the table functioned as a social process in which a diverse collection of outsiders could be brought together and molded into a community through the ritual of eating together’ (106).
Finally, a third edition of a ‘classic’: the 2016 edition of Kenneth J. Dover's Greek Homosexuality,Footnote 8 which originally appeared in 1978, is prefaced by two essays, one by Stephen Halliwell on the book and its author, and the other by Mark Masterson and James Robson about the initial reactions to the book and the subsequent flourishing of publications on ancient Greek sexuality. Dover created and shaped the whole field, and all subsequent publications on Greek sexuality argued in favour of or against his conclusions about the dominant and subordinate sexual roles (100–9), the exact expectations from an ideal eromenos, the social class of the partners in the same-sex relationship, the age difference between the partners, Dover's anachronistic use of the word ‘homosexuality’ to characterize same-sex relationship in Greece, and so on. The two initial essays will enable the novice in the field to understand the intellectual climate in which Dover was working and the impact of his work on the study of sexuality; they also provide a very useful (though very brief) overview of more recent studies of Greek sexuality. Dover is still a very useful starting point, but many of his conclusions were subsequently challenged and he cannot be read in isolation as a definitive and last word on same-sex love.
The study of emotions has been a beloved topic for a while now, spawning a number of delightful contributions in recent years. After first steps were made in ancient philosophy by William Fortenbaugh's work on Aristotle and emotions in the 1970s, followed by W. B. Stanford's Greek Tragedy and the Emotions in the early 1980s, it was in the 1990s that the study of emotions started gaining more momentum. Particular credit for this development in Classics, and cultural history more generally, is due to Douglas Cairns, whose 1993 Aidos paved the way for many, and who continues to provide excellent investigations (one of which is reviewed below). Then there was Angelos Chaniotis’ Oxford-based and ERC-funded project on ‘The Social and Cultural Construction of Emotions: The Greek Paradigm’, which resulted in a database of sources, countless individual contributions, and three collective volumes entitled Unveiling Emotions (two published, one in preparation), while David Konstan's incisive, witty, always sophisticated, and inspiring investigations on compassion, pity, envy, spite, and jealousy – and The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks (2006) – will be familiar to many readers.
The trend is not limited to Classics: the Max Planck Institute in Berlin set up a Center for the History of Emotions, Queen Mary University, London, founded another Centre for the History of the Emotions in 2008, and the Australian Research Council established a Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions in 2011.Footnote 9 I mention here just a few; for a fuller overview of current projects, the reader is encouraged to see pp. 7–8 of the Introduction to Cairns and Nelis’ volume, reviewed below.
Emotions, in a word, are hot. Already established as a substantial subdiscipline in the field of Classics, study of emotions attracts the attention of the general public, too: a recent exhibition on ‘A World of Emotions: Ancient Greece, 700 bc–200 ad’ at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York opened in March 2017, generating great interest and earning critical acclaim.Footnote 10
In this sense, Classicists should feel nothing but gratitude and joy at the appearance of an edited volume concerned exclusively with the ancient emotion of – wait for it – disgust: ‘The blooming field of disgustology is going to be an exciting place in the near future’, are Valerie Curtis’ prophetic words from the epilogue to her exciting and easily digestible Don't Look, Don't Touch, Don't Eat.Footnote 11 Indeed, anyone interested in the study of ancient emotions and/or (religious) purity will benefit greatly from Donald Lateiner and Dimos Spatharas’ collection on ancient disgust.Footnote 12 While Robert Kaster tackled the concept of fastidium and outlined the ideology of disgust in a memorable 2001 essay,Footnote 13 this volume provides the first large-scheme venture into the topic. Often breaking new ground, it has plenty to offer to those interested in history of emotions, cultural and social anthropology, or cultural history more generally.
My personal interest in issues of purity and pollution sufficed to pick up this volume for a review but, as I laid my hands on it, I was immediately intrigued by the image on the dustjacket, and challenged, from the very outset, to think about the very notion of ‘disgusting’: an image of a defecating dog from an archaic kylix might seem a strange illustration for ‘disgust’ to someone like me, who has a ten-year-old Labrador, and who every day does what all responsible dog owners do, but I am certain that some could find the sight itself disgusting. Am I desensitized? To what extent is disgust then socially conditioned? Is disgust an instinctive, visceral, automatic, universal emotion – a result of what the cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman described as human processing ‘System One’, or a product of conscious deliberation, calculation, and logic (Kahneman's ‘System Two’), or both?
Looking at a child picking and eating from its mucky nose for the duration of a transatlantic flight elicits in everyone – save for, perhaps, the child's desensitized parents – a physical reaction: the stomach churns, the nose wrinkles, one averts one's gaze, the jaw drops, and the tongue is already laced with acids, preparing the body for the seemingly inevitable. And it is precisely the expressions of disgust, along with the phenomenology of disgusting (such as appears in our sources), that thirteen contributions to this volume dissect and put on display, warts and all. The Introduction provides an excellent overview of key methodological issues and source-related problems (both textual and visual/material) associated with an exploration of disgust as an emotion (especially connoted by the Greek terms aēdia, bdel-, duschereia, and the Latin fastidium and derivatives of pig-). It brings the reader up to speed with current trends in disgustology and emotion studies (Paul Ekman and Paul Rozin's works are often cited) and it then contextualizes the volume within the wider field of emotion studies, with the aim to ‘explore disgust's effects as produced by obeying and transgressing cultural norms, polluting and policing Greek and Roman lives’ (7). While informative in all aspects, what is particularly worth reading carefully, or even twice, is the section concerned with ‘projective disgust’ (23–35), that is, ‘cases in which elicitors of “core” disgust are projected upon individuals’, groups, and ideologies as a means of stigmatization and marginalization (23), construing ‘the deviant’ and reaffirming the construed sense of normality.
The thirteen essays are split into two relatively even sections, the first of which comprises six essays and deals with Greek sources until the second century bc, while the second part deals with Roman and Imperial Greek material. George Kazantzidis opens the Greek section with an essay entitled ‘Empathy and the Limits of Disgust in the Hippocratic Corpus’, demonstrating clearly that, in the medical texts under examination, disgust is regularly perceived as a side effect or symptom of an illness, and attributed to the patient. Kazantzidis investigates what he identifies as a competition between the Hippocratic discourses on the human body and the discourses of the literature contemporary with the Hippocratics. I found the first two sections exceptionally interesting and more informative than the concluding one, in which the author takes a somewhat odd turn to draw parallels between the Hippocratics and the Philoctetes regarding the understanding of illness. But this odd turn facilitated a smooth transition between two initial papers: Sophocles’ Philoctetes is the focus of the next chapter, Emily Allen-Hornblower's piece on ‘moral disgust’ in the play. Sophocles’ use of duschereia in both a physical and a moral sense (and understood as a ‘psychophysical’ emotion) is at the centre of this examination, and one will find a fine discussion of the term's meaning in the play. Daniel B. Levine's straightforward piece deals with the Greek for ‘yuck!’ and ‘blech!’ – the exclamation aiboi (and similar) and its uses in Attic comedy. The following two essays form a coherent diptych and concern orators: Nick Fisher explores Demosthenes’ use of disgust in Against Androtion and Against Meidias, while Dimos Spatharas limits his piece to Aeschines’ speech Against Timarchus. Fisher does a terrific job both at the level of lexical analysis (especially for bdel-, and duscher- [106–8]) and at the level of discourse analysis; I found his discussion of the conflation of religious impurity and disgust in Against Meidias of great interest. Spatharas, equally, has interesting things to say about the use of bdeluria in Aeschines: at 41, the orator states that Misgolas was attracted to Timarchus because the latter had a nice body, he was young, and he was bdeluros, which Spatharas assimilates with modern pornographic uses of the adjective ‘filthy’ (129), before turning to broader ideological connotations of the term in the rest of the essay. Floris Overduin's essay closes the ‘Hellenic’ section with a discussion of Nicander's Theriaca, which was not, I confess, among the very first texts to spring to my mind when thinking of Greek works to do with disgust. Reader, I was terribly wrong. Overduin brings out mercilessly and in quick succession Nicander's most disgusting passages: analysing the consequences of various kinds of bite wounds, he lets the pus and bile flow, bloody urine gush, genitals discharge galore, bloated bellies swell and burst, rotten teeth fall out; his page retches pimples, blisters, wounds, and ulcers. The grotesque hyperrealism of Nicander's ekphraseis and Overduin's concluding comments on ‘the beautiful presentation of the repulsive’ (155) made me think of the elder Bruegel's and Bosch's paintings, and I was glad to escape to the second half of the volume.
Turning to Robert A. Kaster's essay with a sweaty palm and upset stomach, I found just the relief I needed. Kaster's terrifically funny, playful, and sophisticated ‘Not Tonight, Dear, I'm Feeling a Little pig-’ explores the semantic range of Latin piget and provides a (semantic) taxonomy of usage. For pig- words there is no single direct and exact translation in English, but Kaster describes a sentiment familiar to all of us: ‘the experience of pig- entails an unpleasant state of diminished energy in which lassitude and aversion are combined – a weary sigh blended with “ugh”’ (160–1). I greatly enjoyed this essay. The following piece, Ayelet Haimson Lushkov's ‘Beyond Disgust’, explores the Latin word fastidium, and its uses in Livy in particular. After several case studies, the paper concludes that the meaning of fastidium extends beyond the emotion of ‘disgust’, and that it is ‘essentially a mark of awkwardness and anxiety’ (187). Debbie Felton's piece is an interesting read, discussing witches, disgust, and abortion in Imperial Rome; she explores the representations of Imperial witches as physically and morally disgusting, raising the intriguing question of why sexy spell-dispensing seductresses became old, wrinkly, ugly, and filthy in the imagination of the first-century ad writers. Donald Lateiner mines two novels which prove to be generous providers of many things disgusting: Petronius’ Satyrica and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. The essay identifies six categories of disgusting as targets of exploration (what goes into the body; what goes out of it; certain sexual acts; bodily deformations; disease and death; and contact with the repulsive) first in Petronius and then in Apuleius, before offering a syncrisis by way of a conclusion. In another remarkable essay, Marika Rauhala engages with ‘projective disgust’ and explores portrayals of Galli (castrated priests of Cybele), laying an emphasis on dehumanization through disgust. Tom Hawkins’ essay, penultimate in the collection, deals with Aesop and the representation of his body and suggests ‘that Aesop's disconcerting form participates in a discourse about disgusting bodies, behaviors, and materials in the Aesopic vita tradition that uses our disgust response as a springboard for personal and social transformation’ (253). An interesting piece, but much of the reader's joy will depend on how far one wants to follow the author in his understanding of Aesop as disgusting rather than plain ugly, or to rely on questionable reconstructions of the pharmakos (‘scapegoat’) rituals. Mali Skotheim's short sketch of the disgusting bodies of actors in the Imperial period first produces some evidence for actors’ ‘disgusting stage bodies’ before turning to a description of Nero as ‘actor-emperor’, drawn largely from Suetonius. If at any point during my study of this volume I had qualms concerning definitions of ‘disgust’ and the logic of the argument, then it was with the final two essays, but let us assume that, like beauty, disgust can sometimes be in the eyes of the beholder.
The book closes with a bibliography, indices nominum et rerum, and an index locorum. The volume is reasonably well produced; I did note, however, that there are items missing from the bibliography which are quoted in notes, and there are some rogue publication dates in the notes which do not square with the dates in the bibliography. Kazantzidis, Fisher, Kaster, and Lateiner are the highlights, listed in order of appearance. I will, without doubt, furtively glance again at Overduin at some point, drawn to disgust like a drive-by gawker at a car accident. Nearly all the essays in this collection merit great praise and the editors are to be applauded for putting together an original, often lucid, and almost invariably inspiring volume. Disgustology has arrived in Classics in great style.
Broader in scope and brimming with outstanding contributions is Douglas Cairns and Damien Nelis’ collection of essays, derived from a 2013 conference held at the Fondation Hardt.Footnote 14 This volume is envisaged as a programmatic consolidator, and an observatory: where does the study of emotions go from here? The Introduction takes stock of accomplishments so far, sketches desiderata, weighs the applicability and force of various methodological approaches, and delineates the scope of the volume – a crash course for anyone who wants to find out quickly and reliably where we are right now. The twelve contributions cover a lot of ground. Donald Lateiner again investigates disgust, this time in earlier Greek literature (mostly epic and drama, and there is an interesting section on smells). Douglas Cairns looks at Greek phrike – shudder, chills, fear, but sometimes even intense joy (61) – as an emotion and a physical symptom in drama, Hippocratics, philosophy, and orators, pointing out its ‘nature as an involuntary, instinctive response, especially to immediate visual and aural stimuli’ (73). I caught myself wondering if English ‘freak(y)’ has something to do with this; it doesn't seem to, although the etymology of ‘freak’ remains unclear. Dana LaCourse Munteanu investigates grief and mourning, first in epic and tragedy, then in Middle Comedy and select philosophers from Plato to Cicero. Stephen Halliwell's piece deals with ancient theories concerning poetics of emotional expression and inspects closely relevant passages from Aristotle's Poetics, Horace's Ars poetica, and Longinus’ On the sublime, raising questions regarding the generation of emotions in the triangle constituted by author (and/or author as a persona), audience, and text. William Fortenbaugh looks at the Pseudo-Aristotelian Physical Problems and what they have to say about sympathy (in Book 7), which turns out to denote shared affections, ‘shared pain, painful sounds and sights, contagious diseases, infectious yawning, and urination’ (140). His essay is a superbly interesting read, partially thanks to the author's introductory reminiscences on the early days of the field. Angelos Chaniotis, one of the organizers of the exhibition at the Onassis Center I mentioned above, analyses emotions and statues from two angles in particular: emotions which led to the production of statues, as well as the broad spectrum of emotional responses to statues (from awe to agalmatophilia), highlighting cases of statues which were thought to be endowed with particularly human capacities and characteristics. Glenys Davies looks at Roman art, inspecting depictions of personal space (‘proxemics’ – how close people stand to each other) and of touch (‘haptics’) as emotional signifiers in non-verbal communication. Cynthia Damon's piece deals with historiographical emotions: emotions as a historian's source, then emotions and their impact on the (historians’) audience, and, finally, the author's own emotions. Margaret Graver turns to Cicero to study grief and distress, looking, with stoic doctrines in mind, at ‘cases in which the public figure projects an image of himself as one who is strongly moved by emotions’ (195). From grief and regret, we are led to hope – but Laurel Faulkerson also discusses those cases in Ovid and Virgil when hope is deceitful or misguided, and the emphasis is on literary appropriations of hope as a closural/structural feature. David Konstan's piece on the relationship between reason and emotions, cohabitants of the mind in the Stoic view, made Seneca come alive for me; his discussion of reason defying emotions (which can however, be modified – not by reason but by other emotions) was an inspiring read, and one of my favourites in the collection. Chiara Battistella and Damien Nelis close the volume with another piece on Seneca, this time on anger in his Medea. The escalation of passion, violence, and horror in Seneca's eponymous character is juxtaposed to the Euripidean model, and then also, and with emphasis, to the closing of the Aeneid. The volume closes with a single index (locorum) – a pity, since several papers have thematic overlaps which may remain undetected by those using the volume in hurry. All in all, this is another splendid contribution to the field, with, without exception, inspiring and excellently researched pieces, covering a great deal of ground, and showing the way.
The third book on emotions I chose for this review is the collection stemming from a 2013 Royal Holloway conference organized by the Centre for Oratory and Rhetoric.Footnote 15 Like the previous book under review, this one is published by Franz Steiner Verlag, which is quickly establishing itself as the prime venue for publication of studies of ancient emotions. The topic of the volume is, generally speaking, the use of emotions as a part of persuasive strategy in a wide variety of genres and periods. Its purpose is to ‘present exciting new thinking in areas of this subject that are currently commanding research (and growing public) interest’ (19). Following a succinct Introduction, sixteen papers are split into four even sections. The first section, entitled ‘Emotion in Classical Greek Oratory: New Directions’, contains papers on forensic and deliberative oratory (Chris Carey); Isaeus 7 and 9 (Brenda Griffith-Williams); deliberative speeches of Attic orators and deliberative speeches in Thucydides (Ed Sanders); and Demosthenes’ persuasive strategies in his letters (Guy Westwood). Part 2 is entitled ‘Emotion and the Formation of Community Identity’. It opens with another paper by Angelos Chaniotis, this time mining epigraphic sources to explore his concept of emotional community, that is, the ‘community of people who are expected to feel the same emotions in a certain situation’ (95). Thucydides’ Plataian Debate and Melian Dialogue in the context of kinship diplomacy are the subjects of Maria Fragoulaki's essay. From Thucydides we jump to the memory of Sulla's violence during the Late Republic and the first century ad (Alexandra Eckert, who also ponders on what emotion might be and how to approach it). Then we move back in time to Plato's Laws in Lucy Jackson's essay on ‘kinaesthetic’ empathy (a spectator's emotional response to a performance derived from a recollection of previous performance). Part 3 is entitled ‘Persuasive Strategies in Unequal Power Relationships’. Here, Jennifer Winter discusses a broad spectrum of emotions attested in Xenophon's Hipparchus and Anabasis; Jayne Knight looks at anger as means of social control in Imperial Rome; Judith Hagen investigates tears as means of persuasion in Roman historiography; and Matthew Johncock's paper deals with emotional appeals (to family members, peers, inferiors, superiors) in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Part 4, ‘Linguistic Formulae and Genre-Specific Persuasion’, opens with a superb piece on the language of persuasion and politeness in letters and petitions of the Hellenistic period (Eleanor Dickey). Just as interesting and inspiring is Irene Salvo's treatment of emotive strategies of persuasion in Greek erotic curses (eros, philia, provocation of anger, and resentment). Federica Iurescia follows with a piece on anger, fear, and other negative emotions as parts of persuasion strategies in Plautus; and the volume closes with Kate Hammond's conversational analysis (‘discursive psychological approach’) of select passages of Catullus. The volume ends with a general index, which includes the key terms and sources.
It is certainly not an easy task to construe a structurally coherent volume from the proceedings of a conference. I put down this volume thinking that, while many of the papers are of exceptional quality and deserve great interest (Carey, Chaniotis, Dickey, Fragoulaki, Jackson, and Salvo being personal favourites), the whole does not amount to more than the sum of the parts. Nevertheless, the papers in this collection are thought-provoking and in all of them the reader will find something of interest, even if more often it will be on persuasion rather than on emotion. I trust that students of ancient oratory in particular will profit from this book, while those interested principally in the study of emotions will find that some papers demonstrate more methodological sophistication and more awareness of current trends than others.
Jörg Rüpke's investigation of religious deviance opens with a discussion of an emotion, and this would be the one often felt by both Theophrastus’ ‘superstitious man’ and Plutarch's (On Superstition) deisidaimon (deisidaimonos on page 2 is clearly a typo): fear and anxiety before gods.Footnote 16 Rüpke, however, is not interested in emotions in this slender (114 pages of text and notes) yet strangely expensive book on religious deviance, a revised and enlarged English edition of his 2011 Aberglauben oder Individualität? Religiöse Abweichung im römischen Reich (which comes with a price tag of 24€, about a third of the price of the English translation). Instead, he studies another increasingly prominent topic in religious studies: the role of the individual in polytheistic religions and, relative to that, the extent of religious freedom and infringement of norms in Roman religion. Religious deviance more generally is understood as a behaviour which is not necessarily legally prosecutable but is aberrant from the religious perspective: infringements of norms, offences against socially accepted standards, and similar. In this sense, Rüpke uses an investigation of deviance in order to scan variations in religious behaviour, and thus cast light on the limits of individuality in the religious life in antiquity (2, 10–11). Having clearly defined his aims, methodology, and attitude towards sources in the first chapter, he turns to Republican normative texts, skimming instances of religious deviance from relevant fragments of P. E. Huschke's Iurisprudentia anteiustiniana. The reader will find here an interesting discussion of piaculum (both the matter of and means for expiation), an analysis of the SC de Bacch. of 186 bc, select fragments of Varro, and Cicero's De legibus (for 2.15, 3.2–5 and 2.19–22 all of the Latin is printed and English translations are provided; for some reason the first sentence quoted from 2.19 on page 24, ‘ad diuos adeunto caste…’ is left out at the beginning of the translation on page 26, but then referred to in discussion on page 29, and some readers may find of interest Cicero's subsequent redefinition of caste from 2.19 as caste…animo videlicet at 2.24). The third chapter explores religious ethos and religious knowledge (or rather ignorance) as a vehicle for religious deviance, while Chapter 4 investigates deviant behaviour in temples, with an emphasis on the handling of statues: Seneca, for instance, complains about people whispering names into divinities’ (that is statues’) ears, telling them the time of the day, reading out to them their witness statements, combing their hair, washing and anointing them, and so on. Intriguingly, ancient authors characterize such behaviour as furor, insanire, dementia, and this chapter provides an exceptionally interesting read. In Chapter 5, the book explores types of religious norms in late antiquity, drawing evidence from long passages – again given in both Latin and English – of Lactantius, Tertullian, and the Codex Theodosianus. Those interested in religious life in late antiquity will find very helpful the catalogue of themes and subjects of religious legislation (the clergy, sacred property, ritual practices), along with Rüpke's discussion of authorities issuing religious norms. Chapter 6 deals with competition between religious norms and their potential conflicts, going back to issues of individual agency and group diversity. The final chapter sums up key observations on normative processes during the Late Republic, and explores potential models for the historiography of deviance during the Imperial age. Here, Rüpke takes into account changes in the nature of imperial religion and outlines key processes of religious individuation along the seams of political and social history of the Late Republic and the Imperial period. A bibliography and subject index complete the volume. Those looking for straightforward, clear-cut answers will not always find them in this investigation, but Rüpke's book is a thought-provoking journey through some of the tricky material and hairy topics, which will, no doubt, invite further debate.
The final volume I picked for this review turned out, much to my surprise, to partly overlap with Rüpke's Chapters 5 and 6, not just thematically but also chronologically.Footnote 17 For Religious Competition in the Greco-Roman World is a deceitful title: in truth, the book deals almost exclusively with late antiquity; with the exception of one essay (Hoklotubbe), several cursory discussions of Plato and some observations on Asclepieia, it has nothing of import to offer on earlier Greek or Roman religion. Following the Introduction, there are fifteen essays, split over four sections; each part contains a succinct introduction to the section's topic and a proleptic overview of the essays that follow. The Introduction, short and very thin in substance, announces that the volume's aim is to ‘use competition as an approach to enlighten the origins, contours, and nuances of socioreligious discourses in antiquity and to put forth a general methodological framework for the study of these ancient dialogues’ (1). I therefore expected to then find more explication from the editors concerning this methodological framework, but have discovered relatively little. Other than some shadow-boxing against anonymous scholarly opponents who ‘ignore complexities of late antique discourses’ (1) and the editors’ statement that theirs are ‘broadly comparative methodologies that delineate the ways this competitive interaction reshaped cultural and religious landscapes’ (3), I learned that the papers in the collection ‘broadly fit into more modern sociological models such as those of Pierre Bourdieu’ and his theories of cultural capital and symbolic economy (6). On every occasion when the editors use without qualification the terms ‘ancient’ and ‘antiquity’ in the Introduction, the reader should supplement them – ‘late antique’ and ‘late antiquity’ – to save the relevant statements from being factual errors. The first of the four sections, ‘Competition and Material Culture’, opens with its mini-introduction (Gardener); all four mini-introductions do a fine job providing and discussing intellectual context, relevant methodologies, and outcomes. Then there is an essay on the symbolic power of dress in Tertullian (Daniel-Hughes), one on funerary art (Urbano), an interesting piece on imagery on Constantine's coinage (DesRosiers), and a chapter on the (reconstruction of a) synagogue in Callinicum in Syria (Chin). Krulak introduces the second section, ‘Competition and Neoplatonism’, which contains essays on Origen's allegoresis (Ramelli), wisdom and religious competition (Shaw), and Julian's theurgic Platonism (Dingeldein). Section 3, ‘Religious Experts and Popular Religion’, the most interesting of the volume, is splendidly prefaced by Ullucci, and contains chapters by Stowers on experts and non-experts and modes of religiosity in the third century ad; by Hoklotubbe on piety in Plutarch, Philo, and 1 Timothy; by Shuve on nuptial imagery; and by Spielman on Jewish and Christian responses to spectacles. The final section, prefaced by Harvey, deals with ‘Competition and Relics’: Winn Leith and Everingham Sheckler's essay on competition between churches without relics and those with relics opens the section; a piece on Muhammad's hair follows (Bursi), then one on the cult of Symeon the Stylite (Boero), and finally a paper on votive offerings at Christian healing churches (Vikan). The volume closes with a bibliography and a set of very good indexes. The book is reasonably well produced, though with some minor typos and annoyances (e.g. Robin Lane Fox became Robert Lane Fox [255]). While I freely admit to bearing a grudge owing to the misleading title and the half-baked Introduction, I did enjoy several papers dealing with material culture and most of the section on religious experts, and many papers in this collection show a great degree of sophistication and deserve interest. It remains a pity, however, that the editors missed a splendid opportunity to think harder about marketplace/agonistic/competition metaphors in critical language, or to engage more closely with relevant theoretical models in religious studies. Those who wish to do so have at their disposal David Engels and Peter Van Nuffelen's meaty introduction to their 2014 edited volume, Religion and Competition in Antiquity.
