In recent classical scholarship, the modern terms ‘monsters’ and ‘the monstrous’ have served as a means of approaching familiar sources afresh. This often means putting new emphasis on previously marginal evidence, and D.L. offers a substantial advance in that direction. While centred on the work of much-studied philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, D.L. focuses on the chosen cluster of motifs, together with relevant philosophical thought across a broader milieu, including poetry and paradoxography, and with special attention to late antique theology. This ambitious book is an important study of monstrosity in ancient Greek and Latin philosophical texts, moving in chronological order from the archaic period to late antiquity. D.L. argues that this theme is meaningfully present in each of the major philosophical movements of antiquity, though, as one might expect, it proves to mean more for some than for others.
Eight chapters address separate philosophical eras or movements, generally starting with doxography before exploring passages or sources with special relevance to monstrosity. The first two chapters address cosmogony, in early mythological poetry and in Presocratic physics; the next two address Plato and then Aristotle; Chapters 5–7 cover Epicureanism, Stoicism and Scepticism; and Chapter 8 (by far the largest, five times the length of the Plato chapter) concludes with Middle and Neoplatonism. In many cases the discussion includes works of authors considered to share the doctrine, for example including the tragedians as mythological poets, Lucretius as an Epicurean, Pliny the Elder and Lucan as Stoics, and Philo, Galen and Plutarch as Middle Platonists. As a result, the book lives up to the sweeping breadth of its subtitle by mentioning many dozens of texts and authors. There are a few typos, but the presentation is high quality. The backmatter takes up a full hundred pages, including indices locorum, verborum, rerum and nominum.
The result of this breadth is that monstrosity is defined in several different ways. For previous classical studies of monstrosity, there have been two main areas of interest. One is supernatural monsters in classical myth, as represented in epic poetry and the visual arts; the other is physical abnormalities in history, including not only human and animal deformities as miracles or sensational exotica, but also the ideology of impairments or deformities as monstrous. Monstrosity can also be a metaphor for things that are alarmingly bad or otherwise shocking, though monstrosity-as-rhetoric is much more coherent and prevalent in modern English than in ancient Greek or Latin. The book gives many convincing demonstrations that the imagery or language of monstrosity in classical texts communicates philosophical thought.
As D.L. acknowledges frankly in the brief but excellent introduction, the monstrosity under investigation varies in its degree of literalism, depending on the subject matter. The most successful chapters deal with sources that substantially mention monsters or deformity, whether imaginary or real. This may happen in accounts of the past or of the present world, or at least in metaphors or allegories with significant philosophical meaning. In some chapters monstrous forms are imagined for the past: it is well known that almost all ancient cosmogonies or zoogonies involve monstrous forms of one kind or another, so there is plenty to say in Chapters 1 and 2 about Hesiod’s hybrids and Empedocles’ man-faced oxen. In Chapter 3, by contrast, Plato’s imagery of monstrosity is mainly limited to two instances – the metaphor for the soul’s multiplicity in Republic 9 and Aristophanes’ pseudo-cosmogony in the Symposium –, in other words, to playful allegories. Broader talk of ‘monstrosity’ in Plato must dilute it into a synonym for materialism, badness, imperfection and so on; it seems a stretch to claim that ‘Prodigious myths and monstrous metaphors are … at the core of the idealist construction that fundamentally shapes Attic Greek thought’ (p. 91). By contrast, Aristotle is a biologist, and in Chapter 4 D.L. focuses on Aristotle’s account of defective organisms that fall short of what he defines as their telos. For D.L. monstrosity in the sense of abnormal forms is necessary for the Aristotelian explanation of nature, ‘based on the substitution of dynamic forms and ends for both Plato’s static ideas and the atomists’ exclusively material reality’ (p. 129). Chapter 5 finds plenty more monstrosity in Epicureanism – not in its doxography, but in Lucretius’ poem, which uses it in a zoogony and in vivid counterfactuals of impossible bodies. The chapter ends with a swerve into Augustan poetry, by arguing that Virgil, Vitruvius, Horace and Ovid respond to Lucretius in their various imaginings or critiques of monstrous forms.
The last three chapters do not find such consistent roles for monstrosity in their doxographies, and D.L. sometimes locates it in incidental mentions or in more vivid sources by authors labelled affiliates of the school under discussion. Chapter 6 finds no consistent role for monstrosity in Stoicism, for which we have no explicit zoogony. Stoics use mythical monsters as passing illustrations, such as reasoning by analogy from normal-sized people to imagine Cyclopes and Pygmies, or imagining false representations, such as the Erinyes or Centaurs. Seneca is present in Chapter 6, although much else of it is devoted to authors supposed to shed light on Stoicism who are not avowed Stoics: the Christian authors Tertullian, Minucius Felix and Lactantius; the poet Lucan, whose witch Erichtho is mentioned as an example of cosmic disorder (p. 190); and Pliny the Elder, whose ethnography of monstrous races is cited. Many Roman authors take broadly Stoic beliefs and attitudes for granted, but the absence of appeals to Stoic providentialism in Pliny (p. 199) or Lucan (p. 211) should not be surprising, since they are not dogmatists. Chapter 7 on Scepticism seems the thinnest, since this philosophical school has by definition no concern with monstrosity. The only monstrous image cited – ‘Plato the head of him, Pyrrho the tail, in the midst Diodorus’, a parody of the Iliadic Chimaera – was coined by a Stoic, Aristo of Chios, about Arcesilaus the Sceptic. D.L. resorts to inserting his own metaphorical monsters, a tactic also found intermittently in other chapters: ‘Greek culture shows its monstrous face to Rome’ (p. 223); ‘Sceptics are aware of the monstrosity of their philosophy, or rather of the monstrous force that is needed to eradicate the opposite monstrosity of dogmatism’ (p. 247). Although monstrosity is a flexible and ever-ready metaphor, it must be elicited from the evidence, as much fine work in this book demonstrates.
The extensive concluding chapter on Middle and Neoplatonism covers a great deal of ground, with some individual examples of monster imagery, such as Plutarch allegorising Typhoeus as irrationality in De Iside et Osiride or the strange tale in Phlegon of Tralles (who has an ‘acutely neoplatonist sensibility’ [p. 272 n. 113]) of a ghost eating a hermaphroditic baby. Neoplatonist demonology is also discussed, beginning with archaic monsters such as the Ker, even though philosophical demons are not themselves monstrous. Much of D.L.’s discussion of Neoplatonism relies on the broadening formulation ‘evil and monstrosity’, since in the Platonist schools monstrosity is mainly metaphorical, often a shorthand for imperfection or inconsistency.
D.L.’s extensive study of monstrosity in ancient philosophy (and beyond) contains many useful illustrations of its relevance to ancient physics, metaphysics and indeed ethics. Not least among the book’s important contributions is its demonstration that monstrosity must encompass varying definitions, if it is to be the connecting thread between disparate philosophical viewpoints, from materialism to idealism and from theogony to theodicy.
