In Cosmology and the Polis Footnote ¹ Richard Seaford carries forward the trajectory of Reciprocity and Ritual (1994) and Money and the Early Greek Mind (2004), extending his analytical resources with (not exactly Bakhtinian) chronotopes – socially constructed cognitive models, in which space and time are congruently conceived (i.e. as ‘the same’ in certain respects: 22, 39). He distinguishes three chronotopes: reciprocal, as found in Homer; aetiological, related to ritual and the emergent polis (and containing an ‘antideterminate’ sub-chronotope, which expresses the space–time from which the aetiological transition is made); and monetized (4–5). ‘In the genesis of drama at the City Dionysia the reciprocal chronotope has been replaced by the aetiological’ (75). Monetization then contributes to tragedy's content by isolating powerful individuals from the collective: ‘tragedy frequently ends with the demise of the powerful individual(s)’ (113), and ‘tragic isolation derives in part from the self-sufficiency imposed on the individual by the new phenomenon of monetisation’ (169). Monetization ‘contributes also to its form’, since ‘the establishment of the second actor…may have arisen out of tension – between Dionysos and autocrat at Athens’ (111). The slide from indicative (‘contributes’) to hypothetical (‘may have’), with its long train of speculative attendants (‘it is tempting…hypothesise…seems likely…it is possible…may well have…’, 111) is, despite the desperately optimistic adverb, an index of the fragility of the construction. What is the exegetical pay-off? Seaford is capable, it must be said, of pure fantasy. He detects an allusion to incest in Aristotle's use of the phrase ‘currency from currency’ in Pol. 1258b1–8 (333). Aristotle objects to profit from purely financial transactions, not because it resembles incest (which would be silly), but because it has become disconnected from the real economy. In any case, ‘X from X’ has nothing to do with incest. The formula sums up an obvious feature of the natural course of reproduction (horses come from horses, and so on: Ph. 191b20–21, 193b8, 12; Gen. Corr. 333b7–8; Metaph. 1034b2, 1049b25–6; Pol. 1255b1–2; Pr. 878a27), and is applied to currency in a parenthetic explanation of the metaphorical use of tokos for interest. Aristotle is not the only victim of exegetical extravagance. The gold-changer to whom Aeschylus compares Ares (Ag. 438–9) exchanges gold dust for goods; Seaford knows this (200 n. 43, 247) but still assimilates the passage to currency exchange and monetized commercial transactions (200). Though his claims for the unique powers of monetization ought to make the importance of the distinction salient to him, mentions of silver are treated indiscriminately as references to money (201, on Aesch. Ag. 949, 959). Similarly, it is Seaford who associates insatiable prosperity with monetization (201), not Aeschylus’ text (Ag. 1331–42); and when Antigone speaks of death as kerdos (Soph. Ant. 461–4), it is Seaford who insists that Creon's single mention of coined silver (296) makes ‘the association of kerdos with monetary gain…inevitable’ (328). Why should our understanding of Antigone's patently non-monetized gain be determined by Creon's ‘obsession’? If it is an obsession, what marks it as such is its irrelevance: his grounds for complaint would be just as strong if a guard were suborned by non-monetary incentives. No other character has reason to share Creon's irrationality; nor has the audience; nor have we. This is a dazzlingly clever book; but its foundations are unstable, and its superstructure fragile.

So, in my copy, is its binding. The same goes for Callimachus in Context.Footnote ² I hope that is not a sign of a decline in the hitherto notably high Cambridge production standards. As for the content, Benjamin Acosta-Hughes and Susan Stephens seek to ‘reframe’ discussion of Callimacheanism (1). They argue that Callimachus’ aesthetics developed in dialogue with Plato; that Callimachus consciously combined the tradition of embedded public performance of poetry with exploitation of the ‘universalizing’ strategies made possible by written texts; that he re-mapped the Mediterranean world, shifting the centre from mainland Greece to Alexandria; and that the interpretative tradition has been skewed by the reconfigured Callimachus of a selective Roman reception. Some of these themes are familiar, some novel; readers will need to burrow into the detail to assess the volume's contribution. In the case of Plato, I have some reservations. That Callimachus knew Plato's works well is very probable; that there is some intertextuality is beyond doubt (Acosta-Hughes and Stephens start from Epigr. 53 GP = 23 Pf.). The attempt to reconstruct engagement with Plato from the very incomplete remains of Iambus 13 (47–57) is inevitably on weaker ground. But let's grant the reconstruction: what, in that case, is Callimachus doing in response to Plato? The suggestion is that he uses Ion of Chios as a ‘counterexample’ to Plato. But a successful poet who did things Plato thought should not be done is not much of a counter-example: Plato knew of poets (Homer, for example) who had won great acclaim by doing things that he thought poets should not do. The suggestion that Callimachus ‘shows deeper understanding of philosophical argument than has previously been suspected’ (57) is therefore unwarranted. On the contrary, Callimachus has been made to seem philosophically superficial. A philosophically superficial response to Plato might, of course, still be a ‘powerful…act of reception’ that helped Callimachus to ‘find a vocabulary and an adaptable critical framework in which to articulate a poetics that de facto differed from an earlier literary culture’ (82).

The unquestioned pinnacle of this batch of books is also Callimachean. Volume 1 of Annette Harder's edition of the Aetia Footnote ³ supplies the introduction, text, and translation; the awe-inspiring commentary fills more than a thousand pages of volume 2 (Harder has pre-empted the ‘big book’ joke in her preface). A reviewer constrained to oligostichy cannot hope to do justice to Harder's scholarly achievement. I can only give the boot, for once, to Momus, and record my admiring (but superfluous) recommendation.

My sympathies with Momus were first declared in connection with ‘the proliferation of guides, handbooks, and companions’ (G&R 52 [2005], 250). Since then I have found nice things to say about some of them, but still harbour reservations about the genre. So I was encouraged to find Kirk Ormand, in the introduction (a model of thoughtfulness and brevity) to the Blackwell Companion to Sophocles,Footnote ⁴ reflecting on the nature of companions. He suggests that ‘this volume, if it is successful, should open up new paths of Sophoclean scholarship and should play a part in defining the research for the next 20 years’ (4). Accordingly, this review must be very provisional. One contributor (Patrick Finglass) explicitly sets out a programme for future work on the transmission of the plays. Another (Michael Lurie) does so implicitly for the study of the plays’ place in European intellectual history; his chapter is learned, but too preoccupied with contemporary polemic to achieve sympathetic historical understanding. In the absence of further predictions, I found myself wondering what the future will bring. Will the next two decades settle the dispute between Robin Osborne (‘Sophocles sought involvement in Athenian politics’, 283) and Ruth Scodel (‘there is…no sign that Sophocles was “political”’, 33)? And will people still deface their prose with scare quotes? Will Osborne (275) and Edward Harris (288–91) have achieved consensus on the ethics of not burying corpses? Will people still think of tragedies as being ‘about’ abstractions (‘Oedipus Tyrannus is…a play about (self-)knowledge, the limits of knowledge, and the relationship between human reason and the gods’: Osborne, 275)? Will they be so unreasonably judgemental in their attitude to tragic characters that Antigone's inconsistency (if it is, in fact, inconsistent) leads them to find ‘a certain poetic justice’ in her being walled up in a cave (‘brought low’, as André Lardinois euphemistically calls it: 63)? Or will they start to take the characters seriously as individual human beings in situations that are very specific, very complex, and (morally and emotionally) very taxing? Will we see an end of interpretations claustrophobically trapped in images of Sophocles extrapolated from the very small sample of surviving plays? Carolin Hahnemann's attempt to illustrate ‘typically Sophoclean traits that happen not to be represented in the intact plays’ (174) is refreshing, but too limited in scope to encourage optimism. Richard Armstrong contributes an illuminating Freudian chapter – illuminating, that is, about Freud: for, though I agree that understanding Freud's thought and its place in history of philology and culture is important (478), I still see no reason to believe that Freud has anything to contribute to the understanding of Greek tragedy. Armstrong's opening sarcasms about ‘some classical scholars’ (‘holy calling…sacred assumptions’, 477) put his complaints about the use of Freud as a ‘straw man’ in a curious light. Rapprochement in the next twenty years seems unlikely. Two high points must not pass without (undeservedly brief) mention: Bruno Currie on hero cult is excellent; Sarah Nooter's ‘Poetic Speakers in Sophocles’ shows striking originality, but is very dense: I shall have to return to it.

Rosie WylesFootnote ⁵ promises ‘a comprehensive introduction to what fifth-century costume looked like and how it was used in performance’ (3). Chapters on visual evidence (with a clear statement of the interpretative difficulties that such evidence poses), the practicalities of making and using costume, and the basic semiotics of tragic costume prepare the way for the longest chapter, on the ‘language’ of costume in action; the examples, which are not numerous, range from the familiar to the highly speculative. Two further chapters cover metatheatre and cross-cultural translation. In the end, I was underwhelmed, largely because of the limitations of the evidence. But there are things that I applaud, such as the concisely demystifying remark that the mask is ‘important not so much because of the loss of identity for the participant…but for the construction of an identity as seen by the viewer’ (54).

Ian Storey's Festschrift is to be commended for not living up (or down) to its unpromising title,Footnote ⁶ and for having a thematic coherence lacking in many specimens of the genre. Keith Sidwell fails again to make his conception of metacomedy persuasive. Hallie Rebecca Marshall is persuasive on the revision and re-performance of Clouds, up to a point; but the problem of the apparently incomplete revision is not entirely removed by glossing alternative performance contexts as ‘likely’ (60) when they are at best conceivable. She speculates that the play was more popular with the original audience than its placing suggests: but it is the audience that Aristophanes rebukes in the parabasis of Wasps (1016–47). Douglas Olson is good on Lysistrata, though he is wrong to concede the ‘commonplace’ that the sex strike and the occupation of the Acropolis are ‘incompatible’ (76): ask Cinesias. Arlene Allen, analysing chronology and thematics, conjectures that Frogs had an influence on Theramenes’ failure at dokimasia after being elected general (Lys. 13.10) – but also that Aristophanes was ‘responding to sentiments that were “in the air”’ at the time (109). Ralph Rosen's discussion of Timocles F6 K-A as a parody of literary theory is excellent.

Exemplum and Myth, Criticism and Creation Footnote ⁷ collects thirteen papers by Gordon Howie (one previously unpublished, some supplemented). Though they focus primarily on Hesiod, Homer, Sappho, Pindar, Herodotus, and Thucydides, Howie's formidably wide-ranging use of evidence gives them a much wider scope. The recurrent focus on topics such as aetiology, exemplum, encomium, aristeia, and myth revision gives a deep coherence to the intellectual project that Howie has been pursuing over three decades. His work is notable for its rigorous, but also often bold, argument, its attention to habitual patterns of thought and expression in the Greek world, and its illuminating use of parallels. This is a body of work that merits careful attention and profound respect.

Reading the Victory Ode Footnote ⁸ is a credit to its multiple editors. Based on the reasonable premise that ‘the time had come to take stock of the state of research in the field and to see where the interesting ideas were to be found’ (xxvi), it has sections on the ‘lost history’ of epinician, contexts of performance and re-performance, and critical approaches to the victory ode. In a volume that sustains such a high standard it is hard to pick out stars; but I found particular reward in papers by Peter Agócs on kōmoi (219: the examples ‘illustrate the complexity of the genre and its expressions in the song culture. There is no one answer to the question “What is epinician?”’); Rosalind Thomas (making suggestive use of ethnographic comparisons to put Pindaric obscurity into proportion); Glenn Most (an illuminating direct comparison of Pindar and Bacchylides in poems for the same occasion); and David Fearn (on Bacchylidean myths). Michael Silk, whose epilogue is billed as ‘a pyrotechnic finish’ (xxvii) and ‘iconoclastic’ (xxxiv), is, as ever, both brilliant and exasperating. On the first page he declares that the writers who ‘matter most (in a large perspective)’ are those who ‘revalue, and enact their revaluations’ (347). ‘Enactment’ and cognates appear eleven times in the paper; but this ‘crucial word’ (343) is never explained, and it is left unclear how we should understand its proliferation of direct objects (revaluations, values, visions, roles). If we follow Silk's reference to an earlier paper (347 n. 3), we may be even more perplexed to discover that ‘“presence”, in Derrida's sense, is what enactment enacts’: but also that ‘what is enacted…is the evocation of presence’. In Interaction in Poetic Imagery (1974) Silk himself described ‘enactment’ as ‘a rather overworked expression’ (140) – without, however, giving it a rest break. We know how well Silk can do articulate analysis; simply reinforcing repetition with italics is not a substitute.

Cambridge's suite of green-and-yellow commentaries on Homer is augmented now by Irene de Jong's splendid treatment of Iliad 22.Footnote ⁹ The introduction presents the standard Homeric questions incisively, and carefully situates Book 22 in relation to the rest of the poem. The commentary itself, skilfully orchestrating the many different aspects of reading Homer, provides a series of masterclasses. There is, unsurprisingly, an emphasis on text as narrative. Those averse to narratological jargon will not find it unduly obtrusive; it should, perhaps, obtrude more. When narratological novices read that ‘the Homeric narrator…is very active, rigorously controlling his narratees’ beliefs, interests, and sympathies’ (19), will they recall the oblique introduction of the narrator/poet distinction (5)? They will, I hope, observe that this narrator is doing something that no actual poet can do with any actual audience, and question the usefulness of such an unrealistic construct. When they read that ‘it is conceivable that the Homeric narrator is here subtly referring to his own poem’ (135), perhaps they will spot an impending infinite regress: if the poet's poem needs a narrator, the narrator's ‘own’ poem must also need a narrator, whose poem in turn…

Ahuvia Kahane's Homer Footnote ¹⁰ is marketed as a ‘Guide for the Perplexed’. Fulfilling that prospectus requires clear, critical thinking, and lucid exposition. Here, lucidity is compromised throughout by an addiction to scare quotes: when an author writes that ‘re-performance opens up a “historical” gap: the poet is forever creating a “new” version of something “lost”’ (23), all we can be sure of is that he isn't saying that the gap is historical, the version new, the thing lost. So what he is saying? And why doesn't he say it? As for clear thinking…: ‘The poem makes a rapid start – as one might expect from the “first” poem’ (1): why on earth would one expect that? ‘A basic fact remains: Homer's monumental opus could only have been created in history’ (30): a resonant vacuity, since no human act or artefact is produced outside history. Kahane, admittedly, may think otherwise, since he claims that the bond between Achilles ‘exists in an [sic] singular point in time…yet it also exists outside of time’ (119); but he offers no intelligible explanation of the paradox. ‘To have a name is to be a “man”’ (137): Penelope has a name – is she a man? Is she a ‘man’? What would that mean? Kahane provides us with no guidance. We are left more perplexed than when we started.

Contrast Michael Flower's lucid and illuminating introduction to Xenophon's Anabasis.Footnote ¹¹ It presents itself as ‘primarily a literary study…consisting of a historically informed close reading that pays particular attention to rhetorical and narrative strategies’ (5). Flower's ‘intention is to open up different possible readings’, helping readers ‘to see and understand dimensions of the story they might otherwise have missed’ (9–10). He is very successful in doing this, and is particularly scrupulous in showing his own working: readers are introduced simultaneously to the text and to ways of reading the text. Chapters cover the Anabasis in context; Xenophon as author, narrator, and agent; fact and/or fiction in the Anabasis; the ‘style and shaping’ of the narrative; Xenophon's self-presentation as commander; reading the Anabasis (‘what the Anabasis may have meant to Xenophon, to his contemporary Greek readers, and to readers ancient and modern of subsequent generations and, finally, what it may mean to us in the early twenty-first century’ [170]: but there is not much on the last item). A final chapter focuses on the religious dimensions of the Anabasis, redressing, as Flower says, an imbalance (203): that this is done in what has the air of a brief afterthought was perhaps the only thing in the book that disappointed.

Meriel JonesFootnote ¹² explores the performance of elite adult male identity in the ‘ideal’ novel, under the headings paideia, andreia, and sexuality. Keeping the first two headings in Greek reflects a sensitivity to possible divergences from related modern concepts; for the same reason, ‘sexuality’ is treated with due caution (174–9). ‘Masculinity’ is not. To see the problem, consider the argument that in manipulating language for ulterior motives Cleitophon ‘misperforms a major element of Second Sophistic masculinity’ (72). I'm not sure that this is true (fathers paid rhetoricians to teach their sons techniques of manipulation; Plutarch recommends collusive manipulation of popular assemblies in De republica gerenda), but if it is, in what sense is it masculinity that is misperformed, rather than some other aspect of elite adult male identity? If all the criteria of this multi-dimensional identity are lumped together under ‘masculinity’, the word ceases to mark distinctions that are made by the English term. So in what sense is it a concept of masculinity that we are examining, rather than some other concept (e.g. elite adult male identity)?

I have now fulfilled a long-standing goal: I have got acquainted with Artemidorus’ work on dream interpretation, thanks to Daniel Harris-McCoy's text, translation, and commentary.Footnote ¹³ But my gratitude is qualified. The translation is often obscure, and contains too many minor errors (e.g. 1.1 ἀντιλογία is not ‘backlash’; 1.10 πραγματεία is ‘treatise’, not ‘matter’; 1.24 ϕοιτᾶν applied to a student does not mean ‘wander’ but ‘frequent (a teacher's classes)’; 2 praef. μεγὰ ϕρονῶ is not ‘I have given serious attention’; 2.69, for ‘of the prophets, those who do not deceive or are false diviners’, read ‘of the prophets, those who do not deceive and are not false diviners’; 4.59 τὸ παρόν is the object of ὑπερθέμενος, not adverbial). The commentary fairly consistently failed to answer the questions that the text prompted me to ask – though that common failing of commentaries is mitigated in this case by the target text's extraordinarily diverse and often obscure content. (However, keying the lemmata to the text only by running headers, which may span seven pages, does show a lack of consideration for prospective users.) The commentary on 2.70 finds it ‘remarkable’ that Artemidorus thinks that one hundred years is the average human lifespan (498). I find it inconceivable. If Artemidorus agrees with those who postulate a thirty-year generation, takes Nestor's three-generation lifespan (Hom. Od. 3.245) as a limit, and is understood as observing that people often die some time short of or beyond a generational boundary, then one hundred years would be a reasonable estimate of the maximum human lifespan. If that's right, Artemidorus has expressed himself obscurely. But, as I've discovered with Harris-McCoy's assistance, that's far from inconceivable.

The Society for Biblical Literature's series of Writings from the Greco-Roman World has completed its treatment of the chreia,Footnote ¹⁴ of which previous volumes appeared in 1986 and 2002. Since I'm interested in the systematics of rhetorical theory and teaching, I never warmed to the project of treating the chreia in isolation from the rest of the progymnasmatic syllabus. But anyone who needs an annotated text and translation of the Byzantine commentaries on this one chapter of Aphthonius will find in this volume the answer to their prayers; the introductory general remarks on each commentary will have even wider appeal.

The same series gives us the late Richard Norris’ translation of Gregory of Nyssa's homilies on the Song of Songs, with a facing Greek text and valuable annotations.Footnote ¹⁵ I confess to being disappointed to discover that so fine a writer and so glorious a theologian as Gregory could make the Song so dull. But Norris, and the editors who brought his work to posthumous publication, have done their work exceptionally well, and the material merits the attention of any classicist interested in the history of allegory.