‘Why Classics matters’ is an important question and Neville Morley offers his answer in a slim volume published in Polity's Why It Matters series which is advertised as follows: ‘word-leading thinkers make the case for the importance of their subjects and aim to inspire a new generation of students’.Footnote 1 Morley opens the book with a chapter entitled ‘What's Wrong with Classics’ and presents himself in the afterword as ‘a historian who does ancient stuff’, whose ‘ability to appreciate Latin poetry…or spot subtle intertextual references is, to say the least, negligible’ (126). His first chapter provides basic information about the standing and importance of classical languages in the Western curriculum from the Middle Ages to the present day and then focuses on the (much discussed) issue of gender and class: yes, Classics used to be the epitome of the aristocratic male education, not only in Britain (the main focus of Morley's book) but throughout Europe. This fact, and the trite topos of the sadistic at worst, mind-numbingly boring at best, Classics teacher is illustrated with many quotations from literature, from Eliot's Middlemarch to Tartt's The Secret History. From classical knowledge as cultural capital Morley pivots to Classics as ‘a weapon in the culture wars and the clash of civilizations’ (35) and to far-right internet memes, which leads him to the conclusion that Classics matters today precisely because it is dangerous and deeply problematic. At some point in this chapter he swerves into narrowing down Classics to mean ‘ancient history’ – approximately at the point where he remarks that classicists themselves have actually been ‘at the forefront of questioning traditional understanding of the classical word and how it should be studied’ (36), so his answer as to why Classics does matter mostly pertains to the study of ancient history (and, to a degree, reception):
But we do need people who know classical antiquity, who can compare it with other historical periods and cultural traditions, explore how it has shaped the present (for good and ill), and chart ways in which our societies can draw positive inspiration from it for the future. (40)
The book continues in the same vein, as a combination of self-flagellation (at several points in the book, classicists are described as ‘magpie-like’, ‘consumers rather than producers of theory…we gather ideas from every other discipline that seems to offer something useful for our purposes, but fail to do anything with them that might be useful to anyone else’ [117]) and ever more forceful arguments for dismissing the study of ancient languages in favour of…what exactly? This is the crucial point that I failed to grasp. The closest that Morley comes to answering this question is in his chapter on classical reception, where he (plausibly) points out that the best study of reception is done by those equally at home in Classics and in the culture whose reception of Classics they are studying. He (rightly) calls for more interdisciplinary and collaborative research.
But nowhere in this book does Morley spell out his positive vision of Classics as a field. One is left wondering if it was actually the Greek irregular verbs or Latin conditions in indirect discourse that propped up imperialism, racism, and misogyny in the West:
As long as ‘Proper Classics’ is defined in terms of the ancient languages, so that teachers and researchers are expected to have a high-level command of at least one and preferably both, regardless of whether that's actually necessary for their research, the discipline operates a means of exclusion that works against all its other aims. (71).
The core phrase here is ‘regardless of whether that's actually necessary for their research’, and this is a matter that professional classicists should discuss vigorously. But the book is not labelled and marketed as an intervention for professional classicists; it is meant to ‘inspire a new generation of students’. This book certainly has the potential to inspire a student to turn away from studying Classics for good.
This review is not a forum for possible counter-arguments to Morley's views – and there are many – but I want to end it on a positive note. In this book, and elsewhere, a dangerous idea is perpetuated: if one does not start learning Greek and Latin in school, by the time one enters university it is far too late to start. This is nonsense. Classics departments in Europe and in the US (these are the institutions I know) run excellent language programmes and are committed to teaching beginning Latin and Greek. We know that this task is crucial and we put enormous amounts of energy and enthusiasm into language teaching. It is perfectly possible to develop language skills to a high level at university. However, learning Latin and Greek is also a life-long commitment and classicists develop their language skills throughout their careers. So even the premise that one ‘learns’ Latin and Greek in school and then ‘knows’ the languages for the rest of one's life is false. Homer was difficult to understand for ancient Greeks as well, and they, too, perceived it as a life-long task to confront difficult texts and questions and grapple with them. They were, in fact, the first to enshrine a specific type of education as cultural and political capital. We can learn from them, but we can also do better: my grandparents were illiterate peasants (true story) and I am a woman who has taught Classics at three major universities in two languages (neither is my mother tongue). Had someone told me when I entered university that one cannot learn Ancient Greek at eighteen, I would have probably listened. But no one did. At this point, we have amazing and dedicated teachers of Greek and Latin and phenomenal resources for language learning. If we truly want to take class and privilege out of Classics, we need to inspire and challenge our students, instead of crushing their spirits by telling them what they cannot do.
Which brings me to the edited volume Forward with Classics, a perfect antidote to the gloom, doom, and aporia of Classics. Why It Matters.Footnote 2 This collection of essays serves well as a manifesto and a companion volume to the project Classics in Communities, a partnership between the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, and the Iris project.Footnote 3 The aim of the project is to equip teachers in British schools with the skills and knowledge necessary to teach classical languages and to determine the impact of classical language learning on children's cognitive development. The very existence of this project and the amount of enthusiasm, time, and effort put into it not only by school teachers but also by the very institutions that are supposedly instrumental in oppressing students with no prior knowledge of Ancient Greek and Latin speaks volumes. In the introduction, Mary Beard does an excellent job in succinctly outlining the ways Classicists confront and challenge elitism and conservatism. The editors introduce the project and its goals and provide an overview of their national and international activities, which explains the international cast of contributors. Individual papers are essential reading for classicists across the UK, but also around the world, as the Australian, Brazilian, South African, North American, and Irish initiatives to broaden the reach of classical languages and culture, not only in primary and secondary schools but also in prisons and local communities, are excellent examples of best practice we can and should all learn from.
An excellent illustration of the importance of engaging with ancient texts in the original language is the new study on affection in ancient Greece and Rome.Footnote 4 David Konstan, one of the pioneers of the study of ancient emotions, starts from the premise that emotions are not raw feelings but are decisively shaped by societal standards and personal evaluations of specific situations and agents. Accordingly, in order to understand even the seemingly straightforward human constants, such as emotions, a careful study of the social norms and values, ancient and modern ideas about human psychology, and the specific linguistic registers are vital. In his latest book, Konstan investigates philia/amicitia (love and friendship) in its relationship to loyalty, gratitude, grief, and civic concord. This type of love was perceived as the foundation of civic solidarity and personal relationships. But what was the relationship between philia and reciprocity? The question is important, because subsuming philia into the larger category of reciprocity obliterates its altruistic sentiment and reduces it to self-interest and egoism. Konstan's discussion is also relevant to the modern ideas about human behaviour as it questions the validity of the rational choice theory in economics, which tends to perceive all social exchanges as governed by one principle, the individual interest. Konstan demonstrates that the modern idea of self-interest is not a universal human concept, since it did not exist in antiquity.
The discussion revolves around three themes: the relationship between altruism and reciprocity; the nature of the self (and its boundaries); and the precise classification of friendship, loyalty, gratitude, grief, and social solidarity: are these emotions or not? In five masterful chapters, Konstan investigates the relationship of philia and amicitia to each of these categories. His eloquence and deep insight into ancient emotions and their modern counterparts, and the genuinely central questions that he raises render this book a delight to read. Both specialist and general audiences will benefit from this slim and elegant volume.
Another book that bridges the gap between modern and ancient thinking is on an unlikely subject: robots, machines, and artificial life.Footnote 5 Adrienne Mayor discusses ancient myths and modern technology and argues that many of the current most advanced innovations in robotics and AI were already imagined in ancient myth. Some of the parallels are more obvious, such as the bronze automaton Talos, the guardian of Crete who was (literally) brought down by Medea. Mayor investigates ancient versions of the myth and demonstrates persuasively how the story of Talos resonated through the ages – from ancient Greece to the Middle Ages, from Spenser's Faerie Queene to the Talos RIM-8 missiles designed in 1950s, and the weaponized exoskeleton-type suit designed for the US Special Operations Command and invested with the acronym TALOS (Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit), devised but not yet realized. The dream of artificial rejuvenation and Medea's ‘mythico-scientific’ procedure with the ram are less persuasively linked with the famous first genetically engineered lamb, Dolly. Can Medea's procedure be stretched to map onto cloning, genetic engineering, and artificial life-support systems?
Even if one disagrees with some of Mayor's parallels, the questions she raises are significant and timely. Her chapter on the quest for immortality and eternal youth aptly demonstrates the merits of thinking things through, as illustrated in the tale about Eos and Tithonus, and sometimes woefully lacking in the age when doing things just because they are technologically possible too often precedes ethical considerations. The lively and richly illustrated discussions include Hephaestus’ moving statues and tripods, Daedalus’ technological marvels, Prometheus’ creation of first humans (biotechne?), the story about the creation of Pandora (evil fembot?) and its remarkable afterlife, and close with an overview of real automata and lifelike artifices in the ancient world. The book ends with a fascinating question: if the universal question of stories can be reduced to ‘what does it mean to be human?’, can we use stories (including Greek myths about artificial life forms) in order to teach robots? Can our stories be ‘human user manuals’ for AI computers? The book left me wondering whether current AI truly resembles ancient Greek automata, or should more aptly be compared with Greek divinities: more powerful in every way, but not quite in touch with human emotions and vulnerabilities.
It is a truism commonly repeated in the study of Greek myth that stories about human encounters with the divine teach humans about their own limitations and weaknesses. Greek tragedy often highlights the abyss between the serene divine detachment and the human suffering and frailty. The relationship between gods in tragedy and gods in lived religion has been vigorously discussed, and the debate is still ongoing: should we perceive the gods in tragedy as literary creations, or do they represent the same divine beings whom ancient Greeks venerated in cult? And what about comedy? A new study of Aristophanes’ Wealth aims to place comedy to the forefront of the study of Greek religion and belief.Footnote 6 Francisco Barrenechea examines the role of traditional narratives about religious experiences in the play in order to answer the question ‘How did Aristophanes’ comedies take part in the various discourses on religion that existed in his time?’ (1). Drawing on recent studies of belief in Greek religion, especially on the study of myth and narratives about the divine in a broader sense as providing a cognitive framework which gives narrative shape to the worshippers’ religious experiences, this book focuses on a specific religious experience in each chapter: divination, incubation, epiphany, the introduction of the new god. But first, Barrenechea has to answer a rudimentary question: what exactly is the status of Wealth in this play? Is he a personification? If so, would the reality of the divinized concept of Wealth matter for the audience's understanding of the story? Barrenechea argues for Wealth in the play as fictional divinity. He shows how Aristophanes’ story initially relies on the audiences’ familiarity with Wealth as personification. In the course of the play the status of Wealth is gradually raised to that of a fully fledged divinity: by portraying Wealth as invested with a specific power and by presenting him in the mode of a ‘wandering’ divinity, who, after being cured from blindness becomes able to bestow gifts on humans in a discriminate fashion, Aristophanes raises the status of Wealth to that of a beneficial divinity who receives a cult place and worship.
The oracular consultation which sets off the plot is placed in the context of stories about divination and their relationship to religious belief (note: belief without quotation marks). Both the question of the protagonist of the play (should I educate my son to be a criminal, because such men succeed in our society while the just and god fearing fail?) and Apollo's answer (take home the first person you meet upon leaving the temple) are comic appropriations of the traditional questions posed to the oracles (should I practise my father's techne / should I take up this techne?Footnote 7) and the fabled first-met oracular responses (‘when you first meet X, do Y’). Here Barrenechea insists that the audiences would not distinguish between ‘first-met’ oracles as a fictional folkloric story-pattern and actual oracular responses. I do think that the distinction would matter, and that it was used by Aristophanes for comic purposes: while I agree with Barrenechea that Fontenrose's classification of oracles in fictional and historical does not conform to ancient Greek thinking about the truth value of oracular stories, a specific type of oracle such as ‘first-met’ would probably have been classified as the response given to important figures in the distant past, not to real-life contemporary figures. This, in turn, would comically raise the status of the protagonist Chremylos to rival the kings and heroes of old and prepare the audience for the extraordinary tale that is to follow (first-met oracles are frequently linked with aetiological stories and Aristophanes’ comedy is an aetiology about the institution of Wealth as the state cult at Athens). But this is a minor point. Aristophanes stresses the process of the interpretation of the oracle and the role of Apollo as helping and providing guidance for the human character, which does conform to the typical story-patterns about oracular consultation and the general belief that the oracles are proof that the gods are invested in human life.
In the next chapter, the healing of Wealth and the intervention of Asclepius is insightfully compared to the iamata, fourth-century bc inscriptions about miracle cures from Asclepius’ sanctuary at Epidaurus. The good nature and often mischievous character of the god, the importance of belief in the process of healing, the moral stance of the divine healer, his closeness to the humans, and even humour are all topics we find both in the iamata and in the report about the divine healing in Aristophanes. Next discussed is Chremylos’ enshrinement of Wealth in his house, the act that turns the private space into a public one. Barrenechea persuasively demonstrates how Aristophanes harnesses his audiences’ familiarity with narratives about divine powers and appropriate acts of responding to it by presenting Wealth as performing a miracle that proves deity (epiphany), which is promptly followed by acts of religious worship: dedications, sacrifices, priesthood, and even a divine companion (Hermes, who voluntarily become attached to the shrine of Wealth). Finally, the transfer of Wealth from a shrine in a private house to the Acropolis is modelled upon stories of cult introduction, which Barrenechea calls ‘new god tales’.
The comedy is evaluated in terms of its relationship to the traditional religion: is Chremylos actually acting impiously by introducing a new god? This issue has been vigorously discussed in scholarship, and Barrenechea sides with those scholars who argue that similar stories featuring scrutiny and scepticism in ancient Greek texts actually play an important role in reinforcing belief – and reminds us that such stories have a similar role in the iamata from the Asclepieia. In addition, the study highlights the role of the new god Wealth as the saviour, and the act of salvation is importantly accomplished through combined human and divine agency. The gods care for mortals and in Aristophanes’ comic fantasy Wealth is paired with Asclepius and Zeus the Saviour, who were worshipped as benevolent and salvific divinities at Athens. By demonstrating the ways in which Aristophanes relies on the audiences’ familiarity with the story-patterns involving divination, epiphany, salvation, and establishment of new gods, this book certainly opens new vistas into study of comedy as an important source for Greek religion.
An important and direct source for the study of human–divine communication in the ancient Greek world are the lead tablets (lamellae) from the oracle at Dodona containing questions posed to the oracle and sometimes also the oracular answers. The publication of the lamellae broadened our understanding of the working of the sanctuary.Footnote 8 A new book aims to provide a history of the Dodona sanctuary from its beginnings in the Early Iron Age until the mid-fourth century bc, with a special emphasis on the catchment area of the shrine.Footnote 9 Jessica Piccinini starts with an overview of the modern search for the site of Dodona and the excavation history and then turns to the location of the sanctuary. She paints a lively picture of Epirus in the Iron Age and highlights the importance of the geographical position of the sanctuary at the centre of the communication and exchange networks which can be reconstructed from the Late Helladic Period (c.1400 bc) onwards. The position of Dodona as a nodal location within exchange networks can be paralleled with the sanctuaries at Olympia, Thermos, Delphi, and Kalapodi. Each subsequent chapter studies the links between Dodona and a specific regional group: Euboeans, Corinthians, north-west Greeks, Spartans, Boeotians, Thessalians, and Athenians (in a roughly chronological order). Piccinini also offers an overview of the ancient stories about the origin of the oracular site. She relies on textual, archaeological, and epigraphic sources and provides important insight into the history of the site. However, the textual sources are scanty and not always reliable, whereas archaeological evidence is subject to various interpretations. She also relies on the quantity, value, and provenance of dedications found in situ to reconstruct the relationship between Dodona and various poleis, but this type of evidence is subject to diverse interpretations. Piccinini is, however, careful to note the instances when scholars have offered different interpretations of material evidence, and probes the textual sources carefully. What emerges in the end is a fragile but valuable series of speculations.
Religious life, connectivity, and a diachronic study of the other end of the Greek world, the Black Sea region from the archaic period to the Byzantine era are the focus of David Braund's monograph about the goddesses in the Bosporan kingdom.Footnote 10 These goddesses are associated with various aspects of the Greek Artemis and Aphrodite. Especially prominent were the cult of the goddess called Parthenos, who is usually identified as Artemis, predominant in the Crimea, and that of Aphrodite Ourania, ‘Mistress of Apatouron’, at Cimmerian Bosporus (the Taman peninsula). Each chapter of the book is a detailed investigation of the local characteristics of divine cults: Parthenos of Crimea turns out to be different in character from Parthenos of Chersonesus, who is more similar to Artemis. In the second chapter, Braund studies the famous legend about the human sacrifice to Artemis by the Taurians and the mythic connections of the Taurian cult with other cults of Artemis in the Mediterranean world, especially at Attica, Sparta, Elis, and Nemi. The third chapter looks at the cult of Ephesian Artemis in the Bosporan kingdom, and the fourth the cult of Isis, surprisingly less significant there than elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. The fifth chapter is on Aphrodite Ourania.
Braund's central argument is that the cults of Parthenos and Aphrodite Ourania provided a geographical and social unifying framework for the two regions of the geographically and nationally diverse kingdom. Whereas previous scholarship attempted to discern the original character of the goddesses and to tease out their ethnic origins, Braund demonstrates the ways in which each cult was understood by the local population and by the Greeks, charting the ways in which these cults were embedded in the mythic web of stories involving Iphigenia, Achilles, and Heracles. His study is rooted in a careful evaluation of disparate and chronologically diverse textual sources and material evidence, and the picture he assembles is compelling, with all the reservations which accompany investigations of this kind.
A complementary aspect of ancient religious life, magic, is the topic of the edited volume which arose from a panel held at the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference in 2015.Footnote 11 The theme of the panel was ‘Roman Magic: Old Theory, New Approaches’ and the resulting set of papers looks into material culture as evidence for ancient magical practices. Considering the subject, I expected a rich harvest of beautiful illustrations, but in this respect the volume disappoints: black-and-white images of varying sharpness do not do the topic justice. However, the papers are illuminating and worth reading: four deal with specific objects used in magical practices (curse tablets, phallic objects, unguentaria, and gemstones). Three further papers investigate the spread of Roman magical practices in Britain, and two look into the spatial context of magic – the household, and the body of the performer as a magical weapon of sorts. The closing chapter surveys the field and suggests that the study of practices at the crossroads of religion, medicine, and magic offers a wealth of evidence about ancient conceptions of the body and its agency and place in the world, with the body put forward as a productive focal point in future investigations.
Saving the best for last, The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic fulfils and exceeds both the promise of the series and that of the volume: the series undertakes to provide ‘an authoritative and state-of-the-art survey of current thinking and research’ with ‘specially commissioned essays from leading international figures’; the volume itself ‘offers a diversity of scholarly voices that attempt to define the state of this rapidly developing field’.Footnote 12 The book delivers on all fronts and will certainly be an indispensable starting point for a novice in the field and a reliable tool for the expert. The editors should be applauded for the clear and exhaustive organization of topics and on the selection of the international team of scholars who wrote the individual chapters. No stone is left unturned, no major topic neglected, and the essays all provide a clear and lucid overview of the subject matter, and a useful guide for further reading. The volume also provides an excellent survey of the way in which research in the field has diversified in the past decades as scholars have started to look beyond the narrow confounds of Atticizing Greek prose between the late first and third centuries ad. So we find here the chapters on the usual suspects: Lucian, Plutarch, Pausanias, paideia, performance, and culture and identity, but also no fewer than three initial essays questioning the term and its geographical and chronological application. There are the expected sections on philosophy and rhetoric, but also chapters on Latinitas, cosmopolitanism, ethnicity, sex, and athletics, and a whole section on religion and religious literature which includes Jewish literature, Christian apocrypha and early Christianity, and a chapter on the creation of Christian elite culture in Roman Syria and the Near East. Far from merely taking the measure of the field, this splendid book provides a stimulus for further research and much food for thought.
In the previous issue, I closed my section with a review of Jeremy Mycott's excellent book on birds in Greek and Roman antiquity, and I choose to open this one by introducing the readers to another book on animals: Peter Mitchell's study of the role of donkeys in human society.Footnote 1 The reason I picked up this particular book for a review is that, during our summer sojourns in Greece, we have often been moved by the kindness and affection that the people of Messenian Mani have for their farm animals, and for their donkeys in particular. I recall here just one such instance: when one very popular donkey, who happened to be named after a very unpopular Greek prime minister, got quite unwell in a tiny village below Taygetus, every household in that village pitched in to cover the veterinarian's substantial fee and save the donkey's life. When I asked them what they used the animal for, they answered: ‘Nothing; we simply like him.’
Mitchell's ambitiously pitched and well-written study, a major contribution to the archaeology of animals, is the work of a scholar of African archaeology and this shows throughout the book. Covering a vast amount of ground in terms of both geography and chronology, and picking up on key moments in the history of the donkey, Mitchell often directs readers towards the material evidence and guides them through sometimes difficult material with ease and elegance. Anthropological, archaeological, and historical sources provide the foundation for this distinctly interdisciplinary study, and the narrative is very well illustrated with images (the volume contains more than a hundred black-and-white images, and there are around thirty colour plates, alongside a number of tables).
The introduction first justifies the topic and places it in the wider context of relevant scholarship, highlighting the relative neglect of donkey in modern discussions focusing on the history of animals. Then it points out, from the get-go, the ways in which the perception and status of this animal have changed in the course of time – from riches to rags, as it were: once a highly regarded and much appreciated beast of burden, the donkey's fate was sealed when the attention, affection, and generosity of the powerful eventually turned to the splashy newcomer, and the donkey's close relative, the horse (and then to the camel, too).
Things, of course, tend to change over time, and it is no less than six or seven millennia over which humankind's relationship to donkeys has been played out, their ‘mutual domestication’ (3), as Mitchell points out. This I found a particularly interesting idea, and a recurring motif throughout the book, and certainly one of the bigger take-homes for me: Mitchell comments with great insight on the agency of domesticated animals on human ways of life, and for this he draws the material from far and wide. After the discussion of the domestication of the donkey (Chapter 2, including sections dedicated to the animal's evolution, biology, behaviour, and hybrids), tentatively dated to c.5500–4500 bc in the area of Sudan, Mitchell takes us to Predynastic and early Pharaonic Egypt (Chapter 3) to shed light on donkeys in everyday life, their use in transport and economy, their symbolism, and also the spread of the species beyond Africa. Chapter 4, looking at the Near East, is a very interesting read: there was a time, and that would be the Near Eastern Bronze Age, when to call someone a ‘rider of donkeys’ would be an apt way of relating to the upper crust in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Eshnunna (87). In ancient Akkad and Sumer, there is ample evidence for the practice of burying elite individuals together with the donkeys (90–4), and in various places in the Near East, the donkey played an important role in religious life, whether celebrated in Amorite ‘festivals of the ass’, used in Hittite practices of purification, or offered as a sacrifice to gods such as Ba‘lu in Ugarit.
Chapter 5 brings us to Greece and Rome. Here, the author draws on material as heterogeneous as Linear B tablets and Suetonius to discuss the donkey's role in history, economy, agriculture, transport, and war (with an excurse on mules and warfare), and even their symbolic appeal in Graeco-Roman iconography and literature. Like the rest of the book, this chapter demonstrates erudition and ambition, and there is plenty to be learned here. And classicists will certainly be grateful for the detailed references to further readings and a wealth of archaeological and anthropological data. Some of us might pause here and there in this chapter, however, to wonder to what extent we can rely on certain literary sources to distil positive facts about the handling of the donkey. Chapter 6 considers the symbolic value of donkeys and mules in Christianity and Islam (with observations of interest to classicists as well), before turning to medieval Europe, considering donkeys on farms and as a food, and then, in another geographic, thematic, and chronological turn, to the Silk Road and the Salt Road.
The penultimate chapter explores the donkey's story in the Americas, Australia, and southern Africa, taking into account climatic, economic, and demographic particularities, and takes the reader to many interesting sites, such as mule markets in Brazil, the mule trains carrying gold in the mountains of eastern Colorado, or the mules transporting maté tea in Paraguay. The concluding chapter sums up the results, takes a synoptic view of the material, and goes back to the topic of the agency of donkeys in their relationship to humans, their standing in human societies, and the methodological challenges associated with attempts to break away from anthropocentricity in accounts of animal histories. Here Mitchell has interesting things to say about the increasingly modish and useful actor network theory which is employed to throw light on the dynamics of relations between human and non-human agents in a society.
All in all, this was an interesting read and classicists will profit in particular from Chapters 4–6. The book is well produced and the indexes are well assembled and helpful (but something went wrong with the Greek: I noticed on page 111 that the author prints the modern Greek form, όνος; on page 112 one should read ἀπήνη for απηυη [sic] in two places; page 120 one should read ἀγγαρεύσει). Even if some of the material is rather complex, the author seems fully cognizant of the expectations that he places on his readers, and he regularly assists them by producing maps and definitions. Since the book attempts to do so much on some 250 pages of main text, the density of the narrative with its constantly shifting foci will demand some patience.
I turn now to a couple of books on ancient medicine, one a companion to Hippocrates and the other one dealing with the increasingly hot topic of mental health (in Roman antiquity). Abiding to chronology, I start with the former, The Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates, edited by Peter E. Pormann, which was conceived as an ‘easy guide to a topic that can appear extremely baffling to the uninitiated’ (xiv, 3–4), and it fulfils its aim excellently.Footnote 2 An international cast of experts in the field supply fifteen overview articles on fundamental topics in the Hippocratic studies, such as ‘Epistemologies’ (Lorenzo Perilli), ‘Body’ (Brooke Holmes), ‘Nosology’ (Amneris Roselli), ‘Doctors and Patients’ (Chiara Thumiger), and the editor has provided a fluent, accessible, and highly informative account on the major issues in the field, introducing novices to relevant resources, key problems, and current trends. All essays are of consistently high quality and do a terrific job opening up the sometimes strange, often terrifying, and always deeply fascinating world of ancient medicine to general readers. The prose is elegant and clear (Pormann edited and translated into English several chapters originally penned or published in French), and some of the chapters, such as those on ‘Surgery’ (Mathias Witt) and ‘Female Patients’ (Lesley Dean-Jones) are nothing short of enthralling.
This volume will also be welcome to those who are interested in distinctly philological issues: Jacques Jouanna, a towering figure in the studies of ancient medicine and one of the founders of the Colloquium Hippocraticum, the series of conferences established in 1970s and now in its seventeenth iteration, has produced an illuminating overview of the textual history of the Hippocratic corpus, sketching its development from antiquity until the Renaissance, and then outlining the development of the major editions, followed by a synopsis of the key moments of the textual tradition and of the central issues related to text constitution. Similarly, Elizabeth Craik, another veteran of the field, raises the issue of ‘the Hippocratic question’ and discusses the place of Hippocrates in the Hippocratic corpus: like Jouanna's contribution, this piece is bound to find its place on the reading lists and syllabuses of university courses.
The final four chapters all deal with the reception of the Hippocratics: Véronique Boudon-Millot discusses Hippocrates’ heritage in Galen; Daniela Manetti looks at the reception and the ‘re-writing’ of the figure of Hippocrates in the period between the third century and the sixth century ad; Pormann himself draws a captivating picture of the impact of the Hippocratics on medieval Islamic medicine; and David Cantor revisits some of the topics tackled in his earlier works, outlining the reception of Hippocrates from the early modern period to the TV-show worlds of Xena, the Warrior Princess and Deep Space Nine.
My one quibble is that I wish that the volume, being a companion and as such destined to be a point of entry for many, had a better set of indexes: there is no index locorum, which would have been helpful given the overlaps between the chapters, especially since the general index is somewhat on the short side and uneven. But there is a very useful appendix (by Melissa Markauskas) which charts the directions through the Hippocratic corpus on the basis of the English titles of individual works. In sum, this is a very well-organized and thoughtfully structured companion in which essays regularly cross-reference each other, and on the whole a timely, welcome, and helpful contribution, not only to the thriving field of ancient medicine but also to the study of cultural history more broadly.
If Pormann's volume serves as a stepping stone and a compass, Chiara Thumiger and P. N. Singer's collection of essays on mental illness from Celsus onwards treads genuinely new ground.Footnote 3 The topic is not itself new, of course, as there is already a successful and much-quoted volume, edited by William V. Harris in 2013 (Mental Disorders in the Classical World), for which Thumiger herself and four further authors from Pormann's volume provided contributions; and excellent scholarship, from Ruth Padel's to, most recently, Yulia Ustinova's, has already grappled with the topics of (in)sanity in Greek literature. Nor is the focus on the medicine itself original, as it was again Thumiger herself who provided us in 2017 with a thorough account of views on mental health in Greek thought (A History of the Mind and Mental Health in Classical Greek Medical Thought).
What makes this collection stand out is, first, the body of evidence that the editors and their contributors zero in on: the (predominantly) medical writers and thinkers from the period between Celsus (first century ad) and Paul of Aegina (sixth century ad), who discussed in particular the nature of distinct types of mental diseases (Greek key terms here being melancholia, mania, phrenitis, and lēthargos) and provided insights into their symptomatology, causes, and prognoses. Among the authors considered there are, of course, some household names such as Galen and Celsus, but not all classicists will be familiar with the surviving fragments of Athenaeus of Attalia and Archigenes of Apamea. The second seminal contribution of this volume is the ambition of the editors and the contributors to write the history of mental illness within the lively landscape of contemporary philosophical discourses on relevant topics: it was exciting to find out that, even in Galen's day (second/third century ad), some Aristotelians and Stoics still objected to the encephalocentric view – that is, to the conviction that the brain is the seat of the rational self.
Following an exemplary introduction by the editors, the first of the three parts (‘Broader Reflections on Mental Illness: Medical Theories in their Socio-intellectual Context’) contains two essays: George Kazantzidis discusses the issue of melancholy in pseudo-Hippocrates letters, and Nadine Metzger considers late antique evidence for the belief that daimones could inflict mental diseases. The second part (‘Individual Authors and Themes’) comprises nine essays. Sean Coughlin looks at philosophical discourses on the training of the body and the training of the soul informing Athenaeus’ of Attallia views on regimen. Orly Lewis explores Archigenes of Apamea's therapy, which involved purging the body and the mind of his patients with a wide range of (at times violent) methods. Melinda Letts promotes Rufinus of Ephesus’ psychological sensitivity in his views and treatment of melancholy. Julien Devinant investigates psychological pain in relationship to mental disease in Galen's cases. Ricardo Julião continues the theme of Galen, looking at memory disorders and forgetfulness (here's a gem: coldness is one of the two main causes of memory loss, and improper lifestyle the other; and I was relieved to see that Galen does not claim it to be necessarily a mental disorder). Thumiger contributes two chapters: in the first, she looks at eating ‘disturbances’, especially boulimos (‘huge famine’), atrophia (‘lack of nourishment’), polysarkia (‘huge appetite’), and the more complex cases of stomachikon (‘stomach disease’) and hydrophobia (‘fear of water’), and she terms them disturbances rather than disorders in order to avoid implications of the current psychiatric term ‘eating disorder’; in the second, she considers sexual disorders in late antique sources. In the following two chapters, Anna Maria Urso and Ricarda Gäbel focus on late antique discourses on mental illness by studying Caelius Aurelianus (fifth century ad) and Aëtius of Amida (sixth century ad) respectively. The third and final section (‘Philosophy and Mental Illness’) contains three wide-ranging essays: Marke Ahonen writes on the Stoic view of mental illness; Christopher Gill asks to what extent philosophical views of madness affected actual medical practices (an excellent piece); and Singer closes the volume with a discussion of Galen's analysis of the pathē of the psyche. A bibliography and a set of excellent indexes (index locorum and a general index) close the volume.
This is an important and very useful collection of essays that should be read by anyone interested in (ancient) medicine. But those like myself who are interested in religion will also benefit from reading many of the chapters and will think about some of their material in a new light. The volume is handsomely produced, very well edited, and accessible to non-experts, as all ancient texts have been translated. An impressive achievement on all fronts.
Another remarkable achievement is Gregor Staab's Gebrochener Glanz,Footnote 4 an important contribution to the quickly growing field of Greek inscriptional poetry which has been spurred on in recent years by the publication of a number of important new texts (including the newly found verse inscription commemorating the Battle of Marathon). Some fairly spectacular new poems are yet to be published, among which is an inscribed hymn (?) from the Hellenistic Mylasa, a poem composed in trochaic tetrameter catalectic, and there are some intriguing finds from Asia Minor which will see the light of the day in the next few years. It's unsurprising that literary scholars, epigraphers, and cultural and social historians are all expressing more and more interests in inscriptional poetry. Rightly so, but this was not always the case. Until relatively recently scholarship tended to perceive inscriptional epigrams as formulaic, amateurish, and as much lower in rank and status than the ‘proper’ or ‘book’ literature. Poems on stones are, with some exceptions, anonymous, and since they are not backed by the poetic authority, previous generations of scholars tended to come up rather quickly with damning judgement concerning the style, the language, and the poetic art more generally.
A major shift in the perception of such poems started in the 1990s, triggered by the publication of Carmina Epigraphica Graeca in the previous decade, two volumes of editions of poems from the archaic and classical periods by Peter Allan Hansen. All of a sudden, these texts started being taken seriously: there were fundamental discussions of the reciprocal relationship between inscribed and literary epigram, spearheaded by scholars such as Peter Parsons, Peter Bing, Kathryn Gutzwiller, and Joseph Day. And then, between 1998 and 2004, Reinhold Merkelbach and Josef Stauber published a total of five volumes containing verse inscriptions, translations, and short commentaries on texts from the Greek East, some 2,100 Greek verse inscriptions, from Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine, and material from Armenia, Iran, and Bactria, from all periods. The critical response was a mixed one, with the major objection highlighting that the editions were not of consistently high quality (one does find various indicators that the volumes were cobbled together hurriedly, and, admittedly, the texts were largely derived from the existing editions). But not even the harshest of critics will deny that these volumes have exercised a major influence and impact on the way that inscriptional poetry is perceived today.
Recent work in this field looks into the ways in which literary epigram influenced the style of the inscriptional poems, and some scholars, such as Valentina Garulli and Timo Christian, have recently charted the ‘literarization’ of Hellenistic and later inscriptional epigrams by analysing the way that inscriptions adopt and adapt the literary techniques of book epigram. Staab's book, a substantial, erudite, and well-researched study of the inscribed funerary epigram from Asia Minor of the Imperial period, fits directly into this trend by looking at the literary influences and cultural conditions on both the production and the reception sides. In the first half of the book, Staab places his texts ‘between literature and everyday life’, provides a literary history of the genre, addresses the issues of literary education and engagement of these texts with Homer and post-Homeric literature, and then turns to the issue of pattern books, a complex problem regarding the ways in which formulaic expressions may have been spread. The second half of the book effectively represents volume six of the Merkelbach–Stauber collection, containing editions, translations, and detailed philological and epigraphic commentaries of the new texts (with, in many cases, very helpful images).
Everywhere in the book Staab displays insight and authority, and while a nit-picky reader could perhaps find reasons to disagree on one or other point of detail, this volume will be a standard point of reference for the material it contains and an important and admirable contribution to studies of inscriptional poetry. Over the last few months I have found myself using this book often and with great benefit.
I turn now to a literary rather than an epigraphic study of inscriptional poetry, and a pleasurable read on the Greek and Latin poetry carved on a colossal statue. Patricia Rosenmeyer's book deals with around one hundred Greek and Latin texts found on one of the two almost identical statues of Amenophis (Amenhotep) III, which were both at some point named after the epic hero Memnon.Footnote 5 Still standing today next to its twin in the west plain of Egyptian Thebes, the northern of the two colossi was famous for its alleged capacity to utter voices at dawn, and has attracted visitors from far and wide, some of whom have left inscriptional testimonies of their visits on the colossus’ body. Some of the texts are simple statements, confirming that the visitors had heard the hero's voice – ‘I heard Memnon at such-and-such hour’ – occasionally followed by the information on the visitor's hometown and her or his profession. Other inscriptions have positively Martialesque wit and spirit; my absolute favourite is Rosenmeyer's no. 11, a text associated with the name of one Mettius (senator Mettius Modestus, perhaps), squeezed somehow among almost thirty other texts on the left foot of the colossus, and stating in an elegiac couplet followed by a hexameter:
Many of the inscribed texts investigated in this book are poems, some by painfully obvious amateurs, some by more or less skilled poets, and Rosenmeyer, who has a long-standing interest in the statue and the texts, provides in six chapters a highly readable account of the texts and their monument.
After she has provided the contextual information in her first two chapters, dedicated to the types of evidence and sacred tourism (a prominent topic in this book) respectively, Rosenmeyer turns to the texts in a chapter dedicated to strategies of communication with the statue. In the following chapter, she moves on to those texts which, as she argues, echo Homer and reactivate the mythical past (another prominent topic of the book). The penultimate chapter, ‘Sapphic Memnon’, focuses on Julia Balbilla's four epigrams and Balbilla's Sapphic allusions, and provides some exculpating readings of what is generally held to be inferior poetry (this chapter treads the same ground and updates Rosenmeyer's 2008 Classical Antiquity piece on ‘Julia Balbilla's Sapphic Voice’). The final chapter turns to ‘modern Memnon’ and traces various strands of the reception of the statue and the Memnon narrative, presenting a variety of touchstones, from Hegel's Lectures on Fine Arts to Shelley's ‘Ozymandias’. The book closes with three appendices, one containing the map of the physical locations of the poems on the statue, a second covering the texts and the translations, and the third one providing an overview of personal names, after which the bibliography and a general index follow.
A significant achievement of this enjoyable book is that it will draw increased attention to the material, which is, as Rosenmeyer rightly points out, often sidelined in Anglophone scholarship (but less so in French, perhaps understandably, given traditional French presence in the area), and it will greatly facilitate access to this intriguing material.
We end for this issue with the study of emotions. De Gruyter's well-established series Trends in Classics has now introduced a new sub-series entitled Trends in Classics – Ancient Emotions. Its first volume, resulting from the proceedings of a Rethymno conference organized in 2015, deals with the concept of hope (with a particular focus on the affective and passionate hope [elpis/spes]).Footnote 6
After a strong introduction written by the editors and dealing with the methodological and definitional issues, the volume is split into three main parts. The first section, dealing with hope in Greek literature contains five essays dealing with hope in Pindar (Alexandre Johnston), Euripides (Nick Fisher), comedy (Niall W. Slater), Thucydides and Aristophanes (Natalia Tsoumpra), and hope and reason in fifth-century bc historiography (Donald Lateiner). While one can hardly ever cover everything one would like to address in an edited volume, there is one obvious gap in this part: Hesiod is mentioned in the introduction, as well as in several essays en passant, but did not receive a chapter, which seems a pity to me. The second section, on spes, takes a look at Roman comedy (Laurel Fulkerson), Virgil (Michael Paschalis), Ovid (Andreas N. Michalopoulos), Statius (Antony Augoustakis), and Tacitus (Sophia Papaioannou). The essays of the final section deal with the historical reality of hope and take a broader outlook on the topic. Starting from the end of this section, Angelos Chaniotis discusses associations between elpis, cognition, and judgement on the basis of epigraphic sources; Olympia Bobou investigates hope and ‘sub-adults’; Keely Elizabeth Heuer looks at visual evidence from south Italy that might be associated with representations of hope. The section begins Kostas Vlassopoulos’ wide-ranging piece on hope and slavery, followed by two essays that are somewhat narrower in scope, dealing with northern barbarians’ expectations (Antti Lampinen) and with the adoption of Tiberius according to Velleius Paterculus’ account (Andrew Stiles).
This is a well-edited (excellent indexes) and substantial volume, containing meticulously researched contributions. Nobody will be able to neglect it, and, for many issues concerning elpis/spes, both methodological and related, this will now be the first port of call.
