The academic world is currently host to the proliferation of variously labelled compendia of topically or thematically defined Darstellungen, the genre to which this book belongs. Among the medium's inherent merits is that it allows editors more discretionary latitude than, say, a textbook or a reference work does. It is also, though, prone to the negative consequences of cronyism, a problem for which there is no obvious practical solution. In any case, as the phenomenon inexorably swells our library collections, the profit lines of publishers and the CVs of contributors, these compendia have become a major presence in the apparatus of teaching and scholarship. It is, therefore, gratifying to encounter a specimen of the genre that promises as successfully as this one to inform and whet the interest of a variety of readers. It has been an engaging and stimulating exercise to read this collection with its multiple perspectives on the panorama of Greek literature from Homer to the threshold of the Byzantine era and its extended effects on the cultural history of the centuries since. All of that is supplemented by entries on what might collectively be termed ‘para-literary’ matters: inter alia L. Del Corso on ‘Mechanics and Means of Production in Antiquity’ (pp. 9–26), R. Armstrong on ‘Textual Survival and Transmission’ (pp. 27–40), E. Wilson on ‘Trends in Greek Literature in the Contemporary Academy’ (pp. 491–510) (i.e. curriculum, pedagogy, critical approaches etc. in English-speaking, but mainly American, schools and universities.)
The editors follow a creative plan, reflective in a way of Greek literature itself, that integrates traditional and predictable elements (a total of fifteen chapters dedicated to individual chronological periods and major literary genres) with innovative or unusual approaches and themes, some of which few readers are likely to anticipate. The content is deployed in an editors’ introduction and in 33 chapters distributed thematically (more or less) among eight Parts. Each of 30 contributors presents a single chapter and editor H. adds a medley of three (‘Philosophical Writing’, pp. 235–55, ‘Places [i.e. cities] of Production’, pp. 325–43, and ‘Literature and Truth’, pp. 373–85) distributed among three different Parts. The contributors, some of them well-known and veteran scholars, are drawn from two or three generations and from the international community of classicists. All this lends a lively poikilia of mode and method to the collection. No particular target readership is specified, and if the reference in the first sentence of the introduction to ‘an introductory companion volume’ should suggest that the content is directed more towards neophytes than towards periti, any such notion is soon dispelled. For one thing, notwithstanding the copious prefatory key to abbreviations, the novice will surely balk at many conventions of scholarly writing including such intra-textual references as ‘P. Cair. Masp. II 67097 and 67185’ or ‘Σ Aristoph. Equ. 400a = Cratinus, Pytine test. ii, PCG Vol. IV’. From the opposite perspective, it would be a rare journeyman Hellenist, however thoroughly versed in Greek literature and its criticism, for whom there are not at least some ‘introductory’ moments in a volume that distils an accumulation of earlier scholarship too vast and varied to have been mastered by any individual. Indicative of that are the bountiful bibliographies that accompany individual chapters.
Perhaps the book's best success at integrating disparate material is in the six chronologically defined chapters grouped under the heading of ‘Greek Literature as a Dynamic System’. There is an emphasis here on cross-currents of influence and reception between and within genres and eras that span more than a millennium. The capstone is J. Stenger's masterful chapter, ‘The Encounter with Christianity’ (pp. 126–38), that covers the final phase of the collection's chronological purview. Stenger lifts the centuries-long quarantine that, for reasons sound and unsound, isolates the study of writings of Greek Christians such as Basil and John Chrysostom from those of their pre-Christian or non-Christian co-linguals. He does that, not by treating Christian works as marginalia or appendages, but by showing them as integral participants in the historical development of the whole literary organism, retrospectively and prospectively, at the time of transition into the next era of literary culture.
While my reading of all but one of the 33 essays left me favourably impressed, to various degrees, with the authors’ command of subject and clarity of presentation, I must re-echo an apology encountered repeatedly in the volume to the effect that the large scope of the assignment dictates that comments here will be ruthlessly and arbitrarily selective. The expedients, sometimes ingenious, by which the contributors meet the imperative for brevity inevitably skew, for better or worse, the execution of their assignments. So, for instance N. Baechle's ‘Poetic Devices in Greek Literature: Pleasure and Creative Appropriation’ (pp. 461–75) turns out to be devoted to ecphrasis, albeit as combined with some other devices, in three specific poetic works. It is a sensitive and sophisticated essay, but it leaves a lot of casualties. An analogous instance, with perhaps lighter losses, is D. Dueck's ‘Knowledge of Self’ (pp. 386–400), where brief discussions of literary presences of antithetical groups such as ‘Humans and Gods’ and ‘Men and Women’ yield to her dominant theme of ‘Greeks and Barbarians’, which in turn is dominated by passages from Strabo, a writer, happily, on whom Dueck has an established expertise. Exceptional for the author's adeptness at weaving a wealth of information and argumentation into a necessarily brief text is E. Hall's ‘The Reception of Ancient Greek Literature and Western Identity’ (pp. 511–33), which manages to probe the semantics of both ‘reception’ and ‘western’ while presenting numerous concrete examples of reception in various modern artistic media. Sometimes a reader's anticipations, as cued by a chapter title or other extraneous considerations, are belied in other ways. So, under the rubric of ‘The Players’, M. Lefkowitz's ‘The Creators of Literature’ (pp. 283–95) might be expected to deal with biography or biographical fiction related to writers. It opens, though, with demurring observations on the dearth of reliable biographical data before presenting what amounts to a rather pedestrian, encyclopaedia-type, exposition on several major writers and their works.
The editors acknowledge that things might have been done differently, and readers will inevitably have a range of regrets and criticisms about options followed or neglected. I note the absence of any extended treatment of the chronologically protracted interplay of Greek literary culture with the traditions and literature of western Asia and Egypt in what contemporary scholars identify with terms such as ‘cultural continuum’ and ‘cultural koine’. This robustly motile area of current scholarship is beset with controversies and polemic, but, whatever editorial difficulties a dedicated chapter might occasion, the subject demands more than the brief and sporadic notices presented in this volume (e.g. by Wilson on ‘Trends’ and by A. Mori on Seleucid literary culture in ‘Literature in the Hellenistic World’, pp. 89–111).
The single index is generally accurate, although it covers some chapters more thoroughly than others. Was the indexing left to the individual contributors? The same might be asked of proof-reading or copy-editing since some chapters retain more corrigenda than others. Several of them are philologically bemusing; Jason almost certainly did not ‘plow … fields with dragons’ teeth’ and the year ‘41–0 bce’ is momentarily diverting. Pedants must blanch at the following sentence. ‘For most of its history humankind has been illiterate’. Others are more prosaic. So, Chios is probably not ‘in Asia Minor’ and ‘North American’ should not be narrowly applied to what is in effect the Jeffersonian and post-Jeffersonian USA. Quite a few orthographical errata (e.g. Gurtzwiller, ἄπαλος, παραναμασίαι) are scattered through the volume. Trivial in isolation, such slips do, in the aggregate, diminish confidence in the diligence of editors and contributors.
