The present volume is the result of the tenth international conference on orality and literacy held in Ann Arbor in June 2012 on the topic of ‘Tradition, Transmission, and Adaption’. There are seventeen articles arranged chronologically, which cover topics regarding transmission and transformation of information in the ancient world. The articles take into account not only literary texts, but also vase paintings, ritual formulae, letters, Fachliteratur and inscriptions, exhibiting a rich and varied landscape about ancient communication. The central concern of the collection is to extend and deepen a path in orality and literary studies that has become well trodden in recent decades. All the papers – despite their wide-ranging and heterogonous topics – show a desire to move beyond the simple opposition between literacy and orality found in traditional scholarship. Instead of focusing on classical topics such as oral composition, they attempt to reveal the complexity of the interactions between orality and literacy from the point of view of communication. The discussion is guided by two main questions: (a) How does performative context shape the compositional strategies of texts? (b) How is a tradition (e.g. a myth or a historical event) transmitted and received in a multi-channel way? Through different case studies, they aim to demonstrate that ancient texts can only be properly understood by taking into account the communicative dimension. This review cannot address each contribution as it deserves, but attempts to highlight several intriguing points.
A remarkable feature of the collection is that it explains communicative forms of ancient texts through theories of hypertext. J. O'Maley backgrounds his research on previous generations’ crimes in the Iliad against the development of hypertext theories. In parallel to the first wave of hypertext theories in which democratic multilinearity and networks replace traditionally hierarchical concepts such as centre and margin, early oral criticism of Homer also seeks to replace allegedly anachronistic literary analysis by disclosing textual openness and lack of meaning in variations. The extreme position of the first hypertext theorists, however, has recently been challenged by a sophisticated approach foregrounding the interplay of authorship with the internet's non-hierarchical structure. Similarly, Homer scholars nowadays are more inclined to look for subtle ways in which meaning is created in a complicated communication between author and audience. In this spirit, O'Maley illustrates characteristics of Homeric texts using blogs, Wikis and Google. Through a case study of the meaning of atasthalia, he aims to show how the author controls multilinear links and leads the audience to his destination.
As in O'Maley's research, Finkelberg, in her study on the transformation of the myth of Boreas and Oreithyia, complicates the tension between authority and democracy in the communication of information. Through analysing two kinds of local myths – one is transformed into Panhellenic myth, the other, not – she distinguishes two kinds of transformation of hypertext. Whereas the former gradually loses its multimedia characteristics, undergoing a linear process of textualisation, the latter maintains its hypertextual features by being recurrently actualised and transmitted through multi-channels. Related to these two studies is Zelnick-Abramovitz's research on the role of epigraphy in ancient historiography. The author sensitively compares the relation of performance of historiography to its inscribed version with that of digital to printed versions nowadays. According to her, being inscribed on stone invests dynamic local history with eternity and authority, and this resembles the case where a blog, a multiple representation with texts, images and occasionally music on the internet, achieves its authority by reducing its multimedia dimension in publication. Unlike O'Maley's sophisticated approach, however, Zelnick-Abramovitz does not notice that the internet is less anarchic than it first appears, but always contains a subtle interplay between authority and freedom. Instead, she insists that ‘no text is conceived as authoritative while still performed orally or uploaded on the net’ (p. 193). This echoes the radical democratic hypothesis endorsed by traditional hypertext theories, but criticised by O'Maley. Unfortunately, there are almost no cross-references among the contributions (except between Beck and Minchin on Virgil and Homer). As a result, a dialogue among O'Maley, Finkelberg and Zelnick-Abramovitz about hypertext theories is absent.
The collection also calls into question the simple opposition between written texts and oral performances. Cambron-Goulet foregrounds the orality in the literary by examining philosophical epistles. Through analysing their pedagogical function, she draws attention to the requirement of reading commonly implied in such letters, which brings readers back to the school practice these texts seek to imitate: Symphilosophieren with teachers and friends. In this manner, she succeeds in manifesting how orality is brought into the literary genre, which leads to a fusion between orality and literacy. A similar point is made by Wiber's study on Gaius’ Institutes, a handbook for legal education. Equally from a didactical point of view, Wiber seeks to trace oral elements in this literacy-coined instruction which, he argues, are rooted in the older tradition of legal education by questions and answers. Based on the analysis of this book's didactical agenda, he further assumes that different MSS of the Institutes go back to different traditions in which orality is mixed with literacy to different degrees. In contrast with these two studies, Hawes exposes the underlying literacy in the oral in her study on Palaephatus’ mythology. According to her, although Palaephatus uses oral languages in his work, he none the less offers a stable version of traditional stories, which separates them from their dynamic local context. An instructive lesson from this study is that in the process of transformation of communicative forms, literalisation and systematisation are not always synchronised or synonymous. For in Palaephatus, on the one hand, oral myths are replaced by texts with singular linear form with a fixed quality; on the other hand, this tendency is accompanied by a process of de-systematisation, i.e. the genealogy, chronology and geography implied in the oral version melt into the background, while isolated narrative episodes prevail.
Epics are the loci classici of the study on orality and literacy. It is not accidental that five articles approach the traditional topic from various perspectives. Ready provides a meta-poetic reading of Homer. Instead of focusing on stereotypical scenes of internal singers and audience in narrative, he draws a parallel between internal receptions of omen and external receptions of epics. He argues that the external audience can acquire more knowledge than the internal characters from the same omen, which leads to a meta-poetic reflection about how the poet, like the soothsayer, conceives and controls the responses of his audience. S.'s paper does not focus on the internal communication of texts, but aims to reconstruct an external connection between Hesiod and Near Eastern literature. Against a majority of scholars, she tries to demonstrate that the channel of Hesiod's reception of Near Eastern material is not multiple, but narrow, by comparing the description of a set of admonitions and a prophecy of doom in Works and Days and in Near Eastern sources. Both Beck and Minchin focus on the relationship between Homeric epics and the Aeneid. The former argues that the divergence between the Homeric and Virgilian similes is influenced by media, performance and audience reception, whereas the latter – in applying the distinction between spoken and written language introduced by Chafe – attempts to demonstrate that the poet's expectation of the reception of his poem determines the way in which he arranges and presents the materials.
In general, the volume is well produced. It contains preliminary information (preface, list of contributors, a concise introduction) and helpful indexes (index locorum and a general index). Nevertheless, a few misprints indicate sloppy proofreading: a few Greek texts, for instance, remain untranslated (pp. 106, 109). J. Fischer is not included in the list of contributors, whereas Cambron-Goulet is printed twice. Ebbott 2010 in O'Maley's footnotes 25 and 27 does not appear in the bibliography. [Κ]λιτοϕõν is misprinted as [Κ]λιτοϕ῀ον (p. 107). Aristophanes’ Knights 190–3 quoted by Anderson and Dix should not include the following lines Ἀλλὰμὴ παρῇς ἅ σοι διδόασ' ἐντοῖς λογίοισιν οἱ θεοί (pp. 193–4), which is evidenced by the discord between the Greek text and their translation (p. 80). In Zelnick-Abramovitz, not all the italic Greek texts are accordingly marked in her translation (p. 186 n. 28). Despite such minor matters, this collection offers a rewarding and thought-provoking read, succeeding in illustrating the variety and the richness of recent orality and literacy scholarship.
