This volume, which had its origins in a seminar at the Corpus Christi College Centre for the Study of Greek and Roman Antiquity at the University of Oxford, comprises a rich and diverse collection of thirteen essays. Taking a wide range of approaches and spanning Graeco-Roman texts from the Iliad to Neoplatonic philosophy, the chapters address a central question posed by the Editors: ‘what significance does the voice, or projected persona, in which a text is written have for our understanding of the meaning of that text?’.
After a foreword by E. Bowie and an introduction by M. and H., the volume is divided into two overarching parts. Part 1, ‘Authors and their Manifestations’, groups essays that treat how particular authors frame and express their voice. Part 1, which presents Graeco-Roman texts in roughly chronological order, is further divided into subsections on the ‘third person’, the ‘dialogic voice’ and the ‘first person’. The section on the third person begins with Homer, with B. Graziosi's exploration of the particular ‘voice and vantage point’ of the Iliad poet. Graeco-Roman historiography follows epic, with C. Pelling's investigation of the dynamic relationship between first- and third-person voice in Xenophon and Caesar. The volume's only co-authored piece fittingly opens the section on dialogic voices: W. Allan and A. Kelly argue that Athenian tragedy should be understood as a ‘multi-vocal form of popular art’ whose plurality of expression is fundamental to its important status in fifth-century Athenian society. Two contributions on Roman literature round out this section: S. Culpepper Stroup's examination of the development of Cicero's dialogic voice throughout his career, and S. Harrison's contribution on how Horace's second book of Satires constructs the satirist's voice by means of its dialogic polyphony. As Part 1 turns to the ‘first person’, G. Longley returns to historiography by arguing for a reading of Polybius' first-person authorial voice as part of his didactic approach to writing history. R. Ash then addresses Pliny's construction of his epistolary persona in a cycle of letters featuring Regulus. Part 1 concludes with T. Whitmarsh's essay on fictional autobiography, which focuses in particular on ‘autobiographical illusion’ in Lucian's True History.
Part 2, ‘Authors and Authority’, makes explicit a question already raised by many of the earlier chapters, namely how the voice of a text's author (or presumed author) encodes authority for the writer, for ancient readers and for authors of later texts. This section also moves the volume's chronological focus into Late Antiquity. Beginning with I. Peirano's examination of the complex ways in which an author's signature influences the reading of literary texts, the volume moves to A.D. Morrison's treatment of fictional letter-collections that assume the voice of the famous figures from the Greek world. The pseudonymous act, he argues, entails a delicate balance between masking and revealing the fictionality of the writer's assumed authoritative persona. M. Erler's contribution on the religious authority held by the Socratic voice in Late Antiquity is followed by M. Edwards's discussion of authorship in the long recension of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch. Inhabiting a different cultural climate than Ignatius himself, the writer of these letters creates in his Ignatius ‘a new character for a new Church’. Finally, M. Squire closes the volume with a contribution that moves away from the purely textual realm to visual material, offering an analysis of the concept of authorship in Graeco-Roman art.
The collection addresses a set of questions that are fundamental to the study of ancient literary production and reception. Given the enormous variety of ways in which issues of authorship and authorial authority have been treated by different scholarly communities under the wide umbrella of Classics – from the Homeric Question, to the debate over the lyric ‘I’, to speaking inscriptions – the volume makes an important contribution in bringing together scholars working on very different genres, periods and traditions. As Bowie observes in his foreword, many different constellations of chapters speak to each other. In what follows, I draw out some of the conversations that I found especially stimulating.
First, if this diverse volume can be said to have an especially prominent generic focus, it is epistolography. Three contributions on letters both ‘real’ (Ash on Pliny) and ‘fictional’ (Morrison on Greek pseudonymous letters; Edwards on Ignatius) together demonstrate the manifold ways in which an author's voice is created by the letter, a form that claims to bear a special relationship with a writer's inner thoughts and private world. These letter-writers trade in authority in very different ways: Pliny's is magnified in relation to the other characters he creates; in fictional letters, those who take on the famous voices of Plato and Euripides play upon their supposed writers' cultural authority; while the author of the Ignatius letters simultaneously relies on and augments the authority of a single religious figure. In all three cases, the form of the letter collection contributes to a particular creation of authority: as Ash shows, Pliny's published collection allows him to fashion a narrative of evolving and intensifying invective, while Ignatius' ‘palimpsestic and supervenient persona’ in this particular recension is created in dialogue with his other letters.
As a discussion of these letters suggests, the idea of authenticity and the ‘fake’ is another important strand of the volume. It is addressed with particular elegance in the complementary pair of essays by I. Peirano and M. Squire. Peirano explores the ‘hermeneutic function’ of the authorial figure in Graeco-Roman epic traditions; she considers in particular how the sphragis sets up an encounter between author and reader, serving both as an authenticating device and a practice that risks ‘being exposed as an emblem of deception’. The symbolic function of the signature is also at the heart of Squire's contribution. He considers how the visual arts construct authority and agency, taking as case studies first the use and abuse of famous artists' names, then the Tabulae Iliacae, which associate themselves with the ‘authorial voice’ of the miniaturist Theodorus of Samos. Like the literary sphragis, these objects use an author's voice self-consciously to invite a particular mode of viewing. Squire uses his own authorial voice admirably to tie together several of the volume's interpretative strands, while forming a pleasing ring composition with Graziosi's opening chapter on Homer.
The volume's selection of authors and literary forms from antiquity might come as a surprise to some readers. Despite the cover image of Sappho holding her stylus, the collection is in general geared more towards prose than poetry, and some poetic genres where authorship and authority are very much at stake, such as monodic and choral melic poetry, or Graeco-Roman elegy, do not find a voice. This is, as Bowie notes in his foreword, part of a decision by the editors to favour ‘mutually illuminating concentration’ over any attempt at exhaustive coverage, particularly in areas where the paths are well-trodden. While this approach certainly results in much thought-provoking and often unexpected cross-pollination, this reader at least would have welcomed the opportunity to see how more poetic texts might have entered into dialogue with some of the volume's most interesting lines of inquiry, such as the religious authority of an authorial voice (Erler, Edwards).
The volume is in general handsomely produced, with twelve maps and illustrations, individual bibliographies and a combined index. Unfortunately, one chapter (Longley) was let down by the copyediting process, and a number of distracting errors in both the Greek text and English prose remain.
