This fresh, concise book is in many respects a natural and welcome extension of K.'s first book, Status in Classical Athens (2013), given how far an individual's status or identity is often bound up with methods of denigration or offence. K. characterises her book as a ‘first step’ (p. 151) towards what D. Lateiner, in a memorable phrase also quoted in her closing pages, has described as the ‘ecology of insult’, a complex system of interaction between society and the language and symbols it uses, and the social significance with which certain words become imbued. As such a first survey, this book is highly successful: K. covers a huge range of relevant areas, and she is right to identify the isolationism of disparate fields within the study of the classical Greek world, all of which are required to move towards an understanding of ancient insulting and offence more broadly. It is a great strength of the book that these are brought together in a single place, although with such breadth there will inevitably be places where specialist readers are left wanting, and tantalising ends left untied, despite a very large number of endnotes (which take up 60 pages out of 258). K.'s prose is likewise very accessible and readable, and the Greek is transliterated so as to be intelligible to the non-specialist, for which K. should be commended.
The main focus and structure of the book is more conventional than the introduction suggests it will be, with the bulk of the discussion on Old Comedy and oratory. It does not really focus on ‘insults in daily life’ (p. 11) in as complete a way as it might, not taking into account the admittedly even more disparate evidence of papyri and other ephemeral material. The general arc of the book is to move from less to more serious insult, using the settings of insulting speech or discussion of it as a diagnostic tool, although, as K. admits, we do not know how the audience in any public arena reacted to our snatches of preserved invective or how any single individual felt about being called a ‘shit-eater’ or ‘deserter’ – or any other word. There is a particular tension underlying work on insults in assuming context gives the degree of offensiveness of a word, and often not knowing what words were actually used. Given that humour is also an intimate bedfellow of insult – what is highly insulting to one person may be hilarious to another –, it is surprising it does not feature more prominently in the introduction, although it does appear in particular throughout the early chapters.
The first chapter is on insults in ritual or festival settings (1 ‘Skōmmata and Aischrologia: Benign Insults’), followed by one on Old Comedy (2 ‘Kōmōidein and Skōptein: Mockery in Old Comedy’) with the remaining three chapters (3 ‘Diabolē and Loidoria: Invective in Attic Oratory’, 4 ‘Kakēgoria and Aporrhēta: Forbidden Verbal Abuse’ and 5 ‘Hubris: Affronts to Honor’) all essentially on oratory, and in the case of Chapter 4 the complexities of insult in Athenian law in practice. The use of Greek terms for chapter titles is neat, but, as K. admits, these overlapped in use, and I suggest their use was always likely subject to perspective: I produce powerful rhetoric against you, you slander me. Likewise, I am not convinced that diabolē had more serious consequences than comic mockery, but this depends on how you view the relationship between the comic stage and Athens at large, and indeed what consequences you consider to be serious (losing a trial vs losing social capital or influence). K. is an excellent guide to the legal material and its context, which dominates the book, but it is a shame that she does not draw on a spectrum of evidence as full as the introduction intimates she will. (The image on the cover of the book hints at something not discussed, even though it must surely have formed an important part of the everyday life to which K. refers – the offensive gesture.)
The final chapter on hubris feels more tangential to the general topic. Hubris has its place here for sure, but this chapter feels quite different in tone to the rest of the book. In the conclusion hubris is called ‘the most egregious of all insults’ (p. 149), but surely it is not a subcategory, but rather a broader label for behaviours of various kinds, in all kinds of arenas. This raises the question of whether this is a book about verbal insult (i.e. insulting language) or about affronts to honour more broadly through all kinds of actions, including the non-verbal. Indeed, this is not so much a book about words, but about the social significance of insults and the broader uses for which insulting speech was employed. If the reader wants to know how to insult someone in ancient Greek and the full spectrum of options available, there is no immediate answer here since that is not K.'s main purpose.
One should not criticise a book for not being the one you would have written, but because K.'s book straddles both the principles of insult and the verbal insults themselves, which were part of these principles, it is important that the latter are nonetheless properly contextualised. My primary quibble on the discussion of insulting words is the lack of outline as to how any data was collected or how the individual categories for discussion were chosen. In several places K. notes that she focuses on a few of the common conventional topics of insult (e.g. pp. 52, 68), but without outlining how these were specifically identified or quantifying how prominent they are in her material. ‘Rhipsapsis’ (‘shield-discarder’) may be a ‘particularly harsh insult’ (p. 32) given the importance of martial valour to Athenian male status, but there is a risk that by choosing such categories to do with citizenship and status she prejudges her own conclusions. I do not disagree with her conclusions that there were a set of insults associated with non-citizen status that likely had a negatively-marked status within discourse, but the way in which these are framed risks suggesting they are the only set of insults with such social significance – and I doubt that this was the case. For example, K. speculates that shouting generalised insults such as ‘Shorty! Fatty! Baldy!’ might have been a feature of ritual insult at the gephurismos (p. 21), but does not unpick the evidence for slurs associated with body-type or appearance even though these must have existed, albeit perhaps in ways that are unfamiliar. Likewise, there is a rich vein of recent work on linguistic impoliteness and interpersonal communication that K. does not tap. Stepping back even further from the traditional generic restrictions of ‘Comedy’ or ‘Oratory’ would have allowed a broader picture of insult to be painted, including common sociological and anthropological practices: surely, for example, any public figure at some level is offended by lampoon or satire, even if it is within the bounds of what is deemed legally acceptable at a particular time and place, and insult is a universal tactic for trying to win an argument and not something specifically associated with classical Athens.
K. opens up a huge number of avenues of interest and further research in this rich book, and I am glad to have it on my bookshelves. In addition, it would be a very useful core text for anyone bold enough to teach a course on ancient insult or interpersonal conflict once a cheaper paperback edition appears, which I hope will be sooner rather than later.
