This book, a revised Oxford DPhil thesis, attempts ‘to put thauma on the critical map … when considering Greek culture more broadly’ (2). In the introduction, Jessica Lightfoot considers the slipperiness of the term and its relation to kindred notions, such as ekplexis (‘astonishment’), thambos (‘surprise’) and agasthai (‘to admire’), before setting out her study’s indebtedness to Richard Neer (The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture (Chicago 2010)) and Stephen Greenblatt (Marvelous Possessions (Oxford 1991)). The book is less a sustained argument-driven investigation of a circumscribed set of questions than a panoramic view of wonder that unfolds over six loosely integrated substantive chapters centred on the aesthetics of thauma (Chapter 2), the textuality of wonder (Chapter 3), wonder and music (Chapter 4), the cognitive dimension of wonder (Chapter 5), wonder and ethnography (Chapter 6) and the fabrication of wonder (Chapter 7).
Philosophical texts loom large. In Chapter 2, Lightfoot contrasts Charmides and Theaetetus in their respective dialogues to emphasize philosophy’s ambivalence to thauma: it can be protreptic but also potentially pernicious. Charmides, described as an agalma, enters the palaestra in a ‘pseudo-divine epiphany’ (20) but is shown to be intellectually bankrupt, while Theaetetus is philosophically inspiring but physically underwhelming. The visual emphasis in philosophical theorization of thauma aligns with broader literary treatments of wonder, as Lightfoot makes clear in readings of classic ekphrases in Iliad 18, Theocritus’ first Idyll and the Lithica. Elsewhere, Lightfoot addresses thauma vis-à-vis theatrical marvel-making (thaumatourgia) in Plato’s Sophist and Republic (Chapter 7). Plato belittles sophists as well as the shadowmakers in the cave allegory by comparing them to theatrical wonder-makers who deceive spectators for pay. Lightfoot compellingly argues, moreover, that the cave allegory – Socrates’ ‘verbal painting’ (195) – is itself a thauma, but one that is mobilized philosophically for moral improvement.
Lightfoot devotes considerable attention to comedy and historiography, two genres that reveal further anxiety about wonder as an effect of language. She reads Birds as a parody of ethnography that ultimately undercuts the reality of the fantastical city of Nephelococcygia and of ‘the very believability of any object labelled as a marvel’ (148). Aristophanes, Lightfoot proposes, inverts periphery and centre (145), turning his ethnographic eye on the near and familiar (Athens) rather than on distant lands. Pivoting to Thucydides, Lightfoot shows how Pericles and Nicias exploit rhetoric to intensify sentiments of wonder to promote Athenian self-idealizations and to sway public opinion on foreign policy. In both cases, thauma is construed as the effects of crafty speech that lead to political miscalculations. While Lightfoot’s analysis is sensible, some treatment of how thauma differs from competing conceptions of the power of logos would have been welcome (for example, Gorg. Hel. 8–10 on rhetoric as inspiration and incantation).
Other chapters investigate poetic appropriations of wonder. Passages centred on the Delian Maidens in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and on the performance of Arion (Hdt. 1.24) attest to the ways in which choreia and rhapsodia could collapse the boundary between mortal and immortal to great thaumatic effect. Hermes’ theogonic performances and construction of the lyre in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, moreover, exemplify how performance culture could harness the epiphanic to elicit both wonder and disbelief. The notion of epiphany recurs in Lightfoot’s elucidation of the encounter of Priam and Achilles in Iliad 24 (Chapter 5). While the analysis of Priam’s ‘quasi-epiphanic’ appearance (109) is lucid, it is less evident how a thauma-oriented perspective (or a focus on the inversion of familiar and unfamiliar, 130) is surprising or nuances traditional views of the recognition scene, long admired for its poignancy. Likewise, it would have been profitable to examine how focusing on thauma per se enhances regnant views of Euripidean anagnorisis in Iphigenia in Tauris and Ion, which Lightfoot discusses as the ‘paradoxical interplay between spatial nearness and distance’ (111).
Paradoxography constitutes a substantial body of evidence for Lightfoot. She aims to identify aesthetic principles in textual collections of wonder, especially those of ps.-Antigonos and ps.-Aristotle, which resist narratives (unlike Herodotean ethnography) and eschew causal explanations to accentuate their enigmatic qualities (unlike Peripatetic scientific treatises). Lightfoot opines that discrete paradoxographical descriptions ‘tumble’ into each other and ‘communicate back and forth in unexpected dialogue’ (68). Supporting examples are sparse and selective, and the patterns detected are not wholly convincing, as in the alleged unity of [Mir. ausc.] 9–12 in respect to their focus on phenomena related to the mouth (66–67). One need not, moreover, dismiss (as Lightfoot does at 79) possible utilitarian functions of paradoxography; these texts could fulfil multiple aesthetic and practical functions depending on the objectives of the user.
Lightfoot’s kaleidoscopic account illustrates how ‘conceptions of and responses to wonder and wonders in antiquity were both multiform and multivalent’ (1). She casts an ambitiously wide net, but this very capaciousness sometimes obviates deeper probing of the fundamental issues. The juxtaposition of wildly different texts within single chapters is thought-provoking, but the throughlines are at times tenuous (for instance, the protracted discussion of ps.-Antigonos preceding the analysis of the Homeric Hymns, 80–88, or the recapitulation to Ion in the analysis of the Sicilian expedition, 166); similarly, recourse to generic analytical binaries (for example, the familiar and unfamiliar, centre and periphery, 121) is occasionally forced or vague. Regrettably, the epilogue parades an assortment of additional case studies of wonder in lieu of drawing systematic conclusions about the tenacity of thauma across Greek literature or clarifying how the category complicates or enhances conventional understandings of the texts under examination.
Methodologically, there is an ambivalent – if not uneasy – relationship between synchrony and diachrony in the book. On the one hand, Lightfoot renounces straightforward diachronic accounts of wonder (11) and thus juxtaposes texts of various genres within individual chapters to discern how they ‘relate to each other and talk with each other both forwards and backwards’ (16). On the other hand, language throughout the book betrays a diachronic impulse that would have benefited from more explicit elaboration (for example, ‘changing attitudes’, 79; the ‘time that elapsed between Homer … and Aristotle’, 118). At times, Lightfoot attributes shifts in conceptions of wonder to intellectual developments in philosophy (for example, in Plato ‘thauma really emerges for the first time as a fully conceptualised and complex term of philosophical hermeneutics’, 200). Elsewhere, wonder apparently responds to the self-interest of orators in the context of fifth-century Athenian imperialism (120). The chapter on paradoxography, in turn, foregrounds libraries and compilatory textual practices, as well as Ptolemaic collecting habits (52–57), as pivotal in generating new modes of expressing and perceiving wonder. Finally, the assertion that ‘the association of thauma with human action becomes gradually stronger’ (209) intimates a secularizing orientation. These intriguing propositions are only partly substantiated in the book but deserve greater scrutiny. Should we posit, in the final equation, a single prime motor for changing conceptions of wonder in Greek antiquity? Or do multiple, distinct notions of wonder emerge from different fields of knowledge and cultural spheres and develop independently for variegated reasons? Lightfoot leaves it to readers to speculate how these possible forces and their confluence transformed images of wonder in Greek thought. But she has rendered us a service by implicitly raising these conundrums and indicating routes for further research on how thauma complexifies over centuries as an object of discourse and inquiry.
