In the wake of Bakhtin, the roughhousing genres of ancient Athens—especially Old Comedy, but also iambic poetry and satyr plays—have been productively evaluated through the frame of the carnival. From this vantage point, the prospective reader of Abusive Mouths in Classical Athens, a rich reappraisal of such genres, faces the open maw of a Rabelaisian funhouse. Upon entry, one finds the usual suspects: the slippery tongue, the gullet that defines the stock character of the hungry outsider, and the orifice at the other end, the often “gaping” asshole that has been central to so much scholarship on Greek sex in recent decades. But there is much more inside. Focusing on the figure of the mouth in a range of archaic and classical genres, Worman charts a rich world of character types that shape Athenian debates about those capable of advising the polis and those interested only in serving appetites—their own and those of the public. By probing the “oral fixation” of ancient Greek invective, she builds a strong case for the claim that the mouth, where speech and appetitive behaviors converge, functions “as the central metonym for the excesses of the democratic polis” (p. 61).

The figure of metonymy dominates the book's analysis of how the body is taken up in the rhetoric of abuse. Drawing on Barthes' treatment of the blason and the “metonymic falsehood” in S/Z, Worman demonstrates how poets and orators dismantle the body to invest some of its parts with the power to figure that most elusive of signifieds: character. Foremost among these parts, naturally, is the mouth. Nearly as important is the anus, which often appears in close proximity to the mouth on the grotesquely reconfigured body. Capitalizing on this proximity, Worman reads the fixation on effeminizing sexual practices that is so prevalent in abuse language, as well as the less noticed but arguably more significant interest in eating, as part of an overarching critique of public speakers. That is, talking about the lower hole and the consuming mouth is really just talking about talking (though talking, dizzyingly, is metonymic of character more broadly defined). Worman's shift of emphasis does not create the body as a site for expressing anxieties about character in Athens: scholars have extensively documented how charges of depravity facilitated attacks on a citizen's masculinity and, hence, his right to political participation. But by funneling these anxieties through the mouth and foregrounding non-sexual appetites, Worman subtly realigns our perspective on the representational potential of bodies, thereby accommodating our sources' obsessive interest in what people do with their mouths as an index of virtue and vice.

More vice than virtue, of course. Worman is interested in blame, and in fact, another of the book's major aims is to rethink its generic character. Noting that iambos has long challenged conventional generic markers such as meter, she proposes that we attend to the “discursive nature of abusive speech” (p. 9): its tone, its subjects, and its repertoire of (especially oral) images. This “iambic mode” has not only an internal coherence but also, she argues, a history. The book traces this history from early epic and sympotic poetry, through the mode's transformation into an instrument of political critique in Old Comedy, to fourth-century prose (Plato, oratory, Aristotle, Theophrastus). Although the iambic mode becomes, at times, rather diffuse, especially in the fourth-century genres, and the two central characters—the boorish haranguer and the effete chatterer—grow less sharply defined over time, Worman nevertheless shows, over six very full chapters, the persistent attention to the mouth in the negative characterization of public speakers. The book thus helps to stake out new space beyond formalism and sociolinguistics for thinking about genre in the classical period. This, together with its baroque portraits of the characters who populated Athens' dirtiest domains of civic speech, makes Abusive Mouths in Classical Athens well worth the price of admission.