The domination of human beings over nature and their own animality has been at the heart of historical European conceptions of humanity for a long time: this anthropocentrism is etymologically attached to humanities – and thus Classics – and social sciences. Anthropologists originally postulated a human specificity beyond and below all cultural variations; however, in the last two decades they claimed that the world should not be interpreted as a mere opposition between nature and culture, leading to what is now called posthumanism, as traditional humanism is no longer adequate to understand the relationships between human and non-human beings, animal as well as technological. From this perspective ancient texts might be suspected of delivering an obsolete vision of the world, since they are considered a cornerstone of traditional humanism. LeV.'s book successfully demonstrates the contrary: ancient texts may reveal how much ancient people questioned the relations of human beings with their environment, and especially the ‘human-animal line’ (I borrow the term used in a conference of the CEFRES [Centre français de recherche en sciences sociales] in Prague 2017). This is the result of a careful reading of many theoretical texts dealing with posthumanities, postcolonial and sound studies applied to Greek and Latin texts through the prism of narratives of metamorphosis, as far as they reflect a singular vision of the world, in which ‘boundaries of human and nonhuman animals, gods, elements and matter constantly shift’ (p. 5).
This is not an exhaustive study of all the myths describing a transformation of human beings into a musical animal or into a feature of the acoustic landscape. It consists in a selection of case studies particularly appropriate to the issues LeV. wants to address, the most fundamental one being what is music in Graeco-Roman thought. Furthermore, readers should not expect a purely philological commentary of those texts. Rather, LeV. invites us to have a fresh look at this corpus with the eyes of a scholar who tries to think beyond humanism and focuses on the way in which ancient authors expressed their interrogations about trans-species communication. Although it is an art (tekhnē), music appeared in antiquity as something being also non-human, divine or animal. An unsophisticated reading would consider that the term music was applied to non-human beings as a metaphor. By contrast, LeV. shows that the myths of metamorphosis give a more intricate answer, as sound remains an important mystery to solve: where it comes from, what it is made of, whether it is part of the body or a disembodiment etc. In the introduction LeV. notices that it is when sound and music deserve important scientific and technical treatises that narratives of metamorphoses developed (in Hellenistic times) and multiplied (in the imperial period). It gives the impression that ancient authors wanted to express the idea that science is not able to explain everything regarding sound and the need to ‘reendow music with a (super)natural force’ (p. 3). Therefore, LeV. wants to highlight the embodiment, situatedness and connectedness between all ‘musicking beings’ (from C. Small, Musicking: the Meanings of Performing and Listening [1998]) and the world around them.
The book consists of six chapters, each dedicated to a specific aspect of the research. The first chapter, ‘Forest: On Surrounds’, paves the way to a better understanding of LeV.'s method of reading the texts. Three animal characters occupy the stage of this chapter: Plutarch's pig (to illustrate the ontological continuity between humans and non-humans, as far as logos defines humans), Pliny's nightingale (on the idea that some non-human beings may imitate human ones and vice versa) and Aelian's swan (on non-verbal performances).
The second chapter, ‘Ringdove: On the Uncanny Power of Performance’, is based on an excerpt of Daphnis and Chloe and highlights how music affects the listener. The main anthropological reference here is D. Haraway's concept of ‘natureculture’ (The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness [2003]; it would have been appropriate to mention also P. Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture [2013], originally published in French in 2005). LeV.'s demonstration sheds light on the narrative of the two protagonists, who ‘became with’ the animals they are coexisting with; in Longus’ text Daphnis tells Chloe the myth of a young girl, who turned into a ringdove (phatta) after she was defeated in a poetical contest initiated by a young boy and lost eight cows. LeV. points out the relationships between the metamorphosis and the performance of a musicking body, human as well as non-human; for Daphnis the song of the ringdove gets its meaning from both the myth of the young girl and his own situation.
The third chapter, ‘Cicadas: On the Voice’, consists of a new reading of the famous text on cicadas in the Phaedrus, which LeV. considers as a dialogue on voice. She argues that the cicadas are a ‘metonym of the voice’ (p. 105) because the power of the insects’ voice comes from the fact that they are not visible. In Plato's myth music defies mortality: the voice is overemphasised while at the same time the body disappears.
The fourth chapter, ‘Echo: On Listening’, focuses on the delayed voice. The narrative is inserted in their works by Longus, who tells how Echo is dismembered by Pan, and Ovid, who relates her disappearance to her vain love for Narcissus. LeV.'s point is not only to show how perception exists only in relationship with the environment, but also to reflect on the aural agency of landscape. Following posthumanist feminist thinking, she suggests that ‘in a radical posthuman move, Echo has achieved the ultimate post-body condition’ (p. 134).
One of the crucial achievements of posthumanism is to draw attention to the relationships between human beings and machines. That is the goal of the fifth chapter, ‘Reeds: On Musical Objects’, devoted to the well-known story of Syrinx, therefore to instrumental music. LeV. questions the player's interiority in three accounts of the myth (Ovid, Longus and Achilles Tatius) and how the instrument can imitate feelings, engaging with the key notion of mimēsis in ancient aesthetics.
Emotions are at the core of the sixth chapter, ‘Nightingale: On Expression’, which deals with the metamorphosis of Tereus, Procne and Philomela. Before turning into birds (hoopoe, nightingale and swallow), the three characters were not musicians, but they are transformed into musicking bodies, which can affect the listener by arousing, expressing and representing emotions.
Finally, the seventh chapter, ‘Beetle: On Rhythm’, considers the metamorphosis of Kerambos, an expert in bucolic songs, as reported by Antoninus Liberalis. In his transformation due to his hybris, Kerambos loses his voice and his musical capacities: no perceptible sound comes from the stag beetle, but its head looks like the arms of a lyre, and it moves its jaws in a certain rhythm. As LeV. points out, there is a continuity between the insect, which produces a very low sound, and the virtuosity of the performer he was. Leaning on the distinction coined by R. Braidotti between bios and zoē (‘The Politics of Life as Bios/Zoe’, in: A. Smelik and N. Lykke [edd.], Bits of Life [2008]), she reads the myth as a tale, in which the mousikos bios (a discursive and political discourse about life, here the life of a musician) turns into a mousikē zoē (a vitalistic life, here as part of the living musical kosmos).
Since LeV. drives readers several times to the ancient pastoral world, one may regret that, dealing with boundaries between human and non-human beings, she does not address more deeply the traditional opposition between domestic and wild worlds. There are many studies, related to zooarchaeology, in this field, which could have completed or even reinforced her analyses (see e.g. C. Stépanoff and J.-D. Vigne [ed.], Hybrid Communities. Biosocial Approaches to Domestication and Other Trans-species Relationships [2019]). This does not detract from the overall quality of the book: the reader appreciates also that LeV. honestly refers to specific anthropological approaches adapted to each chapter, since it would be erroneous to think there is a posthumanist unified theory.
To conclude, LeV.'s book succeeds in the three main goals she pursues: to deepen our overall understanding of ancient aesthetics, to explore the ‘natureculture’ of the ancient world and to evaluate how much music can be an agent of metamorphosis. The study is not over; as a symptom, there is no general conclusion (each chapter has its own conclusion), as if LeV. wanted the reader to go further with other myths. This is a stimulating perspective.
