To review a work that itself undertakes to review the literature on a particular aspect of antiquity – a sort of research au deuxième degré – may seem superfluous. In the wake of the development of digital humanities, in the last decades scholarship has developed strategies to find and retrieve information easily (search engines, databases), which are instrumental in coping with the enormous amount of data at our disposal. However, conceived within the German tradition of Jahresberichte, R.'s report is not a mere list of publications concerning research on Greek myth. Rather, R. attempts to offer a critical and descriptive account of many of the titles. More to the point: a list is never a neutral enumeration of elements. On the contrary, a seemingly rigid and simple form, it is a sophisticated cultural practice that foregrounds the principles of selection and combination. As important as what you find in a list is what is left out or how it is arranged.
As for what is left out, the (sub)title already puts forward an anteoccupatio: this Forschungsbericht is necessarily a selective (‘selektiver’) survey that does not aspire to completeness (see also p. vii). The focus of this selection is Germanocentric. By this, I do not simply mean that German and German-speaking scholarship is massively represented. R. often marks off those titles produced by German (or German-speaking) scholars as being apart from what is produced abroad (‘im Ausland’: p. 33) or by international research (see p. 97: ‘in der deutschsprachigen und internationalen Mythosforschung’; cf. also pp. 35, 37, 169, 319–20). What is more unfortunate, at certain points (not in a consistent way and without an identifiable purpose) some scholars are identified as Jews (Paula Philippson; p. 23: ‘jüdische[n] Religionswissenschaftlerin’). The study of antiquity, as J. Bromberg reminds us (Global Classics [2021]), has not yet disentangled itself from national and ethnic borders in a satisfying way, and scholars are often subject to the limitations of a state-centred perspective that has come to be known as ‘methodological nationalism’.
As a result of this bias, a number of researchers and some relevant theoretical schools are left out. Most blatantly, French scholarship is strongly underrepresented. In my opinion, a book covering research on ancient myth over the period from 1920 to 2020 is expected to devote more than half a page to the École de Paris (see pp. 66–7). Scholars like Gernet, Loraux, Hartog, Svenbro, Frontisi, Schnapp, Borgeaud, Georgoudi or Durand are not even mentioned. H. Jeanmaire's Couroi et Courètes (1939), the only study before the 1960s in which the initiation scheme was applied to Greek myths, finds no place in this book either. Not a single allusion is made to G. Dumézil's comparative hypothesis and his theory of trifonctionnalité. A scholar that has made crucial contributions to the understanding of the reception of Greek myth in the twentieth century, Hendrik Versnel, is ignored altogether.
Although R. acknowledges that the most recent period of research has benefited from ‘Erweiterungen und Verbesserungen der textlichen Gesamtbasis’ (p. 210; cf. also p. 327), he unfortunately misses the opportunity to account for the growing interest in the mythographical perspective. Both an Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Mythography and a Cambridge History of Mythology and Mythography are currently on the way. Besides R.L. Fowler's epoch-making edition (2000 and 2013), collections of the fragmentary early mythographers can also be found in the updated Brill's New Jacoby and in E. Lanzillotta's Frammenti degli storici greci. Both are ignored. Critical and commented new editions of mythographers such as Pherecydes of Athens, Acusilaus of Argos, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, Antoninus Liberalis, Heraclitus the Mythographer and Hyginus, have appeared during the period from 2000 to 2020. They are ignored, too. The main mythographical handbook that has came down to us from antiquity (Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca) has attracted attention from scholars as a number of recent editions shows. P. Dräger's 2005 edition is the only one cited by R.
Regarding the overall structure of this Bericht, there is no clear indication as to the reason behind the tripartite organisation: ‘Frühphase’ (1920–1960), ‘Mittelphase’ (1960–2000) and ‘aktuelle Phase’ (2000–2020) – although I tend to think that the 1960s, a time of transition and transformation, established a turning point in the research on Greek myth with the emergence of gigantic figures such as Walter Burkert and his continuators or Jean-Pierre Vernant and his équipe. As a result of this clear-cut division, it is hard to find a connected narrative within the historiographical endeavour as well as a coherent comprehension of the most relevant trends in scholarly approaches to myth and of their developments. The production of some scholars is difficult to grasp, as in many cases their contributions are listed in different sections – a case in point is Arthur Trendall, whose scholarship is ‘torn apart’ and his publications are to be collected from the first (p. 34), the second (p. 100) and the third section (p. 230). Even more problematic is the fact that in the core areas of the book (‘Altertumswissenschaftlicher Kernbereich’) no distinction is made between properly scientific approaches to mythology and the more or less popular Nacherzählungen of ancient myths. This fracture has its own history, which goes back to the German scholarly tradition in the aftermath of the controversial ‘Kampf um Creuzers Symbolik’ in the nineteenth century, as G. Most explained (‘One Hundred Years of Fractiousness: Disciplining Polemics in Nineteenth-Century German Classical Scholarship’, TAPA 127 [1997]). As a consequence, readers may find juxtaposed such disparate items as K. Kerényi's Die Mythologie der Griechen, A. Brelich's Gli eroi greci, W. Kraus's ‘Prometheus’ entry at RE, P. Grimal's Dictionnaire de la mythologie grecque et romaine, R. Graves’s New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, or W. Nestle's Vom Mythos zum Logos (pp. 19–20). By the same token, I am not comfortable with the inclusion of a separate Bereich concerning ‘Narratologie’. A comparative, narratological study of ancient myths ‘im Gesamtrahmen der europäischen Erzählkultur’ (p. 2) is a serious scientific endeavour that could be part of the main area ‘Altertumswissenschaftlicher Kernbereich’.
The best pages of the book are those devoted to ‘Klassisch-archäologische Mythosforschung’ (pp. 32–6; 92–108; 221–40), by which R. mainly understands the study of iconographic evidence of ancient myth. References to encyclopaedias, handbooks, corpora, monographic studies and a good number of exhibition catalogues (see the index under ‘AK’, pp. 343–4) are accurately registered, and valuable information along with a critical evaluation of many of them is provided. Thoughtful comments are made on what R. terms as ‘Text-Bild-Problematik’ – namely the vexed relationship between the literary and the iconographic sources of ancient myth and the ‘iconic turn’ as a counterbalance of the traditional priority of poetic texts. R. posits that a change of the communis opinio was already observable in the late ‘Mittelphase’ (1960–2000) and hints at a forthcoming mutation of paradigm (p. 222).
The sections concerning reception (‘Rezeptionsgeschichtlicher Ergänzungsbereich’) fare well: first period 1920–1960 (pp. 41–50); second period 1960–2000 (pp. 117–68); and the much shorter final period 2000–2020 (pp. 251–306). The dramatic increase in the range of pages indicates that reception has become over the last 100 years a central focus of interest among scholars. It is indeed significant that precisely at a time in which classical studies do not hold sway in schools and universities, the role of ancient myths in modern and contemporary culture has attracted an increase in attention, notwithstanding the current lack of historical consciousness (of which R. repeatedly complains: pp. 3, 174, 187; cf. pp. 189, 251, 290, 297, 333). By reception R. understands notably the presence of myth and manipulation thereof in literature and all sorts of arts. On some occasions books of ample scope, yet with incidental bearing on the reception of myth (like L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson's Scribes and Scholars), are included without any plausible reason. Conversely, R. largely ignores the scientific reception of mythology, that is to say, the story of the interpretation of myth, which starts already in antiquity. R. does not take account of (to name just one title) A. Von Hendy's The Modern Construction of Myth (2001), and he fails to notice that the second edition of L. Edmunds's Approaches to Greek Myth (2014) starts with a new chapter on the reception of Greek myth that the first edition (1990) did not include.
All these lacunae notwithstanding, the volume constitutes a welcome contribution to a blossoming discipline such as ancient mythology. Scholarly production has increased in such a way over the last decades that it has become more and more difficult to grasp in its entirety – and any selektiver Überblick would be exposed to criticism.
