This is the longest book I have ever reviewed, and surely the most ambitious. It covers nine centuries of Mediterranean history and mentions hundreds of authors; it crosses boundaries between Greece and Rome, prose and poetry, literary genres and specialist (i.e. technical or scientific) writing, to provide a survey of the dynamics of ancient culture. In the course of this study N. extensively rewrites the history of Hellenistic science. N. is well known as a specialist in ancient mathematics, but here the horizons are far broader.
There are arguably three books combined here. Book 1, mainly Chapters 1 and 5, is a series of statistical arguments, seeking to establish, from papyrological and other evidence, (a) the shape and size of the Greek literary canon and the date by which it achieved a fairly rigid shape (very early, N. thinks); (b) the scale of literary production in the ancient world – how many authors were there simultaneously at work at different dates, and in what genres or fields? To put it another way, what is the relation between attestation in extant works and what originally existed? (Attestation is important, since there are large numbers of allusions to lost works embedded in the texts we possess.)
These parts of the book strike me as the most successful, and although the margins for error are often hair-raisingly large, the argument is presented with wonderful clarity and vitality: at times it feels as exciting as an intellectual detective story. Fixed data include the known figures for papyrus finds and their dates, and the known attestations of authors. One way of estimating the latter is to go through Pauly-Wissowa counting the authors listed in it up to the end of the second century ce (where ‘late antiquity’ begins for N.). N. has not performed this task, which awaits a particularly masochistic graduate student, but he has taken reasonable samplings, producing a figure of c. 5000 Greek authors attested. Otherwise, everything depends on the assumptions made. N.'s key assumptions (p. 793) include a 1:1,000 rate of survival for papyri from Egypt, and a 1:10 ratio of Upper Egypt to the overall Greek world in terms of book production. Interested readers should note pp. 31 (table of papyrus numbers for the 15 most popular authors), 59 (correlation of papyri with TLG citations) and 115–16 (list of the most popular works by the canonical authors). A particularly ingenious calculation starts from the excellent indexes to two of our top quoters, Athenaeus and Plutarch (Moralia), and the statistical deductions that can be made from the total citations in each and from the figure for overlaps in names cited (pp. 547–50). Yet another argument relates to genre: according to N.'s estimates, historical writing (esp. local history) was probably the largest literary genre in antiquity (pp. 598ff.), perhaps as many as 10,000 authors. For the overall tally of authors prior to 200 ce his eventual best estimate is within the range of 20,000 to 60,000 (p. 621), with prose exceeding verse by at least 5:1.
Book 2 is a narrative providing a kind of literary history emphasising changes of direction and emphasis, including a very detailed account (Chapters 3 and 4.1–4) of the Hellenistic age, with a polarisation between the key centres of Athens and Alexandria. The narrative then brings in Rome, stressing the importance of elite Roman patronage of Greek culture and the ways in which Greeks adapt to the dominant power (Chapter 4.5). Some of the material here is familiar (N. pays appropriate tribute to E. Rawson's work), but the treatment is fresh and stimulating. The narrative resumes (Chapter 6) with an account of reduced prosperity, the drying-up of patronage and a shift to a new kind of classical culture, characterised not by public performance but by circles of teachers and pupils studying and commenting on texts (pagan as well as Christian). With this paradigm shift late antiquity dawns. The crisis of the third century ce (prolonged succession wars, plagues, economic decline), though doubted by many recent scholars, is given full weight. According to N. patronage has practically dried up, and authorship is both reduced in scope and transformed in its nature.
Book 3 has an even broader sweep, but N.'s arguments here are scattered and undeveloped. Stimulated by a question asked long ago by G. Lloyd, his Ph.D. mentor, he maintains that the ideals of democracy and open debate, enshrined in so many texts of the canon, constitute what he describes as ‘the polis of letters’. If I understand him rightly, he is suggesting that, although democracy was short-lived in the original Athenian context, the ways in which it promoted discussion and openness of mind provided a lasting inoculation against narrower ways of thinking for as long as the canon remained central to ancient education. In particular he regularly claims that the polis of letters provided a safe space that prevented the development (or the dominance) of a monarchic ideology (pp. 8, 228–9, 522–3 on ‘dodging the monarchic bullet’). I find it harder to grasp what he sees as the relation between the canon (which consisted of literary texts) and the technical sciences, but he evidently sees both as providing a precious (even a unique?) legacy to future ages (p. 802). Such bold claims would need to be buttressed by more detailed argument than they receive here, preferably with cross-cultural comparisons (as one might expect from a colleague of W. Scheidel, Confucian China makes an appearance, but seldom outside preface and coda, cf. p. 229). In any case, should we be talking about democracy or about the polis (cf. P.J. Rhodes on tragedy in JHS 123 [2003], 104–19)? N. is right that much of the canon was forged in classical Athens; but although his book has less to say about the archaic age, Homer is the dominant figure in the papyri, and Greek readiness to challenge monarchy and argue both sides long predates Cleisthenes.
Although the survey often resembles satellite photography in its mapping of the contours, there are frequent close-ups, many of them small studies in their own right. I draw attention to an important discussion of the formation of the philosophic schools of Athens (pp. 322ff.), some effective pages on Aratus (was he poet or Stoic?) (pp. 416–20) and an absorbing treatment of Posidonius (pp. 459–62, 501–7). There is an amusing catalogue of ‘attention-grabbing titles’ on pp. 144–5 (some of Varro's satires might be added).
In a book of this kind errors are inevitable, and it is pointless to gripe about oversights such as the attribution of the Silvae to Lucan or a muddling of Lycophrons (pp. 145, 562). But Corinna should not be casually included in what claims to be a list of writers in the mid-third of the fifth century (p. 628). More importantly, N.'s view that 100 bce is the key date for the beginning of Roman patronage of poets and others surely puts things too late. The total absence of Ennius from the index is startling. It also lacks Velleius Paterculus, who should be taken into account in the discussion on p. 683 – it is not the case that we have ‘entirely lost’ the historiography of praise of contemporary emperors.
The last word must again be on length. Aristotle remarks that a creature a thousand miles long could not be considered beautiful, as it could not be viewed as a whole, and we would lose our sense of it as a unity. There is something of this problem with N.'s vast tome. Summary passages (pp. 102–3, 126–9, 154, 525–6, 619–24) and in particular the six-page coda (pp. 800–5) do help, but I feel this is a book that would have made its argument better, not just as well, if it had been half the length. The index will be much used! Perhaps N. might consider providing a summary of the main theses as a separate paper, after the manner of M.H. Hansen's ‘95 Theses about the Greek Polis’ (Historia 52 [2003], 257–82).
Still, an intellectual feast – even if Trimalchian in proportions.
