Thinking about anachronisms often leads to anachronistic thinking. This is one of the reasons why this rich and intriguing book makes one wish to have had the opportunity to participate in the preceding discussions within the Oxford based research project devoted to this topic funded by the Leverhulme Trust from 2016 to 2019.
At the same time, this anachronistic desire can be fulfilled, since the activities of the research group are not only conveniently documented by their own blog (https://anachronismandantiquity.wordpress.com), but also in several other publications (e.g. the special issue of the Classical Receptions Journal 12.1 [2020], edited by J. Marincola, T. Rood and M. Umachandran). Nevertheless, the book under review, a collaborative monograph written by three members of the group, is intended to offer a summary of their shared methodological approach and of the resulting insights, namely that anachronisms have played a manifold part in the historical thinking of antiquity (although they are often considered as a kind of hallmark of its modern counterpart) and that they, therefore, can be used to ‘explore the richness of ancient thought on temporality, in part to explore the constructedness of classical antiquity itself’ (p. 229).
The book succeeds in presenting these findings by taking the following steps: the introduction (‘Prelude: Look to the End’) reads the famous encounter of Croesus and Solon (Hdt. 1.29–33) as a prime example of the anachronistic thinking on different levels characteristic of classical antiquity. The first chapter, ‘Inventing Anachronism’, offers a thorough investigation of the use both of the term ‘anachronism’ and of the underlying verb in modern languages and in ancient Greek. Against a common view that the word is basically a modern coinage, the material presented here (including several scholia and two more recently discovered papyri) shows that it has firm roots in ancient usage. Both in antiquity and in modern times, however, the term has been applied to a wide array of phenomena, ranging from historical errors via intentional re-dating through to literary techniques like allusions or allegory (sometimes competing with similar terms like metachronism etc.). This is the reason, too, why it is so difficult to give a precise date for its first use in any modern language. During the nineteenth century, however, the perception as error becomes predominant, leading to its damnation as the ‘historian's unforgivable sin’ (p. 27), although this verdict has lost much of its severity with the growing awareness of the inevitability of anachronisms in the course of the twentieth century.
The next two chapters tackle another commonly held view, namely that people in antiquity lacked not only the word, but also the concept of anachronism. The first, ‘Anachronistic Histories’, focuses on the role that the ‘detection’ of historical errors has played in modern times – for example in Lorenzo Valla's proof that the donation of Constantine was a forgery or in the varying interpretations of Albrecht Altdorfer's painting The Battle of Alexander at Issus (1529) from Friedrich Schlegel to Reinhart Koselleck – and on how these observations have been ‘used to structure narratives of historical consciousness’ (p. 37), in which the differences between the modern era and antiquity are usually overemphasised. In the second, ‘Anachronism and Philology’, the frequent occurrence of intentional anachronisms in literary works from nearly all periods of antiquity is demonstrated, although Athenian drama and Alexandrian philology receive special attention in the examples presented. With regard to the types of anachronism, similes on the one hand and (place) names on the other are central to the discussion, not least because in both cases the differences in historical knowledge between the author and the figures are obvious.
After the first three chapters, a first ‘interlude’ (‘Dido versus Virgil’) uses the longstanding debate about the ‘historically’ impossible encounter of Aeneas and Dido in Virgil's epic (since Carthage was only founded some 300 years after the Fall of Troy) to highlight the prominence and the potential of anachronistic depictions in literary texts.
The next chapter, ‘Anachronism and Chronology’, starts from Scaliger's important contributions to a better understanding of the chronology of ancient history and then moves on to the ancient attempts to synchronise the different dating systems used in antiquity, in both cases with regard to the role played by anachronisms. In a similar way, the following chapter, ‘Anachronistic Survivals’, begins in the modern era with descriptions of ‘anachronistic’ customs and traditions in ethnology and other European disciplines, only to move back to antiquity in order to show that similar strategies can be found in the works of antiquarians, in plays of (among others) Aristophanes or in the writings of ancient predecessors of modern ethnographers.
Another argument against the awareness of anachronisms in antiquity is taken into account in the sixth chapter, ‘Anachronism and Exemplarity’. Even if exempla play an important role in historical thinking in Greece and (especially) in Rome, this focus on the repeatability of human behaviour does not necessarily preclude the perception of change. This view is underpinned by a number of passages both from more theoretical writings and from historiographical practice. After that, a second interlude, ‘Ariadne on Naxos’ contrasting two reactions to the myth of Ariadne by Johann Joachim Winckel-mann and by Giorgio de Chirico in his painting The Soothsayer's Recompense from 1913 (also shown on the cover), leads on to the topic of the seventh chapter, ‘Anachronism Now: Multitemporal Moments’. On the basis of the discussion so far, the authors present examples of the use of what they call ‘multitemporality’ in several classical works of art and literature and especially in the representation of artworks in literary texts from antiquity. In addition, a third interlude on ‘Aeneas in the Underworld’ uses the famous sixth book as a paradigm for the usage and the relevance of different layers of time in Virgil's Aeneid.
The last chapter, ‘Anachronistic Dialogues’, starts with Raphael's School of Athens (c. 1510) and then moves on to the constellations of interlocutors in the philosophical dialogues (written among others by Plato and Lucian) that are often historically incorrect in the same way – or in other words: can be equally understood as multitemporal. The epilogue, ‘Crowning the Victors’, again uses a modern example, this time the series of paintings The Progress of Human Culture by James Barry (1741–1806), to illustrate and to provide a résumé of the observations of the preceding chapters. Notes, references and a substantial index conclude the book.
This is a very timely publication, filling an important gap by showing convincingly and with an astonishingly wide range of reading from Homer to the twenty-first century that anachronisms, far from being alien to antiquity, on the contrary offer valuable insights into the historical thought of classical times, and also into Greek and Roman art and literature. The main focus, however, lies on demonstrating ancient awareness of anachronisms and the consequences of this observation for our picture of classical antiquity and of the various historical processes that have constructed this particular view. This not only encourages, but also leaves enough room for further contributions dealing with more detailed questions like the role of anachronisms played in individual works (see e.g. P. Geitner, Anachronismus und Aktualisierung in Ovids “Metamorphosen”. Zu einer Ästhetik uneigentlicher Zeitlichkeit [2021]) or the impact they could have on the individual reader or viewer (see e.g. A. Junghanß, B. Kaiser and D. Pausch [edd.], Zeitmontagen: Formen und Funktionen gezielter Anachronismen [2019]). That a work like the last one has already been published, although too late to be taken into account here, must not be seen only as the usual synchronism of academic endeavours, but also as further evidence that we live in times that favour anachronisms.
