This is an ambitious volume, aiming to cover Greek and Latin authors from Homer to the second century ce, supplemented with inscriptions and material culture. It also draws on a wide variety of modern theoretical works. S.’s primary expertise in areas such as Attic oratory and Greek religion shows in his deft handling of that material. S. has collected a mass of examples which make, in his words, ‘the first systematic, detailed, up-to-date, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary study of underestimated and under-researched aspects of nonverbal behaviour, semi-volitional bodily behaviour, a generic term coined by the author for sneezing, spitting, coughing, hiccups, belching, vomiting, farting, defecations, and urination’ (p. 1). He states that no one has previously attempted to analyse all this material together. It would be an immense challenge to find any single scholar possessing the requisite expertise in so many genres and types of evidence, and this is the negative side of the project’s ambition.
In the introduction S. writes that he ‘aims to answer two questions: how semi-volitional acts are expressed in the sources and how they are presented as constructs of individual or collective (ethnic/civic and cultural) identities’ (p. 1). He has succeeded in answering the first, but the second needs far more work before it can be considered answered. Indeed, the thoroughness of the answer of the first question detracts from the book’s ability to answer the second. One very curious and often frustrating feature that begins in the introduction is that the book both over- and under-explains. At times, lists of theorists or other works whose relevance varies are included and discussed at length, and then at other points a seemingly important passage is mentioned but not quoted, explained or, sometimes, discussed at all. Sporadically there are statements such as ‘my reading of the text shows’ (p. 38) or ‘thus the deductive conclusion is’ (p. 39) when the reading or the deduction has not been elucidated in the text (see also pp. 47, 59, 93, 148, 200).
S. creates a useful framework for each chapter by laying out near the beginning what it covers and summarising it at the end, which is particularly appreciated in view of the wide range of sources and subjects. Overall, S. makes a convincing case that the body and its functions can exert a kind of agency and control over people and identities, sometimes against their will, even if individual elements of this case are under-argued or unconvincing.
Chapter 1, ‘Sexual identity in bodily production’, is the broadest chapter in terms of the range of sources introduced. It is also the weakest due to its lack of engagement with modern (post-1980s) theorising about sexuality in ancient Greece or Rome, which would have improved the analysis of the texts. That said, early in the chapter (p. 45), S. makes an excellent point that small and superficial details can be an important part of how a person is perceived and evaluated in a culture, a point that is certainly an argument in favour of the work started in this volume.
Chapter 2, ‘Framing collective and clashing identities’, furthers the strengths and weaknesses of the previous chapter. An example of how S. is at his best when moving in his areas of speciality comes at p. 99, when he makes a good point about the ways in which semi-volitional behaviours are part of religious identities. A lengthy discussion of Horace, Satires 1.8 (pp. 114–20) is interesting and well written, although at times it loses its focus on flatulence, the semi-volitional behaviour in question. This chapter also has the most extended example of a larger issue, eliding the differences between cultures, here Persian and Athenian, especially in the subsection ‘Codifying indecency: Bodily behaviour in public’.
Chapter 3, ‘Nonverbal behaviour, ēthos, and emotions’, allows S. to showcase his expertise, such as when he makes a compelling argument (p. 152) that being deserving of spit is equivalent to being deserving of contempt in Attic oratory. He builds on this to show that spitting is more often about contempt than disgust, at least in classical Athens (p. 163), while still noting conflicting examples such as Hippolytus spitting in disgust in Euripides (p. 164). Remaining in the study of oratory, but now Roman, he shows how Cicero adduces Mark Antony’s public vomiting as a measure of his bad character in the Second Philippic and in general uses a dirty or befouled mouth as a metaphor for bad speech (pp. 169–70). It is odd, however, that S. repeatedly refers to ‘sympotic’ occasions or activity in this Roman context, given that ‘sympotic’, even in a Greek context, has a specific and loaded meaning that does not apply to, for example, a Roman wedding banquet. It is also curious that S. does not engage with the scholarly conversation on the difficulty of translating terms applied to emotions, begun at least 20 years ago, when R.A. Kaster (Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome [2005], p. 6) stated that ‘the Romans’ language of emotions is not our own, that indeed no two emotion terms in either language map perfectly onto each other: their amor is not always and exactly our “love,” their odium still less our “hate”’. Neither Kaster’s work nor S. Braund’s work on Roman emotions appear in S.’s bibliography.
Chapter 4, ‘Body from the inside out: Identity, diet, and medical conditions’, collects sources on the topics of food, drink, dietary regimes, illness, disease and medicine into the shortest of the chapters, at just over 20 pages. It includes some highlights, for example how the diets prescribed by some philosophical schools contributed to identity-forming (p. 206), but by attempting to cover so much material in so few pages, much of it is little more than source-gathering, which S. seems to acknowledge when he writes ‘What follows is inevitably a very condensed review of the sources’ (p. 212) near the beginning of the subsection ‘The body in medical conditions’.
When it comes to inscriptions and material culture, S. is in clear need of expert assistance. The various figures in the chapters almost always cite the frescoes, vases and other artefacts incorrectly, with sometimes confusing results, as in figure 1.4, whose description is ‘an eye siren teases two defecating dogs under the grips of the masturbating satyrs’ but features no eye siren, one defecating dog and one satyr, whose lower body is not included in the image and who is not gripping the dog. A more worrying issue can be illustrated by his interpretation of CIL IV 10488 (pp. 3, 87–8). This inscription was found on a water tower in Herculaneum (not, as stated, in Pompeii) and forbids anyone from throwing excrement (unspecified as human or animal) into the area, with penalties set out for those who do. That S. interprets this as ‘an inscription describing the punishments for public defecators’ in general fits neither the Latin in hunc locum stercus abicere, which suggests disposing of excrement rather than defecating, nor the physical context of the inscription.
In the acknowledgements (p. x) S. says that ‘[i]n the process of writing this book, I have gone beyond my limits’. This is evident in both its strengths and weaknesses. In the conclusion he states his intention to ‘invite others to follow in your footsteps, show them where the paths you have found are, and allow them to find their own’ (p. 237), and in this he has succeeded, although an index locorum would be an asset. The book is not an unqualified success, but it is difficult to imagine how a project with such lofty goals and broad subject matter written by a single author could be. This book might have benefited from one or more co-authors with complimentary specialisations; one hopes that others take up the paths S. has shown are there to follow.
