The subject of B.'s concise and clear book is just what the title suggests. Borrowing from R.B. Rutherford (Greek Tragic Style [2012], p. 119), B. defines imagery in ways ‘deliberately inclusive’ so as ‘to include words and expressions which communicate in a non-literal sense’, mainly through ‘metaphors and similes’ (p. xv). B.'s definition of politics is, in contrast, ‘fairly restrictive … relating to the exercise of power and to relations with communities’ (p. xvi). On this foundation, B. builds eight chapters. The first group consists of five thematic treatments of specific images: ‘Gods as Kings, Kings as Gods’, ‘The State as a Household and Family’, ‘The Shepherd of the People’, ‘The Ship of State’ and ‘The Body Politic’. The second consists of three historical chapters, using the earlier discussion to illuminate key themes from the recognised periods of Greek literature: ‘Leaders and Communities’ in the archaic period, ‘Democracy and Autocracy’ in the fifth century and ‘Orators and Philosophers’ in the fourth.
While B.'s command of scholarship, absorption in the material and dependable sensibility produce an invaluable resource, the sparing use of theory makes the book less ‘systematic’ than promised on the back; the organisation around conventional images and topics, moreover, limits and scatters discussion of what many might consider most exciting about ‘Greek political imagery’, that is, its ability to affect, not just reflect and rationalise, traditional history.Footnote 1 B. seems to suggest that imagery can do this. In his discussion of Aristophanes' house of Demos, he writes: (p. 27): ‘Aristophanes … implies that this imagery … is intended to regulate the operation of Athenian democracy’. Yet B. does not discuss how it does so. Throughout B. mentions the ‘persuasive aims’ of Greek political imagery (e.g. pp. 29, 61–2, 86, 121), but focuses more on ‘the underlying ideological landscape which dictates, and is further constituted by, the imagery actually employed’ (p. xiii, cf. 124). Even so, there is little discussion of such ‘constitution’ as an active process, which finer distinctions in the definition of what ‘imagery’ does, along with a more definitive form of organisation, would have encouraged.
Within B.'s canon, possibilities for theorisation and alternative organisation are available. Thus, for example, with the aforementioned house of Demos, B. wonders whether ‘Aristophanes is taking advantage of the allegorical domestic context to give new energy to a faded metaphor’ (p. 27). Allegorical or otherwise, Aristophanes is not only exploring the way that ‘imagery’ structures collective experience and can be manipulated (B.'s right reading) but is also doing so in the very ‘political’ venue (the public stage) in which B. suggests such images ought to be the most inert. The concern that this raises is not so much that a distinction between the literary and political is difficult to sustain in discussions of ancient texts (pp. xii–xiii). Rather, one wonders about the ‘consensus’ supposed to be effected by the normal and normative (‘political’) ‘imagery’: it is at least arguable that, prior to their ‘death’ and assimilation to conceptuality (pp. xiii–xiv, xvi n. 13), the function of most images is originality (aka deviation/defamiliarisation: Silk [2003], pp. 120–31). If this is so, it is not clear what kind of consensus such images can achieve if consensus is based on convention as B. suggests (p. xii). Some kind of dialectic of consensus and deviation, convention and defamiliarisation, must be at work, even within the context of ‘consensus’. One could thus imagine organising the data in categories of constitution, deviation, contestation, reaction.
A notable exception to B.'s identification of consensus and convention is his insightful discussion of Pericles, ‘one of the rare cases when we can not only locate the invention of a new political image precisely in time, but also identify the individual responsible’ (p. 116). The image in question is that of the citizen as erastês to the eromenos of the city in Thucydides' funeral oration. For my money, B.'s discussion proves this image a Periclean innovation with political effects. I take issue only with B.'s collusion with the tradition in suggesting that such innovation was not happening at every level of society, individually and collectively, as a condition of meaning in general, and not just in the mouth of ‘honey-tongued’ Pericles (Plat. Phdr. 269a). Instead, B. often ascribes to ‘nature’ (pp. 53, 70, 87, 93, 99 n. 47, 108) aspects of imagery which are actually contingent expressions of social agency and which B. only acknowledges marginally in the form of ‘the accumulated weight of tradition’ (p. 121) or the ‘claims of a wider community’, ‘tacitly acknowledge[d]’ within the imagery which ‘maintains the elite stance’ (p. 94). In addition to revealing the limitations of induction without the supplement of theory, such statements efface the role of collective agency in the production of culture.
In general, B. compensates for the lack of a theoretical framework with passages of narrower compass, more determinate theme or, as it were by the back door, with the inclusion of not strictly ‘political’ but rather philosophical texts; it is in these passages, as in the discussion of Pericles above, that B.'s insights show through. Discussed in the narrow compass of democracy, B. explains, the image of the leader as ‘the shepherd of the people’ is rarely used positively in the ‘mass’ (p. xii) genre of tragedy since it implies that the masses are animals and available for exploitation (pp. 44–5, 149–50). Similarly, on B.'s analysis (pp. 53–4, 85–6), the ship of state first figures a small community, the poet's hetereia, and only later, with the emergence of ‘“politics” … as a discrete field of experience and knowledge’ (p. xi), is the image extended to the larger community. Philosophy enters by the backdoor here in the contrast that B. observes between the active participants in politics who identify with crewmembers of the ship and the political theorists who identify with the spectators of the wreck (pp. 57–8).
As such examples show, B.'s discussion is bristling with insights case after case, and the system that one can infer from the index and ample notes alone is worth the price of admission. Even the missed opportunity of definitively shaping future discussions with more powerful organisation does not diminish the work's utility. Finishing this review, I was, by coincidence, reading the new Sappho. In it, she triangulates her frustration with the condition of her immediate community with reference to her truant brothers and conspicuous maritime imagery. Considering B.'s treatment of the image of the ship as one but nascently political in this period, it occurred to me that Sappho's otherwise familial frustration might be itself nascently political, concerned, as B. suggests of Archilochus and Alcaeus, less with the polis which has yet to exist than with the smaller communities of which ‘politics’ at this early period consisted. If there is anything to my impression that Sappho exceeds the merely personal to which she is usually relegated, it emerges as a deviation from the conventions with which B. diligently, if somewhat too comfortably, collaborates in his book. If that is so, then the proof is in the pudding, and my criticisms about the missing theory are indeed rather theoretical.
