To open with an anecdote, or in G.'s terms, an ‘archival fragment’ involving ‘memory of worlds’, I read this outstanding book while preparing to teach a repeat course on a subset of cosmography, a survey of ancient literature on ‘Afterlives and Underworlds’. There was thus a natural connection between G.'s approach and my topic: as scholarship has shown, underworlds may be read as spaces for transformative encounters with memory and, so, for possible rewritings of history and reconceptualisations of historiography (esp. G. Gazis, Homer and the Poetics of Hades [2018]; cf. E. Gee, Mapping the Afterlife [2020]).
As spaces for alternative histories, underworlds and other discursive settings for the afterlife imagine ‘memory of worlds’, emphatically multiple insofar as they gather pieces from metaphysically different eras. Those include times before history that must be accessed through divine memory, a mode of human contact with higher ‘orders’ of being, and materials which, for related ‘cosmic’ purposes, are kept out of mind. We might compare, for example, Virgil's invocation of chthonic deities, to ‘reveal the materials/histories’ hidden beneath the Earth, with his Sibyl's refusal to tell Aeneas much about Tartarus, a fortiori to let him see it (both Aeneid 6).
In that context, reading G.'s monograph felt like following a katabasis both expanded and refracted: a wide range of ‘archival fragments’ are made to appear out of what could otherwise be technical obscurity, a sort of Heldenschau of ‘heroically’ meaningful mappings of times that are entered into discourse as space or spatial arrangements; and, above all, a far more clearly explicated theory than an epic katabant would get for reading such fragments as syntagms of incompletely transmitted paradigms. That is, G. theorises historiography as a rhetoric that entextualises not-present time as imagined space – and, so, requires a ‘philology of worlds’.
G.'s focus is not the underworld, or other imagined spaces for metaphysical different lives, but of course Hyperborea. One could argue that any ‘world of memory’ – any present writing (‘graph’) of not-present time in terms of spatial arrangement or order (‘cosmos’) – is logically ‘after’, at least per the premises of ordinary narration. Such displacement is implicitly at work in ancient discourse about Hyperborea, a place imagined, by definition, as elsewhere than the here and now, ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ (hyper-).
On this argument, G.'s topic chimes with how the underworld has been considered as a space for alternatives to ordinary modes of historiography, including extraordinary spatialisations (e.g. B. Gladhill and M. Myers, Walking through Elysium: Vergil's Underworld and the Poetics of Tradition [2020]). However different the Hyperborea and the underworld are in their imagined metaphysics, in ancient discourses both spaces are written – ‘graphed’ – as fictive nexuses of displacement and, therefore, as suitable for the fictionalising culture's repositories of memory. Classicists may note the influence here of scholarship such as F. Hartog's Le miroir d'Hérodote (1980) and Mémoires d'Ulysse (1996).
G. further theorises not only what cosmographies mean, but how, with what modes of discourse. As he defines this core term, cosmography is ‘the rhetoric of cosmology. It is the act of giving shape to the principles that make a world’ (p. 410). In a crucial formulation G. evokes meaning-making structures of syntagm and paradigm, or metonymic piece and imagined whole, to suggest how ‘[e]ach of these worlds constructed by texts’ has ‘its own hermeneutic situation, but none … is fully significant in and of itself’. Rather, each such cosmos ‘is written through dialogue with … a memory of worlds’ (p. 64), a ‘memory’ that is a matter of discursive forms. It is here, to explicate that cosmological ‘writing-through’, that G. invokes ‘the archive’, developing a compound model that links the ‘inherited conglomerate’, perhaps familiar to Classicists via E.R. Dodds's The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), to the archive in cultural memory studies, especially in work by J. Assmann (including ‘Canon and Archive’, in: Erll and Nünning [2010]).
Not incidentally, that compound model must deepen connections between G.'s theory and other recent applications of cultural memory studies to spaces imagined in ancient literature. Perhaps above all would be M. Scherer's Memories of the Classical Underworld (2021), with its theorisation that builds directly on foundational work by A. Erll and A. Nünning (e.g. A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies [2010]). Still, in Classics we might compare, for example, D. Felton's Landscapes of Dread in Classical Antiquity (2018), while farther in material but of central relevance in theory would be T. Richards's The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (1993).
From this perspective, centring theory, G. frames his readings as ‘[f]ollowing trajectories of cosmography through the fragments of the archive’, fragments that enact ‘rewritings of Hyperborea’ as a notional ‘entry’ in an ‘archive’ constructed in retrospective cultural imagination (p. 64). That is, G. seeks to theorise discursive traditions of imagery for space, or cosmography as a rhetoric for cosmology, so as to read the meanings of a given imagined space as matters of shifting cultural memory. As he summarises it, ‘[t]he worlds of cosmography … are circumscribed by ontological frames’ of contingent historicity, ‘a modal system’ that limits how such worlds, each a matter of poetics defining metaphysics, interact with each other through fragments of discourse (p. 411). This means that ‘[m]aking sense of individual cosmographic documents cannot be dissociated from historically situated consideration of the relevant archive’, since ‘a distinctive process of intertextuality animates the poetics of worlding’ (p. 412).
G. defines his approach to such intertextual cosmography as a ‘philology of worlds’. At first glance, the set-up could recall longer-standing insights into discursive mappings of space onto time and vice versa, with the one dimension read as standing somehow for the other; we might think of narratology or a classic study of ancient geography like J. Romm's The Edges of the Earth (1992). What distinguishes G.'s approach is his incorporation of ‘possible worlds theory and the anthropology of worlds’ (p. 411) as ways of historicising fragments of cultural memory. Thus G., sketching ‘further trajectories’, argues for linking a ‘philology of worlds’ that, in practical terms, involves ‘reading worlds slowly’ (p. 410), to the theoretical observation that ‘[t]here is a memory of worlds in every cosmographic nexus’ (p. 412).
This theory, fascinating in the abstract, leads in G.'s hands to fresh insights into a wide range of concrete examples. The case studies are ‘discursive’ in a broad sense, ranging from a first extended example, Pindar, through other literary sources including Hesiod and Alcaeus, to different genres of literature as in Herodotus and Plutarch, and including writing on other objects (e.g. amphorae, armour, votive inscriptions). Both the range of examples and, in my view, the richness of G.'s readings are testaments to the clarity and usefulness of his theorising.
If I may close, then, by returning to anecdote: I imagine that G.'s book will have an impact on my research, and I imagine that it will exert an influence on others’ scholarship, too. I will certainly include portions of it in future courses, including on the underworld as well as other discursive spaces of cultural memory and imagination; although the theory is complex, G.'s presentation throughout is lucid, such that – ceteris paribus, including familiarity with given examples – I foresee it serving as a thought-provoking entry-point to studying ancient cosmography as well as other worlds whose fragments may be approached via this ‘philology’.
