Anton Maria Salvini, the highly successful translator of Oppian's Halieutica (1728), wrote in the dedication note addressed to Prince Eugene of Savoy: ‘[Oppian's] style is florid and smooth, yet dense and firm. There is some fuzziness and rawness in the poem, but after a bit of effort you come out onto a beautiful plain where – so to speak – the poetic steeds rejoice. So let the reader not be afraid’ (my translation). The recipient of K.'s book must be prepared for a similar reading experience.
Generally, it offers a literary analysis of the Halieutica, a major didactic poem written in the age of the Antonines. In this book K. develops some ideas and thoughts presented by her in several other pieces devoted to the Halieutica; incidentally, I do not understand what the reason is behind a striking self-omission in the bibliography, where her important article published in Ramus 37 (2008), setting new directions in the studies of imperial didactic epic art, is not mentioned. Here she has decided to elaborate first of all upon the issues concerning the literary effect of the creative confrontation of different epic models in Oppian's piscatorial hexameters as well as upon the imperial context of the Oppianic representation of the relationship between human and animal life.
The book consists of four main parts. In Part 1, ‘Didactic Epic’, K. raises the important and broad issue of the nature of the ‘didacticism’ of ancient poetry. She shows that the commonly held view of the primarily educational aim of the didactic genre must be redefined by modifying some key functional parameters of this epic category. The incorporation of pleasurable elements into the texture of didactic poems has fundamental consequences for defining this subgenre. The chapter includes an analysis of several passages of the Halieutica and shows in a number of ways that the imperial epoch allowed these aspects of didactic epic to flourish. This part of the book contains a rich account of ancient didactic epic, wonderfully detailed and well documented. The same can be said about the sections of this part, the heart of which is the dynamics of intertextuality in Oppian. They provide a new perspective on the sophistication of the author of the Halieutica in situating his work within a tradition of (as K. says, p. 86) ‘reflecting on epistemological issues relating to the scope of one's subject matter’. The material presented in this section clearly points to the self-consciousness of Oppian, who rewrites themes (e.g. of ease and toil, knowledge, and concealment) occurring in the works of earlier didactic poets.
The main objective of Part 2, ‘Morality at Sea’, is to show – in the three studies, devoted respectively to the concepts of guile, greed and lust as presented in Oppian's poem – how heroic epic models are used in the Halieutica to expand the didactic paradigm. One can say that the Halieutica is treated by K. as an example of generic confluence (however, she does not define the poem in this way, nor does she use the term ‘generic enrichment’ proposed by S. Harrison [2007] with reference to the phenomenon of the inclusion into a literary genre of elements belonging to another generic model). This chapter of the book provides lively and often insightful readings of selected passages of Oppian's poem, which are sophisticated revitalisations of Homeric topoi. Adapted for a new marine environment, they acquire fresh strength and, operating between the literal and the literary, become tools for the critical assessment of human emotions and desires.
Part 3, ‘Humans and Animals’, furthers this trajectory. K. examines the many-sided anthropomorphism, which is the fundamental concept of presenting the close relationship between human and non-human animals in the Halieutica. A wealth of material emphasising a constant similarity between sea-creatures and humans (above all in the ethical and erotic spheres) is subtly scholarly and at the same time delightfully presented. The culmination of this highly revealing book, which on no page desists from keeping the reader interested in what the author has to say next, is Part 4: ‘The World is a Sea’, where it is not so much the brilliant analyses of the narratives concerning catching stupendous sea-monsters that impress the reader already accustomed to such erudite disquisitions, supported by carefully balanced arguments, but rather how K. deals with the problem of the relationship between the Halieutica and Oppian's contemporary world. K.'s treatment of the poem as Oppian's contribution to discussions of the importance of concord, justice and peace, popular in interpretative debates of his time, as well as a work evoking the idea of the limitations of human knowledge and power, which, in turn, is closely related to Oppian's vision of the Roman empire under Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, is convincing and brings a fresh perspective to our understanding of the Halieutica. Although some passages discussed in this part of the book have recently received different, not groundless, as it seems, interpretations (see e.g. my paper on imperial fishing in the vivarium, Hal. 1.56–72, Sem. Rom. 9 [2020]), all of them fit into the same current trend of a broader research field concerned with imperial Greek literature and culture.
Although K. notes that ‘“literary” approaches to the Halieutica are still in their infancy’ (p. 9), the book is supplemented by a long list of works cited (pp. 412–49; while the majority of the several hundred listed items directly pertain to problems examined within the book, some are very loosely related to its topic). Nevertheless, I would expect an author so well versed in literature on the Halieutica to include pieces such as A. Abritta's article on the rhythmic coherence in Oppian's hexameter (An. Filol. Clás. 29 [2016]), which examines interesting aspects of the dialogue with the Hellenistic tradition, and E. Kurek's instructive article on large sea-creatures (Scripta Classica 7 [2010]), to mention only two.
An attentive reader of this review may be waiting for an explanation of what lies behind my reference to Salvini's expression ‘some fuzziness and rawness’ in K.'s book, which is by any standard worth recommending. I note two (perhaps minor) deficiencies. First, although she does not seem to share the opinion, expressed by some, about la mort de l'auteur and devotes a bit of attention to the poet's biographical tradition (which she finds ‘interesting in its own right’, p. 5), in a book focused on the poem she could go further in interpreting certain details (e.g. the motif of the generosity of the emperor who gave the poet one gold coin for each line, recurring later as a means of propaganda in Sozomen's The Ecclesiastical History) that might highlight and make more acute what she writes about ‘the imaginative richness’ of the poem that ‘impressed readers from antiquity onwards’ (p. 7). Secondly, it may be hard for non-Greek readers to share K.'s enthusiasm for this splendid poem, marked with aesthetic refinement, including rhythmical aspects and those connected with word order, when they have a prose translation (which always has its own rules) before their eyes.
Oppian's poem, smelling, as T. Bekker-Nielsen (Ancient History Matters [2002], p. 30) elegantly said, of the desk, not of the deck, has received – thanks to K.'s book – an appropriate, valuable study. It meticulously charts the contours of didactic epic in a new way and will provoke further research on the field of Greek poetry of the imperial Age.
