There is much to enjoy in reading (and then re-reading) this carefully-curated collection of seven essays on the spatial dynamics of Greek literature and culture. The range of the volume is narrower than the title implies: the essays are concerned exclusively with fifth- and fourth-century texts and contexts. The discussion which emerges is both rich and varied; the volume does not seek to push any particular agenda, but each contribution illustrates something of the slippery multivalence of thinking about antiquity in spatial terms. The best contributions convey the excitement of this topic and are lucidly and elegantly written. The attractiveness of the volume is marred by some obvious typographical errors.
The editors map out in their introduction various ways in which ‘space’, ‘place’ and ‘landscape’ have been theorised over the past 40 years. This deft discussion is accessible and insightful – I have recommended it to many over the last few months. One virtue of this volume is its pragmatic deployment of a series of spatial methodologies. The editors (like most of the contributors) display a keen sensitivity to how different categories have been articulated within the spatial turn more broadly while anchoring their discussions precisely in the topoi – literary and otherwise – of the ancient world. Notably, the editors' discussion downplays an abstract or formalistic sense of space (they champion Lefebvre's embodied conceptualisation over Tuan's more formal one, for example [p. 7]) in favour of emphasising the centrality of human experience and perception to constructions of space. In this way, they highlight how the spatial turn can offer a new, necessarily humanised perspective on the ancient world: ‘For scholars who study the past primarily through texts, a focus on place is tantalizing because it insists that the imaginary is grounded in the real, locating the discursive patterns that we interrogate in the realm of lived experience’ (p. 5).
The most successful essays in this volume do indeed show how sensitivity to spatial dynamics can open up radical – and even radically unsettling – perspectives. But it is not merely that texts give access to ‘lived experience’; rather, this volume shows the various imaginative methodologies through which things ‘grounded in the real’ may be productively excavated. It reminds us that ‘the real’ is, in any case, intricately bound up both in mimetic processes and conceptual traditions, as well as in material contingencies.
As the collection is quite short, I offer brief comments on each of the essays. C. Eckerman takes on the promising topic of Pindar's invocation of Delphi through the triple lens of place, space and landscape. His long discussion, although lacking the distinctive methodological ingenuity and incisiveness of many of the other contributions, adequately surveys the material, offers some intriguing close readings and contributes to some points of interpretation.
T. Rood's analysis of the spatial dynamics of Xenophon's Anabasis plays with the motif of aporia in a text so decisively concerned with progress. Some of the intertextual relationships that he traces for Xenophon's language of centrality and encirclement seem underdeveloped; it is the intratextual ones which prove most productive. Through these, Rood argues that the skill of ‘Xenophon’ (the character) in analysing and strategically exploiting his environment has key implications for the narrative aims of Xenophon (the narrator). This essay displays the potential for even quite fleeting topographical references to illuminate distinctive features of narrative technique.
A. Purves' discussion of furtive views of interiors in Herodotus offers insightful new readings of some very familiar episodes. She takes up more overtly the editors' concern with the embodied experience of space, adopting a highly granular model which not only separates out sight from other kinds of sensory interaction, but which points to the emotional, intellectual and cultural codes which such interactions activate. She maps the architectural dynamics of intrusion and seclusion inherent in enclosed spaces onto narratives of the covering and uncovering of the body, and shows how shifting power dynamics with the capacity to impact vast territories have their analogues in intimate situations.
C. Dougherty presents a ‘poetics of infrastructure’ which takes embodied experience in a different direction. She charts how responses to the traumatic sack of Athens by the Persians, the subsequent rebuilding of the city and then its defeat in the Peloponnesian War resonate through literature (primarily Herodotus, Sophocles' OT and Thucydides). Her ‘Athens’ is made up of three metonyms: its walls, its navy and its men. The city is not a place, but an embodied entity perceived differently as both its built environment underwent radical changes, and the figures of speech which underlined correspondences between civic infrastructure and body politic likewise evolved. Again, the discussion ranges through very familiar territory (Herodotus' wall of wood oracle, the ship of state metaphor, the idea that men constitute a polis). Dougherty's reading precisely teases out the implications of shifting emphasis between her three constitutive parts, and their individual ambivalences.
G. attributes to the Athenians another associative nexus. She argues that Athenian anxieties about their own growing commercial and naval hub at Piraeus are manifest in their characterisation of Corinth as a place of hetairai. Her discussion neatly ties together the material and the conceptual. She shows how the Corinth of Athenian discourse is pejoratively associated, via its reputation for high-class prostitution, with trade, effeminacy, transience, wealth and exclusivity, and how these relate to aspects of the physical and cultural geography of the place itself. The final section traces the role of Lais in the Second Sophistic as a metonym for Corinth, competing against Phryne-Athens. This argument is less distinctive, but does raise the important issue – relevant also to the prominent use of Strabo's description of Corinth earlier in the chapter – of how changed perspectives impact cultural geography; it is at this point that G.'s framework of ‘relational’ significance (p. 174) needs to be re-articulated.
W.'s appropriately meandering contribution shows how the mimetic spaces and paths of Aristophanes' Frogs gesture simultaneously to topographical, religious and literary parallels. This is an ambitious attempt to illuminate the multivalence of space in this volume, and it slips constantly – dizzyingly, even – between the concrete and the representational.
After this sophisticated consideration of space in literary critical terms, the volume ends on a seemingly more pragmatic note, with A. Blanshard's discussion of Athenian law-courts. Blanshard begins by considering how the language and practices of forensic oratory distinguish (and thus partly create) their legalistic context; he goes on to show that the concrete spaces of law-courts at Athens were not in themselves set apart, but rather were made into significant places by the requisite paraphernalia. He argues that the procedures of jury selection created an unusual degree of social isolation, then returns once more to his theme of porosity: the law courts and their rhetoric were not experienced as hermetically sealed entities, but rather as part of the visual, conceptual and performative life of this loquacious city.
