CUP (2022) p/b 866pp £39.99 (ISBN 978110769209)
This review is linked to Volume 2 by the same author:
Volume 2: Comedy, Herodotus, Hellenistic and Imperial Greek Poetry, The Novels
Ewen Bowie
CUP (2023) h/b 1050pp £120 (ISBN 9781107058125)
These formidable volumes (in total 82 chapters in 1900 pages), are yet to be supplemented by a third volume (in the pipeline), but do not include reviews or (e.g.) contributions to Der Kleine Pauly. The chapters bear witness to truly remarkable industry, demonstrated in person to scholars around the world from Seattle via (e.g.) Ohio, Tours, Crete, Rostock and many other places to Melbourne—but never was sabbatical leave taken in a Michaelmas term, when a fresh group of undergraduates would arrive at Oxford’s Corpus Christi College to be tutored by B. (B. has also found time to produce a commentary on Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe in CUP’s Green and Yellow series.) The scale of the volumes precludes detailed review except at a wholly unacceptable length: what follows are little more than notes aimed at providing some flavour of what is on offer. The publisher’s description of B. as ‘one of the world’s leading Hellenists’ receives full justification here,
The two long Introductions are essential reading, providing not only some account of the chapters’ contents but also (from time to time) a little autobiographical information. But of course, they are no substitute for the detailed analysis which B. gives to his topics (such analysis is only occasionally ‘textual’ in nature: there is a small but plausible suggestion made in Sappho’s Charaxus (‘Brothers’) poem, and several persuasive ‘indecent proposals’ in Wasps achieve recognition in the apparatus criticus—but not text—of N.G. Wilson’s OCT of Aristophanes.) The reviewer notes that distinguished names such as Lobel, West, Dover, make appearances as appropriate and—from time to time—are politely but firmly disagreed with. The introductions are usefully preceded and supplemented by a separate section which assembles all the details of Places of Original Publication.
Generous though is the meal provided, it is worth noting some of what is not included: Homer, Hesiod, the tragic dramatists, the Attic orators, Thucydides and Plato, Pindar—indeed, much of what used to be the traditional fare in the Greek section of Oxford’s five terms ‘Classical Honour Moderations’ course, besides Xenophon (the historian/ philosopher), Plutarch, Lucian. There is little on Aristophanes, not much more on Theocritus. But what there is included dominates the second volume: the Greek novel, with 28 out of the book’s 46 chapters. As things go, this is a recent introduction: B. tells us that, ably assisted by Stephen Harrison (also at Corpus), he caused Jasper Griffin’s notably more ‘classical’ approach to be outvoted, to bring in the Greek novel (there are five of them) as a suitable subject for study at a serious level—as has been the case since the 1990s (rather earlier, I think, in the USA: see [the late] J. J Winkler in the Bibliography). Moreover, these are not fields where the ground had already been thoroughly tilled by Bentley, Wilamowitz, or Dover.
First, however, Volume 1. In Aristophanes’ Acharnians, where B. argues (chapter 2) that the character Dikaiopolis stands not for the poet, but for his rival Eupolis: the case is well presented, but the decisive evidence (the posited play in the previous year by Eupolis) is wholly lacking. In Wasps, B. makes several ‘indecent proposals’: they are all highly plausible, and have subsequently achieved recognition in the apparatus criticus—but not the text—of Nigel Wilson’s Oxford Classical Text: appropriately enough, the proposals first appeared in Owls to Athens, the Festchrift for Sir Kenneth Dover. A rather complicated note in volume 1 (chapter 1) on Early Greek Elegy should make us cautious about the simple equivalence ἔλεγος = elegy = lament (cf. Ovid’s flebile carmen). Archilochus, for whom we now have Laura Swift’s outstanding Text, Translation and Commentary (Oxford 2019), makes frequent appearances in Volume 1, not only in chapters 12 (‘Sex and politics in Archilochus’ poetry’) and Chapter 36 (‘Reconfiguring Archilochus’), but also in many references: see Index locorum pp.825-6. We may perhaps be grateful that B. does not (so far as I can see) offer an interpretation of the concluding lines of the Cologne Papyrus, which have so exercised the minds of at least 12 scholars (Swift, p.367). Chapter 33—How did Sappho’s Songs get into the Male Sympotic repertoire?—is acutely argued, as B. considers several of Sappho’s songs in detail: the reviewer confesses uncertainty about how far we dare go in reconstructing symposia which took place over 2,500 years ago B. also justifies a tiny but sensible emendation in the ‘Brothers’ poem, and suggests that natron was among the gifts expected to be brought from Naucratis; this could have relevance to the ὄλισβοι in a papyrus fragment—which however may be more plausibly assigned to Alcaeus (E-M Voigt), and possibly translated as ‘plectrum’.
In chapter 34, B. considers The Performance Contexts of Trochaic Tetrameters Catalectic. B. of course recognizes their ‘recitative’-like quality (παρακατολογή), referencing Archilochus in particular, but also Solon: more on the metre’s versatility would not have come amiss—contrast its solemnity in Persae with the liveliness of the parabasis in Knights. An interesting study of Stesichorus’ Palinode decisively disposes of the intermittently favoured ide of their being two Palinodes; however, his persuasive and elegantly structured conjecture about merging the apparently irreconcilable aspects of the myth is, as he admits, no more than conjecture. Euripides of course bases the entire plot of his Helen on the ‘truth’ of the palinode: is it mildly curious that Aristophanes refers to the play as the καινή (new-fangled) Helen, given that the palinode had been composed roughly two centuries earlier? B. sensibly remains silent. Incidentally, he dismisses West’s early (1971) suggestion that Stesichorus was a citharode performing by himself.
The reviewer finds Longinus more to his taste than Longus, but chapter 45 in Volume 2—Callimachus and Longus—is certainly of interest. Longus, says B. ‘seems to know and to use Callimachus’, a proposition which depends on more than their common use of such a rare word as ἀρτιγένειος (and a closely associated phrase in Theocritus) and ἀνέραστος, the latter word also occurring in Moschus and Bion as well as in imperial Greek prose. B. also finds parallels in the Hymns, Iambi, and Aitia. Whether Longus’ s relatively frequent use of πολλάκις, λεπτός, τέχνη also contribute to the conclusion that he was acquainted with Callimachus is debatable, but ‘the number of features of the Aitia which are shared with Daphnis and Chloe is not small’. B. develops the theme, but the reviewer may perhaps be permitted to comment that Callimachus was a famous author, likely to have been widely read. Readers interested, actually or prospectively, in the Greek novel will find much to their taste in the lanx satura here so generously provided, though no great breakthrough is aimed at or offered. (B. discusses the readership of the novels (chapter 20) without concluding much more than that the generality of the readers will have been well-educated (πεπαιδευμένοι), as is, after all, likely. B. does not mention J.J. Winkler’s punning witticism in reference to the solution of a kind of conjuring trick performed in one of the novels; ‘Alimentary, my dear Watson’.)
Both volumes have large-scale Bibliographies; P.Oxy. 2506 (the ‘palinodes’) is effectively illustrated on p.509 of Volume 1 (and makes one admire the skill of scholars who have interpreted it); both volumes, again, have an Index locorum. Those who—rightly—admire the minutiae of scholarship will find their cup filled to overflowing. We must be grateful both to the author and to the Cambridge University Press, whose work is beyond praise. The reviewer looks forward keenly to the arrival of Volume 3.
Colin Leach