Pennsylvania (2016) h/b 267pp £52.00 (ISBN 9780812247657)
As is made clear from the outset, this is not a comprehensive evaluation of the Greek view of the sea. Rather it is a series of six case studies, which in B.’s words ‘address the role of the sea as a boundary between the visible and invisible world, or between the world of humans, the gods, and the dead’: voyages of heroes (such as Heracles and Odysseus), the sea as locus for heroic comings-of-age (such as those of Theseus and Jason), girls set adrift in chests (such as Danae), mortals or mortal remains rescued by dolphins (such as the live Arion and Hesiod’s corpse), gods, heroes, heroines and mortals who leap into the sea (such as Ino and Sappho) and finally Dionysus and the sea.
Drawing on mythology, ritual practice and a wealth of academic material, B. argues that in the Greek imagination the sterile salt water of the sea occupies a medial position not only between ports on dry land but between the fertile fresh waters of rivers and the all-encircling Ocean as well as between the upper sky and the underworld. It is ‘the meeting point of different planes of reality’, its water a liminal, purifying element, contact with which can effect lasting changes in physical or psychological status. Initiates into the Eleusinian Mysteries bathe in the sea as part of their process of rebirth, statues are dipped into the sea to re-energize their sanctity, and in a host of myths heroes and heroines experience transformative adventures at sea.
At the same time, the sea is home to a host of creatures, some malignant (such as Scylla and the fish which eat the corpses of the drowned), some benign (such as dolphins, a creature ‘at the center of a web of relations between animals, men, the dead, and the gods’), and others who must be tamed in order that they might benefit mankind (such as the prophesying shape-shifting Old Man of the Sea, or the Graeae). Many of the book’s arguments are compelling and in the final chapter B.’s brief analysis of (albeit Etruscan) wall-paintings—including the famous Paestum diver leaping into death and transfiguration—convincingly ties together many of them.
Well illustrated with 27 useful black-and-white photographs, and containing quotations from Greek and Latin authors both in the original language and in translation, this is a volume which will enhance the understanding of scholars of classical literature and beliefs as well as provoking debate about those areas which it does not cover.
David Stuttard