De Gruyter (2016) 396pp £59.99 (ISBN 9783110434576)
As the saying goes, you can’t prove a negative, yet it is precisely this hermeneutical difficulty that the contributors seek to address. The ‘submerged’ is a concept of Luigi Rossi, to whose memory the volume—the second of a projected three-volume set—is dedicated. It refers to a category of text (broadly defined to include pottery and music) that never received independent or uninterrupted transmission. ‘Literature of this kind never enjoyed the protection of either the polis or any other authority which institutionalized […] literary credentials.’ (p.1, a translation of a ‘submerged’ note circulated by Rossi among his pupils, including the editors and some of the contributors to this volume). As p.2 makes clear, Rossi was interested in texts that were not or only partially transmitted ‘because no community had any interest in their preservation, or because it was in the interest of a community that they be concealed, and even suppressed.’ Naturally, it falls outside the scope of this brief review to discuss every contribution in detail, so the reviewer has limited himself to a general overview of the book’s contents and some general remarks. Suffice it to say that the overall quality of the papers is good and some are quite simply masterful, though in places the application of the label ‘submerged’ is somewhat problematic.
In this varied volume we find contributions on ancient philosophy (Cerri on Leucippus as founder of ancient atomism), drama (Nesselrath on Sopater’s status as an author of phlyax plays), the Erechtheid casualty list (Douglas Olson on the remembrance of the Marathonomachai and its appropriation), Aesop and Plato (Jedrkiewicz on Socrates as a ‘submerger’ of literature), Theocritus (Sbardella on Theocritus and the Hellenistic interest in submerged literature), the tradition of travelogues (De Romanis on the Periplus Maris Erythraei), Armenia (Traina on its marginalization in Graeco-Roman texts), sacred texts and mystery cults (Lippolis on sacred and consecrated texts, Ribichini on the interplay of text and ritual, Ferrari on Orphism), the corpus Hippocraticum (Roselli on the gynaecological and nosological treatises), ceramics (D’Acunto on representations of dance, D’Agostino on Corinthian pottery, Cerchiai on representations of Ariadne), papyri (Del Corso on writing and reading cultures, Luiselli on ]adespota, particularly the Acta Alexandrinorum), and music (Napolitano on the impact of professionalization on the transmission of music, Meriani on musicology, Rocconi on folk song and drama). The volume begins with the editors’ ‘Introductory Notes’, paraphrasing their introduction to the ‘submerged’ of volume 1, explaining the origins of the project, and setting the papers in this volume into context, and is rounded off with Indices Nominum, Rerum Notabilium, and Locorum. No overarching conclusions are offered. Some contributions are illustrated beautifully with both black and white and colour images, and the volume as a whole is well-produced.
As often in such collective works, coherence between individual contributions is frequently lacking, even when connections could have been made profitably and are in fact encouraged by the thematic grouping of the papers. This comes to the fore, for instance, in Sbardella’s opening claim that an awareness of the submerged only developed in the Hellenistic period, when ‘the common people’ were ‘strongly tied to tradition’, while ‘an elite culture […] was erudite, refined and consciously innovative’ (p.81). This sits uneasily with Jedrkiewicz’s conclusions in the preceding paper: he claims that Socrates in the Phaedo is able to manipulate Aesopic fables for his own purposes because they were so fluid and malleable. Surely this presupposes an awareness of a different status of Aesopic fable vis-à-vis other forms of literature (however defined). If Socrates, and Plato even more so, was not erudite and part of the elite, then who was? At the same time, Aesopic fable has been labelled as belonging to a form of traditional ‘popular culture’ (the term must be used hesitatingly).
Moreover, is it not more likely that there were more continuities in literary production between the Classical and Hellenistic periods than breaks? With the dawn of what we now term the Hellenistic period (after Alexander’s death, etc.) the world might have changed profoundly, but it is doubtful that anyone after 323 BC felt like s/he had woken up to an alien world. The split might thus not be as hard and fast as Sbardella makes it out to be, though his overall argument is very interesting. At the same time, Jedrkiewicz is right that Socrates immediately submerges his Aesopic fable, but it is not clear how representative this is of fables in general. His assertion that ‘[i]t is precisely because it is so easily available and effective that the Aesopic fable will never gain the status of a fully-fledged literary genre in antiquity’ (p. 70, his emphasis) is almost certainly overcharged: Phaedrus would beg to differ, I think. Moreover, there is evidence that fables were used in a school-context from classical times onwards: compare Pisthetaerus’ scolding of Euelpides in Aristophanes’ Birds (l. 471: ‘And you haven’t studied your Aesop either!’) or the third century Tabulae Assendelftianae. The matter of clearly-defined Aesopic collections aside, how submerged is the fable really?
The volume is almost impeccably edited and the quality of translation generally excellent. The reviewer has found only a handful of errors (see (https://edinburgh.academia.edu/GaryVos). These quibbles aside, this ‘book on (largely) lost books’ brings together some materials that are normally the preserve of specialists. This should encourage further thinking about texts outside the canon and prompt reflection on how precarious the transmission of all things classical really is.
Gary Vos