[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
Time, “the all-conqueror,” as Simonides would have it, is currently conquering academic publishers: Routledge is one of at least three publishing houses this year to bring out a volume on time.[1] Can time be having a moment? Kate Gilhuly and Jeffrey P. Ulrich, the editors of Making Time for Greek and Roman Literature, boldly decided not to narrow down the topic: the theme of the volume is time in authors as diverse as Ovid, Galen, Petronius and the protevangelist James. What is there to unite them all? In their introduction the editors state that the distinguishing feature of their volume is to “showcase various contemporary theoretical approaches to temporality and its limits in order to build bridges and expose chasms between ancient and modern ideologies of time” (p.1).[2] Yet a mere three pages in the introduction are offered on this big picture of the book; and a single paragraph lets us look in the mode of time-lapse photography at theories on time from Mircea Eliade’s work in the fifties to recent work by Lee Edelmann via Michel Foucault and many others. The volume may be making time for Greek and Roman literature, but it is hardly making time for an introduction to set out its concept. Yet rather than blaming the introduction for its brevity, we should perhaps buy into the editors’ metaphor of their volume as a showcase: the volume allows us to look at a number of attractive pieces, well-curated by the editors, and it is their variety that delights. The individual contributions are short, snappy chapters that all successfully combine succinct case studies with theoretical concepts. Anyone who reads through the whole volume will thus see some of the claims of the short introduction vindicated and appreciate the variety of theoretical approaches that the essays offer. There is something to gain even for those of us who might not specialise in Galen or Phlegon. My review will focus on selective essays and aims to bring out how the individual case studies hint at the value of theories such as queer temporality or Conceptual Metaphor Theory beyond their application here.
In the opening chapter Alex Purves and Victoria Wohl offer an unusual angle from which to look at present time, one of the biggest issues in scholarship on lyric: the time of sleep. Time relies on the perception of change, Aristotle says, but sleepers are deprived of perception: they only perceive two strangely unconnected nows of falling asleep and waking up—a bit like the multi-layered now of lyric: “sleep opens a temporal gap between speaker and addressee in which the lyric utterance can emerge” (p.15). Purves and Wohl turn to two lyric poems about sleeping, by Sappho and Simonides. The bibliography of the chapter is minimal, but the issues raised are new and—for a chapter on sleep—paradoxically exciting: what does it mean to address (or apostrophise?) someone who is asleep? What sense of time does a poem produce when the speaker is asleep? The chapter is book-ended by a discussion of the photo series “The Sleepers” by Elizabeth Heyert. The comparison of lyric with photography is suggestive, and I would have liked to hear more about the temporality of the medium of photography.
Elsewhere James Ker has written in detail on quotidian time in Rome.[3] In the present volume, he adds a footnote to his work on daily routines, turning to a passage in Galen (On Hygiene 6.5). Does this passage tell us about the daily routine of slaves working under the emperor, Ker asks; do we hear of “Untold Times?” as the title of Ker’s contribution puts it? It turns out that Bettridge’s Law of newspaper headlines strikes again, which famously states that “any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” While Galen does say that “slaves” spend their whole day toiling when the emperor is awake and get some time for themselves when his daily schedule is over, Ker ultimately acknowledges that “slavery” here might be best interpreted as a metaphor for the adulators at the court. Indeed, much of what Galen has to say about daily routines makes more sense for adulators than actual slaves: a courtier might have some free time after the emperor hit the gym in the afternoon, but would a cubicularius, an attendant of the bedroom, really call it a day at that time? No “untold time” then. Perhaps the real question that the chapter raises is what the metaphor of slavery does for the concept of daily schedules.
Sarah Olsen looks at Euripides’ Andromache through the lens of queer time. Olsen zooms in on one choral ode from Euripides’ play. In this ode, the chorus of Phthian women expresses the unfulfilled wish that Hecuba should have killed her son Paris as an infant (293–4): “Would that the mother who bore him had cast him over her head to an evil end before he came to dwell on a ridge of Ida!” Olsen argues that the counterfactual conditional in the ode introduces queer temporality: the chorus momentarily rejects the “normative reproductive order and its deep investment in the survival of the child” (p.47).[4] The counterfactual statement opens up queer avenues of stories that do not follow either the grand normative story of Troy or the generational narrative of reproductive mankind. The link that Olsen draws between conditional statements and queer theory is fascinating and her close readings are nothing if not thought-provoking. And yet, the unfulfilled wish along the lines “would that the story had never started” is common in tragedy: in some cases it relates indeed to characters not wholly signed up for normative reproductive order (E. Med. 1–2; cf. E. Alc. 881), in others it does not (S. Ph. 969). While I find myself in much sympathy with Olsen’s mode of relentless close reading of a choral ode, I have also found myself wondering to what extent such undiscussed parallels (also within the same play: Andr. 1182) might have impacted her argument.
From queer time to women’s time: Caitlin Hines analyses gestation time in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti. The narrative of these poems is propelled forward by the genealogies of heroes (and less heroic characters). Any long description of pregnancy would cause delay to the narrative, Hines argues, and shows how Ovid repeatedly summarises the nine to ten months of pregnancy within the space of a sentence. Lengthy descriptions of pregnancy are unusual in Ovid’s two works, and Hines argues that the cyclical time of pregnancy, “women’s time” in the words of the literary critic Julia Kristeva,[5] threatens to delay the linear, teleological narrative of his-tory. The point is fascinating, and it is to the credit of the chapter that it raises more questions. Alcmene’s pregnancy with Hercules is described in great detail in Metamorphoses 9; what sort of delay does it constitute given that it is told after the hero’s death? And whose labour(s) really gets the best lines, Hercules’ or Alcmene’s?
Nigel Nicholson follows a historicist approach to ancient literature. Nicholson argues that epinician odes commissioned by the Sicilian tyrant Hieron for Olympic victories in 476 BC manipulate time: unlike the schedule of other athletic festivals, the schedule of Olympic Games was not restricted to a local calendar but linked to the summer solstice. This supra-local quality of the festival time of the Olympic Games is explored by the victory odes for Hieron, Nicholson argues. At a time when Hieron might have felt left outside alone as the Sicilians had not taken part in the recent Persian War, the odes write him into the panhellenic ritual time of the Olympic Games. Nicholson cites as an instructive parallel the way Augustan poets write Augustus into Caesar’s calendar.[6] His sophisticated analysis of ritual time had me wishing for more of it. I was also wishing for a closer dialogue with those scholars who in recent years have stressed the significance of lyric poems and especially Pindar’s beyond their immediate historical context, such as Felix Budelmann, David Fearn, Tom Phillips and Henry Spelman. For Nicholson, however, context is everything and clearly doesn’t stink.[7] His analysis of this historical context is incisive: epinician odes become part of Hieron’s project to remake the “spatio-temporal order” (p.114) of his world beyond the confines of the polis. But Nicholson’s focus on history involves a trade-off: victory odes start to sound like witness statements on history, not poems that resonate across time.
Jeffrey Ulrich is influenced by Marxist thought in his interpretation of the Cena Trimalchionis in Petronius’ Satyrika. In Neronian Rome, time becomes an abstract unit with economic value, that is a commodity, Ulrich argues. “Wasting time” becomes a metaphor. This argument is based largely on some quotations from Seneca, and it is to be hoped that Ulrich will marshal some further evidence in future explorations of the topic. At any rate, when Ulrich turns to Trimalchio who wastes his guests’ time and to the hidden author who might waste our time, there’s much to appreciate about his chapter.[8] At the heart of it is a delicious close reading: Trimalchio’s well-known Zodiac dish, which presents luxurious food stuff assembled as the Zodiac, makes the cosmos edible.
Andreas Zanker applies Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) to narratives of Roman decline. As it turns out, decline and fall are “orientational metaphors” of downwards movement that can also be found in Roman writers. But the greater part of the chapter deals with “ontological metaphors”: is Rome’s decline like that of a sick body infected by a plague or that of an ageing body awaiting its death? Zanker shows what is at stake with these metaphors: only the first leaves space for reversal. Just as in his book on CMT in Homer,[9] Zanker again succeeds in writing with great clarity about abstract concepts.
Robert Cioffi’s chapter deals with ghosts in Imperial Greek literature. Taking a cue from theatre studies,[10] Cioffi argues that ghosts are time machines par excellence: haunting texts, ghosts bring memories of the past and prophecies of the future, not intertextual heroines, but intertextual spectres. And whether ghosts are evocative of the past, as in Pausanias’ haunted battlefield of Marathon, or tell of the future, in either case the Roman present is absent. Cioffi’s argument is, then, much influenced by seminal scholarship on Imperial Greek literature: Ewen Bowie, Simon Swaine and Tim Whitmarsh have all stressed how in the face of the Roman present Imperial Greek literature turns to the Greek past as a place for nostalgia or resistance. For Cioffi, ghosts are the ideal mediums for voicing such ideas. At times the relatively high number of case studies (Lucian, Pausanias, Phlegon, Philostratus) does not allow Cioffi to go into much detail, but his argument is neat.
The individual chapters do not demand much time but offer rewards to their readers: as the volume’s contributors make time for Greek and Roman literature, they also make time for modern theory.
Authors and titles
- Alex Purves and Victoria Wohl : “Now, Sleep”
- James Ker: “Untold Times? A Page from Galen”
- Sarah Olsen: “Fertile Pasts and Sterile Futures in Euripides’ Andromache”
- Kate Gilhuly: “The History of Sexuality in Xenophon’s Symposium”
- Caitlin Hines: “Materna Tempora: Gestational Time and the Ovidian Poetics of Delay”
- Nigel Nicholson: “The Politics of Epinician Time”
- Kirk Ormand: “But now…The Temporality of Archaic Invective Poetry”
- Jeffrey Ulrich: “Wasting Time with Petronius”
- Andreas Zanker: “The Roman Poetics of Decline”
- Robert Cioffi: “Greek Ghosts and Roman Imperial Temporalities”
- Patrick Glauthier: “Time Stood Still, and It Was Sublime (Proto-Gospel of James 18)”
Notes
[1] The other two are Bloomsbury (B. Xinyue, ed. Temporalities, texts, ideologies. Ancient and early modern perspectives) and De Gruyter (A. Walter, ed. The temporality of festivals). OUP has a volume in the pipeline.
[2] This might very well be “[w]hat distinguishes Making Time” (p.1) from most contributions in Classics, but at least the perhaps most important book on ancient time and modern theory would have deserved mention: D.F. Kennedy (2013) Antiquity and the meanings of time. London.
[3] J. Ker (2023) The ordered day. Baltimore.
[4] The main influences are the queer theory of L. Edelman (2004) No future. Durham, NC and a volume that the author co-edited, S. Olsen and M. Telò, eds. (2022) Queer Euripides. London.
[5] J. Kristeva (1981). “Women’s time”. Translated by A. Jardine and H. Blake. Signs 7: 13–35.
[6] Cf. D.C. Feeney (2007) Caesar’s calendar. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA (an influence on several chapters in the volume as well as on Nicholson’s one, which oddly does not refer to pp.43–7 of Feeney’s book, although this section has much to say about Hieron, Pindar and time).
[7] Cf. R. Felski (2011) “‘Context stinks!’”. New Literary History 42: 573–91.
[8] A detail: instead of Epicureanism on pp.144 and 146, I would speak of “popular Epicureanism”: Lucretius and Philodemus reject carpe diem and fancy dining in their philosophical works.
[9] A.T. Zanker (2019) Metaphor in Homer. Cambridge.
[10] M. Carlson (2003) The haunted stage. Ann Arbor, MI.