[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
This excellent volume, a ‘small token of appreciation’, as noted by the editors in their preface, honours Professor Susan Stephens, who recently retired from the Department of Classics at Stanford University. It features an impressive line-up of world-leading scholars whose contributions, very frequently inspired by Stephens’ scholarship, celebrate its legacy and make important, often even major, contributions to their respective fields. The scope of this book is in fact much wider than its title suggests.
Part I consists of two chapters on archaic and classical Greek literature. Christopher Athanasious Faraone traces stylistic and thematic similarities between Semonides 1 and elegiac poetry, esp. Solon 13, including a similar stanzaic structure. He proposes that Semonides 1 is an experiment in rendering elegiac stanzaic catalogues into iambic meter, which suggests that either Semonides directly imitated Solon (or vice versa) or both poets had at their disposal standard features of archaic catalogues which made their way into different genres.
Marco Fantuzzi and Mathias Hanses read Euripides’ Electra through the lens of ‘materialistic realism’, arguing that Euripides ‘deglamorises the traditional mythological atmosphere of Greek tragedy’ (p.18). Close attention is paid to Electra’s carefully crafted rhetoric in which she deliberately exhibits (in speech, song, and costume) her lowly status and appearance in order to elicit pity, but whose pseudo-humility is later called into question by Orestes’ speech.
Part II comprises one contribution only. In a most stimulating chapter, which brings together an impressive array of ancient and modern sources, Selden takes as a starting point the discrepancies in the accounts of ancient historians (Arrian, C. Curtius Rufus, Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, M. Junianus Justinus) regarding Alexander’s visits to Memphis, Sīwah and Rhakōtis in the course of the imposition of Macedonian dominion over Egypt. Exploring the ways in which historians in the Roman empire used narrative as their preferred mode of representation (and some methodological issues with the use of narrative more broadly), Selden demonstrates that, as a result, they missed the interdependence of the three places and their—joint—relevance to Alexander’s endeavours to legitimate his succession to the Egyptian throne. Selden warns that signifiers drawn from diverse, culturally specific signifying systems are simultaneously present in Greco-Roman accounts of Alexander in Egypt (especially in Arrian) and they create networks of signification which preclude one stable or absolute meaning; nonetheless, reading such accounts through the lens of Egyptology affords a higher degree of ideological coherence.
Part III is dedicated exclusively to Callimachus—a most suitable choice for a book in honour of a scholar whose prolific work on the Hellenistic poet par excellence contributed so fundamentally to his study. The first two chapters centre around Callimachus’ engagement with archaic literary genres. In their chapters, Giulio Massimilla and Don Lavigne, who look at lyric and iambus respectively, commence from the same observation: it was the variety of voices and perspectives associated with archaic lyric and iambus which was attractive to Callimachus. Massimilla builds on an observation he has made in the past,[1] to discern additional intertextual links between Alcman’s Louvre Partheneion (64-77) and Callimachus’ elegy Phrygius and Pieria from Book 3 of the Aetia (fr. 80.5-11 Harder) in the enumeration of items which Pieria refuses to receive from Phrygius and in the gradual move from objects to people. Lavigne emphasises the significance of the construction and presentation of gender to the iambic genre, which sees the poet-persona oscillating between emasculation and hyper-masculinity. He proceeds to explore the ways in which Callimachus, exploiting this iambic performativity which effectively requires a misrepresentation of reality, both aligns with and distances himself from Hipponax in iambic poetry removed from the archaic performance context.
Benjamin Acosta-Hughes starts from the final line of Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos, which sees the appearance of Artemis in the same line as Apollo in a poem from which she is largely absent, to uncover a series of sibling pairs across Callimachus’ poetry. He compellingly demonstrates how influential in Callimachus and Hellenistic literature and art more broadly the royal sibling marriage of Ptolemy II Philadelphus and Arsinoe II really was.
The following two chapters look at Callimachus’ epigrams. Phiroze Vasunia offers a close and penetrative analysis of the ways in which Callimachus engages and innovates with mourning in his Epigram for Heraclitus (AP 7.80, 2 Pfeiffer). Markus Asper discerns the Egyptian oracular practice of attributing prophecies to children in Callimachus’ Epigram 1 Pf., suggesting that the scene is effective only if the elements from both the Greek and Egyptian cultures are taken into account.
The contributions which follow can also be paired, as they both look at papyri. Giovan Battista D’Alessio offers a few most astute and persuasive observations on the papyrus scrap P.Ant. III 179 add. (preserving a fragment of Callimachus’ Hecale) which further illuminate Callimachus’ use of the Homeric models. The late Peter Parsons examines a new restoration of the Lille papyrus preserving fr.54d Harder = 150 Massimilla of the Aetia. He offers an ingenious new conjecture which sees the contested line 8 of the fragment as possibly spoken by Heracles who talks about seeing again Molorcus’ hut—ἴδω καλύβη[ν—rather than the previously assumed reference to a lyre.
Finally, Richard Hunter explores Strabo’s treatment of Callimachus, which—he convincingly demonstrates—is particularly favourable: although Strabo seems to be engaging with Callimachus’ works through Apollodorus of Athens, he does not adopt Apollodorus’ critique but rather defends, justifies, or simply avoids criticisms of Callimachus, whose authority he respects, even when he believes him to be mistaken.
Part IV attempts a look at Hellenistic and Roman literature and culture more broadly. Ivana Petrovic detects strong correspondences between the murder of Apsyrtus and the death of Phaethon, recounted as the Argonauts arrive at the shores of Eridanos, site of Phaethon’s death, in Apollonius’ Argonautica 4. Petrovic argues that the two episodes reflect different perceptions of miasma, namely religious miasma and miasma as a medical phenomenon, and that Apollonius, by bringing together myth, paradoxography, and medical texts, re-mythologises rationalising accounts of disease found as early as the Hippocratic corpus.
Edward Kelting, interested in Greco-Egyptian identity formation, looks at the famous case of the Greek Ptolemaeus, who lived for twenty years in the Egyptian temple of Serapis in the second century BCE, and his bother Apollonius (UPZ I). He analyses the language of the Greco-Egyptian self-presentation, which is neither Greek nor Egyptian and which refuses to translate one language into the other, but rather carves out a third, in-between space of untranslatability and cultural combination.
Alexander Sens turns to a programmatic passage in Nicander’s Theriaca (343-58) which contains an acrostic inscribing the poet’s full name. He proposes that the passage evokes Aratus’ famous acrostic (λεπτή, Phaen. 1.783-7), thus declaring both its generic affiliation with the Phaenomena and its stylistic affinity with Aratus and Callimachus’ leptotes.
Peter Bing closely analyses two Hellenistic epitaphs on Hesiod from the Greek Anthology (AP 7.54, 7.55) and demonstrates that their authors independently draw on and respond to biographical narratives (including the paratextual tradition and that of the Contest); and that the two epigrams, in inviting readers to reconstitute the narrative of Hesiod’s life and death, supplement each other by evoking different elements of the paratextual tradition (such as Hesiod’s double burial).
Alessandro Barchiesi explores the reception of Hellenistic literature in Virgil’s Aeneid. In the variously interpreted omen of Aeneid 5.522-4,[2] he discerns an ominous prophecy about Segesta, in which he reads an echo of Segesta’s 307 BCE destruction by Agathocles. Segesta is also mentioned ominously in the Alexandra, and Barchiesi suggests that Lycophron is likely to have been influenced by Hellenistic historians on Segesta’s tragic fate (the story survives in the later Diodorus Siculus [20.71], who presumably relies on earlier Hellenistic models). Virgil’s omen then alludes to Lycophron and his use of tragic historiography.
Virgil’s Aeneid is also the starting point for Jay Reed’s contribution. Looking at the similarities between Iarbas’ address to Jupiter in Aeneid 4 and Rameses II’s “Kadesh Poem”, Reed discusses ways in which Ptolemaic appropriations of Egyptian discourse of kingship fed into Romans’ own ‘syncretistic’ approach.
Roland Mayer examines a number of epigrams by Crinagoras of Mytilene written for the Augustan family. He makes the very tempting hypothesis that the production of the poems was commissioned or encouraged by Octavia, Augustus’ sister, whose literary interests are well documented, as the majority of Crinagoras’ epigrams celebrate special moments in the life of her children, as well as of the children of Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra, whose upbringing Octavia undertook after their parents’ death.
Finally, Kathryn Gutzwiller looks at the proem to Meleager’s Garland, in which each of the poets mentioned is identified with a flower/plant/tree often containing a riddle. In a brilliant argument, Gutzwiller substitutes the corrupt reading ἄμεινον in AP 4.1.23-4 with ἄμετρον, which is appropriate both because it is reflective of the unmetricality of the relevant poet’s name—Diosco(u)rides—and because ἄμετρον is an alternative name for βάτος, bramble. Bramble was associated with invective, which is consistent with the scoptic nature of Diosco(u)rides’ surviving epigrams.
Part V consists of two chapters on ancient prose fiction. Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne examines the two Parthenope stories surviving from Greek antiquity, the Greek novel heroine and the Siren. She argues that, although they followed distinct literary trajectories, they share broader thematic similarities which, alongside the confusion of Byzantine scholiasts on the matter, might suggest a more complex and overlapping development, reflective of the era in which the Greek novels were produced.
Stephen Nimis explores Alexandria in the literary imagination of the Greek novelists. He traces a close affinity between ancient novel as a genre and the fabric of Alexandria itself, in that the novels’ (‘Hellenized’) authors came from the margins of the Greek world and their intended audience comprised a multicultural community united by Greek as a literary lingua franca.
In the volume’s final section (‘Aftermath’), Maud Gleason turns to Byzantine literature and investigates the former sophist Sophronius’ Thaumata (7th century CE), exploring in particular the use of the human body in Sophronius’ rhetoric. Gleason acutely observes the strongly somatic element present in many of the stories which, she argues, can stimulate a visceral response in the readers—observations which strands of cognitive literary criticism (not used here by Gleason) would strongly endorse.[3]
Lee Palmer Wandel offers a concluding essay which celebrates Stephens’ work by singling out certain passages of significance and resonance for the essay’s author from Stephens’ groundbreaking Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandira (2003), justly lauded and mentioned abundantly in this book.
Although this book’s title is perhaps not reflective of the book’s wide scope, the breadth of the texts, authors, genres, eras, and broader aspects of Greek literature and culture discussed do reflect the range of Stephens’ own research interests and contributions to the study of the ancient Greek world. The quality of the contributions and the quality of the edition itself (which also contains a number of high-resolution colour images)[4] celebrate in the most appropriate way a career as remarkable as that of Prof. Stephens.
Authors and Titles
Part I: Archaic and Classical Greek Literature
Christopher Faraone, Semonides, Fragment 1, as an Iambic Catalogue in Stanzas
Marco Fantuzzi and Mathias Hanses, The Humble and the Grand: Realism in Euripides’ Electra
Part II: Coming to Egypt
Daniel L. Selden, Iter ad Aegyptum: Alexander’s Trip to Memphis
Part III: Callimachus
Giulio Massimilla, Neglected Splendors: Alcman’s Louvre Partheneion and Callimachus’ Tale of Phrygius and Pieria
Don Levigne, Callimachus’ Duplicitous Iambos
Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, From a Small Beginning: Of Sibling and Poetic Order in Callimachus
Phiroze Vasunia, Them He Cannot Take: Callimachus’ Epigram for Heraclitus
Markus Asper, Advisory Tops: Callimachus Ep. 54 Gow/Page (1 Pf.)
Giovan Battista d’Alessio, On a New Papyrus Fragment of Callimachus’ Hecale (P.Ant. III 179 add.)
Peter Parsons, No Lyre for Heracles
Richard Hunter, Strabo’s Callimachus
Part IV: Hellenistic and Roman Culture
Ivana Petrovic, Seeing Double: Apollonius’ Two Phaethons
Edward Kelting, “Apollonius speaks Greek, Petiharenpi speaks Egyptian”: Cross-Cultural Self-Fashioning in the Serapeum Archive
Alexander Sens, Young Snakes, Old Models: Hellenistic Poetics and Literary Heritage in Nicander, Theriaca 343–58
Peter Bing, The Death of the Author: Hesiod’s Double Burial in Epigrams of Mnasalkes (AP 7.54 = 18 GP) and Alkaios (AP 7.55 = 12 GP) and in the Biographical Tradition
Alessandro Barchiesi, Doomscrolling at Segesta: An Allusion to Lycophron in Virgil, Aeneid 5. 552-4
Jay Reed, Father Ammon and the King
Roland Mayer, Crinagoras of Mytilene and Octavia
Kathryn Gutzwiller, Poets, Plants, and Riddles
Part V: Ancient Prose Fiction
Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne, The sparagmos of Parthenope between Ancient Novel and Myth
Stephen Nimis, Alexandria in the Ancient Greek Novels
Aftermath
Maud Gleason, Practicing Orthodoxy: Body Language in Sophronius’ Thaumata
Lee Wandel, Reading Stephens
Notes
[1] Massimilla, G. (2010), Callimaco: Aitia, libro terzo e quarto, Pisa and Roma, p. 402.
[2] It must be noted that the lines given in the chapter’s title are incorrect as the omen which this chapter looks at is found in Aen. 5.522-4 (rather than 5.552-4).
[3] See e.g. Kuzmičová, A. (2012), ‘Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative: A Case for Motor Enactment’, Semiotica 189, 23-48.
[4] I have noted a few typographical errors: ‘placed a the longer poem’ (p.4), ‘has disappeared. where it presumably’ (p.10), ‘subdued’ instead of ‘subdue’ (p.53), a full stop instead of a comma in ‘Holies”). Amun-Re’ (p.62), ‘ἠελίοθ’ instead of ‘ἠελίου’ (p.155), ‘a with’ instead of ‘with a’ (p.348). There are a few instances where words are missing: ‘human life [] ten couplets’ (p.8), ‘Electra delivers an aria [] an expression of her lofty descent’ (p.22), ‘discovery [] Alexander’s full pharaonic titulary’ (p.50), ‘as a successor [] the Theogony’ (p.239), ‘recognised [] at least some’ (p.242), ‘able [to] rejuvenate themselves’ (p.243). On p.276 a paragraph is incorrectly indented and marked as translation of the preceding Latin passage, and on p.278 no line numbers are given for the Greek passage.