This is an elegant and challenging book. Though the term poikilia does not appear in the title, here Lather sets out to do for that concept what Detienne and Vernant did for metis a half-century ago in Les ruses de l’intelligence: la mètis des Grecs (Paris 1974). For those Hellenists who were drawn to the field in part by the thought-world constructed by the so-called École de Paris (Vernant, Detienne, Vidal-Naquet, Loraux, et al.), this book marks a welcome return to those approaches and priorities. Yet it is also decidedly of this moment, as the engine of Lather’s work is recent critical trends, particularly cognitive literary studies and the materiality turn in literary criticism (new materialisms, Jane Bennett’s “vibrant matter,” Bill Brown’s “thing theory”, etc.). Poikilia itself has been the subject of several studies of the last decades or so, and interest in the term has only intensified in recent years. This, however, is the first monograph on the subject, and its core observations about the ways in which the concept of poikilia is not only synesthetic but problematizes dualistic mind-matter distinctions will be of interest both to scholars pursuing these modern theoretical commitments and to students of archaic Greece, particularly those compelled (like this reviewer) by work in the spirit of l’histoire des mentalités.
In her Introduction, Lather develops a theoretical framework that draws on recent interventions in aesthetics—particularly “everyday” aesthetics—and the new materialisms, which (she helpfully summarizes) “aim to formulate a less anthropocentric worldview that adequately accounts for the influence of nonhuman substances on human life and thought” (2). The contributions of theorists in these areas offer, she suggests, an opportunity for a clearer-eyed understanding of the semantic field of poikilia—“its semantic range from its earliest attestations onwards encompasses both artefacts and mental processes” (2)—and the philosophical implications of the (fitting) variety, yet ideological coherence, of the term’s significations. The concept of poikilia, we are now better positioned to recognize, gestures to the “fluid economy of exchange between minds, bodies and things,” (3) with the word often evoking the “interplay between cognitive activity and material qualities” (6). This in turn allows us to identify the concept of poikilia as at work and on view not only in literary texts, but as animating (sometimes quite literally) crafted material objects: the term itself was, of course, nowhere to be found on korai, textiles (or depictions of textiles on vases), pieces of metallic work, and so on; nevertheless, Lather sees these sorts of objects as (necessary) participants in its domain. Such “things” (a term of art here) are physical manifestations and indeed extensions of the cognitive processes and mental qualities of the human agents who produced them, where those abstract processes and qualities are also understood as characterized by poikilia. Where poikilia is concerned, then, the Cartesian mind-matter distinction dissipates, for matter and mind come to exist, and are understood to exist, as extensions of each other.
Chapter 1 (“A Beautiful Mind: Patterns of Thought and the Decoration of Textiles”) explores poikilia as it was conceptualized in relation to fabric, both in ekphrastic descriptions of textiles and in representations of fabric on actual crafted objects (namely statues and vase paintings). Drawing on evidence from Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the Brauron clothing catalogues, Lather argues that the sources treat textile poikilia “as both material and cognitive, as something that embodies the scintillating and even illusory effects of sense perception” (26). Fabric that displays poikilia is more than the sum of its threads: with its scintillating and chameleonic qualities, it is capable of seeming other than it is. This quality is tied to the feminine domain of textile production, and crafted fabric becomes a physical extension of the thought processes driving the manual labor of its creation; textiles therefore become monuments to the labor of their creation. This association with the feminine then feeds back to the depiction of women in artforms traditionally produced by men. In the case of the textile ornamentation—sculpted fabric—depicted on the Acropolis korai, “the representation of fabricated forms of poikilia fostered a multisensory and dynamic perception of the clothed female form” (44). The poikilia of the garments on black-figure vases “complicates any straightforward distinction between ornament and figure” (54). The category of poikilia thus transcends the familiar binaries of labor/product and body/ornamentation, and in so doing produces an enchantment that engages both senses and intellect.
In Chapter 2 (“Brazen Charm: The Vitality of Archaic Armor”), poikilia in metalwork, particularly bronze armament, produces a somewhat different but related effect. For Lather, “living bodies and pieces of armament together can form powerful new hybrids that align mortal men with the gods themselves” (65). Bronze armor flashes, glints, glitters, and shimmers, and when the warrior dons the already “vibrant” armor, the distinction between his own physical being and the armament dissolves. Bronze solders with body, enhancing the warrior’s martial spirit and endowing him with heightened physical qualities. (In the Iliad finely-wrought armor allows Ares to enter a warrior; today we might call this an adrenaline boost.) The warrior’s body and spirit meld with the armor, rendering impossible a clear distinction between the two—just as on black-figure vases it is often futile to ask where a female figure’s body ends and her adorned garment begins. Lather’s analysis here shines a light on the taking-and-making of armor that drives Books 17-18 of the Iliad.
Chapter 3 (“Mind Tools: Art, Artifice and Animation”) extends the analysis to “phenomena that are explicitly said to confuse ontological categories between human and nonhuman”: automata, lifelike images, and “feats of superhuman construction” (95), all of which inspire wonder. The Egyptian labyrinth at Lake Moeris described by Herodotus (2.148), Odysseus’ brooch (Od. 19.227-31), and Pandora in Hesiod’s Theogony (570-90) all incite wonder with their vibrancy and resistance to human comprehension, and so transcend their mere “thingness”. Hephaestus’ automata (Iliad 18) and the rudderless unpiloted ships of the Phaeacians (Od. 8.557-9) manifest another expression of poikilia in that they exist as “seamless extensions of mind” (97): Hephaestus’ tools as an extension of himself, and the Phaeacian ships as steered by their commanders’ thoughts. In the last movement of this chapter, Lather begins an account of poikilia in speech, where the concept suggests speech that beguiles, inspires awe, and misdirects (as the objects discussed earlier also do) originates with humans but seems to have a (divine) life of its own.
Chapter 4 (“The Protean Shape of Lyric Poikilia”) pursues this question of language further in turning to the lyric corpus, where terms related to poikilia appear with striking density. In such instances, the term “aids in the construction of highly vivid and highly particular imaginative scenarios because of the variety of sensory features that the terminology of poikilia can encapsulate simultaneously” (129). Poikilia in lyric is synesthetic, and contributes to the sensory, affective, and imaginative vividness of lyric poetry. In fragments of Sappho, Alcman, and Anacreon, poikilia often denotes “coveted or pleasurable items” and “connotes the alluring pull exerted by such objects” (140). But the very word poikilia also, in a sense, partakes of itself, in that the term alone seems to have the power to excite and activate the imagination, and in doing so to provide pleasure. For Pindar, the concept of poikilia is exceptionally bound up in his lyric poetics, since Pindar self-referentially uses the word of his own poetic vision and production: his poetry thus synthesizes the full range of possibilities for poikilia discussed by Lather in the previous chapter. Here again, poikilia has as referent both the crafted “object” (the poem, so often described by Pindar in architectonic terms) and the mental processes by which that object has been produced. Artist, art, artifice and artifact become one.
Chapters 5 (“Mētis and the Mechanics of the Mind”) and 6 (“The Materiality of Feminine Guile”) tease out the conceptual overlaps and complements between poikilia and metis. Chapter 5 focuses on male/masculine figures (Prometheus, Odysseus, and Hermes in particular, but also Zeus and Athena), and builds on Detienne and Vernant’s work by arguing that male instantiations of metis, with its inherent quality of poikilia, also fuse the mental with the material. These figures enact metis by means of “canny manipulation” of material objects and environments. For example, Prometheus’ theft of fire depends on his repurposing of the hollow fennel stalk, while his deception of Zeus at the sacrificial meal rests on his ruse of concealing bones beneath animal fat. Hermes, too, is cunning in his manipulation of material objects (the tortoise lyre, sandals, etc.), while Odysseus crafts his doloi from wood (the immovable marriage bed; the Trojan Horse). In all cases, dexterity with material represents an extension of the poikilometis quality of mind that these actors share. For these figures, “their mētis is inextricable from their bodies as well as their material environs” (194), and the epithet poikilometis that attaches at some point to them all further signals this fundamental quality of interaction between, and even melding of, mind and matter.
Chapter 6 turns to expressions of metis and poikilia among female/feminine agents, and here Lather finds that in their deployments of metis women use (rather than fashion) intimate objects, whose pre-existing special qualities they are able to recognize and turn to their advantage. The paradigmatic example here is Hera’s use of Aphrodite’s enchanted and finely crafted kestos himas for the “deception of Zeus” in Book 14 of the Iliad. The assemblages of garments and adornments described in divine toilette scenes—the feminine equivalent of “arming scenes”—have a similar effect on the wearer as armor has on the warrior (as described in Chapter 2). In the world of tragedy, Clytemnestra and Medea, themselves armed with the knowledge of the power of a poikilos textile, both use their own cunning intelligence to weaponize sumptuous and mesmeric cloth-works against their husbands. Like Hera and Aphrodite, they know that certain objects can script human behavior, but while “Hera and Aphrodite seduce with the help of objects, Clytemnestra and Medea allow things to seduce all on their own” (221). If the purple carpet and bridal gift are physical extensions of Clytemnestra and Medea’s mental cunning, it is perhaps only fitting that, in death, their victims become physically ensnared and fused with those objects.
In a brief conclusion, Lather turns to Plato’s account of poikilia in the Republic, for his discussions there serve to connect the conclusions of the previous chapters about the vitality of poikilia and the power of its material instantiations to fascinate and beguile, as well as its attestation to the permeability of the human mind and the material world. For Plato’s Socrates, poikilia is as dangerous as mimetic poetry, and its “various manifestations—whether in textiles, music, or drama—are for Plato the very embodiment of changefulness and irrationality” (228). That which is poikilos is therefore to be excluded from the ideal state, lest its slippery qualities seep into the souls of the state’s members.
This book is challenging in part because the concept of poikilia is itself so “kaleidoscopic”. It is impressive that, throughout the book, Lather’s readings are equally informed by abstract literary theory and philological rigor. At points, the quantity and variety of modern theories invoked seemed to overpower Lather’s own compelling voice, and the nature of the contribution here might have been even clearer had the introduction included an account of the history and current state of scholarship on the concept of poikilia itself. Nevertheless, her work and her writing offer much that, like its subject, is beautiful, beguiling, and cognitively demanding, and the assemblage of evidence that she gathers and analyzes speaks with fitting eloquence and evocativeness to the centrality of poikilia as a term, concept, and value within the archaic Greek imaginaire.