posted with permission:

Edith Hall, Richard Alston, and Justine McConnell, eds., Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood. Classical Presences. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xviii + 509. Hardcover, £90.00/$150.00. ISBN 978-0-19-957467-4.

Reviewed by Fábio Duarte Joly, Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto

The reception of ancient slavery in modern culture has been the subject of growing academic interest in recent decades. Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood reinforces this trend by bringing together papers presented at an international conference held at the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2007, on the occasion of the bicentenary of the parliamentary act that abolished the slave trade in the British colonies. Within the domain of cultural history, the aim of the book is to provide studies of the non-academic reception of ancient slavery. After an introduction by Edith Hall, highlighting the themes and methodologies covered by the book, there are eleven chapters which deal with the appropriation of Greco-Roman ideas in debates about slavery in England, the United States and South Africa, in literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and even in Hollywood. A postscript by Ahuvia Kahane on “Slavery, Abolition, Modernity, and the Past” concludes the book.

The first chapter, by Richard Alston, draws attention to a central point of the reception studies throughout the book. If, on the one hand, the appropriation of ancient ideas of slavery by various social agents during the modern period helped to minimize the otherness of the ancient slave system vis-à-vis modern ones, it also represented, on the other hand, a substantial rupture between Antiquity and modernity, since the respective notions of freedom and slavery were located in quite different socioeconomic and ontological contexts. Examining the concepts of freedom in Pliny the Younger and Hobbes, Alston indicates that while for the former, slavery and freedom were embedded in a web of social and status relations, for the latter freedom meant the absence of impediment to action, something inherent in every individual regardless of status. By reinforcing this liberal perspective, the insertion of transatlantic slavery in the capitalist system prevented any actual recovery of the intellectual background of ancient slavery. However, such a rupture did not prevent the generalized use of classical ideas in the debates about slavery triggered by abolitionism. This is illustrated by the numerous citations of the first book of the Politics of Aristotle by pro-slavery writers of the antebellum United States, a subject analyzed by S. Sara Monoson, and by appropriations of the image of Spartan helotage by British abolitionists, which reveal, as Stephen Hodkinson and Edith Hall argue, both positive and negative evaluations of this historical phenomenon according to the political interests and actors on scene. This ambivalence of the modern reception of ancient ideas about slavery is also noted in the chapters by John Hilton and Margaret Malamud, who treat the use of classical ideas in the abolition debates in South Africa and the antebellum U.S., respectively.

In this sense the figure of Prometheus, bound and unbound, analyzed by Edith Hall, proves to be a fine example of the difficulties of the appropriation of classical culture by the abolitionist movement, since it involved selecting some aspects akin to the abolitionist cause (such as victimhood and suffering) and discarding others related to social disorder (such as the desire for revenge). The presence of Greco-Roman culture in poetry, novels, historical accounts, and films related to abolitionism and its legacy is treated in five chapters. Brycchan Carey points out the relations between classical form and content in eighteenth-century abolitionist poetry and Emily Greenwood examines the work of Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved African poet in late eighteenth-century Boston. The novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) by Edward Bulwer is analyzed by Leanne Hunnings, who focuses on the characterization of Nydia, a blind slave. Lydia Langerwerf addresses L. R. James’ portrait of Toussaint L’Ouverture as influenced by the representation of two ancient slave rebels (Aristomenes of Messene, as depicted by Pausanias, and Drimakos, whose story is preserved in Athenaeus), while Justine McConnell demonstrates how the script of the film Sommersby (1993) was inspired by the plot of Homer’s Odyssey to represent the impact of slavery and abolition in the Deep South.

All these chapters have some points in common: the present-mindedness of the representation of ancient slavery, the tensions between the “outsideness” of slaves and their possibilities of actual agency, and the classical education of the modern writers. This latter theme is well explored in the chapter by David Lupher and Elizabeth Vandiver on Basil L. Gildersleeve, one of the founders of the professional study of Classics in the United States, who illustrates the close link between the development of classical studies and pro-slavery ideology.

In general, by its range of topics and insightful analysis of different sources, the book will surely give new impetus to reception studies. However, its focus on the Anglophone world suggests that future research should also consider the cultural framework of both pro- and antislavery movements in a broader Atlantic perspective. The Iberian slave system, for example, in which Brazil and Cuba played a central role, was strongly affected by the emergence of the British antislavery movement, the Revolution of Saint-Domingue, and the American Civil War. The debates on the abolition of slavery throughout the Iberian system also mobilized images of ancient slavery, and a comparison of them with those circulating in England, the United States, South Africa and the Caribbean would allow a more interconnected view—and one, therefore, less restricted to national boundaries—of what David Brion Davis has called the “problem of slavery in Western culture.”

posted with permission:

C. P. Cavafy, Selected Prose Works. Translated and annotated by Peter Jeffreys. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010. Pp. xix + 163. Paperback, $24.95. ISBN 978-0-472-05095-6.

Reviewed by James Nikopoulos, Rutgers University

Despite the numerous translations into English of C.P. Cavafy’s poetry that have appeared in recent years—no less than seven in the last decade alone—Cavafy’s prose output has been ignored by translators. Peter Jeffreys has stepped in to fill this void. The result is an admirable compilation of a notoriously idiosyncratic body of work. Among the forty pieces included in this volume one finds essays and reflections on such diverse subjects as The Elgin Marbles to Shakespeare to Lycanthropy, written both in English and Greek. Jeffreys provides enough notes to allow the reader to contextualize each piece, and his translations of Cavafy’s Greek are accomplished and clear.

Thus the goal of introducing the non-specialist to heretofore neglected work has been achieved. However, as the one who has taken upon himself the responsibility of introducing Cavafy’s prose to a larger English-speaking audience, Jeffreys also takes on the responsibility of explaining it. To be more precise, Jeffreys is left with the unhappy task of trying to justify the presence of what is essentially mediocre work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets.

That this is a task the book feels obliged to perform comes across clearly in the introduction, in which the reader is presented with what amounts to a series of excuses for why the Alexandrian’s prose is so inferior to his poetry. My problem is not that Jeffreys does this, for it needs to be done. Any reader of Cavafy’s poetry expecting to come across the same caliber of thought and style in these pieces as one habitually finds in the poems will be strongly disappointed; therefore some explanation is in order. My problem then is not the presence of a defense but how Jeffreys goes about formulating it.

The Introduction begins by pinning the blame on necessity:

Cavafy’s Greek readership expected a peculiar style of learned journalism that consisted of a formulaic blend of encyclopedic dilettantism interspersed with choice translations of foreign authors and foreign journalists.

Many of these pieces are journalistic, thus Cavafy had to keep an eye firmly fixed on the requirements of the job, but to pin the blame on an expected readership is an inadequate explanation for lackluster work, especially when one considers that many of these pieces were either never published or remained fragments. Jeffreys continues in this vein in the following sentence:

The fact that the literary preferences of late nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle readers diverged greatly from those of the early twentieth century and post-World War I era—the period during which Cavafy found his mature poetic voice—surely induced Cavafy to view his early prose as unfashionably dated and even embarrassingly pretentious.

It is as though the zeitgeist is more to blame for a writer’s immature work rather than the author’s immaturity itself.

Jeffreys’s comments also speak negatively of Cavafy’s use of katharevousa—the artificial language that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a view towards “cleansing” modern Greek of its foreign impurities. He writes:

As nearly all prose during this period was written in puristic Greek, Cavafy had to display his journalistic mastery of this cumbersome idiom for the public while simultaneously satisfying his more private creative impulses, attempting in the process to craft a lucid, effective and learned prose.

It is true that Cavafy progressively moved away from katharevousa in his writing, both in his prose and his poetry, but Jeffreys implies that Cavafy’s early use of it was a kind of necessary evil, as though forced against his will to cultivate an unwanted idiom. Cavafy, however, is not like the many Greek writers of the twentieth century who argued against the unnatural language. He is even recorded to have been disgusted by the debate between katharevousa and demotic, stating that both sides aimed to “throw half our language away.”[[1]] Jeffreys himself admits that Cavafy did not consider katherevousa to be such a horrible thing. The lead note to the essay, “Professor Blackie on the Modern Greek Language,” reads: “John Stuart Blackie, Professor of Greek at the University of Edinburgh, was, like Cavafy, favourably disposed towards the purist ‘katharevousa’.”

Professor Jeffreys’s best means of defending these pieces is also the most obvious. As he writes, the prose “remains fertile ground for furthering our critical understanding and evolving appreciation of the poet.” Thus, whenever possible, the notes seek to connect the piece at hand to Cavafy’s verse. For example, we learn that the essay, “Coral from a Mythological Perspective,” testifies to Cavafy’s lifelong interest in ancient mineralogy, which can be seen in the poems “Indian Image” and “The Footsteps” as well as in the prose poem “The Ships.” Why Jeffreys would fail to mention that coral also appears in perhaps Cavafy’s most famous poem, “Ithaka,” I do not quite understand.

Despite these flaws, there is much that deserves praise here, especially considering the lackluster material Jeffreys is presenting. The defense he offers may be flawed, but the spirit behind it is commendable. Overall, for those seeking that quintessential Cavafy voice, the prose works are sure to disappoint. However, anyone seeking a deeper understanding of Cavafy’s development as a thinker and as a writer will surely find much to his liking in this volume.

NOTE

[[1]] See Roderick Beaton, An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature (Oxford 2004) 338 n. Beaton’s note also mentions a review Cavafy never published in his lifetime of the second edition of H. Pernot’s Grammaire du Grec Moderne (1917), in which Cavafy makes his most overt comments on the “Language Question.” This review can be found in the standard edition of Cavafy’s prose: Πιερής, Μιχάλης. Κ.Π. Καβάφης: Τα Πεζά (1882–1931) (Athens: Ikaros, 2003). The review is not included among Jeffreys’s translations.