posted with permission:

The Greeks and the New: Novelty in Ancient Greek Imagination and Experience. By Armand D’Angour. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. x + 264. Hardcover, £58.00/$90.00. ISBN 978-0-521-85097-1. Paper, £20.99/$33.99. ISBN 978-0-521-61648-5.

Reviewed by Ruth Scodel, University of Michigan

This book initially seeks to refute a belief that I am not entirely sure needed to be refuted, the claim that the Greeks were profoundly conservative and shunned novelty. To be sure, this claim has often appeared, notably in van Groningen’s In the Grip of the Past;[[1]] but I would judge that scholars today are generally inclined as much to discount the Greeks’ traditionalism as their innovativeness. Work on the development of literacy, on Greek science and mathematics, on democracy and its ideology, and on literary genres has made it hard to ignore the importance of the new in Greek history. Still, a general investigation of Greek attitudes to the new is itself new and worthwhile, both because we sometimes repeat tired clichés about Greek conservatism, and because Greek attitudes were obviously not uniform or uncomplicated—there was a powerful tendency in Greek thought to value stability and the past, as well as a strain of cyclic thought. We would not want to move from one excess to another. The book is wide-ranging and hard to summarize (even so it does not address every issue I might have liked), but it is consistently balanced and thoughtful.

It wisely concentrates on novelty in the Greek imagination, on how Greeks thought about the new rather than on the “actual” new. As D’Angour says, what counts as new is socially constructed. To be sure, D’Angour briefly comments on the evidence for actual innovation in such technical fields as pottery and architecture, and refers in passing to trade and the development of the money economy; some slippage between reality and Greek thought about it is probably inevitable, but his primary focus is clearly how Greeks evaluated and categorized the new, not on what they invented.

He finds little evidence for what in modern times is both the most typical form of actual innovation and a typical way of thinking about it. In modern capitalist society, we take it for granted that competition prompts invention, as a machine or process is newly invented or improved in response to commercial competition (D’Angour worked for several years in manufacturing). Competition spurred Greeks to innovation in music and poetry, but not in industry. Even in warfare, the evidence that competition prompted invention is weak. Although the argument is familiar that the Greeks did not do as much as might expect in practical improvements, and explanations offered are also familiar (such as slavery and contempt for banausic occupations), the specific point about competition is interesting. Greeks associated innovation not with competition, but with multiplicity, complexity and pluralism, and Athens was a center of innovation because it was a center of trade and contact. D’Angour does not say much about financial innovation, where political and commercial needs were surely powerful, but even here it is hard to see the effect of competition as such. Instead, Greeks created new styles in painting and poetry, or built clever devices, to create wonder. New objects are associated with brightness and radiance.

One of the richest features of the book is the treatment of the vocabulary of newness. There is a sensitive and sensible discussion of the complex semantics of words for “new,” which overlap with “young,” “recent,” and “strange.” The word καινός is not found before the sixth century, when it refers to objects, and it first appears in literature in Bacchylides. D’Angour suggests etymologies for both kainos and the name Kaineus from the Semitic root qyn, whose derivatives refers to metalworkers (Kaineus would be from qayin, “spear”). He certainly makes a strong point that the Indo-European etymology linking it to Sanscrit kanyā (“young woman”) is implausible for a word that could so often have been used earlier than it is, and whose associations are with newness rather than youth. Connecting kainos with metal imports, he suggests that its first meaning is “brand-new,” “just manufactured.” It certainly accords well with the consistent Greek love, which D’Angour documents, for splendid, never-used objects. He also suggests that this word was particularly Attic. This too is plausible. Another particularly interesting discussion concerns the association of innovation and youth. Although Greeks did not think about why young people welcome innovation more than their seniors, they clearly recognized this phenomenon, and D’Angour speculates that Greeks may have given themselves freedom to innovate because they thought of themselves as racially and culturally young.

Not all praise for the new is praise for innovation. D’Angour’s treatment of Telemachus’ famous statement that people celebrate “the newest song” (Od. 1.351–2) points to the difference between a new song and a new kind of song. The New Music of the late fifth century was a new kind and brought lasting change, but not everyone was happy about this transformation. Plato’s Socrates insists that Homer’s praise of the new should be interpreted to encourage only new works, not new forms or style (Plato, Rep. 424b–c).

The book is well-written and fun to read—it has itself some of the gleam and glamor of the new, and I expect that its readers will give it kleos.

NOTE

[[1]] B. A van Groningen, In the Grip of the Past: Essay on an Aspect of Greek Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1953).

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Playing the Farmer: Representations of Rural Life in Vergil’s Georgics. By Philip Thibodeau. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011. Pp. viii + 326. Hardcover, $60.00. ISBN 978-0-520-26832-6.

Reviewed by John Henkel, Georgetown College

Its author describes this book as a “large-scale exercise in compare-and-contrast” between the Georgics and the tradition of Greek and Roman agricultural writing (5). Most modern scholars have treated Vergil’s agricultural poem as a vehicle for some other message—whether political, moral, or literary—but Thibodeau hopes to renew interest in the poem’s treatment of agriculture for its own sake. Based on a thorough knowledge of Greco-Roman agronomy and a broad survey of relevant sources, he shows that Vergil’s presentation of agriculture differs significantly from that of his contemporaries, and he makes an attractive argument that these differences reveal part of Vergil’s purpose in the Georgics.

In Chapters 1–4, Thibodeau argues that Vergil’s intended original audience was wealthy landowners, whom the poet aims not so much to instruct as to entice to rustication and the further study of agronomy. The civil wars forced many of this class into an unhappy retirement from political life in the city, so the Georgics can be seen as a work of consolation carried out through a protreptic to agriculture. As Thibodeau shows, the Roman tradition before Vergil is generally hostile to the vita rustica, largely because its isolation precludes social and political advancement. Vergil, however, systematically distorts country life in ways that characterize it as a worthy alternative to the city and even, paradoxically, as a place where one could achieve glory. This argument is not only convincing, but also simple and elegant enough to teach with; one may hope it will finally supplant the dated view of the Georgics as an agricultural handbook advocating a return to the simpler days of peasant farming.

Thibodeau’s steady focus on agronomy—with its corresponding de-emphasis on the poem’s literary background—makes these chapters valuable as historical and economic context for any study of the Georgics, but also creates some blind spots. Thibodeau shows, e.g., that Vergil’s positive depiction of manual labor is foreign to the Roman agronomical tradition, but he fails to connect this perspective to Vergil’s literary model Hesiod, who enjoins work on his brother Perses throughout the Works and Days. Still, the book’s new perspective on Vergil’s audience gives it new traction with some previously difficult passages, like the Laudes ruris at the end of Georgics 2: where Ross and Thomas have seen the poem as provoking skepticism and pessimism through its “lying” presentation of rustic life as easy (e.g., fundit humo facilem victum iustissima tellus, 2.460), Thibodeau shows that much in this passage makes good sense from the perspective of a wealthy landowner, whose staff would handle the day-to-day difficulties of farm life.

In Chapter 5 Thibodeau departs from his early focus on agronomy to consider the Georgics in light of ancient literary criticism. Although it is not quite clear how this chapter fits with the rest of the book, it is nevertheless full of valuable insight into Vergil’s poetic method and its development. Proceeding from the ancient critical disagreement over the purpose of literature—instruction or entertainment (psychagōgia)—Thibodeau explores the poem’s “psychagogy,” i.e. its ability to excite and then relieve strong emotions in its readers, analogous to the excitement and catharsis of pity and fear that Aristotle saw in tragedy. Although didactic poetry was sometimes condemned for its failure to draw readers in emotionally, Thibodeau plausibly suggests that Vergil adapts technical advances by Nicander—who excited fear and pity by describing the effects of snake bites—and Lucretius—who excited and then undercut strong emotion to demonstrate its vanity—to involve his readers emotionally in his project of agricultural protreptic. To demonstrate, Thibodeau looks at how Vergil excites pathos in the Georgics, and how he “scripts” the emotional responses of his readers, finding (inter alia) that he creates emotional tension by exciting an emotion but ordering his addressee not to feel it (e.g., he should not forgive the horse’s pathetic old age, 3.95–100), and that he excites strong emotion only to purge it (catharsis) by channeling it into wonder (e.g., Aristaeus’s grief over the loss of his bees, 4.321–32 is dispelled by his wonder at his mother’s underwater home, 4.363–73). Thibodeau’s argument here is indirect, but his points are of great interest, and Vergilians will see implications for the Aeneid as well, since these techniques prefigure that poem’s well-known polyphony and its use of wonder/ignorance as a closural device (e.g. after Aeneas views his shield, 8.729–31).

Different parts of this book will be useful to different readers. Students will profit from its convenient Introduction, which lucidly surveys trends in the poem’s interpretation; teachers of literature and history will find Thibodeau’s narrative helpful for their accounts of the Augustan period; and scholars will find much of value in his endnotes, his survey of the poem’s early reception (Ch. 6), and his two highly informative appendices, which include a catalogue of the poem’s known early readers. The book’s greatest virtue is this assemblage of data, which allows Thibodeau to make good observations and novel suggestions. Not every detail of Thibodeau’s argument is equally satisfying, but its general contours emerge as both right and useful. And although some scholars may see insensitivities that result from his emphasis on economics, Thibodeau is remarkably sensitive to how Vergil creates an effect, even when one disagrees about why.