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An Environmental History of Ancient Greece and Rome. By Lukas Thommen. Translated by Philip Hill. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp xi + 186. Paper, $29.99. ISBN 978-0521-17465-7.

Reviewed by Jeremy McInerney, University of Pennsylvania

Thommen’s work illustrates both the strengths and shortcomings of a short handbook designed to introduce readers to the study of the environmental history of the Greek and Roman worlds. Constraints of the handbook format, especially length, make it unfair to compare it to more theoretically sophisticated works like Horden and Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea, or more exhaustive tomes such as Sallares’ magnificent 1991 volume, The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World, and in the space of a scant 142 pages of text Thommen is able to touch upon a broad range of topics, from deforestation to changes in shore-line, with short chapters on topics as varied as Fire, Water, Animals and Food, which is not to exhaust the list. Also, the work has a very thorough summary, in the Introduction, briefly noting various modern works devoted to environmental history. Thommen is admirably lucid in laying out the key ancient and modern terms used for discussing environmental matters. The section on further reading is also very helpful and the volume will be a good jumping off point for undergraduates working on environmentally-themed term papers.

A more difficult question to answer, however, is whether such a format is really desirable for a topic as immense as the environmental history of the Ancient Mediterranean. Time and again questions are raised, or more commonly, assertions are made, that one would like to have seen more fully teased out. For example, after a half-page discussion of the Greek understanding of climatic zones and meteorology, Thommen declares, “No concrete effects of this teaching on settlement activity are apparent” (25) This is strictly not true. Lothar Haselberger has shown quite convincingly that classical urban planning took account of Aristotelian notions of the winds. [[1]] Rather than a closed avenue, as Thommen’s comments suggest, this is a new line of inquiry that deserves much more attention. Similarly, a statement such as “During the Augustan period, the poets Vergil and Propertius praised the superior strength of the Roman Empire precisely because of its better environment” (76) borders on oversimplification. Debellare superbos et parcere subiectis is not an environmental manifesto!

A second reservation concerns Thommen’s decision to base his work primarily on literary sources (16) and to take into account “natural-scientific investigations” (which I take to mean archaeology in its fullest sense) “only to a limited degree.” Thus we get Oliver Rackham on the capacity of pine trees to regenerate and the revisionist view that widespread deforestation was not responsible for the degradation of the Greek countryside, and a passing reference to Hans Lohmann’s Atene survey, but no mention of the Nemea Valley Area Project, the Pylos Regional Area Project or the nearly fifty year old Minnesota-Messenia Project. Similarly, on the Roman side, an influential 2010 Dutch landscape and archaeological project entitled Regional Pathways to Complexity is simply absent. Such omissions are a concern: Thommen’s analysis of Roman agriculture relies far too heavily on Columella and Varro, while his treatment of Rome as an urban environment is skewed towards Horace and Martial’s familiar complaints about the noise, traffic and smell of the city. Once again, archaeology is being reduced to a bowl of cherries, to be picked for the juiciest bits but not systematically digested. That’s a step backwards.

Even if we follow Thommen and restrict the analysis to literary sources, there’s much here to cause raised eyebrows. It is not controversial to say that “In Greece the gods took anthropomorphic form,” but recent studies have explored the animal nature of Hera and Zeus, as well as the obvious cases of Athena Hippia and Poseidon Hippios in much greater depth. Accordingly, the statement that Poseidon “was primarily held responsible for earthquakes” is not wrong but only skims the surface, since the cult of the Earthshaker was central to the religious, political and ethnic identity of central Greece. [[2]] Another lost opportunity is the omission of any discussion of the Mycenaean draining of Lake Copais, despite a short section on drainage that mentions a similar, though more modest project under Alexander the Great. One might have expected the greatest engineering feat performed on the Greek mainland in three millennia to have warranted a mention.

The second half of the book is dedicated to Rome and in particular the environmental changes associated with the growth of imperial power. The section on roads is clear, if somewhat weighted towards the physical connections made between Italy and Germany without much attention to other provinces or regions. The same can be said of an interesting section on timber that makes some keen observations about Roman forestry practices in southern Germany. Here too, however, the highly selective nature of Thommen’s argument, which is assembled somewhat serendipitously, leaves the reader dissatisfied. For example, Thommen cites a lugubrious passage from Pliny on the human dilemma: man is weak, threatened by the environment, aided only by his technical resources, which, ironically, leave him even more exposed to destruction. Yet what qualifies this passage as programmatic (an illustration of “the fundamental dilemma of people in antiquity with respect to nature” (78)) rather than, say, Sophokles’ famous ode to man from the Antigone, in which human ingenuity is seen as a continuous triumph over nature?

So light is Thommen’s engagement that at times his pages read more as aperçu than argument. Page 97, for example, begins with bans on animal fights in the arena before moving to depictions on arches and sarcophagi of animal hunts, five lines on the Piazza Armerina mosaics, Vergil on bee colonies, Pliny on zoology in general, Neopythagoreans and vegetarianism, Plutarch on animal reason, Porphyry on avoiding carnivory, and finally, the New Testament, the Lamb of God and the Good Shepherd: a veritable smorgasbord!

Overall, students will find a good deal of useful information here but despite Thommen’s laudable concern for the environment his volume can hardly be said to have ascertained “the interactive complexes of effects between people and their environment” (15) in the ancient Mediterranean. Such a work remains to be written. A final note: Philip Hill’s translation is fine, although there are occasional missteps. “For whenever anyone was belated by a sacrifice …” (51) is not a happy expression.

[[1]] Lothar Haselberger, “Geometrie der Winde, windige Geometrie: Städtebau nach Vitruv und Aristophanes,” in Stadt und Umland-Diskussionen zur Archäologischen Bauforschung 7 (Mainz,1999) 90-100.

[[2]] See Sabine Szidat, Poseidon als Erderschütterer (Munich, 2001).

[©2013 by The Classical Association of the Middle West and South. All rights reserved.]

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Under Divine Auspices: Divine Ideology and the Visualisation of Imperial Power in the Severan Period. By Clare Rowan. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xvi + 303. Hardcover, $110.00. ISBN 978-1-107-02012-2.

Reviewed by Adam M. Kemezis, University of Alberta

The last ten years of scholarship have greatly enriched our understanding of the Severan period of imperial history (193-235), and Clare Rowan’s study of the emperors’ religious self-presentation represents both a synthesis of this new material and an important advance in its own right. It will be indispensable to specialists in the period, and of great interest both to scholars of imperial Rome’s religious and cultural history and also to students of the historical side of numismatics.

The book, a revised version of a Macquarie University doctoral thesis, consists of an introduction, methodological-and-background chapter and one chapter each on the four Severan emperors, followed by a brief conclusion and three appendices. Each of the main emperor-based chapters gives a detailed survey of surviving uses of religious imagery in visual media for that reign with particular emphasis on coinage, both imperial and civic.

The methodology chapter lays out Rowan’s approach to coins (19-31), which is notable for its stress on hoard evidence as opposed to catalogs; thus Rowan looks not only at which types were issued, but also at which types were most heavily issued. It is this that leads to the most important finding of the book overall, which is that religious imagery is considerably more prominent in Severan than in Antonine coinage when one considers it as a percentage of the total coins minted. Thus in a sample hoard of 80,000 coins, a coin of Alexander Severus is twice as likely to have a religious image as a coin of Marcus Aurelius (see Rowan’s Appendix 1). Furthermore, many of the cults invoked in Severan coinage are provincial in origin, suggesting a new ideological dynamic between center and periphery.

The remaining chapters detail the rather different emphasis that each emperor used in this practice. The chapter on Septimius Severus is the longest, due to the abundance of sources, and consists mostly of an important discussion of Septimius’ use of the tutelary gods of Leptis Magna. Some of this material has been covered very recently and in great depth by Achim Lichtenberger, in a book that Rowan was fortunately able to consult (Severus Pius Augustus: Studien zur sakralen Repräsentation und Rezeption der Herrschaft des Septimius Severus und seiner Familie (193-211 n. Chr.) Leiden, 2011). Rowan adds to this formidable study particularly in her coverage of numismatic material, of monuments in Leptis itself (84-102), and in her cultural-historical arguments, which are more straightforwardly presented without being any less sophisticated.

The chapter on Caracalla concentrates on an aspect of his persona that may be unfamiliar even to specialists: his obsession with his health. Rowan convincingly links his well-known devotion to Sarapis with numismatic references to Aesculapius and Apollo which seem to coincide with Caracalla’s travels to specific holy sites, and with literary references to his diseases (115-37). The iconography of the cults finds its way into imperial coinage as a sort of reflex to the appearance of imperial ideology in provincial coinage and art.

The chapter also contains detailed considerations of Caracalla’s visits to Troy and Alexandria (146-53). Elagabalus’ religious self-presentation is well mapped territory, and Rowan is less interested in breaking new ground than in placing what we know in better perspective. Her sensible conclusion is that, based on the visual and material evidence, Elagabalus’ presentation of himself as priest-emperor appears neither as a unilaterally and universally imposed policy, nor as a radical aberration from Severan practice generally, however disastrously it may eventually have failed.

The chapter on Alexander is the shortest, again as dictated by the available evidence, and Rowan mainly discusses his use of Jovian imagery and in general his reaction against Elagabalus. There is also a sensible discussion of Alexander’s heavy use of solar imagery (241-5).

What makes this book most useful is its breadth and accessible organization: Rowan brings together a very great deal of material for a medium-length book, both in terms of ancient evidence and of modern bibliography, and presents it sensibly without getting lost in technicalities. Above all to be commended is her treatment of coins. Her quantitative methodology brings out her most original new findings, and she is clearly far more comfortable with the technical aspects of numismatics than most historians (this reviewer very much included), but she keeps these details fully integrated within historical arguments, and the non-specialist never feels talked over or talked down to.

This same breadth does at times constitute a drawback. The book discusses nearly all the “greatest hits” of Severan art and architecture, but in many cases, such as the Arch of the Argentarii and Septimius Severus’ Forum Arch (104-7), the discussion adds little either to the overall argument of the book or to the separate scholarship on the monument, and seems to be there for the sake of completeness.

The treatment of literary evidence and of historical narrative is sometimes faulty (e.g. the description of the aftermath of Pertinax’s death at 34-5) and often heavily derivative of one point of view (e.g. Harker’s revisionist take on the Alexandrian violence under Caracalla). These points are ultimately tangential to Rowan’s larger argument, however. The idea of the Severans as religious innovators is of course not new, but much of the older work is ideologically problematic and/or based on uncritical readings of literary sources. Rowan’s findings, and the recent scholarship she has admirably incorporated into her study, will place the entire discussion on much firmer ground.

[©2013 by The Classical Association of the Middle West and South. All rights reserved.]

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Roman Disasters. By JERRY TONER. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 220. Hardcover, $25.00. ISBN: 978-0-7456-5102-6.

Reviewed by Herbert J. Benario, Emory University

When this book reached me around the middle of June, I recalled that, in the fall of 2000, I had arranged a panel for the Southern Section of CAMWS meeting on “Roman Military Disasters and Their Consequences,” consisting of four papers, which were published in The Classical World 96 (2003) 363-406. But the present volume treats sparingly manmade disasters, largely in warfare, such as the Romans’ terrible defeats at Cannae, in the Teutoburg Forest, and at Adrianople.

Its subject is rather essentially those calamities caused by Mother Nature: volcanic eruptions, flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, earthquakes. The book’s arrival was very timely, alas. There were daily reports of the horrendous flooding in northern Europe. Not long before, tornadoes had leveled large sections of central Oklahoma. Forest fires were devastating parts of California and Colorado.Every classicist will think immediately of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. We may not recall that there had been an earthquake in Pompeii seventeen years before, nor should one forget the seemingly continuous eruptions of Mt. Etna and the horrendous earthquake at Messina in 1908.

It is disasters such as these which are the prime subject of Toner’s book. There are two main themes: how did the Romans respond to these overwhelming disasters and what lessons, if any, the people drew from them or tried to explain them in some rational manner. In our day we have splendid communications, heavy equipment to attempt to give immediate succor, and trained dogs which can find and rescue buried people. But, all in all, we have not advanced very far from the time of the Romans. We may anticipate an earthquake or predict a tsunami, but we cannot forestall them.

Toner’s book is the first in my memory which treats such a huge range of disasters. I quote here from page 10 his subjects:

natural hazards:

atmospheric: rain, snow, hurricane

hydrological: floods, drought

geological: earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides

biological: epidemic diseases, blight, plagues of insects, forest fires

technological hazards

fire, hazardous materials, destructive processes, structural failure, mechanical devices, organizational failure

violence:

war, rebellion, assault, ethnic cleansing

Perhaps the Roman disasters which most readily come to a reader’s mind are the collapse of the amphitheater in Fidenae in 26, followed by a huge fire on the Caelian Hill (Tacitus Ann. 4,62-4), the earthquake at Pompeii and eruption of Vesuvius, in 62 and 79, and the great fire at Rome in 64, which may have been set at Nero’s instigation. The emperor Titus’ short reign was marked by this eruption and another massive fire in Rome. Even the emperor could not do much against them; human capabilities were too frail (“Oh Gertrude, Gertrude! When sorrows come, they come not single spies, But in battalions” [Hamlet, IV 1])

When a disaster struck in antiquity, it was almost impossible for help to arrive from any distance, save for the delivery of food. This was the case into the nineteenth century, until the invention of the railroad. The victims did the best they could, fear and panic generally reigned, but one could do little more than hope and pray. The division of society into its various strata could help, because the aristocracy had private resources which they could tap, if they so wished.

It was easier to find blame in military disasters. In ad 9, the disaster in the Teutoburg Forest was irrevocably linked with Quinctilius Varus, and to a large degree quite appropriately. Yet some of the blame must fall on Augustus himself. Had he appointed to the legateship of Germany an experienced soldier like Caecina, history might well have been different. But conjecture can never lead to an answer, why some disaster occurred. Religion was most often invoked. In the first century ad and later, the Christians could argue that God had caused A or B to punish the remaining pagans; conversely, the pagans could claim that the disaster came because the Christians had abandoned the ancient religion. But none of this is satisfactory.

Discussion of the consequences of disasters is largely psychological and sociological. The last two chapters, “The Psychological Impact” and “Roman Disasters in Context,” recapitulate the arguments which Toner has presented. 

The book’s publication is almost foolproof. I offer here a few suggestions and amendments. On page 18, eighth line from the bottom, use of the noun “vice” for “vise” befuddled me; is this a British usage? In the first paragraph on the next page, the Teutoburg forest is located in “what is now southern Germany.” Not so; if one accepts Kalkriese as the battle site, it will be well into the northern part of the country, northeast of Osnabrück. On 143, the Arch of Gallienus deserves mention.

This is fine and informative book, for which the author deserves great praise. The subject is sad and gloomy, and the reader will not be very cheerful as he/she works through it. But the reader will know much more about Roman disasters at the end. Bene factum!

[©2013 by The Classical Association of the Middle West and South. All rights reserved.]

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Reading the Letters of Pliny the Younger: An Introduction. By Roy K. Gibson and Ruth Morello. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. iv + 350. Hardcover, $99.00. ISBN 978-0-521-84292-1.

Reviewed by Barbara Weinlich, Eckerd College

Organized in eight chapters and supplemented by a map, four appendices, references, an index of passages, and a general index, this highly informative book is devoted to the process of unpacking Pliny’s Letters as an artistic product, a cultural document, and a reading experience. What makes this introduction so interesting and engaging is the way in which it meets the twofold goal of covering a range of reading methodologies to Pliny’s correspondence and a selection of its key themes and topics. Each chapter combines a (different) subject with a (different) approach and thus exemplifies a number of interpretive possibilities that Pliny’s Letters-both individually and as a collection-offer to the reader.

In good didactic (and pedagogical) fashion, Chapter 1 (“Reading a Life: Letters, Book 1”) chooses the most popular approach, i.e. reading Pliny “for his life,” and applies it to the first book. The chapter elucidates how biographical and narrative gaps as well as the use of metaphor are part of an artistic concept by means of which Pliny shapes a meta-text in Book 1. By uncovering the high degree of complexity of Pliny’s text, this chapter makes the reader realize that Book 1 offers first and foremost an elite member’s autobiographical perspective, not narrative, on a new political era.

Chapter 2 (“Reading a Book: Letters, Book 6”) studies the arrangement of Pliny’s Letters for evidence of artistic design. Although this approach is primarily applied to Book 6, it introduces the reader to structures that create coherence not only on the book but also on the collection level. As to the latter, the chapter points to a narrative cycle that stretches across several books and illuminates how the interaction between Book 6 and the cyclical narrative are meant to make a particular point (about Pliny).

Reading “by cycle” then is the approach that Chapter 3 (“Epistolary Models: Cicero and Seneca”) applies to Pliny’s Letters for exploring their literary context. Though Seneca and Ovid do not remain unmentioned, the chapter is mostly concerned with the question of how Pliny positions his work and his epistolary persona vis-à-vis Cicero. Based on both textual and intertextual evidence, the chapter highlights Pliny’s innovative contributions to the genre, his ambivalent attitude toward his most eminent predecessor, and the artistic manifestation of this enormously stimulating, yet also limiting, hate-love for Cicero.

Further examining the ways in which Pliny wishes to present himself to the reader and once again applying the approach of reading Pliny ‘by cycle,’ Chapter 4 (“Pliny’s Elders and Betters: The Elder Pliny, Vestricius Spurinna, Corellius Rufus, Verginius Rufus [and Silius Italicus]”) focuses on the cyclical narratives devoted to those who acted as his good or bad role models (or both). Chapter 5 (“Pliny’s Peers: Reading for the Addressee”), in turn, focuses on so-called friendship narratives, i.e., cycles of letters about or addressed to a number of Pliny’s peers.

Turning to a key theme of the Letters, Chapter 6 (“Otium: How to Manage Leisure”) explores how Pliny defines his concept of otium vis-à-vis his epistolographical predecessor Seneca and, more broadly, vis-à-vis the elite’s concern with time management. Alternating between sequential readings and the study of individual letters, the chapter illuminates in which ways Pliny both agrees and disagrees with the Senecan tradition and how he establishes his personal version of otium in his Letters as well as in elite culture.

Adopting the anthologist’s approach, Chapter 7 (“Reading the Villa Letters: 9.7, 2.17, 5.6”) focuses on the three best-known letters on Pliny’s villas. While this chapter is specifically concerned with exploring an essential aspect of Pliny’s discourse on otium and implicitly on himself, it first and foremost demonstrates the interpretive benefit gained from integrating varied, seemingly exclusive, approaches (e.g. archaeological, historical, and literary) to the villa letters. In addition, Chapter 7 stresses the significance of Book 9 and of Letter 9.7 in particular for providing important reading guidance to the earlier villa descriptions by Pliny himself.

Chapter 8 (“The Grand Design: How to Read the Collection”) is concerned with closure and the significance of Books 9 and 10 in this regard. Roughly divided in halves, the chapter first makes a well-argued case for reading Books 1-9 as one unit and then considers the interpretive potential of Book 10 as an integral part, continuation, and even climax of the Letters-text.

The eight chapters are complemented by four appendices that provide a “Pliny timeline,” a catalog of contents and addressees of Books 1-9, bibliographical help on popular topics in the Letters, and a list of the collection’s main characters.

This co-authored volume has many strengths. Above all, it is a very stimulating read, offering food for thought about approaching and exploring Pliny’s Letters. Moreover, it is written with great clarity and with an eye for a well-balanced presentation. Roughly of equal length, each chapter contributes to a varied, yet thematically coherent introduction. Diversity is achieved by the fact that each author gives a different overall meaning to Pliny. This change of perspective(s) may pose a challenge to the reader and may at times result in re-reading a chapter or at least parts

[©2013 by The Classical Association of the Middle West and South. All rights reserved.]

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The Invention of Greek Ethnography: from Homer to Herodotus.  By Joseph E. Skinner.  Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.  Pp. vii + 343. $85.00.  ISBN 978-0-19-979360-0.

Reviewed by Sandra Blakely, Emory University

The Invention of Greek Ethnography is a welcome addition to studies of identity in the ancient Mediterranean.  Ambitious in scope and intelligent in execution, the book positions the question of ethnographic prose in the broad context of Mediterranean engagements with cultural identity, articulated in art historical and archaeological as well as literary sources. 

Skinner challenges many of the models traditional for emergence of Greek ethnography: that it was a Greek invention; a prose genre; characterized by simple dualities; a response to the “Barbarians” encountered in the Persian war; and that a preference for aggregative and ethnic identities changed, after that encounter, to oppositional and cultural ones. He defines ethnography as “thinking about identity from the point of view of an outsider” and seeks continually to recover the perspective of the man in the Greek street. Ethnographic discourse emerges as a process as ongoing and ubiquitous as the creation of cultural identity, both of which were continually evolving activities rather than fixed ideas and bounded genres.      

The book is organized into five chapters, which proceed from the intellectual history of the problem to a survey of the chief objects of ethnographic investigation, an overview of the cultural mechanisms for addressing the question, case studies in Olbia, Campania, Delphi and Olympia, and a return to the question of Herodotus’ ethnography, informed by the results of the first four chapters.

Chapter 1, “Ethnography before ethnography,” establishes the need for the study: while scholarly monographs and edited volumes on Herodotus have been exploding, the study of ethnography as a genre has been largely static. Material evidence, including Achaemenid cylinder seals, Egyptian reliefs from 1400 BC, and Persepolis reliefs counter assumptions that ethnography was a uniquely Greek or a fifth century invention. 

Skinner then outlines the concept of a Greek prose ethnography, beginning with Jacoby’s invention of the idea, his challenges in maintaining the category as he assembled the FGH, and the historical context in which he operated, in which traveling ‘discourses of wonder’ drew popular enthusiasm, and ancient Greece was privileged as the heart and soul of European rationalism – inherently incomparable, and safely distant from the ‘primitives’ studied by Jacoby’s anthropological counterparts.

Chapter 2, “Populating the Imaginaire,” provides a sketch of key players in the Greek ethnographic tradition, from the purely mythic, including Cyclopes and Amazons, to the Thracians, Lydians and others of historical contact. Skinner integrates iconographic, archaeological and textual traditions, and underwrites his presentation with a productive elision between the imaginary and historical. The chapter foregrounds the shortsightedness of approaches which value ethnographies primarily for their historicity, and demonstrates the abundance of Greek ethnographic traditions before the Persian wars, traditions sufficiently individual and detailed to counter reductive polarities of Greeks and “Others.”    

Chapter 3, “Mapping Ethnography,” provides a survey of the cultural mechanisms through which ethnographic information was disseminated.  These begin with literary and sub-literary forms, including lists, epithets, stereotypes, epic and epinicia, and conclude with the material evidence typically excluded from discussions of ethnography-the coins, ceramics, metalwork and sculpture in which iconographic depictions of self and others, as well as regional stylistic variations, provide reflections on ethnic identities.  Skinner emphasizes the place for movement and variation: epithets are defined as “mobile, discursive operators that can be continually reworked” (115); stereotypes as cognitive devices to help deal with social complexity; lists as mechanisms of signification which segment, order, condense and transform.   

In Chapter 4, “Mapping Identities,” Skinner brings the principles established in the first three chapters to two loci at the farthest reaches of the Mediterranean-Olbia and Calabria-and to Olympia and Delphi as two “imagined centers”.  Here as throughout the study, the debates and the nuances regarding each case study are carefully accounted for, and an impressive range of both material and literary evidence is brought to bear.  Herodotus’ accounts of Skyles and Anacharsis, read against the evidence from Olbia and the Scythians, emerges as authorial choice rather than historical inevitability. 

For Calabria, often deemed a cultural backwater because of its modern poverty, Skinner demonstrates the deep prehistory of Greek contact, the rich agricultural possibilities in the eyes of incoming Greeks, and material evidence for wide-reaching trade networks. Calabrians emerge as people “immersed in a sea of ethnographic imaginings,”  (211), including epic, lyric, sculpture and vase paintings, in the constant renegotiation of power and identity. Skinner questions the extent to which Delphi and Olympia functioned as centers for information about foreign lands, and foregrounds the contested and competing Greek identities which were played out in the form of genealogical manipulation and victor’s lists, read against foreign votives and myths which made the sanctuaries the point of entry for exotic imaginary groups such as the Hyperboreans.

Chapter 5, “The Invention of Greek Ethnography,” returns to the question of Herodotus and reframes his invention as the choice of prose narrative for the exploration of other ethnicities.  A prose ethnography could serve, on the one hand, the interests of the emerging democratic polis, a context in which a competitive display of knowledge could replace divine inspiration as the basis of authority. A less Athenocentric approach, however, is both more appropriate for Herodotus’ origins in multi-ethnic Ionia, and for Skinner’s model of ethnography as a continual cultural process, more nuanced than simple, in which Greeks were as concerned to distinguish themselves from other Greeks as they were from the “Barbarians” on whom so much scholarly ink has been spilt.  

[©2013 by The Classical Association of the Middle West and South. All rights reserved.]