CJ Online Revew: Beneker, The Passionate Statesman

March 12, 2013 ~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

posted with permission

The Passionate Statesman: Erōs and Politics in Plutarch’s Lives. By Jeffrey Beneker. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xii + 258. Hardcover, £55.00/$99.00. ISBN 978-0-19-969590-4.

Reviewed by Sophia Xenophontos, University of Oxford

In twenty-first-century politics, erotic passion is typically connected with scandalous stories of the private lives of well-known politicians. But when it comes to Plutarch’s statesmen of the Graeco-Roman past, erōs, or erotic desire, does not always denigrate their moral character and political careers. In his stimulating and well-argued book, Beneker explores the interplay between passion and politics in the Parallel Lives on the basis of three biographical pairs, the Alexander–Caesar, Demetrius–Antony, and Agesilaus–Pompey. These cases offer different perspectives in the way Plutarch represents erōs: sometimes it rewards the hero, at other times it destroys him; still, Plutarch’s ethical message may be unified in his focus on self-control as the mean between sexual lavishness and total abstention.

The book comprises a short Introduction and five main Chapters. The lack of a separate conclusion is compensated for by the brief summaries Beneker gives towards the end of each Chapter; these work most effectively in reminding readers of the main premises and leading them securely in new interpretative directions. Furthermore, the lucidity in exposition and diligent analysis of relevant passages make the book easily accessible.

Beneker argues that Plutarch introduced the element of erōs in his biographies as a response to previous accounts that failed to interpret properly certain historical events. In creating thus his ethical biography, Plutarch attributed the public success of a hero to the control of his erotic impulses in his private life. This argumentative strand is not totally new—one need only refer to the pioneering work of Pelling and Swain, who have explained the heroes’ uncontrollable emotions as resulting from their insufficient education. Beneker, however, casts light on the modulation not of any kind of passion (anger, ambition, envy), but of erotic desire in particular, and not on the causes of pathos but on its consequences.

In Chapter 1, Beneker explores the philosophical background to Plutarch’s notion of erōs, by delving carefully into Platonic psychology (division of the soul) and Aristotelian ethics (concept of friendship, philia). In light of the Amatorius, Beneker suggests that an ideal marital relationship is the product of mutual love of both soul and body; and he then applies these theoretical views to the case studies of Brutus and Porcia and of Pericles and Aspasia. In describing the way that Ismenodora develops the character of younger Bacchon in the Amatorius (31–9) or how Pericles becomes an ethical model to the Athenians in rational response to passions (43–54), he rightly makes his case by employing the vocabulary of “piloting” and “government” of which Plutarch is so fond. I wonder whether Beneker here could have pondered moral guidance in Plutarch as an alternative form of power. That would make sense in light of Plutarch’s role as a dedicated moralist, who differs from his contemporary sophistic setting which assesses power as political or social imposition. It would also fit Beneker’s emphasis in the rest of the book, and especially his extensive discussion of Antony’s relation to dominating women in Chapter 4 (173–94). In commenting on the influence that Fulvia and Cleopatra exercise over Antony and the relevant deterioration of the hero’s character, Plutarch uses the intense language of power, e.g. Ant. 10.4–7: κρατεῖν, ἄρχειν, στρατηγεῖν, and most significantly γυναικοκρατία (female domination of men). Similar overtones occur with Demetrius’ submission to Lamia (Demetr. 16.6) and Antony’s manipulation by Curio (Ant. 2.4), all of them cases of ethical imposition.

In Chapter 2, Beneker establishes the term “historical-ethical reconstruction,” which refers to Plutarch’s technique of transforming history through the lens of ethics. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the precise meaning of παραλόγως in the proem to Pelopidas–Marcellus (2.8–9) (66–9), which not only encourages sensitivity in translation for modern readers, but also affirms Plutarch’s sophisticated language and often ambiguous expression. In this Chapter, Beneker is insightful in associating Plutarch’s system of characterization with larger philosophical contexts of human psychology. In at least two cases (84 and 101; cf. 176) he persuasively refers to Plutarch’s depiction of “types” rather than of “individuals,” with particular allusions to Plato’s descriptions of the timocratic or the tyrannical man from the Republic. Such distinctions not only improve upon the existing discussion of “character” and “personality” in Plutarch; they additionally offer new ways of evaluating the appropriation of Plutarch’s Platonic material.

Chapters 3 and 4 deal with how eroticism determines the course of a public career: Alexander and Caesar withstand erotic appetites for the benefit of their political and military objectives, but are later on undone by their erōs for glory. Demetrius and Antony succumb to carnal pleasures, so that erōs eventually brings on their catastrophe. Chapter 5 revisits the notion of self-restraint in Plutarch’s ethics by welding together the four previous chapters. One of Beneker’s contributions to the understanding of Plutarch’s theory of passions is his analysis of the gradations of sophrōsyne in Alexander. That helps him to argue that Xenophon is an important, though less known, philosophical model for Plutarch’s conception of erotic desire. With the examples of Agesilaus and Pompey, Beneker concludes that acting ethically shows a person’s ability for a successful performance of his public duties.

I recommend Beneker’s book as an excellent resource not just for scholars and students of Plutarch, but for anyone interested in Greek politics and ethics.

CJ Online Review McPherran, Plato’s Republic

March 11, 2013 ~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

posted with permission:

Plato’s Republic: A Critical Guide. Edited by Mark L. McPherran. Cambridge Critical Guides. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xiv + 273. Hardcover, £53.00/$90.00. ISBN 978-0-521-49190-7.

Reviewed by David Schur, Brooklyn College, The City University of New York

As McPherran observes in his introduction, this collection of twelve essays is not for those just beginning to explore the Republic, but is most suited for scholars pursuing more advanced paths of academic study. Each of these essays is clearly written and well organized, and the book offers a fresh and thought-provoking body of inquiry. While accessible to all readers who have studied the Republic, this book will resonate best with philosophers drawn to the kinds of logical quandaries that arise when one looks for consistency in the arguments deployed by Socrates over the course of a Platonic dialogue; most of the essays revisit fairly specific cruxes that have been previously identified and pondered by modern scholars. (Zena Hitz on degenerate regimes and Malcolm Schofield on music are notable for addressing neglected topics.) Most of the papers here had their genesis in a colloquium on ancient philosophy held at the University of Arizona, Tucson; the resulting collection brings together distinguished philosophical perspectives on a full range of topics, including politics, moral psychology, education, mimesis, the divided line, and the structure of the dialogue.

In the present review, it will be possible only to indicate some trends and exceptions found in the volume. An installment in a series of guides to philosophical criticism, the book presents a fairly homogeneous picture of how contemporary scholars approach Plato’s dialogues. Issues of character, setting, and the like are largely ignored in favor of analytic literalism. The work here is dominated by the careful (sometimes superfine) teasing out of logical claims and arguments, arguments that Plato is understood to be endorsing, but which nonetheless require further explanation. Guided by the assumption that Plato must have meant to communicate a consistent, coherent, logical, and (more or less) linear series of arguments, the authors regularly address certain apparent inadequacies—unfortunate or infelicitous misunderstandings that stem from Plato’s indirectness as well as from our own limitations.

Accordingly, these scholars often set out to reconstruct Plato’s arguments, correcting mismatches between the author’s form of expression and our own powers of comprehension. In these readings, puzzling parts of the Republic present a challenge to the dialogue’s status as a logically coherent whole. So, for example, Rachana Kamtekar is concerned with rescuing Socrates’ defense of justice from being occluded by the apparently irrelevant but lengthily elaborated ideal city of the Republic; she does this by viewing the city as a primarily ethical (rather than political) part of the dialogue’s argumentation. Nicholas D. Smith answers the “happy philosopher problem” by suggesting that the return of (potential) philosophers to the cave can fit into the logic of the dialogue if we understand happiness in terms of Socrates’ explanation of psychological harmony. Christopher Shields, arguing that the soul in Socrates’ account may be understood as having aspectual rather than compositional parts, is able to reconcile the soul’s tripartition with its immortality. Shields thereby “saves Plato” (167), or our interpretation of his text, from a contradiction that would ultimately seem to undermine Socrates’ explanation of justice. And Malcolm Schofield reconciles two seemingly incompatible versions of mimesis presented in the Republic by directing our focus to the importance of music, using evidence from Plato’s Laws to support his striking claim that “the few pages on music in the Republic give us a keener insight into its theory of the shaping of the human soul than anything else in the dialogue” (246).

Some of the essays are less conclusive. McPherran observes multiple ways in which the Myth of Er seems to weaken “the Republic’s entire project of adumbrating a theory of justice” (135); unlike his fellow contributors, however, McPherran displays an unusual willingness to leave a puzzle standing, and he invites readers confronting Socrates’ account of the afterlife to “admire and commiserate with Plato on the size of the problem he raised but did not solve” (143). In an essay containing references to an amusing range of modern Atlantises, Julia Annas anchors the Atlantis story in the Republic’s emphasis on the intrinsic value of virtuous behavior; at the same time, Annas suggests that the story (like Socrates’ description of the cave, she might have added) may really have been too seductive for Plato’s purposes.

The contributions by G. R. F. Ferrari and Rachel Barney, which open the volume, are distinguished by broader and especially fertile topics. Ferrari confronts the underlying and pervasive problem of Socrates’ reluctant participation in the dialogue’s recorded conversation. Socrates’ role as an internal narrator, observes Ferrari, draws attention to Plato’s authorial control. And Barney takes the highly original approach of considering ring composition, typically associated with Homeric verse, as a philosophically significant aspect of Plato’s writing.

The essays in this book rely on various translations of the Republic and Plato’s other works, with transliterated Greek provided for key textual details. Each essay is accompanied by endnotes, while the back matter contains a bibliography of works cited, an index of passages, and an index of names and subjects. The book is handsome, well edited, and—given the range, density, and number of contributions—pleasingly slender.

Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews

March 4, 2013 ~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

rcReview: The Murder of Cleopatra

March 2, 2013March 2, 2013 ~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

[editor’s note: I purchased the Kindle edition, which explains the lack of page references in what follows]

Brown, P. (2013). The murder of Cleopatra: History’s greatest cold case. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

This is not a scholarly book. The author — Pat Brown — is a noted criminal profiler who has authored several books germaine to that subject and has appeared on assorted news programs. In trying to turn the death of Cleopatra into a “cold case”, however, she is clearly out of her element. Although her book has a very impressive bibliography of secondary sources, she seems to be either padding heavily, or is deliberately choosing to ignore quite a bit of Classical scholarship which has gone before. Indeed, when this blog mentioned a hypish piece written by the author in the Huffington post a couple of weeks ago (Cleopatra Murdered? Hmmmm ….) , she carried on a conversation with me in the comments in which she clearly either has no idea or is unwilling to acknowledge that pretty much all the questions she raises have been dealt with before by professionals in the field, and they did it without resort to speculation being built upon circularity built upon speculation supported by arguments e silentio built upon sentences beginning with the word “surely” and overuse of the first person singular pronoun. The book is, however, somewhat unique in that it appears to have arisen out of a documentary of the same name from a couple of years ago (rather than the other way around, which is more usual). Indeed, if you want a good TL;DR version of the book, you can still see the German version on Youtube, although for how long is impossible to say:

Outside of the lack of a scholarly approach, Brown’s chief ‘sin’, as it were, is in looking at Cleopatra’s death almost solely through the eyes of a 21st century criminal profiler who seems to think the ancients were “just like us” and that ancient historians like Plutarch were writing about events in such a way that they could substitute for a modern police crime scene report. What’s worse, is she seems to think that the ‘Hollywood’ or Shakespearean view of Cleopatra’s demise is the one which is generally accepted by “historians”, who are held up as nameless strawfolk on a fairly regular basis. More than that, she spends an awful lot of time not believing anything Plutarch says, sometimes for good reasons, but more often for questionable ones to paradoxically bolster her own baseless speculations.

Enough of generalities, however, let’s examine some specifics. I really don’t want to do a chapter-by-chapter critique (which this thing actually deserves) because I really don’t have an attention span long enough to write such a thing. We are fortunate, however, that brief excerpt of The Murder of Cleopatra has been put up at The Scientist, as it includes what might be called Brown’s Credo – a list of all the things she believes. I won’t deal with all of these, but fittingly, it begins with one of Brown’s more outlandish claims:

I believed Cleopatra was tortured.

This comes following chapter eighteen, which is entitled “The Unforeseen Murder of Antony”, which begins with a long digression about how Egyptian temples were designed — it later turns out — to argue that Cleopatra couldn’t possibly have dragged the dying Antony up to a window, as portrayed by Plutarch (a very long excerpt from Plutarch is also included here). Eventually her head is “spinning at Plutarch’s contorted logic” and so she decides it makes more sense that Antony was actually murdered by his own men. In the next chapter, “The Capture of Cleopatra”, the focus is on another section from that excerpt, in which Cleopatra tears her breasts and garments in grief over Antony. Brown doubts that Cleopatra would have done such things to herself because of her high levels of narcissism and the fact that she didn’t ‘fall apart’ when Julius Caesar was murdered or when she and Antony escaped from Actium (although I don’t know how that last one fits in). She does acknowledge that this was the sort of thing one might do for a loved one, but another part of her credo is:

I believed Cleopatra never loved Antony.

… the arguments presented for which I really won’t get into, but it’s all part of trying to find an alternate explanation for Cleopatra’s “self abuse”. To further cast doubt on Cleopatra engaging in what is a well-known traditional act of mourning, Brown decides to ‘role play’ to see if Cleopatra could inflict “the level of harm” that various sources claim for such actions. She tried beating her own breasts and decided it would require “hysterical grief to keep up such a ridiculous activity”. To tear clothes and lacerate one’s breasts would require “a crazed emotional haze.” Adding to her evidence is a typical bit of e silentio — Plutarch’s report of Proculeius intervening when she was attempting to stab herself with a knife. She suggests (through questions) that if Cleopatra was already bloodied from these grieving actions, that Proculeius would have believed she had already stabbed herself. Brown further thinks that Proculeius would have checked for such wounds and/or would have informed Octavian of all the bruises and gashes.

Yet he apparently notices none of these things, nor does he call for medical assistance. He also never notes that she has exposed either of her breasts for examination.

Note to Brown: Plutarch ain’t writing a police report. He is drawing on other sources and they aren’t dealing with a prosecutor and a judge. That women in the ancient world could rip garments and lacerate themselves is a common enough idea in the ancient Mediterranean world, as Brown does seem to know. The fact that it — and even Proculeius’ actions — doesn’t fit with her own world view is the problem here, not Plutarch’s description of it.

Another item from the ‘Credo’:

I believed Cleopatra was strangled.

To get to this is incredibly convoluted and there is much criticism of Plutarch based on the traditional ‘asp’ story. Indeed, a major segment of the documentary version was designed to demonstrate that there weren’t a lot of snakes capable of killing a human so quickly, and even if the cobra were successfully smuggled in as suggested, it wouldn’t be sufficient to kill Cleopatra and her two slaves. The book actually opens with a long section all about temples which, it later turns out, is designed simply to stress that the blocks that temples were made from were so close together that the snake — which was never found — could not possibly have escaped from whatever room Cleopatra was in. It then goes on to present the accounts of the death from Plutarch, Dio and Suetonius. Then Brown puts on her profiler hat and tells what she does when she deals with a crime scene and then applies it to Cleo:

The queen’s physician, who visited the scene of the crime and pronounced the ladies dead, did not state the deaths were natural, so we can determine that their deaths were at least suspicious.

Hmmm … I don’t recall any mention of a ‘queen’s physician’ … ancient folks don’t need to call in a doctor to declare someone dead.

She goes on to question the asp story, and does not seem to acknowledge that the asp story has been questioned for quite a long time, both by ancient historians (as seen in the alternate accounts in Dio and Plutarch) and in modern accounts. Readers with access to JSTOR, e.g., might want to check out the exchange between Griffiths and Baldwin in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology on the snake (or snakes) involved and the likelihood that the slaves took poison (J. Gwyn Griffiths, “The Death of Cleopatra VII”, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 47 (1961), pp. 113-118; B. Baldwin, “The Death of Cleopatra VII”, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 50 (1964), pp. 181-182 ; J. Gwyn Griffiths, “The Death of Cleopatra VII: A Rejoinder and a Postscript”, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 51 (1965), pp. 209-211). We might also note that Brown’s claim that Plutarch is first to mention the story underscores her shaky handling of all the ancient attestations of Cleopatra’s death (Horace, Carmina 1.37 anyone?). Brown also rejects the suggestion that simple poison was involved — which, I suspect, most modern scholars at least mention, if not endorse. Brown’s objections are based solely on there being no mention of a ‘bottle’, as if a bottle was the only means of carrying poison in the ancient world. She ignores, it seems, Dio’s account of the poison hairpin. Even if we don’t buy into that, we have to point out that Cleopatra was renowned for being able to hide poison, as an account from Pliny (21.9 via Perseus) reveals:

At the time when preparations were making for the battle that was eventually fought at Actium, Antonius held the queen in such extreme distrust as to be in dread of her very attentions even, and would not so much as touch his food, unless another person had tasted it first. Upon this, the queen, it is said, wishing to amuse herself with his fears, had the extremities of the flowers in a chaplet dipped in poison, and then placed it upon her head. After a time, as the hilarity increased apace, she challenged Antonius to swallow the chaplets, mixed up with their drink. Who, under such circumstances as these, could have apprehended treachery? Accordingly, the leaves were stripped from off the chaplet, and thrown into the cup. Just as Antonius was on the very point of drinking, she arrested his arm with her hand.—”Behold, Marcus Antonius,” said she, “the woman against whom you are so careful to take these new precautions of yours in employing your tasters! And would then, if I could exist without you, either means or opportunity of effecting my purpose be wanting to me?” Saying this, she ordered a man to be brought from prison, and made him drink off the potion; he did so, and fell dead3 upon the spot.

A ‘chaplet’ is a garland for the head (I had to look it up) … this too is not mentioned by Brown, but it’s obviously important. If Cleopatra wanted to use poison, she knew how to hide it. Whatever the case, we can turn to the evidence presented for Cleopatra being strangled. Brown doesn’t present any … the whole strangling thing is the culmination of her “reconstruction” (Chapter 20). This is a chapter which is essentially a work of bad fiction, with painful dialogues and descriptions, most of which would be hard to support with any evidence at all.

If I haven’t lost you yet, I’ll deal with the culminating bit of her Credo as a sort of conclusion:

I believed Cleopatra may have been one of the most brilliant, cold-blooded, iron-willed rulers in history and the truth about what really happened was hidden behind a veil of propaganda and lies set in motion by her murderer, Octavian, and the agenda of the Roman Empire.

I don’t think anyone would disagree that Cleopatra was, to some extent, the victim of a propaganda campaign (although Antony was the major target of such), but we might be hesitant to see Octavian as a “murderer” (I won’t get into the section where she decides he was gay as well). Even here, however, Brown isn’t breaking new ground — Michael Grant suggested such things back in 1972 in his tome dedicated to the Egyptian Queen. But it is very difficult for those who are familiar with the ancient sources — and not just translations of Plutarch and Dio — and the historical and cultural milieu in which Cleopatra et al were living, to see the death of Cleopatra as having any real advantage for Octavian. Indeed, the current ‘party line’ — that exhibiting her in his triumph and then allowing her to live in some other place — would be an amazing exhibition of his own clementia. To emphasize this, we can note (along with Adrian Goldsworthy, p. 384 and in a discussion with Dorothy King which she mentioned to me a few weeks ago), the precedent had already been set by Julius Caesar who sent Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoe into exile in Ephesus … we won’t get into that story again, though.

As can possibly be surmised from the foregoing — which was incredibly difficult to write because there are so very many things to object to in this book — this isn’t the sort of book which should be gracing the shelves of scholars. If you feel you must purchase it, get a Kindle edition so at least trees don’t have to suffer … if you must have a print version, wait a month or so. This is destined to be filling the remaindered bin very soon.

CJ Online Review: Potter, Loeb Hippocrates vol. 10

February 28, 2013 ~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ 1 Comment

posted with permission:

Hippocrates: Volume X. Edited and translated by PAUL POTTER. Loeb Classical Library 520. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2012. Pp. xxii + 432. Hardcover, $24.00/£15.95. ISBN 978-0-674-99683-0.

Reviewed by Lesley Dean-Jones, University of Texas at Austin

In 1983, after a hiatus of fifty-two years, Potter produced the fifth volume in the Loeb translation of Hippocrates and with the appearance of the present volume he will have made accessible in modern English translations thirty-two treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus.[[1]] Many of these treatises had no previous English translation and some of them (as is the case with On Barrenness in the current volume) had not been edited since the mid-nineteenth century editions and translations of Littré and Ermerins (French and Latin, respectively). For this Potter deserves heartfelt thanks.

Apart from the ready availability of text and translation there is much that is useful in these volumes. Each volume is introduced with a very brief account of the manuscript tradition of and relationship between the treatises translated in the volume and a brief select bibliography. The present volume also has a brief note on technical terms (as did volume VIII). Each treatise has its own brief introduction explaining when it was first associated with the name of Hippocrates, the nature of the treatise, an outline of its organization (very helpful) and a list of the editions, translations and studies that have been done on it. Where previous editions exist Potter bases his edition largely on them. In the case of Barrenness he collated the manuscripts that were unavailable to Littré and Ermerins (M & V) from microfilm. This volume also includes Lexicons of the therapeutic agents used in the treatises in both English and Greek. Volume VI had similar indices of foods and drugs and I have found these very helpful. Volume VI also had indices of symptoms and diseases and I could have wished that Volume X did too, at least of symptoms since the illnesses detailed in the treatises in this volume are not given explicit names that often.

There are five treatises in the volume. Four deal with human reproduction: Generation, Nature of the Child, Nature of Women, Barrenness. The fifth treatise, Diseases IV, is almost certainly written by the author of Generation and Nature of the Child and is quite rightly included here. The relationship of this group of three treatises to Nature of Women and Barrenness—and to the two gynecological treatises yet to appear in a full English translation,[[2]] Diseases of Women I & II—is a vexed question on which there is no consensus at the moment, but the treatises at the very least share some theories (importantly the existence of hydrops as a significant bodily fluid) and the inclusion of all five in one volume is not unwarranted.

With that said, however, I do wonder if the non-specialist reader is well served by this use of space. As my repeated use of the modifier “brief” above indicates, the 400+ pages of the volume are almost entirely given over to the text and translation. There are no introductory essays such as those in the first four volumes of the series. In the Introduction to volume V Potter directed the reader to these essays for an orientation to Hippocrates, but they were already a little out of date in 1983 and a great deal of work has been done since then. Nor are there any notes to the translation to help a reader with the author’s argument and train of thought, which is particularly dense and convoluted in parts of Diseases IV.[[3]] David Balme’s 1991 Loeb of Books VI–X of Aristotle’s Historia Animalium included some very extended notes, so it is not a concept foreign to the format.

Naturally, with texts so rich and so under-studied no two scholars are going to agree on every reading or interpretation and it would be invidious to raise issues requiring extended debate here. It is to be hoped that now the texts are more readily available their intrinsic interest will also be more widely appreciated. Potter’s deep familiarity with these texts will be invaluable in the close analysis which they deserve.

NOTES

[[1]] Volume VII (Epidemics 2 & 4-7) was translated and edited by Wesley D. Smith.

[[2]] A translation of selected chapters by Ann Ellis Hanson appeared in Signs 1 (1975) 567–84. These, along with a few other translated passages, are now available in M. R. Lefkowitz and M. B. Fant’s Women’s Life in Greece and Rome (3rd ed., Baltimore and London, 2005).

[[3]] Interested readers can find some help with these passages in Iain M. Lonie, The Hippocratic Treatises On Generation, On the Nature of the Child, Diseases IV: A Commentary (Berlin and New York, 1981).

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