CJ Online Review: Potter, Loeb Hippocrates vol. 10

February 27, 2013 ~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a 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).

Reviews from the Ancient History Bulletin

February 26, 2013 ~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

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CJ Online Review: Sansone, Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric

February 26, 2013 ~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

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Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric. By David Sansone. Oxford, Chichester, and Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Pp. xi + 258. Hardcover, £66.95/$99.95. ISBN 978-1-118-35708-8.

Reviewed by Michael Lloyd, University College Dublin

This book argues that the art of rhetoric in Greece was inspired by fifth-century Athenian tragic drama, and that any increase in rhetorical sophistication in tragedy was due to a coherent development within the genre itself rather than to the influence of orators or rhetoricians. The present reviewer’s book The Agon in Euripides (Oxford, 1992) is frequently cited for the “standard view” with which Sansone disagrees, that the plays of Euripides in particular can usefully be related to rhetorical developments outside the theater.

No one now suggests that Euripides relied on a lost earlier version of the fourth-century treatise known as Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, as was argued by Thomas Miller in “Euripides Rhetoricus” (diss. Göttingen, 1887), but it was in the life-and-death contexts of the assembly and the lawcourts that new and effective arguments were most essential and therefore most likely to have been developed. For example, the hypothetical syllogism (e.g. “you should have done x, if you were not bad, but you actually did y”) is needed to convince a jury at Lysias 12.32–3 but is addressed to someone who already knows the truth at Euripides, Medea 586–7. Sansone offers an interesting and detailed discussion of prokatalepsis, the anticipation of potential counterarguments (180–4, 192–204), while failing to make a convincing case that it was more likely to have developed in the theater than in the courts. He repeatedly notes that rhetorical devices appear in Euripides considerably earlier than in any extant orator (e.g. 148), but the accidents of transmission have no bearing on the direction of influence. He could also have looked more closely at the speeches in Thucydides, with dramatic dates going back to the 430s bc.

Sansone overlooks the ways in which the tragedians evoke the courts for dramatic effect. This goes back at least to Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which is full of legal imagery and culminates in a trial by jury on the Areopagus. Euripides never portrays so formal a trial, but this “poet of courtroom cant-phrases” (Aristophanes, Peace 534) recognized the dramatic potential of forensic debate. Hippolytus begins his defence speech in the agon of Hippolytus by saying that he is unaccustomed to addressing a mob (986–9), while actually talking to his father in the presence of fifteen far-from-unruly Trozenian women. The gambit has no meaning without its lawcourt resonance, which is reinforced as Hippolytus establishes his good character, appeals to witnesses, swears an oath, and develops an elaborate argument from probability. This speech is also good example of the self-consciousness which was a hallmark of the new rhetoric, manifesting itself in reference to the act of speaking itself (990–1), explicit subdivision of the speech (991, 1007, 1021), and point-by-point refutation of the opponent (991–3, 1002, 1008). Sansone’s discussion of rhetorical self-consciousness (155–9) fails to adduce anything on a remotely comparable scale in earlier authors, and he further confuses the issue by failing to distinguish reference by dramatic characters to their own speaking (as in Hippolytus’ speech) from their comments on the utterances of others or even the poet’s own self-consciousness about his art (e.g. 7, 156–7). Hippolytus is portrayed as a character whose fluency in the latest rhetorical devices will inevitably infuriate his elders, a striking example of the generation gap which was a notable feature of Athens in the 420s (Hippolytus was first performed in 428 bc, a year before the famous visit of Gorgias).

Sansone’s discussion of rhetoric occupies the second half of the book. The first half, which is as absorbing as the second half is flawed, deals in an original and discursive way with no less a subject than the essential nature of drama. Its ostensible relevance to the treatment of rhetoric in the second half is that the characters on stage were granted the eloquence that was previously the prerogative of the Muse-inspired poet, and that “counterpoint” between speaker and listener in drama inspired new forms of argumentation. This counterpoint requires the audience to pay attention to the characters who are not speaking as well as to those who are. Sansone stresses the distinctive and revolutionary nature of drama, criticizing attempts by Plato and Aristotle to obscure its differences from narrative. The quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon in the first book of Homer’s Iliad is frequently and subtly discussed as representative of the narrative mode, and there are especially interesting discussions of complex stage situations in Sophocles’ Electra and Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris. Sansone also has sharp and amusing words about the fashionable concept of performance culture, which further erodes the distinctiveness of drama: “[i]t seems that everyone in ancient Greece was performing, and they were doing it all the time” (78). The book is elegantly and often wittily written, with a wide range of cultural reference, and can strongly be recommended to anyone interested in the drama of any period.

CJ Online Review: Gowers, Horace Satires Book I

February 25, 2013 ~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

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Horace: Satires Book I. Edited by Emily Gowers. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xi + 370. Hardcover, £60.00/$99.00. ISBN 978-0-521-45220-5. Paper, £23.99/$40.00. ISBN 978-0-521-45851-1.

Reviewed by Amy Richlin, University of California, Los Angeles

Richly abundant as the lanx satura, Gowers’ long-awaited commentary serves up Horace’s first book of Satires, bursting with two decades’ thought. Gowers began publishing on Horace in 1993, the year in which she brought out The Loaded Table, and that long span of work informs this current product.[[1]] Hallelujah, for the cryptic Satires I needed a good commentary to make some sense of it all.

Making sense of the book as a whole is just what Gowers sets out to do; in a neat ring-composition, she explains on page 1 that “the full reinstatement of Satires I is in progress [as] a ten-poem pre-Augustan poetry book,” and concludes the notes to 1.10 on p. 338 with, “H.’s loose chartae … have finally been pulled together into a self-respecting poetry book.” In making her case, Gowers treats the state of the question as a team effort, the combined thoughts of many scholars. Unusually for a commentator, she presents a complete reading of her text across the notes and separate introductions: the poems are autobiographical but deliberately un-pin-down-able; in 1.9, for example, “he takes the part of a satirist to suit the times, inoffensive, reticent and passive-aggressive,” teasing his reader (281). At the same time, Gowers presents all sides of disputed points and a generous helping of others’ ideas, with a superb bibliography. Her main interlocutors here are Kirk Freudenburg and John Henderson, but no dogma dominates.

The most loving attention is devoted to detail, including meter. Likewise excellent are the notes on Roman culture (for example, on barbershops ad 1.7.3) and the dramatis personae (for example, on Hermogenes Tigellius ad 1.2.3, or the literary cliques in 1.10). Yet Gowers wears her learning lightly, with never an unkind word. Her particular strengths in the Bakhtinian side of satire show well in her treatment of 1.2, 1.5, 1.7, and 1.8, several of which have suffered from scholarly neglect due to their subject matter; here they are treated as respect-worthy parts of that self-respecting poetry book. Her own style is entirely suited to the Sermones—chatty, witty: so on Forum Appi, “a well-known dump of a town” (ad 1.5.3); on one leg of the trip to Brundisium, “a rare line of latitude in a longitudinal poem” (ad 1.5.26); on “the chutzpah of [Horace’s] freedman father” (214—a rare sighting of Yiddish in a Cambridge green-and-yellow); the battle between Persius and Rex, “a seedy courtroom aristeia” (ad 1.7.1-4).

The book is hugely welcome to the teacher of satire, previously dependent on P. Michael Brown’s necessarily much more concise version in the Aris & Phillips series (1993), Kiessling–Heinze (7th ed., 1957), and the shelves of old school texts whose communis opinio goes back at least to the seventeenth century, some of it still quietly persisting here (though Gowers is very good about divulging the lineage of ideas with long ones).[[2]] The book is still not without issues. As commonly in the green-and-yellows, there is no apparatus criticus, although the notes do discuss points Gowers considers crucial. The general index is sketchy, and a book this dense needs an index locorum; buried within lies a parallel between the text of Horace and that of ps.-Sulpicia (imitator of the satirist), and without me you would not know to look for it ad 5.53–4.[[3]] I would have liked a list of the places where Gowers draws connections between Satires I and the Epodes, and especially all the ties to Persius and Juvenal, of whom I would have liked to see more; so also Ennius is well represented in the notes, Plautus hardly at all, although Lucilius receives full and first-rate attention. As does Bion, who plays a large part in Gowers’ reading of the philosophical aspects of the sermonizing satires, helping the reader to stay awake through Satires 1.1 and 1.3. I would have liked to see more on the reception of a book that served as a school text, with Persius and Juvenal, almost continuously from antiquity to the 1800s. Greedy to ask for more when so much is given; indeed, the book has the faults of its virtues (est brevitate opus, 1.10.9), often repetitive, sometimes too generous in the attention given to far-fetched observations, usually others’—sort-of palindromes, quasi-rhymes, “unspoken puns” that “float in the air” (251). In stretches, there is too much glossing for ideal classroom use, especially ad 1.6, 1.9.52–78, and 1.10.2–35. This is not immediately noticeable since the glosses are separated by vast stretches of commentary; those students who most need help will be the least inclined to dig through the lemmata in search of help on vocabulary and grammar, which, however, is handsomely provided. Almost never did I think a reading was just wrong (but see ad 1.8.39, 47). The book well serves the advanced students and their instructors who constitute this series’ readership.

As for today’s usual problem, I read every word and found a total of five typographical errors in the commentary, all in punctuation but one (318, line 4, for “H.’s” read “His”—Cicero’s, not Horace’s). There is, oddly, a typo in the Latin text at 5.31 (optimus has slipped in before atque, echoing line 27), and assisto at 6.114 is mysteriously italicized. In short, a miracle of accuracy in the current deplorable state of book production.

Morris Zapp’s monumental work on Jane Austen, he hoped, would put an end to all further writing on the subject.[[4]] After reading this commentary, it is hard to think what could be left to say about Horace Satires I; whatever it is will certainly be much better-informed than before Gowers.

NOTES

[[1]] Emily Gowers, The Loaded Table: Representations of Food in Roman Literature (Oxford, 1993). Articles appeared on S. 1.5 (1993), 1.7 (2002), 1.4 (2009), and 1.6 (2009), along with several general articles.

[[2]] P. Michael Brown, ed., Horace Satires I (Warminster, 1993, 1995): with a short bibliography and introduction, facing translation in English, and brief notes, useful but keyed to the translation. Brown’s observation on S. 1.7, “perhaps included as a make-weight,” marks his distance from Gowers’ approach.

[[3]] Density: Compare Elaine Fantham’s exemplary Lucan De Bello Civili Book II, also in the green-and-yellow series (1992): 23 pages of text, 147 pages of commentary; Gowers has 26 pages of text, 281 pages of commentary. The pages in Fantham’s Lucan are also much smaller, the paper much better, and the ink, for reasons best known to the press, much blacker.

[[4]] David Lodge, Changing Places (London, 1975) 35.