CJ Online Review: Monson, From the Ptolemies to the Romans

January 17, 2013 ~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

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From the Ptolemies to the Romans: Political and Economic Change in Egypt. By Andrew Monson. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 364; 4 tables, 14 figures, 1 map. Hardcover, £60.00/$99.00. ISBN: 978-1-107-01441-1.

Reviewed by Jane Rowlandson, King’s College London

Recent generations of scholars concur that Roman rule brought a radical break with Egypt’s past by instituting fundamental reforms which progressively assimilated Egypt to the rest of the empire. There is less consensus, however, about both the pace of change and how far its key elements were consciously planned by Augustus as a coherent program. Monson is the first scholar to address these issues through a totalizing, integrated structural explanation of the transformation from Ptolemaic to Roman Egypt which balances multiple variables: the ecological and demographic parameters, economic processes, institutional reform, and government policy (well summed up at 282–8). His account introduces important qualifications to the received view of Roman innovation, and in particular, makes a strong case that fiscal reform was more significant than changes in land tenure in fostering the accumulation of private wealth in landed property. The main arguments are of interest not only to specialists on Egypt, but to everyone seeking to understand the impact of Rome on its provinces.

The book exemplifies how the “Stanford School” approach, applying neo-institutional economics and other social scientific theory (critically introduced in Ch.1), can produce valuable insights into ancient society when combined with meticulous attention to the primary evidence. Monson adduces much recently published material in both Egyptian and Greek alongside neglected older texts. Chs. 2 and 3 test the models of Boserup and Demsetz correlating communal organization of agriculture with low population density; greater density encourages land privatization and agricultural intensification. Ch. 2 proposes that the regional variation found in the 1895–1910 census figures (highest population density in the upper Nile valley, lowest in the Fayyum and most of the Delta) represents a longstanding pattern reflecting ecological constants, true of both the pharaonic (argued by Butzer) and Greco-Roman periods. Whether or not one accepts that the concentration of government and commerce in Alexandria would not significantly increase the density of settlement throughout the western Delta (p. 60; Strabo noticed the numerous villages south of Alexandria: 17.1.22), the Greco-Roman evidence does tend to bear out a greater population density in the Nile valley than the Fayyum. This contrast is essential to the argument of Ch. 3, which explains the much higher proportion of publicly-owned, communally-organized land in the Fayyum than elsewhere as the consequence of regional demography and ecology, not (as previously assumed) Ptolemaic royal policy. This is reinforced by the reassessment of land tenure in Ch. 4, which demonstrates that private ownership of land (including much royal and temple land as well as idioktētos) was already widespread in the Nile valley in the Ptolemaic period, and thus that the Roman step of fully privatizing the cleruchic land was much less far-reaching in fostering capital accumulation and the land market than scholars have thought (except arguably in the Fayyum). There were also Ptolemaic and pharaonic precursors for the property archive, although the Roman innovation of centralizing property records did facilitate long-distance market transactions (122–31).

Ch. 5 systematically revises the modern consensus that the Romans left tax rates on arable land largely unchanged, arguing that the ekphorion in the Ptolemaic Fayyum was essentially identical to the Upper Egyptian epigraphē, a harvest tax charged at high rates reassessed annually; before ad 32 this was abolished on private land throughout Egypt, leaving it paying only the low fixed-rate artaba tax. Monson supports his case with important new texts, but the evidence still seems frustratingly insufficient to confirm conclusively that Fayyum cleruchs ever regularly paid a harvest tax to the Ptolemaic state (178–80). Nevertheless, the stronger evidence that the Romans abolished the harvest tax in Upper Egypt and reduced tax rates on vineyards and orchards (190) makes the case for an overall reduction in the tax burden on private land convincing, particularly in conjunction with the gradual abandonment of flexible assessment even on the public land (cutting administrative costs). Comparison with early modern England, Japan and France (199–206) suggests why lowering tax rates made sense for the Roman government, a theme pursued further throughout the final three chapters which explore the consequent transformations in sources of wealth and status.

Previous scholars have characterized the change from Ptolemaic to Roman Egypt as one from a redistributive to a market economy, but Ch. 6 shows precisely what this involved for the two main beneficiaries of Ptolemaic redistribution, the priests and civil officials. The sections on priestly office (212–27) together with temple land (131–41) provide the best succinct explanation of how the Roman government, while overtly respectful of the priesthood, completely undermined its economic and social basis. Likewise the Ptolemaic bureaucracy with its lucrative “rent-seeking” opportunities was progressively replaced by liturgical offices obligatory on the propertied class and mostly unpaid, shifting onto them much of the state’s administrative costs. “Rent-seeking” flourishes, to the detriment of state revenue, under unstable political regimes like that of the later Ptolemies. Olson’s “bandit state” model well describes this period, especially Auletes’ precarious and rapacious reign. The more effective Roman imperial government could afford to think longer-term: by minimizing running costs and reducing taxation they stimulated economic production which ultimately increased the total tax yield, as well as developing a stable power base in the broad and diverse gymnasial class (Chs. 7–8; I would question the suggestion on p. 272 that the Ptolemies’ power base was much narrower).

This rich and thought-provoking book contains many more insights than a short review can convey. It should be read by all ancient historians and their students, and everyone interested in the cross-fertilization of history and social scientific theory.

Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews

January 13, 2013 ~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

CJ Online Review: Ruzicka, Trouble in the West

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

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Trouble in the West: Egypt and the Persian Empire 525–332 BCE. By Stephen Ruzicka. Oxford Studies in Early Empires. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xxv + 311. Hardcover, $74.00/£45.00. ISBN 978-0-19-976662-8.

Reviewed by Jan P. Stronk, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Though ancient Greek historians frequently make it appear that Greece was the main concern in the west for the Achaemenid Persian kings, figures present a different picture. It seems, therefore, appropriate to seek for a (more) balanced view on Persian interests in the west. Greek sources “make possible at least a skeletal account of the sixth–fourth-century Persian-Egyptian conflict” (xxiv–xxv). Such an account should, though, be fleshed out with additional evidence.

Ruzicka has set himself the task to provide, in twenty chapters, such a fleshed out account. The first chapter (3–13) starts with developments as early as the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE before it ends with the announcement of Cambyses’ campaign against Egypt in 525 BCE. Chapter 20 (210–18) constitutes both a short synthesis of the intervening chapters and a preview of developments in the Hellenistic period and beyond. In the chapters between, Ruzicka follows the Achaemenid Persian–Egyptian relation in chronological order.

A substantial part of the book (chapters 5–18) is devoted to the period of 401–341 BCE, when Persia had lost control of Egypt. The attention to this period fits the book’s title: it is the period in which the situation in Egypt was a major concern for the Achaemenids. Ruzicka describes, wherever possible, Persia’s strategies and actions in some detail, mainly based upon Greek literary texts. His treatment of these sources is not always satisfactory, however: regarding a passage of Diodorus (Diod. 15.93.1–6), e.g., he provides on the same page (152) two contradictory analyses, not signalling the different approach.

The downside of his method is indicated by Ruzicka himself, explaining that as a consequence of the King’s Peace of 386 BCE, Greek “sources turn primarily to Greek mainland affairs and provide only sparse information about developments in Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean” (83). Though archaeological evidence might fill some gaps, Ruzicka uses it (too) sparsely. The same applies for his use of numismatic evidence.

I have some problems with Ruzicka’s explanation for Persian expansion towards Egypt. First he mentions that it was “Cyrus’ strategy … to seek secure frontiers” (13); next he affirms Diodorus’ observation (Diod. 1.31.6; 15.42.1) that “Egypt was ‘fortified on all sides by nature’” (14) and that it generally was difficult to get to Egypt. Not to invade Egypt would, then, seem like having quite a secure frontier. Ruzicka points at Assyrian expansion into Egypt in the past and Egypt’s role in “the middle territory” (i.e., Phoenicia, Philistia and adjacent territories) to explain the Achaemenids’ almost constant urge to conquer Egypt. He fails to notice the inconsistency of ambitions that becomes visible by Persia’s obvious incapability of securing a safe border on Egypt’s western side. A more thorough analysis of Persian motives to (continue to) involve itself in Egypt might well have served the book’s purpose.

Ruzicka pays much attention to the interaction between the occurrences in the Aegean basin and those in Egypt and the “middle territory” as well as Persia’s role and activities in both theatres. Ruzicka’s analyses, e.g. on the Persian-Athenian détente between c. 465 and 415 BCE, on the miscalculation of Abrocomas regarding Amyrtaeus’ revolt in the period 404–401, and the relationship between the location and military importance of Egyptian Memphis are interesting and to the point.

The same conclusion goes for Ruzicka’s discussion of the Persians’ arrival in Egypt around 525 BCE. Starting with Herodotus’ account, he complements it with Egyptian sources, like the text on the stele of Udjahorresnet.[[1]] This text significantly alters the picture of Cambyses drawn by Herodotus. The image emerging from Ruzicka’s account of Cambyses, and later of Darius I, as an Egyptian king, seems to be largely correct and is, moreover, supported by Egyptian monuments. The consequences of the “fateful decision” (28) of Xerxes to administer Egypt as a Persian king sufficiently prove the importance of royal identity for the Egyptians. The discussion of the stela of Somtutefnakht (197) provides a welcome addition to the accounts of the conquest of Egypt by Artaxerxes III. This also goes for Ruzicka’s discussion of the importance of the site of Bubastis in Egypt (188–9). On these topics Ruzicka does succeed in fleshing out Greek accounts. In Chapter 19 (199–209), moreover, discussing a period for which there is no Greek account, he fills the vacuum by presenting some relevant texts like Ptolemy’s so-called Satrap Stela.

In spite of the critical remarks above, I am pleased with this account of the Achaemenids’ western policy, an account, moreover, accessible to a wider audience. Possibly this aim of accessibility led to the decision to assemble all references into a single corpus of endnotes (227–83). Such a solution, however, does not invite or challenge the reader to follow up on the evidence: at the very least, a missed opportunity. For a wider audience the appendixes (A and B: 219–22) may be very helpful. The bibliography (285–306, with some emphasis on publications in English) is good, as are the maps (xiv–xviii) and the index (307–11).

NOTE

[[1]] I am, though, slightly at a loss why Ruzicka displays (111) a photograph of the statue of the priestess Utahorresenet, dating to the Ptolemaic period, instead of the statue of physician and admiral Udjahorresnet, that should be dated to 519 BCE (cf., e.g., A.B. Lloyd, “The Inscription of Udjaḥorresnet: A Collaborator’s Testament,” JEA 68 (1982) 166–80 at 166), even though both statues look somewhat similar, have similar names, and sit in the same museum.

CJ Online Review: Trimble, Women and Visual Replication

January 9, 2013 ~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

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Women and Visual Replication in Roman Imperial Art and Culture. By Jennifer Trimble. Greek Culture in the Roman World. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. xi + 486. Hardcover, £79.00/$125.00. ISBN 978-0-521-82515-3.

Reviewed by Antony Augoustakis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Jennifer Trimble has produced a compelling study of the Roman portrait statue of the second century ce known as the “Large Herculaneum Woman” and its variations, of which she surveys 202 examples. The statues “represented individual women but replicated the same body from the neck down, recreating the same stance, the same gesture, the same elaborate drapery folds” (1). Trimble suggests that this book is about visual representation, sameness and otherness, social relations, the Roman empire and imperial practices, and, of course, Roman women. But then again with certain limitations: only adult women are represented; these statues are common in some regions of the vast empire, and ultimately they do a poor job of replicating women. The study aims to explain such paradoxes, often despite the limitative nature of the evidence (most of the statues are fragmentary), and I believe it does a good job.

After an Introduction, the first chapter looks at the origins of these statues, three of which were discovered in a well near Portici in 1711: the Large type and two Small Herculaneum Woman type statues (all dated to before 79 ce). Trimble rightly interrogates previous assumptions by pointing to some intriguing facts: the Large type was spread in the second century ce in the eastern Empire and Italy, it was used for display in public, urban spaces, and it was employed to honor the woman, not the sculptor or the Greek prototype. How do we explain then the replication and continuity of a type of statue in shifting historical and social circumstances from one century to the next?

Chapter 2 directs our attention to the questions of production. These statues were made in bronze and marble (the former do not survive). Where? Trimble delves into quarrying practices in the Imperial period: for instance, emphasis was laid on efficiency and speed, and there was also a wealth of prefabricated forms, which were then finished according to need. No Large Herculaneum Woman statues have been found in quarries though: as Trimble concludes, the semantics of “finished” vary according to perspective: for the quarries, the statues were finished when stockpiled as unshaped blocks (perhaps half-finished); for the cities, the statues were “finished” locally when they were ready to be installed in public spaces.

In the third chapter, Trimble investigates questions of distribution and looks at the finishing workshops involved. The period witnessed the expansion of marble trade, and here one can locate certain practices regarding local tastes and consumption, destination markets and shipping. Since the Large type left the quarries usually roughed out, Trimble examines the finishing workshops that undertook the next phase of the project. By observing similarities and differences among these statues, what can we gather regarding local demands and taste: different tunics, varying details of the mantle, different folds, or even same fronts but different backs.

The reader will surely find Chapters 4 and 5 to be the most rewarding in the book. The first one is dedicated to issues of portraiture: head, body, and inscription on the base. As expected, bodies are not individualized but rather idealized, formulaic, as opposed to the facial features and the hairstyle which vary. There are those statues, however, where the head is generic or replicated, with classicizing hairstyles and faces. As Trimble suggests, this flexibility in assemblage between head and body can be explained only by looking at the whole final product, including the inscriptional base (seven of which survive). Among the inscriptions some common themes emerge as topoi: the city’s patronage, the immediate family members, Greek ethnicity and/or Roman citizenship, stereotypical (female) virtues (arete, sophrosune, eusebeia). Visual representations help build or reinforce social identity, and Trimble persuasively points to the networks of social relationships constructed and extended by means of these (replicated) statues.

The use of space to display the sculpture is addressed in the fifth chapter, where Trimble takes into account the physical settings as well as the relationship formed among groups of statues meant to be viewed and received in specific contexts. The Large type is used for public, civic display with honorific purposes, namely in recognition of civic euergetism. Moreover, the sculptures becomes part of a koine of forms: they affirm membership “in a wider world of instantly recognizable visual forms, types of urban space, and kinds of social relationships” (257). In the same vein, in the penultimate Chapter 6, Trimble turns to those statues found far outside the canonical areas, away from the centers (Italy, Greece, Asia Minor), especially in the Danube region (Sarmizegetusa). Trimble interprets the statues as part of the koine which was spread by Imperial culture in the second century through the mechanisms of Romanization.

In Chapter 7, Trimble concludes with a survey of the possible reasons why the Large statue type stopped being made in the early third century: loss of demand is explained as the result of the statue’s inability to bestow special meaning and rank any longer.

The volume’s 95-page catalogue (360–456) is highly informative. To be sure, Trimble’s book is to be recommended for its thorough treatment of the subject and for its insightful and challenging views on a very interesting type of female statues.

Renaissance Quarterly Review: Passannante. The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition

January 8, 2013 ~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

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Reviewed work(s): Gerard Passannante. The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. 250 pp. $45. ISBN: 978–0–226–64849–1.
Jonathan Goldberg
Emory University
The Lucretian Renaissance is a somewhat elusive book, and this is the source of much of its strength. Eschewing Poggio Bracciolini’s rediscovery of the manuscript of De rerum natura as key to the Lucretian Renaissance “one might expect” since it is “the starting point of so many narratives” (17), Passannante performs his own swerve, beginning much earlier in order to make the stunning point that Lucretius was not lost to the Renaissance: Virgil transmitted him to Petrarch. This is the topic of the long first chapter of the book, “Extra Destinatum,” which moves in sympathy with a Petrarch drawn past his intentions into the orbit of Lucretius. This unexpected path recalls the plague that ends De rerum natura: “we discover in the shadow of Petrarch’s moving pen . . . an idea of contamination that silently undoes the figure of imitative control” (31). Passannante works “in the shadow” (itself a Lucretian trope) toward a silent undoing: tracing out what is elusive, he seeks what cannot be seen, the atomic particles that, for Lucretius, are the basis for everything. Passannante tropes these material substances as textual substance — a trope found over and again in Lucretius — insisting that the atomic order is a matter of elements, the same word in Latin for the letters that make up words. The troping contamination that undoes the trope of control is, by the chapter’s end, itself a figure for imitation. The plague in Lucretius figures the movement from Virgil to Petrarch, a movement “extra destinatum” since its passage is hardly a straightforward narrative, but one, as Passannante tells it, that passes through Macrobius, Gellius, Servius, and on to Poliziano, with whom the chapter ends.

Passannante’s path is philological, as his subtitle indicates: he follows movements from text to text, but not to endorse a story of a self-conscious making of tradition. Rather, contamination becomes the conveyor of tradition. The tradition Passannante has in mind is not Lucretian, however, but humanistic. Here too Passannante disclaims any interest in retelling a familiar story — “the question of atheism or impiety that has haunted Lucretius since antiquity” (9) — and his tale is not one of humanism versus Lucretius but of humanism haunted by Lucretius, a literary incorporation. Figurative contamination emerges finally as “The Pervasive Influence,” to cite the title of the final chapter (on Spenser, Gassendi, and Henry More). The phrase comes from Edwin Greenlaw’s early twentieth-century attempts to assess the influence of Lucretius on Spenser; Passannante faults Greenlaw only for trying too hard to pin down an influence, suggesting instead (but this is argued throughout, no matter the text) that we look “not so much on the surface of the poem as in the play of its simulacra” (163). The Latin term is drawn from Lucretius, who uses it to explain the limits of what we see, and, at the same time, how the visible can lead us to the invisible. Passannante looks to Lucretius for a model of influence, and specifically as a model for how texts come to be. As he tells it, they come from a starting point — call it Homer — difficult to locate, and pass through texts difficult to establish. The editorial dream of restoration to an original is replaced by the swerves. In Passannante’s account, we only find Montaigne after Lucretius’s text passes through the hands of several Renaissance editors (this is the subject of the book’s second chapter); Montaigne gets “Lucretius wrong,” but, if so, “one could say, Montaigne ironically captures something of the poet’s critical spirit” (115). Capturing textual instability is Montaigne’s method, Passannante’s too: like Bacon anatomizing Homer (the focus of chapter three), Passannante weaves his textual film through small-scale recognitions of tenuous Lucretian echoes. The destination of these endeavors is a redefinition in the name of Lucretius, whose name functions as a trope for continuity. If early in the book Lucretius stands for ruin and contamination, by the end Passanante grasps that Lucretian matter, however elusive, is all there is, and is inexhaustible. Material permanence is no guarantee that what continues will look the same.
In his epilogue, which, in its by now familiar method of unexpected swerves, starts with Newton, backtracks to Ralph Cudworth, and ends with Einstein, Passannante pauses for a moment to recall the work of one of his critical models, Thomas Greene, noting Derrida’s pun on the word dérive, which means both drift and derivation. The punning brings the two together in the kind of conservation Derrida himself practiced when he turned mischance into his own chance (mes chances). Passannante, ever alert to ironies and overturnings, brings things together that drive apart: his witty text offers a serio ludi that he calls the Lucretian Renaissance, but which might as easily be hailed as a renovated humanist philology.

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