RBL Review ~ Orphic Gold Tablets and Greek Religion

December 24, 2012 ~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

At the Review of Biblical Literature site:

Edmonds III, Radcliffe G., editor, The “Orphic” Gold Tablets and Greek Religion: Further Along the Path

Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews

December 24, 2012 ~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

I seem to have missed a week …

CJ Online Review: Feig Vishnia, Roman Elections in the Age of Cicero

December 18, 2012 ~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

posted with permission:

Roman Elections in the Age of Cicero: Society, Government, and Voting. By Rachel Feig Vishnia. New York and London: Routledge, 2012. Pp. xi + 184. Hardcover, $148.00/£80.00. ISBN 978-0-415-87969-9.

Reviewed by Jeff Tatum, Victoria University of Wellington

Feig Vishnia’s most recent book is a serious scholarly work, aimed at explaining to undergraduates the procedures of republican elections as well as the expectations and ideology that underpins them. Ancient sources are carefully cited and footnotes guide the reader to modern research, mostly though not exclusively in English. There is much of value here, and this book will doubtless (and rightly) find a permanent place in university reading lists for courses in ancient history, though its price may prohibit its use as a prescribed textbook.

In the first chapter, Feig Vishnia offers a potted history of Rome from its foundation to Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon—in thirty pages. So summary a treatment is inevitably liable to false impressions, not least because the author frequently introduces a surprising degree of specificity on contestable scholarly points. For instance, on pp. 6–7 she claims that the so-called senatus consultum ultimum “authorized them [viz. the consuls] to strip anyone suspected of threatening the state’s security of their citizenship.” This view, which perhaps owes itself to the arguments of Bleicken that the final decree designated specific men hostes and therefore no longer proper citizens (J. Bleicken, Senatsgericht und Kaisergericht (Göttingen, 1962) 23), is perhaps too legalistic in formulation for what was always an extralegal phenomenon that remained controversial even among contemporaries (see, e.g., A. W. Lintott, The Constitution of the Roman Republic (Oxford, 1999) 89ff.). On p. 69, by contrast, we find that the decree “did not specify the scale of powers to be exercised by the consuls or relate to the question whether these prevailed over the basic rights enjoyed by Roman citizens,” which is a far better account of the matter. Still, this chapter is on the whole unexceptionable if somewhat old-fashioned, a quality that is clearest in its treatment of the Roman army’s admission of capite censi into its ranks. Feig Vishnia attributes this innovation to Marius and deems it significant because “proletarii volunteered for military service not out of patriotism, but in anticipation of a material reward at the end of their service” (9–10). Hence the willingness of soldiers to follow their generals anywhere, even into civil war. But this exaggerates both the presence of capite censi in Marius’ legions, and in the legions of later republican generals, and assumes, incorrectly so far as one can tell, a profound disparity between the moral fibre of assidui and proletarii (see A. Keaveney, The Army in the Roman Revolution (London, 2007) 24ff., with further references).

The second chapter more usefully maps out (again concisely) various social groupings and categories relevant to any understanding Roman elections: tribes, municipalities, and local administrative districts; the classes of the centuriate assembly; divisions within the Roman elite (patricians and plebeians; nobles and new men; senators and equestrians); and elements defining the lower orders (the rural and urban plebs; freedmen; collegia). This section is especially good in its treatment of sodalitates. Still, a few problems remain. It is not true that “each municipium was run by a board of four men (quattuorviri)” (39); some were administered by duoviri (see E. Bispham, From Asculum to Actium: The Municipalization of Italy from the Social War to Augustus (Oxford, 2007) 381ff.). On p. 36 Feig Vishnia describes the classes of the centuriate assembly but without making it clear that hers is a contested reconstruction: our sources insist on providing figures for the Servian classes (always the Servian classes, never explicitly the situation in the republic) in terms of asses; in that scheme, the minimum requirement for membership in the First Class is 100,000 asses; but this figure could mean that, in the republic, the minimum for the First Class was as little as HS40,000, a commonly accepted conclusion. Feig Vishnia, however, puts the minimum at HS100,000, following, I assume, arguments advanced by M. H. Crawford (see Roman Republican Coinage (Cambridge, 1974) 2.622). Students should at the very least be aware that these matters are uncertain and controversial. On p. 41 she asserts that freedmen “comprised the majority of the population in the city of Rome,” a view she seems to reject on p. 53 (“the evidence available to us precludes any meaningful estimate of the relative percentage of freedmen”) and yet takes up again on p. 125.

The structure of Roman government is the focus, in Chapter 3, of an extended and substantial treatment. The concept of res publica is examined, after which the magistracies are discussed with care; senatorial practices and the operations of the popular assemblies follow. This is a detailed and reliable treatment of all these matters, though at three points students could be misled. On p. 82, in discussing grants of imperium to privati, Feig Vishnia asserts that “in such cases popular approval was only rarely requested.” This remark is too general to be clear. Popular legislation was, so far as we can tell, the routine means of conferring imperium on a private citizen, the apparent exceptions being when a consul delegated his imperium to a military subordinate or when, in an emergency, the senate granted imperium pro praetore to a subordinate commander in the field, an action that appears to have required a lex curiata and so was (admittedly in a tenuous sense) given approval by one of the people’s assemblies and was certainly ratified by the gods (see, e.g., Mommsen, StR 2.1.652ff. and 677ff.; Lintott, op. cit. 114f.; T. C. Brennan, The Praetorship in the Roman Republic (Oxford 2000) 190f. and 586f.). In her treatment of senatorial procedures on p. 85, Feig Vishnia states that “all former magistrates who had not yet been appointed to the senate,” because since the time of their election a census had not yet taken place, although they could attend meetings were “without voting rights.” But this is not the impression of our admitted meager evidence, which suggests on the contrary that in practice, and even in official decrees, no distinction was drawn between enrolled senators and former magistrates destined for enrolment (Mommsen, StR 3.858f.). Finally, also on p. 85, we are told that senate meetings could be held in any inaugurated space “as long as it was within the city’s official precincts (the pomerium),” but in a footnote are directed to sources that, when consulted, indicate that the same requirement obtained outside the pomerium as well.

The chapter dealing with elections is the most substantial, and the best, part of the book. Feig Vishnia guides her reader through the various facets of a candidature, in a discussion that in a very brief space provides an admirable treatment of the Commentariolum Petitionis. She is right to observe the relevance of Roman sumptuary legislation to the aristocratic concerns operative in canvassing (111, on which point see now E. Zanda, Fighting Hydra-like Luxury: Sumptuary Regulation in the Roman Republic (Bristol, 2011) 52ff.). The difficulties of translating Roman electoral practices and assumptions into modern ones are addressed, principally by way of a discussion of terms like coitio, amicitia, and factio. The mechanics of voting, still uncertain or controversial owing to the sheer inadequacy of our sources on these matters, are carefully rehearsed, including a very sensible survey of the leges tabellariae and their purposes. There is also a lengthy examination of ambitus. As Feig Vishnia rightly discerns, the Romans’ legislation against ambitus as well as their denunciations of it constitute sources that are crucial for our own reconstruction of what was traditional and normative in political campaigning. Here Feig Vishnia in inclined to share the Romans’ own moralizing concerns about electioneering. She expresses agreement with Cicero’s anxiety that pecunia omnium dignitatem exaequat (Att. 4.15.7), though the examples she provides of nobles defeated in elections by men of lesser rank are all men from houses in decline, like Catilina: the fasti make it clear that the nobility continued to excel in Roman elections to the very end of the republic. Still, she is right that bribery became a significant and disturbing factor in elections and that cash was the culprit, a conclusion that comes into sharper focus when one considers the very real novelty of pervasive monetisation in the late republic (see D. B. Hollander, Money in the Late Roman Republic (Leiden, 2007) 15ff. and 111ff.). This chapter concludes with an assessment of the democratic quality of Roman elections, in which matter Feig Vishnia finds herself perhaps closer to the conclusions of H. Mouritsen than of F. Millar or A. Yakobson.

A few qualifications. Feig Vishnia’s depiction of ius honorum is probably a bit too prescriptive for what was mainly a matter of tradition and not formal regulation, except in the case of individuals, like the sons of the proscribed, who were legally prohibited from standing for office (see, e.g., Mommsen, StR 1.480ff.). Feig Vishnia cites Polybius 6.19.1–2 as evidence that ten military campaigns were required before one could stand for office, but even the early enforcement of this rule has been doubted (Mommsen, StR. 1.505f.) and in any case it no longer applied in the late republic (W. V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327–70 BC (Oxford, 1985), 12): Cicero himself did not fulfil it. In discussing antecedents to the Commentariolum Petitionis, Varro’s exposition of senatorial procedures composed for Pompey the Great, his Commentarius Eisagogikos, is adduced as if it, too, were an “advisory letter” (109). But although Varro’s later revision of this work took the form of a letter (the Letter to Oppianus cited at Gell. NA 14.7), we have no way of knowing what form the Commentarius took. At p. 108 Feig Vishnia insists that “only listed candidates were allowed to stand” and that “if voters cast ballots for a non-approved candidate, they were discarded.” But this is not easy to prove. Even if professio became a legal requirement in the late republic, it had previously been possible for the people to elect whomever it chose (see E. S. Staveley, Greek and Roman Voting and Elections (London and Ithaca, 1972) 146) and it is hard to imagine that, short of declaration by the presiding magistrate that he would refuse to declare a specific individual elected (e.g. C. Piso on Lollius Palicanus in 67: Val. Max. 3.8.43), the people’s choice would be rejected at any time.

The book closes with a very brief (150–2) consideration of Fergus Millar’s thesis that the Roman republic can fairly be described as democratic. Feig Vishnia rightly sees merit in Millar’s challenge to entrenched academic notions regarding Roman politics and government, and equally rightly she turns to Polybius in order to define the limits of the legitimacy of Millar’s claims.

My emphasis here has been, obviously, on disagreements over matters of detail. But this should not distract anyone from the sentiment of my opening paragraph. Feig Vishnia has written a very useful book that will be consulted frequently by all students of Roman republican history.

Misprints are few and mostly in the book’s cross-references: e.g. p. 00 on p. 32 (twice), on p. 33 the reference to p. 140 should be to p. 78, and on p. 41 the reference to p. 106 should be to p. 56.

CJ Online Review: Marincola, Llewellyn-Jones and Maciver, Greek Notions of the Past

December 17, 2012 ~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

posted with permission

Greek Notions of the Past in the Archaic and Classical Eras: History Without Historians. Edited by John Marincola, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones and Calum Maciver. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Distributed in the US by Columbia University Press. Pp. xiv + 378. Hardcover, £75.00/$120.00. ISBN 978-0-7486-4396-7.

Reviewed by Tim Rood, St. Hugh’s College, Oxford

There has been a considerable amount of criticism in recent years of Jacoby’s model of the development of Greek historical writing, much of it well rehearsed by John Marincola in his “Introduction” to this volume (a collection of essays stemming from an Edinburgh Leventis conference organized by Marincola in 2009). Less attention has been paid to situating Jacoby’s view of Greek historiography in relation to other ways of viewing the past in archaic and classical Greece. The range of Greek attitudes to the past has of course received much discussion, notably in Jonas Grethlein’s important monograph, The Greeks and the Past: Poetry, Oratory and History in the Fifth Century BCE (Cambridge, 2010). What this collection of essays brings out are some of the (unavoidable) restrictions of Grethlein’s approach. Some of the richest chapters move beyond the range of genres treated by Grethlein to embrace the role of the past in other sorts of written evidence such as inscriptions (Lambert, Shear) as well as in contexts such as rituals (partly mediated through written evidence, admittedly, but also based on more theoretical and comparative reasoning: Kearns) and weaving (loom-weights as possible evidence for family traditions: Foxhall). As an incentive to thinking about “history without historians,” this collection is particularly timely because it complements another new book, Joseph E. Skinner’s The Invention of Greek Ethnography (Oxford, 2012), which seeks to challenge Jacoby by extending the definition of ethnography beyond a narrow literary genre (in other words, by looking at ethnography without ethnographers).

Since it is not possible to do justice in a short review to the full scope of the volume (Marincola’s “Introduction,” 16 chapters, then a closing commentary by Simon Goldhill, Suzanne Saïd, and Christopher Pelling), I will restrict my remarks here to some observations on the way Greek historians are brought into contact with other modes of conceiving the past. One strand that emerges in many chapters (e.g. Allen Romano on “Euripidean Explainers”) is that treatments of the past are often framed so as to provide an implicit comment on the situatedness of the narrator. Here, Herodotus’ concern with the way in which national traditions are shaped by self-interest is invoked by several contributors. Such a concern was not restricted to Herodotus, however: arguably the Plataean debate in Thucydides as well as Antiphon’s Tetralogies (both of which feature competing claims about the past that cannot be resolved by the reader) would have provided a closer parallel than Herodotus for Ruth Scodel in her illuminating discussion of Euripides and Sophocles.

Less satisfying is an occasional tendency to adopt an overly simplistic view of the techniques of Greek historians. Thus Jeffrey Henderson’s discussion of “Old Comedy and Popular History” draws one-dimensional contrasts between mythical modes of historical explanation as evidenced in Aristophanes’ Acharnians and more rigorous Thucydidean techniques. Henderson’s loose phrasing on p. 145 would make the uninformed reader imagine that Hecataeus’ rationalization of Greek myth took place decades later than it did, while on p. 158 he appears to place the publication of Herodotus’ Histories later than Lysistrata. Henderson in any case undercuts his own analysis with his closing suggestion (based on the portrayal of the past in later orators) that the availability of historiography would not have made much difference to Aristophanes and his audiences. Fair enough—but then there are also treatments of the past in Old Comedy that are much more historiographical in tone (e.g. Demetrius Fr. 2, from his Sikelia: “the Spartans took down our walls and took possession of our warships, so that the people of the Peloponnese should no longer be the losers on the sea,” trans. Storey).

The great strength of Bruno Currie’s “Hesiod on Human History,” by contrast, is that its author has thought hard about different ways of configuring the relationship between Hesiod and Herodotus. Currie starts with a lucid and densely annotated discussion of the relationship between Hesiod’s “myth of the races” and his account of Prometheus, before offering a nuanced comparison with Herodotus’ technique of including partly incompatible alternatives (though Currie does not address Seth Benardete’s argument for the synchronic placement of Hesiod’s races in Herodotean ethnography (Herodotean Inquiries (The Hague, 1969) 29).

Two broader issues could have been addressed more explicitly by contributors. Marincola’s “Introduction” rightly stresses Jacoby’s interest in the relation between local and national modes of historical consciousness. The opposition of the local and the panhellenic finds significant echoes in recent scholarship both on the literary genres of epic and lyric (in this volume, in Ewen Bowie’s treatment of Stesichorus) and on the development of Hellenicity. Secondly, there is the very idea of “the past.” The contributors could not of course have grappled with Zachary Sayre Schiffman’s argument in The Birth of the Past (2011) that “classical historians … conceived of multiple ‘pasts’ characterized by different time frames” without subsuming “these pasts under a single entity—“the” past” (p. 5). But Schiffman—who places the birth of “the past” in the early eighteenth century—is developing the views of earlier scholars with whom more contributors could have engaged, notably Reinhart Koselleck (who is referenced explicitly by Grethlein and Goldhill).

This volume does nonetheless offer much to anyone interested in those scholarly debates as well as in archaic and classical Greece more broadly. In particular, Currie’s chapter is an important contribution to study of the relationship between “mythical” and “historical” modes of thought, while Kearns and Foxhall offer imaginative extensions of scholarly approaches to the past. The editors deserve thanks, then, for a volume that should do much to inform and nuance future debate.

CJ Online Review: Andreau and Descat, The Slave in Greece and Rome

December 14, 2012 ~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

posted with permission:

The Slave in Greece and Rome. By Jean Andreau and Raymond Descat. Translated by Marion Leopold. Wisconsin Studies in Classics. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. Pp. vi + 198. Paper, $26.95. ISBN 978-0-299-28374-2.

Reviewed by John G. Nordling, Concordia Theological Seminary

Originally published in France as Esclave en Grèce et à Rome (2006, Hachette Littératures), The Slave in Greece and Rome covers slavery from the entire period of classical antiquity, beginning with the Mycenaean Greeks (Chapter 2, “The Earliest Forms of Slavery”) and ending with the late Roman empire (Chapter 7, “Slavery at the End of the Western Empire”). However, the book does not treat the topic in simple chronological fashion; on each of the many topics covered the order is Greek slavery first (Descat’s contribution) followed by Roman refinements (Andreau). One is struck by the continuity of slavery overall: “Greek ideas were adopted and repeated in one way or another throughout the centuries of the Roman Empire” (168). It obviously required much careful editing on the part of both authors to have their respective contributions fit so seamlessly together.

The book begins with the question “What is a Slave?” (Chapter 1). The authors conclude that a slave—in the ancient world, at any rate—was indeed the property of a master (10), but also a human being with an authentic place in society (10–11, cf. 96, 131). Thus, while the authors clearly show an awareness of the modern view that slavery could be conceived of as a form of “social death,”[[1]] they seem much more attuned to the ambiguity of the institution overall and that in its earlier form slavery was not necessarily racist. That one person was servile and another free was “by virtue of law” (130); thus while slavery could be conceived of as a matter of injustice, violence, or constraint, the law existed so that—in civilized society, at any rate—some were servile and others free. No one questioned slavery as such, and many slaves were quite content with their lot in life (61, 86, 87). Naturally, slaves were always more susceptible to violence, torture, and sexual abuse than free persons were (e.g., 106–8, 113–14, 161–2), and some effort has been made to connect ancient slavery to its modern equivalent in these respects (3–4, 106).

The authors also grapple with whether ancient Greece and Rome were “societies with slaves” or “slave societies” (13). The issue could be resolved by facts and figures, though these vary drastically according to the scholar and specialized study (explored in Chapter 3, “A Slave Population”). Classical antiquity of course contained “societies with slaves” everywhere (say 4–5% of the population), though it was mainly a matter of degree as to whether a city or region should be considered a “slave society” (30% of the population or more). No consensus emerges here, though our authors are aware of problems associated with the debate and report them clearly.

The bulk of the book concerns what slaves actually did in ancient society (Chapter 4, “The Slave and Economic Life”; Chapter 5, “The Slave in the Household and the City”). The wealthy always had more slaves than the poor, and agriculture was the activity that occupied the greatest number of people—free as well as slaves (68–9). Though subject to seizure, peculium was a fund masters allowed enterprising slaves to manage to give them hope and incentive, and praepositiones authorized slaves to exploit various properties of the master—with profits flowing to the latter (81–2). So slaves were not all “equal” as any evaluation of the evidence shows (105, 112, 118). At the top were dispensatores (treasurers), tabularii (accountants), actores (agents), and scads of secretaries. Elite households (such as Livia’s) contained a large number of actual servants: footmen, masseurs, cooks, clothiers, watchmen, workers in shops, house slaves, etc. (105). It is very difficult to point to slaves on the lower end, though these existed too. Once the authors make a comparison between “servants” in the Roman empire and domestics in France in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries (106). Everywhere else, however, the authors understand that ancient slaves and modern workers constitute two separate categories and analogies are not easily made. Plato and Aristotle’s attempts to justify slavery (130–2) were for the most part carried over by the Romans (133–6).

Chapter 6 (“Escaping Slavery”) focuses upon attempts by the slaves to avoid slavery, whether by suicide, flight, banditry, revolt, or manumission. Freedom was, without a doubt, “the dream of all slaves of Antiquity” (137).

While the book contains endnotes (169–84), a subject index (185–90), and index locorum (191–8), there is, regrettably, no bibliography. The secondary literature is predominantly French with only limited contributions in English, German, and Italian. My greatest complaint is that the authors sometimes mention an ancient author without giving a precise citation (this happens on pp. 7, 9, 23, 41, 47, 53, 57, 79, etc.) making it difficult for those of us working on slavery to add Andreau and Descat’s contributions to our own. Most of the time, however, attestations are clear and properly backed up, making available to English-speaking scholars a huge new resource of materials. The translation from the French is for the most part adequate, though I count six split infinitives (51, 58, 127, 131, 139, 164) and a few typographical errors (37, 82, 142, 168).

NOTE

[[1]] So Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Harvard University Press, 1982) passim.

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