• 12.10.56:  Lucie Pultrová​, The Latin Deverbative Nouns and Adjectives. Acta Universitatis Carolinae: Philologica monographia, 162.
• 2012.10.55:  Lauren Hackworth Petersen, Patricia Salzman-Mitchell, Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome.
• 2012.10.54:  Patrizia Mascoli, Iohannes de Segarellis. Elucidatio tragoediarum Senecae: Thebais seu Phoenissae. Quaderni di Invigilata Lucernis, 40.
• 2012.10.53:  Fred Eugene Ray, Land Battles in 5th Century B.C. Greece: A History and Analysis of 173 Engagements.
• 2012.10.52:  Paolo Asso, Brill’s Companion to Lucan.
• 2012.10.51:  Géza Alföldy, Römische Sozialgeschichte.
• 2012.10.50:  Sophie Helas, Selinus II: die punische Stadt auf der Akropolis. Sonderschriften / Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Rom, Bd 15.
• 2012.10.49:  Henry Power, Homer’s Odyssey: a Reading Guide. Reading Guides to Long Poems.
• 2012.10.48:  Kevin M. Cherry, Plato, Aristotle and the Purpose of Politics.
• 2012.10.47:  Dana LaCourse Munteanu, Tragic Pathos: Pity and Fear in Greek Philosophy and Tragedy.
• 2012.10.46:  Jeffrey S. Soles, Costis Davaras, Mochlos IIC: Period IV, the Mycenaean Settlement and Cemetery: the Human Remains and Other Finds. Prehistory monographs, 32.
• 2012.10.45:  Richard McKirahan, Philoponus: On Aristotle Posterior analytics 1.9-18. Ancient commentators on Aristotle.

posted with permission:

The Roman Empire in Context: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. Edited by Johann P. Arnason and Kurt A. Raaflaub. Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Pp. viii + 319. Hardcover, £90.00/$149.95. ISBN 978-0-470-65557-3.

Reviewed by Greg Woolf, University of St. Andrews

How could one study the Roman empire “out of context”? The trick is to find the appropriate context for each specific enquiry being undertaken. The stated context for Kurt Raaflaub’s series Ancient World: Comparative Histories, of which this is the fifth volume to appear, is a broad set of societies from the Bronze Age to the early Middle Ages along with (more contentiously) other societies “that are structurally ‘ancient’ or ‘early’” for which pre-modern Japan and pre-Columbian America are the paradigms. Not pre-capitalist, then, nor pre-industrial, nor even pre-modern since Europe and western Asia after 600 AD are excluded. Those readers worried about unacknowledged Eurocentrism might be more comfortable with a sociological-cum-technological definition such as Ernest Gellner’s “agro-literate state” or either a Weberian or Marxist version of early / tributary empires. Arnason and Raaflaub lean, in different ways, towards recent reworkings of Karl Jaspers’ Axial Civilizations concept: appropriately the dedicatee of this volume is Shmuel Eisenstadt.

This particular volume collection originated in a conference held in Florence in 2005 and brings together 16 papers, most of them first given on that occasion. About half are written by Roman historians with interests in comparative studies: the other half by like-minded scholars from cognate fields. Assyriology, Mediaeval History, Byzantine Studies, Sinology and Islamic and Iranian Studies are all represented. The line up—which includes Mario Liverani, John Haldon, Michael Loewe, Egon Flaig, Garth Fowden and Guy Stroumsa—is impressive.

Few chapters disappoint, but there is little in the way of an overarching theme.[[1]] Apart from the editors, only a few contributors undertake explicit comparative analysis. Notable exceptions are Peter Fibinger Bang on universal empire,[[2]] Michael Loewe whose paper on early China makes frequent references to Rome, and Ted Lendon and David Cohen who co-author an entertaining chapter comparing the letter style of Roman emperors and a mediaeval Aragonese king.[[3]] Because the original conference was focused on the “formation and transformation of empires” several papers consider transitions across conventional historical periodizations: from Republic to Empire, from the early empire to late antiquity, from Rome to Byzantium, and so on. This offers a different kind of comparison, diachronic rather than taxonomic, with the accent on interpretative narrative rather than structural analysis.

For the most part, then, the volume offers the academic equivalent of “proximity talks,” with the work of compare and contrast, of generalization and differentiation, largely left to any interested reader who works through the whole collection. Perhaps inevitably for papers originally aimed at colleagues in other disciplines a good deal of introductory material is included. Roman historians may feel they have learned more about other empires than about “their own,” but that may be no bad thing. A few papers on Roman themes do indeed find new things to do with familiar material: invidiously I single out Egon Flaig on the end of the Republic and Arnason’s interesting if challenging chapter comparing approaches to Rome as a state, as an empire and as a civilization.[[4]]

The Roman Empire in Context does not offer a unified and novel perspective on Roman history, nor a major contribution to the theorizing of early empires.[[5]] Perhaps this is not the sort of project from which it would be fair to ask for a more rigorous historical sociology.[[6]] But reading it does provide an opportunity to think harder about the comparative enterprise. Few individuals will probably want to pay quite so much to own the proceedings of this experiment, but those interested in a pursuing serious comparison between early empires will learn a good deal from consulting it.

NOTES

[[1]] The volume is less successful in this respect than other volumes in the series, such as the tightly focused and very interesting K. Raaflaub (ed.), War and Peace in the Ancient World (Malden 2007).

[[2]] A study for his own collection P. F. Bang and D. Kolodziejczyz (eds.), Universal Empire. A comparative approach to imperial culture and representation in Eurasian History (Cambridge 2012).

[[3]] A model worth pursuing. For a very successful recent application of this technique to interdisciplinary history, a collection in which every chapter is co-authored, see A. Shryock and D. L. Smail (eds.), Deep History. The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley 2011).

[[4]] This essay includes a rare engagement with the important study H. Inglebert, P. Gros and G. Sauron, Histoire de la Civilization romaine (Paris 2005).

[[5]] For this, readers should return to S. Eisenstadt, The political systems of empires (London 1963), J. H. Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (Chapel Hill NC 1982), S. E. Alcock, T. D’Altroy, K. D. Morrison and C. M. Sinopoli (eds.), Empires. Perspectives from Archaeology and History (New York & Cambridge 2001), I. Morris and W. Scheidel (eds.), The Dynamics of Early Empires. State power from Assyria to Byzantium (Oxford & New York 2009), P. F. Bang and C. A. Bayly (eds.), Tributary Empires in Global History (Basingstoke 2011).

[[6]] See the useful survey by P. Vasunia, “The Comparative Study of Empires,” Journal of Roman Studies (2011) 222-37.

posted with permission:

Aristotle Poetics: Editio maior of the Greek text with historical introduction and philological commentaries. By Leonardo Tarán and Dimitri Gutas. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012. Pp. viii + 538. Hardcover, €162.00/US$226.00. ISBN 978-90-04-21740-9.

Reviewed by Andrew Ford, Princeton University

This editio maior of the Poetics gives a moderately different text from that in Rudolph Kassel’s widely used 1965 OCT (reprinted in D. W. Lucas’ 1968 commentary) together with a fuller apparatus and a vastly fuller picture of the work’s complex tradition. Tarán, author of numerous studies of Aristotle and the Greek philosophical tradition, has teamed up with Gutas, a specialist in medieval Arabic, so as to be able to give a thorough account, in the case of each variant, of the evidence of the four primary witnesses (i.e., witnesses that do not depend on any other extant source). These are assessed in Tarán’s “Prolegomena to the Edition of the Text” (pp. 129–58): the two oldest Greek MSS (A and B), the lost exemplar of William of Moerbeke’s 1278 Latin translation (Φ), and a Syro-Arabic transmission (Σ), known to us through a tenth-century Arabic translation and a tiny bit of its Syriac original. It has been known since the 19th century that the Syro-Arabic tradition can be right against the unanimous testimony of our Greco-Latin sources (e.g., 1447b16).

Tarán’s text and critical apparatus is accordingly accompanied by two commentaries: he provides extensive notes on the transmission of the text in the Greek and Latin sources (pp. 221–306) and Gutas a “Greco-Arabic Critical Apparatus and Commentary” (pp. 307–474) which patiently shows how the lost Greek hyparchtypes (plural: pp. 144–8) of Σ might be reconstructed. Gutas quotes and translates Arabic liberally and labors to make the bases of his judgment clear (e.g., noting when a given Greek word is regularly translated by an Arabic one). His substantial contributions must be evaluated by specialists in the relevant languages, but this reviewer can attest that a classicist will find here much that is new and significantly different from what can be extracted from Margoliouth or Tkatsch (e.g., pp. 334–6 on the mangled names Epicharmus and Phormis at 1449b6) or from Kassel’s report of them (e.g., pp. 331–3, 351–2).

Tarán acknowledges Kassel’s reports of the Greek MSS as “the most complete and accurate so far” but has additional material (and a few corrections) to add. He is more consistent in reporting B (which is deteriorating alarmingly: pp. 154–5), lest readers infer from Kassel’s silence that it supports A when it doesn’t. He also lets us know when the Latin or Arabic translations cannot contribute to a question with the sigla [Φ] and [Σ]. Among recentiores, Parisinus 2038 is given special attention: not a simple offshoot of B as Lobel and Kassel thought, but reflecting both A and B (pp. 149–50), its right readings in agreement with the Syro-Ar. tradition (e.g., 1454b25) deserve mention as conjectures collected by Andronicos Callistos that importantly influenced the Aldine edition (pp. 44–7).

Tarán rightly esteems Kassel’s edition (pp. 152–5), and often follows him in the conjectures he accepts, though he will use Σ to support a different text (e.g., 1454b37) and is more likely to cite Bywater’s conjectures and commentary (pronounced “the best so far,” p. 66). Modern emendations that are not adopted are not recorded in the apparatus, though they may be discussed in the commentary. On the other hand, Tarán does register, with the note “ci.,” conjectures of scholars of the 15th and 16th centuries when they were subsequently confirmed by better knowledge of the primary witnesses (pp. 58, 156). He admits two emendations of his own: at 1455b22, he plausibly suggests Aristotle wrote ἀναγνωρίσας εἰς τινὰς (i.e., εἴς τινας) to say Odysseus “made himself known to some people” upon his return; at 1449b10, to express the idea that tragedy and epic both use metrical speech, his μετὰ μέτρου καὶ λόγου is closer to the (confused) paradosis, but the instrumental dative in Kassel’s μετὰ μέτρου λόγῳ fits better with Aristotle’s usual way of referring to the media of imitation (e.g., 1449b25).

The most obvious improvement of his text over Kassel’s is in the discussion of the “nameless art” at 1447a28-b9 (pp. 226–31, 312–4). Bernays’ insertion of “nameless” (confirmed by Σ) is kept in the singular, and getting rid of Lobel’s emendations allows a correct appreciation of Aristotle’s complex division of mimetic arts (cf. CP 105 [2010] 222–4). In another substantial difference from Kassel, Aristotle no longer says at 1455a32-3 that “poetry is the art of a man of genius or [ἢ] one with a touch of madness” (tr. Hutton); Tarán inserts μᾶλλον from Σ (as Gudeman had) to say poetry requires genius rather than madness, pointing out that the (Platonic) idea of poetic inspiration is absent from the Poetics.

Tarán may be called conservative insofar as he resists emendations that might smooth out the text but are not necessary (e.g., 1447b14). On the whole, he is sparing with brackets and obeli, even though he is able to show that his archetype Ω (= Kassel’s Λ) was imperfect and interpolated (pp. 148–9) and that readers’ notes crept into the text at times (e.g., 1450b9–10, 15). Where Kassel has brackets or obeli, Tarán may read through (e.g., 1450a17–20), repunctuate (1450a1-2) or emend (1452a35); he is content to retain a phrase that is “not necessary but not illogical” (p. 258 on 1451b32). The overall impression is of a treatise that is occasionally rather loose in syntax (e.g., staying with the nominative participle at 1449a9) and train of thought (keeping the otiose melos at 1449b29), but also one that is less shot through with interpolations and glosses than one sees in Kassel (to say nothing of Gerald Else).

Two general essays open the volume: Tarán’s “History of the Text of the Poetics” lays down his editorial principles and tracks the history of the text and its editions from Aristotle’s library to the present. Gutas’ “The Poetics in Syriac and Arabic Translations” shows this tradition to be far more complicated than Kassel’s stemma (p. xii of his edition) may lead one to suppose (contrast p. 110). These lengthy chapters may go beyond what is strictly necessary for an edition, but they provide a wealth of fine-grained information about how pre- and early-modern scribes and scholars worked.

Although Tarán’s commentary focuses on the evidence for the text and not on explicating Aristotle’s theory (we are referred to a forthcoming work on the question of whether catharsis should be understood as involving moral learning, for example: p. 58), the commentary inevitably deals with interpretative issues, often illuminatingly (e.g., on 1447a22, 1449b3). His exegesis of poetry’s two natural causes (1448b4–19), however, raises objections. For Tarán, these are: “1) our congenital power to imitate since childhood and to learn from these first imitations; 2) the fact that all men rejoice in seeing imitations” (p. 239). He comments on the first cause that Aristotle offers no argument to support his claim, but this is because Tarán conflates the actual cause—imitating is natural to us—with one of the signs pointing to its truth: the fact that we get our first lessons through imitation shows that imitating is instinctive, not something learned. So to gloss this cause as “our instinct to imitate and thus to learn” goes well beyond Aristotle and will be weak support for attempts to convert tragic pleasure into moral learning (cf. p. 240).

Because the Poetics has so many passages in which a great deal hangs on the choice between variants, it is impossible to do justice to an edition in limited space and short time. But there is no doubt that this is a work all scholars of the Poetics will want at hand and all research libraries must have. An obligatory port of call for textual questions, it provides a fresh approach to numerous passages and offers all students of the Poetics a treasury of information about the reception—eastern and western—of that profound work. Helpful indices of Greek words, names, subjects, and of Greek, Latin, Arabic and Syriac manuscripts conclude the book.

… sorry … forgot to post them yesterday:

• 2012.10.44:  Marianna Scapini, Temi greci e citazioni da Erodoto nelle storie di Roma arcaica. Studia Classica et Mediaevalia, 4.
• 2012.10.43:  Sinclair Bell, Teresa Ramsby, Free at Last!: the Impact of Freed Slaves on the Roman Empire.
• 2012.10.42:  Daniela Summa, Inscriptiones Graecae Graeciae septentrionalis, voluminibus VII et VIII non comprehensae. Pars I. Inscriptiones Phocidis, Locridis, Aetoliae, Acarnaniae, insularum maris Ionii, editio altera. Fasc. 5. Inscriptiones Locridis orientalis. Inscriptiones Graecae IX 12, 5.
• 2012.10.41:  Lorenzo Miletti, L’arte dell’autoelogio: studio sull’orazione 28 K di Elio Aristide, con testo, traduzione e commento. Testi e studi di cultura classica, 50.
• 2012.10.40:  Antoine Hermary, Bertrand Jaeger, Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum. Volume VII: Festivals and Contests.
• 2012.10.39:  Hanna Stöger, Rethinking Ostia: a Spatial Enquiry into the Urban Society of Rome’s Imperial Port-town. Archaeological studies Leiden University, 24.
• 2012.10.38:  Marietta Horster, Christiane Reitz, Condensing texts – condensed texts. Palingenesia, Bd 98.
• 2012.10.37:  Gabriel Herman, Stability and Crisis in the Athenian Democracy. Historia Einzelschriften 220.
• 2012.10.36:  Michel Fattal, Paroles et actes chez Héraclite: sur les fondements théoriques de l’action morale. Ouverture philosophique.
• 2012.10.35:  Giuseppe Roma, I Longobardi del Sud.
• 2012.10.34:  Sinéad O’Sullivan, Glossae aevi carolini in libros I-II Martiani Capellae De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis (CCCM), 237.
• 2012.10.33:  Fabio Gasti, Sant’Agostino: Storie di conversione (Confessioni, Libro VIII). Letteratura universale Marsilio.
• 2012.10.32:  Chiara Pizzirani, Il sepolcreto etrusco della Galassina di Castelvetro (Modena). Studi e scavi, nuova serie 24.
• 2012.10.31:  Biagio Virgilio, Le roi écrit: le correspondance du soverain hellénistique, suivie de deux lettres d’Antiochos III à partir de Louis Robert et d’Adolf Wilhelm. Studi ellenistici, 25.
• 2012.10.30:  Heather L. Reid, Athletics and Philosophy in the Ancient World: Contests of Virtue. Ethics and sport.
• 2012.10.29:  Carolin Ritter, Ovidius redivivus: die Epistulae Heroides des Mark Alexander Boyd. Edition, Übersetzung und Kommentar der Briefe Atalanta Meleagro (1), Eurydice Orpheo (6), Philomela Tereo (9), Venus Adoni (15). Noctes Neolatinae.
• 2012.10.28:  Roberto Pretagostini, Scritti di metrica (a cura di Maria Silvana Celentano). Storia e letteratura, 268.
• 2012.10.27:  Giuseppe Girgenti, Giuseppe Muscolino, Porfirio: La filosofia rivelata dagli oracoli. Con tutti i frammenti di magia, stregoneria, teosofia e teurgia. Il pensiero occidentale.
• 2012.10.26:  Jean Andreau, Raymond Descat, The Slave in Greece and Rome. (Originally published in French 2006; translated by Marion Leopold).
• 2012.10.25:  Edith Hall, Richard Alston, Justine McConnell, Ancient Slavery and Abolition: from Hobbes to Hollywood. Classical presences.

• 2012.10.24:  Mark J. Johnson, Robert Ousterhout, Amy Papalexandrou, Approaches to Byzantine Architecture and its Decoration: Studies in Honor of Slobodan Ćurčić.
• 2012.10.23:  Stefano Caciagli, Poeti e società: comunicazione poetica e formazioni sociali nella Lesbo del VII/VI secolo a. C. Opera vincitrice del premio Giuseppe Cevolani per il 2011. Supplementi di Lexis, 64
• 2012.10.22:  Olga Tellegen-Couperus, Law and Religion in the Roman Republic. Mnemosyne supplements. History and archaeology of classical antiquity, 336.
• 2012.10.21:  Wolfgang de Melo, Plautus IV: The Little Carthaginian; Pseudolus; The Rope. Loeb classical library, 260.
• 2012.10.20:  Marie Louise von Glinski, Simile and Identity in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
• 2012.10.19:  Response: Versnel on Bonnet on Versnel, Coping with the Gods.
• 2012.10.18:  Richard Holway, Becoming Achilles: Child-Sacrifice, War, and Misrule in the Iliad and Beyond. Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches.
• 2012.10.17:  William Bowden, Richard Hodges, Butrint 3: Excavations at the Triconch Palace. Butrint archaeological monographs, 3.
• 2012.10.16:  Response: Nardelli on Dasen on Budin, Images of Woman and Child.
• 2012.10.15:  Francis Cairns, Roman Lyric: Collected Papers on Catullus and Horace. Beiträge zur Altertumskunde, Bd 301.
• 2012.10.14:  Rodney G. Dennis, Michael C. J. Putnam, The Complete Poems of Tibullus: an En Face Bilingual Edition / Albius Tibullus, Lygdamus, and Sulpicia.
• 2012.10.13:  James H. Richardson, The Fabii and the Gauls. Studies in Historical Thought and Historiography in Republican Rome. Historia Einzelschriften, 222.
• 2012.10.12:  Sotera Fornaro, L’ora die Antigone dal nazismo agli ‘anni di piombo’. Drama: Studien zum antiken Drama und seiner Rezeption, NS, Bd 9.
• 2012.10.11:  Antonio Aloni, Massimiliano Ornaghi, Tra panellenismo e tradizioni locali: nuovi contributi. Orione, 4.
• 2012.10.10:  Jörg Rüpke, The Roman Calendar from Numa to Constantine: Time, History, and the Fasti. (Translated by David M. B. Richardson; originally published 1995)