posted with permission:

Llewelyn Morgan, Musa Pedestris: Metre and Meaning in Roman Verse. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. x + 412. £78.00/$130.00. ISBN 978-0-19-955418-8.

Reviewed by John Henkel, Georgetown College

This ambitious book aims to convince Latinists that meter is not just a category for formal analysis, but an important constituent of meaning in Roman poetry. Each meter, Morgan argues, constitutes a literary tradition with its own distinct character, or “ethos.” As distinct from its formal characteristics, a meter’s ethos accrues from its association with one or more distinctive authors and/or subjects. Often this association is with its eponym or perceived inventor, but further associations accrete over time. So, for Catullus, the Sapphic strophe conveys vulnerability, privacy, and domesticity through its association with Sappho, but for Horace it also carries an association with Catullus, and for Statius with Horace. To recover the ethos of a meter, Morgan looks at ancient metrical practice in light of ancient metrical theory; and although moderns often disdain the metricians as historically inaccurate, Morgan shows their value as evidence of ancient perceptions of a meter’s origin and associations. Morgan applies this methodology through numerous and detailed close readings, in chapters on the hendecasyllable, the non-dramatic iamb, the Sapphic strophe, and the hexameter. The individual readings vary in elegance and success, but they demonstrate the value of this new approach to meter in Roman poetry.

After an introduction that demonstrates his method on Priapeans (which share an ethos with Priapus) and Sotadeans (which connote sexual deviancy because of the κιναιδολογία of their namesake Sotades), Morgan attempts in each chapter to reconstruct the ethos of one meter. The chapters are long (65–103 pages), because they combine close reading with a survey of relevant evidence from the metricians. At his best, Morgan uses these to present a general overview of a meter’s history and development. Where the evidence is less congenial to overview, however, his organization can be difficult to follow. The book ranges widely over Latin literary history—this is one of its virtues—but in doing so, it often moves in unexpected directions. Nevertheless, some of its obiter dicta are quite interesting, like the claim that ἡσυχία as part of the Sapphic ethos may help explain Catullus’s remarks about otium in his translation of Sappho fr. 31 (Cat. 51.13–16).

Chapters 1 and 2 are the book’s shortest (65, 67 pages), but do the best job combining close reading with overview. Chapter 1 treats the hendecasyllable, the history of which is hazy before Catullus and the Neoterics (its consequent malleability, Morgan suggests, may be one reason the Neoterics favor it). Among other findings, Morgan here shows the usefulness of metrical theory by examining Catullus’ use of this meter in light of rival theories about its origins. Although the dominant critical tradition (Varro, Bassus, Quintilian) regards the meter as ionic and therefore effeminate, Catullus apparently knows about another theory (also in Bassus) that regards it as iambic, since he represents his hendecasyllables as iambi and therefore as aggressive (truces vibrare iambos, 36.5). In Chapter 2, Morgan discusses the Romans’ highly artificial use of iambic meters other than the trimeter: the choliamb, known for its metaliterary limp; the so-called pure iambic trimeter, which is delicately Hellenizing in Catullus 4 but elsewhere charged with iambic aggression; and the epodic meters of Horace, which imitate those of Archilochus. This chapter provides an excellent overview of these meters, which variously exploit what ancient critics saw as the iamb’s originally aggressive character (lost from the trimeter because of its adoption for tragedy).

Chapters 3 and 4 are longer (103, 94 pages) and less cohesively organized. Chapter 3 treats the Sapphic strophe, which, as noted above, projects an ethos of vulnerability, privacy, and limitation. Chapter 4 addresses the dactylic hexameter, which Morgan rightly claims is the standard of comparison for other meters, just as epic is the standard of comparison for other genres. Because of its association with Homer and the epic tradition, the hexameter projected grandeur and achievement. In Italy, it also represented artistic refinement on the model of Greece, as seen when Ennius contrasts it with the native Italian Saturnian meter (fr. 206–7 Sk.). Morgan’s chapter deals mainly with the genres/meters that oppose themselves to the epic hexameter, especially satire (epic’s “evil twin”), which turns the tables and uses the same meter to decry Hellenizing and Greek influence as pretension. It also treats Saturnians, which project nationalism and archaism after the introduction of the hexameter, and the elegiac couplet, in which Ovid and others are well known to play on the tension between alternating hexameter and pentameter lines.

This is not an easy book to read, and it sometimes oversimplifies complex phenomena. It pays very limited attention, for example, to the relationship between meter and genre. But although readers will not agree with Morgan at every point, there is much here that is intuitively right, and Morgan’s methodology is clearly valuable. In approaching meter, Morgan makes arguments similar to those that Hinds and others have made about genre: Roman poets tendentiously reinterpret the rules of decorum, finding in a genre or meter some new and original capability, which is nevertheless firmly rooted in literary history and theory. This book, therefore, will be valuable not only for those who work on meter, or on Catullus, Horace, Statius, and Martial, but also for Latinists who work with issues of genre as well.

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James I. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. x + 607. £85.00/$149.00. ISBN 978-0-521-84180-1

Reviewed by Christos Tsagalis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

This is the first installment of an ambitious tripartite project on the origins and evolution of aesthetic thought in antiquity. It aims at studying the origins of aesthetic inquiry in various art forms from the very beginnings of Greek culture down to the fourth century and then into late antiquity. The other two volumes will explore the evolution of aesthetic inquiry in the post-Aristotelian era with an emphasis on literary criticism, theory, and aesthetics, and the idea of the sublime in antiquity.

In the first part of the book (Foundations: Aesthetics, Formalism, and Materialism, 1–176), Porter lays the necessary groundwork for his project. He meticulously examines the concepts (and traditions) of formalism and materialism that constitute the two driving forces in the history of the study of Greek art. In Chapter 1, he argues that sensation and experience are of key importance to the evolution of aesthetics, and that a comprehensive study of aesthetic terms is still to be written. In Chapter 2, Porter examines the various forms and theories of formalism with particular emphasis on Russian Formalism and Victor Shklovsky’s famous doctrine of “defamiliarization,” and Plato’s and Aristotle’s theory of beauty. In Chapter 3, the focus is on matter and appearances. The author argues that the Presocratics were the conceptual innovators with respect to the emphasis they led to the phenomenal world: “for what is most significant to the Presocratics’ contribution to aesthetic thinking is not only that they, as it were, dub matter or materiality categories of thought and occasionally find beauty in this realm, but also that they construct these categories as existing in infinite expanses, farther than the eye can see or the mind can grasp” (158).

Part Two (The Nascent Aesthetic Languages of the Sixth to Fourth Centuries BCE, 179–450) deals with the emergence of aesthetic reflection in ancient Greece from the sixth to the fourth century across the arts (verbal, visual, and musical). In Chapter 4, which is dedicated to the Sophistic movement, Porter shows how empirical experience of the material and phenomenal world really took off with the Sophists whose investigations on language should be placed against the backdrop of a wider inquiry on music, rhythm, painting, and architecture that marked the rise of Greek culture in the fifth century. The author rightly places the development of a critical and descriptive language within this context, the more so since the vocabulary of summetria, rhythmos, and phantasia is admirably cross-generic. Chapter 5 is dedicated to the examination of the evolving discourses on aesthetics in fifth-century Greece through the work of Aristophanes and Gorgias. Porter builds on Rosemary Harriott’s work (Poetry and Criticism Before Plato, 1969), who has drawn attention to the fact that pre-Platonic criticism of poetry tends to “express ideas and abstractions in visual, concrete terms” (97). He then examines the use of “craft-metaphors” in Aristophanes’ Frogs and Thesmophoriazusae, which he interprets within the framework of the emergence of interest in aesthetic materialism. The author is right to argue that Aristophanes represents only the best known example of this tendency and that there was an entire comic tradition on poetic criticism that had also made use of such “craft-metaphors” (Cratinus, Pherecrates). Porter interprets this tendency to materialize metaphors as evidence for the development of aesthetic materialism. Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted to the music of the voice and the voice of music. In the former the role of voice in ancient sources is thoroughly discussed, mainly in the light of the reflection on poetics that it provoked. In the latter, given the close association between music and performance contexts, especially but not solely of poetry, special emphasis is put on Pindar’s teacher, Lasus of Hermione and the new poetics of the sound. Chapter 8 concludes Part Two with an assessment of the viewing practices and different visual languages used in painting, sculpture, architecture, and visual imagery in literature.

Part Three (Broader Perspectives, 453–523), which in sharp contrast to Parts One and Two contains a single chapter, deals with what Porter calls “the material sublime,” a “distinctive form of monumentality: produced by the intersection of three basic themes in ancient aesthetics: verbal artistry, architecture, and the sublime.”

Before I briefly engage with some criticism, let me make it clear that this is a well argued and thorough contribution to the study of aesthetic criticism in ancient Greek thought. Porter is well informed with respect to secondary literature, meticulous in the presentation of his case, and careful with methodological issues that are (understandably) quite crucial in an endeavor of gigantic proportions. My main criticism concerns the questionable predominance of aesthetic materialism. I would have personally opted, if ancient Greek culture as a whole is kept in mind, for a more blurred picture. A second point to be made concerns the absence of what I would (also)[[1]] consider the natural product of an engagement with materialism, experience, and sensation, i.e. the senses themselves. Next to the hearing (aural) and seeing (visual), there is touching, smelling, and tasting. In fact, such an approach would unavoidably lead to an entire reconsideration of the limits and limitations of the notion of “art” and the “beautiful” employed by Porter as the framework within which aesthetic materialism operates.

As far as technical issues are concerned, I think that the book is over-analytical and that most chapters could have been reduced by 30%. This would have made them more straightforward and easy to read. Part Four (Aesthetic Futures), for some reason that I cannot explain, contains only the epilogue. The book is nicely produced and basically free from typos. I list only a couple of mistakes in the Greek: τῶν αἰσθήτων for τῶν αἰσθητῶν, ποιοτήτος for ποιότητος (292); παρέργον for πάρεργον (337).

NOTE

[[1]] See the review by Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi in BMCR 2012.01.11.

• 2012.07.50:  Paul Curtis, Stesichoros’s Geryoneis. Mnemosyne supplements. Monographs on Greek and Latin language and literature, 333.
• 2012.07.49:  Claire Holleran, April Pudsey, Demography and the Graeco-Roman World: New Insights and Approaches.
• 2012.07.48:  Dorigen Caldwell, Lesley Caldwell, Rome: Continuing Encounters between Past and Present.
• 2012.07.47:  Daryn Lehoux, What Did the Romans Know?: an Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking.
• 2012.07.46:  David Collard, Jim Morris, Elisa Perego, Food and Drink in Archaeology 3: University of Nottingham Postgraduate Conference 2009.
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• 2012.07.44:  Karina Grömer, Regina Hofmann-de Keijzer, Helga Rösel-Mautendorfer, Prähistorische Textilkunst in Mitteleuropa: Geschichte des Handwerkes und Kleidung vor den Römern. Veröffentlichungen der Prähistorischen Abteilung, 4.
• 2012.07.43:  Gesine Manuwald, Roman Republican Theatre.
• 2012.07.42:  Iñigo Ruiz Arzálluz, Francesco Petrarca. La Vita Terrentii de Petrarca. Studi sul Petrarca, 39.
• 2012.07.41:  Graham Shipley, Pseudo-Skylax’s Periplous: the Circumnavigation of the Inhabited World. Text, Translation and Commentary.
• 2012.07.40:  Kathleen M. Lynch, The Symposium in Context: Pottery from a Late Archaic House near the Athenian Agora. Hesperia Supplement, 46
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• 2012.07.38:  Sviatoslav Dmitriev, The Greek Slogan of Freedom and Early Roman Politics in Greece.
• 2012.07.37:  Jenny Bryan, Likeness and Likelihood in the Presocratics and Plato. Cambridge classical studies.
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Melissa Lane, Eco-Republic: What the Ancients Can Teach Us About Ethics, Virtues, and Sustainable Living. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012. Pp. ix + 245. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-691-15124-3.

Reviewed by Susan A. Curry, University of New Hampshire

Melissa Lane’s Eco-Republic is a very good example of what I hope is a burgeoning trend in classical scholarship: the application of ancient thought to contemporary environmental problems. By using Platonic images to conceptualize contemporary obstacles to the creation of a sustainable society and unraveling forgotten connections between city and soul in Plato’s writings, Eco-Republic offers a powerful corrective to those who devalue the role of the individual in favor of a top-down, policy-oriented approach to problems like climate change. For classicists, Lane’s work shows how the insights garnered from the close reading of ancient texts can and should be applied to today’s global challenges.

Using Plato’s ideal city as a model, Lane effectively demonstrates the crucial role the individual plays in reshaping his/her community’s ethos and acting towards the creation of a sustainable society. A sustainable society “will be one which its members themselves recognize as thriving in a way which can be continued into the future, in relation to the interactive life-support systems of the earth” (p. 19) and, over time, “will be ever more able to realize and instantiate the good” (p. 20). Citizens of bureaucratic societies have lost sight of the way individual ethics and behaviors are intertwined with a city’s values and policies. As a result, many individuals have come to feel that what they could do would make no measurable difference and so do not act at all. Similarly, when one’s government fails to take action, as when the U.S. government refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, many of its citizens do not believe that they ought to act either. In Plato, Lane finds ways of understanding why individuals fail to act and of imagining a society in which the individual participates in creating a vision of and implementing a society oriented towards, the good.

In the first part of Eco-Republic, “Inertia,” Lane analyzes three factors (inertia, greed, and negligibility) interfering with individual action. In the first chapter, “Introduction: Inertia as Failure of the Political Imagination,” Lane uses Plato’s myth of the Cave to discuss just how difficult it is for an individual to change his or her habits. While in Chapter two, “From Greed to Glory: Ancient to Modern Ethics—and Back Again?,” Lane traces the values of modern Western societies back to their origins in ancient Greece, but suggests that we no longer employ certain Greek terms and values, which now may prove vital to reinvigorating the contemporary political imagination and channeling it towards a more sustainable way of life. Toward that end, Lane discusses the importance of individual participation and virtue, and the dangers of pleonexia, “grasping-for-more,” and hubris.

The third chapter, “Underpinning Inertia: The Idea of Negligibility,” is the most provocative. Using Plato’s tale of the ring of Gyges, which renders its wearer invisible, Lane grapples with the problem of negligibility, the idea that whatever action an individual takes would make so little difference that that action is not worth taking, even when s/he believes it to be “right.” Lane convincingly argues, however, that one never knows what indirect effects an individual action may have. For example, installing solar panels on one’s roof may not save one enough money in the long-run to warrant their installation and certainly will not, by itself, radically alter the pace of climate change, but if one person in a community installs them anyway, his/her neighbors, too, may wish to be, or be seen to be, “green” and install solar panels themselves. Having solar panels may become a factor in one’s social identity; and, together, all of these solar panels will begin to make a measurable difference.

The second and third parts of Eco-Republic, “Imagination” and “Initiative,” further rely on Plato’s writings to describe the psychosocial relationship souls have with their cities and to illuminate ways individuals can positively influence the societies in which they live. In Chapters four through seven, “Meet Plato’s Republic,” “The City and the Soul,” “The Idea of the Good,” and “Initiative and Individuals: A (Partly) Platonic Political Project,” Lane summarizes the Republic, defends the values of virtue and health, and provides a cogent argument for ecological sustainability as “an indispensible part of the common good” (p. 137).

Of these, chapter six, “The Idea of the Good,” makes the best use of Plato’s Republic. In discussing the concept of the Good, Lane stresses the Platonic idea that self-destructive actions are in themselves unsustainable. Since what is of highest value must be both intelligible and a source of growth, the pursuit of goals that are self-undermining is the pursuit of that which cannot generate indefinite growth and is not sustainable. Sustainability, Lane concludes, “is best understood as a condition on goodness” (p. 136).

Lane does not purport to offer practical solutions to the myriad ecological challenges we face in the 21st century, which can frustrate the reader hoping for more direct applications of ancient theory to modern practices. Some Plato specialists will also find fault with the particular way Lane interprets and then applies Platonic ideas to the problems of sustainability. However, Lane’s is an original book that brings ancient psychology, political theory, and ethics to bear on the issues of sustainability. Ultimately, Eco-Republic admirably shows that students and scholars of the ancient world have unique contributions to make to discussions concerning the creation of a more sustainable society. We should take our place at the table.