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Cosmology and the Polis: The Social Construction of Space and Time in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. By Richard Seaford. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xiii + 366. Hardcover, $110.00. ISBN 978-1-107-00927-1.

Reviewed by Vayos Liapis, Open University of Cyprus

This bold and complex book develops a line of argument that Seaford has been pursuing since Reciprocity and Ritual (1994) and Money and the Early Greek Mind (2004). It shows how essential elements of the Greek polis-ritual, money, spatio-temporal structures-are also reflected in Greek drama and philosophy, with particular emphasis on Aeschylus.

Essential to Seaford’s analysis is the notion of the chronotope, a spatio-temporal unity that correlates socially constructed conceptions of uniform and analogous spatial and temporal frameworks. These frameworks are cognitive structures corresponding to communal and socially integrative practices, such as ritual, which articulates both space (in the form of, e.g., space covered by sacred processions) and time (through, e.g. sacred calendars). Earlier (Homeric) chronotopes, configured by reciprocity and plunder rather than by spatially fixed (landed) property as the basic means for wealth acquisition, show little interest in consistently articulating spatial relations, and construct time principally in terms of genealogies and of reciprocal relations between ruling families.

By contrast, the ascendancy of the “aetiological” chronotope in the context of the polis foregrounds the interconnection of cultic, political, and cosmic space, by emphasizing comprehensiveness (it embraces all components of the cosmos) and collectivity (the community appropriates and structures space). Aetiological time, too, unites mythic past and cultic present, especially as ritual regularly re-enacts events of the mythic past in the present, and homogenizes, through repeated circularity, the perception of time as a linear sequence.

Finally, in the “monetized” chronotope, time and space are imagined as potentially unlimited, insofar as money has the same purchasing power at any place or time, and also (unlike pre-monetary wealth) the capacity to accumulate unlimitedly, as well as being unlimited in scope qua universal standard (it can be exchanged with all things). This is the chronotope informing some Presocratic philosophy (esp. Anaximander and Heraclitus) but also the political reforms of Solon.

Seaford is particularly interested in the tension between the (socially integrative) aetiological chronotope on the one hand and the (potentially disruptive) monetized chronotope on the other. By articulating distinctions, ritual imposes order on mythic or social chaos, and thus limits the potentially unlimited. Money, on the contrary, by collapsing distinctions through its imposition of a universal standard, permits unlimited exchanges and unlimited accumulation over space and time.

Seaford’s insights into the tension between these two chronotopes are subsequently applied on Aeschylus, in what is perhaps the most engaging part of his book. In Supplices, he argues, the multiple crises caused by the Danaids’ rejection of marriage-and their interstitial state as reflected in the location of their supplication at an altar that is neither in the royal abode nor in the agora-would have been resolved at the end of the trilogy, with the establishment of polis cult ordering gender relations, as well as relations between oikos and polis.

In Septem, the tension between the chorus’ ritual lament, which integrates the polis, and its rejection by Eteocles, who embodies the introversion of the royal household, is resolved by the annihilation of the latter but also by its subsequent commemoration in hero cult and concomitant lamentation. Especially stimulating here is the discussion of how the new frame of thought represented by monetization is grafted onto older mythico-religious patterns, so that the ancestral curse is conceived (as it is in the Oresteia) in terms of a debt to be exacted in due time.

In Agamemnon, Clytemnestra’s initial control both of ritual and of geographic space (through the beacon sequence) perverts these into instruments of the royal house’s destruction. Likewise, in Choephori, allusions to mystic ritual at the climactic scenes surrounding the tyrannicide are again perverse, since they facilitate matricide in a distinctly non-public context (the introverted royal house). In Eumenides, however, Orestes’ supplication of Athena’s image takes place in civic space, in contrast to his earlier supplication in the god’s “house” in Delphi. Likewise, the Erinyes, who had threatened to pursue Orestes over limitless space, are eventually contained, through public ritual in civic space, within the confines of the earth, thereby linking polis and cosmos.

The same ritual also distinguishes and imposes order on the perverse unity of opposites represented earlier in the trilogy by the unending cycle of violent reciprocity. This unity has a parallel in the non-differentiation inherent in monetary transactions and in the accumulation of monetary wealth. It is embodied by the Erinyes, who stand for both chronological homogeneity (their power to exact punishment is equally valid at all times) and spatial homogeneity (they can exact punishment anywhere). In moments of crisis in tragedy, spatial and temporal homogeneity are emphasized: the remote space brings crisis into the immediate space (royal house), and structurally similar actions (e.g. violent revenge) are cyclically repeated. Ritual brings resolution by differentiating the opposites: space is reclaimed by the community, and cyclical, repetitive suffering gives way to permanent well-being.

The book also offers a wealth of insights into a variety of topics related to the interplay between the limitedness of ritual and the unlimitedness of monetized wealth. I single out the discussion of “form-parallelism”-the juxtaposition of words or phrases that are parallel and often antithetical-as a vehicle for conveying ideas both of antithesis and of a deeper unity. For instance, in Septem 911-14 form-parallelism in lamentation for the fratricidal brothers assimilates their unnatural opposition to their unnatural unity in both origin (incest) and death. In Aeschylus, this rhetorical device signifies the deferral or subversion of completion by emphasizing that the opposites are bound together in a relationship of endless tension- a conception (also Heraclitean) associated with the homogenizing power of money, which assimilates different commodities by remaining in itself always the same.

This is an important work that redefines our conception of central categories of early Greek thought: space, time, ritual, and money. It will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in the areas of classical Greek literature, Greek history, philosophy, and theatre.[[1]]

[[1]]Though generally well produced, the volume has a high number of typos. Most are relatively unobtrusive (e.g., “facilated,” p. 119; Κύκλο<ϋ and στεφάνο for Κύκλō and στεφάνō, p. 227). In a few cases, however, they may hinder comprehension (e.g., “seeing gain,” p. 198; “penalties imposed the polis,” p. 251; “benefaction combined with hostility,” p. 268). On p. 211 delete n. 22 (it reappears, correctly, as n. 23). The coinage “endophony” (= intrafamilial murder, from endon and phonos) can be misleading, esp. since “antiphony” is also used in the book.

[©2013 by The Classical Association of the Middle West and South. All rights reserved.]

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Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the Late Roman Republic. By Valentina Arena. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. ix + 324. Hardcover, $99.00. ISBN 978-1-107-028173.

Reviewed by Robert Morstein-Marx, University of California, Santa Barbara

Valentina Arena’s important book, a revision of her dissertation written at University College London, is at its heart a study of how the concept of libertas was (or might have been) theorized so that it could effectively be deployed in political debate between the termini of Sulla’s victory and the Caesarian civil war. This naturally first entails (Ch. 1) defining the concept of libertas as it was generally understood (“a status of non-subjection to the arbitrary will of another person or group of persons,” (6), taking a leaf from the “Cambridge School” of modern republican theorists), then (Ch. 2) reviewing the various “rights” or iura that expressed and protected that freedom, i.e. suffragium, provocatio, the rights of the tribunes and the rule of law generally.

Arena contends that while all parties in Rome understood the core definition of libertas in the same way (“non-domination” rather than “non-interference”-language drawn from P. Pettit and Q. Skinner in their rebuttal to the doctrine of purely “negative liberty”),[[1]] the same concept could be theoretically or ideologically articulated in two divergent directions by optimates and populares respectively. These constituted two “discourses,” “intellectual traditions,” or “families of ideas” (5, 7) about how to realize and protect libertas in political life both at the level of constitutional arrangements and of specific debates over distinct kinds of policy, such as land distribution. At the constitutional level (Ch. 3), Arena argues, for instance, that optimates insisted that the “mixed constitution,” in which power was divided and spread over three parts, was essential for the preservation of libertas,and while the People remained sovereign, direction and leadership was left in the hands of the Senate. Populares on the other hand assigned a far more robust role to the popular assembly and even are supposed to have claimed “that, in order to preserve political liberty, every citizen should not only participate in political affairs, but also play a central role in governance” (117).

Turning to the level of policy and public debate, Arena notes that only certain types of disputes consistently encouraged notable invocation of libertas (at least by optimates): proposals for “extraordinary commands,” the so-called senatus consultum ultimum, and plans for agrarian distribution (Ch. 4). She sketches out the saliency of the idea of freedom for each one: in brief, optimates objected to “extraordinary commands” as inevitably undermining freedom by investing excessive power in individuals and waiving real accountability; they advocated the s.c.u. as a necessary defense against tyranny or domination, while on the other hand opposing agrarian distribution as another way of concentrating unchecked power in the hands of an individual or group. Optimates resorted to the language of libertas because they needed “legitimation” of their opposition by means of arguments that might plausibly construe their opponents as undermining the fundamental Roman value while correspondingly representing themselves as its protector (Ch. 5).

Finally, in an Epilogue, Arena suggests that in the 40s, which is, strictly speaking, outside the period she has defined for her study, libertas underwent an important “conceptual change” along the lines of a process modeled by Skinner. As a result of debates over the s.c.u., libertas came to be invoked in a new way, as being dependent on an individual’s moral judgment rather than on the laws; and when this new application of the old concept came to be accepted by the community of language-users (the Roman People), then the concept itself could be said to have changed.

The argument is ambitious and elegant but is vulnerable to several objections. Above all, Arena’s cherry-picking of doctrines and principles enunciated, often implicitly, in a variety of genres (historiography, speeches, and essays) without controlling for the varying rhetorical demands imposed by their audiences leads to a vision of public debate that suggests far greater ideological polarization than what we find when actual debates are examined. Nothing in Tiberius Gracchus’s defense of his removal of a tribune from office (for Arena, a paradigm case of the popularis ideology of the absolute sovereignty of the popular assembly) conflicts with Polybius’ sketch of the functioning of the “mixed” or “balanced” constitution, supposedly the bedrock of a partisan, optimate constitutional ideology: Gracchus’s key point that the tribune must carry out the People’s will (not its “true interest” as judged paternalistically by the Senate) is indeed contained explicitly therein.

It is Cicero, not some firebrand tribune, who in court before a jury of senators, equites, and other well-off citizens, praised a tribune for not recognizing a veto and therefore preventing one man’s voice-albeit a sacrosanct tribune’s-from suppressing the judgment of the entire citizenry (Corn. I 31 Cr.). Arena adduces the Pseudo-Sallustian Second Letter to Caesar (here treated as an authentic document of 50 bc) as testimony for the optimate “preoccupation with a morally strong senate, to which a central role in the government of the commonwealth is assigned” (99)-yet a dozen pages later she acknowledges that it “focuses on a democratizing reform of the comitia centuriata” as well as other popularis-sounding initiatives (112).

Even the senatus consultum ultimum, which Arena presents as an exclusively optimate weapon, does not appear to have been opposed as such after the acquittal of L. Opimius in 120; neither Caesar (B.C. 1.7.5-6) nor Sallust (Cat. 29.2-3) challenges its legitimacy as an emergency measure to protect the Republic from violent insurrection. (It is, by the way, surprising that Arena can still assert without argument that the execution of the so-called “Catilinarians” was legally justified by reference to the s.c.u. after A. Drummond’s effective demolition of this idea: Law, Politics and Power (Stuttgart, 1995), 95-105.) And it is quite a stretch to assume (again, without argument) that the “democratic” speech mouthed by “Scipio” in the De re publica (Rep.1.47-50) reflects actual contemporary political discourse rather than the lecture-hall, which after all must be the source of Scipio’s subsequent assertion that monarchy was the best political system (Rep. 1.54-64: just try that in a contio!). Can any Roman popularis honestly be called a “democrat”? (So at pp. 172, 181.)

Far from the sharp contestation of political principle in public debate that Arena’s analysis would imply, orators in contiones competed by positioning themselves as the authentic heirs of Roman political tradition: popularis politicians never openly objected to the auctoritas of the Senate in principle but to the failure of corrupt senators of the present to uphold it, while optimates never openly disputed the principle that the decisions of the assembly of the People were sovereign (though they might claim that the People’s sovereign will had been subverted by procedural failures such as violence or religious neglect). No popularis is ever known to have publicly advocated a truly fundamental change of the traditional institutions that would eliminate the great influence of the Senate or subordinate it to the People, much less actually try to bring it about that “every citizen should … play a central role in governance” (above).

In her introduction Arena declares that the voting audience of the plebs will not be included in her analysis and therefore that her book “is not meant to be a direct contribution to the very lively debate on the nature of Roman political culture” (12). It may be churlish to complain that Arena did not write the kind of book she did not intend to write, but what is missing in my view is, unfortunately, the very core of the matter. It was the audience of voters, the Roman People, who were the chief persuasive target of the major political debates reviewed in this book, and consequently they indirectly determined what arguments could and could not successfully be made.

It is not enough to assert that optimates needed to invoke libertas “if they wished to entertain any serious hope of success” (255); why exactly, and within what parameters? No optimate could hope to persuade the majority of tribes that land distribution was unjust and therefore destroyed the very foundations of the community (as Cicero argues outside the public eye in De off.2.78-84), but there was just a chance-not, in fact, a very good one, statistically speaking-that, like Cicero in the de lege agraria speeches, he could succeed by exploiting his audience’s incomplete knowledge by representing a land bill as an insidious plot against their freedom.

Nor, for all the lavish attention Arena gives to this ill-fated line of argument, did optimates ever actually succeed in persuading the majority of the tribes that “extraordinary commands” were likely seriously to undermine libertas. What is even more important than L. Catulus’ arguments against the lex Gabinia (detailed here at inordinate length given that Dio 36.31-6 is a relatively free composition by the third-century historian) is the fact that few voters believed them. By leaving the audiences of public debate mostly out of the picture Arena’s long-and certainly thoughtful-exegesis of possible or real political theory fails to get real “traction” on what is, after all, expressly a study of “the practice of politics” (as expressed in her subtitle).

However, these are matters for respectful debate. The quarrel I have with the way in which Arena carries out her project should not obscure the many valuable contributions made by the book. She offers an interesting new view of the fundamental Roman conception of freedom which accepts M. Roller’s claim that political libertas derived its meaning essentially from the contrasting metaphor of legal slavery but develops it in a manner inspired by Skinner and Pettit: there was consensus across the political spectrum that libertas consisted in a status of “non-subjection to the arbitrary will of another person or group of persons” (6). But, contra Roller and Bleicken before him, she holds that this does not mean that the Romans lacked an abstract political idea of freedom-that is, that the concept was undeveloped or relatively empty. Arena has given us a thoughtful and intellectually challenging survey of the connection between the contemporary conception of libertas and some of the most persistent and bitterest controversies in the history of the late Republic. Her book serves as a highly salutary reminder of the absolute centrality of a strong concept of libertas in the political ferment of the Late Republic.

[[1]]A classic essay that will help orient readers to understand the terms and implications of this larger debate is Q. Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Machiavellian and modern perspectives,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 2 (Cambridge 2002) 186-212.

[©2013 by The Classical Association of the Middle West and South. All rights reserved.]

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Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy. By Hunter H. Gardner. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. viii + 285. Hardcover, $110.00. ISBN 978-0-19-965239-6.

Reviewed by Sara H. Lindheim, University of California, Santa Barbara

Hunter Gardner’s book, which began its life as a doctoral dissertation, is a welcome addition to scholarship on Augustan love elegy. Situated simultaneously within the debate about the dynamics of gender and power in elegiac poetry and interpretations that seek to explore the contradictions at the heart of the elegiac amator’s subjectivity, Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy argues that the genre, obsessed as it is with time, offers a different experience of temporality to (male) lover and (female) beloved.

Drawing on the theories of the French psycholinguist and feminist Julia Kristeva, Gardner suggests that, on the one hand, the elegiac amator, faced with the newly emerging prescriptions governing the lives of young, elite, Roman males in the early Principate (in particular the pressures to marry and rise to political responsibility at an increasingly young age), attempts to eschew the demands of male time-historical, teleological, linear. Instead, he seeks to embed himself firmly within the repetitive, cyclical, a-teleological “women’s time” that marks the puella. Embarking on a circuitous relationship of ever-deferred pleasure with an unattainable puella, the elegiac amator sidesteps the pressures of the Roman political, social, and cultural expectations for a man’s life course. Emphasizing the generic connection between amor and mora (Prop. 1.3, Tib. 1.3, Ovid’s Remedia Amoris), the amator finds the antidote to linear time in his pursuit of his beloved.

On the other hand, however, Gardner shows that the amator constantly raises the specter of hideous old age for his beloved, both through threats of what the future holds for her, and the recurring presence of the physically decrepit lena. Female subjectivity, posits Gardner, is linked in its cyclicality to the cycles of nature, and in this way circularity becomes “a sign of mortality and decay rather than eternity” (28). Cynthia (Prop. 2.15, 2.18, 3.24/25), Delia (Tib. 1.6), Phloe (Tib. 1.8) are all subject to the ravages of time, on the verge of becoming wrinkled, sagging, and erotically unappealing.

But woman’s decay does not imply man’s; on the contrary, the amator aligns himself with culture, rather than with nature. Through ars, through his poetry, he provides himself with the means to escape the grasping hands of time. The puella, trapped within the elegiac genre, may reach her expiry date, but the poet can grow up, can write about other subjects, can evolve poetically from erotic elegy to “celebrating Messalinus’ priesthood [Tibullus] … memorializing the matron Cornelia’s virtues as a Callimachus Romanus [Propertius], and spinning out a carmen perpetuum in hexameters from the world’s origins to the Augustan era [Ovid],” (223). In the end, however, freedom to join the teleological march toward responsible, male adulthood and citizenship is not all it is cracked up to be, and Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid all regress, through “various tropes of recantation” (255), to “a posture of eternally arrested development” (250), firmly ensconced within the demands of the elegiac genre.

Gardner’s reading of elegy is intelligent and persuasive. Rather than obfuscating or explaining away contradictions that emerge so clearly from the genre of erotic elegy, she invites us to focus our interpretive attention squarely on the inconsistencies. The puella provides the amator with a means to deny temporal imperatives, either when he discovers a refuge from linear time in her arms, or, antithetically, when he underscores her limited shelf-life along with that of erotic elegy by promising to grow up and choose other poetic forms. When he highlights the process of aging that awaits her, Gardner argues, the amator aligns the puella with the natural world and thus with decay. At this point, somewhat surprisingly, Gardner supplements her arguments based on Kristeva’s theories of “women’s time” with concepts drawn from the work of feminist anthropologist Sherry Ortner, who famously points out the alignment of the feminine with (perishable) nature and the masculine with (immortal) culture (“Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?,” orig. published 1972, revised version in Making Gender: The Erotics and Politics of Culture (1996: 21-42). This seems to me an unnecessary and confusing blending of theoretical models.

Much closer to hand are Lacanian theories of desire that would serve more seamlessly to illuminate the contradictory representations of the ageless and aging puella; indeed one could argue that the works of Kristeva, influenced by, and in constant conversation with Lacan’s, must always already be read in intimate connection with his. The workings of desire as Lacan sets them forth make clear that the puella, as a representation of all the lover aspires to be and also, conversely, all he denies in himself, tells us little about the feminine and remains for the amator no more than a strategy and a signifier that he manipulates for his own purposes.

Despite my quibbles about mixing theoretical frameworks and my preference for a more bleak reading of the feminine in the poems, this book will sit on my shelf right beside my current favorite pieces of scholarship on elegy, Paul Allen Miller’s Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real and Micaela Janan’s The Politics of Desire: Propertius IV. It is a must-read for both students and scholars of Augustan love elegy.

[©2013 by The Classical Association of the Middle West and South. All rights reserved.]

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Lucian’s The Ass: An Intermediate Greek Reader. Greek text with running vocabulary and commentary. Evan Hayes and Stephen Nimis, eds. Oxford, OH: Faenum Publishing, 2012. Pp. xii, 230.  ISBN 978-0983-2228-28.  $14.95 (pb).   

Katherine Panagakos, The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey

Hayes and Nimis have self-published five intermediate Greek readers since January, 2011, as part of a series funded by the Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Prize through the Honors Program at Miami University. These include: Lucian’s A True Story (2011); Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love (2011); Lucian’s The Ass (2012); Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess (2012); and Hippocrates’ On Airs, Waters, and Places and The Hippocratic Oath (2013). The editors should be commended for their dedication and daring to provide relatively cheap textbooks of less mainstream works for the undergraduate Greek student.

The intended audience for these textbooks is the student who has completed the first year sequence of ancient Greek and is embarking on the often daunting task of reading either their first work in toto or selections of a work. Commonly, a student’s first intermediate course is in the fall term after a summer that may have miraculously removed all knowledge of both simple and more difficult grammatical constructions as well as a good portion of their vocabulary. Students, therefore, will frequently require a comprehensive review of grammatical and syntactical constructions.

The advantages of the all-inclusive reader are manifold, and the student will have nearly everything s/he will require at her/his fingertips, thus allowing and encouraging them to read a fair amount of Greek at a steady pace. The instructor, therefore, is free to offer whatever reviews s/he deems necessary. One of the best aspects of the all-inclusive textbook is that it requires little or no need to consult a lexicon. I acknowledge that knowing how to use a lexicon is an important skill for students to have, but perhaps the intermediate level is not the ideal time to introduce it.

Another helpful feature of the all-in-one textbook is that students will rarely have to refer to their introductory Greek text or a Greek grammar, such as Smyth, for grammatical explanations. Admittedly, knowing how to use Smyth or any Greek grammar is fundamental for the success of language students beyond a certain level.  But I would argue that the intermediate student does not need this additional challenge. Finally, graduate level and scholarly commentaries tend to provide too much information for the undergraduate’s needs and often bring about an understandable frustration to the student. For an undergraduate to be required to not only read through extensive explanations but also determine what is useful for their primary purpose is not the goal of an undergraduate reading course, and this process often discourages students. At the intermediate level, we want to do all we can to help the student read as much Greek as possible while reviewing grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. The all-inclusive reader makes this possible for intermediate Greek students.

Hayes and Nimis, in their very short introduction (IX-XI), include a discussion on the aims of the work, a brief summary of the story itself, its connection to Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, a “How to use this book” section, their use of “translationese,” and a disclaimer concerning its “Print on Demand” status. The editors make sure to point out how appropriate Lucian’s The Ass is for the intermediate level, citing its fast-paced, relatively easy vocabulary as well as its comedic topics and tales. And I would agree.

Although the connections between The Ass and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses are only mentioned briefly, a few sources are included for those interested in further reading. The editors then explain how to use their book, which sets forth what is and what is not included in the page-by-page glossary, e.g. particles, common nouns, and adjectives are omitted. These vocabulary items, however, are included in the full glossary at the end of the book. Verbs, though, are treated more fully than any other part of speech, and there is a list of verbs with unusual forms in an appendix. The editors caution readers that they have employed “translationese” in their commentary in order to keep as close to the original grammatical constructions as possible. The text itself is based on C. Jacobitz’s Teubner (Leipzig, 1907), and the editors indicate that they have made only slight modifications to the text.

Finally, the authors explain the text’s “Print on Demand” status, and this may be one of the more important aspects for instructors to keep in mind. “Print on Demand” texts often have a number of typographical errors since the editorial stage is omitted. While many might consider this a negative feature, I suggest that instructors turn this into a teaching moment. By inducing students to become typographical detectives, they will be compelled to examine the text very closely. In my experience, the majority of Greek (and Latin) students get a thrill out of pointing out incorrect breathing marks, accents, or forms (sometimes to our chagrin). By urging students to keep a list of errors that they can submit to the editors at the end of the term, we are teaching them a valuable lesson in proofreading and editing, and including them in the larger community of classical scholars. In fact, the editors themselves suggest and encourage users to share any corrections to the text.

The Greek text of Lucian’s The Ass is found on pages 3-147; Apuleius’ Metamorphoses on 151-194; a list of irregular verbs on 199-207; and the full glossary on 211-230. The pages with the Greek and Latin texts are divided horizontally into three or four sections. The topmost register is reserved for the original text, which ranges from 2-10 lines of text, but is usually between 5-8 lines; vocabulary is just below this, divided into two columns and listed alphabetically; and the bottom third is reserved for the grammatical commentary in the order that they appear in the text. If there is a specific grammar review (such as those found on pages 5, 7, 16, 19, 24, 30, 41, 70, and 85), it is placed beneath the commentary. The only exceptions to this are pages 9 and 36, which include full-page grammar reviews (Defective Verbs and Indirect Statement).

As mentioned above, the Greek text is based on Jacobitz (in the public domain and accessible online) and, therefore, warrants no further discussion. The editors, however, have included short English headings that alert the reader to the upcoming events in the story. The vocabulary is listed alphabetically except for page 144 where they are listed in the order in which they appear in the text. Noun entries include the nominative singular form and gender, while those with stem changes also include the genitive form: e.g. ἵππος, ὁ/ἡ vs. ἀνήρ, ἀνδρός, ὁ. Adjectives are listed with all their nominative forms: e.g. πλήσιος, -α, -ον: παράδοξος, -ον, while adverbs and prepositions are simply listed with a definition. Particles and conjunctions are not listed in the running vocabulary but can be found in the full glossary (starting on page 211).

No parts of speech are included in the running vocabulary, but students should know the difference between an adverb and a preposition by this point in their studies. Finally, verbs are listed with their first principal part only. Definitions are limited to 1-3 possible choices: e.g. πάγος, ὁ: a rock; συμπόσιον, τό: a drinking-party, symposium; and ὁδός, ἡ: a way, path, road.

The majority of errors in the vocabulary section are minor: e.g. Δεκριανὸς, ὁ should have an acute not a grave accent (6); λόγος is missing its definite article (10); and a sprinkling of missing commas between nominative and definite article: ἱμάτιον τό (11); μάγος ὁ (13).

One noteworthy item in the vocabulary section for instructors is that a word is included every time it occurs no matter how often it has arisen in the text, e.g. “γυνή, γυναικός, ἡ: a woman, wife” is listed on pages 5, 6, 11, 13, 15, 30, 54, 76, 87, 88, 103, 104, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, and 141. While some might argue that a vocabulary item should be removed after its third entry, thus compelling the student to learn the word, I would venture to guess that the authors chose to include a vocabulary item every time it occurs because that would allow an instructor to pick and choose passages and not be concerned that a vocabulary item would already be excised due to its earlier frequency.

On the whole, the commentary is sufficient for the needs of intermediate students, helping them with both forms and translations. Again, a number of errors are found, the majority being accentuation: e.g. ἦμεν: impf. of  ἐιμί (breathing on wrong vowel in diphthong) (3); and ἀσπασάμενοί: ao. part. of ἁσπάζω (should not have hard breathing) (4); but also an inconsistency in listing the verb a form is from: συνέκειτο: impf. (but no verb is listed) (19); and ἐστεφανούμεθα: imp. mid. (no verb listed) (29). The only other critique for the commentary I offer is that imperfect and aorist tenses are both translated as the simple past with no distinction between the two.

In the ten grammar reviews, I also found a number of minor typographical errors. In the review of αὐτός(5), the heading has αὐτὸς listed with a grave instead of an acute; in the review of Defective Verbs on page 9 has the Aorist of λέγω as ἕλεξα (should be a smooth breather); in the Future Conditions review on page 16, the more vivid example includes an extra “.” in the ellipsis; in the review of Potential ἄν (70), ἂν is listed with a grave in the heading and throughout the English explanation, but correctly in the Greek examples and in the full glossary (212); and in the final grammatical review on Indirect Statement in Secondary Sequence (85), φημι is lacking its acute accent on the ultima.

Following the Greek of The Ass are ten passages from Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, which highlight the striking parallels between the texts. The Latin selections, as I mentioned above, are divided similarly into a three-part register: text; vocabulary; and commentary. The inclusion of selections of Apuleius is one of the most useful and exciting aspects of this textbook, for it is extremely rare that students are provided with Greek and Latin textual parallels, especially at the intermediate level. Students reading Apuleius’ Metamorphoses will certainly know its literary background and expansion on a now-lost Greek original. Hayes and Nimis have provided us with a textbook that allows this comparison to be evaluated with relative ease.

The “List of Verbs” (199-207) is useful for students as it lists verbs with irregular forms as well as its common compounds. The list is based on that from Smyth’s Greek Grammar. One glaring error is the spelling of Smyth with an “e” (199). Other very minor errors include an extra colon after the definition of δέω and δέομαι; a missing space between the definition of ἔπομαι and the future form; and a missing comma after the definition of χέω.

Overall, I would highly recommend this textbook for instructors of intermediate Greek. Despite some minor issues (mainly typographical) the edition put forth by Hayes and Nimis provides a unique opportunity for students to read a highly entertaining story with relative ease. For those instructors whose students are familiar with Apuleius and/or have completed an equivalent level of Latin, this all-in-one textbook is a rare find and should be seriously considered for an intermediate Greek class. 

[©2013 by The Classical Association of the Middle West and South. All rights reserved.]

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