#classicaltwitter ~ March 25, 2017

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CJ-Online Review: The Museum of Augustus: The Temple of Apollo in Pompeii, the Portico of Philippus in Rome, and Latin Poetry

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The Museum of Augustus: The Temple of Apollo in Pompeii, the Portico of Philippus in Rome, and Latin Poetry. By Peter Heslin. Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2015. Pp. xiii + 350. Hardcover, $65.00. ISBN 978-1-60606-421-4.
Reviewed by Christina Kraus, Yale University
This fascinating, beautifully produced book is a terrific read putting forward detailed and sophisticated arguments that will certainly provoke productive discussion.  Disclaimer: I am not an art historian or archaeologist-but neither is Heslin.  All the more remarkable, then, that he has produced such an intriguing, archivally rich study, with a methodology combining close reading of architectural and archaeological drawings, ancient artistic representations, and poetry with historiographical research into the excavations of the Temple of Apollo in Pompeii and the area of the Portico of Philippus in Rome. He reveals his method in his preface (xi): “Most of the research for this book was … done online rather than in museums, at sites, and in archives”; he also relies on enlargements-only possible digitally-of scanned drawings, reconstructions, and photographs of his sites and paintings.  He was fortunate in his publisher, who has reproduced quantities of these in fantastic clarity. (Paradoxically, this is a book that is very much a physical pleasure to handle and to read.) Heslin, an expert on the possibilities raised by the digital revolution, is certainly right that his method of research in this project is one of the best ways forward, not only for scholars who cannot travel to see the sites themselves, but also in cases such as this one where the on-site material has been degraded past legibility, or destroyed altogether.

Heslin begins with a detailed analysis of the drawings and reconstructions made by early visitors to Pompeii, after the frescoes in the Temple were uncovered (1817) and before they were irretrievably damaged by exposure; he also makes heavy use of the mid-19th century cork model of the city. He then moves via a study of copies of the more popular paintings in private Pompeian houses to an analysis of the now-lost Portico of Philippus, including a lucid investigation of its development from the Republican Aedes Herculis Musarum. (This was physically incorporated into the later, larger complex erected by Augustus’ stepbrother and uncle, L. Marcius Philippus.) He wants both to decipher the original fresco cycle and to show that the Apolline temple decorations in Pompeii were based on-if not copies of-Theorus’s cycle of frescoes in the Portico. Heslin’s real target is that Roman cycle which-together with the Portico itself and the other art it contained-was “the public justification in the language of Roman architecture of Augustus’s patronage of poetry … his importation of the Museum of Alexandria into a Roman context” (2). Augustus in fact, Heslin argues, separated the Alexandrian Museum complex into two: as a rebuilding of the Aedes, the Portico continued its longstanding tradition as a prestigious meeting place for the guild of poets, while Apollo-a god less congenial to the Romans, who did not build a temple to him in Republican times-received his own home on the Palatine, with the new libraries, trumpeting Augustus as the principal patron of the arts (187).

I have by necessity vastly oversimplified Heslin’s argument, the beauty and challenge of which is in the details, from readings of the Marble Plan to the Tabulae Iliacae to 19th century German engravings. For literary scholars, the payoff will come in his final chapter, “Imaginary Temples,” on the poets who responded to this art. Heslin looks closely at the poems that clearly refer to the Aedes Herculis Musarum: Vergil’s prologue to Georgics 3, Propertius (though the promised discussion of 3.4-5 is missing [300]), Horace’s Odes, and-most intriguingly to me-the decorations on Juno’s temple in Aeneid 1.
I would especially like to believe the thesis that Aeneas is misreading those paintings not (as we have long recognized) because he sees glory for the Trojans where the Carthaginians must be celebrating their slaughter, but because, having only his own, subjective experience of the war to go by, he simply misidentifies the people represented. What Aeneas describes can be mapped onto the cycle of paintings that Heslin reconstructs, but he gets the names wrong: so, e.g., when Aeneas sees the tide of battle being turned by a person he identifies as Achilles (instaret curru cristatus Achilles, 1.468), Heslin suggests that Aeneas recognizes the armor because he has seen Achilles in it, but that because he has not read the Iliad, he does not know that it is in fact Patroclus wearing Achilles’ armor who turns the tide in Book 16. If Heslin is right (and he has many other examples), then the depth of the effect of art on the reader(s) in the Aeneid-and the map of misreadings we can construct around it-is even more remarkable than has previously been understood.
But that’s a big ‘if’. Heslin disregards too much recent scholarship on the Aedes (especially the important work of Alexander Hardie), and he is at times overly reductive. So, for example, in his treatment of pattern books (143), which is a mixture of assertion (“there is no evidence at all” for them-but then why do archaeologists appeal to them?) and oversimplification: assuming that local artists used pattern books “reduces [them] to more or less competent robots, slavishly attempting to imitate artistic forms that they scarcely understood”. Either the books existed or they did not; but (1) if they did, then one could profitably look at studies of 19th-century architectural pattern book use, which demonstrate that robotic copying is far from what was going on; and (2) if they did not, then this is simply a straw man, related to the straw men on whom Heslin depends far too much, of the art historian who looks at all Roman art as copies of Greek “originals,” hand in hand with the literary scholar who ignores material culture.  Both of those creatures are on their way out; Heslin doesn’t need them. Better to direct scholars to works like the new book by Vibeke Goldbeck, Fora Augusta, on the reception of the Forum Augustum in the West, including Pompeii; that book came out too late for Heslin to take account of, but it and similar studies support his strong argument that the Pompeian cycle was part of the imitatio Vrbis, a reinterpretation of a complex and influential building program at Rome.

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CJ-Online Review: Stealing Helen: The Myth of the Abducted Wife in Comparative Perspective.

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

Stealing Helen: The Myth of the Abducted Wife in Comparative Perspective. By Lowell Edmunds. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016. Pp. xvii + 430. Hardcover, $49.50. ISBN 978-0-691-16512-7

Reviewed by Henry V. Bender, St. Joseph’s University, Philadelphia

Fascination with the name, the person, and the myth of Helen is epic and universal. Inspirations, derivations, and adaptations abound in literally every medium from Mycenaean and Minoan artifacts through modern art and cinema. How did this “story” begin? Annually facing this query, professors and teachers of classical mythology invariably offer an unavoidable conundrum response. But that was before Edmonds’ extraordinary volume. Covering every possible substantive comment relevant in the slightest way to the subject of this work, the thirty-six page reference bibliography (in 10 point type) constitutes a lifetime of scholarly reading, reflection, and research. The vast variety of topics that comprise the book’s five chapters-each handled with great precision and depth-exceed the scope of this review. The paragraph numbering and titles of the subsets which constitute each chapter signal their thought lines. Throughout this review I have preserved their numbered sequence to convey to the reader the enormous breadth and depth of this book.

The Introduction traces the many cycles of analysis which have evolved throughout the study of the Helen myth. Edmonds is careful to distinguish between langue and parole (terms introduced by Saussure), the former to denote the most initial oral rendering of the myth or folktale, and the latter to denote its written re-performances. Relating this inquiry to the problems that attend the perception of and realization of oral tradition and written text traditions, Chapter 1 is composed of 15 numbered essays bearing titles which unfold a sequential exposition of the “The Abduction of the Beautiful Wife” as International Tale.”

The meticulously arranged, content revealing titles include: Typology in Folktale Studies (1), The Concept of Type (2), The Motif (3), The Emic and Etic (4-5), The Deconstructive Point of View (6), Variant and Version (7), The Ontological Point of View (8), and The Historical Basis of an Ontology of the Type (9). Consideration of How Old are Folktales? (10), leading into Proverb and Fable: Oral Wisdom Literature in Antiquity (10.1), informs Morphology and Structuralism (11). Typological Status of “The Abduction of the Beautiful Wife” (12) presages Motifs of “The Abduction of the Beautiful Wife” (13) which itself includes 8 subsets: Birth or Origin (13.1), The Swan Maiden (13.1.1), Childhood and Marriage (13.2), Perilous Beauty of the Wife (13.3), Abductor (13.4), Abduction (13.5), Recovery (13.6), Fate of the Abductor (13.7), Reunion of Husband and Wife (13.8), and Orpheus (13.8.1). Edmunds concludes with The Syntagma (14) and Methodological Reflections (15) in which he treats “hybrids not as curiosities of folklore but in order to establish a larger typological or perhaps metatypological context for defining the differentiae of “Abduction”.” (60).The extraordinary, tightly woven analyses of Chapter 1 are further augmented by an exhaustive Appendix 1 (247-301). This catalogues all text examples of “The Abduction of the Beautiful Wife” originating from Africa, Eurasia and Asia, Europe and Iceland, and North America.

Chapter 2, Dioscuri has ten subsets as it examines the myths involving the brothers of Helen and the different versions involving them in bride theft. Following an Introduction (1), Edmunds treats The Abduction of Helen by Theseus and Perithous (2) and Indo Europaean Cognates (3) as well as those in The Caucasus (4) and The Baltic Egg (5). He then examines Cults of Helen and the Dioscuri (6), and presents an interesting discussion on The Name Helen and The Nature of Names (7),  An Indo-Europaean “Abduction” (8) is further subdivided into The Abduction in Indo-Europaean Epic (8.1) and The Three Functions of Georges Dumezil and the Trojan Myth (8.2). Considerations of The Indo-Europaean “Abduction” and the Question of Origins (9) introduces a summary of the chapter’s findings, Conclusion (10).

Chapter 3 Helen Myth, asserts that in spite of its ubiquitous nature, the myth is really about her “life” story.  The multiple variants must receive attention in any effort to handle the literary sources such as Helen in Homer, Helen in Epic Cycle, Helen in Lyric as well as representations in media such as pottery, paintings and sculpture. The 14 subsets begin with Parentage, Birth, Siblings (1) and Childhood (2). An engaging discussion on Wooing of Helen and Marriage to Menelaus (3) is augmented by a brief comment on Helen’s Motherhood (4) and a transition to the core consideration of Helen’s interactions with Paris (5). The treatment of Helen’s Abduction (6) is expanded by a full discussion of her Abduction in Art (6.1). Following a brief commentary on Consequences in Sparta of Helen’s Abduction (7), Edmunds presents variants on Helen’s alleged Stay in Egypt and Eidolon (8) before treating the topic of Helen at Troy (9). Recovery of Helen by Menelaus (10) consists of six subsets including The Trojan Horse (10.1), Helen’s Role in her Recovery (10.2), Menelaus’s Happy and Unhappy Reunions with Helen (10.3), Helen Bares her Breasts (10.4), Himation (10.5), To the Ships, with His hand on Her Wrist (10.6), and lastly Reflections on the Reunions (10.7). Edmunds then turns to the topic of the Return of Menelaus and Helen to Sparta (11) and follows up with reflections on After the Return (12) and the Death of Helen (13). The Chapter ends with a Comparison of Myth of Helen with “Abduction” Type (14). This reviewer found Chapter 3 to be most informative, particularly because of frequent illustrations of art objects well integrated with text commentary. Appendix 2, coordinated with the subset titles throughout the chapter, lists objects, dates, places of find, episode and notes for all objects considered in the text.

Chapter 4, Hypostases of Helen, explores the literary and material evidence for the existence of Helen as a goddess. Citing various sources, Edmunds discusses The Cult at Patanistas (1) and that on the island of Rhodes, Helen Dendritis (2). Each sanctuary featured a special tree venerated in her honor, Back in Sparta, there was also the Cult at Therapne(3) explicitly referenced by Herodotus, Pausanias and others, and to which belong several artifacts inscribed with Helen’s name. A brief treatment, Herodotus’s Designation of Helen: “the goddess” (3.1), is followed by summary, Conclusion on Cults (4), and discussion of The Cults and the Indo-Europaean Goddess (5). Rooted inthe forgoing analysis, Helen as Pictorial (6) essentially addresses the question of how does a real Helen become a fictional Helen and vice versa. In the belief that epic poetry did not create Herlen but essentially preserved her memory, Edmunds further notes in The Discovery of a Real Helen (7):  “For ancient Greeks, however, down to a certain point in time, Helen was a real person who lived in the days of the Trojan War, whereas for the modern scholar Helen is the creation of poetry (or of poetic traditions)…”  (189). These points receive extended attention in Self Ancient and Modern (7.1) and The discovery of the Personality of Helen (7.2) with summary comments appearing in Conclusion (8).

Chapter 5 Helen in the Fifth Century and After does what it sets out to do. Opening with Helen in the Fifth Century (1), Edmunds examines commentary from Herodotus (1.1), Thucydides (1.2), Pindar (1.3), and discusses Helen in Spartan Charter Myth (1.4). Such recollectionsgenerate Consequences of Social Memory (1.5). Helen is then looked upon both as a Figure of Reference (1.6), and thereafter as a Figure of Song (1.7). The second half of Chapter 5, Helen from the Fourth Century to Goethe (2), critiques Eustathius’ observations on Helen, Pythagorean Helen (2.1). An informative discussion, Simon Magus (2.2), demonstrates how a mixture of magic and sophistication informs Simon’s Helen. One of the most engaging and stimulating essays in the book, Faust (2.3), meticulously unfolds Helen’s reappearance in Georg Faust’s writings of 1540, and subsequently its impact on Goethe’s Helen. Roman Reception of the Helen Myth and the First Fictional Helen (3) has three subsets: The Origin of Fiction in Antiquity (3.1), The Fictive and the Fictional (3.2), and A Fictive Helen: Ovid Heroides 16-17 (3.3). After Fictive Helen (Lucian, True History 2) and a Fictive Hermione (Colluthus) (4), Edmunds offers a summary Conclusion.

This comprehensive, holistic, well organized book is clearly a significant advance in scholarship on myth. Procedurally challenging, but rigorously engaging on multiple levels, all scholars, professors of mythology or comparative literature will find in this volume and indispensable companion to any serious study of the story of Helen.  Edmund’s informative scholarship packaged with his vigorous writing style has truly made it possible “to trace a narrative constant, persisting with remarkable tenacity, that could generate many new Helens” (xiii).

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#classicaltwitter ~ March 24, 2017

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

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CJ-Online Review: Empire, Authority, and Autonomy in Achaemenid Anatolia

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

Empire, Authority, and Autonomy in Achaemenid Anatolia by Elspeth R. M. Dusinberre. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xxvi + 374. $ 40.99. Paper. ISBN 978-1-107-57715-2.

 
Reviewed by Jan P. Stronk, Universiteit van Amsterdam

 
In a world where various forms of imperialism still exist, it is interesting to look at the way how (the idea of) Empire worked for the Achaemenids. Dusinberre has looked into this matter, specifically for Anatolia-a region she is very familiar with as her 2003 book Aspects of Empire in Achaemenid Sardis attests. However, in that book she organized the treatment of evidence (largely confined to the city of Sardis) after the type of evidence, in the current one she presents the material-for a much larger area-thematically. Due to its treatment of many varied types of sources (archaeological, epigraphical, literary, art historical), necessary to create the comprehensive picture that Dusinberre presents, the book seems to be aimed primarily at an academic audience. In spite of its scholarly aims and contents, the book is nevertheless-in my view-(relatively) accessible and a pleasure to read.

The publisher’s blurb summarizes Dusinberre’s book neatly: “The Achaemenid Persian Empire (550-330 bce) was a vast and complex sociopolitical structure that encompassed much of modern-day Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, and included two dozen distinct peoples who spoke different languages, worshiped different deities, lived in different environments, and had widely differing social customs. … Through a wide array of textual, visual, and archaeological material, Elspeth R. M. Dusinberre shows how the rulers of the empire constructed a system flexible enough to provide for the needs of different peoples within the confines of a single imperial authority and highlights the variability in response. This book examines the dynamic tensions between authority and autonomy across the empire, providing a valuable new way of considering imperial structure and development.”

As indicated in the first paragraph of this review, Dusinberre’s book has been structured thematically, basically a chapter dedicated to each theme (imperial control, religion, education, diet, to name some). What strikes the eye is both the diversity and the varying amount of evidence present for each of these themes. Some themes (like education) are hampered by the near absence of viable data, while others (like diet and death: the latter I find an excellent contribution to our knowledge and understanding of how people in Anatolia incorporated Achaemenid elements into their funerary culture) are blessed by a relative wealth of evidence.

Whenever the amount of evidence is poor, I think Dusinberre deals as well with the problem as might be expected, relying more heavily on literary than on material evidence, the type of evidence she prefers in the chapters where both types are present. The risk of bias in the literary evidence, however, remains-in my view regrettably-largely unattended by Dusinberre. For instance, she appears to ignore the fact that some authors may well have been more informed than others. In this respect a discussion on minimalist-maximalist attitude, i.e. the extent one can rely on literary sources might have been really helpful.[1]

As the title of the work indicates, Dusinberre confines her study largely to Achaemenid Anatolia, which thereby serves as a kind of exemplum for Achaemenid imperial practice.[2] Methodically, I think, few can argue with her approach and its results. Nevertheless I sometimes felt slightly uncomfortable with the strict way she sticks to her approach. As the publisher’s blurb, quoted above, rightly states, the Achaemenid Empire (my emphasis) encompassed many regions and many peoples. An excursion to (cautiously) compare the situation in (or of) Anatolia with that in other parts of the empire would-as far as evidence goes-have been extremely welcome. In the same category would have fitted an excursion into the afterlife of Achaemenid Anatolia during the succeeding Antigonid and (after 301 bce advancing) Seleucid kingdoms. Many of the practices Dusinberre describes did not disappear with the Achaemenids and, therefore, such an excursion could contribute to the understanding of Achaemenid imperial elements in their relation(s) to Anatolian local and/or regional ones.

Since a good deal of Dusinberre’s evidence in the various themes is of art historical nature, it is obvious that the illustrations in this book are many and, necessarily, (almost) all of good or excellent quality. They support many of Dusinberre’s observations. I was less impressed by the quality of the maps and the fact that some of them are used more than once (a simple: see figure so and so on page xx could suffice). Also the added value of inscribed aerial pictures instead of plain, well-drawn maps eludes me at all. As with fig. 18 (page 25), such maps distort the geographical dimensions and only allow for a limited amount of information. Only occasionally, as in fig. 25 (page 47) which shows (some of) the relief of the Taurus mountains against the Cilician plain, such aerial pictures may add to our understanding, though here as well the geographical distortion is obvious. In a work aimed at academic use I find the use of endnotes instead of footnotes obnoxious, distorting the coherence of text and note. The bibliography is extensive, up to date, and really helpful. The index, regrettably only limited to a general one, is succinct but sufficient.

Nevertheless, in spite of the critical remarks in the preceding two paragraphs, I am happy with the final result of Dusinberre’s attempt to bring her audience up to date through a review of the available evidence on Achaemenid influences upon local and/or regional communities in one of the provinces constituting the Achaemenid Empire. The book, moreover, is well taken care of and only counts few typos. For everyone taking either Achaemenid or Anatolian studies seriously, this absolutely is a book to own.

[1] Elementary in such a discussion is at present: Hall, J. M., Artifact and Artifice: Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian, Chicago 2014. Though this book had not yet been published when Dusinberre composed hers, the subject itself obviously is a long debated one that Dusinberre largely passes by.

[2] The book under scrutiny in a way deepens our understanding of one (geographical) area that already figures, though obviously less pregnant, in Gruen, E. S. (ed.), Cultural Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean, Los Angeles, CA, 2011. In this book Margaret Miller wrote a contribution on drinking in Achaemenid Anatolia (97-134).

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