Kalos-inscriptions identify historical individuals, gods, heroes, even horses, as objects of amorous attention in Athens in the sixth and fifth centuries bce. Missing from catalogues of kalos names is an inscription on a bell-krater attributed to a painter in the Group of Polygnotos and dated to c. 440-430 bce. This vase, now lost to the art market, shows the Return of Hephaistos and includes the misspelled phrase Kappa Alpha Lambda Omicron Sigma Eta Phi Alpha Rho Sigma Tau Omicron Sigma. In this brief article, I re-present this vase and offer possible avenues for its interpretation. I argue that the vase can contribute to discussions of kalos-inscriptions, the characterization of the god Hephaistos, and the relationship between Athens and Hephaistos in the fifth century BCE.
Urban redevelopment creates winners and losers. The monuments of ancient Rome are visually impressive, but they often overlie residential areas. Many Greek and Latin authors eulogize feats of construction, but others express uneasiness about, even hostility to, such works. While the double-edged sword of urban development in contemporary cities continues to be the focus of intense scrutiny, scholarship on the Roman world predominantly emphasizes the positive aspects of monumental architecture - baths, forums, temples, entertainment complexes. Yet what was the impact of these large structures on the people who actually lived around them? What was the opposition to such projects? Questioning the assumption that 'public' buildings necessarily benefit the 'public', this paper examines the harmful side of building activity in antiquity.
This article traces how changes in the depiction of atimia (loss of honour/citizen rights) in Athenian tragedy provide crucial information for understanding how the actual punishment evolved in the fifth century. Scholarship on the term has long agreed that the archaic personal form of atimia differed from the legal version of the fourth century, but has failed to explain why and when that change occurred. The tragedians' discussion of atimia reveals when the punishment took on its legal aspects and how its scope expanded after the restoration of democracy at Athens, when the Four Hundred were declared traitors and atimoi.
I argue that the scenes featuring Briseis and Xanthus in Iliad 19 are closely parallel. Each features a speech from an unexpected source, previously constructed in the epic not as a character but as a valued possession. The audience's brief access to their fresh perspectives is soon curtailed by the recentring of Achilles' corresponding speech and familiar point of view, and the enslaved woman and the horse are subsequently relegated to their former object status. These scenes form part of a broader pattern as a private counterpart to the public exchanges that constitute the Greek assembly. Together, the paired speeches throughout Book 19 produce a significant accumulation of unresolved tensions that underlie the superficial consensus of action and mark the limitations of Achilles' reintegration into the community. It is this dynamic, I suggest, that unifies the book and defines its primary function in the epic.
In Memoriam Ed. ChamplinIn this article, I argue that fictional stories about the Roman emperor are a fruitful avenue for excavating a multifaceted discourse about the sole ruler of the Roman world, who, in this case, is Tiberius. Edward Champlin, who worked on anecdotes about Tiberius in the last decade or so, attributes these negative impressions of the emperors to the pen of a single author (i.e. M. Servilius Nonianus). This argument, I argue, sells the wider meaning of these stories short. The anecdotes themselves are windows into a wider discourse about how the emperor seemed to his subjects. Fictitious or true, such stories inform imaginations about who Tiberius was seen to be, which make these the stories historically relevant. We must both embrace these stories as relevant historical evidence for how Roman emperors were scrutinized and criticized and recognize them as a crucial part of Roman understandings of who the emperor was.
The article considers unity and its counterpart, digression, as themes within Pindar's own poetry, rather than a 'problem' for criticism to 'solve'. The article considers Pindar's treatment of action, time, and place (the so-called 'Aristotelian unities') alongside the modern critical concept of deixis (temporal, spatial, and person deixis). The property of indexical statements of being centred on a certain person, place, or time ('me', 'here', 'now'; 'him', 'there', 'then') makes them naturally conducive to the creation of centripetal or centrifugal dynamics in a Pindaric ode, according to whether the implied deictic centre is constant or variable. It is argued that an important way of understanding Pindaric unity is as a complex equilibrium and counterpointing of competing and complementary principles of centripetalism and centrifugalism, not only acting within and across the areas of action, time, place, and person, but also observable in Pindar's handling of grammatical, metrical, and thematic structures.
This paper considers the processes that contributed to the creation of an Athenian red-figure rhyton in the form of an Amazon, signed by the potter Sotades, which was excavated in Nubia in 1921. Despite its secure archaeological provenance, the rhyton has not played a significant role in studies of trade or intercultural interaction because its unusual form and iconography - it features images of Persians defeating Greeks in battle - seemingly make it exceptional. Yet these features are best explained as the result of a feedback loop of information between Sotades and his Persian customers, relayed by merchants. This information was distorted, translated, and perhaps even manipulated in the course of transmission, which contributed to the rhyton's unusual appearance. Thus the rhyton does not represent a special circumstance, but rather is the culmination of a sustained period of tenuous yet persistent links between Sotades' workshop in Athens and Persians living in Egypt.
While the reception of Greek tragedy is by now well-trodden terrain for the classical reception scholar, responses to Old Comedy are still harder to come by. Peter Swallow's study of the reception of Aristophanes in Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century examines the playwright's appearance, following a period in which there had been ‘few translations, and no commentaries’ in English, and his obscure contemporary references proved irksome to Hellenists (23). As a result, while the political – or intentionally apolitical – dimensions of his case studies are a consistent topic throughout the study, we also see Swallow unpick some more subtle or ‘subterranean’ receptions among their more explicit companions. This is particularly the case in the chapter on W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911), who, although known as the ‘English Aristophanes’ (4), showed little in the way of direct acknowledgement of his Attic predecessor. However, characterizing Gilbert as a beloved, but moderate humourist, Swallow identifies several modes of Aristophanic reception across a number of his works. For example, his burlesque Thespis (1871) not only has similar plot points to those found in Birds but also shares with the Aristophanic Jacques Offenbach, whose ‘influence on the British tradition is impossible to overstate’ (98), a cheeky attitude towards the gods. Gilbert's body of work and attitude to classical sources is contextualized with reference to the work of J. R. Planché (1796–1880), in whom classical reception scholarship has already shown a significant amount of interest and who appears throughout this book, even having his own chapter. Here, Swallow helps to fill in some notable gaps in the history of Victorian burlesque and related performance forms.
In my last review I discussed Mark Usher's How to Care About Animals, one of Princeton University Press’ volumes of Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers. The series’ rapidly growing roster now includes Sarah Nooter's book How To Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality. Nooter selects, translates, and introduces a range of texts from Sappho and Plato (most heavily featured) to Homer, Pindar, Alcman, Anacreon, Theognis, and Theocritus (to name just a selection of the selection). There is an important ‘nothing new under the sun’ ethos to this volume, as is the case with many in the series. As Nooter puts it, ‘The past decade has seen a revolution in sexuality… sexual fluidity is now mainstream… And yet the Greeks got there long ago.’ (vii) The Greeks wrote about sexuality ‘with little angst and much wit’, and it is this that Stephen Fry picks up on in his endorsement of the book: ‘our ancestors often had clearer, less guilt-ridden, confused, prurient, and prudish attitudes to the rainbow of sexualities we wrongly think unique to our age’.
The first two books of this review are part of the Bloomsbury ‘Cultural History’ series, which has now been around for several years. In this series, a cultural theme is explored over the course of a six-volume set that moves progressively through time from antiquity to the modern age. Each volume works as a stand-alone book exploring that particular era but, to facilitate cross-referencing, each volume is organized in the same way, with a standard sequence of chapters. It is a clever idea, but the two books here, on the theme of furniture and colour, show some of the problems of having to squeeze antiquity into categories designed for the study of later periods.
Books about Ancient Greeks and Romans for general readership abound, so it was with a certain weariness that I started reading Jennifer Roberts’ ‘accessible and lively introduction to the Greeks and their ways of living and thinking’ (jacket blurb). I like to read the acknowledgments section first to get a sense of the person behind the book. Among the formulaic, the catalogic, and the dutiful, slight personal details or minor idiosyncrasies can be revealing and even endearing, sparking my curiosity about the author's persona and their world view. Roberts pulled me in immediately with an anecdote about her dictation programme's hilarious interpretations of the name Thucydides (‘Facilities’, ‘The city flees’, ‘Abilities’, ‘He silly is’, and … ‘Frank’). I provide this detail not just because it is amusing, but also because it is telling. Although this book covers the territory I am very familiar with, I really enjoyed reading it and just could not put it down. Roberts is a wonderful writer and storyteller. Her sprawling narrative, dotted with quotations and anecdotes, is reminiscent of Herodotus. Even though the book is meandering at times and full of digressions, Roberts manages to both outline the historical macro-narrative about the Greeks from the Bronze Age to the end of the Hellenistic Age and, more importantly, to convey a good sense of who they were as a culture and what mattered to them, ranging from the myths about the heroic past, the city states and their various political organizations, attitudes towards women, slaves, and foreigners, competitiveness, religion, philosophy, afterlife, and (I see what she did there – but at the expense of internal logic because afterlife should have been paired with religion) reception. The tone is just right, instructing without condescension, lively without cuteness or overfamiliarity, and – what is probably the most difficult task when a professional Classicist is pitching to a wide audience – straightforward and confident, truly written with a wide audience in mind, rather than plagued by prevarication anticipating the snarky reviews by colleagues. This is a terrific and engaging book, and I hope that it will reach a wide audience well beyond the US (despite its title).
I will start this review with a major development for the study of ancient Greek history: the publication of the first volume of the Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World (OHAGW), edited by Paul Cartledge and Paul Christesen. The range of the available evidence can no longer keep pace with the theoretical frameworks and the syntheses of individual scholars. A huge part of the evidence remains known to a few specialists, while wider interpretative frameworks rarely make the effort to incorporate the diversity and complexity of the evidence. Big data digital projects are certainly one way forward; the editors of OHAGW have chosen an alternative path: to offer a collection of syntheses on the archaic history of thirty Greek communities for which the available evidence makes this possible. The adoption of a common format for all local syntheses will make possible the focused comparison between individual cases; alongside the serious effort to systematically combine archaeology and history, which OHAGW editors call ‘archaeohistory’, this project has the potential to revolutionise Greek history.
Three brilliant recent books get us to think harder about risk in ancient Rome and Roman approaches to risk-taking. They are very different from one another, both in the evidence they cover and the approaches they take, and that in itself reflects the ubiquitous, or indeed proteiform, nature of the subject matter: risk is all around, as we all know.
Studies on magistracies have emerged as a solid and important trend in the scholarship on the Roman Republic over the last quarter of a century, and have enabled important connections between institutional history, prosopography, and the exploration of political practice and culture. There are at least three recent additions to this distinguished body of work. Grégory Ioannidopoulos has written a full-scale treatment of the quaestorship, which appears a mere five years after the monograph on the same topic by F. Pina Polo and A. Díaz Fernández.1 While overlaps in coverage and argument are inevitable, there are also significant differences. Ioannidopoulos does not include a prosopography, but focuses at length on terminological issues. The whole first part is taken up by a discussion of the titulature of quaestors, and the focus then turns to the systematic treatment of the ‘institution’ (the function of the college, the rules on eligibility, the election process, and so forth) and the powers it entailed at Rome and overseas. The outcome is an impressively full and thorough treatment, which warrants as close attention as its predecessor, and will be profitably consulted side by side with it. Its central ambition is to elucidate a number of important issues of public law; the remit of the discussion is wider, though, and encompasses the contribution of the quaestorship to the development of the empire as well as issues of political practice and culture; the treatment of the bond between promagistrates and quaestors, necessitudo (pp. 633–3) is especially rewarding.
In 2008 the first annual Go Topless Day was organized in the US. In 2012 the #FreeTheNipple campaign was launched, prefacing Lina Esco’s 2014 film of the same name. Bruce Willis’ daughter Scout went shopping topless; Jean-Paul Gaultier sent a male and female model down the catwalk with their nipples on show and wearing the Free the Nipple slogan; and Miley Cyrus flashed Jimmy Kimmel. These movements argue, as they say on the tin, that it should be acceptable by legal and cultural norms for women to bare their breasts in public. The question is one of equality and bodily autonomy, and the movement is a way of making women’s voices heard. In our current fraught times, these voices are angry. At International Women’s Day just this year, women from the FEMEN activist group marched topless in Paris to protest against the ‘Fascist Epidemic’ (these words painted on their chests). In their mission statement, FEMEN declare that ‘Our Mission is Protest! Our Weapon are bare breasts’ – and they profess themselves to be a ‘modern incarnation of fearless and free Amazons’.
Two books came out in this review period that set out to investigate monuments that were once considered amongst the wonders of the ancient world but of which no trace remains today: the Pharos of Alexandria is reconstructed by Andrew Michael Chugg and the Colossus at Rhodes explored by Nathan Badoud.1 These monuments were initiated within a few years of each other and both were completed around 283 bc. The Colossus was short lived, destroyed by earthquake in the 220s bc; the lighthouse lasted much longer, perhaps surviving several earthquakes in an increasingly depleted state, the initial, most damaging one occurring in the late eighth century ce. Their complete absence from the physical landscape since then has always fuelled imaginative and academic speculation as to their form. Both authors spend considerable time on the legacy of these speculations and the way that subsequent fantasies have shaped our imagination, particular in terms of the Colossus of Rhodes straddling the harbour, a foot on each promontory. Maerten van Heemskerck’s 1570 illustrations of the Octo mundi miracula was key to the creation of this fantasy, one that Badoud traces not only in European tradition but also to early nineteenth-century Japan and of course to the Statue of Liberty with her rayed head. Heemskerck’s image of the Pharos was equally influential. It shows the Pharos as a spiral tower springing from a wide cylindrical base leading up to a colonnaded rotunda from which spews smoke, omitting the sculpture that is so prominent on ancient coins.
We begin from the beginning, or rather from the Romans’ interest in origins: Raphael Schwitter offers a monumental synthesis of Roman antiquarianism from the second century bc to the third century ad.1 Rightly identifying such a study as a gap in the scholarship, Schwitter approaches the subject in a comprehensive fashion, starting with a substantial section of introductory material, including an intriguing case study of the way the Romans explained the origins of the use of coins, and some methodological thoughts on what it means to deal with fragmentary texts, followed by an overview of antiquarian writing in Greece, before moving on to the main part of his study: a systematic overview of the contents, literary formats, and scholarly methods of antiquarian writing in the second and early first centuries bc, the first century bc, and the imperial age. As Schwitter himself admits, many of his conclusions necessarily have to remain in the realm of speculation, due to the extremely fragmentary nature of the evidence, but he still achieves his aim: i.e. to show that antiquarianism is a pervasive phenomenon, rather than the mere symptom of a crisis, and that is does not stem from scholarly curiosity per se or the aim to entertain, but to gain orientation in the present by elucidating its connection with the past. Throughout, his focus is on antiquarian monographs, i.e. works more or less exclusively dedicated to antiquarian questions, comprising aetiology, genealogy, and etymology, but also their interaction, e.g. with poetic texts. Schwitter’s study shows impressively that antiquarian writing was a pervasive facet of Latin literature, with a first, still somewhat experimental, phase especially focused on specialized disciplines such as grammar and law, a surge in interest and a growing specialization and differentiation in the first century bc, and a growing trend towards compilation and new contextualization in the imperial age.
The city-state (polis) is undoubtedly one of the most fundamental aspects of Greek history. John Ma’s book is a monumental study of the history of the Greek polis in the very long term.1 It starts from the collapse of the Bronze Age palaces around 1200 bce and takes the story to the end of ancient poleis around 600 ce; alongside the immense temporal extent, Ma impressively covers the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean. In my view, this is unquestionably the most significant contribution to the study of Greek history over the last two decades. It is the first attempt to focus the history of the polis not on the archaic and classical periods, but on the Hellenistic and early imperial poleis. The reason for this, and the most significant contribution of the book, is Ma’s concept of the ‘great convergence’: the spread across the eastern Mediterranean between 400–200 bce of a democratic model of the polis based on citizen equality, assemblies, the provision of public goods, and the disappearance of older models based on oligarchy and characterized by disenfranchised citizens, subject communities, and serf populations. At the same time, the dominance of large-scale geopolitical actors such as the Hellenistic kingdoms and later Rome put an end to the ‘Hundred Years War’ between 450–350 (another important conceptual innovation), in which dominant poleis tried to subjugate and conquer other poleis; after 350 bce, poleis’ attempts at expansion usually incorporated smaller communities on equal terms. The book is structured around the great convergence: earlier chapters examine the diverse world of the poleis before the convergence, while later chapters explore the transformation of the polis and its employment by the Roman Empire, once the Mediterranean stopped being a multipolar world. This very rich book functions both as an excellent survey of numerous Greek communities, as well as an impressive synthesis offering a new periodization of Greek history. It will undoubtedly generate major new debates among Greek historians, which are urgently needed in our field.
There is a long-standing controversy in Greek History about whether the othismos, or 'push', of the hoplite phalanx mentioned by classical authors was real or metaphorical. Experimental archaeology - structural and finite element analysis with both physical reconstructions and computer modelling (presented non-technically here) - suggests that the archaic Greek hoplite panoply of bell cuirass, Corinthian helmet, and large bowl-shaped shield (aspis), which seems at first to present contradictory design choices, in fact offered important mechanical advantages under compressive force; that cuirass, helmet, and shield were designed or evolved to work together to allow the Greek warrior to survive and fight in a pushing mass of men without being crushed or asphyxiated. The hoplite othismos was, then, real and was presumably practised from the earliest era to which this equipment can be dated, the late eighth century bc.
Inscribed Greek verse epitaphs were produced in relatively high numbers in the city of Rome under the Principate. Although many were made for slaves and freedmen, their use was not confined to them. The individuals who opted to use them made a deliberate choice to emphasize their Greek cultural identity. They may have had several motives, but often the deceased or their (grand)parents had migrated from the eastern parts of the Roman empire to Rome, voluntarily or involuntarily. By presenting themselves as Greek in their language and use of mythological exempla, they claimed the paideia ('education') and culture associated with the Greek literary past. Yet despite the heavy emphasis on Greekness, the epigrams also display an awareness of the Roman context in which they were set up. Greek epigrams formed excellent vehicles to navigate the cultural ambiguities of 'being Greek' in Rome, and this explains why Rome became a major production centre of Greek funerary epigram.
