Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Angelos Chaniotis (ed.), La Nuit: imaginaire et réalités nocturnes dans le monde gréco-romain. Entretiens sur l'antiquité classique, 64. Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 2018. Pp. ix, 410. ISBN 9782600007641. CHF 55.00. Contributors: Collaboration with Pascale Derron

Reviewed by Scott G. Bruce, Fordham University (sbruce3@fordham.edu)

Version at BMCR home site

[Authors and titles are listed below.]

With the publication of Murray Melbin's seminal article "Night as Frontier" in 1978, scholars began to take seriously the hours of the day between sunset and sunrise as a distinctive period of human activity worth studying on its own terms.¹ While Melbin's focus of inquiry was modern America, historians of pre-modern Europe have applied his insights to the study of the nighttime activities of people and to literary representations of the night. Medievalists and early modernists have been at the forefront of this "nocturnal turn." Over the past two decades, Jean Verdon's Night in the Middle Ages (2002), Craig Koslofsky's Evening's Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (2011), and especially A. Roger Ekirch's At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (2005) have corrected for our long neglect of the night as a topic of historical inquiry in preindustrial Europe. Thanks to their efforts, we can no longer say, as Georg Christoph Lichtenberg observed in the late eighteenth century, that "[o]ur entire history is merely the history of the waking life of man." ²

The experience of ancient nights has not received as much attention as the European Middle Ages. The volume under review remedies this situation by bringing together nine papers in English, French, German, and Italian on the topic of the night in the ancient world, from the ancient Greece to the later Roman Empire. The contributions to this book fall into two broad categories: historical studies and literary analysis. The volume's editor, Angelos Chaniotis, opens the collection with an essay that serves double duty as an introduction to historical research on the night and an analysis of the socio-cultural factors that contributed to changes in the nightlife of ancient people in the 'Long Hellenistic Age.' He credits a rise in security measures, participation in private associations, the gifts of benefactors that prolonged the opening hours of baths and gymnasia, and the diffusion of nocturnal religious celebrations with an increase in the nighttime activities of ancient people. As a result, throughout the Hellenistic period, "the night" was progressively "made safer, brighter, more efficient, and more full of life" (p. 40). As Chaniotis notes, artificial illumination also played a role in this trend. Following seamlessly on this paper, Andrew Wilson's contribution "considers the effectiveness and limitations of available lighting technology" (p. 59) in the Roman world, with an emphasis on its impact on economic productivity. He proceeds with a discussion of the historical and archaeological sources for the use of lamps, candles, and street lights, and argues that "effective illumination extended the useful hours of the day, and thus allowed for extending the working day" (p. 74). The topic of artificial lighting is taken up once again later in the volume by Leslie Dossey, who draws attention to "a virtual explosion" of glass lamp production in the later fourth century, which coincides with historical accounts of street lighting in large imperial cities in the eastern Mediterranean. Using the evidence of patristic sermons, she argues that late antique city- dwellers were more active in the public sphere after nightfall than their early imperial predecessors, because the daily habits of people had changed; in the fourth and fifth centuries, they tended to do their bathing, shopping, and dining at night. As a result, "[t]he nights were becoming busier, more pressured, more like part of the day" (p. 317). While Dossey denies the influence of the widespread adoption of Christianity for this change (see the discussion on pp. 329-330), Filippo Carlà-Uhink's article shows that early Christians were most active at night, which prompted suspicion among Roman pagans, who generally avoided conducting religious rites after dark.

More than half of the papers in the volume treat the depiction and perception of the night in ancient art and literature. Ioannis Mylonopoulos examines scenes of violence in ancient Greek art, where "depictions of nocturnal brutality often achieved a fascinating level of explicit goriness and cruelty" (p. 175). Ancient artists rendered many scenes from the Trojan War (the murder of Dolon and Rhesos by Odysseus and Diomedes, the rape of Kassandra, the killing of her father Priamos by Neoptolemos) on dozens of vases and other media between 580 and 400 BCE. The murder of children, sometimes by their own mothers, and assaults on other vulnerable members of society were also depicted as a nocturnal activity, perhaps, as Mylonopoulos suggests, as a "social comment in visual terms against the atrocities of war" (p. 195). In ancient literature, military ambushes also took place at night. Sergio Casali surveys the evidence for the depiction of nocturnal ambushes (imboscate notturne) in Greek and Roman epic poetry. While the readers of Homer and Euripides would have viewed these activities as familiar, the Roman audiences of Virgil and Statius considered these maneuvers to be a morally reprehensible intrusion on the private lives of the victims, even when they were soldiers, perhaps because ancient Athenians were trained as warriors, while the audience of the Roman epic poems had no direct experience with military tactics. Moving from poetry to prose, Koen de Temmerman examines the representation of the night and nocturnal phenomena in Greek and Latin novels. He identifies numerous tropes and literary commonplaces related to the night in these works: night as a time of exacerbated suffering; as a time for cognitive rumination, sometimes due to sleeplessness caused by love-sickness; as a time of erotic encounters; and as a time of story-telling. While the hours of darkness were generally perceived as ripe with hidden danger, the poems of Sappho offer a different view. According to Renate Schlesier, her verses portray the night as a stage lit by the stars and the moon, on which the sleepless play out the dynamic scenes of their nocturnal lives. An outlier among these contributions is Vinciane Pierenne-Delforge's paper about Night as a divinity. While Hesiod draws attention to Nyx as one of the primordial deities born from Chaos, there is very little evidence for public devotion to her and the surviving epigraphy that may allude to her cult is fraught with ambiguity, as the discussion following this article suggests.

Taken together, the papers in this volume offer a stimulating introduction to the potential of studying the night as a venue for historical action and as a literary trope in Greek and Roman society. I was surprised that none of the contributors took up the insights of A. Roger Ekirch's application of modern research about bi-phasal sleep as a way to explain nocturnal activities in pre-industrial Europe, but these papers make clear that there is much more work to be done on many more topics related to the Night than those treated here, including ancient star-gazing, divine incubation, and other actions and events shrouded by the darkness. As Chaniotis reminds us, "the sum of night stories does not constitute a history of the night" (p. 9).

Table des Matières

Préface par Pierre Ducrey
Angelos Chaniotis, "Nessun dorma! Changing nightlife in the Hellenistic and Roman East "
Discussion
Andrew Wilson, "Roman nightlife "
Discussion
Renate Schlesier, "Sappho bei Nacht"
Discussion
Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge, "Nyx est, elle aussi, une divinité  : la nuit dans les mythes et les cultes grecs"
Discussion
Ioannis Mylonopoulos, "Brutal are the children of the night!"
Nocturnal violence in Greek art
Sergio Casali, "Imboscate notturne nell'epica romana"
Discussion
Koen De Temmerman, "Novelistic nights"
Discussion
Leslie Dossey, "Shedding light on the Late Antique night"
Discussion
Filippo Carlà-Uhink, "Nocturnal religious rites in the Roman religion and in early Christianity"
Discussion
Epilogue
Table des illustrations
Illustrations
Index

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Notes:

1.   Murray Melbin, "Night as Frontier," American Sociological Review 43.1 (1978): 3-22.
2.   Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Philosophical Writings, trans. Steven Tester (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), p. 154.

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Frank Vermeulen, From the Mountains to the Sea: The Roman Colonisation and Urbanisation of Central Adriatic Italy. BABESCH Supplement, 30. Leuven; Paris; Bristol, CT: Peeters, 2017. Pp. 224. ISBN 9789042934702. €84,00 (pb).

Reviewed by Miko Flohr, Leiden University (m.flohr@hum.leidenuniv.nl)

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This important monograph by Frank Vermeulen is the culmination of more than fifteen years of engagement with the Roman archaeology of central Adriatic Italy, and a thoroughly documented contextual analysis of the results of Vermeulen's ambitious and innovative surveys in the Potenza Valley, which started in 2000 and continued until 2015. Richly illustrated and well-referenced, it offers a detailed, evidence-driven analysis of the urban history of the region between Rimini and Pescara, from the the central Apennine watershed to the Adriatic shoreline. Chronologically, the book covers the period from the fifth century BC until the late second century AD, thus starting a century or so before Roman conquest of the region, and continuing until Roman urbanism in this region had reached its peak. This suits the agenda of the book, which consists in assessing the impact of Roman conquest and hegemony on the urban system of Picenum and the Ager Gallicus, but it results in the exclusion of later antiquity from the analysis.

The narrative is divided into four main chapters, preceded by a brief introduction and followed by a short epilogue and a lengthy appendix discussing the history and the remains of the individual cities of the region, co-authored by Vermeulen and Dimitri van Limbergen. The chapter following the introduction serves to build up the narrative: it discusses the region's geological formation, its main topographical features, and its climate, highlighting the fragmentation of the region into a sequence of valleys, and the sharp differences in climate, ecology and viability between the mountainous upper valleys, the hilly lower valleys, and the flat but marshy coastal zone. Vermeulen rightly highlights the natural subdivision of the area into more-or-less independent settlement chambers. After briefly discussing the traditional (text-based) scholarship on the region, Vermeulen moves on to outlining the methodology of his project, emphasizing the role and the potential of urban surveys for reconstructing Roman urban landscapes. The chapter concludes with a brief conceptual discussion on Roman colonisation, urbanisation and Romanisation, which reflects the (heated) debates about the ways in which these concepts can be used to capture the historical development of Roman Italy.

The following chapter 3 discusses the history of the region in the centuries preceding Roman conquest. It starts from the observation that the region should be seen as a 'melting pot', where a variety of peoples were living in close proximity, including Piceni, Umbrians, Gallic tribes, Etruscans and Greeks – and shows how this reality is not only reflected in textual evidence, but also in the archaeology of the region, though it is emphasized that the archaeological evidence leaves a lot to be desired. Vermeulen subsequently moves on to discuss several subregions in more detail, highlighting processes of nucleation, and developments that can best be characterized as a form of proto-urbanization. This leads Vermeulen to discard the traditional idea that the Romans, upon conquest, introduced urbanism in a region that otherwise was not yet developing in that direction. Particularly in the fourth century BC, the move toward urbanization was accelerating under the influence both of internal processes of wealth accumulation and social differentiation, and of increased integration into supra-local economic networks. Vermeulen particularly identifies the appearance of Gallic tribes in the area as an accelerator of nucleation and integration. In the end, however, Vermeulen declines to identify any of the sites in the region as truly urban in this period.

This changed, of course, in the following centuries, when, partially on the initiative of the Romans, a range of settlements in the region develops a clear urban form. Chapter 4 covers the immediate impact of the incorporation of the region into Rome's emerging power network in the Italian peninsula. In the first phase, which covered the third century BC, Roman engagement became most clearly visible in the coastal zone, where a number of Roman and Latin colonies were founded, including Sena Gallia and Ariminum. Though the early phases of these foundations remain badly documented, Vermeulen notes that most settlements show evidence for at least some pre-Roman occupation. A second wave of colonization followed after the Hannibalic war, with several new foundations, including Pisaurum, Potentia and Auximum (though the case of Auximum may in fact be less secure than Vermeulen takes it to be, as it rests on an extremely generous interpretation of Livy 41.27). Vermeulen argues, rightly, that these developments had impact on the countryside, particularly in the direct environment of the colonies, but also throughout the rest of the region, and fostered the emergence of an entire range of smaller and larger habitation centres, including several old indigenous centres, and a larger number of new centres that emerged in central places on the countryside, either through active policy by the Romans, or spontaneously. This development particularly intensified in the second century BC.

After the Social War, the urban system of central Adriatic Italy developed its final, imperial form. Chapter 5 highlights the dynamics of urban growth in the first century BC and the first two centuries AD. This started with the municipalisation of the region in the century following the Social War, and was decisively influenced by renewed phases of colonization under Caesar and Augustus, which reorganized both the urban system and the countryside. The centuries of peace that followed saw uninterrupted demographic growth, and a gradual increase in the wealth of local elites, resulting in a continuous prospering of urban life, as expressed through architecture and epigraphy. Vermeulen presents a number of case studies of settlements developing into true towns in this period, including, of course, the cities of Septempeda and Trea in the Potenza Valley, but also Suasa, further to the north, and highlights the architectural models that spread through the region in the architectural boom of the first and early second centuries AD: baths, theatres, amphitheatres, monumentalized fora, and other urban embellishments. Moreover, survey work in the countryside indicates an increased density of settlement throughout the region, and particularly in the environs of cities. Still, however, Vermeulen assumes an urbanization rate of not more than 20%, and argues that the level of monumentalization reached by many urban centres was exaggerated, and not proportional to the relatively small demographic size of these towns.

And then, somewhere between Hadrian and Caracalla, the narrative stops. While it makes sense for this monograph to end around 200 AD, one cannot help longing for more: what happened after the late second century AD, when the construction of monumental (public) architecture came to a halt, and the production of epigraphy dwindled? How are we to understand the historical processes of later antiquity and the early medieval period that resulted in the abandonment of so many urban centres? Should we see this as a true demographic collapse, where many urban communities simply ceased to exist, or as a transformation, where the urban areas of the Roman period were simply given up by their shrinking populations in favour of alternative locations nearby? How long did the early imperial urban system continue to function in a recognizable way, and how much of it continued to exist throughout later antiquity into the Middle Ages? It is clear that Vermeulen – and probably no one more than him – has the detailed knowledge of the region necessary to reconstruct what was happening, and one would like to challenge him to supplement this book with an article covering this issue, as far as possible in the current state of our knowledge.

Apart from lamenting the omission of Late Antiquity, one can only recommend this book. It fits very nicely into recent debates on the urban history of Roman Italy, and offers a regionally specific and archaeologically enriched angle on, e.g., the work of John Patterson (Landscapes and Cities, Oxford 2006), and Cooley's recent Blackwell A Companion to Roman Italy (2016). In general, Vermeulen's main argument seems roughly in line with most of this earlier scholarship, but From the Mountains to the Sea offers a good, detailed overview of how more general trends worked out in a specific region which is on the one hand an easily recognizable part of Roman Italy, but on the other hand distinguishes itself clearly from both Latium and Campania and Samnium, which have dominated discourse so far. It has to be pointed out that this also gives the book significant potential in teaching: it presents a lot of evidence in plain and clear English that can not only inform scholarly endeavours to Roman urbanism, but also student papers. This is true for the general narrative, but also for the richly documented gazetteer, which offers up-to-date overviews of our archaeological knowledge and ample references to further literature. One can only recommend to colleagues to make sure they, and their library, get a copy of this monograph.

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Pieter B. Hartog, Pesher and Hypomnema: A Comparison of Two Commentary Traditions from the Hellenistic-Roman Period. Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah, 121. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Pp. xv, 356. ISBN 9789004353541. €132,00.

Reviewed by Andrew M. King V, University of Notre Dame (aking8@nd.edu)

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This monograph is a revision of the author's dissertation completed at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 2015, which evaluates the similarities and differences between two commentary traditions developed in the Hellenistic world: the hypomnemata (ὑπόμνημα) and the pesharim (פשר). The hypomnemata are Greek commentaries using Alexandrian literary and philological interpretive practices while characteristically maintaining a distinction between the base text being interpreted and the interpretation itself. As the oldest extant biblical commentaries, the pesharim are exegetical works that interpret Scripture through quotation and discrete commentary. Routinely categorized as part of the "sectarian literature" of Qumran, the pesharim lack completely satisfying parallels from the rich literary history of the ancient Near East that could account for both the form and function of the pesharim. As a result, comparison between the Hellenistic and Qumran commentary traditions began when Markus Bockmuehl sketched, albeit briefly, the outline of such a study in a 2004 conference presentation, which, along with other papers from the conference, was published in 2009.¹ While a few articles have since focused on defining the relationship between the two traditions,² Hartog's monograph is certainly the most detailed and focused treatment. In it, Hartog aims to explain the spread of Alexandrian commentary writing to Palestine through social and intellectual networks between Egypt and Palestine and the subsequent modification of hypomnemata to fit a new intellectual context in Palestine.

His study proceeds in three parts: an evaluation of the intellectual cultures of Alexandria and of Palestine with a focus on the physicality of the hypomnemata and the pesharim (e.g., textual emendations, additions, and the use of signs and sense dividers); an analysis of the bifold structure of both commentary traditions with diverging characteristics between them; and a more detailed account of the hermeneutical strategies of both text types. Each section comprises three chapters, the first being a general overview while the second and third focus on specific details within the hypomnemata and pesharim, respectively.

The monograph begins with a review of scholarship on the pesharim and the many proposed points of comparison between the writing of commentary at Qumran and other types of literature; mainly this literature review outlines a few comparisons between the pesharim and proposed parallels from the Jewish (i.e. midrashim and apocalyptic writings), ancient Near Eastern (i.e. the Egyptian Demotic Chronicle, Akkadian dream interpretations, and Babylonian and Assyrian textual commentaries), and Greek literary worlds. In reviewing the history of scholarship, Hartog argues that previous comparisons have only produced partial parallels to the pesharim. In place of identifying a single parallel as others have done, he posits their "replacement with a more multi-faceted approach" (6). Hartog's focus, however, is almost entirely on the comparison between the pesharim and a single parallel, the hypomnemata; presumably, he limits the scope of his research to the hypomnemata because he is ultimately concerned with describing the pesharim as the product of Jewish intellectuals "who worked in a globalised context and upheld relations with other communities of scholars and intellectuals throughout the Hellenistic-Roman world" (21). Despite the nod to a multi-faceted approach, there is no sustained attempt to weave together a study of the hypomnemata with the partial findings from research into ancient Near Eastern parallels.

To address the problem of the spread of a literary trend developed in Alexandria to a sectarian group living in the desert of Palestine, Hartog argues for a network between Alexandria and Jerusalem wherein "Hellenistic courts and the Jerusalem temple constituted central nodes" (23). Relying on Maren Niehoff's work on the relationship between Jewish exegesis and the teachings of Aristarchus,³ he establishes that knowledge of Homeric scholarship existed within the Jewish intellectual community of Alexandria. The transmission of Alexandrian textual scholarship, as he argues, "reached Jews in Palestine primarily via Jews in Egypt" (25). He understands the travels of Ben Sira, Dositheus (Add Esth 11:1), and Philo who "took books with them" (22) to be evidence for an exchange of knowledge between the two regions.

As knowledge of Alexandrian textual scholarship made its way through the channels of exchange, its features, according to Hartog, underwent a process of "glocalisation" whereby the local culture and traditions of Qumran (i.e., the local) shaped Greek commentary writing (i.e., the global) to fit new and unique needs (16-21). Glocalization is the process of the local adoption and adaptation of something that is global. Though globalism is a modern concept, he is indeed careful to define its use in his study by an emphasis on the interconnectedness and interdependency around the Mediterranean, which was brought about by Hellenism. He borrows the concept of glocalization from research developed in the study of modern global branding in which corporations tailor products to fit various local cultures. As an example of glocalization in global branding, he mentions the phenomenon of the change (i.e., glocalization) made to the menu at McDonalds (i.e., a global brand) in regions that have dietary restrictions (18, n. 71). A shortcoming in his application of globalism and glocalization, the problem of anachronism aside, is the lack of argument establishing the hypomnemata commentaries, or more generally Alexandrian textual scholarship, as a global intellectual culture that other scholars and intellectuals outside of Egypt would feel an impulse to adopt and then to modify according to their own scholarly and intellectual needs.

Having discussed his intended use of network theory and glocalization, Hartog addresses the physical aspects of both commentaries. Concerning the hypomnemata (64-81), he argues that the physical characteristics of some of the manuscripts reveal their potential scholarly use as a master copy having annotations in the margins (BKT 10.16897), as the location of exchange between at least two members of a scholarly community (P. Oxy. 2.221V), or as the product of note-taking (P. Oxy. 8.1086). He argues (82-100) that some of the pesharim too reveal similar intellectual usages as a master copy (4Q169), as the result of an exchange between a teacher and student (1QpHab), or as the result of (communal) note-taking (4Q163).

Physicality also includes the use of marginal signs in manuscripts. Hartog discusses the use of the diple, obelos, the chi-rho, the alpha-nun, and the alpha-omega in the Greek commentary tradition (71-77). In the pesharim these marginal signs include the eleven or twelve X-shaped symbols whose exact purpose is disputed, the lone aleph that may mark a passage a reader found important, and the twice-used horizontal strokes; all of these are found in 4QpHab. There are also several occurrences of horizontal-like strokes in 4Q163 6 ii, some of which might indicate sense divisions between quoted texts and their interpretations. Hartog likens the horizontal strokes of 1QpHab to the chi-rho symbols used in P. Oxy. 8.1086 to mark interesting passages (80 and 95-96). He further suggests that some signs, especially the horizontal-like strokes found in 4Q163 6 ii, are added to create "an image reminiscent of Alexandrian works of textual scholarship," (97) but they are not always evident of meaningful interaction with the base text. Of the sixteen pesharim, however, only 4QpHab and 4Q163 have marginal signs, and Hartog ultimately finds no exact graphic parallels between the two traditions. This limited use of the marginal signs in only two pesharim and, to a lesser extent, their unique graphic forms suggest that Alexandrian textual scholarship's influence at Qumran was minimal at best.

The second section analyzes the bifold structure of both commentary traditions. Hartog demonstrates that both share a similar macro-structure, "which distinguishes explicitly between lemmata and their interpretations" (107). He argues that their shared macro-structure is a result from the network to which both traditions are connected. The similarities do not extend to the micro-structure level, according to Hartog, who explains that "every commentary combines the voices of the base text and its interpretation, but how these two voices are combined tends to differ between individual commentaries and broader exegetical traditions" (108). These micro-structural elements include "glosses," (113-16, 144-50) "paraphrase," (116, 150-51) "references and quotations," (116-28, 151-65) "formulaic terminology," (128-30, 165-69) and "multiple interpretations" (130-31, 169-70). He provides excellent selections from both commentary traditions as he interacts with the primary texts to establish the differences in the micro-structural elements in the hypomnemata and pesharim. At times the differences are remarkable. For example, the hypomnemata, according to Hartog, are "repositories of scholarly knowledge" since some of the commentaries (e.g., P.Oxy. 8.1086) retain conflicting interpretations without purgation (131). In contrast, the pesharim very often provide a single authoritative commentary on a Scriptural passage having "no interest in presenting alternative views" (170).

The third section evaluates the hermeneutical characteristics of the two traditions. Hartog identifies two major differences between them. First, they differ in what they isolate for interpretation in their base texts. The pesharim find and focus on elements in their base texts that provide an opportunity to connect the scriptural text to their own movement. The hypomnemata, in contrast, have a wider focus in commenting on various details within Homer. These details connect to various interests in scholarly fields, such as geography and botany. Second, the pesharim tend to "neutralize or define the co-text of their lemmata" (290) whereas the hypomnemata distinguish themselves even from allegorical interpretation by their preference for co-textual reading (221). Hartog ends this final section with the reminder that "rather than straightforward Greek influences, therefore, the Pesharim reflect intricate processes of glocalisation" (292).

He provides a concluding chapter that summarizes his major contention, which is two-part: both commentary traditions "are at home in similar settings" and their differences and similarities "point to the workings of intellectual networks," which "constituted a globalized context for the exchange of knowledge" (293). Hartog has certainly made a strong and credible case that the hypomnemata and pesharim reflect similar settings in as much as both are scholarly and educational products that interact in various ways with a base text. There should also be little doubt that intellectual (as well as social and economic) networks existed between Palestine and Egypt throughout the Hellenistic period. The existence of these networks allows for the possibility of intellectual exchange such that scribes at Qumran could have knowledge of Alexandrian commentary writing, but it by no means necessitates such transmission. Ultimately, the major warrant underpinning his claim of adoption and adaptation of Alexandrian commentary writing at Qumran is that commentary writing is "relatively rare in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods" (295; see also 39 and 135). For some readers, however, the central reservation hindering full acceptance of Hartog's thesis will be whether there is enough shared distinctiveness between the hypomnemata and pesharim to suggest substantial transmission of Alexandrian textual trends to Qumran through intellectual networks as proposed in this monograph. He has demonstrated that both commentary traditions existed in deeply textual communities that oriented themselves to their base texts; this similar context might just as well point to shared participation in broader cultural trends only partially preserved in the extant literary evidence.

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Notes:

1.   Markus Bockmuehl, "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of Biblical Commentary," in Text, Thought, and Practice in Qumran and Early Christianity: Proceedings of the Ninth International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, Jointly Sponsored by the Hebrew University Center for the Study of Christianity, 11–13 January, 2004, ed. Ruth A. Clements and Daniel R. Schwartz, STDJ 84 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 3–29.
2.   Daniel A. Machiela, "The Qumran Pesharim as Biblical Commentaries: Historical Context and Lines of Development," DSD 19 (2012): 313–362; Reinhard Kratz, "Text und Kommentar: Die Pescharim von Qumran im Kontext der hellenistischen Bildungstradition," in Von Rom nach Bagdad: Bildung und Religion in der späteren Antike und im klassischen Islam, ed. Peter Gemeinhardt and Sebastian Günther (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 51–80.
3.   See, for example, Maren R. Niehoff, Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria. Cambridge: CUP, 2011.

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Nancy Worman, Virginia Woolf's Greek Tragedy. Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Pp. xii, 152. ISBN 9781474277822. €52,50.

Reviewed by Holly Ranger, Institute of Classical Studies (holly.ranger@sas.ac.uk)

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A rich vein of scholarship in Virginia Woolf studies over the last thirty years has explored the intersection between feminism and imperialism in Woolf's work. Scholars including Urmila Seshagiri, Supriya Chaudhuri, and Sonita Sarker have been writing and thinking through the ways in which—and the extent to which—the undoubted legacy of the pacifist and feminist polemic exemplified by Three Guineas and A Room of One's Own is undermined by Woolf's imperial gaze. This dilemma is perhaps best expressed for classicists in Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff's formulation that '[w]hile being Arachne, unveiling the face of Empire, in matters of capital, the state, war, and women, Woolf may become—or remain—Athena in matters of race'.¹ The general trend in Woolf studies has been towards increasingly acute postcolonial critiques which have problematized any naïve extension of Woolf's clear anti-patriarchal and anti-militarist politics to anti-imperialism or anti-racism. Nevertheless, these accounts do not discard Woolf as a feminist foremother; all acknowledge Woolf's self-conscious gestures towards her complicity in imperialism and its expression in modernist aesthetics. Such critical interventions have ensured that credible scholarship examining Woolf's politics always foregrounds the double movement of complicity and critique enacted by her work.

A similar shift in thinking around Woolf's relationship with Greek was effected by the ground-breaking discovery in 2010 by Christine Kenyon Jones and Anna Snaith that Woolf had been formally educated to 'final pass B.A.' level in ancient Greek at King's Ladies' Department for three years (1897-1900) under the tutelage of George Warr ('my beloved Warr', Letters Vol. I, 20). The shockwave from this discovery is still reverberating in Woolf studies; although it does not undermine her later pedagogical critique and its searing reckoning of the abuses wreaked by educational privilege, it has forced a significant revision both of the image of Woolf as the ur-outsider, and of narratives around her use of Greek as emblematic of female exclusion from the academy, amateurism, and feminine forms of knowing or not knowing. It is amongst these tectonic shifts that Nancy Worman's excellent new book makes its nuanced contribution. Worman's innovation is to identify Woolf's Greek aesthetics as a potent site for an examination of the intersection of empire, race ('exoticism'), and gender in Woolf's work. The book explores how Woolf's 'Greek' both reflects and challenges imperial perspectives—and, in turn, how her feminism inflects and is inflected by those perspectives.

Previous studies of Woolf's Hellenism have been dogged by biographical reductionism, which has resulted in forensic comparisons of the novels with Woolf's diaries and Greek translation notebooks and in studies of the spectral presences of J— H— and Woolf's family bereavements (this is not to dispute the tragedy of those deaths, but to set aside such criticism's phatic use of 'tragedy'). Worman signals early her 'anti-biographical' approach and justifies her intention to pass over the Monks House Papers and the 'rich accretions' of letters, journals, and holographs (which a reader would expect to find), except where they serve as productive 'extensions and supplements' to the book's central aesthetic analysis (3). Each of the chapters treats a particular aesthetic strand of Woolf's gendering of Greece: Greek primitivism and exoticism; tragic styles; and choral voices. Previous studies have also tended to treat 'Hellenism' very broadly defined, although the individual figures of Sophocles' Antigone and Aeschylus' Cassandra, and the Platonic themes of To the Lighthouse do predominate; Worman adds Electra and Clytemnestra and specific choral imagery. Of course, any account of Woolf's Hellenism hinges on the essay 'On Not Knowing Greek'; Worman's insight here in moving away from biography is to read the essay as setting out Woolf's ars tragoedia.

Chapter 1, 'Gender and Primitivist "Greek" Aesthetics', first sets out how Woolf genders the Greek elements in her work, searching past the male bodies that dominated the Athenian stage to find 'the more female aspects of [tragedy's] textures, including mournful embodiments and choral voices' (21). Worman also places Woolf's 'often racializing… classical aesthetic' within English modernist aesthetic impulses, which 'collude […] with imperialist and colonialist perspectives while only appearing to critique them' (16). But, 'if Woolf's aesthetic orientations resist reduction to a brand of imperialist nostalgia, this is largely due to her sensitivity to the ways in which gender and class inflect privilege' (35). Worman's load-bearing conditionals ('if', 'may', 'to what extent', 36) invite the reader throughout the book to consider Woolf's 'compromised stance' (6) vis-à-vis imperialism; Worman remains sensitive to the contradictions of Woolf's attempts to critique masculinist militarism while patronizing admiration of a perceived primitive purity and imperialist racism are in play. It is Worman's attendance to Woolf's status as a problematic foremother that surely allows her to detect the presence of Electra where previous scholarship has focused on Antigone, a more readily recovered feminist foremother. Electra is difficult. Yet she is a 'recalcitrant presence' (38), a feminine body that won't quit the stage (51). Although Worman regrets Electra's 'conventional' characterization in much of the literature, this moment in the book distils an essential quality of the difficult work of Worman's project and her confrontation with Woolf's 'compromised stance'.

Chapter 2, 'Electra and the Materialities of Tragic Language' is exemplary of the readings opened by Worman's anti-biographical perspective. Rather than searching for traces of the tragedies in the novels, Worman instead reads Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway and The Years as classical Athenian tragedy. Drilling beneath the surface layer of a 'tragic' plot, Worman uncovers the craft of Woolf's manipulations of the figurative and material elements of tragic form and style: the discursive inflections of female tragic characterization, epitomized by the 'sharpness and compression' of Electra (28); the imagery of characters' language and their sense of 'language itself as embodied and textured' (46)… 'as if it were material and geometric'; cadences that echo tragic lyric metres (61); the way the 'the most meaningfully embodied actions take place offstage'; the use of deixis, and proxemics. This is 'Virginia Woolf's Greek tragedy'.

Worman resists the subjectivist speculation that Woolf was drawn to the strong female characters of Greek tragedy, noting Woolf's disinterest in Euripides; instead, she pinpoints Woolf's aesthetic attraction to tragedy and to Sophocles in particular: a master of 'stylistic balance and restraint', whose Electra and Antigone 'seem to have had special resonance for their stark characterizations and lapidary choral modes' (9). Later, Worman suggests that Clytemnestra, Electra, and Antigone are also of interest to Woolf for their unruly bodies ('riveting inhabitations', 12), finding in Woolf a sympathetic reader resonant with her own scholarship on tragic embodiments. Despite Woolf's exoticizing gestures, Electra's harshness provides a feminist counter to propagandist or sentimentalizing wartime aesthetics in Jacob's Room (68), while the rich colorations and literal materials of Aeschylus' Clytemnestra (55) shade Mrs Dalloway's weighty 'stylistic, tonal and characterological elements' (50). Worman's identification of the presence of these female tragic characters re-casts two works conventionally labelled elegiac as books of rage (68).

Chapter 3, 'Female and "Natural" Choral Voices', tracks the gendered and structural development of Woolf's 'Greek' choruses. It is a critical commonplace to highlight the trope of the bird chorus in Woolf, but Worman links it specifically to the choruses of Sophocles' Electra and Oedipus at Colonus, and secondarily to Aeschylus' Agamemnon (81). Again, the metonymic and symbolic function of Electra to Woolf is foregrounded. The chapter moves from Jacob's Room and Mrs Dalloway, in which choral passages briefly punctuate the authorial narration and evince 'classicizing presumptions usually associated with men' (79); through the 'extraordinary choral orchestration' of The Waves; to the 'feminine and non-human voices' of Between the Acts, which pose 'a choral challenge' to the imperialist undertones of the male voices (80). The feminine chorus is not unambiguously positive, however, and Worman draws out how it is also gossipy, propagandist, even murderously inclined. I would have liked to see this analysis pursued a little further with reference to the power dynamics and characterization of ancient choruses, particularly as outsider figures who often express conventional attitudes, and how these factors may have nuanced the ways in which Woolf's choruses both reinforce and challenge imperialist discourse.

Over the course of the book, Worman tracks a tension between feminine tragedy and masculinist Platonic dialogue—and to a lesser extent, Homeric epic—that increasingly shapes Woolf's 'Greekness' and which emerges from an initial 'gendered face-off' (13) of style and form, to a dynamic integration. The book's epilogue explores how the polemic Three Guineas 'orchestrates a triangulated "Platonic" dialogue that is tragic in a deeper and more pervasive sense than [its] occasional references to Antigone would suggest' (14). In this reading, Three Guineas enacts at a structural level the entanglement of the feminine element within the masculine, and replicates in its aesthetic dynamic the tragedy of women's lives both complicit in and entrapped by patriarchy.

The book is engaging throughout and accessibly written for scholars and students of modernism and Woolf studies without training in Athenian drama: all Greek is translated, the introduction includes a synopsis of feminist approaches to Greek tragedy in ancient and modern settings, and each of the three major chapters begins with a brief overview of the elements of Greek tragedy relevant to the chapter's focus (Silenus, tragic lament, etc.). This reviewer was not wholly convinced by the book's claim to write against 'traditional historicizing' (3) accounts of Woolf's work, a claim qualified as relating to both the historical situatedness of Woolf's writing (the book argues instead that Woolf's Hellenism is inflected by a timeless 'mystical strain', 16), and to the monograph itself, which states an intention to challenge the tendency in existing criticism to track Woolf's Hellenism in 'developmental and periodizing historicist modes' (18). To my mind, any account of the discursive and ideological conflicts of empire and fascism as they play out in Woolf's Hellenism before and then through two World Wars is deeply historicized; and, while the book is careful to show how the idiosyncrasies of Woolf's 'Greekness' can oscillate messily between periods and styles, there is a general positive correlation that is reflected in the book's structure, which traces a line from 'A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus' [1906] (22-28) to Between the Acts [1941] (92-107) and Three Guineas [1938] (109-116). However, this claim to anti-historicism does not detract from Worman's achievement. Worman's contributions to Woolf studies, modernist studies, and reception studies are many, and I include only some of the many points of interest. Woolf's Hellenism is a major research area in Woolf studies, but Worman shows us that the field is far from exhausted; the book itself contains tantalizing glimpses of areas for future research, including p. 59's brief reference to the 'evidence of… [Aeschylus'] Helen' (!) on Woolf's style of her mid-period.

Worman's book is one of two inaugural volumes in Laura Jansen's new series, Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing (full disclosure: I have a book under contract in the same series). The series foregrounds the dynamic processes of reception which generate new insights into modern artists and ancient texts. This two-way perspective is reflected in each volume's attempt to probe the tension between the wish to break with tradition, and the persistent and fluid dialogue with the Greco-Roman past, a tension focalized here by Worman's attention to the ways in which Woolf creates an 'exoticized aesthetic space' at the same time as she 'negotiates classical ideals' and the 'British colonizing of Greek literature' (17). Worman presents us with a significant revision of the 'modalities and textures' of Woolf's 'Greek' and in turn, to offer one example, shows us how reading Woolf reading Aeschylus opens the dramatist to 'a much more ambivalent and imbricated vision of male-female roles and interactions than some feminists have thought' (11). But she also demands that her reader interrogate disciplinary classical ideals: 'I want to emphasize that [Woolf's] struggles with the British versions of triumphalist Hellenism remains familiar and dangerous territory for classicists. It is the rare student of Sophocles… who can resist the sense that something thrillingly, simply and essentially human underpins his dramas' (17). That this is a radical provocation is evidenced by Worman's frequent anticipation of a hostile reader (e.g., 'this may sound an unduly harsh assessment of Woolf's engagements with Greek literature', 17). Jane Marcus once asked Woolf scholars to consider whose interests are served in the creation of facile anti-imperialist readings of Woolf ²; Worman's book poses the same question to the classical scholar. ​

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Notes:

1.   Cliff, M. 1994. 'Virginia Woolf and the Imperial Gaze: A Glance Askance', in M. Hussey and V. Neverow (eds), Virginia Woolf: Emerging Perspectives (NY: Pace University Press), 91-102 (99).
2.   Marcus, J. 2004. Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), pp. 18-19.

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Emma Dench, Empire and Political Cultures in the Roman World. Key Themes in Ancient History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 207. ISBN 9780521009010. $27.99.

Reviewed by Carlos Noreña, University of California, Berkeley (norena@berkeley.edu)

Version at BMCR home site

Preview

This slim volume scores big on the bang-for-the-buck scale. In just over 200 pages, written in her characteristically jaunty style, Emma Dench covers a dizzying array of topics, expertly and often provocatively, not only providing the sort of high-level introductory overview for which the Key Themes series was designed, but also advancing a coherent and compelling program for how we should understand "the local experience of change attendant on empire in the Roman world" (1). Dench does not argue a concrete thesis, but do not be fooled: this is very much a thesis-driven account of cultural change—or, rather, of a particular facet of that change. The argument is mostly implicit, however, and not organized to prove a set of claims, but rather to illustrate, through example and interpretation, the significant heuristic payoff derived from granular analysis of the infinitely variable local articulations of what she calls "statehood," "peoplehood," and "grouphood" in the Roman empire (16). It is one of those very rare books that will be genuinely useful for newcomers and experts alike.

The Introduction and Epilogue together set the book in context and sketch an agenda for future work. The framing is important, and we will return to it below. The substantive core of the book is arranged in five chapters. The first, "Toward a Roman Dialect of Empire" (18-46), explores how modes of sovereignty that were marked in some way as "Roman" were conceptualized and articulated at the labile interface between Roman and non-Roman sources of power. Dench delineates a spectrum from highly charged moments of "translation" at such interfaces (for which the dissolution of the Macedonian kingdom in 167 BCE serves as a paradigmatic case, 24 ff.), through spectacle and performance contexts in which Roman symbolism (Latin, official documents, architecture, iconography, and so on) was mobilized in both pro- and (NB) anti-Roman assertions of authority (29-39), to a coalescing of what she calls the "rule-book mentality" (40), expressed, juridically, by means of town charters, magistracies, and Roman citizenship.

The second chapter, "Territory" (47-73), continues with the broad theme of Roman and non-Roman interfaces, shifting the focus from discourse to space. Dench synthesizes the latest work on roads, frontiers, provinces, borders, colonization, urbanization, and centuriation, urging us (quite rightly) not to view Roman territoriality through the prism of the modern nation-state (52). She is especially good on the transformative impact of Pompey and Caesar—both in the rise of a territorial conception of empire (54-5) and in the intensification of city-foundation (68-9)—and on how large-scale construction in frontier zones animated a resonant "fortress empire" ideology (56-62).

Material conditions and the hard edges of coercive power are addressed, respectively, in chapters three ("Wealth and Society," 74-104) and four ("Force and Violence," 105-33). Discussion begins (ch. 3) with the relationship between Roman imperialism and economic exploitation (76-87). The review of Hopkins' influential "taxes and trade" model perhaps underplays the role of monetization and the distinction between aggregate and per- capita growth, and there is not enough here on the changing personnel of the imperial extraction apparatus, especially the proliferation of financial procurators (80 ff.). Nor will all readers agree that Finley's thesis on the primitivism of the Roman economy "has been substantially upheld in recent decades" (79). There are, however, useful discussions of taxation, the census, and coinage (82-7); the material basis of political participation, especially in democratic government in the Greek East (87-95); and the specifically Roman articulation of wealth and social order (95-101). Her analysis of the Roman regulation of theater seating (96-98), which she identifies as a "first principle of the socio-specific privilege-system associated with Roman rule" (98), is outstanding. She also offers (ch. 4) an extended analysis of warfare and coercion, considering not only the "performative and spectacular uses of violence" authored by the Roman state (111), from executions and proscriptions to monuments, triumphs, and trophies (111-14), but also the operations of the Roman army and the variable impacts of soldiers on the social fabric of local communities (114-24). We are reminded throughout what it must have been like to live in this climate of imperial coercion, which could trigger hostile rejection (116), nightmares and alienation (119-20), and defiance and martyrdom (132-3).

"Time," the fifth and final substantive chapter (134-54), considers how local modes of time-reckoning, and local conceptions of both past and future time, were shaped by Roman power. Local use of calendars modeled on those specific to the city of Rome, and therefore "useless" elsewhere (Rüpke), reflects a naturalization and deep internalization of Roman norms (142-3), while the self-conscious adoption of what Dench calls "Caesar time," in the form of both imperial and consular dating schemes, reveals the extent to which the coming of Rome disrupted the rhythms of daily life (143-7). The chapter concludes with conceptions of past and future. Writing in an ethnographic tradition in which questions about peoplehood were often framed with reference to origins, Greek authors came to represent Romanness in universalizing and totalizing terms, an index of how Rome "swamps local pasts and reconfigures and underwrites peoplehood" (150). Celebrations of local pasts could always be mobilized against Rome, however, and ideas about future time were sometimes expressed in apocalyptic terms (153-4). The discussion is characteristic of the book as a whole in its sensitivity to nuance, context, and complexity.

Studies addressing the many topics covered in this book, often treated under the rubric of "Romanization," continue to proliferate, and Dench is a reliable guide to this bibliography. Indeed, the book will be an excellent first port of call for students looking to get up to speed on this material. Several features of Dench's approach set her book apart from others in this crowded field. First, she situates the Roman empire in the wider context of other ancient Mediterranean empires (with occasional glances to early China), drawing attention, for example, to other imperial rituals (31-2), economies of violence (107-110), and interventions in local time-reckoning (136), especially in the imperial systems of ancient West Asia. This contextualization is an effective safeguard against a recurrent exceptionalism in the scholarship on the Roman empire. Nor does she lose sight of the violence and domination within which processes of acculturation were always embedded. This is another important corrective, since imperial coercion, force, fear, and alienation are often underplayed (or even ignored) in cultural histories of the Roman world.

More novel and distinctive is Dench's sustained attention to the Republican period, on the one hand, and to cultural change in Italy (and not just during the Republic), on the other. As she points out, much of the most influential scholarship has focused on either the Republic or the Empire; on either Italy or the provinces; or on either Roman politics and administration or provincial cultures (9-16). She traces these stubborn dichotomies back to Mommsen (10, n. 15), and then blows them up by seamlessly weaving her discussion in and out of these conventional silos. Nor is it any surprise, given her own areas of expertise, that many of the most arresting insights in the book emerge in discussions of the Republican period (e.g., on how the Republic, as a social and political form, was related to kingship, discursively, both by antithesis and by analogy, 23-8; on the problem of territoriality in a republican empire, 52-5; on the peculiar dynamics of Roman intervention in the Greek world in the 2nd century BCE, 87-94), or in treatments of evidence for political cultures in the Italian peninsula (e.g., the Ostian monument of C. Cartilius Poplicola, the eight-time duumvir and three-time censor of Ostia, 40-3; the urban form and political organization of Roman colonies in Italy, 63-71; the well-known inscription detailing the operations of the collegium of Diana and Antinous at Lanuvium, 101-4). Dench also illuminates the provincial cultures of the imperial period, of course, but the space devoted to Italy and to the Republican period gives the book an unusual, and welcome, orientation amongst the many other studies of acculturation in the Roman world.

Where the book is very much a part of this historiographical moment, however, is in its insistence on the local, in all of its complexity and specificity, as the essential lens through which to view the making of political cultures in the Roman world. This interpretive stance is clear throughout the book, evident in Dench's treatment of this or that episode, artefact, or process, in which we are shown, again and again, the "messiness of the contexts within which Roman imperial institutions developed" (29) and the "complexity of entangled phenomena" (156). Nor is the tight focus on the local just a matter of getting things right at the level of empirical detail. What Dench really wants to draw out is local agency, not only in the day-to-day running (in effect) of the Roman empire (e.g., 34-5, 158-9), but also in the production of meaning, especially in terms of her trio of analytical categories, statehood, peoplehood, and grouphood. Only through careful attention to local structures and agencies, she argues, can we avoid "minimizing the friction, interference, mishearing, and redirection of energy that needs to be reintroduced lest the machine becomes too close to the dystopian, science-fiction vision of The Matrix" (35).

The book can be seen, then, at least in part, as a "middle-ground" account of local culture in the Roman empire (cf. 46, with n. 43, drawing on Wright's influential study of European and Native American colonial encounters in the Great Lakes region), but it is one in which cultural production and local identity operates without reference to any one, totalizing vision of Romanness.

Dench frames her account, perhaps surprisingly, through a discussion of Haverfield's Romanization of Roman Britain (four editions, 1905-23) that is largely sympathetic, and that could even be read, at a stretch, as a rehabilitation of this much criticized work, "remarkable for its sophistication" in its use of anthropology and material culture (2-4), and "ahead of its time" in its "eschewal of a top-down model of the Roman empire" (155). The crucial departure from Haverfield comes with Dench's careful segregation of things and ideas, too often conflated in The Romanization of Roman Britain, and above all with her highlighting of plurality. For whereas Haverfield's slippage from things to (a too narrow set of) ideas led to a conceptualization of "Romanization" as the "erasure of local difference" (3), Dench places local difference at the heart of her vision of political cultures in the Roman world. As she puts it, "The plural 'cultures' of my title signals the centrality of plural languages and idioms within the Roman imperial world, along with the presence of competing states and systems of authority and belief" (16). As a result there is very little in the way of "being" or "becoming" Roman here.

Empire and Political Cultures in the Roman World is bound to be very widely read and influential on the next generation of Roman cultural historians, and that bodes well for future work in this field. It may be that Dench slightly understates the degree to which most local cultures in the Roman world were broadly patterned, at least in form, from one end of the empire to the other, and the ways in which all local cultures necessarily intersected with a single, metropolitan, Roman imperial culture. But we can never understand that patterning, and that intersection, if we do not interpret these local cultures with real sensitivity to the particularities and specificities of any one time, place, experience, and subjectivity. Dench has given us an excellent tool kit to do just that.

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