Pub Date : 2021-09-08DOI: 10.1017/S0017383521000097
C. Whitton
These have been good years for Ennius perennis. A couple of years on from his Loeb renewal, two superb books keep the lifeblood pulsing. Ennius’ Annals. Poetry and History, edited by Cynthia Damon and Joseph Farrell, is a masterclass of a conference volume. The lucid introduction, a sort of ‘Whither Ennius?’, powerfully situates it in the receding wake of Otto Skutsch's monumental edition and the fresher waves of Ennius and the Architecture of the Annals, Jackie Elliott's powerful challenge to ‘Virgiliocentric’ reconstructions of this fragmentary text. As those studies made plain enough in their different ways, reception and interpretation of the Annals are interlocked to a special degree, and the fourteen chapters in this book (plus afterword by Mary Jaeger) roam nicely around and between both.
这几年对Ennius perennis来说是个好年头。勒布续约几年后,两本精彩的书让他的血液不断跳动。恩纽斯编年史。辛西娅·达蒙和约瑟夫·法雷尔主编的《诗歌与历史》是一本会议卷的大师班。清晰的介绍,有点像“恩纽斯在哪里?”,有力地将其置于奥托·斯库奇(Otto Skutsch)纪念版的消退之后,以及《恩纽斯与年鉴建筑》(Ennius and the Architecture of the Annals)的新浪潮中,杰基·艾略特(Jackie Elliott)对这篇零碎文本的“以童贞为中心”重建提出了强有力的挑战。由于这些研究以不同的方式表现得足够清楚,对《年鉴》的接受和解释在某种程度上是相互关联的,本书的十四章(加上玛丽·耶格的后记)在两者之间很好地漫游。
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Pub Date : 2021-09-08DOI: 10.1017/S0017383521000140
Emma Bridges, Henry Stead
From Oxford University Press's ‘Classical Presences’ series, Carol Dougherty's Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature places Homer's Odyssey in dialogue with five twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels which all deal in some way with the ideas of home or travel. The author focuses on novels which, on the whole, do not respond overtly to the Odyssey, but which instead share key themes – such as transience, reunion, nostalgia, or family relationships – with the Homeric poem. The conversations which she initiates between the ancient epic and the modern novels inspire us to rethink previously held assumptions about the Odyssey. For example, Dougherty's exploration of Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918), in which a veteran returns from the First World War with no memory of his wife, prompts her reader to consider Odysseus’ stay with Calypso as ‘a kind of nostalgic amnesia, a necessary break that enables rather than an obstacle that impedes his return’ (111). As ‘an experiment in improvisatory criticism’ (16), this book yields rich rewards for the reader who is already familiar with the Odyssey, as well as for those whose point of entry is one of the five modern novels. The framework applied – in which each chapter presents a reading of a relevant section of the Odyssey before setting out an analysis of the contemporary novel with which it is paired – is perhaps more familiar from comparative literary studies than from classical reception scholarship, yet Dougherty's approach is one which stimulates fresh thought about how we as readers (re-)interpret and ‘receive’ ancient texts based on the contexts in which we encounter them.
卡罗尔·多尔蒂(Carol Dougherty)的《荷马奥德赛与当代文学中的旅行与家》(Travel and Home in Homer’s Odyssey and Contemporary Literature)出自牛津大学出版社(Oxford University Press)的《古典呈现》(Classical Presences)系列,将荷马的奥德赛与五部二十世纪和二十一世纪的小说对话,这些小说都在某种程度上涉及家或旅行的概念。作者关注的小说总体上没有对奥德赛做出公开回应,而是与荷马诗有着共同的关键主题,如短暂、团聚、怀旧或家庭关系。她在古代史诗和现代小说之间发起的对话激励我们重新思考以前对奥德赛的假设。例如,多尔蒂对丽贝卡·韦斯特(Rebecca West)的《士兵归来》(The Return of The Soldier,1918)的探索,在这本书中,一位退伍军人从第一次世界大战中归来,对妻子没有任何记忆,这促使她的读者将奥德修斯与卡利普索的相处视为“一种怀旧的健忘症,一种必要的休息,使他能够而不是阻碍他归来的障碍”(111)。作为“即兴批评的实验”(16),这本书为已经熟悉《奥德赛》的读者以及那些以五部现代小说之一为切入点的读者带来了丰厚的回报。所采用的框架——在对与之配对的当代小说进行分析之前,每一章都会阅读《奥德赛》的相关章节——可能从比较文学研究中比从古典接受学中更为熟悉,然而,多尔蒂的方法激发了人们对我们作为读者如何根据我们遇到的背景来解读和“接收”古代文本的新思考。
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Pub Date : 2021-09-08DOI: 10.1017/S0017383521000103
K. Vlassopoulos
I commence this review with a major contribution to the social history of classical Athens. Athenian social history is traditionally focused on polarities of class, status, and gender; while these polarities were obviously important, it is equally significant to adopt an interactionist approach and explore the shape of encounters between people belonging to the same or different groups. Rafał Matuszewski has chosen to focus on the interactions and communication between male Athenian citizens: in particular, the various spaces in which those interactions took place, as well as the means of communication. As regards the spaces, he explores in detail the noisy streets, the Agora, the various shops, workshops, and places of commensality and entertainment, the baths, the gymnasia, and the palaestrae. This is an excellent synthesis of a large number of social spaces in classical Athens, which have never been explored in the same detail as, for example, sanctuaries and cemeteries. Equally fascinating is the second part of the work and its detailed exploration of the body as a means of communication, alongside elements of material culture like clothes, houses, and graves. The wealth of material that is collected and examined and the interactionist framework employed have the potential to revolutionize how we study Greek social and cultural history; it is to be hoped that Anglophone readers will make the effort to engage seriously with this important German book.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1017/S0017383520000339
J. Bryan
Sara Brill's new book develops her argument for understanding ‘shared life’ as central to Aristotle's ethics and politics. By focusing on this notion of shared life, she seeks to establish the connection between Aristotle's ethical, political, and zoological works in order to ground her emphasis on the essential animality of human society in Aristotle's conception. Her argument turns on a distinction between bios, a ‘way of life’ that we can choose or reject, and zoē, ‘life itself’ (3), and she is committed to establishing the generally unrecognized significance of the latter in Aristotle's ethical thought. The volume is divided into three parts. The first (‘Shared Life in Aristotle's Ethics and Politics’) concentrates on developing an account of Aristotle's concept of ‘shared life’ in the ethical and political works in such a way as to establish the importance of the zoological perspective. Here, Brill argues that shared life is at the heart of many of the central concerns of the Nicomachean Ethics, including his account of friendship. This is not simply sharing of goods or communal living: ‘Because living in its authoritative sense is perceiving and thinking, sharing one's life is sharing in perception and sharing in thinking’ (52). Brill finds a similar focus on shared zoē in the Eudemian Ethics, and the suggestion that our self-awareness and self-concern depend on the presence of others. She further develops her central claim: for all that Aristotle makes repeated assertions of human exceptionality, he also adopts a zoological framework of analysis that locates human friendship within the category of ‘animal attachment’, albeit as a special case. Human society is distinguished from animal society, but primarily as an intensification of the animal, rather than as a rejection of it. As Brill notes, setting up some of the critical analysis found in the third part of the book, her emphasis on community helps to highlight both its fragility and the consequences of exclusion. This is an idea she explains further in her analysis of shared life in the Politics: ‘if Aristotle's ethics show us the most vivid form of shared life, his Politics shows us the conditions of its destruction’ (92). Brill considers two extremes of shared life to be found in the Politics. Aristotle rejects communism for the sake of the philia that lies at the heart of a true community. His account of tyranny, meanwhile, can be understood as an analysis of a polis lacking a meaningful presence of shared life or the common good. The second part of the book concentrates on fleshing out the detail of the zoological perspective at the heart of Brill's argument by focusing on the zoological works in particular. She makes the sensible point that, while Aristotle's zoological works may be inaccurate in biological detail, they nevertheless help us to understand his own thinking about the nature and relationship of intelligence and life. Beginning with the History of Animals, Brill looks
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Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1017/S0017383520000327
M. Squire
I am no doubt showing my prejudice, but I didn't expect a book on Greek acroteria to make for such exciting lockdown reading. Because of their position high up on temple buildings, extant sculpted materials tend to be fragmentary – and hence pushed to the literal and metaphorical corners of modern-day museums. Look to scholarly publications, moreover, and there is a tendency towards classificatory catalogues, markedly less in the way of theoretical discussion (whether about architectural and cultic framing, for example, historical aesthetics, or the intersection between ‘ornamental’ and ‘figurative’ representational modes).
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