BMCRn't you glad you're not Stuart?

My all-time favorite BMCR contributor, Steven J. Willett, has a new review of Stuart Lyons's Horace's Odes and the Mystery of Do-Re-Mi.

He touches on some of my favorite topics:

1) The fallacy of biographical reading.

The Roman Odes have long been a quarry from which critics try to extract hard traces of sincerity or insincerity, as if these were binary opposites, but the job of a court-poet is to reflect court agendas and not his own private opinions. ... Sincerity is a poetic illusion created by the poet's verbal and structural dexterity. We have no instrument to probe behind the illusion to mental states, even in the case of modern poets where we possess letters and contemporary documents.

2) The performance of Latin verse.

Whatever Horace's own theatrical performance might have involved, there is nothing to suggest his contemporary readers sang such complex, intricate, allusive, ambiguous and rhetorically informed odes. The only way to comprehend their riches is by reading. Lyons shows himself far too confident in drawing "inescapable" conclusions from literary conventions that lack the slightest external corroboration.

3) Versification.

[Lyons's] decision to use traditional English versification has dressed Horace in such traditional garb that he vanishes into the mob of pallid imitations that stretch back to the sixteenth century. No matter how hard Lyons tries to make the odes sing, they sound like Thomas Gray on a bad day when he had nothing better to do than write his "Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat."

Ouch.

Dover's Theocritus a review (reprint: Bolchazy-Carducci)

As I make my (not so) triumphant return to the field of Mawr's I feel myself compelled to do something I ought to have done a long time ago. The good folks at Bolchazy-Carducci once thought well-enough of this blog to send along a review copy of my choice with the note, "Be honest about the book, because an honest review will be of more use to your readers. While we at Bolchazy-Carducci are hoping for a good review, a useful review would be better for everyone."

Good advice, which I will now follow.

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Dover, K.J., ed. Theocritus: Select Poems. Wauconda IL: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1994. (Pages: lxxii + 323) $46.00. isbn: 978-0-86516-204-2

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As an eager undergraduate (after the turn of the century) disheartened at the lack of advanced Greek offerings, I cooked up a plan with two friends to hit up a young professor for an independent study in one of his pet areas: Hellenistic Greek poetry. It happened that the subject was heating up at the time, and good commentaries were easily attainable. We purchased our own copies of a handful of Cambridge green and yellows: (1) Argonautica: Book III, (2) Theocritus: A Selection (both edited by R.L. Hunter), and (3) A Hellenistic Anthology (edited by Neil Hopkinson). We had recourse to other texts from the library, relying on Pfeiffer for much of our Callimachus, with the aid of the brilliant commentaries that have surfaced on various of the hymns, and used sources ranging from Hutchinson's (somewhat disappointing) Hellenistic Poetry to Peter Bing's (somewhat brilliant) The Well-Read Muse.

To this day it remains one of the most rewarding courses I've taken, and thinking back I'm reminded of a sense of awe for learning and scholarship that has never quite been matched.

I'm also reminded of my professor's recommendation of K.J. Dover's Theocritus: Select Poems (a classic red Macmillan), and his disappointment that the book was no longer in print.

If only he had known of Bolchazy-Carducci's reprint, available since 1994. Since neither he nor I knew that we could buy it, I purchased the Hunter and settled for a library copy of Dover. I have distinct memories of the book's excellence, and while I appreciated Hunter, Dover I loved.

Both editors followed Gow, whose edition has been a holy grail--unattainable yet a source of hope--for me and others like me for some time, and thus stands without compare. It is difficult, however, to not compare Dover and Hunter, and one of the simplest and most significant comparisons for the general reader (if there is a general reader of Greek bucolic) is bang for the buck.

Hunter (the more recent of the two) printed just eight Idylls (1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, & 13). By way of comparison, Dover printed eighteen, inclusive of Hunter's eight (1-7, 10, 11, 13-16, 18, 22, 24, 26, & 28). Both teacher and student benefit from the greater variety of texts.

As a struggling student I found Dover's notes more readable, less discursive, and on the whole more useful. Hunter, of course, had the advantage of being more 'current', and his references are a boon to graduate students dealing with an ever-growing bibliography. But to a reader making his way through the poems, Hunter is cumbersome. His rewards come later, to a smaller audience. Dover, by contrast, reaches more broadly and achieves his aims with great elegance.

One need look no further than the first note of the book to see just how effective Dover's style is:

ἁδύ...μελίσδεται:Lit., 'something pleasant the whispering that pine-tree...makes music', i.e. 'sweet is the whispered music which that pine-tree makes'. καί...καί is superimposed on ἁδύ...ἁδὺ δέ, thus:

ἁδύ τι ... καὶ ἁ πίτυς ... μελισδεται
ἁδὺ δὲ ... καὶ τὺ ... συρίσδες

At once and concisely Dover shows us the music of the line (which transcends the simple position-to-position correspondence that students too often adhere to), and waves his magic wand of the mist that would cloud many a student's mind: the literal rendering tells the student that he does in fact know his forms. The 'id est' that follows is a lesson in adjusting one's thinking, encouraging the student to read intelligently and to make the leap from translation to meaning. While the literal translation sounds like stilted nonsense, the paraphrase helps us to bridge the gap between Translationese and English.

Add to this the undeniable link in meaning and sound that would, without Dover's note, have escaped most students, and you catch a glimpse of the sort of useful and encouraging information that is to be had throughout, and how skillfully it is presented.

By contrast, the reader loses himself in Hunter's pages wherein such things as the linguistic and sound connections (visually displayed by Dover) are buried in explicit prose. Hunter gives a page to a general note on lines 1-11, then another paragraph to lines 1-3, then more than a page to line 1 alone. By the time we've reached συρίσδες, which Dover has in a few lines of text, Hunter has written nearly three pages of notes.

Some might say that this brevity has its price. When Dover tells us, for example, that Apollonius and earlier poets 'represented Herakles as never reaching Kolchis at all' (Idyll 13.75), some will want to know more about the sources. Dover is unconcerned, but Hunter discusses the scholia on Apollonius, the fragments of Dionysius Scytobrachion and Demaretus, as well as Antoninus Liberalis (who would have gotten his version from Nicander). On the one hand this clarifies an indistinct reference, yet on the other bears little on the poem.

It seems necessary here to stop and ask myself which commentary I use when I want to read Theocritus, and the answer is Dover.

And when I want to study Theocritus? Dover with Hunter. And yet I find myself more likely to read than to study Theocritus, and so it is my Dover whose spine is cracked more often.

A final note on the introductory matter: like much else in the books, Hunter is more current, more discursive, and more laden with references. This again makes Dover more readable, and, though it may seem counter-intuitive, more timeless.

With all sincerity I extend my deepest appreciation to Bolchazy-Carducci for keeping this commentary in print (in a clean, durable paperback) and would love to see more reprints like it. Imagine reprints of Stanford's Odyssey, or Marchant's Thucydides, just to name two personal favorites.

Call me old-fashioned.

Latin: The Ne Plus Ultra of Languages

A quick look by Michael Poliakoff at two new books on Latin. Here's the opening:

For generations of adults, the simple word-series "amo, amare, amavi, amatus" used to act as a kind of madeleine, calling to mind long classroom hours spent conjugating Latin verbs (including this one, meaning "love"), then exploring Gaul in its three parts and eventually trying to puzzle out the syntax of the rugged lines that followed "Arma virumque cano," the opening phrase of Virgil's "The Aeneid."

A few lucky students, in that era of required Latin, reveled in the ablative absolute and exulted at their ability to piece together the meaning of a Latin sentence from the seemingly random scattering of stems and inflections. Most students, it is safe to say, found the experience more trying than pleasant; some, like Winston Churchill, might even recall primitive pedagogy and physical brutality from their Latin teachers. But no one finished his years of Latin class without at least a grim respect for a language that could demand so much of young readers centuries after the fall of Rome.

You can read the rest here.

Epic vade mecum

The BMCR has gotten around to publishing its review of John Miles Foley's A Companion to Ancient Epic (2005), and it's a star-studded behemoth: nearly 700 pages by the likes of Gregory Nagy, Walter Burkert, Michael Putnam, and Craig Kallendorff. The incredible range of topics, the eminence of the authors, and the lack of a single theoretical bias—a plague among most companions—mean that I will definitely purchase of this book—if they ever publish a paperback edition. Unless, of course, some dear reader wants to donate $149.

A Couple of Notes

I was happy to find that Eduard Norden's book Die Antike Kunstprosa is readable and fully downloadable at Google Books. I was hoping that they would have his commentary on Aeneid 6, but alas.

Also available is the 1908 edition of Richard Heinze's Virgils epische Technik, which you can find here.

For those interested in the history of classical scholarship, volume 2 of Sandys is available here, though I haven't been able to find the other volumes on Google Books.

Some volumes of Mommsen's Römische Geschichte are available in English translation here.

Also seen was Gilbert Murray's translation of two lectures by Wilamowitz. But they don't have his Geschichte der Philologie.

Finally, I saw Eleanor Dickey's new book Ancient Greek Scholarship (APA/Oxford, 2007) on the new books shelf today. It looks interesting and includes a 'reader' (chapter 5), the purpose of which is 'to provide practice in reading scholarly Greek' (p. 141). That seems to me to be a very good idea indeed. A review by William Slater is here.

Polytheism and Society in Ancient Athens

Dennis recently mentioned a review of Robert Parker's recent book Polytheism and Society in Ancient Athens. BMCR, too, now has a review (in French), this one by Corinne Bonnet.

When in Rome

Constance Bodurow, an urban designer/planner, compares civic life in Rome and Detroit, which has its own Campus Martius (and, of course, one should not forget that Detroit Metro Airport is in Romulus).

Also, Timothy Farrington's review in the New York Sun of Shadow of the Silk Road, in which author Colin Thubron gives an account of his journeys on the ancient trade routes between Rome and China. The closer:

In Mr. Thubron's depiction, the Silk Road provides a cautionary tale of mutual misunderstanding. Although tightly bound by trade, he emphasizes, Rome and China were deeply ignorant of each other. Goods made their way from one terminus to the other in "an endless, complicated relay race," and so "no Romans strolled along the boulevards of Changan; no Chinese trader astonished the Palatine." In the absence of direct contact, secondhand reports blossomed into myth. The Romans believed that silk came from a pacific kingdom free from crime, while the Chinese imagined a splendid city in the west governed by philosophers. The metaphoric lesson for the present is clear, but Mr. Thubron is pessimistic: On the Mediterranean shore, his journey complete, he sees that "to the west and east the sky was not the blue calm of my imagined homecoming, but a troubled cloudscape that swept the sea in moving gleams and shadows."

Of Farming and Classics

I started reading this book 6 weeks or so ago, but haven't picked it up for a few weeks. The review is by Edith Hall. A teaser:

Most classical scholars spend much of their time incongruously reading about activities that they are unlikely ever to develop expertise in, or even witness: rowing triremes, casting metal weapons, and handling distaffs. But Grene actually performed the same tasks as one of his heroes, the narrator of Hesiod’s Works and Days. Persephone-like, for half of each year, Grene was a scholar of ancient Greek literature and thought, with something of a cult following, at the University of Chicago. But what he was really proud of was what he did with the other six months. He knew more about farming than any other twentieth-century classicist, with the possible exception of Victor Davis Hanson, who farms grapes and olives. The pervasive Aesopic tone in Of Farming and Classics is set in the opening two pages, with Grene’s description of the hedgehog he had captured as a child: “Like all hedgehogs I have ever known he managed to escape fairly soon”. The point here is not that the spiny mammal got away, but that Grene had, during the course of his life, been personally acquainted with a significant number of hedgehogs.

Grief Lessons

Glen Bowersock reviews Anne Carson's recent book on Euripides, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides. A little from the beginning of the review on the immediate aftermath of the death of Euripides:

In early 406 BC the news reached Athens that far away in Macedonia the great dramatist Euripides had died. The leader of the chorus at the festival of the Dionysia that year happened to be his old rival, the aged Sophocles, who, in a public gesture of mourning, had his chorus and actors appear on stage without their customary crowns. We're told that the Athenians wept.

After a quarter-century during which Athens had been caught up, off and on, in the Peloponnesian War, the death of Euripides must have seemed ominous. It came in the same year as the voluntary exile of the charismatic Alcibiades, the leader in whom they had once placed great hope. The death of Sophocles himself within months of his tribute to Euripides only added to a presentiment of impending collapse. In 405 Aristophanes made, in his Frogs, a comic but poignant comparison of Aeschylus and Euripides to illustrate just how far Greek drama had come from the majestic verses of its first great dramatist. In that same year Euripides' horrifying play the Bacchae was produced posthumously at Athens. He had written it in Macedonia, and it depicted, as never before in literature, the destructive power of religious frenzy. In the ecstasy of Dionysiac possession a mother quite literally tore her own son apart. One year after the première of the Bacchae the war came to an end with the humiliating defeat of the Athe-nians by Sparta, and, as Xenophon tells us, a wailing went up along the long walls from Piraeus to the city.

Bakhtin Again

In the first part of his review, Eagleton gives a sketch of Bakhtin's difficult life under the Stalinists. At one point, he writes:

Here [in St. Petersburg], as always, he was surrounded by a close group of anarchically minded writers and eccentric polymaths. Indeed, the story of his life is the tale of one such coterie after another; they seemed to form spontaneously around him in whatever godforsaken backwater he happened to wash up. He was a man who practised dialogism as well as preached it. By the late 1920s, however, the kind of religiosity which his circle promoted [a form of Russian Orthodoxy] was in increasing disfavour with the state; and in 1929 Bakhtin was arrested for membership of a religious circle, anti-Communist proclivities and corrupting the young by his teaching.

If you think this sounds suspiciously like an ancient gadfly featured in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, you'd be right, for that is the connection Eagleton goes on to make explicit:

The thinker whose notions of dialogism, subversive irony and indirect speech ran back to Socrates now seemed about to suffer his predecessor’s fate.

But he didn't. To find out why, you can read the rest here.

Bakhtin

You may occasionally run across Mikhail Bakhtin in the footnotes of more recent works of criticism on ancient authors. Terry Eagleton has a review of a new book about him by Graham Pechey in the London Review of Books. The lead paragraph:

For the past three decades, Mikhail Bakhtin has been more of an industry than an individual. Not only an industry, in fact, but a flourishing transnational corporation, complete with jet-setting chief executives, global conventions and its own in-house journal. In the field of cultural theory, this victim of Stalinism is now big business. Most of the mouth-filling terms he coined – dialogism, double-voicedness, chronotope, heteroglossia, multi-accentuality – have passed into the lexicon of contemporary criticism. A cosmopolitan coterie of scholars, some of whom have devoted a lifetime to his texts, have long since struggled to appropriate him for their own agendas. Is he a Marxist, neo-Kantian, religious humanist, discourse theorist, literary critic, cultural sociologist, ethical thinker, philosophical anthropologist, or all these things together?

(L/v A&L Daily.)