REVIEWS
Sorabji, Richard, Animal Minds and Human Morals. The Origins of the Western Debate, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology 54, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993, 267 PP. Sorabji investigates the philosophical theories about animals in ancient Greece in order to place the debate over the moral status of animals in its proper historical context. He advances three main theses. First, he contends that "the Stoic view of animals, with its stress on their irrationality, became embedded in Western, Latinspeaking Christianity above all through Augustine" (2). Second, Sorabji argues that Western Christianity concentrated on the anti-animal half of a much more evenly balanced ancient debate. He presents evidence that the ancient philosophers were less complacent about the killing of animals than has been the norm in our Western Christian tradition. Sorabji believes that in the eighteenth century the tide began to turn a w a y from this complacency, and that in the last fifteen years concern about animals has accelerated. Third, Sorabji identifies as the turning point of the ancient debate the crisis that was provoked when Aristotle denied reason to animals. "It was a crisis both for the philosophy of mind and for theories of morality, and the issues raised then are still being debated today" (7). As his title suggests, the first half of the book examines the philosophies of human and animal minds, while the second half is devoted to the theories of morality regarding the treatment of animals. Sorabji argues that when Aristotle and the Stoics denied that animals have reason (logos) and belief (doxa), they compensated them by expanding the content of their perception in order to account for how they deal with the world. The Stoics other than Posidonius argued that animals are incapable of judgment, and so cannot have genuine emotion (58-59). Sorabji judges the Stoic downgrading of psychological capacities in animals to be "entirely implausible" (61). The Epicureans in contrast focused less on the need to expand the perceptual content, because they had such varying views about the cognitive resources available to animals. Lucretius, Sorabji explains, ascribed a mind (mens, animus) to the horse, lion, and deer, and insisted that animals can dream; another Epicurean denied that animals have minds, but allowed them analogues of belief; and still others denied animals reasoning and thinking (8-9). Sorabji reports that the second head of the Peripatetic school Theophrastus, held that animals do engage in reasonings (logismoi) (45). Theophrastus's successor, Strato, adopted the view, subsequently endorsed by Platonists, that perception involves thinking (noein, dianoia), which therefore belongs to all animMs (46). Sorabji cites another of Aristotle's pupils, Eudemus of Rhodes, as a collector of m a n y examples of animals' cleverness, emotion, ability to count, and even sense of injustice (46). Sorabji makes a compelling case that one of the most important insights for understanding the ancient debate over the mentality and moral status of animals is that the concept of reason itself and other psychological concepts (including perception, belief, memory, and emotion) were widely disputed and, as a result, underwent change during the ancient period. He traces the shifting of the concept of reason in Plato,
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Aristotle, the Stoics, the Middle Platonists, the Neoplatonists, and the "memorists." Sorabji argues that the basic Neoplatonist distinction between reason (logos), which makes transitions, progresses, and unfolds, and is thought of as a function of the soul (psukM,), and intellect (nous), whose gaze is unchanging and simple, was passed on to the Latin Middle Ages by Boethius and was still being discussed in the thirteenth century by Thomas Aquinas (74--75). The "memorists" were the group of empiricist physicians who held that both animals and humans lack reason, since the concept of reason is unnecessary for explaining cognitive abilities. Instead, these memorists argued that memory was what enabled us to think, infer, reflect, believe, assume, examine, generalize, and know (76). Sorabji rejects Michael Frede's suggestion that the Epicureans took a similar line, instead comparing the memorists to David H u m e in the eighteenth century, whose position was that all that animals need, and all that humans need most of the time, is an association of ideas based on custom (76). Sorabji makes the revealing observation that while Aristotle and the Stoics denied that animals have reason, Aristotle's own successors, Theophrastus and Strato, and the Pythagoreans and Platonists up to Iamblichus, disagreed with them. Sorabji details the many capacities that formed the basis of the case for animal reason: perception, memory, preparation, and emotion, but also animal speech, skills, virtues, vices, and even the liability to madness (78-79). Sorabji cites Philo of Alexandria, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, and Plotinus's pupil Porphyry as the most important sources for the arguments for animal reason. In the second part of the book, the author identifies what he takes to be the two main questions for the ancients (107). If animals lack reason, are they responsible for what they do? Do we owe them justice, or are they not the sort of beings w h o can suffer injustice? Thus not only did the concept of reason shift throughout the ancient period, but competing theories of justice, as well as theories of morality, were also debated. Sorabji observes that Democritus held that animals are responsible for their actions, and this makes them subject to just punishment. Aristotle too, Sorabji maintains, thought that animal action can be classed as voluntary and therefore morally praised or blamed despite lacking reason, but that the merely voluntary acts of animals must be carefully distinguished from the deliberate choice of humans, which is a prerequisite for full-scale action (praxis) and genuine virtue (109-110). Sorabji argues that the Stoics diverge greatly from Aristotle on this point by robbing animals of anything like human action (113). The Stoics do this by denying that animals can have desire (orexis), since on their account desire is a rational impulse directed to the good or the apparent good (114). The Stoics and Epicureans, Sorabji explains, both had theories of justice that disquahfied irrational animals from consideration. For the Stoics, since the "process of extending fellow feeling" (oikei6sis) can include only those beings who are rational like ourselves, and justice is based on oikei~sis, justice does not apply to animals (7-8). In his discussion of oikeiOsis, which is one of the most sophisticated concepts in Stoicism, Sorabji describes how Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus paved the .way for the theory of oikei6sis. Plato did so, Sorabji suggests, by making the point that we m a y treasure others because they belong with us or are akin (oikeioi) and that this is different from treasuring them because they are like us. Aristotle's contribution was the idea that friendship towards others is modelled on one's relation to oneself. However, Sorabji emphasizes, the most important antecedents of oikei6sis are in Theophrastus, because he contradicted his predecessor Aristotle's claim that there can be no friendship, and
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so no relation of justice, towards a horse or ox because there is nothing in common (koinon) with them. "On the contrary, a relation of belonging (oikeiot~s) unites us with animals, because they have emotions and even (pace Aristotle) reasoning (logismos), and are closest of all to us in their sense perception. Moreover, they are (as Pythagoras and Empedocles said) made of the same elements" (132). Sorabji claims that the Epicureans, and Thomas Hobbes following them, held that justice extends only to those capable of making contracts, and thus only to rational animals. Those wishing to reject the Stoic and Epicurean conclusion that we o w e no justice to irrational animals, Sorabji reasons, could either deny that animals were irrational or appeal to alternative theories of justice. He observes that Porphyry takes the second route by invoking Plato's account of justice (165-166). In his chapter on religious sacrifice and meat-eating Sorabji makes the case that animal sacrifice was an even more important feature of Greek life than animal experimentation is for us today (170). Sorabji notes that Pythagoras is credited with the argument that cruelty to animals leads to cruelty to fellow h u m a n beings (173) and that Empedocles and Theophrastus held that we wrong animals b y killing them. He concludes this chapter observing that "Iamblichus defeated Porphyry's attempt to steer Neoplatonism a w a y from animal sacrifice" (194). In examining the influences on the Christian tradition, Sorabji claims that Aquinas followed Augustine, who followed the Stoics in holding that animals cannot be brought within the community of just dealings because they lack reason. In fact, Augustine's view that animals exist for humans was, Sorabji claims, in line with a long earlier tradition from both pagan sources (as early as Xenophon's ascription of this view to Socrates and Aristotle) and Christian sources (198--199). Sorabji states that Aquinas, citing Aristotle as his authority, held that since intellectual understanding (intelligere = nous) is the only operation of the soul performed without a physical organ, the souls of brute animals are not immortal like ours (201). However, Sorabji offers the illuminating historical observation that the ancient Greek "pro-animal" arguments re-emerged in the tenth-century Islamic Ikhw~n al-Sa~, or Brethren of Purity, as well as in Montaigne and Leibniz. Sorabji says that the superiority of animals was promulgated to a wide literary public in the sixteenth century b y Montaigne, w h o often followed Plutarch's views on animals (205). Descartes' position that animals have no feeling at all and no souls was, Sorabji speculates, perhaps due to the need to counteract Montaigne. Sorabji notes that Leibniz, contra Descartes, thought that animals do have sense perception, and hence that their souls are immaterial and indestructible (206). In his final chapter, Sorabji criticizes the works of contemporary philosophers Peter Singer and Tom Regan as examples of one-dimensional ethical theories regarding animals. While Singer and Regan each appeal to an overly simplistic, monolithic ethical scheme, Sorabji argues that multiple considerations of morally relevant similarities and differences between animals and humans, as well as the various kinds of relationships we can have with animals, ought to be incorporated into our moral theorizing. The depth and range of scholarship that Sorabji presents in this meticulously researched work is admirable. His references range from Olympiodorus and Priscian to Donald Davidson and John Rawls. But it is surprising that Sorabji seems unaware of the earlier work by Daniel A. Dombrowski, The Philosophy of Vegetarianism (Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1984) which covers so much of the same ground and anticipates many of Sorabji's central theses. For example, Dombrowski explains how philosophical vegetarianism had a history of nearly 1,000 years in ancient Greece and that Pythagoras,
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Empedocles, Theophrastus, Plutarch, Plotinus, Porphyry, and perhaps even Plato all believed that eating animals is wrong (Dombrowski, 2). "Following Aristotle, the Stoics (including Cicero) defined animals in terms of an extrinsic teleology, where plants existed for animals and animals existed for men. Animals cannot be members of our community of concern primarily because they lack reason--i.e., human beings could not possibly be just to animals because justice is possible only between those who share values" (Dombrowski, 75--76). Thus while m a n y of Sorabji's main conclusions lack originality, he does cover new ground, particularly in furthering our understanding of the ancient philosophies of mind. Sorabji's work is more concerned with describing the sources of the Western debate over animals than with critically evaluating the philosophical positions staked out in that debate. But Animal Minds and Human Morals certainly extends the philosophical study of the history of animal ethology and ethical theory in an informative way. It represents a valuable new addition to the group of earlier works in this area: Johannes Haussleiter, Der Vegetarianismus in der Antike (Berlin, 1935), Urs Dierauer, Tier und Mensch im Denken der Antike (Amsterdam, 1977), and Daniel A. Dombrowski, The Philosophy of Vegetarianism (Amherst, 1984). William O. Stephens Creighton University
Relihan, Joel C., Ancient Menippean Satire, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, 306 pp. Despite many attempts to define Menippean satire, and a host of helpful theories advanced in the cause, the genre has remained the misunderstood stepchild of classical literature. In Ancient Menippean Satire, Joel C. Relihan offers a detailed analysis of the history, purposes and salient features of the type. Of course, he goes far beyond the conventional definition of ".prose mingled with verse," which has served readers whose interests in Menippean satire are incidental, but he also complements (and in m a n y ways, supplants) the work of scholars who have studied the genre in depth. His conclusions are provocative and forcefully argued. The book is divided into five parts: Theory and Practice; Fragments; Diverging Greek Traditions; The Late Latin Revival; Boethius and Beyond. The scope includes the practice and development of Menippean satire from its origins into the Middle Ages. In addition, there are three appendices (Greek Prosimetric Romances; The Prologue of Fulgentius' Mythologies; Ennodius' Paraenesis Didascalica), as well as notes and extensive bibliography. The first part of Ancient Menippean Satire comprises two chapters in which the author reviews and summarizes modern theories, notably those of Northrop Frye and Mikhail Bakhtin, with considerable deference to the former, as on pages 4 and 5: "Frye, with his accustomed brilliance... Frye is quite r i g h t . . . Frye rightly n o t e s . . . Frye is right." After acknowledging these theoretical debts and pointing out their limitations, the author goes on to offer his own definition (pp. 10-11), which states in part that "the genre is primarily a parody of philosophical thought and forms of writing, a parody of the habits of civilized discourse in g e n e r a l . . , it ultimately turns into the parody of the author who dared to write in such an unorthodox way." Relihan discusses such essential features of this "antigenre" as its burlesque of language and literature,
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prose-verse mixture, and fantastic narratives. The remainder of the book is a survey of the practitioners of Menippean satire and an assessment of the contributions of each to the genre. The author considers both the fragments of the legendary Menippus and testimonia to him in ancient fictional works. He examines the transformation of the genre by Varro, Seneca and Petronius among the Romans, as well as Lucian and Julian in the Greek tradition. Finally, Relihan deals with the later Latin innovations of Martianus Capella, Fulgentius, Ennodius and Boethius. Ancient Menippean Satire has many virtues. There is a nice scholarly format about it, with detailed analyses, ample supporting information and clear summaries in each chapter. The author does not shy away from bold assertions, and he defends them with refreshing frankness. The documentation in about eighty pages of endnotes and bibliography is full, nearly overwhelming. There is a broad sweep to this study, and the author has undertaken it with admirable thoroughness and scholarship. Relihan's strongest contributions to our understanding of this odd genre are those that deal with the ancient Greek and Roman writers. Readers of the IJCT are likely to be most interested in the influence of Menippean satire and its reception among later authors. In m y opinion, this is where Relihan is least convincing. He expresses some disdain for the later Latin authors, and some uncertainty as well. In the preface he writes, "A number of my interpretations will seem strange, especially to those who know how boring and awful the works of a Fulgentius or an Ennodius can be." To him, the De Nuptiis is a "dull work" (p. 150) and Ennodius "a well-connected toady" (p. 164) whose "Paraenesis is the least compelling of Menippean satires, and its affiliation to the genre, while real, is admittedly weak" (p. 169). Fulgentius is guilty of barbarity of language along with "tortured trivialities" of prose, and there is a "highly erratic nature" to his learning and scholarship (p. 153). To be sure, oddities of style and frequent textual cruces are a barrier to understanding these authors, but Relihan inspires no confidence in his translations when he introduces them as "an inspired guess" (p. 14) or a "pale approximation" (p. 146). In fact, his rendering of certain words and phrases such as m iscillo flamine ("hodgepodge flame") or Martiane ("my son") seem very loose, if not wrong, while "Then she shattered a brittle laugh" (p. 209) for Turn illa cachinnum quassans fragile and "a mouth pregnant with a bundle of insults" (p. 210) for ore contumeliarum sarcinis gravido" seem silly. In view of the difficulties posed by the texts, the Latin should be supplied along with the translation, which is not consistently done. The book is written in a scholarly manner, but occasionally Relihan's o w n style seems affected by extended contact with Menippean self-parody, as when he declares that "Perry is not terribly wrong when he assigns to Roman fiction in general an agglutinative t e n d e n c y . . . " (p. 91) or "Christian Menippean satires.., a valuable and underunappreciated document in the history of Christian thought" (p. 194). There are some minor errors and misprints too, such as "is a work" (for "in a work") and "of new name" on p.5; "him in he world" on p. 86; "discrimation" on p. 215. These are minor distractions in a book, which, overall, provides a lucid, thoughtful interpretation of a difficult genre. Ronald E. Pepin Capital Community-Technical College, Hartford, CT
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Cicero, On Government, Translated by Michael Grant, London, N e w York, Ringwood (Victoria), etc.: Penguin Books, 1993, 421 pp. The prolific classicist Michael Grant has performed a great service in assembling this edition of Cicero's speeches and writings on government. Recognizing that it is neither possible nor truly desirable to separate Cicero's dual career as politician and philosopher, Grant gives us a collection that places selections from the best-known theoretical works, De republica and De legibus, alongside some of the most famous and powerful Ciceronian orations. In addition, the appendices, notes and other critical apparatus provide a wealth of contextual material for understanding the relation between theory and practice in Cicero's life. Thus, the volume will be a useful adjunct to university courses in ancient political and intellectual history and in political theory as well as to scholars teaching classics in translation. A couple of caveats accompany this recommendation, however. Grant's elevenpage introduction to the volume is far too short to do justice to Cicero's complex political career, let alone his intellectual background and development. A full understanding of all of these factors is crucial for grasping the significance of Cicero's arguments. Readers of the I]CT will be especially disappointed that Grant offers no substantial appraisal of the later dissemination and appropriation of Cicero's texts and ideas. Grant simply remarks that Cicero's "influence remained overwhelming," a statement supported solely by a somewhat bizarre reference to the fact that "the headquarters of A1 Capone's speakeasies and gambling enterprises in the 1920s... was a town named Cicero" (p. 11 and note 3). My other quibble with Cicero: On Government stems from the texts selected (or omitted) by Grant. We are given only fragments of Books 3, 5 and 6 of De republica, amounting to about 20 pages. Surely, a larger segment of Cicero's most important and influential work of political theory is warranted. Also, Grant's exclusion of any portion of Cicero's late treatise on moral issues, De officiis, seems indefensible in light of the work's measured reflection on its author's o w n principles of conduct. A better balance between Cicero's oratorical and philosophical works w o u l d have produced a more appealing as well as a more stimulating collection. Cary J. Nederman University of Arizona Cameron, Averil, The Later Roman Empire, A.D. 28~ ~30, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993, x + 283 pp. The Classical past--Classical texts, institutions, and ideals--were of critical importance in the Later Roman Empire. Pagans and Christians argued over the value of that past, claimed it for their own, and redefined it. We owe much to that debate, for, among other things, the survival of many of our Classical texts is in direct consequence of the value placed upon these texts by the men (and some women) w h o read them, thought about their meaning within the new Christian Empire of Constantine, and also, happily, had these texts copied. To understand w h y these texts and the Classical past took on such significance in late antiquity, and to appreciate h o w the ideas and institutions of the Classical world were transformed into the Middle Ages requires one to look at the later Roman empire in its o w n right. It is an important field of study. But until now, it has been difficult to study, since there was no basic textbook
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for late antiquity for students in English. The Later Roman Empire, A.D. 284 ~30 (Harvard University Press, 1993) and its companion volume, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, A.D. 395-600 (Routledge Press, 1993), admirably fill that gap. The Later Roman Empire is no ordinary textbook. This volume reads like a series of essays, showing Cameron confronting a b o d y of material, researching issues, and coming to a personal resolution on a wide series of historical problems. The Later Roman Empire captures the on-going engagement and open-endedness that makes ancient history exciting for students as well as professionals. It also shows us Cameron's thinking in action. So, for example, in dealing with the size and efficacy of the late Roman army, Cameron notes the difficulties in analyzing military changes based on our limited textual sources. She rightly quotes the text of Lactantius (De Mortibus Persecutorum 7.2) and observes that "Lactantius can hardly be taken to mean that the army had quadrupled" to underscore this point in an early chapter. And in a fascinating later chapter devoted to military affairs, Cameron explores this issue at greater length, only to leave the question open in the end. Although students might well like closure on such questions, Cameron pointedly refuses to give "the right answer," but prefers, on certain issues that she considers of weight, to summarize the arguments and leave some problems unresolved. At other times, Cameron takes a personal stand. Indeed, this textbook is openly subjective, a point that Cameron states is true for all history-writing, whether we acknowledge it or not. Not all will agree with her position on all of the issues she treats. So, for example, when discussing the "third century crisis," Cameron argues----weakly to my m i n d - that the virtual halt of civic patronage in the third century may be a result of local notables' being unwilling to put further burdens on city councils for "further additions to the [building] stock [were] being construed as an embarrassment rather than a cause for gratitude." Be that as it may, the cessation of such building nevertheless was a marked change in the patterns of patronage and this supports the model of the third century as a period of "crisis" rather than, as Cameron w o u l d see it, continuity and change. While the continuities with the earlier period are indisputable, the rapidity and kind of change that occurred in the third century reached "crisis" proportions at times. But whether or not one agrees with Cameron's assessments of this and various other issues, it is invaluable that she openly professes them, giving teacher and student the information and room to argue. Some of the most controversial issues of the period concern military affairs. So, for example, the claims of E. Luttwak that Diocletian developed a "defense-in-depth" frontier policy coupled with a mobile field army is critiqued convincingly b y Cameron who underscores the need to take into account changes in supply situations and the archaeological evidence. (Unfortunately, most of the studies Cameron cites to support her argument deal with the Eastern, not Western, Empire as she notes as well.) Cameron also ably critiques the view of A. Ferrill who, in a recent book, has argued for the growing ineffectiveness of the late Roman army as a fighting force. The need to cover a wide body of material in a short space has led Cameron to adopt a clever organizational structure; opening chapters follow i n a chronological sequence; then, for the "sake of simplicity," economic, military, religious, political, and cultural issues are marked out to be addressed in separate thematic chapters. This organization allows a teacher to return and adumbrate more complex issues once the basics are mastered, but an unfortunate outcome is that the reader is forced upon occasion to flip between sections to follow a line of argument.
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The thematic chapters will hold the greatest interest for students of the Classical Tradition. They will enable students and teachers to begin to examine the ways in which the classical tradition survived and changed in the later Roman empire. The summation of complex issues is necessary for a textbook However, a few issues appear too briefly outlined, with Cameron's viewpoint appearing as fact rather than observation. Christianization in Chapter 5 is one case where the need to summarize leads Cameron to give the impression that there is a consensus on certain issues. Cameron states that "One of the results of the Christianization of the court and the patronage of Christianity by the emperors was therefore to separate the latter from the Roman senatorial c l a s s . . . Indeed, it was precisely the fact that the court was now established at M i l a n . . . rather than in Rome that enabled the still pagan members of the Roman Senate to live the lives of luxury that Ammianus describes, and to indulge themselves in being more pagan than their ancestors" (p. 79). This is misleading; emperors had not lived at Rome for a long time, yet even when they had, luxurious living among aristocrats had been the norm, and Christian aristocrats continued to live luxuriously at Rome and elsewhere. The tradition of paganism among the old aristocracy at Rome was not necessarily permitted because the now-Christian court was at Milan; and the juncture between emperor and Senate is still a disputed issue, as Cameron well knows. Further acknowledgement of the complexities of the issues w o u l d help here, and students of the classical tradition might well like to know more about the kind of paganism that survived in late antiquity. A wide-ranging Chapter 10 is devoted to culture, by which Cameron means "the conglomerate of ideas and information on which each society depends for its communal identity, and which is passed on through processes of learning and training" (p. 151). Many of the issues addressed here will intrigue students, w h o will find her bibliography at the end of this chapter and throughout the book extremely helpful in fleshing out the arguments. Cameron's discussion of Christian heresies and theological issues (i.e., pp. 167ff.) is excellent and will be particularly useful for those interested in tracing these issues into later periods. The limitations of The Later Roman Empire previously noted should not detract from the strength of the work; there is much here to give the specialist as well as the novice pause to think again about old controversies. Although not all w o u l d agree with Cameron's final comments that the question of decline and fall has been too often addressed in terms of the end of classical antiquity, her attempt to follow a more recent theoretical model and to "justapose the fall of Rome with that of other major cultures in world history and to provide an explanation in terms of the collapse of complex societies" (p. 191) stimulates thought. Her discussion here is typical of the strength of this volume as a whole. What Cameron has done so well in The Later Roman Empire is to make accessible the issues bearing upon decline and fall and other controversies in late antiquity for an English-reading public. That service, and her wide-ranging, thoughtful learning, make this a welcome contribution not only to those interested in late antiquity, but also to those interested in how the Classical Tradition was transmitted and changed in this period. Michele R. Salzman Boston University
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Howard, Seymour, Antiquity Restored: Essays on the Afterlife of the Antique, Bibliotheca artibus et historiae, Vienna: IRSA, 1990, 344 pp. In a brief and sharply perceptive preface to these seventeen studies, Sir Ernst Gombrich, who, as Director of the Warburg Institute was Aby Warburg's successor and biographer, reflects on what Seymour Howard and Warburg share in their approach to the afterlife of Antiquity. Gombrich rightly observes that it is the "intensity" of Howard's "response to the monuments and documents of our past" that aligns him with Warburg, and winckles out a particularly telling sentence from the book that first appeared in Howard's important review (Journal of Modern History, 55, 1983, 300-303) of Francis HaskeU's and Nicholas Penny's 1981 book, Taste and the Antique. Howard was commenting on how the catalogue illustrations chosen and "the distancing tone of the discussions do little to enhance the sculptures." He continued: The wonder is that--given their ubiquitous exploitation as mementos for the garden, hall, mantel snuff box, and cookie dish and their inflated reputations as once-hallowed norms ritually impressed upon the wills of impatient students--so many of these antiquities still have the capacity to move us as deeply as they do. What Howard pinpointed in this review was how HaskeU and Penny's "disenchantment" with collecting and antiquarianism intrinsically affects their ability to convey how the life-giving images of antiquity inspired the imagination, competition, controversy, adoration, lust, gossip, and fantasy of popes, cardinals, monarchs, nobles, merchants, and innumerable pilgrims on the Grand Tour, including artists, scholars, diarists, guides, and other men of letters who were enriched by them. For Howard, our comprehension of our selves and our bodies should somehow inform our historical understanding of the cultural reception of antiquities. He constructs a prose style that oscillates between the terseness of the archaeologist and a dense allusiveness that seeks to represent the multiplicity of impulses and feelings that these ancient forms elicit in his own mind. It is this committment to the historian/ critic's personal engagement with the figured body that enables Howard t 9 write with such insight about Winckelmann, Cavaceppi, Thomas Jefferson, and a host of artists, restorers and collectors. His account of restoration in the valuable introductory essay signals the distance that he puts between his own conception of the process and that usually presented by archaeologists: The numinous power of the life-size, often nude or exposed ancient figure made its restoration inherently self-fulfilling, self-enlarging, and self-integrating. By patching and repairing the limbs and secondary attributes of a fragment, which in size, texture, and shape simulates our own bodies, the restorer, while learning from the dazzling and seductive mimetic accomplishments of Antiquity how to re-present nature, augmented the remaining core and fragmented idea, providing a seemingly intact shell for our projected selves, which are also in a sense derived from damaged ancient models.
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In this handsomely produced book, H o w a r d offers a selection of his papers published between 1959 and 1985, ranging from Pergamene art collecting to William Blake's retreat from classicism. The studies on restoration, dealing with such crucial works as the Vatican Laoco6n group, Myron's Discobolus, the Athena of Velletri, and a multitude of fakes, pastiches and copies, are simply indispensable for the archaeologist and art historian. What distinguishes Howard's work on restoration is that the restorers themselves are brought to life as purposeful, motivated, market-driven professionals. The fascinating career of Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, eighteenth-century Rome's master restorer and arbiter of taste for collectors on the Grand Tour, gave H o w a r d an acute awareness of the complexity of the process of restoration and its historical significance. Like a tenacious coroner reopening cases on centuries-old murder victims, Howard reconstructs the "surgical" alterations inflicted on excavated figures and groups, and just as importantly, identifies the attitudes among collectors and vendors that made such "customary violence" possible. The essay on Henry Blundell's Sleeping Venus is a delightful revelation, entailing the metamorphosis of what the collector considered "an unnatural and very disgusting" Hermaphrodite with infants at its breast, into a castrated goddess, "as pleasing a figure as any in this collection." H o w a r d explores the sexual psychology underlying neoclassical taste for figures like the Venus and the Boy and Dolphin, showing how the collaboration of dealers, restorers, and collectors promoted the copying of such works. In all of these studies there is painstaking stylistic and iconographic discrimination based on personal examination of the sculptures. Here, working at the margins of archaeology and art history, H o w a r d allows the concreteness of his descriptive w o r k - dealing with chisel marks and acid burns, the spare-parts of restoration surgery--to provide a foundation for the kind of inquiry that really fascinates him: the cultural psychology of the classicizing image. This means that when H o w a r d approaches the Dossenesque "Double Herm" from the J. Paul Getty Museum he is concerned not only to establish that the work is a modern forgery, but precisely from what kind of faking mentality of the 1920s or 1930s it might have arisen. And the masterly essay on Winckelmann is as informative about the twentieth-century reception of his teachings as it is about the conditions in which he formulated his ideas. Howard remarks in his Introduction: I prefer the covert, deeply rooted, and self-revealing subject--spontaneous, elusive, and ostensibly irretrievable expressions of je ne sais quoi--as a restorative complement to the differently fascinating and more traditionally structured archival, bibliographic, iconological, stylistic, and technical aspects of scholarly work. His recognition that the scholar's psyche, too, is in need of "restoration," or perhaps of more spiritual nourishment than a diet of traditional disciplines can provide, gives this collection a tone that brings it strikingly nearer to Warburg than to Ashby, Htilsen, Michaelis, and their successors in the study of the afterlife of classical antiquities. If Howard does not, as Gombrich notes, share Warburg's anxiety about the darker impulses in ancient art and learning, he is nevertheless prepared to delve into the psychology of the reception of classical and classicizing art. In doing so he leaves to future generations a precious, self-conscious record of how a scholar committed to twentieth-
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century psychological insight might comprehend these vestiges of the classical tradition. Robert W. Gaston La Trobe University, Australia
Kunze, Max, Dieter Metzler, Volker Riedel (Hrsg.), Amphitryon. Ein griechisches Motiv in der europiiischen Literatur und auf dem Theater, Untersuchungen zum Nachwirken der Antike 1, Mtinster & Hamburg: Lit-Verlag, 1993, 77 pp. Der kleine Sammelband vereinigt die acht Vortrage des wissenschaftlichen Symposions, das das 5. von der Winckelmann-Gesellschaft im Juni 1989 in Stendal veranstaltete "Theaterfest der Antike" begleitete. Der zeitliche Rahmen reicht yon der ersten Erw/ihnung des Amphitryonstoffs in Hesiods Schild des Herakles bis zu dem Amphitryon von Peter Hacks (1967) und l/iflt neben Philologen und Komparatisten auch Regisseure zu Wort kommen. Das Methodenspektrum ist durchaus weir" neben stoff- und dramengeschichtlichen Aspekten werden geistes- und sozialgeschichtliche Fragen behandelt, aber weil sich die Autoren auf die g r o f e n Exempla, Plautus, Moli~re und Kleist konzentrieren, sind gewisse Wiederholungen unvermeidlich. Sptirbar bleibt aber auch trotz der durch die historische Wende des Novembers 1989 verursachten versp/iteten Herausgabe der Vortr/ige ihre Herkunft aus der sozialistischen Literaturwissenschaft. Dieter Metzlers (Mtinster) Einleitung l/lilt trotz der von ihm beschworenen Koinzidenz der ostdeutschen Bemtihungen um das Fortwirken der Antike mit der Griindung der "International Society for the Classical Tradition" die Herkunft aus der v o n d e r DDR gepflegten Kulturerbe-Theorie erkennen. Ein haltloser Einfall ist es freilich, das beriihmte Schlul~-'Ach' der Kleistschen Alkmene mit dem alt/igyptischen Wort fiir 'Verkl/irung in die Sch6nheit eines g6ttlichen Leibes' (genauer:/ig. '~ch' 'verkl/irt') in Verbindung zu bringen (S. 7). Volker Riedel (.lena), der durch eine materialreiche - wenn auch ideologiebelastete - Studie iiber die Antikerezeption in der Literatur der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Akademie der Kiinste der DDR, Berlin lOst] 19841), hervorgetreten ist, unternimmt den erfolgreichen Versuch, die Geschichte der Amphitryon-Dramen unter dem Gesichtspunkt des Verh~iltnisses von Tragik und Komik zu strukturieren. Doch da er, bei den DDR-Dramatikern angekommen, seine frtiheren Deutungen wieder aufgreift, die als ideologisch einwandfreie Ziele der Antikerezeption nur gelten lassen: 1. Dort S. lff ausffihrlich fiber die Kultur-Erbe-Theorie (Rezension von B. Seidensticker in Arbitrium 1988, 87-91); V. Riedel, "Funktionen und Tendenzen der Antikerezeption in der Literatur der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik', Philologus 127, 1983, 112-134, in fiberarbeiteter Form in: Kurtze, M. (Hg.), Antikerezeption heute. Protokolleines Kolloquiums, Beitr. der Winckelmann-Gesellschaft 13, Stendal 1985, 15-34; vgl. W. Emmerich, "Antike Mythen auf dem Theater der DDR. Geschichte und Poesie, Vernunft und Terror", in: U. Profitlich (Hg.), Dramatik der DDR, Frankfurt/M. 1987, 223-265 (dort auch die Nachweise fiber die ideologischen Auseinandersetzungen), und yon B. Seidensticker, "Antikerezeption in der deutschen Literatur nach 1945", Gymnasium 98, 1991, 420-453; ders., "Exempla: R6misches in der deutschen literarischen Antikerezeption nach 1945", Gymnasium 101, 1994, 7-42; ders., "The political use of antiquity in the literature of the German Democratic Republic", Illinois Classical Studies 17, 1993, 347-367.
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1. Vermittlung vorbildlicher Modelle, 2. Darstellung von E p o c h e n w e n d e n und Klassenk~mpfen, 3. Abrechnung mit der feindlichen Klassengesellschaft, 4. Korrektur der biirgerlichen Antikerezeption (Antikerezeption S. 52f.), u n d e r die M6glichkeit, dal~ unter dem Deckmantel des antiken Stoffs Kritik an den eigenen politischen Verh/iltnissen geiibt wurde, gar nicht in Betracht zieht 2, kommt er iiber einen scheinbaren Widerspruch in Armin Stolpers Amphitryon (1965/6) 3 nicht hinweg: er erkennt den politischen Gehalt der Invektiven auf die korrupte Macht, halt es aber fiir einen Fehlgriff des Autors, am Schlu~ diese Macht als wiederhergestellt darzustellen, weil er - anders als das DDRPublikum, das diese Kom6die vermutlich wegen ihrer vielen aktuellen Anziiglichkeiten zu schatzen wul~te nicht sehen konnte, dal3 der DDR-Staat und sein gewaltt/itiger Freund, die UdSSR, gemeint waren, deren Macht sich trotz aller Anfechtungen zu behaupten wul~te. Um so mehr lobt er den poetisch sch6neren, aber politisch v611ig harmlosen Amphitryon von P. Hacks. Walter Hofmann (Leipzig) hat einen erneuten Versuch unternommen, die H a n d l u n g in der - von den Nachfolgern als dramaturgische H e r a u s f o r d e r u n g aufgegriffenen - Liicke im 4. Akt des plautinischen Amphitryons zu rekonstruieren. Sein Versuch, ohne eine zweite Alcumena-Szene, die die edle Frau in die Niederungen der Bufleske ziehen mut]te, auszukommen, scheitert an dem von ihm nicht diskutierten Fragment VII. Willi Schrader geht den Nachwirkungen des Amphitryon-Motivs bei Shakespeare nach - leider ohne Kenntnis von H.-D. Blumes einschl/igigem Aufsatz (AuA 15, 1969, 135-158). Trotz der Terminologie sozialistischer Literaturwissenschaft ist der Versuch ernstzunehmen, die Identit/its- und Entfremdungsproblematik in Plautus' Amphitruo und Shakespeares Comedy of Errors - mit Reflexen in Was ihr wollt und Troilus und Cressida aus der Zeitstimmung zu deuten. Mit eindringenderer, genuin-philologischer Analyse setzt James Bierman diese Frage anhand von Moli~res Amphitryon fort, indem er die "self-conscious theatricality" als weitere Ebene der Identit/itskrise entdeckt, die ihren Ausdruck in der/iut~eren und inneren RoUenvervielfachung finder, zur frivolen Relativierung der moralischen Werte und zu dem Vorrang von Macht vor Moral fiihrt, d e r n u r v o n d e r Liebe angefochten werden kann. Der Beitrag von Joh. Irmscher (Berlin) iiber die Amphitryongestalt auf der Opembiihne ist wertvoll durch die Zusammenstellung von Daten, kommt aber iiber einen Katalog nicht hinaus. Siegfried Strellers Beitrag fiber "Kleists Amphitryon. Eine Lesart fiir die Biihne" ist aus der Sicht des erfahrenen Regisseurs geschrieben, der das Drama v o n d e r szenischen Wirkung von Gestalten und Aussagen zu wiirdigen weif~ und auch die Abgriinde dieses scheinbar heiteren Spieles entdeckt. Heidi Urbahn de Jauregui wiirdigt den Amphitryon von Peter Hacks in einer verst~indnisvoUen, jedoch leicht in panegyrischen Ton iibergehenden Studie. Ihrer Urteilsf/ihigkeit steht es freilich nicht an, von Giraudoux' Amphitryon 38 als Salongeschw/itz zu sprechen, und ihrer Beflissenheit, dem unpolitischen Stiick yon Hacks eine gesellschaftliche Bedeutung beizumessen, wird man kaum folgen k6nnen, wenn sie formuliert: "Es ist wohl nicht abwegig, in der Amphitryongestalt auch eine Kritik des Sozialismus, so wie er sich vorerst etabliert hat, zu sehen. Dann bedeutet die Jupiterfigur -
-
2. Was um so erstaunlicher ist, als Lenin sich dieses Mittels ausdriicklich bedient hatte, wie Seidensticker, "Political use" 367, nachweist. 3. Vgl. J. BI., "Armin Stolpers Amphitryon (Halle 1967) - oder antiker Mythos in sozialistischer Verfremdung", Reihe: Caesarodunum, Tours 1995.
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seine h6chste Verheil~ung und Alkmene seine Lernf~ihigkeit und gute Anlage . . . . AUein s c h o n die Gestalt des Sosias scheint, sieht m a n sich in g e g e n w / i r t i g e n Intellektuellenkreisen um, aktueller denn je zu sein." (S. 66) Der Regisseur Heinz-Uwe Haus war so ehrlich, seinen Vortrag "Antike und Selbstbestimmung" in der originalen Version von 1988 (s. S. 69 A. 1) mit allem marxistischen Beiwerk abzudrucken. Trotz der teilweise historisch unhaltbaren Pauschalierungen und der unertraglichen ideologischen Phrasen - daf~ "tragische Konflikte gesellschaftlichen Fortschritt erfahrbar machen", kann man nur in v6Uiger Unkenntnis der griechischen Trag6die sagen - erfiillt gerade dieser Beitrag die Aufgabe, die aufklarerische Wirkung der Antike-Rezeption nachzuweisen. Sein Thema sind die geistesgeschichtlichen und politischen Voraussetzungen fiir die Rezeption des antiken Dramas (und anderer Gattungen und Stoffe) in Griechenland, v.a. seit dem 19. Jahrhundert und bis in die 80er Jahre unseres Jahrhunderts. - Im ganzen bietet das B/indchen eine thematisch, aber auch forschungsgeschichtlich lohnende Lektiire. Jiirgen B1/insdorf Universit/it Mainz
Cheney, Patrick, Spenser's Famous Flight. A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career, Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1993, XVIII + 360 pp. The aim of Patrick Cheney's ambitious study is "primarily to introduce a career model that challenges the commonplace view of Spenser's literary career" (5). "Spenser's genius," Cheney argues, "lies in constructing a comprehensive career model that synthesizes the Renaissance version of the Virgilian progression, pastoral and epic, with non-Virgilian genres compatible with Christianity and the Reformation: the Petrarchan lovelyric and the Augustinian hymn" (23). It follows that Cheney's Spenser, like Cheney himself, works first and foremost with very large entities indeed--not with lines, or stanzas, or books, but with what Cheney terms "careeric genres." Cheney specifies this large-scale argument by focusing throughout on the imagery of birds and flight, which he claims is Spenser's "premier device of literary representation" (xi). Accordingly, the classical tradition, while well represented in Cheney's learned pages (there are rare lapses: it is startling to discover that "elegists like Propertius and TibuUus" were "[i]nfluenced by Ovid," 157), figures here chiefly as a repository of career models and avian imagery. In his introductory chapters (Preface, Introduction, and Chapter 1--progressively more detailed discussions of the same argument--could have been consolidated into a single chapter), Cheney situates Spenser's career in relation to a sometimes bewildering array of models: the Virgilian, of course, but also the Augustinian, Ovidian, Bonaventuran and Platonic (submodels derived from the Augustinian), Scaligerian and Puttenhamian, and the inchoate models (they do not achieve adjectival status) offered by figures like Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Sidney. The result is a suggestive if often quite abstract survey of the precedents available to Spenser when he thought (and Cheney assumes that he did think, hard) about the shape and meaning of his career. Cheney argues convincingly that as a Protestant poet Spenser could not simply accept the Virgilian career model, which posits public, political poetry as the supreme poetic achievement. Spenser's Christian alternative will culminate not in epic but in the hymn. One of Cheney's most interesting claims (27-31) is that Piers's advice to
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Cuddie in the "October" eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser's first publication, contains the narrative program or "flight pattern" of his entire career: first lowly pastoral, then lofty epic ("bloody Mars"), then a refreshing interlude of love lyric ("love and lustihead"), and finally, after disillusionment with "Princes pallace," the hymn ("flye backe to heaven apace"). Within each genre, moreover, "the New Poet identifies with a specific species of bird": nightingale in pastoral, dove (astonishingly) in epic, dove again in love lyric, and hawk in h y m n (13-14). The nature and limits of Cheney's generic argument are indicated by a paragraph that recurs, with minimal variations, early in Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 (respectively on pastoral, epic, love lyric, and hymn). Here are its first two incarnations: Spenser's immediate goal in writing The Shepheardes Calender is thus career-based. He aims to establish his authority as England's new national poet--an heir of "Tityrus".... Spenser's career-based goal implies that he defines pastoral poetry (or redefines it) in careeric terms---as a genre that contributes to a literary career. He understands pastoral as a genre in which the young poet demonstrates his authority to wear his country's laureate wreath. Spenser's careeric definition in turn implies a more mimetic selfrepresentation in his central poet-figure, Colin Clout, than m a n y critics are willing to permit. (77) Spenser's immediate goal in writing The FaerieQueene is thus career-based. He aims to enact the authority he has acquired through writing The Shepheardes Calender. His career-based goal implies that he defines epic poetry (or redefines it) in careeric terms--as a genre that contributes to a literary career. He understands epic as a genre in which the mature poet enacts vatic virtue for the benefit of the commonwealth. Spenser's careeric definition in turn implies a more self-reflexive allegory in The Faerie Queene than some critics may be willing to permit. (111) In Chapter 4, we are told that "Spenser's immediate goal in publishing Amoretti and Epithalamion is career-based," and that he "aims to renew the authority he has acquired in writing The Shepheardes Calender a n d . . . The Faerie Queene (150); and in Chapter 5, we are not surprised to learn that "Spenser's immediate goal in publishing Fowre Hymnes is career-based," "aim[ed]" finally at "seal[ing] the authority he has acquired in writing The Shepheardes Calender, The Faerie Queene, Amoretti, and Epithalamion" (199). The repetition is symptomatic of Cheney's tendency to reduce the complexity of Spenser's literary production by mapping it onto a highly abstract grid (in the process filtering out genres that don't fit the pattern). True, all interpretations are reductions of one kind or another. Still I don't feel that we learn very much about Spenserian pastoral, or about pastoral in general, from the somewhat circular claim that it is "a genre in which the young poet demonstrates his authority to wear his country's laureate wreath." Within each chapter, of course, Cheney puts some meat on these conceptual bones. In The Shepheardes Ca!ender, for example, the fledgling poet undergoes a "fourstage experiential process'--the stages are "Original Identity," "Fall," "Vatic Vision," and (envisioned but not achieved) "Vatic Authority," each marked by a distinctive bird--" that prepares the Orphic poet" for his four-genre career (78); in love lyric, he has "an e p i p h a n y . . , about the value of erotic contemplation to heroic action" (183) that enables him to resume his epic flight. But the particular readings that support
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these arguments often seem forced. Arguing that the "August" eclogue registers a change in Colin's "stage of experience" (the fact that Colin's sestina is actually performed by Cuddie goes unmentioned here), Cheney paraphrases Colin's plaintive "Ye carelesse byrds are privie to m y cryes, / Which in your songs were wont to make a part" as follows: "The 'carelesse byrds' used to 'make a part' with him but now are 'privie' to his 'cryes'" (99; Cheney's emphasis). But it is in fact his cries that used to "make a part" in their "songs"; and the point here (as is clear from the rest of the stanza) is not the contrast but (as befits this quasi-invocation) the continuity between past and present. Discussing the "November" eclogue, Cheney claims that "the Song of Dido traces the generic transition from erotic to hymnic genres" (103), but the lines he cites---"Sing now ye shepheards daughters, sing no moe / The songs that Colin made in her prayse, / But into weeping turne your wanton layes" (Cheney's emphasis)--decree a turn not to hymn but to elegy. In his discussion of the "sixteen avian images" (190; the enumeration is characteristic) of Epithalamion, Cheney suggests that the birds catalogued in stanza 5 have a special relation to the poet because they take his place in the refrain, "using their 'song' to elicit the ' a n s w e r ' . . . of the 'woods' " (191). But Spenser likewise delegates his refrain to numerous others "Nymphes," "Choristers," "Angels," etc.; the birds are certainly not special in this regard. And yet, whether or not the reader accepts Cheney's interpretations of individual Spenserian texts, there is plenty to be learned from this wide-ranging study. Chapter 1, for example, contains much fascinating information on the avian origins of poetry and music, and illuminating comments on the significance of phrases such as "peeced pyneons" and terms such as "rouse" and "mew" are scattered throughout the book. Cheney's discussion (138--41) of the intertextual "conversation" of Spenser and Ralegh is particularly rewarding, and his Conclusion mounts a strong case for reading Prothalamion as heralding a return to courtly poetry. While the details of Cheney's "careeric" interpretations m a y be debated, his basic a r g u m e n t about Spenser's Christianization of the Virgilian career model is thought-provoking and largely convincing. The book is amply researched: Cheney has read widely in European poetry (from antiquity through the Renaissance) and in Spenser criticism (he cites other Spenserians regularly and generously). His passionate engagement with his subject is, moreover, evident on every page. If this bird doesn't soar, we cannot help admiring the boldness, dedication, and good will with which the flight is attempted. Ellen Oliensis Yale University
Augustinos, Olga, French Odysseys. Greece in French Travel Literature J'rom the Renaissance to the Romantic Era, Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, XIII + 345 pp. The title of this book serves to remind us of the emotional resonance the idea of Greece produces in the minds of educated Europeans. The subtitle is a sober description of the author's limited objective. She surveys a handful of travel accounts, which, in their day, were influential in shaping the French reading public's vision of Greece. The authors of these travel accounts were motivated by the desire to see the landscapes and the monuments of the ancient world, or what was left of them. Their minds filled with schoolboy memories of the lost civilization that they had
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been taught to revere, these travelers set out to reconnoiter among the ruins. Classical texts in hand, they looked for Troy, for the Cretan Labyrinth, for the famous cities of which hardly any trace was left. The prevailing sentiment among these travelers was well-expressed by Jacob Spon, a physician and amateur of antiquities: "it is the love of Antiquity alone which has caused me to undertake this voyage," he wrote in 1678.1 That is to say, Dr. Spon was not terribly interested in living Greeks, only in the memory of dead ones. This was to remain true of his successors, although Ms. Augustinos believes she can detect the faint beginnings of an interest in the modern Greek nation among one or two French writers in the late eighteenth century. Her survey begins in the sixteenth century, when Greece, the Aegean islands and Asia Minor under Ottoman rule first became accessible to French travelers hardy enough to brave pirates and the prospect of slavery. The survey ends with the collapse of Turkish rule in the 1820s. The author's focus is very much on the later travelers, whose works she scrutinizes for evidence of latent sympathies for modern Greeks. The earlier travelers are presented in a cursory manner, on the commonsense assumption that knowledge of Greece and a feeling for its inhabitants increased over time. Perhaps, although a closer reading of Pierre Belon's Observations (1553), for example, might yield the conclusion that this great naturalist, who spent close to three years in the Eastern Mediterannean, was a more accurate observer of the Greek communities he came to k n o w - - a n d a more sympathetic one--than most of his successors were to be. 2 Ms. Augustinos herself provides evidence of what seems to be an actual decline in knowledge of things Greek: the Italian humanist traveler, Cyriac of Ancona, knew what he was looking at when he saw the Parthenon, in 1436. The French ambassador, Louis des Hayes, stopping in Athens in 1626, did not (p. 95). What matters, it would seem, is not so much whether a Frenchman is traveling in Greece in 1547, 1626 or 1806, but what kind of a person the traveler is. A case in point is that of Chateaubriand, who spent nineteen days in Greece, in 1806, and published his travel book five years later. It was a great commercial success, although the author brought back little or nothing in the way of factual knowledge about Greece. "I went to search for images, that is all," he explained (p. 178). Chateaubriand's host and guide on Argos, the erudite Dr. Avramotti, was plainly disturbed by the great man's method. He showed no interest in monuments and inscriptions. Instead, he preferred to climb to the top of some hill or cliff, and to stand there, striking a suitable pose. This was enough, he claimed, "to awaken in his memory the smiling images of fable and history" (p. 191). Always in a hurry to move on, Chateaubriand confessed that he was only interested "in the Greeks that were dead" (p. 185). In a private letter he went so far as to express regret at having made the voyage: "I visited Sparta, Argos, Mycenae, Corinth, Athens; beautiful names, alas! nothing m o r e . . . Never see Greece, Monsieur, except in Homer. It is the best w a y ' ( p . 178). Few of the French travelers, it should be said, expressed such peremptory judge1. Jacob Spon, Voyage d'Italie, de Dalmatie, de Grece et du Levant (Lyon, 1678, 3 volumes) I, Dedication. 2. Belonis granted a paragraph or so, in passing, in Ms. Augustinos' survey (p. 55). One does not have the feeling that she spent much time reading this surprising book. At least she gets Belon's name right, which is more than one can say about her citation of the cartographer Nicolas de Nicolay, who appears in her bibliography as Nicolas de Daulphinoys. The word "Daulphinoys," appended to the author's name, means that he comes from the province of Dauphin6.
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ments. Some, like Dr. Spon, brought back collections of inscriptions, others, having spent years in Greece, for one reason or another, were quite knowledgeable about monuments. But Chateaubriand's lament for the lost past and his indifference toward his Greek contemporaries were pretty much the norm. Dr. Spon, surveying the ruins of Athens, concluded that "there is nothing left, only debris" (Voyage, IL 310). As for the living Greeks, even Choiseul-Gouffier, writing in 1783 and singled out b y Ms. Augustinos as an advocate of Greek liberation, sees little else but "degradation" in Greece. It is true that he makes an attempt, at least, "to discover, in the midst of all the degradation before my eyes, a few hereditary traits of the Greek character." These degraded slaves, after all, "were not only men: they were the posterity of the Greeks." He was convinced "that there could still be found, in Greece, a few men capable of reviving the memory of their ancestors," although he appears to be referring to Albanian brigands at that point) Ms. Augustinos's survey leaves one with the impression that hardly any of these writers of travel books had first-rate minds. Most of them were journalists catering to their readers' illusions and prejudices. Before the Greek War of Independence, the French reading public was mostly interested in books illustrated with sketches of ruined temples and the like. After the war, in the 1820s, opportunists like the ex-priest Pouqueville cashed in on French sympathy for the Greeks or antipathy toward the Turks. Pouqueville's shoddy compilations presented the Turks as sinister Orientals, the natural enemies "of everything Christian" (p. 257). The new racism of the colonial era was already in evidence in a work such as Pierre-Augustin Guys' Voyage litteraire de la Grece (1771). Guys was a merchant from Marseille w h o spent some 20 years in Constantinople. His admiration for things Greek was focused on the Ancients, but his contempt for the Turks was so highly developed that the Greeks he met, while in no w a y comparable to their illustrious ancestors, appeared to him to have at least the advantage of not being Turks. The distinction he makes between Europeans and Orientals is based on imagined racial rather than cultural differences: "the Negro dies with greater ease than a European," he asserts, and, for him, "the Turk is not very different from the Black African. "4 The dismissal of "Orientals," including Turks, as lesser races is a belief that was making its debut as the new religion of the West in those years. It is chiefly in this context that one may discern signs of sympathy for the Greek people in the books Ms. Augustinos chooses to write about. These books may not have possessed qualities of the kind that w o u l d have recommended them to scholarly readers, but they reached wide audiences. This was a middle-brow literature. Even so, these authors are not entirely obscure. They have had their biographers, so that Ms Augustinos can hardly be said to be breaking new ground, but it is useful to have such a survey in a single English-language volume. George Huppert University of Illinois at Chicago
3. Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste, comte de Choisel-Gouffier, " Discours preliminaire" (1783) in Voyagepittoresque de la Grece (Paris, Aillaud, 1842, 4 volumes) I, XL-LVI. 4. Pierre-Augustin Guys, Voyage litteraire de la Grece [1771] (Paris, 1783, 4 volumes) III, 63.