Keen, 'Literary Responses to Civil Discord', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9410
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9410-keen-literary
@@@@94.10.22, Molyneux ed., Literary Responses to Civil Discord
John H. Molyneux (ed.), Literary Responses to Civil
Discord. Nottingham Classical Literature Studies Vol. 1,
1992. Nottingham: The University of Nottingham, Department of
Classical & Archaeological Studies, 1993. Pp. vii + 76. #9.95
(pb). ISBN 0-904857-06-9.
Reviewed by Tony Keen -- Queen's University of Belfast
Reviewing the papers contained in this volume, the proceedings
of a seminar from May 1992, ought, to a degree, to be a
superfluous exercise, for each essay is accompanied by responses
that should critically appraise the paper in far greater detail
than can be done in a short review of the whole volume. Yet,
when one actually comes to read the responses there is a feeling
(perhaps in some cases unjustified) that the responses never
interact with the whole of the relevant paper beyond a general
remark about how thought-provoking the previous paper has been,
and tend instead to launch themselves at one or two specific
points. It seems that the responses rather fall between two
stools, being too long for a simple appraisal of the paper, and
yet at the same time too short to function as a detailed
critique. This leads one to question the overall approach of the
exercise. Rather than have the paper and response, might not the
time given over to response be better employed providing more
space for the original paper? For the impression the reader is
left with is that the papers themselves suffer, sometimes very
badly, from a severe restriction of space.
The most successful paper is that of Sommerstein, "Sleeping
Safe in Our Beds: Stasis, Assassination and the Oresteia"
(pp. 1-17). It is most successful because it takes a relatively
small topic, the idea that the murder of Ephialtes informs
certain parts of the Oresteia. Nonetheless, much credit
should be given to Sommerstein for managing to be informative
both about the Oresteia and the political background to
Aeschylean tragedy and about Athenian politics of the 460s. It
is not too surprising, therefore, that this paper provokes
Easterling into giving the most and successful response (pp.
19-24), though at the end of the day one feels that Sommerstein's
points about the importance of sleeping and the night in the
Choephori have won the argument, rather than Easterling's
attempts to rebut some (but by no means all) of his arguments.
Lintott's paper, "Civil Strife and Human Nature in Thucydides"
(pp. 25-32), tackles an interesting subject. Though Winton in
his response asserts that "[t]he focus of Lintott's paper is . .
. the excursus on stasis at iii.82-3" (p. 35), in the
event that passage serves more as a means of leading into
Lintott's main theme, which as the paper develops reveals itself
to be more about Thucydides' views on inter- and
intra-polis morality, the interconnection between the two
and how they were transformed by the Peloponnesian War than on
stasis per se (some of the same ground has recently
been covered from a slightly different direction by G. A.
Sheets[[1]]). Lintott touches upon many important points of
Thucydides' work, including the Mytilene debate and the debate
after the fall of Plataea. In this latter context it is valuable
to read what Lintott has to say in conjunction with recent
treatments of the same passage by Badian[[2]] and Sheets; yet
when this comparison is made, it provides one with a prime
illustration of the space problem in the volume as a whole.
Lintott's eight pages are simply not enough to be able to do more
than scratch the surface of such a broad subject, and the
Plataean debate gets no more than a page or so of that space,
compared to the greater detail of Badian (who has considerably
more space available) and Sheets (who has a more proscribed
topic). This is a pity, as there is in Lintott's piece the
beginnings of a valuable study of an important aspect of
Thucydides' work, and it provokes an interesting response by
Winton (pp. 33-35) that ends up taking issue with Lintott's
assertion that Thucydides was wrong to see stasis as a natural
part of human life.
Kahn's paper, "Conflict and Solidarity in Menander's
Dyskolos" (pp. 37-52), is explicit about its limited
scope. Whilst it would be interesting, Kahn says (p. 38), to
give a treatment of all the characters in the play, for reasons
of space he has confined himself to an examination of the
character Sostratos (one feels that a subtitle to this effect
might be valuable). Of course, an examination of a single
character cannot help but also touch upon the other characters in
the play, and the reader does find out something about Kahn's
views of the portrayal of, in particular, Knemon and Gorgias.
Kahn ends with a brief discussion of if and how Menander's text
relates to social divisions in the Greek world. Arnott's reply
(pp. 53-55) is similarly restricted in scope, concentrating on a
few points where he feels Kahn has underplayed Menander's text.
Perhaps the most disappointing paper is that by Hardie, "Tales
of unity and division in imperial Latin epic" (pp. 57-71). The
disappointment emerges principally from the fact that this paper,
of all those contained in this volume, seems least to relate to
the overall title of the symposium. Though Hardie claims that
his theme is "the narrative reflexes in imperial Latin epic of .
. . Roman anxiety about the roots of their social and political
identity" (p. 57), much of the paper seems to touch on such a
theme in only the most roundabout way, being more a portrayal
(and certainly an effective one) of the interplay of single and
multiple motifs in Roman epic. It is not at all clear, to this
reader at any rate, how the enumeration of twos and twins in
Virgil and Statius illustrate Hardie's professed theme, except
perhaps as an echo of the foundation myth of Romulus and Remus.
Only when he is discussing Silius Italicus' Punica do
Hardie's points come into clearer focus and start to tell the
reader something about the interaction of literature and civic
discourse. Fowler's response (pp. 73-76) likewise dwells more on
the implications of Hardie's piece for Latin literary criticism
(on which matter Fowler is reservedly enthusiastic) than on the
symposium's theme.
As already stated, many of the criticisms of the individual
papers in this volume arise from the lack of space. One can
understand that in the context of a one-day seminar time is of
the essence, but it is a pity that more expansion of papers was
not carried out before publication; Lintott in particular could
profitably have doubled the length of his paper (and it would
still have been shorter than either Sommerstein's or Hardie's).
The volume is relatively cheap, at least by the standards of
academic publishing, and an excellent job has been performed in
proofreading and typesetting the manuscript. One hopes that
Nottingham's example will inspire other departments to divert a
small part of their budgets into producing their own
publications. In this particular case, however, one is unsure
what the market for the volume will be, outside of people who
attended the seminar concerned, and one wonders whether this
particular set of papers might not have sat better individually
in journals. But is perhaps best to end on a less discouraging
note. Though this collection of papers is something of a
disappointment, volume two will present the papers of the 1993
Seminar, where the theme of the papers was the interaction of the
Greek world with the barbarian east, as reflected in Greek
literature. From personal attendance of that seminar, I know
that the papers formed a far more coherent whole, and that
publication is to be eagerly anticipated.
NOTE
1. George A. Sheets, "Conceptualising International Law in
Thucydides", AJP 115 (1994), pp. 51-73.
2. E. Badian, From Plataea to Potidaea (Baltimore, 1993),
pp. 109-116.