2018.06.54

Laurie Lefebvre, Le mythe Néron: la fabrique d'un monstre dans la littérature antique (Ier-Ve s.). Archaiologia. Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2017. Pp. 363. ISBN 9782757417294. €28,00.

Reviewed by Muriel Lafond, Université Paris 8 / Tours (muriel.lafond@univ-tours.fr)

Version at BMCR home site

Publisher's Preview

Les historiens modernes reconnaissent de façon unanime l'écart considérable qui sépare la réalité historique de la légende noire de Néron, laquelle demeure bien vivace encore aujourd'hui, en particulier au sein de la culture populaire (cinéma, bande dessinée). Pourtant, aussi bien Diderot que Voltaire émettaient déjà des doutes sur la véracité des récits tacitéens et les premières décennies du XX^e siècle virent poindre une réelle volonté de réhabiliter le dernier représentant des Julio-Claudiens.

Dans son ouvrage, fruit du remaniement d'une thèse de doctorat soutenue en 2009 à l'université Charles-de-Gaulle-Lille 3, Laurie Lefebvre se donne pour but non pas de rechercher la vérité qui se cache sous le mythe – ce à quoi se sont attachés nombre de chercheurs depuis Arthur Weigall,¹ mais d'"analyser la construction et l'évolution de la figure du monstre Néron dans l'Antiquité", longue élaboration qui débuta dans les années ayant suivi la mort du princeps, se poursuivit durant 300 ans et se cristallisa enfin au IV^e siècle. L'auteur choisit donc d'étudier un large corpus qui embrasse les textes évoquant l'empereur de son trépas (afin de ne pas tenir compte des écrits de son vivant, suspectés d'être entachés d'éléments de propagande impériale) jusqu'à Augustin, considéré comme "l'un des derniers représentants de la culture classique".

Le chapitre 1 passe en revue, de façon chronologique et exhaustive, l'ensemble des sources latines et grecques, livrant pour chacune une synthèse de ses apports. Lefebvre s'attache tout d'abord aux sources principales que sont Tacite, Suétone et Dion Cassius, et souligne combien ces auteurs modèlent leur vision de Néron par rapport à la période qui leur est contemporaine. Il en va de même pour les écrits suivants, païens et chrétiens : les choix effectués sont ainsi révélateurs d'une époque, d'un contexte politique et varient même selon le genre littéraire. On notera l'image plus nuancée qui apparaît dans la littérature grecque, du fait sans doute de la bienveillance dont fit preuve Néron à l'égard des habitants de la région. Ce parcours chronologique permet de mesurer l'évolution de la schématisation qui fit du fils d'Agrippine non seulement le type même du tyran, mais aussi une figure de l'Antéchrist. En annexe, des tableaux synthétisent avec une grande clarté la progression de différents éléments du mythe à travers les siècles.

Au chapitre suivant, Lefebvre met en évidence les grandes tendances qui s'imposent dans son corpus et les réduit à un couple antithétique: Néron oscille entre la feritas (cruauté, bestialité, retenues surtout par les chrétiens) et la uanitas (démesure, débauche, participation active aux arts de la scène, condamnées principalement par les païens). L'auteur souligne de même la présence d'éléments tragiques dans les récits tacitéens qui cohabitent avec d'autres points relevant de la farce. Pour donner plus de force au propos, il aurait été bon, nous semble-t-il, de s'appuyer sur les exemples très convaincants qu'offre le livre de Ginsburg,² pourtant présent dans la bibliographie, où certains épisodes relatés par Tacite et Suétone sont assimilés à de véritables intrigues comiques. À ces grandes tendances dégagées par Lefebvre, viennent s'agglomérer des détails inédits, souvent de nature hyperbolique, puisque Néron en est venu à incarner toutes les facettes du monstre et les auteurs, selon le but qu'ils s'étaient fixé, pouvaient ainsi choisir tel ou tel aspect. Malgré ces altérations, c'est surtout la figure du matricide et du citharède qui se dégage au fil des siècles, puisque les détails tendent finalement à disparaître au profit d'une schématisation.

Les chapitres 3 et 4 reviennent, cette fois de façon synchronique, sur les différents thèmes apparus jusque-là – ce qui n'est pas sans entraîner quelques redondances. Lefebvre s'attache à démontrer que la représentation de Néron relève d'une construction littéraire et rhétorique : reconstitution subjective de la jeunesse de l'empereur, bouleversement de la chronologie, critiques relevant de la tradition de l'invective, du discours épidictique, etc. Là encore, la démonstration eût été bien plus efficace si elle s'était appuyée sur l'ouvrage de Barrett,³ qui étudie avec talent la façon dont les historiens jouent des stéréotypes et adaptent leurs portraits à des modèles préconçus pour condamner Agrippine et son fils. Laurie Lefebvre montre bien cependant que Néron, figure de l'anti-princeps, de l'anti-pater, opposé au miles autant qu'au uir, en vient à contaminer de ses vices l'ensemble de la société et à s'apparenter à un ennemi de Rome.

Si, au chapitre 5, l'ouvrage prouve avec efficacité, grâce à un recours constant et précis aux sources, combien l'empereur s'inscrit dans la lignée des monstres de sa famille et voit sa propre histoire contaminée par celle de Caligula, son assimilation aux ennemis de Rome, plus lâche, ne s'avère pas aussi convaincante. Quant au rapprochement avec les monstres mythologiques, il se justifie au contraire pleinement, puisque les sources elles-mêmes rendent parfois ce lien explicite, qu'il s'agisse de Polyphème chez Philostrate ou d'Oreste chez Suétone et Juvénal.

Le sixième et dernier chapitre souligne enfin à quel point Néron synthétise tous les aspects du "barbare", avec la bestialité attachée aux peuples du nord et la lascivité de l'Orient. On peut regretter à nouveau quelques répétitions, puisqu'il est encore question à cet endroit de tragédie ou de la question de la représentation de l'empereur selon le but que se fixe l'auteur, qu'il s'agisse de condamner un tyran contemporain ou de louer un optimus princeps : Néron constitue donc un "formidable outil idéologique".

La conclusion, après une synthèse du contenu de l'ouvrage, se termine par l'évocation de la postérité du mythe à notre époque et souligne que le romancier Hubert Montheilhet (Neropolis, 1984) présente l'empereur comme une préfiguration d'Hitler à la fin du XX^e siècle. En vérité, on trouve cette idée bien plus tôt au cinéma : si QuoVadis de Mervyn LeRoy (1951) multiplie les références au nazisme dans sa représentation de l'empereur, dès 1944, les studios ont ajouté une scène inaugurale au Signe de la croix (Cecil B. DeMille, 1932), dans laquelle des soldats américains identifient de façon explicite Hitler au dernier Julio-Claudien.

L'ouvrage se clôt sur des annexes, dont nous avons loué plus haut la première: différents tableaux présentent les "crimes et travers imputés à Néron à travers les siècles", rangés par thèmes. L'annexe 2 offre une comparaison, toujours sous forme tabulaire, des récits de la mort de Néron à l'époque tardive, ainsi que leurs liens avec Suétone. Suivent un arbre généalogique de la gens julio-claudienne, les extraits en langue originale des citations du corps du texte, une bibliographie, un index nominum et un index locorum. Ce dernier aurait été sans doute plus efficace et plus utile pour les chercheurs s'il s'était contenté de répertorier les passages directement en lien avec Néron. Or on trouve là, pêle-mêle, l'ensemble des références faites dans l'ouvrage sans marque distinctive, qu'il s'agisse d'évoquer l'empereur qui constitue le centre de l'étude, mais aussi Domitien, Vitellius ou Xerxès, par exemple.

Nous avons souligné, au fil de notre compte rendu, les références qui auraient pu étayer le propos de l'auteur. On ne peut tout dire – ni tout lire –, nous en avons bien conscience. Il est cependant gênant de constater que n'est pas véritablement prise en compte la recherche néronienne depuis 2009, date de soutenance de la thèse qui a donné naissance à ce livre. Si quelques ouvrages plus récents apparaissent dans la bibliographie, ils n'ont en effet manifestement pas été utilisés – à une exception près – lors du remaniement de la thèse.⁴ Depuis 2010 pourtant, plusieurs ouvrages consacrés à Néron sont parus rien qu'en langue française et un livre comme The Emperor Nero: A Guide to the Ancient Sources⁵ ne pouvait manquer d'intérêt pour le sujet soumis à l'étude. Il en va de même pour la domus aurea : alors qu'elle fait l'objet de découvertes importantes depuis quelques années, Lefebvre s'appuie sur des ouvrages datant de plus de 10 ans. L'Histoire auguste fait également débat ces derniers temps et les écrits de S. Ratti auraient pu être signalés avec profit.⁶

Écrit en un style agréable, si l'on omet quelques résidus de l'écriture bien spécifique d'une thèse de doctorat, le texte ne comporte que peu de coquilles: quelques erreurs d'accentuation grecque et des problèmes de date dans la bibliographie. L'ouvrage de Laurie Lefebvre, remarquable par son désir d'exhaustivité, qui nous permet de rencontrer la figure de Néron chez des auteurs aussi variés que les attendus Tacite et Suétone, mais aussi Ausone ou Hilaire de Poitiers, offre un panorama complet et clair de la "fabrique d'un monstre". La double approche chronologique et synchronique permet de bien comprendre les mécanismes qui contribuèrent à forger la légende noire de Néron et, hormis les réserves exprimées plus haut, on tirera incontestablement profit de cette lecture.

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Notes:

1.   Weigall marque véritablement le début de la réhabilitation de l'empereur avec son ouvrage Nero : Emperor of Rome (Londres, 1930).
2.   J. Ginsburg, Representing Agrippina. Constructions of Female Power in the Early Roman Empire (Oxford, 2006).
3.   A. Barrett, Agrippina. Sex, Power and Politics in the Early Empire (New Haven, 1998, paru en 1996 au Royaume-Uni sous le titre Agrippina, Mother of Nero, Londres).
4.   C'est le cas, à titre d'exemple, de l'ouvrage de C. Walde, Neros Wirklichkeiten (Rahden, 2013), qu'il aurait été utile d'exploiter dans le cadre d'une étude de la légende néronienne.
5.   A. Barrett, E. Fantham, J. Yardley, The Emperor Nero: A Guide to the Ancient Sources (Princeton, 2016). Outre les ouvrages, à l'intérêt certes variable, de J. Schmidt, Néron, monstre sanguinaire ou empereur visionnaire ? (Paris, 2010), d'A. Rodier, La Véritable Histoire de Néron (Paris, 2013) et de V. Girod, Agrippine. Sexe, crimes et pouvoir dans la Rome impériale (Paris, 2015), on aurait apprécié de voir citées les nombreuses études allemandes qui ont fleuri ces dernières années - évoquons seulement ici l'importante biographie de J. Malitz (Munich, 2013) et le livre de J. Merten, Nero. Kaiser, Künstler und Tyrann (Darmstadt, 2016). The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus (ed. A. J. Woodman, 2009) aurait de même eu toute sa place dans la biographie.
6.   Voir par exemple L'Histoire auguste. Les païens et les chrétiens dans l'Antiquité tardive (Paris, 2016), recueil d'articles qui fait clairement le point sur la question de l'auteur de l'ouvrage.

2018.06.53

Clifford Angell Bates, Jr., The Centrality of the Regime for Political Science. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2016. Pp. 105. ISBN 9788323526407. 29.00 zł (pb).

Reviewed by Sydnor Roy, Texas Tech University (sydnor.roy@ttu.edu)

Version at BMCR home site

The stated goal of Bates' book is "to make the case for the centrality of what Aristotle called 'the politeia' and contemporary political scientists call 'the regime' in any attempt to have a science of politics" (7). To do this, Bates makes an argument for a shift in how we understand the relationship between the idea of the politeia and the idea of the state. Instead of equating the polis with the state, and finding imperfections in that comparison, Bates argues that scholars should compare the politeia to the state. He goes on to argue that the concept of the state is an outdated and static (and European) model, and that Aristotle's concept of the politeia offers a means for thinking about regimes that is more flexible, dynamic, and without some of the biases present in current scholarship. Overall, Bates is successful in making his argument, but his means of getting there and some specific elements of his argument undermine his goal.

In his first chapter, Bates addresses the idea of man as a political animal, and shows how later political philosophers have rejected the idea of both human sociability and a natural political community. He challenges those claims by exploring what Aristotle means in his claim that the polis is prior to the individual and the household. He concedes that Aristotle does not explain this well, but that Aeschylus' Oresteia shows it clearly. The fundamental elements of Bates' argument here are sound—the Oresteia does show the shift from individual- and family-oriented justice to a more civically minded justice. Athena is able to successfully navigate the tension present because the system she puts in place allows for a diversity of opinion that concludes with a resolution. What is frustrating here are the details of his argument. Bates relies primarily upon Meier (1990), Euben (1990), Hogan (1984), and the introductory essays in the various translations he consulted. He seems unconcerned with any more recent attempts to grapple with the politics of the Oresteia addressed by scholars in either Classics or Political Science. He occasionally presents his own observations in a way that doesn't acknowledge that they are in fact well-established arguments with long scholarly histories (22, fn 9: "In one sense, Clytemnestra's desire to revenge Iphigenia's death, makes her a Fury or at least Fury-like"). Likewise, he sweepingly rejects without argumentation approaches he does not like (25-26, fn 13: "Far from being the male sexists which most feminist interpretations assert they are, the jurors' outcome is too close to justify such a view."). He barely engages with the interpretive problems that tragedy presents for those analyzing how it reflects Greek political thought. For example, he erroneously applies Aristotle's description of Argos and Athens to his analysis of Argos and Athens in the Oresteia (22).

Bates' seeming lack of interest in the expertise of Classicists is even more apparent at the beginning of his second chapter. In his praise of Mary Dietz' article ("Between Polis and Empire: Aristotle's Politics," 2012), he says, "Dietz generally does a good job showing how Aristotle's political thought is not confined to the polis and thus something of the past to be relegated to the departments of history or classics" (33). Later, in his critique of Vlassopoulos (2007), he complains that "his work focuses much too narrowly on the debate within the classics and historiographical scholarship, and does not recognize that there is a larger, more theoretical, issue underlying the debate" (34). Bates' argument, rather, is that the Politics should be studied "on its own terms" (35), by which he means without historical context or broader questions about Aristotle's philosophy. In part, I appreciate Bates' goal here – he wants to look at Aristotle's approach to politics without bringing in outside assumptions – but this should be the first step of his analysis, with a later consideration of how his conclusions fit within our understanding of Aristotle's works as a whole and within the world of Ancient Greece.

The second chapter explores what Aristotle means by politeia. He discusses the traditional translations of it (constitution or regime) and sides with "regime," although he generally leaves it as politeia in his analysis of Aristotle's text. Bates' choice here signals his alignment with a strand of political theory that originated with Strauss. He goes on to chart a history of misinterpretation of the Politics that is based upon the focus upon Aristotle's typology of politeia (offered in Book 3) without the exploration of that typology offered in Politics 4-6. He claims that "the model of the politeia found in Politics 4-6 gives one account of Aristotle's politeia that offers students of politics a complex tool to access and understand the political behavior of any existing political community at any given time." Bates argues that because Aristotle focuses not on the powers of government, but rather on its functions, his method of analysis survives the polis itself.

The next two chapters shift in focus from an analysis of the Politics to an extended discussion of its reception. His analysis of the political context of Greece and Rome is confusing and riddled with errors typographical and otherwise. For example, he claims that the idea of the mixed constitution is applied to Aristotle by Aquinas, and that it arose as an idea to handle the separation of civil and religious power in the Middle Ages. I agree that the Politics does not necessarily put forth the idea of the mixed constitution per se, but this does not mean that the idea of the mixed constitution was absent from the ancient world (Thucydides Book 8, Polybius Book 6). Where Bates' book really shines is in his discussion of the difference between concepts of the state and concepts of regimes, and how this difference (or lack of differentiation by thinkers) has affected the reception of Aristotle by political thinkers. Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Hegel all develop the idea of the state as a product of human will rather than natural, and as unitary rather than as a coming together of discrete parts. Bates argues that the motivation for this shift away from Aristotle's position is historical, because the concept of the state allowed for a clear separation from the power of the church, and a competitive advantage.

Bates goes on to argue that the development of the state into the nation-state provided more reasons to reject Aristotle. The nation-state pushes an idea of the body politic as a unified whole, which does not reflect Aristotle's idea of the state as a mixture of different parts. Bates argues here for scholars to make a distinction between the European nation-state and the American state. For Bates, the nation-state is defined by its cultural features first (history, language, religion, culture, and ethno-racial makeup, 69), and then its political organization, whereas the state is primarily defined by its political organization, or regime. He claims that the American Revolution was formed independent of the development of the nation-state, which allowed the nation to remain more heterogeneous in intent, until Lincoln, in the Gettysburg Address, redefined the United States as a nation state (75). He goes on to attack the Progressive movement for failing to understand or embrace the philosophical ideas of the framers of the U.S Constitution (make the country a state, not a nation-state), and associates the movement with fascism. Bates poses an intriguing avenue of inquiry into an American model of the state as opposed to a European one, but the rhetoric of this section made this reader uncomfortable. Bates seemed to be using key phrases directed at a specific set of scholars (most notably, his reference to J. Goldberg's Liberal Fascism 2012).

The fourth and last chapter addresses the state of contemporary comparative politics and why Aristotle's understanding of the politeia might be useful. Bates argues that the attempts to develop new typologies of the state to allow for comparison both globally and historically is both biased and unnecessary. It is biased towards democracy and democratic ideals, which often distort our understanding of how societies are actually organized. It is unnecessary, because Aristotle's typology and method allows comparative political scientists to evaluate states in "a generally undistorted manner" (91).

This book has a sense of urgency to it; Bates is concerned about the lack of political theory classes required in doctoral programs in political science, and he is concerned that the ideology of the (democratic) state is complicating and even damaging modern politics globally. This sense of urgency, however, also leads to poor editing, incomplete sentences, repetition, and errors of fact that are too many to cite in this review. As a Classicist, rather than a Political Scientist (the obvious intended audience of this book), I was especially attuned to these mistakes in his discussion of the ancient world. That being said, the book is worth reading, for it makes a compelling argument for how an ancient model of thinking about comparative politics might offer new directions for political thinking and diplomacy in the modern world.

2018.06.52

Jocelyne Peigney, Brigitte Lion (ed.), L'imaginaire de l'alimentation humaine en Grèce ancienne: International food history research (2013-2016). Food & History, 13.1-3, 2015. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2016. Pp. vii, 365. ISBN 9782503553702. €146.00 (pb).

Reviewed by Alexandra Kovacs, Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté (alexandra.kovacs@hotmail.fr)

Version at BMCR home site

[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

L'imaginaire de l'alimentation humaine en Grèce ancienne constitue la publication d'un colloque éponyme organisé à Tours les 24 et 25 novembre 2011 par Jocelyne Peigney et Brigitte Lion. Bien que l'ouvrage soit relativement onéreux (146 euros) et difficilement disponible dans les bibliothèques, on apprécie tout de même le choix d'éditer ces contributions dans Food & History, revue de référence pour les Food Studies et qui propose toujours des articles de qualité. Ce numéro ne déroge d'ailleurs pas à cette règle. Dès le titre de la publication, on saisit la volonté de mener une réflexion large sur l'alimentation, ce qu'on ne peut que louer. On pourrait cependant s'attendre à ce que l'étude soit purement conceptuelle ou peut-être trop littéraire, or il n'en est rien. Les 15 contributions (toutes en français à l'exception d'une en anglais) sont répartis en 4 thèmes : « Identités humaines et constructions mythiques » (p. 13-100), « Bonheur, cité, progrès : la table mise en scène » (p. 101- 162), « Banquet, politique, philosophie et rhétorique » (p. 163-253), « Nutrition et médecine : Théories et métaphores » (p. 255-281). L'analyse littéraire et linguistique est parfaitement dosée avec la démarche historique proposant ainsi une étude dans la continuité de l'historiographie actuelle qui conçoit l'alimentation pas seulement comme une affaire de nourriture mais bien comme une affaire culturelle et identitaire.¹

Jocelyne Peigney (p. 1-11) ouvre l'ouvrage avec une introduction passionnante qui ne se réduit pas à présenter brièvement les articles qui vont suivre, mais qui fait plutôt un point historiographique sur l'alimentation dans l'Antiquité grecque. J. Peigney appuie son propos sur une bibliographie dense mais incontournable pour qui veut s'intéresser à la question, tout en offrant une très bonne synthèse des enjeux de l'alimentation en Grèce. La répartition des viandes, leur cuisson et leur consommation dans le cadre des banquets sacrificiels confèrent à l'alimentation une valeur religieuse dont les antiquisants, depuis une quarantaine d'années, ont bien montré l'importance.² Également, l'alimentation, en tant qu'outil identitaire, à la fois sert à distinguer l'homme de l'animal, à la fois construit des discours ethnographiques. Enfin, et parce qu'elle relève de la santé, l'alimentation permet d'interroger le rapport au corps et aux sens, plus précisément elle est mise en relation avec le luxe et le plaisir dans les réflexions philosophiques. On l'aura compris, l'alimentation permet de développer les recherches dans des champs aussi variés que le religieux, le culturel, le social, etc. Toutefois l'ouvrage offre une démarche originale en utilisant les représentations de l'alimentation comme un moyen d'expression pour saisir les realia sur une période allant de l'époque homérique à l'époque impériale (II^e s. p.C.). En d'autres termes les contributeurs s'intéressent aux concepts propres à l'alimentation (par exemple l'équilibre du régime, de la nutrition, de la digestion des aliments) pour comprendre comment les anciens s'expliquaient les phénomènes physiques, techniques ou politiques. Enfin, rappelons que derrière le terme générique « alimentation », il faut davantage entendre les pratiques alimentaires car cette expression implique que l'on s'intéresse à la fois au mangeur, à l'acte de manger et aux aliments consommés. Ces trois aspects, bien pris en compte dans l'ouvrage, structureront la suite de mon propos. Françoise Létoublon (p. 15-44) montre que dès l'époque homérique, l'homme se définit par le type de nourriture qu'il consomme à travers un vocabulaire riche (mangeur de céréales = sitophag- ; mangeur de laitage = glaktophag-). La nourriture a donc une valeur normative mais qui peut être renversée afin de mettre en exergue des situations extraordinaires et définir la frontière entre le sauvage et le civilisé. Dans les récits primitivistes, l'homme, parce qu'il ne connaît que l'allélophagie ou la poiéphagie, mène une vie bestiale. L'abandon de ce régime avec la découverte des céréales s'accompagne du règne de la dikè au détriment de l'hubris (Laurent Gourmelen, p. 69-83). Le mangeur, lorsqu'il est mangé, devient expression métaphorique (Charles Delattre, p. 85-100). Pour avoir perdu sa virginité, Leimoné est enfermée par son père dans une maison avec un cheval. Ce dernier, privé de nourriture, finit par dévorer la jeune fille. Ici, « ce n'est pas l'acte de se nourrir qui parcourt l'ensemble du récit, mais la question de la préservation ou de la dilapidation d'un capital corporel » (p. 100). On l'aura compris, avec le mangeur ce sont des valeurs morales qui sont exprimées. Particulièrement le glissement entre sauvage/civilisé permet de saisir la complexité des structures culturelles et sociales dans la pensée des Grecs, la valeur normative de l'alimentation n'étant ni stricte ni fixe.

Ceci est perceptible notamment dans l'action de manger qui, si elle rythme bien évidemment la vie des hommes, est surtout un marqueur identitaire.³ Les représentations imagées des banquets en sont un bon exemple développé par Pauline Schmitt Pantel (p. 45-67) qui montre, avec le cas d'Achille et d'Ariane, que les codes iconographiques employés permettent moins de représenter la réalité que de traduire le statut social des personnes figurées. « Manger » est donc une dialectique (Michel Briand, p. 213-234). Selon María José García Soler (p. 119-137), l'utopie gastronomique développée par les comiques du V^e s. a.C. est dans certains cas un moyen d'évasion hors d'une réalité compliquée, dans d'autres une satire politique. Il est remarquable également que les réflexions autour de l'acte de manger deviennent l'occasion pour les philosophes d'affirmer leurs positions politiques comme nous le montre Maria Noussia-Fantuzzi avec l'exemple des cyniques (p. 197-211) ou bien Luciana Romeri avec le cas de Platon (p. 165-180). Ce dernier associe à chaque régime politique un régime alimentaire précis : ainsi la politique tyrannique de Syracuse que dénonce Platon s'explique par une vie tournée vers l'excès du plaisir alimentaire et sexuel. Par conséquent, seuls les philosophes, parce qu'ils maîtrisent les désirs humains (nourriture, boisson, amour), peuvent construire la kallipolis prônée dans la République. Il s'agit d'une cité dépourvue d'avidité, au régime politique considéré comme juste et sain et dont les syssities assureront la stabilité. On comprend, dès lors, que chez les philosophes, nourriture et morale sont liées : la défense de leur diaita mesurée – autrement dit l'adoption d'un régime de vie exempt des superfluités – s'appuie sur une critique du plaisir (Pierre Pontier, p.181-195).

Enfin, les aliments sont utilisés par les auteurs antiques dans divers contextes d'énonciations. Aelius Aristide, par exemple, emploie le vin comme outil rhétorique en évoquant seulement ses actions bienfaisantes. Alors qu'habituellement le vin est associé à l'absence de maîtrise de soi et à l'hubris, chez Aelius il favorise les relations humaines et est également un bon remède contre les passions (Johanne Goeken, p. 235-253). Les aliments présentent donc des caractéristiques thérapeutiques, qui, lorsqu'elles sont décrites, renseignent sur les conceptions médicales des Grecs (Paul Demont, p. 257-272). Un aliment renferme par conséquent des propriétés diverses (morales, médicales, etc.) que le contexte d'énonciation, mais aussi de consommation, met en lumière. Ainsi, lorsque Galien traite du lait, il informe aussi bien sur les modes de consommation, que sur l'économie alimentaire ou les conceptions biologiques gréco-romaines du II^e s. p.C. (John Wilkins, p. 273- 281).

Tout au long de l'Antiquité, la littérature construit un imaginaire de l'alimentation qui en transcrit les fonctions biologiques, sociales et religieuses comme le montre bien Diane Cuny à travers la tragédie grecque (p. 103-117). Cependant, il faut rester prudent devant le discours littéraire qui ne traduit pas toujours les realia. C'est ce que défend Robin Nadeau à propos de la cuisine grecque (p.139-162). Selon lui, la qualifier de « gastronomie », relève davantage d'une vision fantasmée des modernes et de l'idée erronée qu'un art culinaire se développe dès le V^e-IV^e s. a.C., que d'une réalité. Il semble donc nécessaire de constamment distinguer les discours des pratiques.

L'édition de l'ouvrage est soigné et pratique : chaque contribution est précédée d'un résumé et d'une liste de mots-clés tous les deux présentés en anglais et en français. Les notes de bas de pages sont très lisibles. On regrettera toutefois l'absence d'une bibliographie générale en fin d'ouvrage, ainsi qu'une conclusion. Or, ces remarques, pour le moins secondaires, n'enlèvent rien à la qualité de cette publication qui apporte de riches et belles contributions essentielles non seulement aux antiquisants, mais aussi aux spécialistes des Food Studies.

Auteurs et titres

1. Jocelyne Peigney, « Introduction »
2. Françoise Létoublon, « Manger la chair de son ennemi »
3. Pauline Schmitt Pantel, « Banquet et statut en Grèce archaïque : Achille et Ariane »
4. Laurent Gourmelen, « Pratiques alimentaires et représentations de l'humanité primitive »
5. Charles Delattre, « Quand l'homme devient nourriture : Leimoné dévorée par un cheval »
6. Diane Cuny, « 'Vis, bois, mange' (Sophocle, fr. 167 Radt.). L'imaginaire de l'alimentation humaine dans la tragédie grecque »
7. María José García Soler, « Nourriture réelle, nourriture rêvée : l'utopie gastronomique dans la comédie grecque »
8. Robin Nadeau, « La littérature gourmande : un signe de révolution culinaire ? »
9. Luciana Romeri, « Régimes alimentaires et régimes politiques chez Platon »
10. Pierre Pontier, « L'éloge du 'régime mesuré' et la cuisine du pouvoir chez Xénophon »
11. Maria Noussia-Fantuzzi, « The Politics of Food in the Early Cynics »
12. Michel Briand, « Danses et banquets grecs : enjeux pragmatiques, éthiques, esthétiques »
13. Johann Goeken, « Aelius Aristide et le vin »
14. Paul Demont, « Le ventre et le vase : de l'usage des cavités et des vaisseaux »
15. John Wilkins, « Galien et le lait »

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Notes:

1.   M. Montanari, Le manger comme culture, Bruxelles, Université de Bruxelles, 2010 [2004].
2.   L'ouvrage de M. Detienne, J.-P. Vernant (ss. dir.), La cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec, Paris, Gallimard, 1979, a lancé le mouvement et reste encore aujourd'hui une référence.
3.   Pensons bien évidemment à la thèse de P. Schmitt Pantel, La cité au banquet. Histoire des repas publics dans les cités grecques, Rome, École Française de Rome, 1992. Également on se reportera aux études en sociologie de l'alimentation, notamment celles de J.-P. Corbeau et J.-P. Poulain.

2018.06.51

Thomas Heine Nielsen, Two Studies in the History of Ancient Greek Athletics. Scientia Danica. Series H, Humanistica 8, 16. Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2018. Pp. 299. ISBN 9788773044124. DKK 200.

Reviewed by David Lunt, Southern Utah University (davelunt@suu.edu)

Version at BMCR home site

Thomas Heine Nielsen's recent contribution to the study of ancient Greek athletics is a welcome addition to the field of ancient athletic contests and festivals. This book is exactly what it claims to be—two independent studies focused on a pair of carefully circumscribed questions about archaic and classical Greek athletics. Since Nielsen splits the two questions into separate studies, this review will examine each independently.

Nielsen's first study attacks a devilishly tricky yet fundamentally important question concerning archaic and classical Greek athletics: just how many athletic festivals were available to an enterprising athlete during this time? Ancient claims that an athlete like Theogenes of Thasos won between 1200 and 1400 athletic victories (the sources differ) present a fundamental problem in understanding the logistics of his athletic career. Even assuming that he competed in multiple events, just how many festivals were available to this early-fifth-century BCE athlete, and how often were these festivals held? Marshalling a commendable array of literary and epigraphical evidence, Nielsen sets out to answer this question.

Painstakingly, Nielsen lays out the evidence for ancient athletic competitions, including both occasional games (i.e., funerary) and the institutionalized religious festivals that appear in the sources, however fleetingly. After cataloging the mentions of funeral contests, Nielsen shifts to geography as the organizing feature, tracing allusions to ancient athletic contests throughout the Greek world in places such as Sicily, Italy, Boeotia, Megara, Corinth, Sicyon, Achaia, Arcadia, Lacedaemon, Argos, Aegina, Attica, Euboea, East Locris, Thessaly, Rhodes, Macedonia, and North Africa.

Nielsen is very careful not to push the evidence too far. For example, Pindar's Nemean 10 was composed to honor an Argive athlete named Theaios. In this ode, Nielsen identified a circumstantial reference to athletic contests at Sparta (lines 49-53). If, as Nielsen suggests, Pindar alluded here to Theaios's victories in these contests at Sparta, Nielsen is right to opine that allowing an Argive to compete in Spartan games "would be interesting" with respect to Sparta's reputation for xenophobia (p. 41). However, Nielsen avoids pursuing the notion any further, recognizing that Pindar's brief allusion can hardly support such a conclusion. Similarly, Nielsen points out that a document from Asia Minor that referred to both a palaestra and gymnasion in a town offers evidence of athletic activity on the site, but not necessarily athletic competitions (p. 80).

While the literary works of Homer and Pindar present an array of names and locations for ancient athletic festivals, the epigraphical evidence proves a bit trickier in establishing the existence of a particular festival during the time under consideration. For example, a series of dedicatory athletic inscriptions (IG I³ 585 et seq.) written in two dialects suggests that athletes from Attica sometimes won prizes in Boeotia and brought them back to Athens, where they were dedicated to various deities. However, the condition of the inscriptions has made conclusive dating problematic. Rather than weigh in on the debate surrounding the dating, Nielsen is content to include the competing theories for when these dedications were made (pp. 19-21).

On occasion, Nielsen points out the limitations of the evidence, acknowledging the general vagueness of the word agon and the difficulties in assigning athletic features to all festivals. In addition, some festivals with only single or scant attestations might not have lasted very long and lapsed into inactivity.

Towards the end of this first study, Nielsen offers a catalog of the festivals with known athletic contests held in the late archaic and classical Greek world, including location, attestations, and modern discussions where applicable. The final count is 155 athletic contests, but Nielsen is adamant that these data represent only a "sketch" of the ancient Greek athletic world (p. 109). In an earlier section of this study, Nielsen alluded to Pindar's praise of the pankratiast Timodemos and his athletic victories "beyond number" (Nem. 2.23; Nielsen, p. 47). In this first study of ancient Greek athletics, it appears that Nielsen has cautiously managed to number those competitions after all.

Part Two of the work, the second study in ancient Greek athletics, addresses the amount of prestige awarded to a victory in the Nemean Games. Nielsen begins his study by acknowledging the reasons for the apparently inferior status of the Nemean Games with respect to the other three Crown Games festivals held at Olympia, Delphi, and Isthmia. Primarily, the Sanctuary of Nemea was overlooked by the Hellenic League in its commemorative dedications following the successful expulsion of the Persians in 479 BCE. In addition, the Peace of Nicias (421 BCE) was published at the three other panhellenic sanctuaries, but not at Nemea. Also, epinician poetry's "laudatory compounds," such as Olympionikos and Pythionikos, and Isthmionikos never bother to employ Nemeonikos (p. 169). Finally, catalogs of athletic victories typically listed those at Nemea last, implying a hierarchy and relatively less prestige for the Nemean festival.

Nielsen is surgically precise in his approach to this issue, delicately situating the prestige of the Nemean Games above all other athletic contests except for the Olympian and Pythian Games. He acknowledges that the Nemean sanctuary was certainly less prestigious than that at Olympia, yet he indicates that, despite this inequality, a victory in the Nemean Games still brought a considerable amount of prestige to a victor and his polis.

Nielsen appeals to epinician poetry and victory-monument inscriptions to make his case. Although victories outside of the circuit of the Crown Games were occasionally commemorated with epinician verse, the relative abundance of epinician poems for Nemean victories underscores the importance of this festival. Although very few victory monuments have been unearthed at Nemea, one of the few that has survived appears to be among the oldest yet found at any panhellenic sanctuary. This inscribed statue base, dated to ca. 550 BCE, commemorated the victories at Nemea of Aristis of Kleonai, and its age suggests that victors at Nemea quickly copied this practice from Olympia. In addition, victory inscriptions at Olympia not infrequently included mention of Nemean victories as well. In the nearly 200 Olympic victory monuments recorded by Pausanias, Nielsen points out that Pausanias never recorded a victory from outside of the Crown Games circuit (p. 179). Besides the victory-monument inscriptions at Olympia, Nielsen catalogs commemorations of victory in the Nemean Games from places outside of the panhellenic sanctuaries, such as Argos, Corinth, Sicyon, Aegina, Attica, Thessaly, and Ionia. Nielsen's reasoning is sound. Clearly, the Nemean Games carried a considerable amount of prestige in the currency of athletic victories in the ancient Greek world.

Although Nielsen's conclusion in asserting the overall importance of the Nemean Games as part of the four-festival Crown Games circuit is well supported, his treatment surprisingly mostly overlooks the archaeological record of the sanctuary at Nemea. Archaeology indicates that the sanctuary of Nemea suffered widespread destruction around the year 420 BCE, after which the Nemean Games were moved to Argos. Except for a few decades of revival at Nemea under Macedonian patronage, beginning in the mid-to-late fourth century BCE, the Nemean Games remained at Argos until they ended during the Christian era.¹ In determining the prestige of an athletic victory in the Nemean Games, an examination of the destruction, revival, and eventual abandonment of the sanctuary at Nemea, and the role of Argos in appropriating and re-locating the Games might offer additional valuable insights.

Overall, the book presents a commendable achievement. It is elegantly written and is very user-friendly. All Greek passages are translated in footnotes, and the book contains extensive bibliography and indices, with no obvious typographical errors. The catalog of athletic festivals at the end of the first study is a valuable resource for investigating lesser-known religious festivals and for appreciating the rich complexity of ancient Greek festival culture. It is tempting to regard as deficiencies the book's lack of chronology and scanty contextualizations, or perhaps its host of unexplored avenues in areas like identity or inter-polis travel, but this is not what the studies set out to do. These two studies lay out specific and relevant research questions and offer compelling, insightful, and thoroughly researched answers. Like the ancient Greek athletes treated in these two studies, Nielsen has earned his own measure of praise.

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Notes:

1.   Robert C. Knapp and John D. Mac Isaac, Excavations at Nemea III, The Coins. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, pp. 15-17.

2018.06.50

Christopher Collard, James Morwood (ed.), Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis (2 vols.). Aris & Phillips Classical Texts. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. Pp. 656. ISBN 9781911226468. £95.00.

Reviewed by George Kovacs, Trent University (gakovacs@trentu.ca)

Version at BMCR home site

Publisher's Preview

Christopher Collard and James Morwood have collaborated to produce a new edition of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis (IA). Such an edition has long been a desideratum.¹ Though I note some shortcomings below, this edition is an admirable achievement and will be required reading for anyone interested in this Greek tragedy.

I begin with three coincidences. IA was part of Euripides' final production. So too is this the last of the twenty editions in the Aris & Phillips Euripides sequence. The series began in 1986 with the publication of Shirley Barlow's edition of Trojan Women. Christopher Collard has been the steward of this series since its inception: his thirty-plus years closely correspond to the roughly thirty-three years Euripides took to write these tragedies in the first place, from Alcestis in 438 to IA in 405 BCE. It is entirely fitting that he be one of the editors for this final entry. IA was produced posthumously, and this too resonates. Sadly, James Morwood passed away unexpectedly in September 2017, and so this volume constitutes one of his final efforts. In the general foreword (vii), Collard pays tribute to Desmond Conacher, Kevin Lee, and Martin West, all past contributors who did not live to see the series' completion. A venerable list, to which we now add Morwood. His career was long and prolific, and his energies as a translator, commentator, and teacher of our primary languages will be much missed.

Much has changed since that first edition of Trojan Women, and it shows — and not just because the typeface has improved. As Collard notes (vii), the remit of the series has evolved considerably over three decades. Students, and therefore their instructors, have different needs and skillsets when they sit down to read Greek tragedies. Trends in scholarship have opened more and broader avenues of consideration. Fortunately, the greater complexity demanded of later volumes has been met by increased facility in production, easing the cost and availability of printing.

IA, with a textual tradition unlike any other tragedy, needs these increased capacities. Uncontested in antiquity, the authenticity of great swaths of its script have been challenged since Musgrave discovered an apparently superfluous book fragment in 1762. Uniquely within the series, this edition has been produced in two volumes with consecutive page- numbering. The publisher is to be praised for keeping the price fairly close to IA's single-volume siblings. Volume 1 — the same page length as Barlow's Trojan Women — contains the Introduction, Text, and Translation. Volume 2 is devoted to Commentary and Indexes, at very nearly double that length. One upshot of this arrangement is that it is possible to consult text and commentary at the same time, without flipping back and forth through the volume. This will be a great relief for the advanced reader, as the critical apparatus and commentary are frequently cross-referenced.

Size doesn't always help, however. Despite the generous 80 pages allotted, the Introduction still manages to occasionally feel rushed and I did find it wanting in a couple areas. The section on 'Metre', for instance, is heavily compressed (45–50). The use of 's' and 'l' to represent short and long syllables, instead of the more visually distinct breve (⏑) and macron (‒), does not enable an informative guide. Indeed, nowhere do the editors give any hint at how the quantity of a syllable is determined. Also not helpful is the refusal to actually print out the pattern of a complete line. The editors do not, for example, show us an iambic trimeter, but parenthetically describe it as '("three measure", basic metron x-l-s-l)'. This is not inaccurate, of course, but bewildering to a reader not already familiar with the basics of metrical theory. This system of s-l is not much used in the commentary either, which relies mainly on technical terminology to describe the metrical patterns. To be clear, discussions of metre in the commentary are detailed and precise, and competently point the way to more thorough studies; they are just not well served by the introductory material.

The Bibliography is large but necessarily selective, arranged by subheadings for 'Editions and Commentaries', 'Some English Translations', 'Bibliographic Guidance', and 'Secondary Works', mostly on IA itself. Volumes cited in full in the introduction often do not make their way into the bibliography (but sometimes do) and so careful cross-referencing is necessary to find all sources. There also appears to be a reluctance to cite sources more than once, and so some works do not appear where they would be most helpful. The single paragraph in the Introduction sub-titled 'Sacrifice before marriage in IA' does not cite Helene Foley's important monograph on the topic, for example. That volume is later used to support an incidental claim about Clytemnestra's 'bourgeois' nature.²

The selective list of translations exposes what may be the volume's greatest critical blindspot. One notable absence is Mary-Kay Gamel's 1999 translation of the play.³ That translation and its accompanying introductions and notes take a gender-critical approach. While a study of Greek tragedy need not foreground this approach, it is difficult to imagine any critical edition in this century not giving space to such considerations. Yet the introduction does not identify gender in its discussion of 'Themes and Motifs' (33–37), nor in any of its other subheadings. In this regard, there are significant omissions in the general bibliography.⁴

The Commentary is equally muted on gender issues. One might expect more on the provocative line 1394: εἷς γ᾽ ἀνὴρ κρείσσων γυναικῶν μυρίων ὁρᾶν φάος: 'It is better that one man should see the light of day than numberless women.' In the note for this line, we get the usual comparators (Hesiod, Semonides), contemporary accusations of misogyny, and the lackluster rebuttal that 'the poet was often 'fair' or sympathetic to women.' (593) I could not imagine reading this line with students without a lot more consideration.

But there are many strengths, too. Many themes of the play are handled deftly: subsections on "Human and Animal Sacrifice" and "Panhellenism" standout, as do detailed considerations of kleos, tyche, and ananke. One important question for any edition of IA is the state of the text. Collard and Morwood print a complete text in the received order of manuscript L, with only a few lines transposed. Indeed, textual authenticity, carefully balanced against the needs of a coherent performance, is a key concern and this issue is one of the strengths of the edition. Collard and Morwood have generated their own text and critical apparatus, acknowledging their debt to the texts of Günther, Stockert, and, above all, Diggle. The editors signal about 80 deviations from the text of Diggle's OCT (61–62), and a handful more go unremarked.⁵

Although the introduction declares a position of 'editorial tolerance' and 'see much in it that is Euripidean in origin and spirit' (58), in the introduction, critical apparatus, and commentary the editors take great care to present thorough arguments for and against authenticity at all appropriate points: the prologue, entrance of Iphigenia and Clytemnestra, and both messenger speeches all receive thoughtful, informative consideration. Many notes throughout the commentary are lemmatized [Text . . .], and this edition would be ideal for a senior undergraduate or graduate class to explore issues of textual criticism for Greek tragedy.

The translation is functional and appropriate for the nature of the edition. Not surprisingly, the English hews closely to Morwood's own translation in the Oxford World Classics series. Variations tend to be movements away from English idiom to more awkward, but more literal, translations of individual lines. Thus, lines like τὸ μὲν σόν, ὦ νεᾶνι, γενναίως ἔχει· τὸ τῆς τύχης δὲ καὶ τὸ τῆς θεοῦ νοσεῖ (1402–03) are rendered 'Your part is noble, maiden, but that of fortune and that of the goddess — they are where the sickness lies,' to better capture the use of the genitives (compare Morwood's earlier and smoother 'The part you play, maiden, is a noble one. But fate and the goddess — that is where the sickness lies.').

The translation is occasionally marred by typographical error: 'my brother put all kinds of argument' (97, presumably 'put forward' was intended for προσφέρων), 'the two Dioscuri in the heaven' (769), or 'nor there is any friend near me' (912). Typos are unfortunately numerous throughout, with names and dates being particularly susceptible.⁶

An English edition of Euripides' final tragedy has long been lacking, and Collard and Morwood have addressed this need admirably. Though I note concerns above, IA presents an immense challenge and the editors have pulled off quite a trick in producing such a lucid and comprehensive edition. A worthy capstone to the decades-long project these volumes comprise.

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Notes:

1.   Advertising material and the blurb on the back cover claim that this is 'the first English edition with complete commentary of the play since 1891.' Strictly speaking, there was a BMCR commentary by Tarkow and MacEwen in 1989.
2.   Foley, Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides, (Ithaca, 1985).
3.   Blondell, Gamel, Rabinowitz, Zweig, Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides, (New York, 1999).
4.   Rabinowitz's opening chapter of Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women, (Ithaca, 1993); Wohl's discussion of Iphigenia in tragedy in Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy, (Austin, 1998); Chong-Gossard's chapter on IA in Gender and Communication in Euripides' Plays: Between Song and Silence, (Leiden, 2008); or even Wilkins' chapter on self-sacrifice in Euripides in Powell, (ed.) Euripides, Women, Sexuality, (London, 1990).
5.   E.g., at line 15, they silently allow the elision of κἀκίνητοι over Diggle's καὶ ἀκίνητοι.
6.   E.g., C. E. E. Luschnig for C. A. E. Luschnig (43), Cavander for Cavender (64), Parker 2106 in the addenda. The bibliographic entry for Gurd provides two dates, the incorrect 1989 and the correct 2005. It is surely misleading to state that "Panhellenic forces under Spartan leadership conquered the Persians in a succession of sea and land battles in 480–79" (15).

2018.06.49

Anthony Kaldellis, A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History's Most Orthodox Empire. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 236. ISBN 9780190625948 (hb). $18.95. ISBN 9780190625955. ebook.

Reviewed by Scott G. Bruce, University of Colorado at Boulder (bruces@colorado.edu)

Version at BMCR home site

Preview

In recent years, historians of Byzantium have attempted to repackage their field for non-specialists (including western medievalists) who still cling tenaciously to the misconception that the history of the Eastern Roman Empire from the rise of Constantine (312 CE) to the fall of Constantinople (1453 CE) is, in a word, boring. Judith Herrin's Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (Princeton UP, 2008) and Averil Cameron's Byzantine Matters (Princeton UP, 2014) are two recent examples of this rehabilitation project. Although they are different in scope and emphasis, they share the same agenda. Written by British Byzantinists at the very top of their field, both of these books present the Eastern Roman Empire as a place of surprising possibilities, as a reservoir of textual and material sources that are useful to think with, and as a millennium-long empire whose history we ignore at our own peril. In short, they make the clear and convincing case that Byzantium is anything but boring.

Anthony Kaldellis's A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities follows in the footsteps of the books by Herrin and Cameron, but takes a completely different approach. Kaldellis is well known as a prolific and intrepid author on Byzantine history, whose published studies and translations range from Procopius to Laonikos Chalkokondyles. His new book is not a history per se, but a collection of pithy anecdotes, both direct translations and paraphrases, drawn primarily from Byzantine authors writing during the millennium between late antiquity and the fall of Constantinople. It is divided into eighteen thematic chapters on the following topics: marriage and the family; unorthodox sex; animals; food and dining; eunuchs; medical practice; science and technology; war; saints; heresy and scandal; "a gallery of rogues"; inventive insults; punishments; foreign lands and people, A.D. 330-641; foreigners and stereotypes, A.D. 641-1453; Latins, Franks, and Germans; disasters; and emperors. As a tribute to the Byzantine compilers he so clearly admires, Kaldellis has produced an entertaining florilegium filled with intriguing and sometimes downright strange information drawn from a thousand years of Byzantine history. His primary purpose is to entertain the reader, but he also hopes to provide scholars lecturing on Byzantium with "a handy reservoir of tales and anecdotes that amusingly illustrate a range of contexts and situations." (p. xi). The book is successful on both counts.

Since A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities has no argument and no structure beyond its chapter themes, it is difficult to summarize coherently, so a few examples will have to suffice. Readers will be surprised to learn that the stereotypically staid and orthodox authors of Byzantium had opinions on a wide range of unexpected topics, including the existence of dragons (p. 41); the consumption and production of cheese (pp. 46 and 48); the fear of dentists, who "wage war against the tongue, the teeth, and the lips" (p. 78); the utility of human excrement during siege warfare (p. 85); spies (p. 102); the art of compound insults (pp. 141-144); gold prosthetic noses (p. 153); and, perhaps most surprisingly, cunnilingus (pp. 15-16). Kaldellis has a good eye for humorous anecdotes, including this piece of advice from a nobleman irritated by the influence of eunuchs in the imperial court: "If you have a eunuch, kill him. If you don't, buy one and then kill him" (p. 62). He also finds gold hidden in manuscript folia, like Tzetzes' colorful marginal notation in a poorly copied exemplar of Thucydides (Palatinus graecus 252, fol. 184v): "The shit of the copyist stinks the worst here" (p. 144).

Most scholars and students will find A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities amusing and informative. A few may find it irreverent and alarming. But no one will doubt that Kaldellis has brought to bear the depth of his knowledge of Byzantine sources to produce a book about Byzantium that non-Byzantinists are very likely to read (even if they do so on the kabinés). In doing so, Kaldellis has performed a valuable work of outreach. Through the lens of this fascinating little florilegium, the stereotypes of Byzantine civilization dissolve and the story of the Eastern Roman Empire becomes more familiar, more humane, and more humorous, that anyone would have expected.

2018.06.48

Walter Duvall Penrose, Jr., Postcolonial Amazons: Female Masculinity and Courage in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit Literature. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xv, 317. ISBN 9780199533374. $95.00.

Reviewed by David Braund, University of Exeter (d.c.braund@exeter.ac.uk)

Version at BMCR home site

Preview

This sparky study of Amazons will find its audience among those concerned with issues of gender and sexuality. Such readers may welcome its conversational style and habitual presentation of more-or-less remote possibilities in the form of unanswered questions. There is something attractive in the avoidance of closure perhaps. However, bouncing questions can also be misleading. Faced, for example, with the overwhelming evidence that Amazons were taken to be sexually interested in men and not women, our author asks: "Could … representations of Amazons loving other Amazons have once existed?" (p.86). Maybe some did, and maybe none did. Either way, it is the strong direction of the evidence available that needs to be treated.

The book is not without virtues. Key texts and images are gathered. There is a welcome concern with the chronology of the various texts and images that we have about Amazons. The stated aim of getting out of Athens tends to imply also a welcome acknowledgment of the importance of place as well as time. However, Athens is a focus of our knowledge and might have been given more thought, nonetheless: the notion (p.102) that Lysias has confused Amazons and Scythians is not only groundless, but seems to imply a failure to grasp the key importance of Amazons to Athenians. Postcolonialism is rather elusive here, but seems in this study to centre upon data drawn from outside Greek culture. There is a general suggestion that Greek culture has somehow imported its Amazons from a world beyond, wherein there were real warrior women. In search of real Amazons we are taken to regions north of the Black Sea, deep into Central Asia and sometimes into Asia Minor to boot, but without any sense of profound engagement with those regions. This is all very fine, perhaps, but there are so many problems in this fearless conspectus that I found it hard to retain faith in what the author had to say about matters in which I am not expert (notably Sanskrit). We are told that this book is a revised and expanded doctoral dissertation (p. vi, where explanation of the title also leaves me no wiser). That and the imprimatur of OUP indicates serious research, but at times I had the sense that I was dealing with something else.

Here there is space to highlight only key problems. First, we need to have a much sharper idea of what "warrior women" might be, for (as the book allows early on) there are plenty of fighting women to be found in Greek history, including the old lady said to have killed Pyrrhus with a well-aimed tile (cf. p. 60). The more searching Greek authors (Strabo, Procopius etc.) are not interested in that kind of warrior woman, but in the larger claim that there was a whole community of warrior women. Meanwhile, we have at least progressed beyond old arguments about capacity, for it is easy enough also to point to women active in fighting roles in modern armies and guerrilla groupings, as well as in military and/or ceremonial roles as bodyguards and the like. It is important to be clear about the object of the quest for "real" Amazons before launching claims that archaeology has found some. This book prefers to throw together a mass of material, without seriously engaging with any of it.

Archaeology has not found Amazons—at least not in the innocent sense that this book evidently means. "Soviet" archaeologists are to the fore, though it is some thirty years since the fall of the USSR. In these more recent years there has been increased interest among archaeologists of these expansive regions in the deposit of weapons in burials involving females. However, we should be clear that the possible connection of such burials with Amazons of any kind is very much a niche concern. The principal serious studies of this issue are those of a single scholar (E. E. Fialko), whose works do not appear in the bibliography of this book. At the same time, as any serious archaeologist knows, a mass of questions and uncertainties surrounds the possible relationship between grave-goods and the lifetime experience of the deceased. Among the further host of more specific issues for women of "Scythia" (a term about which this study is notably imprecise) are abiding problems about the past sexing of skeletons, joint or collective burials and the many possible meanings of any weapons deposited (cf. Herodotus, Lucian etc. on the religious evocations of the sword in Scythian culture). To find a "real" Amazon archaeologically is no small task, especially if we mean a woman who is part of a whole society of such women. Archaeology of other kinds is similarly unsafe here (notably pp. 102-4),

My dreary concerns of this kind may seem unsympathetic towards the adventurous spirit of this book. Instead of piling up objections to the many claims floated, let us cut to the chase. If we suppose that Greeks really did take their Amazons from distant parts (presumably very early in large part, since they are visible at the outset of archaic Greece), we are left to wonder whether that would affect the complex function(s) of Amazons in the course of the many Greek and Roman centuries that followed. Attempts to locate the actual Troy of Homer's Iliad have not in my view made a difference to readings of the poem, whether ancient or modern. It is true that modern culture wants to know whether Amazons really existed (in the most simple sense), for many different reasons, but there is something rather Victorian about such a quest for the simple truth of complex myths, especially when diffusionism is the proffered answer. Our author needs to show why Amazon origins matter, if they indeed do. Of course that is not to deny that Greek ideas about Amazons were affected by contact with other societies (the point is routinely made with regard to Persians), but this is Greek application of Amazon myth in the construction of non-Greeks, not merely the Greek discovery of Amazons among them. Finally a word on "female masculinity": a straw poll of females who happened to cross my path leads me to suspect that the term is not universally popular.

2018.06.47

Evy Johanne Håland, Rituals of Death and Dying in Modern and Ancient Greece: Writing History from a Female Perspective. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. Pp. xvii, 672. ISBN 9781443861274. £73.99.

Reviewed by Tommaso Braccini, Università di Torino (tommaso.braccini@unito.it)

Version at BMCR home site

Preview

The objectives, and the potential for novelty, of the book under review are stated in its introductory pages. Håland, a researcher with competence in Classical literature and decades of ethnographic field experience in Mediterranean countries, aims at giving a broad overview of Greek "death cults" from antiquity to the present. The term "death cult" has to be understood in a very broad sense, including both the honors paid by family members to their deceased loved ones and the public rituals involving heroic figures or saints, up to the Panagia herself, the Virgin Mary. In carrying out her research, the author has chosen a gendered approach and a "gyno-inclusive perspective", observing that, although the sources in our possession—above all those regarding antiquity—express a male point of view, nevertheless the most important role in funeral rituals is played by women. The study of modern Greek customs about the cult of the dead could therefore help us, in the author's view, to integrate our knowledge of what actually happened in similar circumstances in the ancient world, allowing us to bypass the androcentric bias, often dismissive towards the world view and the values expressed by the female component of society.

From the first chapter ("Death Rituals and the Cult of the Dead in Greece"), the author shows herself well aware of criticisms made in recent decades, in particular by Loring Danforth, of "survivalist" approaches, which are accused of being mainly motivated by ideology.¹ Her choice, however, is not to refrain from suggesting, when the concordance between ancient and modern practices allows it, a formal and ideological continuity in the relationship of women (and also, consequently, of men) to death and the dead. As for modern practices, in addition to the previous literature, the author draws on her own field work conducted in Greece from the 1990s to 2013, in particular on the islands of Tinos, Cephalonia and Aegina.

The second chapter ("Fieldwork: Modern Saints' Festivals") is dedicated to a very detailed exposition of some festivals in which the author took part, often over a number of years. This allows her to document the evolution of the cult practices and their adaptation to the extremely severe economic crisis that has hit Greece in recent years. The festivals under observation commemorate the Annunciation of the Panagia and the Vision of Saint Pelagia (both in Tinos), Saint Gerasimos in Kephalonia and Saint Nektarios in Aegina, the latter a recent saint (d. 1920) whose cult is quickly spreading in Romania and Russia. In the first two occurrences, at the center of the "death cult" is the icon of the Virgin; in the last two cases, the focus is on the remains and the tombs of the two holy men. Gerasimos' relics are carried in procession and literally "passed over" the sick, lying down along the road, while pilgrims to the feast of Saint Nektarios leave supplication letters near his tomb and put their ear to his coffin to hear the steps of the saint inside; some of them are convinced they saw him open one eye when his head was solemnly carried in a procession. This chapter, as well as the following, is illustrated by black and white photographs taken by the author, documenting the practices referred to.

The third chapter is entitled "The Cult of the Saints, Heroes, Heroines and Other Exceptional Dead." Håland considers these figures as mediators with the supernatural (capable of both good and "malevolent" miracles), and substantially equivalent to each other (pace Brown and others). Major and minor divinities also enter the equation: so the Easter rites on Tinos (focusing on the death and resurrection of Christ), and the festival of the Dormition of the Virgin, are assimilated respectively to the ceremonies in honor of Adonis (but also to Dionysiac rites and the Eleusinian mysteries) and the Panathenaia in Athens. Sometimes some aspects of these ceremonies, like the throwing of wreaths in the sea during a Good Friday procession, have a "mythopoietic" value, i.e. they stimulate the creation of more or less unfounded aetiologies by the faithful, puzzled by their obscure symbolism. It also emerges how often, in modern festivals, there is a discrepancy between the prescriptions of the religious authorities and the actual behavior of the faithful, recalling how some cult practices attested in antiquity, usually those that were the prerogative of women or popular strata, were also frowned upon or actually discouraged by the ruling class.

This last aspect is discussed in detail (with a strong stance against "Detienne's masculinist view" of the Adonia) in the fourth chapter, "Laments and Burials", based mainly on fieldwork conducted in Tinos, Athens, the village of Olympos on Karpathos, and the southern Mani peninsula in the Peloponnese. Funeral lamentations, the author states, are an important female prerogative from Homer onwards, and since antiquity they have always been repressed (in vain) by male authorities. In addition to the written sources, Håland also draws material for comparison from ancient iconography, and makes extensive use of earlier literature, in particular of the work of M. Alexiou. Given the fact that Håland is placing Greek customs into a Mediterranean context, however, and considering her fieldwork experience in southern Italy, it is somewhat surprising that she does not refer, even in passing, to Ernesto De Martino's work, especially Morte e pianto rituale: dal lamento funebre antico al pianto di Maria, first published in 1958 (new ed. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000).

In the fifth chapter ("Tombs and gifts"), Håland describes the contemporary habit of bringing gifts to graves (for example, toy cars in the case of a dead boy) and food offerings for the dead in cemeteries. Primary occasions for these contacts between the living and the dead are the so-called psychosavvata (Saturdays dedicated to the souls of the departed). Cleaning the graves and bringing the appropriate food offerings are an expression of what the author calls the "poetics of womanhood". The desire to excel in this area often leads to a real competition between women attending the rituals, a competition that is completely ignored by men – as perhaps happened also in ancient times. In fact, parallels with grave offerings in antiquity are evident; while discussing their literary attestations, the author also dwells on the figure of Clytemnestra and her role.

The sixth chapter ("The Cult of the Bones") deals with so-called secondary burial, i.e. the modern custom (frowned upon by the orthodox Church, which considers it somewhat redolent of paganism) of exhuming and recovering the bones of the deceased some time after death (usually a year or more); the bones are then placed in an ossuary. The importance of the bones of ancestors (seen as mediators with the gods), both in antiquity and in modern times, is illustrated by the custom of transferring them in case of migration, or of burning them to keep them out of the hands of the enemy. Håland deals also with the bones of saints, which were distributed among the faithful to be worshipped as relics. The possibility that what was left of sacrificial victims could be similarly divided and used as talismans is also raised, in order to explain the lack of any skeletal remains on the site of Mount Lykaion in Arcadia, which according to Plato and Pausanias was the site of human sacrifices in honor of Zeus Lykaios.

The following chapter ("The Cult of the Deceased Mediators") focuses, among other things, on the fertility rites that were dedicated in antiquity to deities like Adonis and Demeter, and now to "special dead" like Christ, the Panagia or the saints. The author notes that, at times, an actual continuity can be found in Greece between the local cult of a saint in modern times and the quite similar cult of a deity or a heroic figure in antiquity. Among other examples, she highlights the case of the Panagia church located very close to the Eleusis archaeological site, where the Virgin, on the occasion of the Panagia Mesosporitissa festival in November, "receives a similar offering in connection with the sowing as the Eleusinian Goddesses once did" (p. 426, see also p. 281-284). While this comparison is undoubtedly thought-provoking for the festival in general (which is celebrated, although under various names, in many other places in Greece), the specific focus on Eleusis, albeit fascinating, may be somewhat misleading. Eleusis was totally depopulated in the modern age, and was resettled by Albanians,² making it extremely difficult to conceive of any actual continuity of the Eleusinian cult in loco. On the other hand, it is much easier to document the overlapping of saints, heroes and deities in the role of protectors of a community: the case of the rescue of Athens from the attack of the Visigoths in 395 CE, attributed both to the Panagia and to Athena (and Achilles) seems exemplary.

In the eighth chapter ("Communication between the Living and the Dead"), the author makes a strong point about the difference between the official tenets of the Church on the afterlife, and folk beliefs on the same subject. Food offerings, the idea that the soul wanders on Earth for forty days after death, grave gifts (with a sexual symbolism for those dedicated to young men and women who died before marriage), even the official rhetoric about "heroes fallen for their country", all point towards a kind of continuity with pre-Christian conceptions.

The short final chapter ("Some Concluding Reflections on Gender and Death in Greece, the Interpretation of Greek History, and the Wider World") sums up the research results, placing them in the context of Kristeva's and Dubisch's bipartition between the linear conception of time, typical of the male world, and the cyclical one, typical of the female world. The author, however, admits that the opposition between the two systems is not absolute, since female and male value systems are "both complementary and interdependent". Moreover, Håland reiterates that the Greek case is not isolated, but must be placed in a wider context that extends to the Balkans and the entire Mediterranean.

The book is completed by a glossary of Greek terms, an extensive bibliography and a very useful index that spans more than forty pages and is absolutely essential in order to track down topics which tend to be taken up several times and discussed separately in the various chapters. Sometimes, in order to fully understand certain references (like the few but tantalizing hints concerning the Babo festival at Monokklesia), it may be useful to consult Håland's work on the Greek festivals.³

Rituals of death and dying in modern and ancient Greece is nevertheless a very informative work on its own, offering a very valuable and often overlooked point of view – that of women – on Greek death rituals and cults. The attempt to link modern practices with ancient ones places many irons in the fire and, as is only to be expected, some claims may need further investigation, while others have the potential for controversy. All in all, however, this is a welcome contribution to the field, and its vivid descriptions of modern practices, in my opinion, make it a real treasure trove for anyone who wants to study Greek religion, using a synchronic or diachronic approach, with particular reference to the funerary sphere.

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Notes:

1.   See L. Danforth, "The ideological context of the search for continuities in Greek culture", in JMGS 1 (1984), 53–85.
2.   See G.E. Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 9-10.
3.   E.J. Håland, Greek Festivals, Modern and Ancient. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017).

2018.06.46

Jennifer Chi, Rachel Herschman, Kenneth D. S. Lapatin (ed.), Restoring the Minoans: Elizabeth Price and Sir Arthur Evans. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. 132. ISBN 9780691178691. $35.00 (pb).

Reviewed by Katy Soar, University of Winchester (katy.soar@winchester.ac.uk)

Version at BMCR home site

Preview

In 2013, Turner Prize-winning artist Elizabeth Price was commissioned to create a new artwork based on the collections of the Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers Museum. The final product, A Restoration, was displayed at the Ashmolean between March and May 2016 and received universally positive reviews. The video installation reinterpreted images from Arthur Evans' archaeological excavations at Knossos between 1900 and 1930 by layering them with electronic music and the voices of computer-generated narrators—a 'chorus' of museum administrators, who use Evans' excavation archive to create a new restoration of Knossos, one which draws on the present and the future much as it does on the past. Following its display in Oxford, A Restoration travelled to the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) in New York, where it was exhibited from October 2017 to January 2018 alongside pieces loaned from the Ashmolean from Evans' excavations at Knossos as well as his archival material.

The ISAW exhibition is the basis for this beautifully presented and illustrated book, and, like the exhibition, the question of the boundary between interpretation and invention when it comes to reconstructing the past is at its heart. The juxtaposition of Arthur Evan's original recreation of the Minoan world and Price's modern reimagining offers insight into the subjectivity of our understanding of the past as well as the influence of the contemporary world on this understanding.

In the introduction, Rachel Herschman (curatorial assistant at ISAW) provides a brief but succinct overview of Evans' excavations at Knossos and his aim to make the Bronze Age civilisation 'intelligible to other men' (p. 17)—an aim that was to influence his work at the site and indeed the popular and scholarly conception of the Minoans for many years. Evans' 'reconstitution' is discussed, focusing in particular on the works of Émile Gilliéron père and fils, remembered primarily as the father-son team who restored the fresco fragments found at Knossos; here the focus lies in their role as second only to Evans in shaping our image of the Minoans. This discussion is supported with multiple clear and impressive colour illustrations, including many that will be new to some readers, such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's lithographs, which were both inspired by and inspired the Knossos fresco reconstitutions. Herschman's consideration of the Gilliérons' work is concise and objective, although she does not shy away from its tendentiousness. Price's contemporary work is then discussed, first setting up the background to the project and then situating it within this context of prior reconstitution. The chapter ends with a brief overview of the remainder of the book.

The central chapter and heart of the book is an interview between Elizabeth Price and Jennifer Y. Chi (then chief curator and exhibitions director of the ISAW) which covers Price's previous work, her creative practice, the creation of A Restoration, and her impressions of Evans himself. The discussion in the previous introductory chapter, on the influences of contemporary artistic styles and cultural developments on Evans' reconstitutions, sets up Price's introduction to and exploration of the Evans' archive at the Ashmolean. She was given the entirety of the Ashmolean and Pitt-Rivers collections to explore, but it was the 'permissiveness and excessiveness' (p. 41) of Evans' Archive which ultimately drew her in. In discussing her practice of video-making as a form of bricolage and her interest in the shifting contexts of artefacts and archives, Price reflects on how this led to a sense of recognition when she first confronted Evans' commissioned watercolours of Knossos, as she questioned whether this familiarity was a result of viewing them through her own prism of knowledge or Evans'. Whose history—Price's, Evans' or the Minoans'—were reflected in this recognition? This questioning of the historicity of Evans' reconstruction led to A Restoration, her attempt to disentangle these multiple histories and to create a restoration of Evans' restoration. Screenshots of her work are interspersed throughout the transcript of the conversation, giving the reader a hint as to how the finished project appeared to its viewers at the Ashmolean and the ISAW. A major drawback here is that for those who haven't seen A Restoration, the discussion and glimpses of her work offer only tantalising clues of the finished piece.

The third chapter, by Kenneth Lapatin, is the longest of the book and traces Evans' impact from his early days as the Ashmolean's Keeper to his purchase and excavation of the land at Knossos, and his subsequent discoveries and—at times hyperbolic—interpretations of the finds, which were often filtered, consciously or not, through his own contemporary experiences, desires, and knowledge of Classical history and literature. Thus the then-undeciphered Linear B tablets discovered in the first weeks of excavation became the Laws of Minos and the forerunners of later Greek legal codes. While today we know this interpretation to be unambiguously incorrect, as an anecdote it serves to illustrate Evans' predilection for collapsing archaeological fact and whimsical interpretation. Lapatin's lively review includes more examples of Evans' dynamic creation of a world of 'beauty, grace and transcendence' (p. 63), but also the wider reception of the 'modernity' of these finds in a world where sanitation and plumbing, corsets, and Art Nouveau (all reflected in these Minoan discoveries) were the very epitome of haute. A consideration of a central artefact of the exhibition appears towards the end of the chapter: the ivory figurine christened 'Our Lady of the Sports'. In his desire to find evidence for female bull-leapers, Evans' accepted this forgery as fact, and Lapatin (unsurprisingly given his previous research¹) eruditely discusses the manufacture of forgeries that Evans' excavations and the subsequent demand for Minoan antiquities created. As an art piece, however, the gold and ivory figurine provides a perfect metaphor for Evans' work: the mingling of the ancient and the modern, the contemporary creation of an ancient past. Finally, Lapatin acknowledges the wider influence of Evans and his excavations on such seminal twentieth-century figures as Sigmund Freud and Pablo Picasso, as well as contemporary figures such as Karl Lagerfeld. It is within this broader background of influence, inspiration and creation that Lapatin places Price's work, noting, however, that she goes beyond simple reference or homage by interrogating the process through which we create our archaeological knowledge.

The preceding three chapters are lavishly illustrated—which in itself makes the book highly desirable for anybody interested in Minoan archaeology—and the final chapter offers additional illustrations of Minoan artefacts, artfully staged photographs of pottery, and watercolour reconstructions of the frescoes, many of which are published here for the first time.

Price's work is fascinating and highlights the interplay between imagination and scholarly endeavour that encapsulated Evans' work—and indeed all archaeological reconstruction to some degree. It is a shame her work is not available to view online, as that would only serve to emphasise further the parallels between her piece and Evans' creation. For example, Evans' use of the most up-to-date material available in order to preserve his vision (ferro-concrete in his case) is echoed in Price's work through the use of digital imagery, hosted by a computer server, to bring her Knossos to life.

While the book offers little in the way of new information for the scholar of Minoan Crete, it is not its intent to do so, and therefore should not be considered a drawback. Herschman and Lapatin's well-written, scholarly yet accessible chapters act as literary equivalents of the exhibitions which frame Price's art piece. This book offers a window into Price's work for those, like this author, who did not have the pleasure of seeing it first-hand. It is also beautifully presented, and worthy of inclusion on any bookshelf for its rich and informative archival images alone.

The central concept of this book regarding how the past is made accessible and meaningful is doubly resonant. It offers a valuable insight into archaeological reconstruction and the interplay of excavation and contemporary culture, as well as new perspectives on how we create our narratives of the past and the ways we make them resonate in the present to assure they continue to be remembered in the future.

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Notes:

1.   Kenneth Lapatin, Mysteries of the Snake Goddess: Art, Desire, and the Forging of History. (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).

2018.06.45

Lynne C. Lancaster, Innovative Vaulting in the Architecture of the Roman Empire: 1st to 4th Centuries CE. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xxvi, 254. ISBN 9781107059351. $99.99.

Reviewed by Filipe Ferreira, Sorbonne Université (ferreira.fjc@gmail.com)

Version at BMCR home site

Preview

Le présent ouvrage de Lynne C. Lancaster s'inscrit dans la suite logique de ses nombreux travaux sur les modes de construction romains et sur les voûtes et les coupoles. Souvent considérées comme une véritable prouesse technique, elles ont souvent été évaluées à l'aune des grands édifices de l'Urbs comme le Panthéon. Le contenu de l'ouvrage dépasse largement le cadre de la première étude monographique de l'auteur sur les voûtes de la ville de Rome et invite le lecteur à se tourner vers les provinces de l'Empire.

L'ouvrage est divisé en 9 chapitres accompagnés de nombreuses cartes, schémas et photographies, chacun d'une grande qualité et illustrant de manière efficace les propos de l'auteur. Cette documentation est complétée par de nombreuses notes en fin de chapitre et plusieurs figures malheureusement dématérialisées, mais aisément téléchargeables en ligne sur le site de Cambridge University Press. En guise d'introduction, l'auteur se propose de déterminer quels facteurs sont entrés en jeu dans l'adoption d'une technique de voûtement et s'il est possible de les mettre en relation avec une période précise et une aire géographique définie.

L'auteur s'appuie sur la théorisation technologique établie par K. Greene (p. 4), selon qui l'invention ou la découverte d'une technique, son développement et sa diffusion sont déterminés par les connaissances accumulées préalablement dans différents domaines, l'existence d'un besoin, la présence d'un contexte économique favorable et une acceptation sociale des nouvelles pratiques technologiques. L'auteur entend donc appliquer cette approche à l'étude des voûtes et des coupoles dans les provinces de l'empire romain en se détachant des approches primitivistes ou positivistes en vogue jusqu'à aujourd'hui (pp. 5-6) : l'objectif est de souligner l'inventivité et l'autonomie dont ont fait preuve les constructeurs en contexte provincial sans pour autant nier les apports techniques proprement romains toutefois réévalués à leur juste mesure.

L'auteur réalise, du chapitre 2 au chapitre 7, plusieurs synthèses régionales s'étendant du Levant à la péninsule ibérique, et de l'Égypte à la Bretagne, en passant par la Grèce et l'Asie Mineure. Ces chapitres sont d'une grande clarté et rigoureusement organisés selon une même démarche. L'auteur débute par une description technique des solutions de voûtement analysées et de leurs antécédents dans les différentes régions avant qu'elles soient intégrées dans l'Empire. Plusieurs variantes d'un même type de voûtement sont ensuite exposées. Enfin, chaque chapitre se termine par une mise en perspective des modes de construction choisis avec le contexte politique et économique de la province.

La voûte maçonnée en opus caementicium fait l'objet du chapitre 2. L'auteur souligne le rôle structurel joué par les matériaux entrant dans la composition du mortier, comme la pouzzolane, pour alléger les voûtes ou pour entrer dans la composition d'un mortier hydraulique (p. 22). Lancaster rappelle d'ailleurs que toute roche volcanique ne permet pas l'hydraulicité du mortier et que plusieurs alternatives pouvaient être utilisées comme le tuf, la kaolinite, ou encore certaines terres cuites et matériaux organiques (p. 25). Il est également important de souligner la mise à jour très utile du vocabulaire, antique et actuel, généralement utilisé pour désigner les mortiers. La question de l'usage progressif des caementa dans les voûtes d'Italie et des provinces est ensuite abordée et l'auteur se demande si la présence de pouzzolane a permis un développement particulier de l'architecture voûtée en Italie au détriment des provinces, revenant sur un argument souvent avancé pour expliquer les grandes voûtes de plusieurs monuments campaniens. Les constructeurs des provinces n'avaient pas nécessairement recours à la pouzzolane, mais ils disposaient d'autres foyers d'approvisionnement que l'Italie ou employaient parfois d'autres matériaux au propriétés similaires (p. 37).

Dans le chapitre 3, l'auteur traite des voûtes dont l'armature est constituée de briques disposées en tranches ou en arceaux, ou combinant les deux, retrouvées en Grèce et en Asie Mineure. Elle démontre que leur usage, originellement dédié à l'architecture hydraulique, s'est généralisé sous le règne de Trajan à la suite des campagnes menées contre les Parthes. Les briques cuites disposées radialement permettaient notamment d'augmenter la portée de la voûte, de mieux en maîtriser la jonction avec le mur et d'utiliser moins de mortier allégeant ainsi la structure (pp. 49-50). En Asie Mineure, le développement des voûtes en briques cuites a également été favorisé par la présence de membres des élites locales dans la capitale de l'Empire, comme les Celsii, mais il ne s'agit pas tant de l'adoption d'un mode de construction romain que du développement d'une nouvelle économie de la terre cuite architecturale dans la région (pp. 66-69).

Dans le chapitre suivant, l'auteur traite de mises en œuvre plus originales de la brique à la fin du II^e s. ap. J.-C., notamment en contexte privé où la voûte en calotte carrée et la disposition en éventail ont été favorisées et améliorées. Ainsi, un large panel d'exemples existe en Asie Mineure dans les maisons et les thermes d'Ephèse (pp. 79-82), dans les tombes de Sidé (pp. 83-85) ou encore dans les thermes d'Aspendos (p. 85). Ces expériences, mises à profit dans l'architecture funéraire et thermale comme le montrent le mausolée de Galerius à Thessalonique et les bains d'Asclépios à Épidaure, permirent quelques générations plus tard de couvrir des espaces bien plus importants comme l'illustre la coupole du mausolée de Dioclétien à Split (pp. 89-94).

L'usage de tubes de terre cuite en Afrique constitue l'objet du chapitre 5. Ils ont été utilisés entre le II^e et le I^er s. av. J.-C. en Espagne et dans le sud de la France. Adoptés par la suite en Afrique romaine en contexte thermal et privé, les tubes ont connu une diffusion rapide. Cette technique de construction a été récupérée par les militaires dans la région en raison de la facilité de sa mise en œuvre, favorisant la création de nouvelles formes de voûtement impossibles à réaliser à l'aide de cintres. L'usage des tubes permettait également d'économiser la main-d'œuvre, un seul homme étant capable de réaliser une voûte de faible dimension à l'aide d'un mortier à prise rapide (pp. 106 et 118), mais aussi de pallier l'absence de bois dans des régions où ce dernier pouvait atteindre des sommes importantes (pp. 115-118). L'usage des tubes a également favorisé la construction de nouvelles formes de voûtes aux articulations complexes, impossibles à réaliser si des cintres en bois étaient employés, et au poids largement diminué, permettant l'ajout de toitures (pp. 122-128).

Le chapitre 6 concerne l'usage des voussoirs creux en terre cuite essentiellement utilisés à partir des années 60-70 ap. J.-C. dans l'architecture thermale en Bretagne romaine. La présence de ces voussoirs creux permettait initialement la circulation de l'air chaud dans les voûtes, l'épaississement constaté dans les générations de voussoirs suivantes impliquent qu'ils aient pris une fonction structurelle (pp. 132-135). Le développement de l'architecture monumentale, et encore une fois, des constructions thermales au début du II^e s. a encouragé la production de ces voussoirs largement diffusés dans l'île. Ce succès s'explique par l'économie de bois engendrée par l'allègement de la voûte : outre son économie dans la construction, les voussoirs creux permettaient une préservation de la chaleur entraînant une économie des ressources combustibles (p. 140).

Enfin, les briques à épaulements des provinces ibériques et de la Narbonnaise sont étudiées dans le chapitre 7. L'auteur évoque différentes hypothèses qui justifient leur utilisation dans les thermes, cette fois privés, où elles ont souvent été retrouvées. Après avoir éliminé une partie d'entre elles, Lancaster met en évidence les nombreux avantages offerts par ce type de couvrement diffusé à la fin du I^er s. ap. J.-C. qui permet de protéger efficacement les poutres des toitures de l'humidité ambiante propre aux salles thermales (p. 161). Leur diffusion dans l'Ouest est due à la culture thermale aussi bien publique que privée et l'auteur souligne l'existence de corpus distincts de l'Espagne au Maroc (pp. 169-171).

Le chapitre 8 se divise en plusieurs sections : après avoir théorisé une méthode d'analyse de la répartition des lignes de forces à partir des connaissances mathématiques et physiques de l'Antiquité pour chaque technique de voûtement exposée (pp. 177-181), l'auteur applique ces différents résultats théoriques à plusieurs monuments de son étude (l'avantage du voussoir creux par rapport à la brique, la Source Sacrée du temple de Sulis Minerva à Bath et les thermes nord de Cimiez). Son objectif est de déterminer si les réponses matérielles apportées par les architectes étaient appropriées au couvrement de certains espaces et permettaient de prévoir, de repousser, ou d'éviter, le point de rupture d'une voûte.

En conclusion, le dernier chapitre de l'ouvrage répond de façon nuancée aux problématiques initialement posées. L'auteur met en avant les différents facteurs technologiques, économiques et sociaux qui ont influencé les choix des commanditaires. Le développement des techniques de voûtement est principalement dû aux avancées de l'architecture thermale ayant entraîné une nouvelle économie de la terre cuite architecturale, elle-même encouragée par la déforestation du pourtour méditerranéen : si les combustibles étaient toujours faciles à dénicher, il restait difficile de se procurer des pièces de grandes tailles pour la construction des cintres notamment. L'objectif était de minimiser le bois hors-œuvre afin de favoriser son utilisation dans des structures pérennes (pp. 198-199). Enfin, l'auteur conclut sur le rôle de l'armée dans la diffusion de nouvelles technologies et celui des centres intellectuels comme Alexandrie dans la création de nouvelles combinaisons géométriques (pp. 199-202).

On ne peut qu'être impressionné par le nombre important de sites analysés par l'auteur dans cette étude. L'exhaustivité des exemples présentés renforce considérablement le propos de l'auteur qui s'attache aussi à souligner certaines exceptions géographiques ou chronologiques. Ainsi, la présence anecdotique en Gaule et en Germanie de voussoirs creux en terre cuite, de même que leur rapide réapparition au IV^e s. en Bretagne romaine, encouragent l'auteur à proposer de nouvelles hypothèses pour expliquer ces cas particuliers qui diffèrent peu des premiers modèles attestés. Il est d'ailleurs nécessaire de saluer l'important travail typo-chronologique des voûtes, des coupoles et de leurs matériaux de construction car il n'avait pas encore été proposé de façon aussi complète. On retiendra notamment les typologies réalisées pour les tubes en terre cuite et les briques à claveaux qui constituent d'importants compléments aux travaux réalisées antérieurement par Alain Bouet pour le sud de la France.

Il aurait été intéressant de développer certaines questions concernant les constructions mixtes et l'intérêt de ces associations. On regrettera peut-être aussi que quelques images ne soient pas publiées, mais plutôt mises en ligne sur le site de l'éditeur. Quelques erreurs mineures sont également à noter comme la localisation de la ville de Badajoz et de Estremoz qui sont inversées (Fig. 113, p. 175).

Bien entendu, ces quelques remarques restent de l'ordre du détail et n'enlèvent rien à la grande qualité de cet imposant travail de recherche. L'étude de Lynne C. Lancaster se distingue nettement des ouvrages dédiés à la construction romaine qui, la plupart du temps, exposent les modes de construction sans en préciser les aires de diffusion et la chronologie. Les exemples utilisés dans ces travaux ne constituent pas un catalogue des techniques de construction des différentes voûtes existant dans l'Empire romain. Ils forment une base solide qui, par la mise en place d'un protocole d'étude rigoureux, permet à l'auteur d'exposer les raisons qui ont poussé les constructeurs à avoir recours à un mode de construction et à un matériau précis. Cet ouvrage incite également les chercheurs à recontextualiser de façon permanente les modes de construction observés et offre toute une série de jalons chronologiques utiles. Il met en évidence les traditions régionales, les savoirs techniques apportés par les Romains et les liens politiques et économiques entretenus entre les élites et la capitale comme des facteurs ayant joué un rôle déterminant dans la création, la diffusion, l'adoption ou l'amélioration d'un système de voûtement.