T HE CL AS S I CAL RE VIEW

361

debate on whether Socrates himself was a sophist. W. seems to take Plato at his word, assuming that Socrates was not. In her discussion of oratory (Chapter 5), W. centres upon the acrimonious relationship between Demosthenes and Aeschines as played out in their speeches about the Macedonian threat. W. demonstrates that the speeches of both speakers are replete with images pertaining to the mouth and appetites; while Demosthenes is often characterised by Aeschines as an effeminate chatterbox, Aeschines is characterised by Demosthenes as a vulgar, loud-mouthed demagogue. What is of particular interest here is W.s discussion of how the orators could turn what might be construed as a weakness (e.g. Demosthenes shrill voice) into a strength (he is less polished and therefore more trustworthy than the actor Aeschines) and vice versa. It is no easy task to negotiate such a diverse range of literary material, and W.s grasp of her subject is admirable. This study is carefully researched and well presented, and there is a clear emphasis upon organisation and structured argumentation. That said, there is often considerable overlap between subjects (specic comic characters are discussed in more than one section in Chapter 2; Socrates is discussed in several chapters), and this can result in a feeling of repetition. While it is difcult to know how this might have been avoided, an organisation around theme (such as sophists; demagogues; mocking women, etc.) rather than genre might have helped to minimise this. Moreover, while this study is commendable for drawing out the profusion of analogies with the mouth and appetite in Athenian literature, I would have liked to see more engagement with the broader question why the mouth was so central to Athenian analogy. These critiques do not, however, detract from the overall merit of the book and its valuable contribution to the study of ancient invective. Cleveland State University KELLY L. WRENHAVEN k.wrenhaven@csuohio.edu

WA N D E R I N G P O E T S H U N T E R (R.), R U T H E R F O R D (I.) (edd.) Wandering Poets in Ancient Greek Culture. Travel, Locality, and Pan-Hellenism. Pp. xiv + 313, ills, map. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Cased, 55, US$99. ISBN: 978-0-521-89878-2.
doi:10.1017/S0009840X10000144

This is a valuable collection on an important topic. To quote the Editors, Travel and wandering are persistent elements in both the reality and the imaginaire of Greek poetry, and intellectual and cultural life more generally, from the earliest days. The contributions show the myriad ways in which a simple fact (poets and texts wander) could work in the cultures collective memory both empirically (the foreign poet might create or transform civic identity in the places he visited, and the movement of performers and songs contributed to the emergence of cultural and political Hellenism) and mythically, as a site of social memory (a place where the idea of belonging to a city or people, or a wider sphere of Pan-Hellenic culture, met the narratives of musical tradition). The focus is on the Archaic and Hellenistic periods, but some contributions extend discussion back to the Bronze Age or forward to the Roman Empire.
The Classical Review vol. 60 no. 2 The Classical Association 2010; all rights reserved

362

T HE CL AS S I CAL RE VIEW

The Introduction by H. and R. a detailed diachronic and cross-cultural survey is of a seriousness unusual in a book of this kind. The chapters open with Mary Bachvarovas Hittite and Greek Perspectives on Travelling Poets, Texts, and Festivals. She argues that Greek forms of phraseology, ritual mimesis and prayer have parallels in Hittite verbal art and ritual, and that they may have been imported or adapted through exchanges of musicians and ritual experts. Although Hittite ritual texts mention no wandering poets, they attest that gods and their associated religious practitioners could move from place to place, and also describe several supraregional festivals. While one might perhaps posit typological similarities or indirect transmission to explain some of the parallels she nds, Bachvarova gives us a convincing account of the Bronze Age Aegean as a zone of EastWest contact. Peter Wilsons brilliant, speculative Thamyris the Thracian: the Archetypal Wandering Poet? reads a Homeric myth (Il. 2.591600) as a statement about poetics, within a framework of ongoing competition between genres and performance traditions. He begins in the pre-literary period. Thamyris, the singer who challenged the Muses to a contest and was punished for his pride, represents a Peloponnesian tradition of song excluded by Homers Pan-Hellenic tradition; more generally, he represents competition between the genres of citharody and hexameter epic. Thamyris the citharode is the bridge to the second half of the essay, where the meaning of the myth in fth-century Athens is examined through a discussion of Sophocles fragmentary Thamyras, and then of Thamyris probable role as a mythical predecessor for the composers and kitharistai of the New Music. Richard Martins entertaining Read on Arrival describes a famous scene from Aristophanes Birds (lines 90457) as an interaction between a wandering poet and his patron. Invoking typological parallels from other cultures, he analyses familiar conventions in Bacchylides and Pindar as responses to the demands of arriving in a new place. He identies strategies by which the outsider-poet can assert his authority. To equate Aristophanes pay-per-poem scheme with the reality of patronage and performance involves undeniable dangers, but the chapter is an engaging account of a fth-century democratic dramatists critique of the Archaic lyric masters. Ewen Bowies chapter, Wandering Poets, Archaic Style, tries to disentangle the reality of poetic travel and patronage from Archilochus to Simonides from a web of biographical anecdote and the often fragmentary texts. The chapter proceeds by genre (iambos, elegy, solo and choral melos), showing how the connection between travel and the poetic vocation evolved, arguing for the centrality of aristocratic patterns of xenia even in the lives of tyrant-employed professionals like Ibycus, Anacreon and Simonides, and presenting some interesting if speculative biographical readings. The next two chapters are a high point of the volume, and it is hard to do them justice in a narrow summary. Giovan Battista DAlessio, in Dening Local Identities in Greek Lyric Poetry, writes that song was a means of articulating civic identity; why, then, he asks, did so many communities choose to entrust this work to foreigners? In the rst part he undertakes a study of processional odes for performance by foreign choirs on Delos, culminating in a reading of the passage from the Birds mentioned above. Only rarely, he argues, was poetic city praise spontaneous narrative (p. 167), its forms rooted in local tradition. In their Pan-Hellenic diction, imagery and circulation, the songs pointed beyond the polis. In the second part he examines the communal voices of solo and choral song,

T HE CL AS S I CAL RE VIEW

363

showing how stock motifs of poetry could be redeployed in local contexts. He begins with a rereading of Tyrtaeus elegies as self-representation by the Spartan polis (lines formulated in such a way that anyone belonging to the community could identify himself in the poetic voice, p. 151), and ends with Pindars second and fourth Paeans (the voice of the polis, reconstructing its own past, p. 159). Like Wilson, Lucia Prauscello, Wandering Poetry, Travelling Music: Timotheus Muse and Some Case-studies of Shifting Cultural Identities, examines the rich symbolic discourse of Greek music, taking as her subject Timotheus of Miletus, the late fth century star citharode and composer of the New Dithyramb. With its unchallenged role in paideia, music was for the Greeks a site of memory, and the New Music, whose cultural signicance (progress or decadence?) was bitterly debated, a site of contestation. Two examples are discussed. The rst purports to be a decree of the Spartans recording the punishment of Timotheus for breaking the rules of a musical agn at the festival of Eleusinian Demeter. Then there is Polybius (4.20.812) on the Arcadians fondness for Timotheus, which Prauscello argues was probably partly motivated by hostility toward Sparta. In Epigrammatic Contests, Poeti Vaganti, and Local History Andrej Petrovic tells us that Greek states commissioned poets to write inscriptions for public monuments, and seem often to have engaged outsiders. Commissions were occasionally awarded in competition and their impact surpassed the boundaries of the polis, local group, or political lite that sponsored them (p. 195). Epigram was another Panhellenic discourse of the local. Sophia Aneziris World Travellers: the Associations of Artists of Dionysus describes the structures an unparalleled explosion of festival culture, and the institutional framework provided by the Artists of Dionysus that sustained the intense patterns of cultural mobility prevalent in the Hellenistic world and Empire. She tracks the emergence of the Artists, rst as regional associations from the third century B.C. onward, and then as a unied organisation for the whole oikoumen, showing how they protected performers interests and helped to create a single Greco-Roman culture. The chapter will be a point of reference for students and scholars. R.s chapter, Aristodama and the Aetolians: an Itinerant Poetess and Her Agenda, examines two decrees on stone from the late third century B.C. which commemorate Aristodama, a woman poet from Smyrna who won citizenship and other rights from cities of northwest Greece for her performances of epics in praise of those communities and the Aetolians. R. discusses the possible implications of Aristodamas tour (her performances, he says, were probably part of an Aetolian campaign of propaganda through poetry and myth), and surveys the evidence for other travelling female performers. Angelos Chaniotis begins his essay, Travelling Memories in the Hellenistic World, on a morning in 206 B.C. when ambassadors from Kytenion in Doris made a plea for help to the citizens of Xanthos in Lycia, justifying themselves with arguments drawn from myth and genealogy. In the Hellenistic period, knowledge of the past was still transmitted mostly through performances: travelling performers, each in their different media (speeches by envoys or orators; public lectures by itinerant scholars and historians on legendary or contemporary history; poetic recitals) helped to shape local and Pan-Hellenic identities. The essay is a tting close to a book that will interest any student of Greek literature or cultural history. Christs College, Cambridge PETER AGOCS pagocs@gmail.com