Van Hoof, Lieve

English

Ghent University Academic Bibliography

 THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 135The Classical Review vol. 62 no. 1 © The Classical Association 2012; all rights reservedsalvation’; this, Amato says, is an oblique reference to the Eucharistic wine. In this particular case it may be argued that Procopius, rather than piously attempting to bring some Christianity into an otherwise pagan performance, engages in further sophistry, telling his audience something like: ‘The lex operis does not allow me to bring in Christian matter in this genre, but see how neatly I handle the vari-ous layers of signiﬁ cation, connecting pagan and Christian symbols for each of you to interpret in the way you prefer …’ One interpretation does not rule out the other, and if both are grasped they may actually enrich each other. This is an elusive technique, which leaves the interpreter with a feeling of uncertainty as to which paradigm is actually at work; this is probably in itself an important part of the rhetorical game. In the end, Amato’s investigation into a speciﬁ c motif comes close to Henry Maguire’s statement that the general spring symbolism in Procopius’ Dialexeis, where nature is ‘resurrected’ after winter, may be interpreted in a Christian fashion by those so disposed (Art and Eloquence [1981], p. 44; see also G.F. Kustas, Studies in Byzantine Rhetoric [1973], pp. 184–5). In general, we should not be surprised to ﬁ nd references to Christianity in the ‘pagan’ works as well as to classical culture in the ‘Christian’ ones. Still, one, or two, or ﬁ ve covert allusions to Christian phenomena in Procopius’ rhetorical works do not in any fundamental way alter the impression that these texts are different from his Biblical commentaries and clearly fulﬁ lled other cultural functions. These functions need further exploration, but Amato, despite my methodological hesitations, has clearly begun to pave the way for a much-needed treatment of the ‘pagan’ and the ‘Christian’ Procopius as a uniﬁ ed author. This book is an important contribution to our understanding of Procopius of Gaza and his works, perhaps the most important so far published. Anyone inter-ested, not only in Procopius and the Gaza school, but in late antique rhetorical culture in general, is indebted to Amato and his collaborators for carrying out this interpretative task.Uppsala University DAVID WESTBERGdavid.westberg@lingﬁ l.uu.seVIEWS OF THE PASTKE L LY (C.), FL O W E R (R.), WI L L I A M S (M.S.) (edd.) Unclassical Traditions. Volume I: Alternatives to the Classical Past in Late Antiquity. (Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, Supplement 34.) Pp. viii + 156. Cambridge: The Cambridge Philological Society, 2010. Cased, £45, US$90. ISBN: 978-0-906014-33-2.doi:10.1017/S0009840X11003234This is the ﬁ rst of two supplementary volumes to the Cambridge Classical Journal dedicated to the topic Unclassical traditions. It consists of a brief introduction, eight chapters, a bibliography and an index. In the opening chapter, C. Kelly presents an analysis of the second part of Eusebius’ Chronicle, the so-called Chronological Tables. Though not preserved in its original Greek version, Jerome’s fourth-century Latin translation and a medieval Armenian tradition allow for a reasonably accurate reconstruction: the Chronological Tables represent the ﬁ rst ‘universal synchronic world history that simultaneously displayed both notable events and comparative chronology in tabular form’ (p. 17). 136 THE CLASSICAL REVIEWAs Kelly argues, Eusebius highlighted chronological uncertainties and contradictions in (especially archaic) Greek history while carefully avoiding any similar problems in Biblical history. The systematic confrontation of the classical and the Biblical past, visualised in the format of a chronological table, thus served to make an apologetic rather than a historical point. The second chapter, by R. Flower, discusses the invectives against Constantius II by Athanasius of Alexandria, Hilary of Poitiers and Lucifer of Cagliari. What is distinctive about these texts, according to Flower, is that they ‘retained the gram-mar of traditional rhetoric, but changed the vocabulary’ (p. 32): all three texts take over features and structures from traditional imperial invectives, but within this framework they construct a wholly Christian discourse. Instead of measuring the Christian emperor Constantius against his worldly predecessors, the Arian emperor is judged by these Nicene authors against the standards of exclusively Christian heroes and villains such as the impious king of Israel Ahab. This erasure of the classical past sets these authors apart not only from their literary predecessors, but also from their Christian contemporaries and successors such as Eusebius. An outstanding chapter is M. Humphries’ contribution on Ambrose’s identiﬁ ca-tion of the Goths with the Gog, the biblical barbarian familiar from Ezekiel, Genesis and Revelation, in the ﬁ rst two books of De ﬁ de. Although Ambrose was neither the ﬁ rst nor the last author to do so, Humphries incisively shows why Ambrose chose to make the identiﬁ cation in function of the particular aim and context of De ﬁ de, written, in Humphries’ view and that of the majority of scholars, shortly after the battle of Adrianople. While Ambrose’s main aim in writing the ﬁ rst books of De ﬁ de was to garner Gratian’s support for Nicene orthodoxy, he realised that the emperor’s main concern at the time was to punish and defeat the Goths: ‘by presenting victory over the Goths as a biblically foretold reward for supporting Nicene orthodoxy, Ambrose’s identiﬁ cation of the Goths with Gog was perfectly suited to Ambrose’s broader polemical goals’ (p. 53). Humphries’ chapter is followed by D. Krueger’s on anaphoras, eucharistic prayers of offering and consecration. Focussing on the West Syrian tradition, as exempli-ﬁ ed in the Liturgy of St Basil, the Egyptian Basil and the Apostolic Constitutions, Krueger traces an evolution from an audible recitation of Biblical history in the ﬁ rst person plural to a silent one by the priest alone in the sixth century. After this, the thanksgiving and at the same time identity-shaping function of the earlier anaphoras was taken over by the common recitation of especially the Nicene Creed. Anybody looking for a succinct yet incisive introduction to Festus’ Breuiarium should read G. Kelly’s ensuing chapter, which constitutes one of the highlights of the collection. First, Kelly carries out a critical investigation into Festus’ back-ground and religious afﬁ liations. Brieﬂ y but decisively doing away with the false assumptions that have so often marred scholarly understanding of Festus, Kelly backs up the identiﬁ cation of the breviarist with the magister memoriae of Valens, but emphasises that his religious afﬁ liation cannot be deﬁ ned with certainty. In the second section, Kelly sets out the twofold structure of the Breuiarium, and concludes from its chronological and geographical coverage that the work ﬁ ts best in the context of early spring 370 in Constantinople. This leads on to the next section, where it is argued that Festus’ focus on, and account of, past confronta-tions between Rome and Persia builds up towards what Festus thought would be Valens’ great military campaign: in an alternation of successful (Constantine, Julian) and unsuccessful (Constantius, Jovian) emperors, Valens’ success against the Persians is as it were predicted. The last section draws attention to Ammianus’  THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 137borrowings from Festus. Avoiding not only too negative but also too positive an assessment of the Breuiarium, Kelly shows thorough familiarity with preceding scholarship, but above all a consistent, sound analysis of Festus’ text and other available sources. M.S. Williams starts his chapter with an intriguing questioning of the tra-ditional reading of the relationship between Paulinus of Nola and his mentor Ausonius. In the ﬁ rst part of his paper, Williams rightly points out the mismatch between Ausonius’ reputation in antiquity and the dismay he often meets with today, and suggests that the current revaluation of the cento may have implications for Ausonius too. The second part of the chapter seeks to rehabilitate Ausonius by drawing a parallel with Oulipo, the ‘Ouvroir de littérature potentielle’, founded in the 1960s. Although Williams suggests several similarities between Ausonius and Oulipo (and makes, in fact, a number of interesting remarks about Virgil), it is rather hard to see how the comparison enhances our understanding of Ausonius. Basil of Caesarea’s Address to Young Men forms the subject of the next chapter, by N. McLynn. McLynn points out that Basil ﬁ rst delivered the Address shortly after returning from his second exile in 365 as an oration on the occasion of the arrival of his nephews in Caesarea, and he argues that it should be read as such: the text ‘is not a monograph, but the record of a performance, and as such is both more sharply focused and less pedagogically ambitious than it has been made to seem: Basil sought not to achieve a major cultural reconciliation, but to create local uneasiness; to cause a temporary disruption rather than to create a coherent system’ (pp. 106–7). Ostensibly, the Address shows Basil engaged in a conversation on the classical tradition with his nephews; his real aim in doing so, according to McLynn, and in deliberately inserting howling errors, was not just to parody his own former role as a professor of rhetoric, but above all to comment on the value of a classical education. Realistic enough to see that he would not dissuade fathers from sending their sons to study with a rhetor, Basil nevertheless managed to question the authority of the classical tradition. The ﬁ nal chapter, by C. Rapp, explores hagiography. It makes two points. First, it argues that the primary aim of hagiographers was not ‘to make a saint by celebrating the subject of his narrative, but rather to make saints out of those who encounter his work’ (p. 130). Second, it suggests that the closest classical parallel for hagiography understood in this sense is the classical chreia, a rhetorical exercise displaying a person’s character by recounting his words, his deeds or a combination of both. Rapp’s argument for each point is convincing in itself, but the relation between them is not fully explored: do chreiai offer a merely formal precedent for hagiography’s means of evoking a saint’s character, or do they share what Rapp sees as hagiography’s primary function, viz. forming the audience’s character? Rapp seems to suggest the former (especially on pp. 126–7 and 130), yet that is difﬁ cult to reconcile with her quite correct emphasis on the fact that ‘form and purpose are closely linked’ (p. 124). As will be clear from this survey, the overall quality of this volume as a whole, as well as of most of its individual contributions, is far beyond average, with several truly excellent chapters. The volume forms a reasonably uniﬁ ed whole, with almost all chapters explicitly reﬂ ecting on late antique engagement with tradi-tion. As opposed to what the title suggests, though, not all reﬂ ect on unclassical traditions (in itself an elusive phrase, as admitted in the Introduction), let alone that they would all deal with alternatives to the classical past in Late Antiquity. They do, however, offer a good survey of the range of attitudes towards various 138 THE CLASSICAL REVIEWThe Classical Review vol. 62 no. 1 © The Classical Association 2012; all rights reservedtraditions explored in a wide range of late antique texts, and as such deserve to be read by anybody studying the period.Research Foundation Flanders (Belgium) LIEVE VAN HOOFlieve.vanhoof@arts.kuleuven.beTHERAPEUTICSZI P S E R (B.) (ed.) John the Physician’s Therapeutics. A Medical Handbook in Vernacular Greek. (Studies in Ancient Medicine 37.) Pp. 377, ﬁ gs. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009. Cased, €125, US$185. ISBN: 978-90-04-17723-9.doi:10.1017/S0009840X11003246John the Physician’s Therapeutics has been successfully and painstakingly edited by Z. This monograph is the ﬁ rst critical edition of this medical text, which most likely dates to the thirteenth century. It was used as a guide for physicians who worked away from the main urban centres of the Byzantine world. It is not a philosophical treatise on medicine, but a handbook that contains practical information about the remedies and methods used for treating a wide range of ailments. The monograph contains two versions of the Therapeutics that have survived through transcription and do not seem ever to have been printed. The ﬁ rst ver-sion (א) was written in learned Greek; the second version (ω) is later in date and was written in a vernacular Greek idiom, possibly that of the Greek Islands. The idiom atic edition made the text available to those less familiar with learned Greek; some of the additions made to this text describe the information presented in א in more detail. The ﬁ rst version of the text (א) is well preserved and has few mistakes; it survives in a single manuscript (N Monacensis graecus 551 [Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich]). In this text only orthographical errors were corrected. The vernacular version (ω), too, survives mainly in one manuscript (L), which is held in the Wellcome collection (Medical Society London 14, Wellcome Library, London). This version had to be reconstructed by Z. because the book had been rebound, the pages were renumbered and some went missing. To further complicate the procedure, the pages were not always rebound in the correct order. L also suffered water damage, and when the margins were reduced for rebinding, parts of the text were cut out. Interestingly, L appears to have been read by a number of people; it has annotations made in various styles of handwriting. In order to edit the vernacular version, Z. consulted a number of other surviv-ing manuscripts (lettered A, B, C, G, M in the monograph) to compare what was missing or different from L. Descriptions of these differences are provided (pp. 17–22). Three ﬁ fteenth-century texts that were based on the Therapeutics were also examined (D, E, F) along with two surviving versions of the text that are based on א (V, W), to help in the formation of version ω. The vernacular Greek was also difﬁ cult to edit. Z. notes that the language was not consistent with modern or classical Greek, and often not consistent with itself. It was not always possible to adjust spelling and grammar to either language, nor could a new grammar be created. Due to the multi-variant textual differences, a complete critical apparatus was impractical, if not impossible, so Z. produced two appendices 

REVIEW of Kelly C., Flower R. and Williams M.S. (eds.) Unclassical Traditions. Volume I: Alternatives to the Classical Past in Late Antiquity. Cambridge.

https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8085078/file/8085082

REVIEW of Kelly C., Flower R. and Williams M.S. (eds.) Unclassical Traditions. Volume I: Alternatives to the Classical Past in Late Antiquity. Cambridge.

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Ghent University Academic Bibliography