Review: Simon Swain, Bryson on Household Management

Journal of Islamic Studies Advance Access published February 27, 2015 Journal of Islamic Studies (2015) pp. 1 of 3 BOOK REVIEW In the Arabic philosophical tradition it was standard to divide practical philosophy into three departments: dealing with the individual, the household, and the city (for instance in al-Khw:rizm;: 6ilm al-akhl:q, tadb;r al-manzil, siy:sat al-mad;na: see C. Hein, Definition und Einteilung der Philosophie [Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1985], 226–32). This is a borrowing from late antique classifications of the philosophical sciences, which in turn go back to Aristotle. Aristotle himself wrote key works on ethics and politics, which could be supplemented by many other texts, from Plato’s Republic to Galen’s On Character Traits (a significant source on ethics in the Arabic tradition). But what about the household? For the study of ‘economics’ (from oikos, Greek for ‘household’), intellectuals of late antiquity and the Islamic world turned to a more obscure author: Bryson. His treatise on the Management of the Estate is lost in Greek, but extant in an Arabic translation made at about 900 ad, as well as Latin and Hebrew versions. It was used by a range of ancient authors, from Stoics like Musonius Rufus to Christians like Clement, and was the standard text on this topic in Arabic literature. It also had a wide indirect influence, because it was used in the two most successful treatises on practical philosophy to emerge in the Islamic world, Miskawayh’s Refinement of Character and al-F<s;’s Ethics for N:Bir. Despite all this, it is not a well-known text today. The book under review aims to change that, and leaves readers little excuse for future ignorance or disinterest. Simon Swain has given Bryson’s slim treatise the most deluxe of treatments, providing a new Arabic edition with a facing-page English translation, along with the Hebrew and Latin versions, and hundreds of pages comparing Bryson to other ancient authors and charting his influence. Though Bryson is rarely far from Swain’s focus, the book is effectively a general study of the main topics covered in the Management: money, slaves, women and children. This is a sensible approach, since Bryson can seem rather banal unless he is juxtaposed to other authors who wrote on the same topics. He seems to have been active in the first century ad, and to have been a Neopythagorean, though that plays almost no role in the exposition. (Regarding the numerological significance of the five virtues possessed by a good wife, Swain comments, ‘Bryson’s division for once shows a dash of authentic Pythagoreanism’, p. 329.) Swain seems to find Bryson most interesting on the topic of money, and uses the text as a jumping off point for an extended argument against the prevailing ß The Author (2015). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Downloaded from http://jis.oxfordjournals.org/ at Universitaetsbibliothek Muenchen on March 9, 2015 Economy, Family, and Society from Rome to Islam: A Critical Edition, English Translation, and Study of Bryson’s ‘Management of the Estate’ By Simon Swain (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), xiv þ 573 pp. Price HB £100.00. EAN 978–1107025363. 2 of 3 book review Downloaded from http://jis.oxfordjournals.org/ at Universitaetsbibliothek Muenchen on March 9, 2015 view that aristocratic Roman intellectuals disdained ‘the values of the market’ (p. 105; here Swain is particularly taking aim at the views of M. I. Finley in, e.g., The Ancient Economy [London, 2nd edn., 1985]). He provides extensive evidence that this was not the case. Bryson takes it for granted that a good householder should be managing his estate so as to increase his wealth, while a more philosophical author like the Epicurean Philodemus could speak of the sage as a ‘good businessman (chrématistés)’ (p. 219). Though Swain convincingly demolishes this prejudice about the ancients, he doesn’t uncover anything approaching an ancient theory of money, that is, something that would correspond to economics in our modern-day sense. Cicero aptly remarked that you can learn more about money from Rome’s bankers than from any philosopher (p. 203). Of the four central topics Swain gives slavery the most concise treatment, evidently because he does not consider Bryson to be particularly innovative on this score. To me the most striking passage of the whole treatise is one that Swain barely discusses, perhaps because it is not an entirely original thought. (A similar passage can be found for example in Seneca’s Epistle 47 which encourages the recipient to dine with his slaves: he should think that the slave was ‘born from the same seed (ex isdem seminibus)’, and breathes, lives and dies just like the master.) Here Bryson unwittingly sets out an excellent rationale for abolishing slavery (x69 in Swain’s text: ‘since [the slave] is of the (same) species as his owner, his owner, in addition to endeavouring to manage him well, must maintain (a feeling of) compassion towards him . . .’). Unfortunately Swain is clearly right that Bryson’s advice to treat slaves gently is purely practical in motivation: it is more advantageous to be respected than feared (p. 267). Bryson is somewhat less repugnant, and more innovative, when it comes to the role of the wife in the household. Though equality of the sexes is not even on the distant horizon, he does gives the wife a substantial role in managing the estate and also emphasizes the emotional bond between the married couple more than other ancient authors did (p. 332). This latter idea goes together with Bryson’s ban on all sexual activity outside of marriage, a ‘truly enormous anticipation’ of Christian ethics (p. 346) that Swain sees as ‘radical’ in the context of ninth century Roman aristocratic society (p. 370). On the philological front, Swain is in a better position than the earlier editor Plessner because he is working directly from the best manuscript, which represents the most important redaction of the work (pp. vii, 71, 139). Swain is confident that the Arabic represents the Greek accurately. Against Plessner’s doubts on this score, he invokes arguments that range from the compelling—for instance material from Bryson found in Musonius matches part of the Arabic text (p. 96)—to the dubious, notably, that the Arabic translators were sticklers for accuracy (e.g. p. 109). While this is fair enough as a generalization there are certainly exceptional cases of texts that were reworked, abbreviated, or, more worrying for the present case, changed only on occasional points of detail. (Might the ‘radical’ ban on sex outside of marriage be such a case?) Nonetheless Swain’s short overview of the Greek–Arabic translation movement is an admirable survey of the state of current research on this topic (pp. 57–68), book review 3 of 3 Peter Adamson Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München E-mail: [email protected] doi:10.1093/jis/etv001 Downloaded from http://jis.oxfordjournals.org/ at Universitaetsbibliothek Muenchen on March 9, 2015 which could usefully be extracted from the book as an introduction to the topic. Swain’s assumptions about the underlying Greek look plausible, though I would be more hesitant in asserting (usually without giving parallels from other translations) that a given Arabic term must correspond to a given Greek term in the lost original. Swain’s generosity with analysis and context is matched by his provision of supplementary texts, with several other brief writings provided in appendices to the chapters, such as Pseudo-Plato’s On the Education of Young Men and Ibn Bu3l:n’s treatise on buying slaves. The book is also a good read, with the occasional deft turn of phrase (Bryson ‘takes a hard line on soft beds’, p. 48) and an entertainingly brusque approach to previous scholarship (‘Hense 1905 has a full but inconsequential discussion of Lucius, of whom nothing is known’ p. 115, n. 9). All in all, the book is a major contribution regarding both the Arabic reception of Greek practical philosophy and aristocratic conceptions of the household in the early Roman empire.