Inscriptions in the Private Sphere in the Greco-Roman World

Religious Studies Review · VOLUME 43 · NUMBER 2 · JUNE 2017 influence that give meaning to visual expressions; the values of the imperial center, they often conclude, are not always mirrored in the imperial peripheries. The geographic scope of this volume is broad, covering visual cultures in Britain and Scandinavia, Gaul and Greece, and Egypt and India, among other locations. Some of the chapters will be of interest primarily to specialists; many, however, are relevant for scholars of the Roman imperial period more generally. This volume is recommended especially for institutional libraries supporting art historians and classicists. Michael Kochenash Claremont School of Theology RUTH. By Jeremy Schipper. The Anchor Yale Bible, 7D. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Pp. xvii 1 221. $75.00. This new commentary on the biblical book of Ruth in the The Anchor Yale Bible commentary series succeeds the earlier Campbell 1975 edition. Overall, the volume is methodologically sophisticated and helpfully selective in its scope and focus. While the excellent introduction addresses standard interpretive issues such as composition, textual criticism, literary genre and structure, and reception history, Schipper also introduces his unique focus on the nature of relationships in Ruth. This concentration leads him to discuss God’s relationship to humans, humans to each other, sexual desire, exogamy and ethnicity, and household organization. The volume also includes the author’s new (and rather literal) translation of the book and a bibliography focused on scholarly works since 1975. The actual commentary of the volume is subdivided into two sections: “Notes” and “Comments.” In the Notes section, the commentator engages in textual critical, linguistic, and grammatical work as he works his way through almost every word or phrase. The Comments section then is used for more general remarks about the passage. The volume concludes with subject, author, and ancient sources indices. Tyler Mayfield Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary FROM HITTITE TO HOMER: THE ANATOLIAN BACKGROUND OF ANCIENT GREEK EPIC. By Mary R. Bachvarova. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xxxviii 1 649; illustrations, maps. $160.00. The epics ascribed to Homer are generally regarded as the beginning of Western literature. But what narrative traditions did the poet(s) of the Iliad and Odyssey draw on? Building on the scholarship of Walter Burkert and Martin West, Bachvarova offers a wide-ranging examination of the means by which literary motifs and storylines were transmitted from Near Eastern civilizations, especially the Hittites, to the Greek epic tradition. The first half of the work focuses on Hurro-Hittite narrative song, tracing the development of the narratives that are most relevant to the Iliad and Odyssey to show how they changed over time as they passed from various sources, notably Akkadians and Hurrians, to the Hittites. The Song of Release proves especially important, as, not unlike the Iliad, it depicts the fall of a city (in this case, Ebla), after the besieged refuse to surrender captives to the invading army. One major aim here is to show that such narratives were not merely written productions of the scribal schools, but part of a living oral tradition. This enables Bachvarova to pivot in the second half of the work to consideration of the venue in which such motifs could have made the leap into Greek tradition, namely performance by bilingual bards at religious festivals, especially those of royal ancestor veneration. Not only would such festivals have been a natural setting for the Song of Release because of the Storm-god’s role both in that poem and in mortuary cult, but the one performance context Homer’s traditional rival Hesiod gives for his poetry is a competition at a set of funeral games. Although not all of the parallels Bachvarova draws are equally convincing, the book will nevertheless be a valuable resource for those who wish to know more about the narrative world that may ultimately lie behind the poetry of Homer. Coulter H. George University of Virginia Greece, Rome, Greco-Roman Period BEYOND BOUNDARIES: CONNECTING VISUAL CULTURES IN THE PROVINCES OF ANCIENT ROME. Edited by Susan E. Alcock, Mariana Egri, and James F. D. Frakes. Los Angeles: Getty, 2016. Pp. xxii 1 386. $69.95. Emerging from the Arts of Rome’s Provinces seminar within the Connecting Art Histories initiative of the Getty Foundation, the contributions to this volume explore the networks of influence that shaped visual cultures throughout the provinces of the Roman Empire. Several chapters in this collection directly challenge the notion of “Romanization” and instead foreground local and/or regional influences, which, they say, often produced “glocal” visual expressions. Maria Papaioannou, for example, reviews the application of the term “Romanization” to the Greek East in a helpful Forschungsgeschichte and proposes instead using “cohabitation” language. (Other contributors favor language of “entanglement.”) Similarly, Alicia Jimenez traces the development of the concept of “provinces”—in ancient and modern discourse—and problematizes the premise that provinces always imitate the visual culture of the imperial center. The contributions to this volume thus offer nuanced interpretations of provincial visual cultures—often in religious contexts—by foregrounding local and regional (in addition to imperial) networks of 160 Religious Studies Review · VOLUME 43 · NUMBER 2 · JUNE 2017 passageways, and areas frequented by both the household and visitors—were preferred, even in houses of the wealthy, since there seems to have been no antisocial connotation. As a result, graffiti in Dura and Pompeii were commonplace and visible. The second section looks at inscriptions that are both “public” and “private,” such as those in Vesuvian latrines, on duplicate (for both public and private display) bronze tabulae patronatus and tabulae hospitales, and inscriptions associated with sculptures from private houses in Ephesos, Pergamon, Delos, and late Republican Italy. In contrast to the first two sections, the theme of the final section is private inscriptions not intended to be visible. Painted and charcoal “inscriptions” recovered from tombs in Cyrene and dated from the Hellenistic period to late antiquity differ in terms of presentation: the latter do not copy public epigraphic styles or parade wealth, but both would have been read by few people. Similarly, magical amulets inscribed on ceramic sherds and thin metal lamellae and hidden under or in synagogues in the Levant synthesize Jewish and non-Jewish ritual formulations for the eyes of the divine only. In returning to graffiti in Pompeii, the penultimate essay notes that people from sub-elite social strata “could read and write at a level of education beyond the purely functional” (254). In the words of Wallace-Hadrill quoted twice by different contributors, “[w]riting for the Pompeians is . . . part of the low-level, everyday life of a town.” Besides engaging a range of topics and stimulating theoretical consideration of “public” versus “private” inscriptions, this observation is for me the most interesting point to take away from this collection of essays. Scott D. Charlesworth University of Divinity, Melbourne WAR AS SPECTACLE: ANCIENT AND MODERN PERSPECTIVES ON THE DISPLAY OF ARMED CONFLICT. Edited by Anastasia Bakogianni and Valerie M. Hope. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Pp. xiv 1 454. Cloth, $162.00; paper $39.95. This is typical volume of collected essays in classics from the United Kingdom with the typical vices and virtues thereof: indeed, the volume can serve as a handy introduction to the current state of the discipline in that country. First there is a series of short, cautious classical articles where one feels that each author is laboring to capture and serve a single intellectual ravioli because all the other raviolis in the pot are bespoke for contributions to similar volumes (from this stricture I exclude with honor the pieces by Rhiannon Ash on Tacitus and Valerie Hope on the literary depiction of fallen Roman soldiers). Attention to previous scholarship, particularly in foreign languages—traditionally an iron requirement in classics—is casual. Of the volume's collective bibliography fewer than four percent of the entries are in German in a field where scholars who do their homework properly can rarely cut the thicket of German scholarship back to a third of their citations. Some articles, therefore, either repeat in ignorance what is already known, or—as in the case of Andrew Fear on Trajan's Column—were pre-emptively refuted by foreign scholars a century ago (from this stricture I exclude with honor the pieces by Laura Swift on war in archaic Greek Lyric and Andrea Capra on war in Plato). Second, a full half of the volume is then given over to “reception”—things classical in later times—and as often this idiosyncrasy of classics in the United Kingdom yields good work by non-classicists: persons whose training is in the periods where the “reception” takes place. The best piece in the entire book is by Jared Simard on the 1920s Thermopylae-infused memorialization in Brooklyn of the Battle of Long Island in the American Revolution (1776). But classicists relying on their own training to analyze later literature, art, or film, usually only embarrass themselves, as they do here. J. E. Lendon The University of Virginia ANCIENT ANTIOCH: FROM THE SELEUCID ERA TO THE ISLAMIC CONQUEST. Andrea U. Di Giorgi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xvii 1 226; maps. $99.00. This slim but information-packed volume offers a fresh view of ancient Antioch-on-the-Orontes focusing as much on the people as the built structures and landscapes in which they lived. Challenging the traditional notion of Antioch as a lost city, the author merges old and new archaeological data to paint a picture of the city’s formation and continued growth through centuries. Moving beyond the city limits, the chapters examines Antioch’s rural hinterland including the Amanus Mountains, Lake District, and Seleucia, to identify a symbiotic relationship between these outer regions and the city-center. Throughout the volume, the author focuses on both the outer landscape and the people living in the city, positing a cultural identity closely tied to this diverse environment. What emerges from this volume is a compelling testament to Antioch’s lasting presence in the region as well as the need to reevaluate our preconceptions of the city. With its array of new information and approaches, this volume is appropriate for a wide scholarly INSCRIPTIONS IN THE PRIVATE SPHERE IN THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD. Edited by Rebecca Benefiel and Peter Keegan. Brill Studies in Greek and Roman Epigraphy 7. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Pp. xviii 1 284. Hardcover, $135.00. This volume of twelve essays, the genesis of which was an “Inschriften in privaten R€aumen” panel at the 2012 Epigraphic Congress in Berlin, demonstrates repeatedly that the modern notion of “private” cannot be imposed on the ancient world. It is arranged in three sections, the first of which examines “private” inscriptions intended to be visible: graffiti from third century CE Dura-Europos, classical Athens, Hellenistic Delos, and early Imperial Pompeii. As far as houses are concerned, the most accessible parts—entrances, 161 Religious Studies Review · VOLUME 43 audience and is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship concerning the ancient city. Elizabeth M. Molacek Harvard University · NUMBER 2 · JUNE 2017 The sixteen essays in this collection were presented at a 2009 symposium on “Women and War in Antiquity” hosted by the Universite Charles de Gaulle–Lille 3 in conjunction with the launch of the European Network on Gender Studies in Antiquity (EuGeStA). Specialists in literature, history, and material culture engaged with this topic from multiple disciplinary perspectives, and a concluding roundtable grappled with the precise issue of how the ancient categories of “masculine” and “feminine” might be redefined. In keeping with a current scholarly trend to question binary assumptions, many authors eschewed anthropological paradigms of opposition couched in terms of “inversion, reversal, and breakdown” in favor of integrated models of gender relations. Such models are noticeably evident in the first part of this collection, “From Words to Deeds: Between Genres,” which treats the mythological cycles of the wars at Troy and Thebes found in classical epic and drama. Here, the editors observe that texts giving voice to women as onlookers and potential victims interrogate the dominant value-system by attributing to them a discourse on war distinct from, yet complementary to, that articulated by combatants. Though diverse in subject and focus, essays by Marella Nappi, Therese Fuhrer, and Alison Sharrock are all striking examples of such a holistic approach. Methodological dialogue between historians and literary critics appears in chapters contained in the second half of the volume, “Women and War in Historical Context: Discourse, Representation, Stakes.” Degrees of engagement with historical sources vary. Some essays survey accounts of women’s participation in combat without venturing much commentary. However, Judith Hallett’s demonstration of how contemporary poetic texts shaped the historical portrayal of Marc Antony’s wife Fulvia and Stephane Benoist’s rhetorical analysis of “feminine imperium” as a trope in debates over legitimate masculine authority offer sophisticated, mutually illuminating critiques of historiography. To sum up, this collection fills a perceived need and ideally should stimulate deeper consideration of women’s paradoxical but inescapable link to war. Marilyn B. Skinner University of Arizona MIGRATION AND MOBILITY IN THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE. Edited by Luuk de Ligt and Laurens A. Tacoma. Studies in Global Social History, 23. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Pp. xvii 1 517. Hardcover, $219.00. In line with current trends, this collection of 17 essays defines migration “as a change of residence from one place to another on a permanent or semi-permanent basis.” Thus, the various forms of early Roman migration—voluntary and stateorganized or forced (military units, veteran colonists, slaves)—are analyzed in relation to each other and to mobility, which might involve travel and/or semipermanent (i.e., seasonal [agricultural, pastoral, nomadic] or temporary) migration. Areas canvassed include motives for labor mobility and rural-urban migration (employment, economic opportunity, war, natural disasters, epidemics), female mobility (private, slave trade, prostitution, relationship, or marital reasons), integration of immigrants (co-opted or dual citizens, resident foreigners), and trans-local or trans-regional links between migrant communities (Jews, in particular, but also Tyrians and Palmyrenes). Previous studies have focused largely on Rome and the Latin West, and there are a significant number of those here. But the second half of the book contains essays on Athens, Egypt, the Near East, and the Greek East generally. The editors recognize that extrapolation from the surviving sources, which are mainly funerary on the epigraphic side, is fraught with methodological difficulties, and urge a fuller consideration of papyrological sources, which are more forthcoming in terms of indicators of mobility and migration. Two such studies move on from the early work of Braunert by looking more closely at individual documents from Oxyrhynchus. A third looks at mobility in Near Eastern inscriptions and papyri from the Judaean Desert, Euphrates region, and Dura Europos. Other studies track movement by using isotopic analysis on small samples of skeletal remains. The overall picture that emerges from this information-rich collection is that of a Mediterranean world, both East and West, in which mobility was commonplace. At the same time, if forced migration of soldiers, veterans, and slaves is excluded, it was also a world in which intraregional mobility and migration predominated. Such a simplistic contrast, however, cannot do justice to the many aspects of this burgeoning area of ancient world studies. Scott D. Charlesworth University of Divinity, Melbourne ROMAN FESTIVALS IN THE GREEK EAST: FROM THE EARLY EMPIRE TO THE MIDDLE BYZANTINE ERA. By Fritz Graf. Greek Culture in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi 1 363. Cloth, $120.00. Graf’s study is motivated by two essential questions: how did Roman festivals come to be celebrated in the eastern Mediterranean, and how did they survive in an increasingly Christian world? Drawing on Mona Ozouf’s La f^ete revolutionnaire more than on Durkheim or Turner, WOMEN AND WAR IN ANTIQUITY. Edited by Jacqueline Fabre-Serris and Alison Keith. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Pp. xii 1 341; plates. $55.00. 162 Religious Studies Review · VOLUME 43 · NUMBER 2 · JUNE 2017 religion will recognize several of Jameson’s most cited titles, among them “Sacrifice and Animal Husbandry in Ancient Greece,” originally published in a 1988 edited volume on pastoral economies; and “Sacrifice before Battle,” originally published in a 1991 volume on hoplites. His peripheral interest in myth and iconography comes across in “Perseus, the Hero of Mycenae,” “The Asexuality of Dionysos,” and “The Ritual of the Athena Nike Parapet” (e.g., see the appendix on “representations of the killing of the sacrificial victim”). Less well-known yet timely is his 1997 article from the International Journal of Hindu Studies: “Sacred Space and the City: Greece and Bhaktapur,” where he employs a recent anthropological study of a Nepalese city as the basis for new discussion of the space—both actual and symbolic, both political and performative—of the Archaic Greek city. Tyler Jo Smith University of Virginia he argues for the persistence of festivals as meeting the “need of any articulated group to celebrate festival.” Graf draws attention to a point made elsewhere by Ruepke and Ando, that festivals in the Roman world were not as closely tied to place as was once argued; case studies on the Kalendae Ianuariae, the Lupercalia, and the Brumalia reveal how festivals from the city of Rome became popular in the Greek East even as they were transformed. These festivals often created points of friction between Christian theologians, who saw participation in these festivals in any form as a threat, and imperial authorities—even the Christian ones—who saw in festivals a means of support for imperial ideology. Although Graf is perhaps too quick to ascribe rigid identities, Christian or pagan, to the inhabitants of the empire—many of the episodes described in the book suggest that individuals often did not see a conflict between participating in “pagan” festivals as well as Christian activities—recent debates over religion and identity are not his prime concern. Rather, he convincingly argues that it was the festival itself that held prime importance to the inhabitants of the Empire, regardless of the divinity it supposedly honored. Festivals might be transformed from the top down or bottom up, but even outside of the imperial cult and even after the end of sacrifice, they helped create a unity holding the disparate parts of the Empire together. Eric Orlin University of Puget Sound THE ATHENIAN ADONIA IN CONTEXT: THE ADONIS FESTIVAL AS CULTURAL PRACTICE. By Laurialan Reitzammer. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016. Pp. xii 1 261. Hardcover, $65.00. The Athenian Adonia is one of the most intriguing yet poorly understood ancient Greek festivals. It was held annually to commemorate the death of Adonis, a mortal lover of Aphrodite who died before her eyes after being gored by a boar, according to Ovid’s recounting of the myth in the Metamorphoses. The female participants in the cult planted their own “gardens of Adonis” (Ad^onidos k^epoi) in broken pottery vessels and, in turn, transported them to rooftops where the actual mourning of the youthful hunter took place. This book, rather than attempting to reconstruct the rituals based on disparate textual and iconographic evidence, takes a decidedly contextual approach to the festival in order to understand its function within Athenian culture. Rather than viewing the Adonia as “peripheral” or “exotic” or “faintly ridiculous,” as some have done before, the author cites evidence from archaic times onward with nuance and caution. Representations of the festival in poetry and vase-painting are not there to be interpreted literally, but rather as the products of their respective genres and audiences. The broader comparative framework chosen for discussion includes two chapters on weddings and funerals, occasions important in the lives of women, and another chapter on philosophy (especially Platos’s Phaedrus), whose proponents coopted the Adonia for their own purposes. Modern readers are encouraged to reexamine existing assumptions about the Adonia, first by removing it from its alleged “private” status, and then by considering its role and importance within the polis. Important to the book’s conclusion is the briefly mentioned post-classical afterlife of the myth and the festival attested in Hellenistic poetry (i.e., Theocritus, Idyll 15) and philosophy, as well as what the “foreignness” of Adonis CULTS AND RITES IN ANCIENT GREECE: ESSAYS ON RELIGION AND SOCIETY. By Michael H. Jameson. Edited by Allaire B. Stallsmith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xxxvi 1 362. Hardcover, $99.00. Michael Jameson (1924–2004) was one of the most influential scholars of ancient Greek religion in the twentieth century. His contributions extend from inscriptional evidence to social history, from ethnography to archaeology, and his influence has scarcely waned since his death more than ten years ago. This volume reprints thirteen seminal essays by Jameson, gathered around four themed sections: gods and heroes, rites, religion and society, and the study of religion. As specified in Paul Cartledge’s introduction, each section opens with a commentary by one of “four leading world authorities on the multifarious, deeply complex, and sometimes irreducibly alien topic of ancient Greek religion.” These summarize Jameson’s individual contributions, situate him within the history of the discipline, and provide additional insights into his method, perspectives, and unique scholarly qualities: “interest in art and knowledge of the abattoir” (Faraone); “the focus on the local was an explicit methodological position” (Graf); “everything connected with everything else in his vision” (Parker); “a scholar who was not afraid to change his opinion” (Bremmer). Also included is a complete bibliography of his publications. Readers versed in the study of Greek 163 Religious Studies Review · VOLUME 43 might have implied over time. The twenty-three black and white illustrations, mainly Athenian red-figure vases, extensive bibliography, and index locorum, all of which follow the main text, are helpful additions. Tyler Jo Smith University of Virginia · NUMBER 2 · JUNE 2017 This volume published by SBL serves as a key introduction to the current status of feminist biblical scholarship in the academy. In her introduction, Fiorenza importantly situates this volume as one which “seeks to chart a rupture . . . in the malestream reception history of the Bible, which includes wo/men’s Bible readings.” To accomplish this task, this volume, therefore, utilizes the word “feminist,” to include “gender, womanist, liberationist, postcolonial, Asian, African or indigenous, Latina, queer, interreligious and transnational” methodologies, discourses, and modes of inquiry. Championing the work that has already been accomplished in feminist biblical studies, Fiorenza argues this volume is simply a preliminary step in “charting the efforts of biblical studies around the globe,” and seeks to illuminate the intersectionality of religion, gender, class, and so on, suggesting “hierarchy” and “patriarchy” be replaced by the gender-inclusive “kyriarchy.” “Kyriarchy,” then, is utilized by the authors of this anthology, as “a heuristic concept (derived from the Greek, meaning ‘to find’), or as a diagnostic instrument that enables investigation into . . . and highlights that people inhabit several shifting structural positions of race, sex, gender, class, and ethnicity at one and the same time.” Therefore, this volume is not only a history, but an imagining of the work yet to be done in this field. The book contains four sections: 1) “Charting Feminist Biblical Studies Around the Globe” provides a history of feminist biblical critique on five continents from 1970 to the present; 2) “Creating Feminist Hermeneutical Spaces in Religion,” examines emerging feminist methodologies, as well as modes of inquiry and textual interpretation; 3) “Reading Otherwise: Methods of Interpretation,” critically examines these aforementioned methodologies which were “developed to ‘dismantle the master’s house,’” and 4) “Working for Change and Transformation,” featuring essays which act to transgress “academic boundaries in order to exemplify the transforming, inspiring, and institutionalizing feminist workto enable wo/men to engage in a critical reading of the Bible.” This book concludes with an extensive and extremely thorough forty-nine-page bibliography. Amy Clanfield University of Ottawa A COMPANION TO FOOD IN THE ANCIENT WORLD. Edited by John Wilkins and Robin Nadeau. Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, 89. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015. Pp. xii 1 457; illustrations. $195.00. The study of food in ancient Greek and Roman cultures is by nature interdisciplinary and comprises archaeology and anthropology, literature, and history. It is an appealing topic with the potential to reach a wide audience of students and scholars whose interests span diet and health, table manners and taboos, religion and the senses, agriculture and economy, to name but few. This well-produced companion is no exception. Gathering specialist authors from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and several European countries, the volume is organized into five sections: Literature and Approaches; Production and Transport; Preparation; Cultures beyond Athens and Rome; Food and Religion/Great Food Cultures. The dizzying array of Greek and Latin terms related to banqueting, feasting, and drinking (e.g., symposion, deipnon, cena, convivium, epulum) occur throughout the chapters and may seem confusing. Good starting places for vocabulary are John F. Donahue’s clear and informative essay on Roman dining, as well as Florence Dupont’s introduction to “Food, Gender, and Sexuality.” Expanding the discussion through time and space, the editors have included Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Celtic Britain, as well as the Jewish, Early Christian, Byzantine, and Medieval worlds. Aegean prehistory and the Etruscans are mentioned only in passing. Especially welcome are two final chapters focused on Islam and Pre-Imperial China. While no collection of this type can serve all people, in an attempt to globalize the scope more fully, Africa, India, the Americas might also have been incorporated. Whether one’s passion is cookery books, baking, sacrifice, or butchery, or if kitchens, viniculture, and archaeobotany are more to your taste, readers of all types will find something relevant to dip into here. Tyler Jo Smith University of Virginia OPPORTUNITY FOR NO LITTLE INSTRUCTION: BIBLICAL ESSAYS IN HONOR OF DANIEL J. HARRINGTON AND RICHARD J. CLIFFORD. By C. G. Frechette, C. R. Matthews, and T. D. Stegman. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2014. Pp. 323. Cloth, $29.95. This festschrift honors jointly two Jesuit biblical scholars, Daniel Harrington and Richard Clifford. While both of these scholars contributed to and published on a variety of topics, their works intersect in relation to Jewish Wisdom literature; thus, the title of the festschrift alludes to famous words from Sirach (opportunity for no little instruction), bearing witness to the importance of passing on wisdom and community teachings. The eighteen chapters are divided into four Christian Origins FEMINIST BIBLICAL STUDES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: SCHOLARSHIP AND MOVEMENT. €ssler Fiorenza. The Bible and Edited by Elisabeth Schu Women: An Encyclopedia of Exegesis and Cultural History, 9.1. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014. Pp. xii 1 451. Cloth, $81.77; paper, $49.07. 164