Review of "A Companion to Greek Literature" by M. Hose, D. Schenker (original) (raw)

The academic world is currently host to the proliferation of variously labelled compendia of topically or thematically defined Darstellungen, the genre to which this book belongs. Among the medium’s inherent merits is that it allows editors more discretionary latitude than, say, a textbook or a reference work does. It is also, though, prone to the negative consequences of cronyism, a problem for which there is no obvious practical solution. In any case, as the phenomenon inexorably swells our library collections, the profit lines of publishers and the CVs of contributors, these compendia have become a major presence in the apparatus of teaching and scholarship. It is, therefore, gratifying to encounter a specimen of the genre that promises as successfully as this one to inform and whet the interest of a variety of readers. It has been an engaging and stimulating exercise to read this collection with its multiple perspectives on the panorama of Greek literature from Homer to the threshold of the Byzantine era and its extended effects on the cultural history of the centuries since. All of that is supplemented by entries on what might collectively be termed ‘para-literary’ matters: inter alia L. Del Corso on ‘Mechanics and Means of Production in Antiquity’ (pp. 9–26), R. Armstrong on ‘Textual Survival and Transmission’ (pp. 27–40), E. Wilson on ‘Trends in Greek Literature in the Contemporary Academy’ (pp. 491–510) (i.e. curriculum, pedagogy, critical approaches etc. in English-speaking, but mainly American, schools and universities.) The editors follow a creative plan, reflective in a way of Greek literature itself, that integrates traditional and predictable elements (a total of fifteen chapters dedicated to individual chronological periods and major literary genres) with innovative or unusual approaches and themes, some of which few readers are likely to anticipate. The content is deployed in an editors’ introduction and in 33 chapters distributed thematically (more or less) among eight Parts. Each of 30 contributors presents a single chapter and editor H. adds a medley of three (‘Philosophical Writing’, pp. 235–55, ‘Places [i.e. cities] of Production’, pp. 325– 43, and ‘Literature and Truth’, pp. 373–85) distributed among three different Parts. The contributors, some of them well-known and veteran scholars, are drawn from two or three generations and from the international community of classicists. All this lends a lively poikilia of mode and method to the collection. No particular target readership is specified, and if the reference in the first sentence of the introduction to ‘an introductory companion volume’ should suggest that the content is directed more towards neophytes than towards periti, any such notion is soon dispelled. For one thing, notwithstanding the copious prefatory key to abbreviations, the novice will surely balk at many conventions of scholarly writing including such intra-textual references as ‘P. Cair. Masp. II 67097 and 67185’ or ‘Σ Aristoph. Equ. 400a = Cratinus, Pytine test. ii, PCG Vol. IV’. From the opposite perspective, it would be a rare journeyman Hellenist, however thoroughly versed in Greek literature and its criticism, for whom there are not at least some ‘introductory’ moments in a volume that distils an accumulation of earlier scholarship too vast and varied to have been mastered by any individual. Indicative of that are the bountiful bibliographies that accompany individual chapters. THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 1