While the German word is not used here, this book is actually a festschrift. That is, a book honouring a respected scholar, in this case Susan A. Stephens, Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Stanford University. In her long and illustrious career, Stephens is the editor or author of 10 books, most famously the 2003 book Seeing Double. It was about poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria, in the age now known as the Hellenistic, which lasted from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE to the death of Cleopatra in 30 BCE.
This volume brings together 23 world-class scholars, who together have produced a landmark volume on the literature and culture of the Hellenistic Age. The book has 3 editors, whose affiliations are listed at the end of this article.
I take the title of my review from the chapter by Daniel Selden (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz), dealing with Alexander’s Campaign in Egypt. While the worship of animals had been enshrined in Egyptian culture for thousands of years, it was quite foreign to most everyone else. “Of all the tenets that challenged Hellenized denizens and visitors to Egypt, animal worship proved perennially the most difficult for them to entertain.” Alexander made a particular point of sacrificing to the Apis bull, “the divine bull” who was the earthly embodiment of the creator-god Ptah. By staging a public worshipping Apis, which involved a gymnastic and poetic competition the likes of which no one in Egypt had ever seen, “Alexander effectively collapsed the Great Chain of Being that Aristotle had erected.” This takes on added meaning when one considers Aristotle was Alexander’s tutor. This Great Chain, Selden writes, “distinguished gods and men categorically from animals and planets, a doctrine that in the West became a cornerstone of Late Antique, Medieval, and Early Modern thought.” So why did Alexander do this? To cement his position as the new pharaoh of Egypt. From as long ago as 3100 BCE, the pharaoh was visually “portrayed as a bull destroying a fortified city.”
One of the book’s authors, Phiroze Vasunia, was taught Hellenistic poetry by Dr. Stephens; he wrote a book on Egypt, The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander. His contribution here is a study of an epigram by Callimachus for someone who had died. He spends a couple of pages here on Wordsworth’s warning of the misuse of language in these tributes to the dead, but I did not see a real integration of Wordsworth’s views with the remainder of the chapter, which is a sensitive look at the famous 19th century translation of the epigram by William Cory. Vasunia’s chapter is just one of eight chapters on Callimachus, which as a collection will be especially valuable to any scholar studying that great Hellenistic poet.
Translation issues loom large in the book. A particularly fascinating case is the so-called Dream of Nectanebo, written about the last indigenous ruler of Egypt, Nectanebo II (359-342 BCE). This literary papyri came into the hands of Apollonius, who wrote it out in Greek around 150 BCE. “Apollonius’ Greek translation of an Egyptian story has become an essential piece for the transmission of Egyptian literary traditions to a Greek audience,” writes Edward Kelting (Univ. of California, San Diego). In his translation, “Apollonius weaves into the Dream a juxtaposition of Greek and Egyptian that, by design, refuses to totally translate Egyptian into Greek. It is a seam that creates space for untranslatability.” Creating this text that is both Egyptian and Greek was an amazing feat, which required him to master the “technical knowledge traditions of astronomy and dream-interpretation.” This is one of eight chapters that explore the intersection of Hellenistic and Roman Culture.
Even though the book is about the period from 323-30 BCE, later texts that look back to this period are also included. Having just visited Alexandria this summer, I found the chapter ‘Alexandria in the Ancient Greek Novels’ to be quite enjoyable. Stephen Minis (American University in Cairo) explores the book Aethiopica, written by Heliodorus in the fourth century CE. “Elements of the past and present of Egypt are brought to mind in a way that lends a mystical quality to the novel’s setting.”
But it is through the 2nd century CE author Achilles Tatius that Minis offers the reader the most important insights into the ancient Greek novel. Minis quotes another scholar as writing that Tatius “was the first of the novelists to draw emphatic attention to the elaborate representation of space.” In this case the space is the layout of the ancient city of Alexandria itself, with its prominent grid of streets that Minis says is inspired “by the Macedonian phalanx imposed on this ancient and ever-shifting soil.”
“The things to see outstripped my sight,” Tatius wrote. “The prospects drew me on. Turning round and round to face all the streets, I grew faint at the sight and at last exclaimed, like a luckless lover, ‘Eyes we have been conquered.’ The space of the city was larger than a continent.”
For Minis, this evokes not only the “eroticizing of the space” but the rhetorical dimension of “setting up in the mind a series of places and inhabiting them with lively images. Once this is done, the loci can be revisited in the mind and associations will act as reminders.” Perforce, a mnemonic device. Minis sees the unfolding of a series of more and more striking expressions as a way into the
“unknown: in the landscape of memory and cognition, the unconscious perhaps, that mysterious and unknown continent that is beyond mastering. What better figure for this than Alexandria, whose origins combine savagery and mysterious ancient wisdom, with its dangerous erotic attractions that famous Romans found so irresistible and frightening, a city that recapitulates the whole cosmos, with gates of the sun and moon.”
In this review I have focused mostly on Egypt, but there is a wealth of other aspects of the Hellenistic world here. A most valuable and insightful look into that era, this inspired book will surely be cited in scholarship innumerable times in the future.
Each chapter contains it own footnotes: sometimes nearly 200 in a single chapter. The book concludes with a 5-page bibliography of Dr. Stephens.
There are several typos: accouterments should be accoutrements (19); subdues should be subdue (p53); form should be from (56); ‘an significant’ should be ‘significant’ (p65); geek should be Greek in the Parke reference (p102); ‘at least’ should be ‘by at least’ (p242); ‘to be able’ should be ‘to be able to’ (p243)
About the editors:
Benjamin Acosta-Hughes is Professor of Greek and Latin at Ohio State Univ.
Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne is Assistant Professor of Classics at Univ. of Virginia
Phiroze Vasunia is Professor of Greek at University College, London.
Hellenistic Literature and Culture is by Bloomsbury. It lists for $94.50.
Photo: Treasures of the Hellenistic period, recovered from the sea floor in the now-sunken ancient Alexandria, are on display in the National Archeological Museum in modern Alexandria. Photo by C. Cunningham in 2024.