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BOOK REVIEWS
Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece. By JESPER SVENBRO.
Translated from the French by JANET LLOYD. Myth and Poetics. Ithaca and Lon-
don: Cornell University Press, 1993. Pp. xiv + 233; several figs. in text. $37.95
(cloth), $12.95 (paper).
It is to be hoped that Janet Lloyd's fine translation of this 1988 book will bring
Svenbro's work to a wider audience. His La parola e il marmo has been relatively
little used by American classicists; yet it is a strong account of the social origins of
Greek literary criticism and makes a superb complement to Detienne's classic Les
maitres de verite.1 Phrasikleia continues S.'s interest, inspired by Eric Havelock, in
how the modes of communication of pre-classical Greece were related to its social
and economic institutions. Its particularconcern is to redress an imbalance in the
study of Greek literacy by foregrounding the role of the reader.
In line with recent work on ancient literacy, S. generally resists the temptation
to make writing a "universal catalyst" explaining all the major developments of
archaic Greek culture.2 As an "anthropology," Phrasikleia is concerned with the
cultural meaning of reading more than its technology or presumed intrinsic powers.
S.'s method is a structuralistanalysis of texts, myths, and artifacts to uncover the
various "models" they exhibit of the relation of reader to writer. His "microsociol-
ogy of written communication" (p. 3) finally aims to enter into that space between
reader and text so as to view their transaction as a social event. Following Foucault
and Bourdieu, S. holds that this transaction was often charged with questions of
power and autonomy, and so seeks paradigms for Greek conceptions of the reader
in such diverse and apparently unrelated social practices as exogamous marriage,
pederasty, and the Athenian theater.
In format, Phrasikleia is a dossier of ten case studies (some published previ-
ously) that range from seventh-century inscriptions to the Phaedrus. Yet the stud-
ies are interrelated and taken together suggest a broad history of Greek ideologies
about the relation of reader and writer that provokes some reservations. But first it
is necessary to sketch the theses of individual chapters, if only to indicate S.'s
range of topics.
The first three chapters focus on inscriptional evidence. S. begins with a stun-
ningly rich reading of the Phrasikleia monument and inscription (CEG 29): its lexi-
cal and iconographic codes combine to insist that KkEo0 (which is cognate with
English "loud") must re-sound; at the same time, writing, like Phrasikleia herself,
1. J. Svenbro, La parola e il marmo: Alle origini delle poetica greca (Turin, 1984), revised and cor-
rected ed. of La Parole et le marbre: Aux origines de la poetique grecque (Lund, 1976); discussed from a
variety of points of view in Dialoghi di Archeologia 2 (1981): 1-108. Also noteworthy is S.'s, "La de-
coupe du poeme. Notes sur les origines sacrificielles de la po6tique grecque," Poetique 58 (1984): 215-32.
2. R. Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 1992), p. 19.
Permission to reprint a review in this section may be obtained only from the author.
367
368 BOOKREVIEWS
can only "show" KcX~oand needs to conscript the voice of a reader to be fulfilled.
The dynamics of this "machine for propagating sounds" (p. 2) are recovered
through a wider sampling of archaic inscriptions in chapter 2. Here S. argues that
before the mid-sixth century the first person was the default case in sepulchral and
dedicatory inscriptions (for the most part, S. leaves graffiti and depinti aside, p. 38,
n. 55). His argument is not simply that none of the texts in Pfohl3 and Lazzarini
from before 600 B.C.E.is explicitly in the third person, but also that a o6E without
explicit verb is easily associated in Greek with the first person (e.g., Od. 16.205-6,
CEG 174A). Hence not only is a votive "Ai" to be read "I was dedicated to Zeus"
(p. 39), but a text such as ofpa T6o'sipti KpiTov(CEG 72) may be rendered "Here
I am, the tomb of Krites," ratherthan taken as a "contaminated"formula (p. 32).4
In these chapters S. gives an entirely new interpretationof the meaning of this
first person. His argumentis that, when writing entered these commemorative con-
texts it did not simply translate established oral utterances into permanentform but
rather created an entirely new kind of speech act. The inscribed "I" belonged nei-
ther to the writer (i.e., no dedicator ever said "I am the Grjta of... ") nor to the
reader, but was assigned to the object to declare its perpetual "hereness." Given
the classical and archaic (S. infers, partly from the use of scriptio continua) habit
of reading aloud, this inscribed "I" has two major implications: writers must
forego any hope of preserving their own (first-person) utterances, and readers are
dominated in being forced to pronounce words not their own.
S.'s approach to this rarely pondered question rejects Burzachechi's thesis that
animistic beliefs endowed these "speaking objects" with life and voice;5 for S. ar-
gues in chapter 3 that real, resounding voice is what inscriptions crucially lack and
must extract from readers. Although Burzachechi's thesis is, as S. says, indemon-
strable, one may be reluctant to rule out all animistic attitudes towards archaic
monuments in light of such religious practices as binding, beating, and banishing
statues. Indeed, it seems that Phrasikleia's monument was buried fairly soon after
it was erected, presumably for safekeeping. To hide this "fame-shower" from the
sight of others and yet to think one has not destroyed it suggests that other beliefs
about the powers of an inscribed artifact may have overlapped with its indubitable
mission to be seen, to be read, and to provoke sound.
Chapter 4 finds perhaps the oldest model by which the Greeks elaborated the
concept of writing (p. 80) in the practice of naming a child from the father or grand-
father. In this perspective, sepulchral inscriptions offer a Kx?o; that, by repeating
the fame of the father, assures a durable "acoustic" ratherthan biological posterity.
The mythic expression of this "genealogical" model of fame is studied in chapter 5,
an exemplary structural analysis of the love story of Phokos and Kallirhoe from
Plutarch(Mor. 774D-75B). Comparisonwith lesser-known stories about the inven-
tion of writing shows the tale to be concerned with the posthumous renown that
writing makes possible. In contrast to the Platonic model where the written ?6&yois
3. I have checked S.'s references against P. A. Hansen, Carmina epigraphica graeca saeculorum vii-v
a. Chr. n. (Berlin and New York, 1983), which I cite.
4. Yet this same text may support the case for contamination, since the carver began to write or|pa
?q, and then corrected himself to ofCLa TO6' eiLi.
T66'
5. M. Burzachechi, "Oggetti parlantinelle epigrafi Greche," Epigraphica 24 (1962): 3-54. For a semi-
ological approach, P. Pucci, "Inscriptions archaiques sur les statues des dieux," in Les Savoirs de'ecri-
ture en Grece ancienne, ed. M. Detienne (Lille, 1988), pp. 480-97.
BOOKREVIEWS 369
the son of the writer, these stories envision writing as a daughter (both are ideally
silent); the epitaph thus is an tciKkXrlpoS of her father's hearth, and the reader (the
one who SvTuyXdvet the writing in both senses of that word) is the son-in-law;
united with the writing, the son-in-law may engender the 6oyo;, the legitimate
offspring of the father who will bear his name. In this worthy rival to the Platonic
myth, any Oedipal tension between the father/writerand son/text is replaced by a
potentially fruitful and legitimate exchange between the father (writer) and the
many suitors (readers) who would take possession of his daughter (his text).
Chapters 6 and 7 argue that the Greek conception of law was inseparable from
its conception of reading, both of which set the very highest value on the word spo-
ken aloud (p. 122). S. proposes an etymology for v6gtoS"law" from vE[itv in the
sense "to read," comparing Latin lex. In its prehistory, vEtctv would have applied
to the "distribution"of laws through oral performancebased on memory; this "oral
distribution," v6joS, became "law" and became "king" in the city when reading
from written texts replaced the sonorous commands of the king or his spokesmen.
In the course of this argument S. makes the important point that tvCVEE[ttv and
dvav?Vctv/-4o0at were early verbs for "to read" (cf. esp. Pind. 01. 6.90-91, cited
on p. 111, a significant passage for the debate about epinician performance). De-
spite S.'s best efforts (pp. 110-14), the etymology suffers from an admitted dearth
of early evidence.6 Yet even without the etymology, S. reconstructs a plausible and
suggestive evolution from oral to written legal practices that includes other terms
such as ErryrMTai who are to be seen originally as performers ratherthan interpret-
ers of laws. Legendary accounts of the relation of writing to the evolving concept
of law are considered in chapter 7. Since, from the Greeks' point of view, reading
is an act in which the reader's vocal apparatusis controlled not by his own WuXni
but by the written inscription before him, S. reads the legends of Lycurgus, Numa,
and Epimenides as showing how writing, not writing, and tatooing may function as
strategies for the lawgiver to exercise power over the body of the citizens/readers
after he is gone (p. 142).
Chapter 8 moves laterally to assess this legal model of "reanimation through
reading" (p. 146) in light of contemporarypoetic practice in Sappho. S.'s basic ar-
gument is that for Sappho's lyrics to pass from their oral forms into written texts they
had to pass through the "order of written discourse" as elaborated in funerary and
votive inscriptions (p. 148). But these conventionally referred to the object in the
first person and to the writer in the third, so that there was a clash with the oral "I"
traditionalin monody. For S., this leads to a paradox:"Seen in the perspective of in-
scriptions, where the writer does not refer to himself as an 'I,' Sappho's poem, like
so many other lyric and epic poems is an anomaly. For Sappho should have defined
herself as 'absent,' or even 'dead,' using the demonstrative keine" (p. 151). S. holds
that in writing down her poems Sappho engaged these conventions and indeed that
her texts allegorically speak of her inevitable future absence. Oaivesai [tot is read
as an allegory in which the "breaking"of Sappho's voice (31.9 L-P) intimates her
6. Apart from Hesychius, the only example of the simplex v?tctv with the meaning "to read" is Soph.
frag. 144 Nauck-Radt. Examples of the reconstructed original sense of v6guo, "distribution by means of
the voice," are got by promoting into the text nTtievv6[toq(= "oral diffusion") for tnCov vopg6 in Hom. II.
20.249 and Hes. Op. 403 (similarly, Hymn. Horn.Ap. 20). But the agricultural context of Op. 381ff. sup-
ports the usual text and meaning, "pasturageof words."
370 BOOKREVIEWS
own "deathby writing" (p. 152); the "godlike" figure she envies is the future reader
who will breathea WuXfiinto her poem (her "daughter,"ypa(pi) and espouse it when
Sappho is gone.
Although this allegory is worked out in great detail, I was troubled by the pre-
liminary argumentsfor taking this poem as allegorical at all. I failed to see why the
"order of written discourse" should necessarily have impinged on Sappho's poetic
traditions, why she was not free to ignore or reinvent such usages. S.'s answer
appears to depend on generalizing inscriptional conventions that are admittedly pe-
culiar into a Foucauldian "order of written discourse" that "carries the force of an
established notion shared by the culture as a whole" (p. 149). But this may be to
forget the variety of available communicative forms (e.g., personal letters), and a
perspective that finds most lyric poems "anomalous"betrays its extravagance.
In chapter9, S. draws together several strandsof his argumentto propose that si-
lent reading was only conceptualized in the late sixth century B.C.E.and was popu-
larized by the Athenian theater. Having argued that silent reading was at best a
marginal phenomenon in the first centuries of the Greek alphabet, S. claims that
drama vocalized texts in a radically new way. The actors on stage functioned as a
sort of "vocal writing" for the spectators, presenting to them a script that did not
need their interpretationand vocalization. The spectator who takes in the play with
so little effort was the model for the silent reader who takes in the text with a pas-
sivity suggestive of an Empedoclean percipient, whose eye receives the radiated
oTotXgia of things. Once silent reading became common and people begin to "see"
what a text says (p. 167), then writing could be regardedas more active and auton-
omous: thus the idea that the silently read text, like an actor, presents itself to the
readerleads to writing being regardedfor the first time as having a voice (first in the
unroKpivopal of an Athenian inscription of the late sixth century, Lazzarini 658.2).
S. claims that metaphorsof "letters that speak" only begin to crop up in the second
half of the fifth century (e.g., Hippolytus 877) and takes them as a sign not of in-
creased literacy but of increased silent reading. So too metaphors of the "tablets of
the soul" (e.g., Pind. 01. 10.1-3) testify to the internalized, silently performedtext.
The new passivity and internalization in silent reading are connected to larger
changes in fifth-centuryGreek culture by which v6oaoqwas internalized as the city's
Super Ego (comparing Crito 54D).
The idea that silent reading and the concomitant metaphors of "speaking" in-
scriptions only arose in Greece under the aegis of the theater seems an unnecessar-
ily strong case to make, and it remained unclear how dramatic performers were
more radically distanced from their passive public (pp. 168, 170, 180) than was the
rhapsode while presenting his text from the Pfjpa. But this thesis is enmeshed in a
larger history of "speaking objects" sketched through chapters 2, 3, and 9 that is
not without obstacles. In chapter 3, S. must dispose of two "speaking"inscriptions
that run counter to his idea that before 400 B.C.E., "the Greeks did not believe in
writing that spoke-except in a metaphorical sense-conscious as they were that it
is the reader who must lend his voice to the mute stone" (p. 41; cf. p. 48). In the
first, S. proposes to correct a reading in the Mnesitheos inscription of about 475
from Eretria,which seems to speak: v?p' Eir0eKe (pie? p9ETCpTtlapTre / TUpOI n'I
aKpoTaTOI(rT?kEvdKadRaTov/ hdTtq ?pci tnaptool ... (108.4-6 CEG). S. claims that
photographs clearly show a ho and not ha beginning line 6 of the poem (12 of the
BOOK REVIEWS 371