577 the Novelist Leslie Poles Hartley Famously Wrote

Book Reviews 577

Dean Hammer, ed., (2015) A Companion to Greek Democracy and the Roman Republic. Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell. xviii + 531 pp. $205.95 ISBN 9781444336016 (hbk).

The novelist Leslie Poles Hartley famously wrote: ‘The past is a foreign coun- try; they do things differently there’.1 Published in the Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World series, Dean Hammer’s A Companion to Greek Democracy and the Roman Republic consciously bears witness to Hartley’s observation (pp. 9, 504). Greeks and Romans did do things differently from us. For example, Athenian theater-goers were not concerned with identifying the original, unal- loyed text that could be attributed to a single playwright (p. 438), while Roman listeners of public speeches would fail to be persuaded if the speaker did not refer to the ‘fluid, flexible, and diverse’ set of ancient customs and moral values (mos maiorum) upon which the political structure of the Republic relied (pp. 218, 223). Yet, the past sometimes looks eerily familiar. Athenian playwrights ‘bypassed argument in favor of the creation of powerful and in some cases unforgettable images … difficult then to undo or to counter effectively’ (p. 443). We can affirm their temptation to do so, living as we do in a spin- doctored world saturated with images. Roman ‘theater was an informal polling place that allowed the ruling class to gauge the sentiments of a broad cross- section of the populace’ (p. 455). It is easy to say the same thing about the ongoing success of the musical Hamilton (2015), first staged in the selfsame year of this volume’s publication, and which has coincided with a moment in US politics of heightened anxiety about history and identity. The past might also seem simultaneously familiar and alien. Athenian democracy was ‘a sys- tem that was maximally participatory and maximally amateurish’ (p. 170). It is hard not to think of the political amateurs who, precisely because of their status as such, have now taken center-stage in liberal democratic polities. Yet there is little that is participatory about our representative regimes, which are also outfitted with professional judiciaries and bureaucracies. By contrast to the Athenian demos, ‘the Roman people [populus] had no legitimate way of conveying or expressing its views without formalized leadership’ (p. 154). On its face, this comes across as a familiar description of representative politics in which ‘the people’ are – and often fail to be – represented by elected or appointed officials; upon reflection, it could also be an alien observation about the acute hierarchies that existed in Roman society and which were reflected in its ancient constitution. In its very existence the volume is a shot across the

1 L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2002 [1953]), p. 17.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/20512996-12340182Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 04:48:04PM via free access 578 Book Reviews bow aimed at those who fall into the fashionable practice of regarding comparative political thought as an enterprise which necessarily involves a so-called ‘non-Western’ civilization. I have presented the claims about Athens and Rome as such to mirror the organization of the Companion, which spans thirteen thematic parts and alter- nates between a chapter on Greece and a chapter on Rome written in large part by tenured or emeritus scholars. The nearly identical titles given to the pair chapters in each theme encourages the reader to read through both chapters, while the total length of each part also pushes in this direction: each pair runs between thirty and forty pages and, with the exception of Stewart (pp. 405-427), each chapter is broken up into multiple subsections. As is typical of Blackwell Companions, each entry is usefully accompanied by extensive ‘References’ and ‘Further Reading’ sections. Students of informal norms, politics, and drama as well as those interested in origins, law, and visual culture will all find rel- evant essays which might serve either as introductions or as surveys. Examples in the first category are Konstan’s standalone essay on comparative political thought (pp. 8-19) and Morstein-Marx’s essay on contional audiences in Rome (pp. 294-309), which pairs nicely with supporting arguments for Roman people power by Arena (pp. 217-238) and Tatum (pp. 262-8), and against by Champion (pp. 330-334). Examples in the second category are Fisher’s essay on social values in democratic Athens and non-democratic Sparta (pp. 195-216), Ligt’s thought-provoking essay titled ‘Production, Trade, and Consumption in the Roman Republic’ (pp. 368-385), and Balot and Atkison’s surefooted tour of the status of women and slaves across theater, oratory, and philosophy (pp. 389-404). Hammer has the first and the last word in the Companion. In the Introduction (pp. 1-7) and Conclusion (pp. 503-519) he raises questions about central political theoretical concepts such as freedom (eleutheria/libertas) and power (dunamis/potestas). Together with his attempt to connect discus- sions about power in international relations theory to those in political theory (pp. 510-515), Hammer demonstrates the importance of comparative political thought to political science. Doing so somewhat mitigates the tension in the volume between the focus on democracy and republicanism, on the one hand, and the broad signifiers of ‘Greece’ and ‘Rome’, on the other. Due to the focus on democracy, Greece is often equivalent to Athens. When Athens is not the focus, as in Fisher’s dual emphasis on Athens and Sparta (pp. 195-216), and in Tandy’s exposition of the wider historical and geographical economic context of Greece (pp. 349-367), the reader gets much more than ‘Greek Democracy’. Sicilian Syracuse, described elsewhere by Ober as ‘a polis that seemed in some ways to be Athens’ twin’, might have served as another example of Greek

Polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek Political ThoughtDownloaded from 35 Brill.com09/30/2021(2018) 569-611 04:48:04PM via free access Book Reviews 579 democracy.2 The authors who write on the Roman Republic cover a period of five hundred years where ‘Rome’ and ‘Roman’ are shifting signifiers (p. 482). Indeed, there exists a heightened awareness among these scholars that the evidence is lacking or, rather, that the preponderance of evidence comes from the later centuries of the Republic (pp. 46, 146). The Companion is not only conceived as an exercise in comparative political thought, but its editor presents the volume as having been executed as such. Hammer writes that the ‘authors of each of the parallel chapters worked with each other throughout the project, organizing each chapter with an eye toward the other, reading each other’s chapters, and ultimately highlighting comparisons that emerge from each of the cases’ (p. 2). The Companion does not vindicate Hammer’s claim. The habitual practice of each author refer- ring to its pair chapter in the first and/or last section of their essays is rarely more than superficial; an exception is Farenga’s segue to Schofield in Part III ‘Dêmokratia and Res Publica’ (p. 110), which, however, goes unreciprocated. In his stimulating survey of visual culture in Athens (pp. 461-481), Hölscher makes no reference whatsoever to the pair essay by Perry. In Part V on law, a ripe moment to think comparatively was missed. Cohen argues for the participatory amateurism of agonistic judicial practice in Athens (pp. 167-178) while in the pair essay, Williamson presents a more sanguine account of Rome’s legal and extra-legal procedures by comparison to other entries on Rome (pp. 179- 192). A parallel which might have been discussed, given how much the two authors make of it, is the absence of a professional judiciary in both Athens and Rome (pp. 171-172; 185-187). The focus on participatory communities is largely achieved throughout the book. A successful instance is the pair of essays in Part VIII on rhetoric where Roisman and Morstein-Marx attend to an institutional manifestation of their topic. Roisman discusses epideictic oratory in Athens using the funeral oration as an example (pp. 277-293). He shows how Athenian citizens were ‘judged by the way they enact their membership in the community, especially in the military sphere; this performance establishes their character and reputation and those of their city’ (p. 282; see also the parallel discussion by Balot and Atkison, pp. 394-396). Morstein-Marx shows how rhetorical performances by Roman senators in public meetings (contiones) were constructive of republi- can ideology. Nonetheless, this ‘steeply hierarchical speech-situation’ could, in practice, lead the people to vote to reject Senatorial instruction (p. 307). Other

2 J. Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 157; there is no entry for ‘Syracuse’ in the index of the Companion.

Polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek Political ThoughtDownloaded from35 (2018)Brill.com09/30/2021 569-611 04:48:04PM via free access 580 Book Reviews entries could have gone further in delineating the participatory communities they address. For example, in the various and useful things that are said about Athenian drama (Fisher, Sidwell) and the Roman comedian Plautus whose plays ‘reinscribe the contest [between master and slave] in its complexity’ (Stewart, p. 421) inter alios, the authors fall short of the participatory aspect of the communities they discuss and which Hammer sets. For they say nothing about the staging of these plays. If, however, it is sound to assume that when writing a play the playwright always has in mind the stage or setting upon which his plays will be performed, that is, the stage upon which the actors will participate, then a Companion that focuses explicitly on participatory communities ought to have addressed the stagecraft of the plays.3 O’Bryhim does go some way in giving the reader a sense of what happened on the Roman stage (pp. 446-458), at the cost, however, of losing theater’s subversive possibilities. For O’Bryhim, the playwrights wrote apolitical plays which were politicized by Roman aristocrats obsessed with social standing: theater merely ‘reflected the power structure of the Roman state’ (p. 455). One final remark about organization. Given Hammer’s commitment to showing how concepts and practices ‘emerge in the enactment of what we can understand as participatory communities in ancient Greece and Rome’ (p. 1, emphasis in original), the editorial decision to put the twin chapters on visual culture last (Part XIII) ‘to complete our picture’ (p. 6) is questionable. Both Hölscher (pp. 461-481) and Perry (pp. 482-499) help us visualize the places in which these participatory communities lived and give us a sense of the theoretical principles which inform these Greek and Roman spaces. For example, we read about how the ancient Greeks engaged in ‘reciprocal interaction’ with ‘members of their ideal tripartite polis community: with their co-citizens (agora), their gods (sanctuaries), and their ancestors (tombs)’ (p. 462). What does it mean, we might pause to ask, to interact in a reciprocal way with gods and with the dead? We know that reputation was central to the practice of politics Athens and Rome. Did Athenians and Romans, individually and col- lectively, see themselves as having a reputation among the gods and among the dead? In an earlier essay on Roman politics and clout, Tatum asks: ‘Whence clout? The Romans’ answer … remained consistent and clear: reputation, not least the distinction conferred by a glorious ancestry, wealth, and extensive personal connections’ (p. 257). Reputation and gratitude (gratia) – clout ‘in its purest form’ are of a piece, for it is through making productive one’s ancestry, wealth, and personal connections that reputation in agonistic Roman politics could be won (p. 257). Tatum demonstrates the process of production with the

3 See P.D. Arnott, Public and Performance in the Greek Theater (New York: Routledge, 1991).

Polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek Political ThoughtDownloaded from 35 Brill.com09/30/2021(2018) 569-611 04:48:04PM via free access Book Reviews 581 example of the ‘routines of the morning greeting, the salutatio, when the man- sions of great men were opened to all and sundry seeking advice or assistance, including material assistance’ (p. 259). Perry elaborates upon this practice in her discussion of the Roman house where private homes are game in politics, both as spaces where the patron-client relationship may be openly cultivated and in disputes among political actors (pp. 491-492). Arguably, and in this instance at least, Perry’s discussion of the salutatio is prior to that by Tatum; for it makes evident the elementary point that the private/public distinction is a modern imposition on Roman (and Greek) participatory communities. In the last section of his Conclusion, Hammer turns to Augustine of Hippo as a normative resource for thinking about power (pp. 515-516). Doing so to ‘challenge or expand our own conception of power’ (p. 511) is consistent with the spirit of the volume; yet it suggests a dissatisfaction with the participatory communities of Greece and Rome. Dissatisfaction because confession, accord- ing to Hammer, is a concept absent from Greek and Roman thought. As part of the ongoing scholarly effort to help our imaginations flourish, Hammer’s call to go beyond the participatory communities of Greece and Rome is surely in the right direction; whether it will promote the editor’s agenda of a comparative study of the ancient world remains to be seen. The Companion shows us what kind of material might be involved in an attempt at comparison, although, Hammer’s own contributions notwithstanding, it does not showcase how such a comparison might be successfully performed. The disciplinary membrane separating Athens and Rome is insufficiently porous and the questions which are particular to comparative endeavors yet not reducible to either comparan- dum remain dormant, awaiting the efforts of future scholarship.

Andreas Avgousti Portland State University [email protected]

Polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek Political ThoughtDownloaded from35 (2018)Brill.com09/30/2021 569-611 04:48:04PM via free access