Severan Culture

[Ursus]

Simon Swain, Stephen Harrison, Jas Elsner (ed.), Severan Culture.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 569. ISBN

9780521859820. $160.00.

 

Reviewed by Tom Hawkins, Ohio State University (hawkins.312@...)

Word count: 3864 words

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Table of Contents

(http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0810/2008297064-t.html)

 

This volume honors the career of Ewen Bowie, and it succeeds mightily

in this goal. The twenty-six contributions composed by members of what

Simon Swain terms "the Bowie clan" (p. 1) are of uniformly high

quality, and I have already recommended several chapters to graduate

students and colleagues. I will offer a few overarching comments

before briefly treating each chapter in turn.

 

My only major frustration with Severan Culture is that, as a whole, it

offers little sense of its motivations or intentions and thus leaves

one to wonder what to make of Severan culture. Imperial dynasties make

easy mileage markers for our interests in periodization, but not all

dynasties cause equally deep tectonic shifts. Alexander and Caesar

gave us wholly new worlds to digest, but can we say the same of the

Severan dynasty? Were the cultural changes equally profound at the

appearance and the disappearance of the Severans? Does the use of

dynastic periodization gloss over important stories of continuity

between dynasties or change within a single dynasty? And is "culture"

adequately represented in the volume's three section headings (the

first of which is obviously problematic as a subdivision of culture):

"Literature and Culture," "Art and Architecture," and "Religion and

Philosophy"? We get no clear answers to such questions or explanations

of the volume's contours in the introduction. In the last two pages of

that section Swain does touch on several critical points, such as the

Severans as the first non-Italic dynasty to rule the empire, the

importance of Caracalla's citizenship policy, the continued growth of

Christianity, etc., but some readers might feel that the twenty-five

preceding pages, in which Swain summarizes and discusses the papers to

come, could have been compressed in order to provide space for a more

general and theoretical foundation for this collection.

 

Moving to the positive, it may well be that the greatest honor Severan

Culture pays to Bowie is the way in which his students and colleagues

have built upon his seminal work on the Second Sophistic (though we

should not forget that he has also made important contributions to many

other areas of classical scholarship). The bulk of Bowie's

bibliography does not consist of studies of art, architecture and

religion, and yet this volume includes ample testimony to the ways in

which his teaching, mentorship, and research have influenced students

of these fields. This influence is also demonstrated in impressive

fashion in the preface, in which Stephen Harrison teams with Swain to

provide a narrative overview of Bowie's career, a list of his students

(a task that requires eight pages!), and a virtually complete

bibliography.

 

In addition to the preface and introduction (already mentioned) and the

individual chapters (discussed below), Severan Culture also features

two enjoyable curiosities. The first is the cover, which seems to

depict a hunter aiming his bow at two copulating wild boars. Some

readers will recognize this as part of a larger hunting scene which

decorates a manuscript of ps.-Oppian's Cynegetica (the Codex Marcianus

Graecus 479), but others might be unsure what to make of this image. I

do hope that whoever cropped the scene in this way is not surprised at

our enjoyment of it. (I surveyed several colleagues' responses to the

cover to ensure that I was not simply being sophomoric with all this,

but everyone immediately saw the same basic narrative, though an

extremely close look will reveal that the rear boar is, in reality,

keeping his hooves to himself.) The second item, found on page xix, is

a letter from Philostratus to Longinus in praise of Bowie. The letter

appears in Greek without preface or explanation, but the Table of

Contents hints that this previously unknown sophistic text may have

been "discovered" by Donald Russell.

 

Aside from these two pleasant oddities, the volume is a well-produced

collection, though its high price will certainly discourage many from

purchasing it. There are copious images in the second section of the

book, a comprehensive bibliography, and a full index. Only twice was I

distracted by editing errors (once on p. 413 where "and" ought to be

something like "as a" and again on p. 457 where an extraneous "not"

undermines the author's point.)

 

I will now move to brief overviews of the book's twenty-six chapters,

which are all innovative, informative, and deserving of individual

comment, though my sketches here must remain extremely brief.

 

Ch. 1: Tim Whitmarsh's chapter, "Prose literature and the Severan

dynasty," surveys some large trends in Severan prose literature. For

example, Whitmarsh argues against a strong imperial influence on

literary production; he demonstrates how the notion of Hellenism was

greatly contested because of the growing role of Christianity, through

thinking about cultures outside the empire (as with Philostratus'

account of Apollonius' trip to India), and as a result of debates

within the Hellenic world; and he notes the Severan penchant for

"large-scale, synthetic works that attempt to capture and define

intellectual traditions" (p. 50). As always, his comments are acute,

and into what could have been a dry overview he intersperses such gems

as a succinct warning about certain interpretive pitfalls (pp. 37-8)

and comments on "the aesthetics of disorder" in texts such as Aelian's

Varied History and Clement's Stromateis (p. 46).

 

Ch. 2: Harry Sidebottom offers a guided tour of literary

representations of the past in "Severan historiography: evidence,

patterns, and arguments." On the Latin side of things there is not

much to be said (though Sidebottom does address some of the underlying

reasons for the non-existence of Latin historiography), but Greek

historiography was flourishing, especially in Sidebottom's flexible

understanding of historiography, which allows him to include in his

discussion a wide range of texts, many of which eschew the tone and

style of their classical historiographical predecessors. Indeed,

Sidebottom lists no fewer than ten sub-genres (e.g. various forms of

biography, ethnography, and historical fiction) that all approach and

re-present the past in significantly different modes. As with so many

of the best arguments in this volume, Sidebottom shows that the story

of Severan historiography is one of creative re-configurations of

received traditions.

 

Ch. 3: John Ma's "The worlds of Nestor the poet" takes us on an

amazing journey in search of Nestor, a poet who wrote a lipogrammatic

Iliad (i.e. each book was composed without a single instance of the

book's letter-number -- thus, no alphas in Book 1, no betas in Book 2,

etc.). This fascinating chapter combines a marshalling of scattered

fragmentary evidence, savvy analysis of this evidence, and a rare

example of the role of scholarly intuition in crafting an argument.

The silhouette of Nestor that emerges is of a Hellenistic-style poet in

the vein of Nicander and Parthenius whose career reminds us not to

forget the role of poetry even in this prose-dominated era (a point

that Bowie himself has forcefully made).

 

Ch. 4: Severan poetry is again the focus in Gideon Nisbet's "Sex lives

of the sophists: epigrams by Philostratus and Fronto," which unwinds a

delightful string of puns and allusions in epigrams by these two

authors more famous from work in other genres. Although Severan

epigrams are less plentiful than their Antonine predecessors, Nisbet

shows that the genre had lost none of its elegance, complexity, and

wit. More than this, he demonstrates how these two sophists reinvented

epigram "as an important tool of sophistic self-fashioning" (123).

 

Ch. 5: A final contribution to our view of Severan poetry in Greek

comes in Mary Whitby's "The Cynegetica attributed to Oppian." As with

Ma's work on Nestor, Whitby alerts us to the Alexandrian aspects of

ps.-Oppian's poetry (e.g. his four-book poem may be "more pointedly

parallel to the four books of Callimachus' Aetia than are the five of

Oppian's Halieutica" (p. 126)), and it is from this perspective that

she liberates ps.-Oppian somewhat from the shadow of Oppian himself.

Her reappraisal works well (including such stylistic matters as the

influence of the Hellenistic epyllion and contextual points, such as

her suggestion that the poem may have been linked to Julia Domna's

visit to the East in 215), and the Cynegetica emerges as a much more

interesting text thanks to Whitby's analysis.

 

Ch. 6: Jason Koenig starts from a paradox in his "Greek athletics in

the Severan period: literary views": Philostratus claims to have

written his Gymnasticus in response to a decline in athletic standards,

but athletics was a boom industry under the Severan emperors. Koenig

plausibly suggests that the real issue was what Philostratus saw as a

decline in the specifically Hellenic quality of the athletes, training

regimens, and competitions. Athletics had gotten away from its roots.

In building his case, Koenig moves beyond the Gymnasticus and shows how

the world of sport had changed in taste and style from the Antonine

era.

 

Ch. 7: Judith Mossman follows Whitby in focusing on an allegedly

pseudonymous text in her "Heracles, Prometheus, and the play of genres

in [Lucian]'s Amores." Fans of Mossman's work on Greek tragedy and

Plutarch will not be disappointed here. She opens up the text by

excavating a network of allusions to a huge range of traditional genres

(as well as the not-so-traditional novel). She places particular

emphasis on characters, such as the two in her title, who are familiar

from a variety of genres, and it is the resulting ambiguity of generic

allusions that propels the text and Mossman's argument well above any

mechanistic rut of one-to-one associations. Of particular importance

is her demonstration of the way in which allusions to Greek comedy

force us to re-evaluate the serious tone of the text's central debate

between champions of homosexual and heterosexual expressions of eros.

 

Ch. 8: The shortest chapter of the volume begins from a scene in

Heliodorus and quickly explodes into an argument of very general

application. Glen Most's "Allegory and narrative in Heliodorus" shows

how a given allegorical mode can drive the contour of the narrative.

His comments on the difference between allegory, which "tells a story

of restoration," and metaphor, which is "in fact the language of exile"

(p. 164) and his brief discussion of the similar narrative trajectories

of Neoplatonic allegory and the Greek novels make this a richly

rewarding essay.

 

Ch. 9: Philip Hardie kicks off a series of three Latin-centered papers

with his "Polyphony or Babel? Hosidius Geta's Medea and the poetics of

the cento." Geta's poem takes lines of Virgilian epic and weaves them

into a tragedy that tells the story of Medea. Hardie focuses on Geta's

poem as an extreme test case for intertextual theory, since "the cento

is an epiphenomenon of a canonicity that defines itself as the very

opposite of the carnivalesque dialogicity of Bakhtin, or the

anti-authoritarian intertextuality of Kristeva" (p. 170). In every

line we hear Virgil's words and Geta's reorganization of them,

fragments of the story of Aeneas re-orchestrated to tell the story of

Medea. Hardie's insightful arguments conclude with the delicious

possibility (which Hardie himself cautions against accepting too

hastily) that this Medea is actually by Ovidius Geta, i.e. that Ovid,

in exile at Getan Tomis, constructed a new Medea from a dismembered

Virgilian text in the very location where he claims (in Tristia 1.3)

she had dismembered her brother.

 

Ch. 10: Jonathon Powell's "Unfair to Caecilius? Ciceronian dialogue

techniques in Minucius Felix" parallels Hardie's chapter in examining

classical influences on a Severan text. In this case, Powell sees two

fragmentary Ciceronian dialogues, the Hortensius and book 3 of De re

publica as key to understanding Minucius' intentionally bland

(according to Powell) dialogue Octavius. An appreciation of these

models suggests that Minucius' literary form was "deliberately adopted

to give an impression of civilized and impartial debate and to divert

attention from the author's parti pris while archly acknowledging it"

(p. 187).

 

Ch. 11: "Cyprian's Ad Donatum" by Michael Winterbottom also addresses

certain Ciceronian influences, but this is closer to the beginning than

the end of his argument. He goes on to discuss the role of Calpurnius'

first eclogue, which, like Cyprian's piece, moves from "intimations of

religion...to the consolations of religion" (p. 193) and Cyprian's

careful strategy of rhetorical dissimulation. Cyprian rejects overly

artful eloquence in place of a strong and lucid case for Christianity,

but his declamation "at times mounts to the rostra he rejects" (p.

197). Winterbottom shows that even when it appears that Cyprian is

breaking his own stylistic rule this is never actually the case,

because for Cyprian the Christian message is by definition always

strong, simple and clear.

 

Ch. 12: Zahra Newby introduces the second section of the volume (Art

and Architecture) with her "Art at the crossroads? Themes and styles in

Severan art," and like the papers by Whitmarsh and Edwards which lead

off their respective sections, Newby's contribution does an excellent

job of broadly orienting the reader to major issues and themes in

preparation for the more narrowly-focused essays to come. Her

examinations of state reliefs, portraits and funerary art lead to the

conclusion that we might expect from her title: "Whether one sees

Severan art as the last great expression of classical art or as the

herald of Late Antiquity depends primarily on where one looks" (p.

249).

 

Ch. 13: Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis' "Landscape, transformation, and

divine epiphany" argues that the mixture of perspectives in the

portrayal of landscapes in Severan art "imitates both the experience of

movement and travel...and epiphany..." (p. 254). Her thesis elegantly

combines an appreciation of mystic modes of viewing and sensitivity to

the prominent role of travel and pilgrimage in this period. In her

final case study, dealing with a mosaic from Cos depicting the arrival

of Asclepius, she shows the flexibility of her model in incorporating a

divine figure as the dynamic mover in something of a reverse pilgrimage

narrative.

 

Ch. 14: In "Urban development in the Severan empire" Andrew Wilson

adds two elements to his enlightening survey of urban building programs

across the empire that make his chapter stand out. First, he is

virtually alone in looking in any detail at how issues of Severan

culture would play out in the later third century. For example, he

shows how Lepcis Magna's annual donation of olive oil in gratitude for

Severus' benefactions became a dire burden after the imperial treasury

took over land once owned by the local elite (pp. 306-07). Second (and

here he has somewhat more company), he is alert to moments when our

evidence may conceal what we might today call an abuse of power, as in

his suggestion that some North African building projects may be the

result of coerced euergetism.

 

Ch. 15: In "Metaphor and identity in Severan architecture: the

Septizodium at Rome between 'reality' and 'fantasy'" Edmund Thomas

presents a thorough re-reading of the Septizodium and a

re-contextualization of it in terms of its regionalist symbolism.

Working through all available evidence (including post-antique sketches

of the building, which was demolished only in 1588), Thomas argues that

this monument must have been quite a bit longer than most scholars have

supposed. This elongation, in turn, spurs a reconsideration of the

building's function and its relationship to its immediate surroundings.

Thomas moves quite effectively from architectural minutiae to much

broader matters as he notes that the septizodium was a specifically

North African form introduced into Rome by a North African emperor.

 

Ch. 16: After receiving mention in the preceding chapters, the Severan

Marble Plan takes center stage in Jennifer Trimble's "Visibility and

viewing on the Severan Marble Plan." This 1:240 scale map of Rome,

which featured an amazing level of detail down to the level of noting

the location of individual doorways, was placed 4 m. above the floor on

an inner wall of the Templum Pacis and stretched up to a height of 17

m. How could a viewer see any of it!? Trimble answers this question

and more in assessing the map's impact on a viewer. The map boasts a

vast amount of knowledge and, because of its placement, also impedes

even a well-informed viewer from accessing any but a tiny portion of

that knowledge. The emperor, with his unequaled resources, is the sole

"ideal viewer" of this map and the rest of us are left to feel

over-awed. One chilling implication of Trimble's thesis suggests that

Roman viewers found themselves in a symbolic panopticon with the

emperor's omniscient gaze bearing down on them and reaching into the

seemingly inaccessible recesses of their private lives.

 

Ch. 17: Alison Cooley discusses the "creative emulation" of Rome's

first emperor in "Septimius Severus: the Augustan emperor." Her

overall argument can be summed up in her statement that Severus

"strengthened his own legitimacy as ruler by calling to mind the first

princeps, who, like him, had emerged from civil wars as founder of a

new dynasty" (p. 385). She gathers support for this thesis from a

broad range of evidence including such issues as the manner in which

both new rulers related to their predecessors, Severus' use of

Augustus' timetable (rather than that of Claudius and Domitian) for

celebrating the ludi saeculares, his sponsorship of urban building

projects in Rome, his claim to have restored the Republic, and even

various points of overlap between the careers of Julia Domna and Livia.

 

Ch. 18: With the first contribution to the volume's final section

(Religion and Philosophy), Mark Edwards has put together an outstanding

overview of Severan Christianity (also the two-word title for his

chapter). In addition to being so clear and readable that it could be

assigned to advanced undergraduates, it offers succinct distillations

and commentary on many of the recent debates in the field. For

example, he highlights some of the problems with recent sociological

approaches to the dynamics of conversion to Christianity (pp. 402-03)

and gives three tenets that were endorsed by all Gnostic sects, a

category which has proven increasingly difficult to delimit (p. 412).

 

Ch. 19: The relationship between charity and piety is treated by

Richard Finn, who uses literary analysis to make a doctrinal point in

"Almsgiving for the pure of heart: continuity and change in early

Christian teaching." Finn shows that Origen, in his treatment of these

topics, is clearly engaging with the Shepherd of Hermas and the Book of

James (the former receiving more attention in Finn's paper). Yet even

as Origen recuperates language and themes from these earlier works he

provides a new balance point for the old "faith vs. works" debate. For

the author of the Shepherd, purity of heart is within our grasp and

almsgiving marks our attainment of that goal; for Origen, purity is

more distant and almsgiving is neither the primary marker of nor

vehicle toward purity.

 

Ch. 20: Catherine Conybeare's outstanding reading of Tertullian's Ad

uxorem in "Tertullian on flesh, spirit, and wives" brings to light a

subtle doctrinal point with potentially major social ramifications.

She interrogates the relationship between spirit and flesh in this text

and comes to the surprising but compelling conclusion that Ad uxorem

has more to do with control than it does with marriage. The spirit's

need to control the flesh is paralleled by the husband's need to

control the wife. Many of Conybeare's excellent points can be summed

up in her hypothetical rethinking of Tertullian's letter to his wife:

"For the conserva to write back to her husband, to advise him on how to

comport himself in her absence, is simply unimaginable: from where

would she derive the authority? How could the flesh lead the spirit?"

(pp. 437-38).

 

Ch. 21: Be sure to make it to the end of Joseph Geiger's "Sophists and

Rabbis: Jews and their past in the Severan age," which highlights many

parallels between these two categories of wise men. It is in the last

paragraph that his most challenging point emerges: that the Jewish

tradition for primarily literary (rather than, say, political) reasons

was obsessively focused on the historical era covered by the Bible to

the virtual exclusion of other epochs. The Bible provided the perfect

and complete canon, and therefore the focus of Rabbinic scholarship had

no reason to dwell on post-Biblical eras. (Edwards makes a similar

point on p. 417 about Origen: he engaged with pagan philosophy in

order to refute it, after which "all books but the Bible may be closed

again.") Geiger sets up the parallel with the sophists, but leaves us

to sort out for ourselves whether or not the same argument could apply.

Did sophists spend so much energy looking at issues from classical

Athens as a result of a heavily Athenocentric literary canon?

 

Ch. 22: In "Trouble in Snake Town" (the catchiest title of the bunch)

Ian Rutherford reads an oracle from Phrygian Hierapolis dealing with

plague. The snake of his title turns out to be a Hierapolitan dragon

killed by Apollo, perhaps recalled in a regularized ritual. He teases

out a religious relationship between Hierapolis and Claros, "a

manifesto setting out a sort of blueprint for how to achieve a

reconciliation between Clarian and local traditions" (p. 457). Many of

Rutherford's suggestions are necessarily speculative, but his

interpretive decisions are always well reasoned and sensible.

 

Ch. 23: Because few magical papyri can confidently be dated to the

Severan era, Daniel Ogden is forced to treat the discussions and

conceptions of magic (rather than its actual practice) in "Magic in the

Severan period." In addition to demonstrating how varied opinions

about magic could be, Ogden looks closely at Philostratus' portrayal of

Apollonius of Tyana, whose powers typically derived from supportive

gods, but who also exhibited enough supernatural power to keep his

audience guessing.

 

Ch. 24: Michael Trapp turns to the state of intellectual pursuits in

"Philosophy, scholarship, and the world of learning in the Severan

period." He shows that there was a significant amount of continuity

with the pre-Severan era in terms of the availability of financial

support for such activities. After fleshing out what was going on in

the most prominent and traditional intellectual disciplines, Trapp

concludes his chapter by briefly sketching the role of Christianity,

which was just coming onto the intellectual radar of the Mediterranean

world, noting that pagan intellectuals of this period show few signs of

concern about this new movement's "appropriation of Greek scholarly

tradition" (p. 487).

 

Ch. 25: George Boys-Stones presents a savvy and important argument in

"Human autonomy and divine revelation in Origen." This piece is

complex (a virtual necessity when dealing with Origen) and richly

rewarding in showing that for Origen 1) history proves the Bible to be

the true font of revelation, 2) revelation reveals the world to be

God's contingency plan for dealing with creation's fallen state, and 3)

reason allows us to put this all together and to recognize that our

limited rational capacity needs supplementing via revelation.

 

Ch. 26: The volume concludes with Christopher Taylor's "Socrates under

the Severans," which effectively shows that Christian and pagan writers

responded differently to the figure of Socrates. The former tended to

be concerned with doctrinal/metaphysical issues, such as the meaning of

Socrates' daimonion as either a proof of his proto-Christian status or

his deep idolatry. For pagan writers, however, Socrates appears as

paradigmatic of all philosophers and is lauded or teased according to a

given author's take on the social location of philosophy, rather than

for any particular dogmatic position.

 

 

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