BMCR 2008.10.13, Victoria Jennings, The World of Ion of Chios

Victoria Jennings, Andrea Katsaros (ed.), The World of Ion of Chios.
Mnemosyne Supplementa, 288. Monographs on Greek and Roman Language and
Literature.  Leiden:  Brill, 2007.  Pp. xiv, 449.  ISBN
978-90-04-16045-3.  $139.00.

Reviewed by Hakan Tell, Dartmouth College ([email protected])
Word count:  3475 words
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[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

Ion of Chios is an intriguing figure, known in antiquity for his
literary diversity (polyeideia), as invoked by Callimachus in his
thirteenth Iambus.  His literary production spanned genres as varied as
tragedy, satyr-play, elegy, lyric, dithyrambs, paeans, scholia,
epigrams, philosophy, biography/memoir, and local history.  It is thus
particularly distressing that so little is preserved of his writings --
136 fragments excluding spurious ascriptions have been collected and
edited most recently by Leurini.[[1]]  Little scholarly work has been
done on the fragmentary material we do have.[[2]]  Except for
occasional short treatments, Ion has for a long time resided mostly in
the shadowy world of footnotes.  This gloomy existence is now changing
through the contribution of the edited volume The World of Ion of
Chios.  The editors Victoria Jennings and Andrea Katsaros have
undertaken this work with the aim of moving Ion "beyond the footnotes"
to offer "original contextualizations through which our sensitivity to
Ion, his works and his world can be advanced" (p. 1 and 13).  Their
volume comes from two conferences held in Australia in 2003 and 2004,
and has since been complemented by additional contributions: an
introduction by the editors, sixteen chapters divided into five parts
(Survival, Ion Sungrapheos, Ion the Poet, Ion the Tragedian, and Ion
the Philosopher), an excellent bibliography, a concordance to the
fragments, an index locorum, and a general index.

The World of Ion of Chios offers a valuable resource for anyone
interested in Ion and his contribution to Greek literature, but I
suspect that the volume will speak more to the specialist than to a
broader academic readership.  For one thing, the book is difficult to
read, since there is little methodological cohesion among the
contributions.  In addition, given that this is an edited book and that
there is no overarching argument that ties together the individual
pieces, the only structure provided are the five, mainly genre-specific
divisions according to which the chapters are organized.  But this
structure seems particularly infelicitous, given the editors' stated
goal of "challenging 'rigid, genre-based classifications'" (p. 13).
This criticism is anticipated and addressed in the introduction, but
the organization of the book still seems at odds with the editors'
intellectual objective.

The volume could have benefited from a general introduction to Ion that
helps orient a non-specialist to the ins and outs of "Ionic"
scholarship, especially since the primary texts are fragmentary and the
scholarship spread over several disciplines (literature, philosophy,
and history, for example).  Also, the contributions might have
benefited from being better cross-referenced.  One occasionally gets
the impression that the authors talk past each other, for example when
addressing Ion's literary originality or attitudes vis-a\-vis Athens.
These topics crop up in several pieces, but the discussions are not
always coordinated.  Finally, at times I found myself frustrated by
what seemed like an eagerness among some contributors to raise
questions rather than attempt to address them.  For example, I counted
some forty rhetorical questions in the main text of Katsaros'
twenty-four page chapter.  Perhaps this should rather be construed
positively, as a conscientious attempt on the part of the authors to
engage the reader in the larger interpretive issues.

Despite these drawbacks, the volume contains some excellent papers,
especially the contributions of Christopher Pelling and Timothy Power.
In addition, Andrea Katsaros' exploration of voices of dissent and
subversion in Ion's writing introduces a fresh approach to the material
that places new emphasis on Ion's Chian identity -- an approach shared
by other contributors like Alastair Blanshard.  Victoria Jennings, too,
manages to reach new conclusions on Ion's Hymn to Kairos, even though
only its title is preserved.  Some pieces, though well-written and
thoroughly researched, seem more to rehearse the known facts than offer
original interpretations on the material.

All in all, The World of Ion of Chios will be most valuable as a
reference work that offers a reliable and extensive resource on "Ionic"
scholarship.  In what follows I will provide a summary of the
individual contributions to the book and offer some points for
discussion.

In the first part, "Survival," John Henderson, Guy Olding, and Nikos
Haviaras discuss Ion's Nachleben, mainly as an encyclopedic entry;
their aim is to show how this format has come to shape our
understanding of him.  After reviewing the typology of the dictionary
entries on Ion (especially in the Oxford Classical Dictionary),
Henderson points to the Pinakes of Callimachus as their ultimate
source.  It was Callimachus, Henderson argues, who stressed the
literary diversity of Ion and thus came to shape all subsequent entries
about Ion as a literary figure.  Only by being aware of the "lost
vantage points that generated the ancient entries" (p. 18) can critical
thinking about Ion progress.  It is ironic, Henderson remarks, that the
original entry was composed when access to Ion's works was still
available -- indeed, it was composed precisely to help the reader
navigate the large collection in the great Library of Alexandria -- but
"the catalogue outlived the library" (p. 18) and it is now our only
available basis for knowledge about the missing works.

In the first of two contributions, Guy Olding uses Ion as a point of
departure to discuss the "process of canon formation" (p. 45).  He
singles out "on-going cultural relevance" (p. 63) as the crucial factor
in the survival of any ancient author.  By this he means the ability of
a given work to appeal to contemporary literary aesthetics or
intellectual needs.  This model, he suggests, might help explain why we
don't have more of Ion's writings in the first place as well as the
distribution of the fragments that have been preserved.  The continued
interest in Greek tragedy in later antiquity helped preserve Ion's
tragic works, while his sympotic and prose works fell victim to
changing tastes and later critical hostility to earlier experimental
literary forms.

In a short piece, Nikos Haviaras, a Chian himself, comments on the
close association of Ion with his home place and the strong links that
Ion attempted to establish in his writings between Chios and Athens.
Haviaras also laments the contemporary neglect of one of his island's
most famous sons.  This is most amply illustrated by the fact that his
only public modern recognition is a 60 meter dead-end street named in
his honor.

Chrisopher Pelling opens the second part of the book "Ion Sungrapheos"
with a discussion of Ion's Epidemiai.  This piece is one of the
highlights of the volume.  Pelling questions the "back to front"
approach to Ion; that is, the attempt to reconstruct Ion's works based
upon quotations from later authors, when those quotations seem to
reflect the specific interest of later authors rather than provide a
balanced view of Ion's works.  He also questions our presumed knowledge
about the period in which Ion lived: "[T]here is a real sense in which
we understand the intellectual (perhaps even the political) life of
second century AD Greece better than the middle fifty years of the
fifth century BC, and know more about the Second Sophistic than the
First" (p. 75).  Given these two restrictions, how can we assess Ion's
impact on his contemporary society?  While later writers were impressed
with Ion's literary versatility, would Ion himself have characterized
his work in such terms?  Pelling draws compelling parallels between
Ion's diverse literary production and the broad literary range of other
Greek writers like Pindar, Simonides, Aeschylus, Euripides, and even
Hippias and Plato.  This raises the question of genre, which, Pelling
argues, was a more fluid and provisional concept  in Ion's time,
especially in regard to prose works.  What then to make of Ion's
Epidemiai?  Pelling argues against the trend of juxtaposing biography
to history and instead suggests that "we should see 'the biographic' as
a strand -- along with local history, fable, epic and others --that
fifth century historiography not merely draws on, but also defines
itself against" (pp. 85-6).

Pelling's approach seems exemplary in its attempt to contextualize
Ion's literary diversity by juxtaposing him to contemporary figures
with similarly broad literary range.  Reading Ion this way can perhaps
shed new light on how literary genres were envisaged in the fifth
century BCE, and how the process of canon formation in late antiquity
came to eclipse that tradition.

In her following chapter Anne Geddes treats Ion as a source
contemporary with the changes  in Athens' system of government that
occurred between the end of the Persian War and the beginning of the
Peloponnesian War; that is, the transition from the "moderately
oligarchic system of Cleisthenes" to the "democratic system of
Pericles" (p. 110).  Examining Ion's portraits of Cimon, Sophocles, and
Pericles in the Epidemiai, Geddes suggests a political undercurrent in
Ion's seemingly apolitical and personal characterizations.  According
to this reading, Ion's disparaging remarks on Pericles are a reflection
of Ion's world-view and socio-economic position: living under
oligarchic rule in Chios and belonging to the aristocracy, Ion was
Panhellenic in outlook and subscribed to the values of aristocratic
cosmopolitanism, as represented by Cimon.  At the same time he was
deeply critical of the democratic and nationalistic policies championed
by Pericles.  Geddes argues that Ion's criticism of Pericles should be
understood as an expression of an oligarchic disenchantment with the
inward-looking democratic radicalization under Pericles' rule.

In his second contribution to the volume, Guy Olding deftly explores
Ion's manipulation of myth in the Foundation of Chios.  Olding
endeavors to tease out the literary, political, and social implications
of Ion's mythological allusions.  The literary strategies at work imply
a somewhat systematic "political use of the medium of myth" (p. 146),
especially in establishing links between Chios and Athens.  An example
of this is the unconventional connection that Ion establishes by making
the early Athenian king Theseus the father of Oinopion, Chios' founder.
Olding suggests that Ion's penchant for unorthodox mythological
rearrangements could have been motivated by political interests, as a
poetic expression of "[p]arochial self-assertion" (p. 164) that sought
to boost Chios' position among the rivalries within the Delian League.

In the last piece of part two, Alastair Blanshard sets out to challenge
"historical literary criticism" by de-emphasizing its claim of the
mimetic quality of literature, and its assumption of the stability of
ideological structures.  Drawing on the recent work of Carol Dougherty
and Leslie Kurke,[[3]] Blanshard argues that literature should be
understood as "claims by agents operating in a maelstrom of competing
and complementary forces" (p. 156).  Adopting this approach, Blanshard
explores "the methods by which Ion is able to establish a way of being"
by locating his "work within a network of social, political and
economic forces" (p. 156 and 157).  Specifically, Blanshard argues that
we should not be taken in by Ion's self-professed status of being a
disinterested observer, but instead understand this as a strategic
posture that enabled him to navigate the cultural tensions that he
confronted -- many not sufficiently acknowledged -- among different
factions in Chios over the relationship with the "hegemonic power" of
Athens (p. 158).  This complicated "cohabitation" (p. 168) with Athens
and its ensuing tensions constitute the historical background against
which we need to understand Ion's development of a literary strategy of
"resistive accommodation" (p. 158).  Blanshard explores how Ion makes
choices both on the level of language, substance, and performance
context (symposium) through which "he is able to carve out for himself
a place that allows him a space to criticize in safety" (p. 158).

The first article in part three of the book, entitled "Ion the Poet,"
is one of the volume's more exciting pieces.  Timothy Power -- building
on Peter Wilson's work on the cultural politics of Greek music -- turns
his attention to the cultural significance of Ion's endorsement of the
eleven-stringed lyre in fragment 93 (Leurini).  Pursuing a sociology of
musical instruments, Power asserts that aesthetic comments are
overdetermined and carry political weight.  Indeed, discourses about
musical instrument are discourses about "cultural power, social
formation, political order and identity" (p. 180).  Power interprets
Ion's approval of the eleven-stringed lyre in light of "its
intellectual, anti-popular snob appeal" (p. 188).  This flies in the
face of traditional interpretations that understand Ion's poem in
relation to the eleven-stringed lyre's connection with New Music and
radical democracy, especially as promoted by Timotheus of Miletus.
Power explains that Ion's poem is anything but democratic or approving
of the popularization of elite aesthetics; it is instead to be read as
a re-validation of elite string culture and "as a politicized response
to the banalization of sympotic culture" (p. 202).  By reading fragment
93 in conjunction with the shifting social and cultural position of the
lyre in late fifth century BCE, Power skillfully sheds new light on
Ion's aesthetics and his position in fifth century sympotic culture.

In the second contribution to part three, Michael Clarke investigates
the "communicative strategies" of Ion's use of metaphors by surveying
"examples of deliberate and self-conscious strategies for poetic
expression, involving the startling or anti-traditional matching of
words to referents to which they do not conventionally belong" (p.
206).  Clarke discovers a verbal strategy at work in Ion's poetry that
centers around a self-conscious play with traditional imageries.  This
strategy has the effect of creating unsettling effects in the audience
by challenging their "received assumptions about language" (p. 215).
But this playfulness has its limits; it offers a "semantic puzzle" (p.
215) to the audience which, once correctly decoded, is solved.  What at
first might appear as novel and strange use of language is thus
revealed as deeply traditional.

In a dense and suggestive piece, Andrea Katsaros finds a different
strategy at work in Ion's use of imagery and metaphor.  She proposes a
new approach to Ion by proposing a close reading of Ion's sympotic
fragments that is "receptive to suggestions of dissent, disenchantment
and difference" (p. 218).  At the core of Katsaros' interpretation is
her questioning of traditional assumptions about Ion's presumed
attachment to Athens.  Once we allow for other priorities to shine
through in Ion's work -- his status as a citizen of Chios and his
concomitant concern for its well-being, for example -- then, Katsaros
argues, we may pursue a reading that is sensitive to subversive nuances
-- that is, to voices that appear to say one thing but in reality say
the opposite.  She goes on to provide interpretations of Ion's work
where the subtext -- in sharp opposition to the prima facie jovial and
trivial tone of the poem -- should be understood as Ion's latent
critique of, among other things, Athens and its relationship with Chios
in terms of its cultural superiority and power.

Alexander Stevens opens part four of the book, which deals with Ion's
tragic fragments, by discussing Ion's victory in the dramatic
competition in Athens.  Starting out from the biographical story that
Ion celebrated his poetic success by distributing wine to the
Athenians, Steven stresses the "symbolic value" of this exchange --
wine, after all, was Chios' most famous product -- "which proffers a
distinctive gloss on the symbolic operations of the Athenian tragic
festivals" (p. 245 and 246).  Stevens proceeds to explore Ion's tragic
fragments with a special emphasis on the Phrouroi, and calls attention
to the strong presence of Homeric vocabulary in Ion's poetry.  This, he
argues, locates Ion in the fifth century trend of interpreting Homeric
language and makes him part of a "larger cultural project of reacting
to and rewriting his Greek epic heritage" (p. 261).  Ion should thus
not be understood necessarily as a foreign presence at Athens composing
"metic" tragedy, but rather as participating in a "larger project of
competitive panhellenic poetic production" (p. 262).  This project, of
course, was linked to Ion's birthplace, as Homer was considered the
island's most famous son.

In a short and descriptive piece, Judith Maitland examines overlaps
between Ion and Sophocles.  The main portion of her argument deals with
similarities in how Ion and Sophocles treat the Oechalian legend, which
chronicles Heracles' servitude to queen Omphale of Lydia.  This
comparison leads her to conclude that Sophocles and Ion "drew upon a
common stock for the account of Heracles' servitude" (p. 281), and she
additionally suggests that Ion's satyr-play Omphale "would have gained
in humour had it been written after, and thus been compared with,
Sophocles' Trachiniae" (p. 281).

Pat Easterling continues the discussion of Omphale by asking what we
know about the play.  She lists the known facts, and then attempts to
further our knowledge through a fourfold exploration: Can we learn more
about the plot from the mythological tradition? Is it possible to
identify the dramatis personae?  What can we learn from intertextual
references? Can later reception shed new light on the play?  What
follows is a thorough discussion of each heading, but the conclusion is
depressingly inconclusive.  Easterling leaves off on a note of hope
that more material will eventual show up that can help us better
understand the Omphale.

Han Baltussen opens the fourth and last part of the book, which is
devoted to the philosophical writings of Ion, by asking whether Ion was
a philosopher, what his relationship was with Pythagoreanism, and what
to make of Ion's philosophical work Triagmos.  Agreeing with
Dover,[[4]] Baltussen argues that Ion should be classified as a
philosopher.  After all, his one preserved philosophical work "fits the
style of early cosmological explanations" (p. 300).  As for Ion's
Pythagorean influences, Baltussen points out that his use of the number
three certainly supports such a view with the modification that "for
Ion, Pythagoreanism is more a source of inspiration than a matter of
strict allegiance" (p. 310).  Finally, Baltussen considers the title of
Ion's philosophical work, Triagmos, and suggests that the uniqueness of
this title might support us in tracing it back to Ion himself, given
his well-documented penchant for originality in the use of language.

In a dense and at times unnecessarily theory-laden piece, Richard
Fletcher considers the comment -- attributed to Ion by Diogenes
Laertius -- that Socrates visited Samos with Archelaus as a young man.
This statement stands in sharp contrast to Plato's Socrates, who never
traveled except for military service.  Plato also has little to say
about Archelaus' influence over Socrates as a teacher.  Later
Hellenistic accounts, on the other hand, often mention Archelaus as
Socrates' teacher, and these sources further establish this
relationship as pivotal in the shift that occurred in philosophy from
physics, as practiced by Archelaus, to the Socratic preoccupation with
ethics.  Fletcher links these observations with Dover's suggestion that
Ion's Epidemiai anticipated the dialogue form later perfected by Plato,
and asks if it is possible that the later Hellenistic accounts can be
traced back "to a pre-Platonic portrait of Socrates as depicted in the
Epidemiai" (p. 327).  Fletcher makes the intriguing suggestion that
Ion's (pre-Platonic) depiction of the philosophical relationship
between Archelaus and Socrates (in a proto-dialogue form) might have
anticipated later Hellenistic constructions of this relationship and
the concomitant transition of philosophy from physics to ethics.

Moving away from the philosophical fragments proper, Victoria Jennings
explores Ion's Hymn to Kairos, of which only the title survives.  To
offset this textual lacuna and offer a possible context for the work,
Jennings considers the development of the term kairos in fifth century
Greek culture.  She outlines a variety of distinct, though often
overlapping, uses: religious, athletic, intellectual/oratorical,
philosophical, poetic, and intellectual.  In her exploration of the
all-but-lost Hymn to Kairos Jennings sees an opportunity to provide a
"re-imagined topography" for the term with links to, among other
things, Olympia, Gorgias, and Pythagoreanism.  This intellectual
topography "points to an intriguing 'mode of Greek thought' at work in
the middle of the fifth century" (p. 345) -- an intellectual milieu of
which Ion of Chios was an integral part.

Contents

Victoria Jennings and Andrea Katsaros. "Introduction." pp. 1-16.
John Henderson. "The Hocus of a Hedgehog: Ion's Versatility." pp.
17-44.
Guy Olding. "Shot from the Canon: Sources, Selections, Survival." pp.
45-63.
Nikos K. Haviaras. "The Poet and the Place: A Modern Chian Perspective
on Ion of Chios and his Home Island." pp. 64-74.
Christopher Pelling. "Ion's Epidemiai and Plutarch's Ion." pp. 75-109.
Anne Geddes. "Ion of Chios and Politics." pp. 110-138.
Guy Olding. "Ion the Wineman: The Manipulation of Myth." pp. 139-154.
Alastair Blanshard. "Trapped between Athens and Chios: A Relationship
in Fragments." pp. 155-178.
Timothy Power. "Ion of Chios and the Politics of Polychordia." pp.
179-205.
Michael Clarke. "Snowy Helen and Bull-Faced Wine: Ion and the Logic of
Poetic Language." pp. 206-216.
Andrea Katsaros. "Staging Empire and Other in Ion's Sympotica." pp.
217-242.
Alexander Stevens. "Ion of Chios: Tragedy as Commodity at the Athenian
Exchange." pp. 243-265.
Judith Maitland. "Ion of Chios, Sophocles, and Myth." pp. 266-281.
Pat Easterling. "Looking for Omphale. pp. 282-294.
Han Baltussen. "Playing the Pythagorean: Ion's Triagmos. pp. 295-318.
Richard Fletcher. "Legwork: Ion's Socrates." pp. 319-330.
Victoria Jennings. "Ion's Hymn to Kairos." pp. 331-346.
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Notes:


1.   Luigi Leurini, Ionis Chii Testimonia et Fragmenta (Classical and
Byzantine Monographs 23), 2nd ed. Amsterdam. 2000.

2.   Some of the more important treatments are those of Albrecht von
Blumenthal (Ion von Chios: die Reste seiner Werke, Stuttgart. 1939),
Felix Jacoby ("Some remarks on Ion of Chios," CQ 41:1-17. 1947),
Kenneth Dover ("Ion of Chios: his place in the history of Greek
literature," in John Boardman and C. E. Vaphopoulou-Richardson (eds.),
Chios: A conference at the Homereion in Chios 1984. Oxford. 1986:
27-37), and M. L. West ("Ion of Chios," BICS 32: 71-8. 1985.)

3.  Carol Dougherty and Leslie Kurke (eds.), The Cultures within
Ancient Greek Culture: Contact, Conflict, Collaboration. Cambridge.
2003.

4.   See Dover (note 2 above).