BMCR 2009.01.02, Simon Swain, Severan Culture

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 ([email protected])
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.