Insults in Classical Athens by Deborah Kamen

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148 PHOENIX bolster her case for wide-spread literacy, including prose, which went well beyond the book on salt Hadjimichael mentions. There was also a readership for Polyclitus’ Canon, Hippodamus’ political works, Sophocles’ Chorus, Agatharchus’ Scene Painting, and the architect Ictinus’ work on the Parthenon. These were not how-to books, but if there was an audience for just these few known titles, this would attest to an Athenian appetite for reading. The book culminates in its very rich Chapter Six on the establishment of the lyric canon in Hellenistic Alexandria, which contextualizes this evanescent event within a detailed consideration of this city’s valuation of all books. Hadjimichael’s command of the relevant literature, ancient and modern, is near complete. I myself would argue that the different arrangements of Pindar’s, Bacchylides’, and Simonides’ epinicians strongly suggest that Alexandrian editions depended on original (fifth-century) editions. But this is disagreement, not criticism. Chapter Seven tries to answer the “paradox” or “enigma” of Bacchylides, who was read, if not loved, in the classical period, but whose presence among the canonical nine raises the question of why he never appears in any of the earlier proto-canons. Why, furthermore, does he go unmentioned in the fourth century, when the Peripatos produced treatises on all the others but Ibycus? Hadjimichael does not claim to have the answer, but in the course of examining Bacchylides’ fate, she covers much interesting ground, including some possible points of contact with Callimachus. At the end, among other factors, she briefly mentions his perceived “poetic value” without further discussion. Some of us, however, might wonder whether he initially dropped from sight primarily because of a lack of appreciation for him as a poet. Can we imagine a heated discussion among the canon makers as to who would be the ninth (a canon of eight being unthinkable), as they are forced to choose from lesser lights such as Lasus, Philoxenus, and Bacchylides? New York University David Sider Insults in Classical Athens. By Deborah Kamen. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press. 2020. Pp. xv, 258. Kamen introduces her monograph on this dark, understudied corner of Athenian social and anti-social history with a flourish. She assembles contemporary cross-cultural anthropological and sociological approaches to insults before addressing ancient Attic comments and acts that denigrate others. Such discourse helps to negotiate status, especially in an agonistic society—one in which competitive values outweigh cooperative ones. Five chapters treat the creative varieties of doing down others—intimidating equals, inferiors, and superiors—in classical Athens. Kamen discusses the regulation of insults, especially the extreme level, hybris. Public and private, informal and legal means of preserving honor and blocking or redressing objectionable behaviors receive attention. The chapters advance from playful banter to more seriously offensive, active and passive, forms of one- or two-upmanship and literal smack-downs. First come three categories of socially acceptable “benign insults”: skômmata and aischrologia; mockery in comedy, komoidein and skôptein;1 and, third, diabolê and loidoria. She then turns to 1 Skômmata and skôptein derive from one root, so Kamen’s distinction requires reconsideration. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 149 forbidden insults, that is, hurtful words that a victim could litigate. These form Kamen’s fourth category of kakêgoria and aporrhêta, what one today might label “slander” and “libel.” Finally, she addresses hybris of the legal kind, with all its conceptual pitfalls, knots of intentionality, and attitude. Mockery (Chapter One) featured prominently at Demeter festivals inter alia. Rituals included visual obscenities, originating according to myth in Iambê’s playful joshing of the deprived and miserable goddess. Humans too suffered “hazing” (22) in Eleusinian initiation. “Playful whipping” (24) seems a more problematic category of festive mockery . How does one measure the degree of humiliation involved in the “pervasiveness of mockery in many different Greek rituals” (28)? Notoriously, the fun of the symposium, when not Platonic, included barbed remarks, gestures, and rejoinders, although some scholars posit unwritten limits (cf. 31 on Wasps 1222–49). Kamen alleges that insults at these parties “could aid in the cohesion of the group’s members through laughter” (33). Shaming insults often cross the invisible line from piquant...