Le bestiaire d'Aristophane by Cécile Corbel-Morana

Abstract

186 PHOENIX Genette, and theoretical linguistics loom large), well researched, and bibliographically informed (Armand d’Angour’s The Greeks and the New [Cambridge and New York 2011] and Zachary Biles’s Aristophanes and the Poetics of Competition [Cambridge and New York 2011] must have come out too late for consideration). There is something for both the specialist and the general reader here. To make the book accessible outside the field of classics, Greek is avoided with the exception of important keywords (even when it comes to play titles: the checklist of play titles 173–177 comes in handy for the classicist). Open University of Cyprus Antonis K. Petrides Le bestiaire d'Aristophane. By CÂ ecile Corbel-Morana. Collection d’Études Anciennes Série grecque 144. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. 2012. Pp. 350. An initial glance at the title of this book (a revised 2002 University of Paris X-Nanterre dissertation) might lead the reader to expect a detailed catalogue of Aristophanic fauna along the lines of Otto Keller’s Die Antike Tierwelt (Leipzig 1909), D’Arcy Thompson’s Greek Birds (Oxford 1936) and Greek Fishes (Oxford 1947), or I. C. Beavis’s Insects and Other Invertebrates in Classical Antiquity (Exeter 1988). But Corbel-Morana’s use of the term “bestiary” is instead intended to place her study in a medieval tradition whose interests were not so much in natural history as in morality, philosophy, and social and literary symbolism. Aristophanic animals are thus conceived as emblems, as a way of revealing and arguing for a particular view of the world and the place of human beings in it, on the one hand, and for a distinctive style of comic poetics, on the other. This argument is placed within both the long history of the depiction of animals in Greek literature and late fifth-century debates about what makes human beings different from other living creatures. Corbel-Morana’s argument is difficult to summarize, and portions of the book might reasonably be described as unfocused. Readers will nonetheless find some interesting points here, in particular—and unexpectedly—on matters of staging having to do with various Aristophanic animal choruses. Corbel-Morana divides her discussion into two main sections, “Bestiary and Politics” and “Bestiary and Poetics,” the former about twice as long as the latter. The first section treats primarily Acharnians, Peace, Knights, Wasps, and Birds, in that order. The second section is concerned mostly with Frogs and then once again with Birds. In each case, animals are used as a lens to support a general reading of specific plays. Diet, for example, provides the organizing focus for the discussion of Acharnians and Peace: different animals are eaten by different characters, in peace and war, in the city and the countryside. So too in Knights, the depiction of the Paphlagonian’s voracious greed serves as a denounciation of Cleon’s illegitimate, self-serving monopolization of political power in Athens. None of this is surprising, and Corbel-Morana’s arguments often merely rearticulate wellestablished understandings of basic thematic issues in the comedies. Nor is the link to the book’s nominal larger topic always as close and productive as it might have been. The Paphlagonian, for example, is first described as drunk on wine and stuffed full of cakes (Eq. 103–104), so that while gluttony is indeed one of his many ugly personal characteristics, the association with eating animals is secondary and tenuous. More puzzling, and much more obviously out of place, are the extended treatments of staging issues involving the choruses of Frogs and Birds. These are important problems for our understanding of the visual reality of the plays, and thus in one sense for interpreting the role of animals within them, and Corbel-Morana treats the issues carefully BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 187 and in detail. But these are also matters that have little directly to do with the announced topic of her book, and which might better have been treated in footnotes or even separate publications, rather than being allowed to take over the discussion here to no obvious immediate purpose and little clear argumentative effect. At the same time, Corbel-Morana tends to leap disconcertingly from matters...