Lives of the Attic Orators: Texts from Pseudo-Plutarch, Photius, and the Suda by J. Roisman and I. Worthington (with translations by R. Waterfield). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2015. Pp. xvii, 381.

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 215 empire; but is it also a prescriptive model for empire? Does Varro endorse this political structure or does he instead present his famers/herders (or allegorical politicians) as driven by selfish motives, which ultimately reduce both ruler and ruled to animals? Nelsestuen’s individual readings of each book are alert to these sorts of nuanced questions, as well as to the general darkness that infuses the work as a result of the backdrop of violence plaguing Italy during the time of the work’s composition, and so there is once more a jarring disconnect between his more open individual readings and the schematic overall thesis. Influenced by John Richardson,4 Nelsestuen reads Varro as innovative in the extent to which he conceptualizes empire in territorial terms with a “core” and “periphery” (218) and shifts from analyzing “agent (farmer/statesman) to system (farm/state)” (227). However, in doing so, he underplays how much Varro focuses on the ethics of the agent and in this is quite similar to a political philosopher like Cicero, according to whom justice and other social virtues cannot function if sought for the sake of pleasure (voluptas) and utility (utilitas; De Officiis 3.118). As Nelsestuen acknowledges, voluptas and utilitas are the twin goals of agriculture in the De Re Rustica (e.g., 231–232) and, thus, allegorically, of political life—a fact that, in my mind, opens up space to find critique of political life from an agent-centered perspective. Nelsestuen does allow that Varro, particularly in Book 3, “offer[s] up sporadic critiques of Roman political culture and imperfect solutions to its problems” (175). The one realistic and positive political model in Book 3, according to Nelsestuen, is represented by the modest profits of the bee-tending brothers Veianii, who “stand as spiritual forebears to the virtue of moderation” (207). While I am not sure that Varro places as much hope in these bee-keeping brothers as Nelsestuen does, if Varro does set up the Veianii as a prescriptive model, it is hard to see how this theory squares with Varro’s simultaneous endorsement of a large scale theory of empire based on the immense profits Rome derived from exploitation of the provinces. Thus, while I do have some disagreements with Nelsestuen’s overarching claims, they should not detract from the many rich analyses and interesting ideas that pervade the book, and which make Nelsestuen’s work an important representative of the recent renaissance in Varronian studies. Rutgers University L. Kronenberg Lives of the Attic Orators: Texts from Pseudo-Plutarch, Photius, and the SUDA. By J. Roisman and I. Worthington (with translations by R. Waterfield). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2015. Pp. xvii, 381. The volume under review is published in the Clarendon Ancient History Series, which sets out to offer English translations, with introduction and commentary, of texts that are primarily of interest to ancient historians. It contains the Lives of the Ten Orators attributed to Plutarch (Mor. 832b–850e), together with relevant biographical material from Photius’ Bibliotheca and the Suda. It is the first full commentary in any language on the Lives, and complements recent volumes by Harding and Lintott in the same series.1 4 J. S. Richardson, The Language of Empire (Cambridge 2008). 1 P. Harding, Didymos: On Demosthenes (Oxford 2006); A. W. Lintott, Plutarch: Demosthenes and Cicero (Oxford 2013). 216 PHOENIX The Lives of the Ten Orators read like a series of mediocre Wikipedia articles. They contain a mass of poorly organized and at times contradictory information about their subjects’ lives and, to a lesser extent, works. If they have a single author, which some scholars have doubted, he does nothing to explain his aims or methods. Nevertheless, they contain much material that is not found elsewhere, and with the exception of Demosthenes , for whom we also have Plutarch’s Life, provide the most substantial biographical accounts of their subjects. In their Introduction, Roisman and Worthington begin with a general account of Greek oratory, and then discuss the creation of the canon of ten Attic Orators, which they attribute to Caecilius of Caleacte in the first century a.d. They conclude that the Lives are the...