Medicine and Paradoxography in the Ancient World by George Kazantzidis

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 423 the Romanization of Greek culture during the empire obviated the role of the novel as a form of resistance; historical relevance was supplanted by literary conceit (19). Times changed again by the fourth century a.d.: in Heliodorus’ Aethiopica only people who had once been slaves can be enslaved (216), which echoes contemporary sentiment in the Constantinian legislation restricting slavery to vernae, i.e., home-born slaves. This is not the first book one should read on the Greek novel, but it is a necessary one. Greek is often cited, usually in parentheses after a summation, but, in spite of this, the book remains accessible for student term essays or oral reports. Owens avoids jargon and his conviction in his thesis never leads him to belabour the point. The discussion of scholarly debates is largely restricted to the notes, and Owens is generous in assessing the contributions of his colleagues to the field. I admit an interest in reading this book for review since a consistent feature of Silenos and the satyr chorus in satyr drama is to declare themselves “slaves of Dionysos.” Epigraphical and material evidence for the continued performance of satyr drama well into the Roman empire is now becoming known,3 and one wonders if the Greek novel and imperial performance of satyr drama could have influenced one another. Satyrus in Achilles Tatius (155–160) raises the possibility of cross-pollination between the two genres in imperial salons and performance. Altogether, the book well illustrates the centrality of slavery to the Greek novel, and shows how the ancient Greek novel became a cultural entrepot through which new comedy, Roman comedy, and other genres came to be appreciated in the Greek-speaking world under Roman rule. Carleton University George W. M. Harrison Medicine and Paradoxography in the Ancient World. Edited by George Kazantzidis. Berlin: De Gruyter. 2019. Pp. viii, 225. Since at least P. M. Fraser’s Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford 1972), Greek paradoxography (the term is a coinage of the twelfth-century poet-grammarian Tzetzes) has been reproached as a derivative genre that pilfers and mutilates the fruits of true scientific, geographic, and historical research. The growing literature on paradoxography, however, has begun to challenge this prevailing conception by situating the genre, and ancient technical literature generally, in its Sitz im Leben to be judged according to its own development and relative merits. This volume, which contributes to these scholarly advances, collects ten wide-ranging papers given at a conference in Patras in 2016, and presents a concerted effort to uncover the sympathies and antipathies between paradoxography and the respectable field of ancient medicine. The editor, George Kazantzidis, identifies in his substantial and genre-traversing introduction (1–40) the synergies between ancient Greek medicine and discourses of wonder . He highlights, for instance, how the stupefying effects and lingering traces of disease could often, like thaumata, provoke intense aesthetic and intellectual reactions. Many of the essays that follow tacitly hinge on Kazantzidis’s unsurprising claim that ancient medicine strived, mostly, to demystify wonders by probing their unobserved causes, in contrast to paradoxography, which eschewed rational explanations to safeguard a sense of 3 For example, M. Skotheim and G. W. M. Harrison in Reconstructing Satyr Drama from Its Remnants (Berlin forthcoming). 424 PHOENIX the marvelous. Katerina Oikonomopoulou (53–71), for example, compares the rhetoric and ethos of two Aristotelian texts (the gargantuan Problemata and the paradoxographical On Marvellous Things Heard) to argue that although paradoxes and anomalies stand at the heart of both, the natural-scientific Problemata endeavors to subordinate their affective qualities to the intellectual and cognitive opportunities that they afford. On Marvellous Things Heard, by contrast, drops causes by the wayside, as if to heighten the pleasurable dimensions of wonders. The problemata genre reappears in Michiel Meeusen’s study (199–214) on the epistemological and moral limits that ps.-Alexander sets for his medical and scientific program in Medical Puzzles and Natural Problems: the causes of preternatural phenomena possessing “unspeakable properties (€di—thtew Ärrhtoi, Med. Puzz. 1, Praef. 59)” (208) are ascertainable by divine reason alone and thus excluded from inquiry. In demarcating a class of marvels to be excluded from investigation, ps...