New Epigrams of Palladas: A Fragmentary Papyrus Codex (P.CtYBR inv. 4000) by Kevin W. Wilkinson

Abstract

370 PHOENIX Sophistic, such as the Alexander Romance (Chapter Six). Most intriguing of all in this section is the eighth chapter on art and text (or “pictorialism,” 123), the underlying importance of ecphrasis behind the novels’ fictionality (above all Achilles Tatius), and the androcentric viewing of parturition as analogous to literary reproduction and mimesis. Whitmarsh does a great service to imperial Greek studies in Part Two by dissenting from the communis opinio that poetic production largely dwindled in the face of energetic prose writings, but by asserting too that the dichotomy between prose and poetic creativity , without cross-over and as separate literary classifications, is unhelpful and unreflective of the nature of this prosopography. He ranges across a broad spectrum of texts, from Mesomedes (Chapter Ten) to Lucian’s paratragedies (Chapter Eleven). The third part of the book, and the shortest, makes the furthest forays beyond the Second Sophistic into Semitic texts which appropriated the very Greek paradigms of literary identities usually reserved only for imperial Greek literature (as discussed in Chapter Thirteen, on Ezekiel’s Exagoge). He also expertly unpicks the significance of the Solymoi in Greek (especially) epic, and analyses the Homeric intertextuality in Theodotus’ epic of the second century c.e. “One of the many reasons why we need to travel ‘beyond the Second Sophistic’ lies . . . in the excessive Hellenocentrism underpinning it” (211). The Second Sophistic, as a notion, as a term, and the texts which traditionally belong to the early imperial period, have been subject to a great deal of modern, academic mythology. Whitmarsh has successfully exploded the Rohdean assumptions about national identity, inheritance, and anxieties, has broadened the canon of texts to show that it is not all about being Greek under Rome, and, at the same time, has treated his readers to cogent analysis of a number of imperial texts Lucianic and novelistic, but non-traditional and understudied works too. This collection of essays is a treasure-house of insights, shaped within a sometimes polemical template which will surely shift the discourse and the future of scholarship on imperial Greek literature. University of Edinburgh Calum A. Maciver New Epigrams of Palladas: A Fragmentary Papyrus Codex (P.CtYBR inv. 4000). By Kevin W. Wilkinson. Durham: American Society of Papyrologists (American Studies in Papyrology 52). 2012. Pp. xi, 214, 12 plates. One of the most exciting aspects of papyrology is that every now and again papyri turn up with previously unknown literary works, such as most recently the fragment containing two new poems by Sappho.1 The volume under review is the much anticipated edition by K. Wilkinson of about sixty new epigrams of the fourth-century a.d. epigrammatist Palladas.2 This may seem substantial, but as the subtitle of the book indicates the poems are preserved only in fragments. They nevertheless are an extremely important addition to the approximately 150 epigrams by this late antique author already known from the Greek Anthology. The fragments, of unknown provenance, were acquired by the Beinecke Library at Yale University from an antiquities dealer in 1996. As set out in the Preface, various 1 D. Obbink, “Two New Poems by Sappho,” ZPE 189 (2014) 32–49. 2 The edition was announced first in K. W. Wilkinson, “Palladas and the Age of Constantine,” JRS 99 (2009) 36–60, at 42. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 371 people worked on them until they were eventually handed to Wilkinson to prepare for publication. This situation is reflected in the Introduction, which contains contributions by B. Babcock on the reconstruction of the codex, R. Duttenhöfer on the palaeography and A. Watanabe on the metre, though the rest of the introduction, the text and commentary , and the overall redaction of the book are by Wilkinson. In the first section of the Introduction, Babcock discusses the rationale behind the adopted reconstruction of the codex, in particular the order of the six bifolia that survive. Duttenhöfer then continues with an important discussion of the hand, which is remarkable for its documentary tendencies and can therefore be compared with a large number of parallels. As a result, she assigns it to the “relatively secure parameters” of ca 280–340. After a short section on orthography...