The Classical Tradition: What's It Good For?

Abstract

The Classical Tradition: What’s It Good For? PAUL BAROLSKY This is a prodigiously ambitious, cornucopian book.* As Terence Cave has justly observed, the authors have “fused their voices into a single, urgently argued discourse .” No easy thing this! Readers will want to place this tome on a shelf next to Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Bolgar’s Classical Heritage, Seznec’s The Survival of the Pagan Gods, Panofsky’s Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, and Auerbach’s Mimesis. So vast in scope is this volume that no review can possibly do it justice. The title says it all. It suggests a seeming infinity of possibilities. The book is intended for scholars, graduate students , and the general reader. One might wonder if the general reader is up to the daunting task. For that matter, I question whether graduate students can handle the sheer abundance of this work, and whether even scholars of various kinds (classicists, literary scholars, art historians, et alia) can deal sufficiently with all of what is contained in this book. I think readers will seek out aspects of the book in which they have some grounding and feel a certain level of comfort. The table of contents and index are crucial. In the former we find a series of titles that point us to various topics : for example, knowledge, style, morality, visual arts, popular culture, translation, science, etc. These themes are all located the first part of the book, which is an overview. The next several sections of the book address subjects that come more sharply into focus: the hero, myth, the city (Rome), the *Michael Silk, Ingo Gildenhard, and Rosemary Barrow, The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought. London: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. 500 pages, 11 b/w illustrations, 10 colorplates, $139.95. arion 22.2 fall 2014 forms of government, painting, poetry, political thought, etc. Although the bibliography of both primary sources and modern scholarship is rich, the authors are fully aware that it can never be exhaustive, and so they remind the reader of other useful bibliographers. The topic of the book is subject to so many possible readings and interpretations that one can imagine some readers wondering about what seem to them to be striking omissions . For example, scholars of Humanism might well wonder why Politian, the great classicist of his day, gets only two brief fleeting references. Art historians might wonder how Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, one of the great sculptures in the classical tradition, a work that brilliantly emulates the Apollo Belvedere, is mentioned only in passing. And in a book that deals with English, French, German, and Italian traditions some will wonder why Spain is essentially ignored , since it produced two towering figurers in the classical tradition: Cervantes and Velazquez. Or, how is it, some might wonder that, in a book that properly deals with Joyce, Picasso, Cocteau, among other modern figures in the classical tradition, there is no mention of the deep Greek roots of Le Corbusier? Such hypothetical criticism is perhaps unfair, but it is inevitable, since no treatment of the classical tradition can be complete. The book can withstand such criticism since it implicitly invites such responses. The subject of the book is open-ended. I cannot emphasize enough the fact that this book is so rich that no review will do it justice. I therefore want to take up just a single issue that it implicitly raises. The subject is rhetoric, which is fundamental to the classical tradition about which our trinitarian authors have so many interesting things to say. I find a deep puzzle here regarding rhetoric . Why is it that when they address the subject of rhetoric as a historical concept, so many scholars in various fields who write about the classical tradition seem so indifferent to the rhetoric of their own writing? It is no secret that ever so much scholarly writing on rhetoric, whether addressing anthe classical tradition: what’s it good for? 126 cient literature or Renaissance literature, is itself so often lugubrious, and impenetrable, so insensitive to its own lack of rhetorical skill. We can trace a tradition that celebrates an art that conceal arts from...