The Discovery of the Fact ed. by Clifford Ando, William P. Sullivan

Abstract

332 PHOENIX Charite in the Metamorphoses (whose fictional narrator, Lucius, claims to be related to Plutarch). Two chapters look at marriage, and its usefulness, in philosophical discourse. Geert Roskam, in “Epicurus on Marriage,” sees Epicurus as “a principled but open-minded opponent ” of marriage (120), who nevertheless understood that there were cases where even the philosopher will marry. Examples of such rare exceptions can be seen in Epicurus’ own will, where he enjoins his heirs to care for the sons of two of his followers and to provide for the daughter of one of them (which in the Greek world would have meant a good marriage). Alex Dressler’s “The Impossible Feminism of ‘Seneca, OnMarriage’ ” discusses the lost treatise on marriage of the Roman Stoic Seneca, known only through its later excerpting in Jerome’s vicious anti-marriage polemic Against Jovinian. Seneca/Jerome offers anecdotes illustrating the pudicitia (“female honor”) of Roman women such as Cato the Younger’s daughter “Marcia,” who used an elegant bon mot criticizing men who marry for wealth to justify her refusal to remarry, or the wife who did not realize her husband had terrible halitosis because she had no experience of any other man’s breath. Women who preferred a violent self-inflicted death to the dishonor of sexual defilement (like Lucretia or Polyxena in Seneca’s Trojan Women) are also lauded, but even Seneca’s praise of Lucretia’s pudicitia (“sexual modesty”) implies “precise limits to female agency,” which differentiate it from men’s greater agency (162). The volume closes with Silvia Montiglio’s “Erotic Desire and the Desire to Marry in the Ancient Greek Novels,” examining “the dynamics between the two poles” of erotic desire and the desire to marry (220). In the earlier novels, Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe and Xenophon’s Ephesian Tale, dating probably from the first century b.c.e./c.e., the star-crossed lovers marry at the beginning of the story, only to undergo a long separation before finally enjoying marital happiness. In the later ones, Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon, and Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story (second to fourth centuries c.e.), the couple do not wed until the end, after having undergone various vicissitudes. Not that there is always an expectation that erotic desire will lead to marriage: in Achilles Tatius and Longus, the idea of marriage only arises long after the couple have expressed and begun to act upon their erotic urges. Montiglio concludes that “Marriage is not a natural bond, and no novelist pretends it is” (238). This volume displays the same variety and breadth of treatment as Plutarch’s own works, and at the same time tells us much about the cultural and philosophical milieu of Plutarch and his contemporaries. Emory University Judith Evans Grubbs The Discovery of the Fact. Edited by Clifford Ando and William P. Sullivan. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. 2020. Pp. vi, 207. The distinction between facts and law is well established today, especially in common law, where it is expected that juries decide facts and judges decide law. On closer analysis, however, the distinction often breaks down and the papers in this volume are intended to participate in “the wider field of debates on the fact/law distinction in modern legal theory, in addition to the historiography of the modern fact” (3). The discussions of facts and law in the Roman law chapters are generally helpful in elucidating BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 333 the fact/law distinction and its history, but the Greek papers seem less relevant in this regard. I take the Roman papers first. Chapter Two by Nicolas Cornu Thénard brings the perspective of Continental jurisprudence to bear on “The Legal Construction of the Fact, between Rhetoric and Roman Law.” Cornu Thénard confines his study to the Roman jurists and rhetoricians. He begins with a general discussion of the jurists’ view of fact (factum) and law (ius) not as different conceptual categories, but as “two modes of reasoning, two types of argumentation that can be employed to resolve a dispute” (41). After noting Quintilian ’s discussion—laws are general, facts are unique to each case; law is finite...