The Moods of Homeric Greek. By Jo Willmott

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 67 nity. More seriously, consideration of Boiotian identity often takes place within a context devoid of Boiotika (tellingly, there is no map of Boiotia); L. summarily discusses inter-communal rivalry in Late Archaic –Early Classical Boiotia as indicating the absence of a regional political federation (pp. 182–4), but this was simultaneously the background for the continuing progression of Boiotian ethnogenesis. My deeper concern is that notions of collective identity, ethnicity, and the like are fetishized here. The utility of the Boiotian ethnicity on display in L.’s work is abstract, and it is clear neither how it mattered on a day-to-day level, nor, for example, how a “populous geographic collective mobilized around the chance at acquiring new territory” (pp. 151–2, L.’s description of the Boiotians at the time of their invasion of Athens in 507/6) was distinct from a formal military and political league.1 The prose style and overall bulkiness of the argument, finally, too often reveal its origins as a doctoral dissertation. These criticisms do not detract from the overall value and usefulness of L.’s work, which represents a significant contribution both to scholarship on ethnicity in Greek antiquity and Boiotian studies in general. D. GRANINGER American School of Classical Studies at Athens University of Tennessee, Knoxville * * * The Moods of Homeric Greek. By JO WILLMOTT. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 264. Cloth, $99.00. ISBN 978–0–521–87988–0. Latin has a sequence of tenses, Greek has a sequence of moods: so goes the standard line. And Classical Attic is relatively wellbehaved in using subjunctives after non-past main verbs, optatives after past-tense ones—with the proviso that an author could always choose in the latter instance to use the “vivid” subjunctive, whatever that is supposed to mean. This distribution, together with the use of main-clause subjunctives in exhortations and prohibitions (over which the speaker has some control) and that of optatives in wishes (over which the speaker has little control), led scholars to posit that the two moods act in parallel, and that they exist, together with the indicative, on an irrealis continuum: with the indicative, the speaker 1 On this point, mention should be made of the recent, very preliminary publication of a fragmentary Archaic columnar monument from Thebes inscribed with a dedication (which came to light too late for L. to take note of) likely recording a “Theban ” perspective on the crucial events of 507/6 (SEG 54.518; BullÉp. 2006, no. 203). In Athenian perspective, these northern invaders were simply [ἔθνεα Βοιοτν] (IG 13 501, supplemented by Hdt. 5.77). 68 BOOK REVIEWS asserts the reality of the event, with the subjunctive that assertion becomes an expression of will, with the optative one of mere wish. There were also morphological grounds for this schema: the subjunctive has primary endings, the optative secondary endings, calling to mind the English pairing of will : would, can : could, and may : might, in which the past tense of the modal verb is more irrealis than the present . Nor is this irrealis continuum the only major theoretical categorization of relevance to the Greek moods. Perpendicular to it runs a division of moods and modal verbs into deontic and epistemic modality . As the names suggest, the former covers the use of the moods to indicate obligation, necessity and will (prohibitive and jussive subjunctives , the optative of wish), while the latter encompasses modal uses in which the focus is more on the speaker’s uncertain knowledge of the truth of the statement (potential optatives, and, in Homer, the subjunctive used as a future). Again, objective morphosyntactic facts seem to corroborate this division: as Chantraine pointed out, deontic modals generally lack the modal particle ἄν / κε and are negated with μή, whereas the epistemic modals have the modal particle and are negated with οὐ. As a whole, the description appears to hold fairly well for Attic. But what about Homeric Greek? The central argument of W.’s book is that it does not. Instead, W. offers a problematized account of the Homeric moods, in which these neat structuralist divisions are called into question and replaced with a more...