Greek Audience Research Articles

The use of cues for attention in ancient Greek art: aspects that influence concentration in the work of art and its elements

The goal of this study is to identify cues for the cognitive process of attention in ancient Greek art, aiming to find confirmation of its possible use by ancient Greek audiences and artists. Evidence of cues that trigger attention’s psychological dispositions was searched through content analysis of image reproductions of ancient Greek sculpture and fine vase painting from the archaic to the Hellenistic period - ca. 7th -1st cent. BC. Through this analysis, it was possible to observe the presence of cues that trigger orientation to the work of art (i.e. amplification, contrast, emotional salience, simplification, symmetry), of a cue that triggers a disseminate attention to the parts of the work (i.e. distribution of elements) and of cues that activate selective attention to specific elements in the work of art (i.e. contrast of elements, salient color, central positioning of elements, composition regarding the flow of elements and significant objects). Results support the universality of those dispositions, probably connected with basic competencies that are hard-wired in the nervous system and in the cognitive processes.

Media witnessing: exploring the audience of distant suffering

This article aims at demonstrating the relevance of the concept of ‘media witnessing’ as an analytical lens for the study of audience engagement with media reports of distant suffering. Drawing upon existing theoretical work on the concept, the article approaches media witnessing as a distinct modality of audience experience and constructs an analytical framework for its study. Applying this framework on an empirical study of Greek audiences, the article provides a typology of witnessing, consisting of four different types of audience engagement with media stories of human suffering. This typology illustrates the complexities inherent in the practice of watching suffering on television, as well as the limitations of mediated cosmopolitan imagination.

Reading between the lines, seeing beyond the images: an empirical study on the comprehension of implicit film dialogue meaning across cultures

Exploring the synergies between audiovisual translation, cognitive (experimental) pragmatics and film studies, the present article proposes a novel approach to the empirical investigation of audience reception. The proposed methodology is applied to a study on the comprehension of implicatures by British and Greek viewers in the two Bridget Jones films Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) and their subtitled versions. Inter alia, it is demonstrated that implicatures whose understanding presupposes familiarity with specific aspects of the British culture presented the Greek audience with substantial difficulties. Overall, experimental data analysis shows that source and target viewers did not always understand implicatures in the way the filmmakers would like them to and/or the analyst had predicted. This finding highlights the subjectivity and creativity of audience response and, therefore, the need regularly to corroborate research hypotheses through studies of actual audiences.

Neighbors: Ethnocentrism in Antiphon and Montaigne

In the first book of his history, Herodotus interrupts his political narrative to offer a quick ethnographic survey of the Persians, wherein he remarks that Persians respect other ethnicities in proportion to their proximity to Persia and reserve their greatest disdain for the most distant peoples. For Herodotus and his 5th-century Greek audience, the Persian himself incarnates the category of the Barbarian, whose inferiority is a function of his distance from Greece. This article proposes to assess the role of ethnocentrism, and its correlation of proximity and superiority, in two of the most iconoclastic figures in the history of Western thought, the ancient Greek sophist Antiphon of Rhamnus and the French Renaissance author Michel de Montaigne. Recently excavated and edited papyrus fragments reveal tantalizing glimpses of Antiphon’s lost treatise On truth, which seems to formulate a very far-reaching critique of ethnocentrism within the framework of cultural relativism. In his renowned essay Des Cannib...

The Culture of the Ancient Epithet: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Translation of Imagination

A culturally nuanced translation of archaic Greek verbal culture can only be achieved with reference to the original audience. In Bacchylides 17 (‘Theseus’ Dive’), the fifth-century poet's compound epithets operate entirely within an epic-lyric tradition, in contrast to the fourth-century verbal innovation of Timotheus. Poetry in the English language has always followed Timotheus more than Bacchylides, reaching a climax in the theory of ‘inscape’ and expressive epithets of Gerard Manley Hopkins. As a classicist, Hopkins was intimately familiar with Greek poetic diction, and his notebooks record that he interpreted the Iliad's traditional epithets contextually and not merely lexically. Analogically, we may imagine Greek audiences as projecting their own personal contexts and experience into the interpretation of the traditional compound epithets of Bacchylides 17.

Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism . by Ian S. Moyer (review)

Reviewed by: Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism. by Ian S. Moyer Susan A. Stephens Ian S. Moyer. Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 357 Pp. $110.00. ISBN 978-0-521-76551-0. Ian Moyer’s study begins by observing that Egypt occupies a position that “is ‘other’ twice over: Other not only to ancient Greeks, but also to modern historians, classicists and other students of Hellenism” (2). His introduction provides ample evidence of the ways in which modern scholars from Gustav Droysen to Arnaldo Momigliano have positioned Egypt as unworthy of serious attention either because it was unknowable, in decline, developmentally separate during periods of contact, or no more than a projection of Greek ideas about the “other.” Arguing that this is a kind of “intellectual apartheid” that traces its roots to colonialism, Moyer prefers a dialogic and transactional model of agency. Beginning with Herodotus, Moyer argues that, by privileging “Herodotus’ text as the only producer of significant meaning,” scholars have reduced Egypt to a “passive object, a flat screen for Greek projections.” He offers by way of contrast a reading of Herodotus’ encounter with the Theban priests (2.142–144) with its embedded story of Hecataeus of Miletus. When Hecataeus claimed an ancestry sixteen generations removed from a god, these priests countered with the antiquity of their own culture, demonstrated by carefully kept human genealogies that reached back three hundred generations. Moyer demonstrates the existence of such detailed priestly and kingly genealogies, and the particular historical circumstances in which they were produced. They constituted, he suggests, a “fundamental and novel orientation to the human past” that could have served as a stimulus for what is taken to be a significant innovation of Herodotus’ writing—to think of causalities in human terms, not divinely directed. In his second chapter Moyer turns to Manetho’s history of Egypt, written under the first Ptolemies. Although this history now survives only in quotations [End Page 709] and epitomes, Moyer makes the case that this was not (as usually presented) an Egyptian enabled to write the history of his own country for the first time thanks to earlier Greek models so much as a response to Herodotus that asserts the primacy and value of authentically Egyptian modes of representing its own past by means of the king list. Manetho annotates his basic chronology with events that illustrate the king acting to uphold the cosmic order, thus modeling good kingship, or failing to do so with the attendant consequences—thus it is a template set out for the Ptolemies themselves to imitate. In his third chapter, Moyer focuses on the establishment of a temple of Serapis on Delos in the late third or early second century b.c.e., an event for which we have an inscription that consists of a Serapis aretalogy with details of a law suit over the temple’s establishment; it is followed by a hexameter poem by Maiistas that fleshes out the earlier narrative (Both are provided in appendices). Moyer argues that the lawsuit was an intra-Egyptian dispute brought by priests of other Serapeia, not (as is generally thought) by Greeks trying to exclude Egyptian gods from the island. A compelling part of his argument is the way in which the aretalogy positions the opponents as Sethian (the god of chaos), evoking Osirian myths of legitimate succession to authenticate the rights of one line of Egyptian priests over another. Although Maiistas’ hymn has been criticized as hackneyed and derivative, Moyer points out that a series of allusions to Odysseus, particularly his speech to the Achaeans to stay the course at Troy, provides a recognizable Homeric precedent for the struggles of the Egyptian priests to establish their shrine in the face of local opposition, thus less a case of colonial mimicry than self-conscious deployment of alien tropes to persuade Greek audiences. The final chapter jumps forward six centuries. Thessalus is the Greek author of a fourth-century c.e. pharmacological treatise (a translation is provided in an appendix) offered to a Roman emperor that claims to have compelled an Egyptian priest to reveal his secret learning. In doing so, Thessalus constructs his...

The unbearable similarity of the other: The multiple identities of Gazmend Kapllani’s migrant narratives

This article discusses A Short Border Handbook (2006) and My Name is Europe (2010), two novels by Albanian-born and Athens-based author Gazmend Kapllani. It argues that both books are not solely about the Balkans and Europe, but also about the meaning of Europe seen through its treatment of immigrants. The first novel offers an account of the journey of an Albanian immigrant into Greece at the beginning of the 1990s and the related problems faced by him and other immigrants. The second consists of a futuristic account of an aged Albanian, emigrant for half a century, returning to Tirana, now part of the United States of Europe, in 2041, punctuated by a series of testimonials based on actual interviews with immigrants residing in Greece. As the two novels were written originally in Greek for a Greek audience and fuse fiction and memoir, with the narrator’s use of the first-person singular adding to the immediacy of the text, the readers are given the opportunity to look at immigration as a mirror looki g back at them and to consider their identity in terms of fluidity and freedom of movement, as a trajectory in which one is constantly confronted by an ‘other’, often in unequal terms, making this constant becoming an essential process of identity formation.

Rethinking media events in the context of a global public sphere: Exploring the audience of global disasters in Greece

Abstract Current accounts on globalization and transnational media flows have reformed traditional debates on media events and have raised questions on the integrative potential of media events at a global level. This article addresses this issue by employing the case of global disasters as media events and exploring some of the characteristics of the global public sphere surrounding them in one of its particular actualizations: that of the Greek audience. The article is empirically grounded on focus group discussions through which questions of perception and framing of disasters as well as of the potential of promotion of global solidarity will be addressed.

Mediated Cosmopolitanism: Global Disasters and the Emergence of Cosmopolitan Solidarity

Theories of globalisation focusing on the intensification of transnational flows of people, capital and ideas appear to challenge the hitherto local forms of solidarity. At the same time, international crises, ethnic conflicts and an emerging interest in multiculturalism have rendered cosmopolitanism as a form of global solidarity an appealing ideal and social project. This promise of cosmopolitanism as a claim about global belonging and solidarity has attracted as many critics as it has advocates. This paper will attempt to defend cosmopolitanism as an emerging reality and will suggest its exploration in relation to global media and communications. It will argue that cosmopolitanism should be thought about and explored as a process “from below” rather than a project “from above”. In this process, media constitute a significant force in forging relations of connectivity and responsibility towards distant others. This is especially the case in the coverage of disasters at a global scale, when audiences are faced with the vulnerability of distant others. The paper will be empirically grounded on a study of Greek audiences in relation to media coverage of distant disasters. It will draw upon material from focus group discussions on the ways people relate to different instances of distant suffering and their victims. Cosmopolitanism as a form of global solidarity, it will be argued, is a rather elusive and vulnerable condition, heavily dependent on media representational practices and conditioned by cultural biases and interpretations. It is, however, an emergent possibility, expressed in terms of responsibility for distant others and of imagining the globe as a terrain of potential action.

A Greek Roman Empire; Power and Belief under Theodosius II (408/450) (review)

Reviewed by: A Greek Roman Empire: Power and Belief under Theodosius II (408/450) David Olster Fergus Millar A Greek Roman Empire: Power and Belief under Theodosius II (408/450) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006 Pp. xxvi + 279. Fergus Millar is one of the great names in contemporary Roman imperial scholarship. Since the 1977 publication of his comprehensive synthesis The Emperor in the Roman World (31 b.c.–337 a.d.), he has been one of the leading English language lights in the field of imperial administration and presentation. Now Millar ventures well beyond Constantine into the time of that emperor's less dynamic epigone, Theodosius II and the politico-religious culture of the fifth century. His topic is the relationship between politics and religion in the reign of Theodosius II, specifically the struggles over Nestorius and his condemnation. His project is to "[form] a bridge between the governmental and administrative history practiced by A. H. M. Jones and the style of cultural history exemplified by Peter Brown and Averil Cameron" (xiv). As a practitioner of the former, Millar brings his own methodological apparatus to his book, and for the latter, he modestly (and accurately) concedes his methodological debt. The book is divided roughly into two parts. In the first Millar sets out to fulfill the promise of his title by explaining the cultural and, more particularly, administrative implications of a Greek empire. Although local languages like Syriac and Coptic played a role in the literary and cultural dynamic of the mid-fifth century, ultimately the language of imperial and ecclesiastical administration and communication was Greek. Even Latin, the nominal tongue of the "Romans," was likely not that common in the central administrative apparatus. The rhetoric of this Greek language culture constructed an empire at once Roman and Christian and in Millar's view a tension between these identities. Millar posits that an ideological dialect arose from "the competing pressures, of legality on the one side and Christian conviction on the other, to which the emperor was exposed" (128) that led Theodosius to follow the dictates of faith rather than imperial duty. However, it is arguable that rather than a dialectical opposition, Theodosius illustrates the continuity of imperial piety that had moved emperors since Augustus to placate divine powers and that panegyricists from Pliny to Panegyrici Latini had praised. At the beginning of the third century, for example, Caracalla was moved to reverse a legal decision when an appeal was made to him as "most pious judge and king" because, as Millar himself once wrote, "the dispensation of [imperial] justice would extend to temples, cults and priesthoods" (The Emperor in the Roman World, 455). [End Page 581] Exactly how the linguistic dominance of Greek affected the theological debates and ecclesiastical conflicts that occupy the second half of the book, however, is far from clear. Millar does not address how Greek specifically framed the religious or political discourse, e.g., how the loan word "Augustus," the most common chancery title of the period, related to basileus, the far more common title for the emperor in histories and council records and what that implies about the Hellenicity of the fifth-century imperial construct. In the field of theological discourse, the complex relationship between proso\pon, hypostasis, and persona could be said to be one of the philological difficulties that plagued Leo's tome and made its Latin formulation so problematic to a Greek audience. But one waits in vain for an explanation of how the use of Greek defined or created a particular intellectual framework in which the political events or intellectual discourse of the second half of the book developed. In short, the linguistic analysis of the first half of the book disappears in the second half. What does carry over from the first half to the second half of the book is Millar's ideological construction of state and church, or Empire and Christianity: one that posits tension between them and a fundamental discontinuity with the traditions of imperial piety and religious authority. Of course, what creates this discontinuity is implied by Millar to be Christianity itself. Introducing the controversy over Nestorius, he explains that "to...

Teaching the Questions: Aristotle's Philosophical Pedagogy in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics

It is widely acknowledged that the style of Plato's political philosophizing is radically different from the systems and doctrines approach established by Hobbes and confirmed and redirected by Kant. But what about Aristotle? Does he intend to produce systematic political theory in sharp contrast to Plato's question-centered dialectics? This essay argues that Aristotle's political science is equally as dialogical as Plato's. Taken together, the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics form a single set of lectures, craftily organized to lead its immediate Greek audience (the equivalent of Socrates' interlocutors in Plato) deeply into the questions and problems that are Aristotle's theoretical basis for the paradigmatically human activities of practical reason (phronêsis) and thoughtful choice (prohairesis). He accomplishes this goal by allowing none of the answers he or his audience might propose to stand unchallenged, thus acting as another, albeit soberer, Socrates to his politically concerned audience then and, potentially, now.

Nostalgoi kai plastourgoi: Entypa, keimena, kai kinēmata ste metapolemikē Ellada (review)

Reviewed by: Gregory Jusdanis Elizabeth Arseniou . . Athens: Parafernalia. 2003. Pp. 448. €20. Can there be an avant-garde in Greece? If so, what form does it take? Elizabeth Arseniou, a lecturer at the University of Thrace, answers in the affirmative and devotes 448 pages of dense prose to prove her case. Specifically, Arseniou examines what she calls the second period of the Greek literary avant-garde, which flourished in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. While she makes extensive references to the modernism of the 1930s, the very influential literary movement of the interwar period, she focuses on the second manifestation of vanguard [End Page 474] writing in Greece, which she finds more radical both aesthetically and politically. To be sure, the writings of the Generation of the 30s, with few exceptions, did not exhibit any of the extreme gestures and impulses of the European historical avant-garde that exploded in the first two decades with such movements as Dada. The second avant-garde, on the other hand, attempted to push experimentation to its limits. This is what makes it so interesting for Arseniou. She only makes tantalizingly brief allusions to what she considers the third period of the avant-garde in the 1990s. Arseniou knows her subject inside and out. She has read a lot, both in the primary material as well as in secondary sources and this extensive research shows throughout the book. Every reader will gain something from her efforts. The book will probably become a standard for writing on the Greek avant-garde. A particular strength of the book is her comparative angle. Arseniou links developments in Greece to those in Europe and North America, making parallels between outside and inside that are illuminating. Readers are thus able to see how Greek authors differ from writers abroad and how they departed from them, responding to their own traditions and realities. Her study offers a detailed examination of how the avant-garde took root and grew in Greece. Like all cultural phenomena it developed in a negotiation between external forces and indigenous needs and exigencies. The organization of the book is peculiar. This is not a traditional book with a thesis, rather the author's approach is more exploratory and descriptive, as she often goes in and out of her field, digging deep and climbing on a hill for a clearer look. Readers gain knowledge about the writing of the avant-garde rather than a particular argument about or theory of the avant-garde. The first chapter provides a historical and cultural introduction to the 1950s and 1960s. This material is too general to be helpful, especially to a Greek audience, which presumably would be familiar with the subject matter. In Chapter Two Arseniou investigates some of the social sites where the avant-garde developed, namely the small, left-leaning literary journals such as Επιθεώρηση Τέχνης, Εποχές, and Πάλι. One does not often get in one book detailed readings of poems and novels as well as an examination of the niches where these texts were originally produced. This chapter is very useful but here again, rather than presenting an argument, Arseniou examines each journal individually, looking into its aesthetic orientation, literature it supported, and authors it published. The penultimate chapter also adopts this approach, this time focusing on journals of the 1970's like Κούρος, Τράμ, and Σήμα. While these two chapters are enlightening and very useful, they function almost like encyclopedic entries rather than parts of on argument. The rest of the book offers a rich exploration of the struggles to establish the avant-garde, the reactions to the literary radicalism both from the right and the left, the successes and the failures. Indeed, rather than presenting a picture of an ineluctable victory of the avant-garde over inherited aesthetic criteria and practices of reading, she demonstrates the conflicts that were involved in this process. [End Page 475] Arseniou ends her study with a few pages that are full of insights on the various stages of vanguard writing in Greece. She argues that the first phase was characterized by a fight between bourgeois and popular discourses, the second by the need to establish the autonomy of literature, and the third by a...

Creating the Past: The Vénus de Milo and the Hellenistic Reception of Classical Greece

This article reexamines the well-known Hellenistic statue of Aphrodite from Melos (the Venus de Milo), drawing on recently published archaeological evidence and archival sources relating to its excavation to propose a new reconstruction of the sculpture’s original appearance, context, and audience. Although scholars have often discussed the statue as a timeless ideal of female beauty, the Aphrodite was in fact carefully adapted to its contemporary setting, the minor Hellenistic polis of Melos. With its conservative yet creative visual effect, the sculpture offers a well-preserved early example of the Hellenistic emulation of classical art, and opens a window onto the rarely examined world of a traditional Greek city during a period of dynamic change. The statue, it is argued, was set up within the civic gymnasium of Melos. Furthermore, Aphrodite likely held out an apple in token of her victory in the Judgment of Paris, as newly accessible sculptural fragments found with the statue demonstrate. The sculpture responds to and transforms both classical visual prototypes and earlier narratives of the Judgment, familiar to Greek audiences from the period of Homer onward. And the Aphrodite not only was appropriate for display within a gymnasium but indeed exemplifies a critical aspect of that institution’s role during the Hellenistic period: the creation of a standardized and highly selective vision of the past to serve as a model for the present. Thus the statue, analyzed within its original context, greatly enhances our understanding of the reception of classical sculpture and mythological narrative in Hellenistic Greece.*

Using Film to Increase Literacy Skills

I n the fifth century BC, a man walked out on a stage with blood pouring from his eyes. He had discovered that, despite his struggles against fate, he had killed his father and married his mother. In the resulting anguish of this terrible recognition, he blinded himself. Even if one's classical education is minimal, the plot of Sophocles' Oedipus the King is probably recognizable. Jump forward 2,500 years. Two brothers and their friend devise a plan to keep money discovered in a crashed airplane rather than turn it in to the authorities. From this simple but far-reaching decision, a series of violent events begins to unfold with disastrous consequences for all involved. What do these two dramas, separated by thousands of years, have in common? Both deal with violence in a unique but similar way and both were presented as the most popular culture of the day. Oedipus the King was as popular with Greek audiences as most films are with today's audiences. The Greeks knew the inevitability of the plot. This man was going to kill his father and sleep with his mother. Many other poets had tackled the same story. They knew nothing was going to change in the plot and could recite the lines uttered by Oedipus in his blindness. It was through this familiarity that the concept of pity and fear was invoked: pity for Oedipus and fear that it could happen to them. Knowing the ending to the story also led to a strong sense of irony that destiny could not be avoided no matter how one tried. The Greek playwrights also recognized that violence in drama had its greatest effect when the play was concerned with the consequences, not the act of violence itself. The violence usually took place offstage, and the audience members had to visualize the act in their imaginations. What they did see was the primary concern of the drama: the impact of the violence on the characters' lives.

Facing the West: Greece in the Great Exhibition of 1851

This paper explores the prehistory of industrial design in Greece, through original research on the Greek participation in the exhibition which took place in London in 1851, and is known as Great or as Exhibition of 1851. Although the participation of the young Greek state was very modest, at the same time it was a remarkable event which triggered numerous reactions, both positive and negative. This paper outlines the condition of the Greek state in 1851, presents facts about the Greek participation in the Great Exhibition, and discusses reactions by Greeks as well as relevant opinions expressed by foreigners. This research is situated in the context of an emerging local design historiography, which bears close links to economic and social history. Since this is research in progress, this text is meant to be an introduction to the subject.' To begin with, it must be stressed that, in 1851, the modern Greek state was only two decades old, and it was undergoing a phase of organizational and political development. Various internal factors constituted serious obstacles in the growth of the production and financial sectors.2 The production base remained archaic and the development rate was negligible. The country was still in a preindustrial, pre-banking, and even pre-property state.3 The country was devastated after more than a decade of independence war, it was very sparsely populated (seventeen inhabitants per square kilometer in 1839), the natural resources were underused, and urbanization was in an embryonic state. The majority of the population lived in villages, where exchange based on money was still unknown. The local economy was based on agrarian and self-sufficient ways of living. Before the take-off of the Greek industry in the late 1860s, there is no point in talking about industrialization, or even early industrialization. 4The first bank, the National Bank of Greece, was founded in 1841, and remained the only institution of this kind for more than two decades.5 The journalist and writer Stefanos Xenos, who attended the Great Exhibition as a correspondent for Greek newspapers, points out the difficulties of presenting the exhibition to the Greek audience, of describing and comparing objects and situations unseen by the majority of the local population: [We Greeks have] neither the things, nor the names, nor the shapes. 6 The British newspaper Morning Chronicle refers to certain historical conditions in an attempt to provide explanations for the underdevelopment of Greek industry in mid-nineteenth century. 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented in Mind the Map, 3rd

“How European am I?”: Prejudice Expression and the Presentation of Social Identity

We propose that the expression of prejudice may be used for publicly validating a social identity. This assumption was investigated in a Greek political context. Prejudice toward the Turks is strongly associated to Greek identity but is contrary to the norms of tolerance associated with European identity. Hence, expressing this attitude in front of a European audience may conflict with many Greeks' desire to be viewed as fully European by other members of the European Union. It was therefore predicted that Greeks who strongly identified with Europe would refrain from publicly expressing negative attitudes toward the Turks when they addressed prototypical Europeans, but not when their answers were private or when they addressed other Greeks. In order to test this hypothesis, the impact of personal identifiability, identification with Europe and the audience's group membership (western European, Greek) on the expression of prejudice toward the Turks was examined among Greek students (n =118). Results were generally consistent with predictions. Unexpectedly, however, identification with Europe was positively related to the expression of prejudice when participants expected to be identifiable to a Greek audience.

Contextualizing the Gospel in Athens: Paul's Areopagus Address as a Paradigm for Missionary Communication

The contemporary emphasis on contextualization has not always recognized that the process of “contextualizing the gospel” goes back to the New Testament itself. This study looks at one of the most instructive case studies in New Testament contextualization, Paul's speech before the Areopagus in Acts 17:16–34. It analyzes various aspects of Paul's missionary communication, showing how both the form and the substance of the speech are targeted to persuade an educated and philosophically minded Greek audience. At the same time, Paul refuses to compromise the non-negotiable message of the Christ event, in particular the resurrection of Jesus, which confronts the worldviews of his hearers. The essay concludes with a reflection on how this paradigmatic account can inform the task of incarnating the gospel in pluralistic settings today.

Philostrate et la chevelure d'Apollonios de Tyane

Philostratos insists on the untrimmed length of Appolonios of Tyana's hair. He no doubt had to take the biographical data into account (his hero was possibly more a thaumaturgist than a philosopher) but he imparted to his material a cultural colouring that made it acceptable to a learned Greek audience. He may also have taken up a challenge particular to the sophists' milieu by giving himself over to the task of paradoxical eulogizing, praising dirty hair as a sign of the highest wisdom.

Deceptions and Delusions in Herodotus

NOT EVERY SELF-INTERESTED charlatan is condemned in any society that values ingenuity. The Hellenes admired the lies of shrewd Odysseus, worshipped Hermes, patron of thieves and sharp entrepreneurs, and found admirable the hedgehog deceits and shams of Aristophanes' comic heroes.' Greek epic, tragedy, and comedy describe cheats and their dupes. After the development of history, philosophy, biography, and the later genres of the novel and hagiography at times would explore popular delusions and false prophets. History proper, from Herodotus on, supplies examples, large and small, of political, religious, and other entrepreneurs who hatch schemes at the expense of the credulous. Frauds require a knowing agent, usually one who works for his own profit or advance. On another hand, we have unplanned delusions, as when groups share a belief in a natural or supernatural event without anyone's being the richer for it. Individual or mass delusions and panics enrich the fabric of historiography and implicitly provide lessons for the attentive audience. Herodotus certainly plays to his Greek audience's pleasure in descriptions of deception and delusion, allowing the listener's or reader's amused perception of a different reality. The responsible historian tried to separate fact from fiction, sham from truth, charla tan from dupe and clearheaded exposer of deceit.

Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema (review)

Reviews219 and undercuts his whole project. If inteUectual content is whoUy secondary to emotionalresponse, dien Greek tragedy's status as a "classic" is wholly dependent on the possession or recreation of a personality that responds as the Greek audience did. For whom today must Oedipus be nobly born to be tragic? The unintended consequence is to make tragedy unperformable, despite Heath's interest in performance, for where wül we find such an audience? "Understanding " tragedy in his sense is left only to readers who never ask embarrassing questions about justice or the gods, which might complicate or deflect the evocation of emotion. One wonders if the sacrifice is worth it. Universität KonstanzNiall W Slater Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema, edited byJoseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan; 209 pp. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987, $29.50. The tide rather accurately reflects the contents ofthis coUection often essays. The lead off essay is Stanley CaveU's revision of his Weigert Lecture, originaUy delivered to the Washington School of Psychiatry in 1985. Of the nine essays that foUow, two (those by Timothy Gould and Karen Hanson) are primarily explorations of CaveU's ideas; three Oby Stanley R. Palombo, WUliam Rothman, Micheline Klagsbrun Frank) draw upon Cavell in passing; and four (by Robert Winer, Irving Schneider, Bruce Sklarew, Stephen M. Weissman) show litde or no indebtedness to CaveU. Winer's primary influence is Erik Erikson's concept of the life cycle, while Sklarew's tide with its reference to "Preoedipal DevelopmentDisturbances " clearlyindicates the essay's Freudian perspective. Because the essays by Schneider, Sklarew, and Winer are, along with those of CaveU and Frank, the most interesting in the book, the deviation ofparts ofthe volume from a strict focus on CaveU's ideas should be regarded as a merit rather tiian a defect. CaveU's essay begins and ends by exploring the dieme of "the faüure ... of a woman's unknownness to prove her existence to a man, to become created by a man" (p. 37) in Max Ophuls's film Letter from an Unknown Woman. In between he recapitulates themes from his other works—chiefly TL· Claim of Reason (1979) and Pursuits ofHappiness (1981)—discourses on his indebtedness to Descartes, Wittgenstein, Freud, Kant, Emerson, Nietzsche, Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, and Lacan (among others), and offers a tribute to Greta Garbo, "the most fascinating, cinematic image on film of the unknown woman" (p. 36). The essay is dense, aUusive, highly stimulating; it is also in some respects maddening. For one thing, it reads like the opening chapter of a book—but 220Philosophy and Literature not the one before us. Early in the essay CaveU lists nine films which exemplify the genre he dubs "the melodrama of the unknown woman" (p. 18), but only one—Letterfrom an Unknown Woman—is discussed in sufficient detaü to clarify the generalizations he makes about it. One looks in vain for the chapters which substantiate CaveU's views on Blonde Venus, Stetta Dallas, Showboat, Now Voyager, Random Harvest, Mildred Pierce, Gaslight, and TL· Marquise of O. CaveU is also unduly fond of sweeping generalizations, which are neither supported nor adequately explained: e.g., "film. . . is from first to last more interested in the study of individual women than of individual men" (p. 29). Does he mean that more films focus on female protagonists than on male (an assertion that would seem demonstrably untrue)? Or is the key word here "study," which perhaps impues a more thorough examination of a character's interior life than is normaUy found in male-dominated action films? And what does he mean when he further states that "it is women that bequeath psychic depth to film's interests" (p. 29)? Do only the female characters in film possess "psychic deptii," or do the male characters only reveal their psychic depth in relationships with female characters? Nevertheless, despite (or perhaps even because of) its ambiguities, CaveU's essay is a highly provocative treatment of crucial issues of gender and identity in phUosophy, psychoanalysis, and film. The remainder of the essays are aU worth reading, not merely in relation to CaveU's ideas but for their insightful treatments of...