MLR, 99.1, 2004 279 Pindar will always appeal to a poet who desires to appropriate the essential condition of his greatness, which Gilbert Highet calls 'high and unifying excitement' (The Classical Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), p. 225). And victories vary: not having the requisite athletic contests, the Renaissance freely adapted epinician to metaphorical victories, like the Nativity, but further to politics or music or abstract thought. Where, then, has the genuine original excitement been most revived, and the particular circumstance connected through myth and sententia to fundamentals? The study is more descriptive than evaluative. Evaluation does enter into the choices, since greater attention is given to firstcomers and to major poets and to those (like Cowley with the 'philosophic' ode) who change the terms ofthe emulation. But at times I felt the lack of a more direct evaluation; out of so many Pindarists, which best survive the comparison they court? My own choice would be Ben Jonson's Carey and Morison Ode, not analysed by Revard, for while it owes much to Horace too, it is epinician in spirit. Valuable by-products of the book include a concise explanation of the origin of 'irregular' Pindaric. This originated in a mistaken view of the Greek texts, whose metrical structure is much stricter than Renaissance editors and readers supposed. By a glorious mistake the resulting irregularities capture the sweep and swoop of the Greek. Besides, the problematic state of the text may have led poets to work instead with whatever came most naturally to their native tongue?again with good results, since the aim is always to make Pindar one's own, where it counts, in spirit. All in all, a great new context of understanding has been opened up, in which to read more poems of this now little-regarded mode. The book is handsomely produced. Though I did find a score or so of typos, there was nothing major, nothing to impede understanding?most commendable in a book which must move between several languages, including Greek. University of Otago John K. Hale Discours sur le primitif. Ed. by Fiona McIntosh-Varjabedian. Lille: Universite Charles-de-Gaulle?Lille 3. 237 pp. ?18.50. ISBN 2-84467-040-7. These collected conference papers are addressed to a wide constituency of specialists in historical, literary or cultural studies, and anthropology. Each asks in differing ways: is there a continuum or a discontinuity between Them and Us (who compose and consume this kind of book)? Ethnocentrism rubs shoulders with egocentricity, and both open up chasms. Are or are we not, under our clothes, the same: stark naked ? Are we, beneath our variable skins, much of a muchness? The 'savage' was for many centuries silenced. Now, and not only in the Middle East, the empire strikes back. Sandrine Berthelot focuses on the recurrent Romantic, later Surrealist, myth of civilizations in need of an influx of barbarism in order to shake up or destroy a played-out world ripe for takeover. Flaubert at his most vengeful typifies this genocidal vision. Equally typical is his ambivalence: the barbarian Matho in Salammbo is violent and yet prone to melancholy. The Felicite of Un Cosur simple represents a differenttake on the primitive: a sublime simpleton. Astutely, the Goncourts saw Flaubert as 'un sauvage academique'. As regards Zola, Sophie Spandonis analyses in La Bete humaine the gallimaufry of biblical myth (Cain/Abel), vulgarized exploitation of Darwin's evolutionism (the animal origins of humankind), with a dash of criminology (Lombroso, who in turn rehashes notions from the 'science' of physiognomy), though Zola tweaks Lombroso by blaming women for male violence. After earlier co-petitioning against Zola, J.-H. Rosny aine, in Vamireh, favours a counter-myth of a paradise in prehistoric times, now lost. Even so, Rosny resorts to the cartoon image ofthe caveman dragging offhis stunned mate. 280 Reviews Trollope's travel book, South Africa, for Laurent Bury presents Blacks as recyclable : 'A Kafir may be ground and baked into a Christian' (p. 109). When, however, Trollope, more liberal than many of his era, speaks of Kaffirs as being 'as naked as my heart could desire' (pp. 110-11), it is a toss-up whether such occidental wishes...