BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 407 (based on vision and presence) that characterizes the metaphorical usage. At the end of the chapter, O’Connell points to an interesting contrast in the use of the same metaphorical language in medical and funerary epideictic oratory. Although both epideictic and forensic oratory (mis)represent “saying” as “showing” and “hearing” as “seeing,” the former aims to communicate timeless, universal truths, while the latter treats particular, contingent ones. Part Three, “Imaginary Sight,” focuses on the jury’s faculty of imagination, which speakers could exploit through vivid imagery. O’Connell astutely compares the truthvalue of these attempts at enargeia to that of eikos-arguments. Through verbs of seeing, picturesque details (or, contrarily, archetypal generality), and deictic markers, speakers encouraged their audience to imagine scenes important to the case and experience them as if they were really there. Chapter Five, “Visualizing Civic Suffering,” contains three case-studies of an apparently common ekphrasis: a city being plunged into disorder, destroyed, or standing in ruins. Chapter Six, “Shared Spectatorship,” examines the way in which orators manipulate the jury’s imagination in order to bridge the gap between the here-and-now of the courtroom and an important event in the past. In his Conclusion, O’Connell stresses that the three visual phenomena he has been examining are more properly understood as belonging to a single, overarching rhetorical strategy prioritizing the sense of sight. He reminds us that everything in these speeches was designed with an eye towards the jury’s vote. Their frequent instrumentalizing of the visual was no exception. Admirably, the book will be easily accessible to a general audience due to the author’s scrupulous explanations of topics already familiar to the cognoscenti. O’Connell always takes the time to explain the significance of the Greek text (and his rendering of it) in terms any reader will understand. He brings in many comparanda from modern courtrooms, which are both enlightening and may make the ancient material easier to comprehend. The book also serves as a solid introduction to the subfield of Attic forensic oratory as a whole, covering foundational topics such as jury selection, the suspicion of legal experts, and witness testimony. Finally, it is full of helpful resources, including an index of ancient texts and a general index, as well as an appendix of speeches, which briefly summarizes each case and its context. University of Toronto Ted Parker City and Empire in the Age of the Successors: Urbanization and Social Response in the Making of the Hellenistic Kingdoms. By Ryan Boehm. Oakland: University of California Press. 2018. Pp. xiv, 300. This book investigates—true to its subtitle—the relationship between the large-scale and small-scale synoikisms of the early Hellenistic period and the emergence of the Successor Kingdoms, the cities’ new lives and economies, and the early Hellenistic kings’ interactions with these cities. As an important contribution that fills a significant gap in the existing scholarship on the structure of Hellenistic empires, it deserves wide readership . The “Introduction” (1–25) elegantly sets out the topic of the book, focusing on a core set of cities and the chronological framework of this study (ca 316–280 b.c.). Boehm carefully argues that it is not only imperial agents but also local actors who actively 408 PHOENIX shaped the Hellenistic empires. For the author, the—often royally—planned synoikisms of the early Successor period are a dynamic, constantly evolving defining marker not only of Hellenistic polis life, but also of the Hellenistic empires per se, offering, he argues, a “distinctive form” of imperial rule (12). The first part of the book (consisting of Chapters One and Two) investigates the role of urbanization through synoikism in the overall structure of the “imperial systems of the early Hellenistic kings” (5), while the second (Chapters Three and Four) views this same process from the vantage point of the local communities, assessing the impact of large-scale synoikism on these former and new poleis. In the first chapter, “Imperial Geographies: City, Settlement, and Ideology in the Formation of the Hellenistic Kingdoms” (29–88), the author offers a well-written political narrative of the Successors’ actions and their key synoikisms (Kassandreia, Thessalonike , Herakleia...
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Jul 4, 2019
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