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N. G. Wilson (ed. & tr.), Aelian: Historical Miscellany. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Pp. 514. ISBN 0-674-99535-X. UK£11.95.
In succession to J. de Veto's translation comes Nigel Wilson's Loeb Varia Historia.1 Classicists no longer have an excuse not to check a citation in Aelian, and a general reader who wants to find out what a bedside book from antiquity might have looked like has the means ready to hand. For all his touted ... ('simplicity', a quality for which he is praised by Philostr. FS 31), Aelian's Greek can be quite tricky and with his translation Wilson puts us further in his debt: besides being clear and accurate it is often sprightly and even elegant. For an example of this elegance, see 13.1: 'In general the atmosphere was of festival and one could feast on the scent' (...).
This is a very miscellaneous miscellany indeed. Generally the stories tumble out without any apparent principle of ordering but sometimes a train of thought (albeit rambling) can be glimpsed. Phrynichos the tragedian (who Aelian says was also a general; where did he get this? can it be right?) wrote choral odes mat aroused a warlike spirit-along the lines of the Aeschylus of Aristophanes' Frogs-at 3.8, which leads into amours among warriors making them more warlike (3.9) and this in turn brings up the topic of how the Spartan ephors dealt with such love (3.10). After an apparently intrusive chapter on Peripatetic doctrine, Aelian returns to Spartan love between men at 3.12. The stories about artists and instrumentalists at 3.30-33 seem to be prepared for by the thought: 'philosophy has a moderating influence even on unlikely recipients' (compare the story about Socrates and Plato at 3.27). In among...