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JONAS GRETHLEIN. The Greeks and Their Past: Poetry, Oratory, and History in the Fifth Century BCE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xii + 350 pp. 3 black-and-white figs. Cloth, $95.
Coming across the line James Joyce gives Stephen Dedalus, "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," Greeks of the classical period might be puzzled by a wish to escape the past, since for them it was far more a treasure than an affliction, but they would accept a description of the past as immanent and eternal. Evidently aware of the wide gulf between, on the one hand, most British and American classicists, and on the other, scholars versed in hermeneutics and phenomenology, Jonas Grethlein devotes the introductory chapter to a careful statement of his approach. All his principal specimen texts are drawn from fifth-century writers, or to be more precise, writers who were at work for at least part of the fifth century, even if a specific work does not quite make it under the wire, e.g., Lysias' (or at least the Lysianic) Epitaphios. There are out-of-period excursions to supplement a slender corpus, for instance Tyrtaeus and Mimnermus to support the analysis of the "New Simonides" (13). Grethlein's conceptual categories are explicitly modern: as social scientists put it, they are of the "etic," rather than the "emic" variety (5, n. 29). A number of phrases appear with great frequency, but what might look like a leitmotif serving as a rhetorical incantation is there by design, meant to make the discussion of any one of the "commemorative modes" intelligible on its own (12).
Grethlein investigates the interplay in the three genres of Greek literature of his title, commemorative modes of memory as he calls them, between two persistent, and evidently contradictory, attributes: consistency and contingency. The latter might be understood as equivalent to..., chance, but Grethlein (following Rudiger Bubner) insists that it is something quite different: the realm defined in medieval logic as quod nec est impossibile nec necessarium, a frame for actions as well as for chance (6). I am not competent to evaluate Grethleins handling of the concepts doxographic history, but found this no impediment to understanding the text-specific analyses.
Grethlein turns first to...