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AESOPIC CONVERSATIONS: POPULAR TRADITION, CULTURAL DIALOGUE, ANO THE INVENTION OF GREEK PROSE. By Leslie Kurke. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010. Pp. xxi, 495.
LESLIE KURKE FINDS IN AESOP far more than he appears to offer on the surface. In Aesopic Conversations, the simple tales and roguish persona of the legendary fabulist become the basis for an expansion of the author's decades-long investigations into the nature of the relationship between the sociopolitical and generic dimensions of literature.1 According to Kurke, Aesopic fables are marked as "popular" and "abject" (4) in Greek culture, providing a useful low end for her rigorous model of literary-generic hierarchy. Because the texts and traditions that comprise Aesopica are both "low" and "open, fluid, anyone's property" (10), Kurke is able to approach Aesopica as a form of "common culture" (8) in which both elite and non-elite participate. Thus the title of this superb and original book invokes a number of different "conversations": between the high and the low in ancient Greek culture; between the disempowered and their oppressors; between the "Aesopic" Socrates and his interlocutors; between Herodotus the logopoios and his poetic predecessors; and even the exchanges between sub-disciplines within the contemporary academy. Who would have believed that the humble Aesop could incite so much discourse?
Building upon the pioneering work of Jack Winkler and Keith Hopkins,2 Kurke was initially drawn to Aesopica in the hopes that somewhere in the motley corpus of fables, proverbs, and biographical legends associated with Aesop she might excavate remnants of the "elusive quarry" (2) of Greek popular culture. In the rich and admirably reflective "Introduction" (1-49), Kurke announces her intention to read the Lives of Aesop and other Aesopica "symptomatically for ideologies and for cultural contestation" (25), in order to shed light on the interaction of popular and high cultural forms in ancient Greece, and ultimately on the origins of Greek prose writing. This approach naturally divides the book into two equal parts: In Part I, "Competitive Wisdom and Popular Culture" (51-237), the focus is on the figure of Aesop as a non-philosophical sage figure who stands both within and outside of the elite wisdom tradition; in Part II, "Aesop and the Invention of Greek Prose" (241-431), Kurke argues that Aesop stood as an important (if...