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Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric, translated and edited by George A. Kennedy. Writings from the Greco-Roman World 10. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003. Pp. xviii + 231. $29.95.
George Kennedy, Paddison Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is well known to biblical scholars for his pioneering work in rhetorical criticism. Many NT scholars "cut their rhetorical teeth" on Kennedy's classic study, New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). This most recent publication, a translation of the Greek progymnasmata, puts the biblical guild even further in his debt.
Kennedy's translation is the tenth volume in the SBL Writings from the Greco-Roman World (edited by John T. Fitzgerald) and represents a revised version of the edition published chez l'auteur in 1999, a fact that may escape some readers. Though Kennedy in the original edition anticipates publishing a "revised version" (see his open invitation for "corrections, suggestions and comments"), and though he describes "revising" that work on the acknowledgments page of the new edition, the work is not actually characterized by its publishers as a "revised edition" on the title page or back cover.
The original self-published volume brought together for the first time in English translation all the extant progymnasmata into a single collection. The progymnasmata were rhetorical exercises for those elementary-age schoolchildren privileged to receive an education in the ancient world. The original edition also provided the first English translation of both Nicolaus's progymnasmata and the commentary on Aphthonius attributed to John of Sardis. It also supplied the first English translation of Theon based on the critical text by Michel Fatillon in the Bude series (though pride of place for the first English translation, albeit based on an older critical text, actually belongs to James Butts and his 1987 Claremont dissertation, on which Kennedy draws, especially for his reordering of the chapters in Theon). The chief service of the new edition is that with the support of a major publishing house it makes more widely available in revised form Kennedy's original translations, which still cannot be found in most university libraries.
The translations of the book under review are readable and faithful, and they appear to follow the...