Lyric Poetry and Social Identity in Archaic Greece by Jessica M. Romney

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 321 their performance because they can be requested, or the way epigram and lament attach to enduring objects), and describes the formal features that help them endure. He undoubtedly succeeds in demonstrating that the orality of the Homeric poems includes textuality (thus defined). The tension between virtual and actual arises again to illuminate the limits of the argument. A striking expression of this tension is the definition of “entextualization” as the creation of “an utterance capable of outliving the moment” (15). An utterance virtually “capable of” enduring does not necessarily endure actually. Ready conflates the two: “presenting the utterance as capable of enduring is one way to make it capable of enduring: claiming something is so is one way to make it so” (22). This conflation constrains his argument to the anthropological level of demonstrating the existence of a logic of endurance in the Homeric milieu, leaving aside the literary question of whether utterances actually endure in the Homeric poems. The Iliad, for one, is replete with figures of the failure of memory, lack of knowledge, and obliteration of objects.5 These unresolved tensions testify, however, to the rich stimulation this book provides , and ought not obscure its achievement of bringing to bear a tremendous range of comparative anthropological evidence in imaginatively and persuasively renewing our understanding of the boundaries of textuality and performance. Carleton University Yukai Li Lyric Poetry and Social Identity in Archaic Greece. By Jessica M. Romney. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2020. Pp. xii, 252. In this study Jessica Romney sets out to identify rhetorical features in selected poems of Tyrtaeus, Alcaeus, and Solon that aimed to forge a group identity in the performance context of the symposium. She argues that because the character of both individual and social identity in the Greek archaic period was fluid by nature (as it is now), the poets were engaged in an act of constant negotiation with their audiences. All three poets, and their listeners, were immersed in the turbulent sociopolitical upheavals that characterized life during the archaic period. Romney argues that to navigate this they adopted persuasive strategies such as identifying a threat posed by an “out-group,” adding urgency to the call to form an “in-group” with the poet. The chapter on Tyrtaeus focuses on his hortatory addresses to an audience of soldiers in a Spartan phalanx. But in a message geared to ensuring martial identity he was faced with a contradiction arising from an evolving ideological landscape: he needed to acknowledge the Iliadic construction of arete based upon beauty, noble birth, and wealth, but also recognize the makeup of the phalanx, which included non-elites. In poem 11 W (60–65) Romney isolates some techniques Tyrtaeus employed for this purpose, such as using second-person plural commands together with indefinite third-person singular imperatives (following tiw). This would allow him, she argues, to address a range of individuals as well as the group. In her contention that identifying an “out-group” was essential to constructing the desired social identity, Romney could add another 5 One thinks of the Achaean wall (obliterated in Il. 12), the race marker that may have been a grave (Il. 23), and the ambiguous identity of the Hill of the Thicket and the tomb of dancing Myrina (Il. 2). 322 PHOENIX instance from this text, where Tyrtaeus contrasts brave fighters with cowards (vv. 14–18), characterizing the latter as outliers who suffer shame and a succession of evils and present a clear warning to his audience to adhere to his ideal of martial identity. The question of the audience and the performance setting is crucial in trying to identify a poet’s technique, admittedly not an easy task in the archaic period, for which evidence is limited. Romney assumes a symposium or a syssition in Spartan barracks as the principal performance venue for the songs of Tyrtaeus. His exhortations would have a direct impact in a small setting. But, given the duration of the Messenian threat to the Spartans, might he not also have had in mind reperformances in other settings, public as well as private? If so, he certainly succeeded: Athenaeus described Spartans marching in

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