Sophist Kings

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 183 are the people on whom this book should have its greatest effect. For while prehistorians have no literary texts contemporary with the material traces of the past which they seek to understand, we classical archaeologists are dealing with objects contemporary with the very texts Bassi analyses. In turning early iron age and classical “material culture” (Bassi at 191 and n. 13 is good on the problems of the term) into text, classical archaeologists are doing what Hesiod, Homer, and Herodotus have done before them. There are two challenges here. One is the challenge to be responsive to the intellectual demands of the exercise in which classical archaeology is engaged. Bassi is able to show how, for example, Hesiod’s discussion of the sceptre given to him by the muses, of the affordances of an anvil with regard to falling through space, and of the stone swallowed by Cronos, regurgitated and placed at Delphi, engage with the problems of telling the truth about events that happened in the distant past; by contrast classical archaeology has frequently buried those problems under descriptions that circumscribe and constrain the past. The second challenge is the challenge to make use of classical texts. It is one thing for prehistorians to generate a narrative in order to give “historical value” to objects otherwise in danger of being reduced to “age value” (to use Alois Riegl’s distinction, which Bassi [107–112] helpfully deploys to illuminate Herodotus’ concern to rescue the great works of the past from fading). It is quite another to construct narratives of our own, when we have narratives offered by ancient authors. If we cannot find a place for the ancient Greek objects and events from the past in the narratives offered by surviving ancient Greek texts, and articulate exactly how our narratives revise theirs, what sort of logos about archaia is our archaeology? Bassi admirably succeeds in providing a map of the intellectual demands which “tracing the past” poses. But if the narratives provided by ancient Greek writers are to find their place in the narratives by which, whether in museums or in our monographs, we understand the material world of ancient Greece, then I suspect that we will need to work harder than Bassi does here to reduce the entry-price to those ancient narratives. University of Cambridge Robin Osborne Sophist Kings: Persians as Other in Herodotus. By Vernon L. Provencal. London: Bloomsbury. 2015. Pp. ix, 330. In SOPHIST KINGS: PERSIANS AS OTHER IN HERODOTUS, Vernon L. Provencal focuses a refining lens on the current communisopinio of Herodotus’ representations of Other in his Histories. Inspired by the likes of Simon Hornblower and Edward Said, Provencal situates his work among some of the foremost scholars of Greek historiography, including Paul Cartledge, Pericles Georges, Edith Hall, Jonathan Hall, François Hartog, and Margaret Miller, with particular attention paid to Erich Gruen’s recent contribution to the question of ambiguity in Herodotus’ “Otherizing” of Mediterranean peoples.1 Scholars disagree over the extent to which Herodotus’ “Otherizing” is either ideologically essentialist (read: proto-racist) 1 In order of mention: S. Hornblower (ed.), Greek Historiography (Oxford 1994); E. Said, Orientalism (New York 1978); P. Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others (Oxford 1993); P. Georges, Barbarian Asia and the Greek Experience (Baltimore 1994); E. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian (Oxford 1989); J. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge and New York 1997), Hellenicity (Chicago and London 2002); F. Hartog, Le miroir d’Hérodote (Paris 1980); 184 PHOENIX or essentially ideological (i.e., based upon unbiased cultural differences), with Provencal taking the latter position. Sophist Kings argues that Herodotus intentionally casts Persians as the ideological Other to the Greeks, in that the Persians, as represented in the text, organize their society around the “law of nature” (nomos phuseōs) while the Greeks adhere to the “rule of law” (nomos basileus). Provencal’s position rejects the scholarly consensus by stipulating that Herodotus engages in a dialogical relationship with his intellectual contemporaries, the sophists, attributing their teachings and methods to the Persians, thereby casting them as “Persosophists.” While maintaining the fundamental opposition of Self (Greek) and Other (Persian), Provencal’s argument

Aesthetics · Apollo · Art · Hesiod · Literature · Narrative · Poetry · Value (mathematics) · Classical Antiquity Studies · Computer Science · History · Philosophy