Mimetic Contagion

384 PHOENIX omission from epistles of details that were presumably conveyed by word of mouth as well as, ironically, epistolary reports of an active rumour mill amongst early Christians. And yet I am unconvinced. Oral networks are a given in every society at all periods, and their existence does not detract from the import or impact of the epistolary medium, which remains a distinct and distinctly employed form of communication. We learn no more about letters and Christian communities from Chapter Twelve, in which Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr considers the Letter of James from a variety of theoretical perspectives which obfuscate rather than elucidate. I found it impossible to decipher this piece’s conclusion. Letters and Communities ends on a high note with its envoi, Catharine Edwards’s brilliant chapter on Seneca’s letters (Chapter Thirteen). Seneca, the author contends, views the epistolary medium as a superior mode of philosophical instruction given its built-in element of absence. For Stoic doctrine holds physical distance in any relationship to be productive, cultivating cogitatio and so furthering intellectual development. Absence, that is, is desirable for self-improvement. But this edification via letter is not confined to author and addressee. Edwards argues that Seneca envisions the act of reading philosophical texts as analogous to epistolary exchange on the model of his own correspondence with Lucilius: we can learn from philosophers of the past not in spite of but because of their distance from us. In sum, this volume is an important contribution that should be read by anyone interested in ancient epistolography. Its focus on a previously uninvestigated aspect of correspondence will, I think, precipitate new work on letters and communities. New York University Emilia A. Barbiero Mimetic Contagion: Art and Artifice in Terence's EUNUCH. By Robert Germany . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press (Oxford Studies in Ancient Culture and Representation). 2016. Pp. xii, 198, 2 ills. The starting and endpoint of Robert Germany’s book is the painted representation of the Jupiter and Danaë myth (Ter. Eun. 583–591) described by Chaerea as he excitedly recounts his offstage rape of Pamphila to his fellow ephebe Antipho. But the primary focus of this study “of spiraling recurrence” (10), a revised version of the author’s 2008 University of Chicago dissertation, is the notion of “mimetic contagion,” a term modelled on Whitmarsh’s “ekphrastic contagion” (66) that channels ancient art’s agency in influencing and infecting its viewers’ ethical choices. Over the meandering course of a rich exploration of ancient aesthetics, visual culture, and especially mimesis, readers repeatedly return to this brief Terentian ekphrasis from a variety of interpretative viewpoints. Germany’s perspicacious study has much to offer to scholars in these broader fields as well as to those more sharply focused on Roman comedy and on Terence’s infamous and idiosyncratic rape narrative. The opening chapter “investigate[s] what the painting does” (6; Germany’s italics), highlighting ancient receptions by Donatus and Augustine to argue that the rape is unpremeditated while promoting the painting’s agency in Chaerea’s act (and the rape’s inevitability , as Chaerea himself might view it). Not all will be convinced that Chaerea’s repeated use of potior (lines 320, 362; cf. 614, where it seems unlikely that porro signifies “a long-term love affair,” 39) does not suggest the contrary. Chapter Two assembles a fascinating array of evidence, especially from popular culture (e.g., defixiones, gorgoneia, BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 385 oscilla), for the ubiquitously transfixing power of images in the Greco-Roman world, including (apropos of Eunuchus) erotic frescoes in brothels. The immediately following chapter by contrast explores mostly familiar philosophical material (Platonic and Hellenistic discourse on images) related to mimesis, to establish a conceptual foundation for art’s capacity to leak outside its frame and infect or even replace the real world. “Mimetic Contagion in Terence’s Rome” (Chapter Four) redirects our focus to the lived experience of theatergoers in the second century b.c.e. by analyzing the dynamic, public spectacle of aristocratic funerals (“The old dead may be spectators of the new dead,” 96) and to later elite moralizing about the influx of images following Marcellus’ sack of Syracuse in 211 b

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• Tenuis oratio , or Terence’s “Limp” Poetics

  Tom Lister, Sebastian Hyams•Classical Philology•2026

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