The Sea in the Greek Imagination by Marie-Claire Beaulieu

Reviewed by: The Sea in the Greek Imagination by Marie-Claire Beaulieu James Romm Marie-Claire Beaulieu. The Sea in the Greek Imagination. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. x, 267. $79.95. ISBN 978-0-8122-4765-7. My questions about the methodology of this book commenced when I first encountered its title. What Greek word or concept corresponds to English “sea”? One thinks of thalassa, pontos, and Okeanos, for starters; then there’s pelagos and hals, and periphrases like hugra keleutha. The Greeks did not always clearly delineate these categories, but does that give a modern interpreter the right to conflate them under the single rubric “sea”? Would not a more focused approach, employing a Greek rather than an English term for its rubric, have a better chance at producing convincing results? Marie-Claire Beaulieu is aware of the problem of terminology, for she begins this series of interpretive discussions by disambiguating the terms listed above. Having thus tipped her hat to philological precision, however, she proceeds to use these terms interchangeably in much of what follows, or even to blend them into more far-reaching categories like “water.” She correctly points out that the Greeks imagined all the rivers and seas of the earth as linking up to form a vast “hydrological network,” but that interconnectedness does not, in my eyes, entitle a modern scholar to collect them all into a single interpretive construct, or sometimes to separate them out by their distinguishing characteristics—salt water versus fresh, for example—but at other times merge them, according to what best suits the interpretation being advanced. Even the distinguishing characteristics of these marine entities are sometimes confused by Beaulieu. I was surprised, for example, by her assertion that “the water of Ocean is fresh” (34). No footnote attaches to this sentence and no direct evidence is cited, only the vague notion that Ocean water is “absolutely pure” so as to cleanse the constellations and divinities that are thought to bathe in it. But does such purity attach more to fresh water than to salt? It is dismaying that Beaulieu, whose central concerns (to judge by her c.v.) are with the religious and ritual significance of various kinds of water in the Greek world, did not discuss this issue more thoroughly or think it through more carefully. Beaulieu conceives of her chapters as “case studies,” presenting discrete, non-diachronic topics rather than a comprehensive survey. The central theme unifying these discussions is that of the sea as a liminal space, effecting [End Page 146] transformations and mediating between poles such as life and death, mortal and immortal. Many of Beaulieu’s ideas are fascinating to conjure with, but the reader who confronts them continually comes up against the methodological problem involved in the differences between thalassa, pontos, and Okeanos. This problem underlies Beaulieu’s book just as ubiquitously as the primeval pool of waters on which, in Thales’ cosmology, the disk of earth floated. In addition to the larger conceptual flaws, there are infelicities of style and usage throughout this volume; I gather that English is not Beaulieu’s primary language. For all of these shortcomings, Beaulieu herself bears only partial responsibility. Some blame surely adheres to the amped-up rivalry among academic presses, leading editors to snap up promising but unpolished work by junior scholars, but then devote too little effort to review, revision, copyediting, and proofing. James Romm Bard College Copyright © 2016 The Classical Association of the Atlantic States, Inc

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