Abusive Mouths in Classical Athens (review)

It's not as simple as "you are what you eat," but Worman argues that we can all recognize who you are by what you do with your mouth. In this richly argued and important book Worman uncovers connections between various types of oral activities (yelling, gulping, sucking, etc.) and an array of public figures (sophists, demagogues, et al.) throughout several centuries of Greek literature, from Homer to Theophrastus. Her ultimate focus is on how certain genres use low-register poetics to deploy mouth-centered invective as part of an ongoing civic debate about where particular individuals or character types fit into the workings of democratic Athens. She constructs her argument around careful literary analysis bolstered by a clear and satisfying methodological framework and a model of continuity (innovative and controversial in its own right) for an "iambic discourse" that runs through all of the texts she studies. Before discussing the details of her thesis directly, therefore, it will help to elaborate upon these two foundations of her larger arguments.

Since the publication of Ralph Rosen's study of the iambic dimensions of Old Comedy (Old Comedy and the Iambographic Tradition [Atlanta, Ga., 1988]), the exploration of iambic elements outside of iambos narrowly understood has become quite common, but what Worman suggests, most explicitly in the introduction and chapter 1, goes further than most. She posits an ongoing "iambic discourse" rooted in a consistent low-register lexicon of abuse and a focus on the degraded body as a primary battleground for invective that orators and philosophers inherited from the poets of Old Comedy and, indirectly, from the archaic iambographers themselves. For those archaic poets, "the appetitive and debased body constitutes a central common element, a body whose needs are focused around the open mouth" (44). For Worman, then, we can spot this "iambic discourse" in the gaping masks of comic characters parodying public figures in Aristophanes; in the aggressive banter and gormandizing in Euripides' Cyclops; in the sarcastic quips of the Platonic Socrates chatting with slick-tongued sophists; in the scathing backbiting between Aeschines and Demosthenes centering on the former's career as an actor and the latter's feeble voice; and in the often subtle nuances between various of Theophrastus' unsavory characters. The last sections of chapter 1 even demonstrate that matters of oral excess pervade the higher register genres of epic, epinician and tragedy. Although their tone and ethos remain more elevated than that of iambos, "these genres all contribute significant details to what the mouth, as a metonym for the appetitive body, can mean in contexts marked by verbal strife and, frequently, physical violence" (60).

This model of a long-standing, genre-crossing "iambic discourse" presents a major challenge to the status quo for the later reception of iambic poetry (although Worman's model is primarily geared toward her more political argument). Overall, I find her approach refreshing and persuasive, although I found myself bothered by two issues from either edge of her temporal range. When discussing the earliest evidence of this iambic discourse, she assumes roles of primacy for epic and dependency for iambos that seem unnecessary and, perhaps, limiting (e.g., 35, 40). As Barker and Christensen have recently argued in their discussion of the newly deciphered Telephus fragment of Archilochus, it is just as likely that the two genres exerted a reciprocal influence on one another ("Flight Club: The New Archilochus Fragment and its Resonance with Homeric Epic," MD 57 [2006]: 9–41). From the other end of the spectrum, Worman occasionally points to a variety of later literary environments where this mouth-centered iambic discourse reappears (e.g., Roman oratory), but she never addresses the boom market for nouveau iambic poetry in the Hellenistic era. While the rise of the Hellenistic kingdoms put an end to the contentious political environment at the center of her study, Worman's model of an iambic discourse would be even more compelling if it could be expanded to account for the increased interest in iambic poetics in this...