Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose (review)

Leslie Kurke's study of Aesopic traditions is a masterpiece. For a work that may well emerge as one of the great achievements of classical scholarship in our era, it is fitting that she has chosen a marginal, non-canonical figure in order to trace a "voiceprint" (15) across a vast swath of ancient culture. Even though the combination of vision and voice in these pages may be too personal to provide a simple template for others to follow, I nevertheless hope that everyone who reads this book will take up the implicit challenge of crafting engaged scholarship that harnesses the strengths of classical Altertumswissenschaft to a broader agenda of literary, social, and cultural commentary. The "almost unique and mysterious status" (6) of some of Kurke's most important evidence casts Aesopic Conversations (rather like Aesop himself) as something of a rogue wave rather than a turning of the tide, yet I am optimistic that Aesop's unusual place in classical culture will not prevent others from emulating Kurke's example of rethinking how we can speak both about antiquity and to our modern audiences.

In the introduction, Kurke shows what is different about both her subject and her book. The bulk of our information about Aesop emerges from a combination of three sources: references to Aesop by canonical authors, such as Aristophanes and Herodotus; the written Lives, especially the fullest version regularly known as Vita G; and ongoing oral and popular traditions about Aesop that lurk behind and inform the literary evidence. The triangulation of these three types of evidence represents the critical breakthrough that allows Kurke to construct the majority of her most powerful arguments. As she explains, even though a text like Vita G has something of the feel of a popular story, various factors virtually ensure that its author was a member of the educated elite. But the early (i.e., fifth-century) references to Aesop, which closely parallel certain details in the later Lives (e.g., Aesop's death at Delphi), confirm the existence of a long-standing sub-literary, oral, and popular tradition of stories about Aesop. Thus, Vita G is something like the periscope of a submarine that extends above the surface of the water. We can scrutinize it on its own, but we also need to recognize that it attests to a larger and mobile reality of popular tradition beneath the surface that we can access only indirectly.

As such, Vita G represents an odd example of a high literary text that emerges from and elaborates on popular traditions. The recognition of Vita G as a point of intersection between these two worlds provides the starting point for everything that follows. In arriving at this perspective on the braided strands of Aesopic tradition, Kurke engages with a colorful palette of theoretical models. I mention this less for her eclectic approach itself and more because she herself emphasizes how her subject matter provides a model for her book. Aesop constantly demands that we defamiliarize our world: Do not assume that ugly means dumb; do not assume that philosophers have all the answers; do not assume that the Delphic priests (or even Apollo himself!) facilitate an equitable access to the oracle out of some high-minded idealism or piety. So, too, we need to understand that popular culture likely marched to its own drummer (part 1) and that the birth of prose writing, especially hybrid generic experiments such as Herodotus' Histories and Platonic literature, involved daring risks (part 2). And if it is wrong-headed of us to think of prose as obvious and unsurprising, because history-after-Herodotus and philosophy-after-Plato have always been in prose, then we should also realize that our modern disciplinary divisions (based in large part, of course, on administrative departmentalizations like "History" and "Philosophy") can also get in our way. Thus...