Aristotle as Poet: The Song for Hermias and Its Contexts by Andrew Ford (review)

That Aristotle was himself a poet is a fact that many classicists ignore. That enough of his poetry survives to allow for close reading and detailed study would come as even more of a surprise to most readers of the Poetics. Five fragments have come down to us, three of them in elegiac meter, one in hexameter, and another in dactylo-epitrite. In Aristotle as Poet, Andrew Ford sets out to analyze the significance of this output. The book, as the subtitle clearly indicates, is focused on the investigation of one particular poem, the most extensive piece of the fragmentary record, but it never loses track of the big picture—where the poem fits in the environment that produced it. Refining the analytical tools used in his earlier scholarship, notably the 2002 The Origins of Criticism, Ford sets out to show how contexts can illuminate the poem, and how the text in turn can illuminate the contemporary poetic culture.

The volume has nine chapters. The first looks at the text and questions of translation, while the second revisits the historical contexts and what we know of the political career of Hermias. The third chapter, one of the most interesting, confronts an epigram of Aristotle with other poems, notably from Simonides and Theocritus of Chios, while the fourth looks at the possible performance contexts of the Song for Hermias, with further close analysis of parallel contemporary texts. The fifth chapter is concerned with the questions of genre raised by the poem’s problematic form, and the sixth chapter with the varieties of literary hymns against which it should be assessed. Chapter 7 examines the issues of ethos, rhetoric, and persona raised by Aristotle’s verses. Chapter 8 looks more closely at the language of the poem, with some detailed discussion of individual words in context, and chapter 9 conceived as a form of epilogue to the book, traces the receptions of the text.

Aristotle as Poet is designed as a progression from the general to the particular, with the argument moving from the broad contextual issues of the first chapters to the close readings found in chapters 7 and 8. The main thrust of the project is to show how a multiplicity of angles can be combined to shed light on the poem and its world. The book could be described as a celebration of inclusive philology. Different methodologies are associated and made to fit with each other rather than opposed, and the discussion moves seamlessly from one approach to another, showing how each one can illuminate the others. Considerations of style are relevant to the political context, formal issues of genre are intertwined with ritual, and the philosophical aesthetics of Aristotle are put in dialogue with the ideology of guest-friendship and the poetics of praise deployed in the Song for Hermias. This multiplicity of perspectives allows Ford to build an integrated view into the many parallel facets of the poem, and ultimately to use it as a model for the inclusive methodology he champions in the book. The controlled eclecticism of Aristotle as Poet is designed as a demonstration of the power of exhaustive complementarity, where every hint of information is viewed on its own terms, pressed for maximum yield, and made to connect with the other seemingly unrelated bits of the dossier. The judgment of the author in assessing the various parts of the puzzle is measured and judicious, always trying to set the various possible scenarios side by side, but it doesn’t shy away from clear interpretive decisions and the ultimate aim of making the text as interesting as it can be. The extensive discussion on the reperformance scenarios of the Song for Hermias and other texts, the exploration of the notion of virtue and the poetic ethos of later classical lyric, and the investigation of semantic ambiguity in the twenty-one lines of the poem are...