Frontiers of Pleasure: Models of Aesthetic Response in Archaic and Classical Greek Thought by Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi (review)
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This short but concentrated book is a welcome addition to a series of recent attempts to reclaim aesthetics as a legitimate subject of inquiry in the understanding of Greek culture. For much of the twentieth century, it was academic orthodoxy that aesthetics was not an ancient category of thought or sensibility, but an invention of the eighteenth century. That doctrinaire stance has now been challenged from various angles. Following hard on the heels of James Porter’s The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece (2010) and the collection of papers on Aesthetic Value in Classical Antiquity edited by Sluiter and Rosen (2012), Peponi’s book addresses the “conceptualization of aesthetic pleasure in the realm of mousikê,” above all in psychosomatic responses to aurally experienced beauty. (A companion volume is promised on the aesthetics of dance.)
Chapter 1 stresses that archaic and classical Greek reflections on poetico-musical beauty differ from the dominant modern model of aesthetic experience as “disengaged” or “disinterested”;mousikê intersects with and contributes to life values. But Peponi is concerned to show that Greek responses to beauty [End Page 410] span a spectrum from entranced “tranquility” to erotically charged attraction. Chapter 2 brings together evidence for rapt but “restful” contemplation of beauty from Homer (κηληθμός), Xenophon’s Symposium, Plato, and Attic vase paintings that depict sympotic figures listening to music.
Chapter 3 moves on to offer a probing account of Homeric responses to song, which display a “split” phenomenology of pleasure and pain. The primary texts here are the Phemius and Demodocus episodes in Odyssey books 1 and 8, together with Telemachus’ reactions to Menelaus’ quasi-poetic storytelling (and the effect of Helen’s drugs on the occasion) in book 4. Peponi reads Odysseus’ tears at Demodocus’ Trojan songs as those of an intensely appreciative “connoisseur”; his grief “by no means negate[s] aesthetic appreciation” (51). (Peponi’s perspective, I think, complements my own recent discussion in Between Ecstasy and Truth.) In the Platonic terms of Philebus and Republic 10.605c-d, Odysseus experiences a “mixed pleasure,” and one which, as the chapter thought-provokingly argues, suggests a complex meditation on the difference between Odysseus’ “self” in life and in song. Reading Homer both with and against Kant, Peponi advances the important thesis that there need be no incompatibility between emotion and judgment in aesthetic experience.
Chapter 4 takes the Odyssean Sirens seriously as a paradigm of one kind of musical impact on the mind. In their hybrid poetic status (somewhere between monodic and choral, and combining elements of lyric and epic), what the Sirens offer points to an “ultimate communion” between singers and audiences. Peponi pursues this thesis, which I find a little too bold (she struggles to explain why the Sirens’ music is lethal), in part by examining “intrachoral” references to the Sirens in Alcman and Pindar and by invoking comparison with the audience response to the Delian chorus at Homeric Hymn to Apollo 162–164.
The book’s last two chapters are devoted to the eroticization of aesthetic experience. Chapter 5’s central case study is Apollo’s reaction to Hermes’ citharody at Homeric Hymn to Hermes 420–462. With a close focus on the (much disputed) meaning of line 447, Peponi argues that Hermes’ music produces a quasi-erotic paralysis in Apollo, a “helplessness” which is once again a kind of “mixed” pleasure (though this time the use of Philebus involves, I feel, some contortion). Chapter 6 puts Plato himself center stage, first with an excellent reading of the personification of poetry as a hetaira at Republic 607–608, and then with a searching inquiry into the implications of the Republic’s own erotic aesthetic of μουσικω̑ς ἐρα̑ν in the argument which culminates at 3.401a–c.
This book is itself a pleasure to read. Presentation is mostly good, though the marginal line numbers on 102–103 are awry by one...
