Herodas: Mimiambs. Aris & Phillips Classical Texts (review)

In his two earlier books, Realism in Alexandrian Poetry and Modes of Viewing in Hellenistic Poetry and Art, Graham Zanker explored the Hellenistic fascination with mimesis in its literature and visual arts. Here he focuses on the Mimiambi of Herodas in the form of a very welcome commentary. It is the first commentary on Herodas pitched to both students of classics and those who cannot read Greek and have no previous knowledge of classical literature, following the commendable guidelines of the Aris & Phillips Classical Texts series as a whole. Zanker makes a strong argument for using Herodas not only in undergraduate and graduate Greek classes, but also in courses on such topics as the history of comedy and gender.

The twelve-page introduction covers a great deal of ground: the history of the discovery of the Mimiambi in 1891; the probable dating of Herodas to the first third of the third century b.c.; the typical Hellenistic experimentation with meter and dialect and mimesis and artifice; the quasi-dramatic nature of the Mimiambi; and the more technical aspects of Herodas’ meter and dialect. Zanker also gives a fine overview of the choliambic meter and a very clear summary of the “literary” sixth-century Ionic dialect Herodas utilizes. The discussion of the papyrus’ dialectical inconsistencies is particularly useful. Zanker explains his decision to regularize aspiration in place of psilosis, as most modern editors other than Cunningham have done. Since Cunningham is the editor of the Oxford commentary, the Teubner, and the Loeb, Zanker’s is now one of the most accessible editions that can be cited with the aspirates intact.

For each mimiamb Zanker presents the text and facing translation, followed by a commentary and interpretive essay. Zanker prints a text that has been influenced, as he says in his acknowledgements, by the editions of Di Gregorio and Cunningham. Zanker aims at readability and avoids when he can cluttering the page with sigla and apparatus. Therefore, those who are interested in the actual state of the papyrus and the history of conjectures and emendations will need to consult Cunningham or Di Gregorio. The translation is accurate and contemporary-sounding, without attempting to be overly idiomatic. The commentary itself is a happy medium between Cunningham’s Oxford commentary, which is quite abbreviated in terms of exegesis, and Di Gregorio’s Italian commentary, which is extremely thorough on scholarship but often too dense for the casual reader. Indeed, Zanker’s commentary now makes it possible to recommend wholeheartedly teaching Herodas at the intermediate undergraduate level.

One of the most appealing aspects of this edition is Zanker’s inclusion of a “Discussion” section after the commentary on each mimiamb. My only regret is that these sections do not contain a “Further Readings” bibliography for those readers who want to pursue Zanker’s lines of inquiry. The essays instruct most notably on Herodas’ technique of characterization.

Zanker’s discussion of Mimiamb 4 is one of the standouts of this edition. This discussion is complementary to Zanker’s important article, “Poetry and Art in Herodas, Mimiamb 4” in Harder, Regtuit, Wakker (eds.), Beyond the Canon (Leuven 2006) 357–78. In this mimiamb two women visit a temple of Asclepius and comment on all of the beautiful and realistic art there. Zanker revives an earlier theory that the temple is specifically the Koan Asclepion. He argues that Herodas’ audience is asked to supplement in their mind’s eye the details of the path the characters take through the temple and the individual groupings of statues they observe. Zanker links Herodas’ strategy here to viewer-inclusion techniques in Hellenistic art. While Herodas’ unsophisticated characters certainly provoke laughter as they attempt sophisticated evaluations of art, they also at the same time enact Herodas’ literary program.

Too often the Mimiambi are relegated to the care of specialists. The major appeal of Zanker’s edition is that it presents the fruits of the labor...