A Companion to the Classical Tradition (review)

The classical tradition is an enormous cake to bake and serve up. My metaphor points to two questions: the ingredients which went into the process and the resulting confection. Craig Kallendorf, as one might expect from his previous publications, proves to be a very competent baker, though not in the master chef category. The ingredients he has assembled include some of the finest – exactly the scholars one would choose to advise on and contribute to such a volume. It is his cutting of the cake which is disappointing, to me at least. I know from experience that editing a volume of this nature is one of the hardest projects one can undertake. One’s initial conception of such a book is often modified in the light of the unavailability of particular contributors, and the final result may even lack components that were not completed in time. I have no inside knowledge of the making of this particular volume; my remarks are intended to provide a possible explanation for the inadequacies of the book to which I shall draw attention. Since some of my remarks may seem carping, I must insist at the outset that I have hugely enjoyed reading this book. I have read every single chapter in it and learned an enormous amount in doing so. I shall have this book on my desk as a valuable work to which to refer as I embark on my own projects in reception studies, and I would recommend anyone else who shares my interests to do the same. In short, I welcome this volume most warmly, and commend Craig Kallendorf for providing an invaluable tool.

It will be obvious that no single scholar is qualified to review such a book as this – that, after all, is why it is not written by a single scholar. Accordingly my aim here will be to provide a sense of the ground it covers and of the gaps in coverage. Only in a few cases do I feel qualified actually to take issue with individual scholars’ treatments of their topics. But before I get to the organization of the book, a word on the choice of terminology in the title – ‘tradition’ rather than ‘reception’. Surprisingly, Kallendorf in his brief introduction does not discuss the different implications of these two terms (or of other available terms such as ‘appropriation’ or ‘re-creation’) but leaves this topic to Charles Martindale, starting at page 297. This is because Kallendorf did not impose any particular model – ‘tradition’ versus ‘reception’ – on his contributors (as he says on p. 4). However, the issue is important enough to deserve foregrounding, and in my opinion Martindale’s essay on ‘Reception’ should have been placed early in the volume instead of just heading Part III. True, Chris Stray, another of the British pioneers in this field, devotes the first three pages of the first chapter entitled ‘Education’ to a valuable discussion of ‘tradition’, and Jan Ziolkowski starts his essay (Ch. 2) with a discussion of ‘classics’ and ‘classic’. But it would have been better to awaken readers’ awareness about their own approaches to classical antiquity before immersion in the specifics of ‘Periods’ and ‘Places’.

The book is organized into three sections, ‘Part I: Periods’, ‘Part II: Places’, and ‘Part III: Contemporary Themes’, followed by an extensive bibliography and an index which seems adequate, although I noticed the omission of Calvin (p. 283) and Syme (p. 354 n. 2), while Carolingian (e.g. p. 22) should surely appear, cross-referenced to Charlemagne. I shall shortly discuss the three sections in terms of ingredients and cake-cutting. Preceding the three sections is Kallendorf’s four-page introduction, followed by Chapter 1 – Chris Stray’s discussion of ‘Education’, which evidently did not fit into any of the three sections. Kallendorf’s introduction articulates the need for this volume and gives an overview of its contents, including the ways in which it corrects imbalances in earlier studies such as Gilbert Highet...