Voice and Voices in Antiquity: Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World, vol 11 ed. by Niall W. Slater (review)

This volume comprises conference proceedings from the 2014 meeting of a twenty-year series of international biennial conferences on orality and literacy in the ancient world. Several of the scholars represented here, including the editor, have contributed to previous volumes and benefitted from a number of years of working together.

The theme of this particular volume, "voice and voices," offers a particularly fruitful opportunity to explore the significance of 'voice' as it crosses the boundaries between oral and literate cultures. The voice of the bard or poet singing in oral performance, captured in writing and transformed into the narrative voice of the text in front of us, exists at the crossover between orality and literacy and offers an especially rich vein for both historical and literary analysis. Several of the papers here offer sustained reflections on the relationship between oral performance and written text, in some cases offering new readings and fresh perspectives on the relationship between the two. Claas Lattmann's reconsideration of Pindar's singing "voice," for example (123–48), in which he argues that some of the apparently autobiographical references in Pindar's Odes should be understood as referring to the performer, not the poet, will be of great interest to both classicists working on Pindar and ancient historians exploring the relationship between writer and speaker in Classical Greece.

Given this focus on texts that stand at a crossroads between oral and literate cultures, and given the origins of the conference series in a 1994 meeting, "Voice into Text: Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece," it will be no surprise to learn that the majority of the papers collected here explore either the beginnings of Greek literature and its oral origins (four papers on Homer and one on Hesiod) or texts from Classical Greece, still dominated by oral culture in many ways. Rome and the Roman world are not forgotten, however. Athena Kirk's discussion of ancient perceptions of animal voices and their relation to animal ethics, for example, explores Homer (once again) and Plutarch more or less equally (397–415). Meanwhile, Amy Koenig's discussion of depictions of voice and narrative voice in Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon (416–32) and Jay Fisher's examination of a Gaulish calendar (377–96) brings us into the imperial world of the second century CE. Joanna Kenty's discussion of Cicero's De Oratore, the only extended analysis of a piece of Latin literature (351–76), offers an interesting counterpoint to the many articles on Greek orality and literacy, exploring this text as Cicero's move from oral performance (recorded in writing) to consciously written text through a text about oral performance.

Slater notes in the Introduction (1–10) that comparative papers have always been an important part of the conference and that in recent years, the series has also expanded to cover more of the ancient world; Rome as well as Greece, but also the ancient Near East and Biblical studies (1). No papers in this volume leave Greece and Rome behind entirely, but two focus on Biblical literature alongside Greek. Raymond F. Person Jr. explores Homer, the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament (277–96; these texts are somewhat confusingly referred to as "Hellenistic sources and the Hebrew Bible," 291). Aubrey E. Buster compares the relationship between group identity and membership and written records as revealed in the Biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah and in Classical Athenian trials (297–320). The latter of these is the more effective, offering a solid basis for comparison (contemporaneous texts produced in similar contexts), and coming to an interesting conclusion concerning the contrast between the use of written records in Persian period Judah and reliance on oral evidence from other citizens in Classical Athens (316).

While some papers are of clear interest to ancient historians, this volume is very much focused on the field of Classics and Classical...