No Laughing Matter: Studies in Athenian Comedy by C. W. Marshall and G. Kovacs

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

396 PHOENIX figure” (41) created for the “Memnonis” (itself an imagined segment of the Aithiopis)? In fact, while never denying the possibility of intertextuality within any tradition, the safer course with multiform material is to presume independent deployment of motifs taken from a common store. Even if the Cypria at some point in its crystallization was tailored to “fit” the Iliad, this does not entail that it was from the beginning designed as “a truly Cyclic undertaking” (West’s shorthand for later gap-stopping poems). He conveniently slices Proclan summaries into sequential plot-points, interleaving these with verse fragments, on which West displays his usual expertise in finding parallels, providing both basic and arcane data about content (e.g., the pain of laceration by stingray , 308) and identifying “untraditional” phrasing. The urge to reconstruct detailed narrative inspires vivid passages of his own creation (e.g., 74), including some fresh hexameter compositions (fourteen whole lines at 210) exhibiting his talent as a Cyclic poet. Setting aside its sometimes questionable larger claims, this is a richly erudite, stimulating, and dependable resource that delineates for the next generation the basics for exegesis. The pronounced tilt toward nineteenth-century Germans in the parsimonious bibliography is more justified in this book than in West’s 2011 “disquisition” (The Making of the Iliad [Oxford]) as Welcker, Nitzsch, and Düntzer are indeed still worth reading. On the other hand, his general lack of interest in rhapsodic procedure (with the exception of a paragraph on 40) keeps West from asking how the Cycle evolved in performance: Jonathan Burgess’s essential volume The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle (Baltimore 2001) is cited, but not his later work that raises precisely this issue (e.g., “Performance and the Epic Cycle,” CJ 100 [2004] 1–23). West is too ready, moreover, to dismiss the story of a contest between Leskhes and Arktinos (Phanias fr. 33 Wehrli) without exploring the role of mousikoi agones in corpus fixation. A commentary along the lines of Adrian Kelly’s (A Referential Commentary and Lexicon to Homer, Iliad VIII [Oxford 2007]) would more helpfully have traced the cumulative poetic force of formulaic phraseology, and attention to what ethno-poetics can reveal concerning processes of canonization would have produced a more convincing basis for his views overall. But expanding the horizon would demand a very different book and scholar, forcing one to deviate from true West. Stanford University Richard P. Martin No Laughing Matter: Studies in Athenian Comedy. Edited by C. W. Marshall and G. Kovacs. London: Bristol Classical Press. 2012. Pp. xiv, 208. The fourteen essays in this collection have been assembled as a retirement gift for Ian Storey, the eminent scholar of fifth-century comedy. As usual with collections of this nature , there is an uneven and miscellaneous character to the book’s contents. These essays vary widely in subject-matter and approach: some of them are of considerable interest and significance, while others are of distinctly minor importance, resembling offcuts or shavings from the workbench (to employ a suitably Aristophanic metaphor). Nevertheless , it may be that this very heterogeneity is thematically significant, because if there can be said to be any overarching plan or thesis to the volume, it is perhaps that the genre of Athenian comedy itself was inherently heterogeneous and hard to pin down. Most of the contributors (implicitly or explicitly) highlight the ways in which our conception BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 397 of komoidia could be expanded, enriched, or clarified by more careful consideration of all the types of evidence available to us, including, above all, the evidence of fragments (an area in which the honorand has made enormous contributions to knowledge). In addition, a number of the more interesting essays venture to question traditional scholarly views of the comic genre, including (inter alia) the extent to which Aristophanes can be seen as extraordinary, the ways in which comedy changed, evolved, or remained the same after 405 b.c., and the problematic periodization of so-called “old,” “middle,” and “new” comedy (a set of labels which is increasingly coming to seem meaningless or even misleading). Jeffrey Henderson (1–12) opens the collection with a...