Review

Author(s): Charles Rowan Beye

Review by: Charles Rowan Beye
Source: The Classical World, Vol. 81, No. 4 (Mar. - Apr., 1988), pp. 332-333
Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Classical Association of the
Atlantic States
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4350222
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332 CLASSICALWORLD
Our manuscripts represent, then, a corrupt form of the final Alexandrian
revision.
Wolf concludes that Homer presents a unique insoluble problem for
editors; the true form of the Iliad and Odyssey is unrecoverable. A modern
editor cannot restore Homer's poetry, only the Alexandrian vulgate of the
3rd or 2nd century B.C.
Wolf never published a text of the Iliad or wrote the second part of his
Prolegomena. But the impact of the work on classical scholarship was great.
The first methodical attempt to write a critical history of a classical text, it
made the Homeric Question a central problem of classical studies. Scholars
spent a century and a half looking for the epic seams where the original lays
had been stitched together. Wolf changed the way scholars see ancient texts.
The English translation of Wolf is, therefore, very welcome, a useful book
for the modern Homerist and philologist.
The editors introduce their translation with an essay on Wolf and his
times, setting the historical context, and with a long note on the Latin text
and the present translation. The rendering itself is careful and rather literal.
Within the text the authors have corrected, completed, and updated Wolf's
references, and appended helpful footnotes of their own. The translation is
followed by the bits of Wolf's unfinished continuation; selections from
Eichhorn's Einleitung ins Alte Testament, Wolf's model for his own work;
Wolf's correspondence with C. G. Heyne, his teacher at the University of
Gottingen, showing the genesis of Wolf's work and how his thought diverges
from his mentor's; bibliographical essays; and indices. No reader could ask
more of these generous authors.

Indiana University, Bloomington WILLIAM F. HANSEN

CW 81.4 (1988)

Eric A. Havelock. The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and

Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1986. Pp. ix, 144. $16.00. ISBN 0-3000-3741-1.
Havelock attempts to present a coherent statement of his belief in the
pervasive orality of ancient Greek culture to the time of Plato, whose use of
the written word represents a major psychological and cultural transforma-
tion. Havelock's numerous books and articles written over a long life as well
as the findings of cultural anthropologists and linguists support this text.
Classicists will welcome what Havelock has brought together (including a
good bibliography) as much as the many questions about ancient Greek
orality which he poses page after page. It is a thoughtful book which offers
tentative answers to very complex questions, answers that will need the
concentrated researches now of Havelock's epigonoi.
Havelock insists that the major fifth century Athenian authors demonstrate
orality, an idea that needs to be tested rigorously by a computer's application
of a compelling definition of orality to their texts. Theories of Homeric
orality do not necessarily translate to, say, Aeschylus or Sophocles. Havelock
also argues for a progressive tilt toward abstract thinking in the fifth century
based on the increasing visualization of language, something only possible for
people who write. But the extreme clumsiness of writing materials argues
against much use of written texts for a very long time, certainly against the
kind of panoramic reading we associate with the intellectual apprehension of
a text.

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 REVIEWS 333

Havelock's assumptions are ever provocative, perhaps none more so than

the Darwinian notion that it was the Greek invention of the alphabet which
was the sudden intervention responsible for a mutation of the human species
into rationalists. The book should find a wide following since it is addressed
to a present day audience who has witnessed the transformation of a culture
solely dependent upon the written word to one yielding to an orality based on
radio and television.

Lehman College and the CHARLES ROWAN BEYE

Graduate Center-CUNY
CW 80.4 (1988)

John J. Winkler. Auctor & Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius's

'The Golden Ass.' Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Pp. xiii,
340. $42.50. ISBN 0-5200-5240-4.

Foremost among the felicities of Auctor & Actor must be its resemblance
to its subject. Winkler first establishes that The Golden Ass poses and
embodies the problem of ascertainability, and then develops this in two
major sections, illustrating his points with close readings of several tales
(most brilliantly Thelyphron's) and galvanizing them with comparisons to
detective fiction. At the center of the book, he turns the reader back on
herself and compels a re-reading of the first half, much as he suggests The
Golden Ass operates in forcing the reader back from Book 11 to re-read the
whole novel and make his own conclusions about experience and knowledge.
The book is addressed to three audiences: literary theorists, classicists,
historians of religion. Winkler adopts the tools of contemporary theorists to
good effect, depending mostly on Genette, Todorov, and Fish to trace the
reader's experience. But he tickles the senses as well as the cerebrum,
providing a tour through the back alleys of imperial literature-apocrypha,
Greek guidebooks, ancient alchemy, handbooks of medical magic, the ribald
"folk-book" Life of Aesop, public rituals of Isis, Egyptomaniacal monu-
ments-which puts The Golden Ass firmly into its cultural context. Into the
bargain we get: mime antecedents of The Golden Ass; the relation between
Lucius and the Scholasticus of Philogelos; a full critique of types of
interpretation of The Golden Ass; and discussion of the mechanics of
parody. The author well conveys his sense of delight in the romances and
paradoxographies he adduces, while manifesting a prodigious scholarship.
He has, like Apuleius, left it to the reader to complete some connections he
implies. And I would like to discuss with him some of the paradoxes of his
stance, e.g., if lack of intelligibility from the text invalidates previous
interpretations of The Golden Ass, how can the interpretation proposed here
be "correct"? Apuleius would have outsmarted himself in making a game of
which almost everyone has missed the point.
This sophisticated, imaginative, erudite work belongs on the shelf of every
classicist interested in literary theory, popular culture, satire, or religion. The
author's suggestion that The Golden Ass is a large koan works as he makes
me imagine it would: it compels me back to the text and texts.

Lehigh University AMY RICHLIN

CW 81.4 (1988)

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