Myrto Hatzimichali

The presence of philosophy in Strabo’s Geography is threefold: firstly, Strabo presents geography as a philosophical discipline, which endows it with prestige and a tradition of illustrious predecessors. Secondly, there are echoes of philosophical ideas in the Geography, which are not explicitly advertised as such, and yet frequently bear traces of Stoic influence. The third aspect of philosophy’s presence in the Geography is the historical one: Strabo is an invaluable source of information on the careers of philosophers in the first century BCE, including teacher-pupil relationships, professional rivalries and events of great cultural importance. An indicative example is provided by his remarks on philosophers from Tarsus:

Xenarchus taught at Alexandria, Athens, and Rome, and his acquaintances included the geographer Strabo and the emperor Augustus. He is best known for his critique of Aristotle’s fifth element, which constitutes the material of the heavenly bodies according to the De caelo. Xenarchus targeted in particular Aristotle’s reliance on direct correspondences between simple bodies and simple motions and suggested that the ontologically privileged fire “in its natural place” could perform circular motion and was thus a plausible candidate for the material constituent of the heavens. He made further contributions in physics, psychology, and ethics, but he does not seem to have shown the same interest in the Categories as his Peripatetic contemporaries.

This chapter examines the Letter of Aristeas, a text that presents Jewish-Greek interaction in a number of arenas, including political power, pilgrimage and travel, material wealth, and everyday life, as well as literary heritage and religious/philosophical wisdom. It focuses on the last two aspects, tracing first how ideas from the Jewish religious tradition are combined with aspects of Greek philosophy and political thought in the ‘sympotic’ scenes where the Greek king receives advice from his wise visitors. It then argues that the measures taken for the preservation of the error-free accuracy of the translated Torah, which in turn secure its position in the library, reveal the same preoccupations as those of the Alexandrian textual critics. Rather than condemning textual criticism, Aristeas warns against the same corruptions that textual criticism was invented to confront.

to maintain a civil attitude. However, in developing the important question of hypocrisy, already discussed in ch. 2, the author also indicates that politeness could turn into acts of political treachery. H. discusses with great care the question of how far the search for linguistic politeness was a Ciceronian idiosyncrasy, and to what extent it was shared by his correspondents, for whom we have limited documentation. He thus adds an Appendix, containing examples of strategies of respect and affi liative strategies, taken from both Cicero’s letters and those of other characters. Overall, these examples appear to attest the existence of a pervasive, shared formal idiom. H.’s method, which consists of moving from a consideration of the single formulas of politeness, and a close engagement with every letter examined, to the external context that occasioned it, is rigorous and convincing. His way of presenting his material makes pleasant reading. In some cases, the methodological instrument chosen leads to an excessive unifi cation of certain texts whose differences should also be observed. The recapitulation of the merits of Atticus, in Att. 1.17, though formally similar to the conventional commemoration of mutual links between correspondents, is not a superfi cial element of politeness, but is part of the elaboration of a discussion between two friends, at a time when their friendship has to face up to diffi culties. The case of Mark Antony is a complicated one: he writes two letters to Cicero, that are impeccably polite, but arouse his irritation. It would appear to be overly constrictive here to evaluate politeness on the basis of the simple presence of polite conventions and the extremely delicate distinction between mutual gain and self-interested manipulation, and the need is felt to apply other criteria: in particular, the criterion of ‘appropriateness to the situation’ (as H. on p. 191 partly recognizes). Antony uses polite language whilst he is trying to curtail his correspondent’s freedom of movement and of choice: it is probably his overpoliteness with respect to the situation that leads the recipient of the letter to consider him impolite. Generally speaking, I would say that the phenomenon of friendship is excessively subsumed into the phenomenon of politeness in H.’s discussion. Undoubtedly, politeness promotes favourable attitudes, and was exploited by Roman aristocrats to create and maintain alliances. But these alliances were a thing that was already in itself qualifi ed as amicitia. And even if this was far from the concept of ideal friendship, it had its own rules of behaviour, which were not only linguistic. H. rightly recalls that at the end of his article on friendship, Brunt (1965) expresses an invitation to study the polite civilities. But in the same sentence, Brunt also invites us to study ‘the moral ideal which informed the concept of amicitia’. The two phenomena of friendship and politeness deserve to be studied not only separately, but also at their interface, taking into consideration the characteristics of each. The study of the forms of politeness, which has so far been neglected, is undoubtedly the merit of this book. In this way H. presents a signifi cant, stimulating contribution to the reconstruction of the complex social phenomenon of Roman personal alliances.