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MONUMENTAL MYTHOGRAPHY - R.L. Fowler Early Greek Mythography. Volume 1: Text and Introduction. Pp. xlviii + 459. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Cased, £155, US$225. ISBN: 978-0-19-814740-4. - R.L. Fowler Early Greek Mythography. Volume 2: Commentary. Pp. xxii + 825. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Cased, £160, US$250. ISBN: 978-0-19-814741-1.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2015

Sara Chiarini
Sara Chiarini*
Affiliation:
Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg
*
[email protected]
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Type
Reviews
Information
The Classical Review , Volume 65 , Issue 2 , October 2015 , pp. 335 - 338
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Copyright © The Classical Association 2015 

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References

1 D. Felton labels vol. 1 a collection of writers of ‘myth as history’ (BMCR 2002.06.02). A. Bernabé talks of ‘a thematic anthology’ (Gnomon 75.8 [2003], 728).

2 M. Giangiulio, ‘Ippi di Regio, la Suda e l'erudizione pinacografica antica (FGrHist 554 T 1 = Suda, ι591 Adler)’, in S. Alessandri (ed.), Ἱστορίη: studi offerti dagli allievi a Giuseppe Nenci in occasione del suo settantesimo compleanno (1994), pp. 225–43.

3 There is no risk of the mythological commentary being criticised by any sensible reader, whereas there is a feeling of unease, which also emerges from the reviews to volume 1, regarding the alphabetical arrangement in the edition of the fragments. Would not a tentative chronological arrangement have better matched the asserted aim of showing the evolution of the genre, especially given F.'s criticism of Jacoby on this very issue (1: pp. xxix–xxx)?

4 The book is not geared for this task, not least because the fragments edited in volume 1 are a selection of those transmitted from the 29 authors, limited to the ones with a mythical subject. Thus, the portrayals of the mythographers cannot (and do not aim to) be complete.

5 The jarring data on these people induce F. to interpret them as the embodiment of the ancestral, pre-Greek people par excellence in the imagination of the Greeks and to reject the search for their localisation (2: pp. 84–96).

6 F. continues: ‘“Myths” were becoming “myth”, no longer organically linked with other things, but a kind of discourse in its own right’. Whatever F. intends by ‘other things’, myth still permeated many moments in the life of a fifth-century Greek citizen.

7 A. Bernabé, op. cit., 728–31; V. Liapis, CR 52.2 (2002), 236–8. Another minor objection by Bernabé concerns Chreophylus' fr. 3 (1: p. 66), which may be alternatively assigned to the homonymous epic poet from Samos. F. replies to this point and defends his attribution to the Ephesian prose writer (2: p. 232 n. 102).

8 These are taken into account within the mythological commentary which, as said, does not rely only on early mythographic sources.