Abstract
There is so much Companion literature around these days that one might easily pass over what gives this title its punch. After all, we have already seen a Blackwell Companion to Aesthetics, now in its second edition, and a Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, which is in its third. But Ancient Aesthetics is something different. The ancients had no term for ‘aesthetics’ as a discipline or philosophical subject, no language or concept of ‘the fine arts’ in the modern sense, and no public museums of the kind that emerged from the 17th century onward. Modern scientific study of ‘aesthetics’ originates in the German philosophical tradition and the culture of the 18th century, and in the second half of the twentieth century one influential view declared that the modern notion of art and aesthetics is essentially absent before then (following Kristeller, 1951–2).
However, the modern discourse of arts and aesthetics has always been indebted to classical antiquity, and in recent years there has been a growing interest in analysing ancient aesthetics more fully in its own right (e.g., James Porter’s Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece, reviewed in issue 125.7 of this journal in 2014). The present Companion develops this burgeoning field of study; both its conception and its execution make it a stimulating contribution.
Destrée and Murray differentiate their approach from the more widely discussed question of the philosophy of art in antiquity. Their aim is to explore the range and breadth of ancient aesthetics; they allow this to be a flexible term, but they insist that it includes both philosophical reflection on issues such as beauty, taste, and quality and issues that are tied more closely to the ‘arts’ themselves. They are particularly interested in what unites the experience of art across different media, and so the essays collected in this volume explore a range of media as well as a range of response.
The essays are arranged into three sections: Part I, ‘Art in Context’, situates poetry, music, dance, sculpture of the human body, art collections. and architecture in the cultural settings in which they were experienced in Greek and Roman antiquity. Part II, ‘Reflecting on Art,’ turns to issues that arose in engaging with art, such as the question of autonomy, poetic inspiration, canons of style, sense and sensation in music, and perception of colour. Part III, ‘Aesthetic Issues,’ engages with issues that are perceived to be significant for the relationship between ancient and modern aesthetics, including mimesis, fiction, imagination, beauty, the sublime, wonder, pleasure, morality, and value. Each of the 33 essays is concise; endnotes are few; bibliography is listed at the end of each chapter, together with helpful suggestions for further reading. At the end of the book, there are indices of both subject and ancient text.
The essays are all by renowned experts in their fields. They frequently provide cutting-edge intellectual engagement in territory that is still fresh: for example, Adeline Grand-Clément’s chapter on ‘Poikilia’ is the first general study dedicated to this important term, whose only previous extended treatment is an edited collection of essays mostly in Italian (Berardi, Lisi, and Micalella, 2009). David Konstan’s discussion of ‘Beauty’ is almost contemporaneous with his new monograph on the subject (OUP, 2014). Pierre Destrée’s account of ‘Pleasure’ in aesthetics opens up an aspect of philosophical pleasure that has never been addressed in a monograph on antiquity as a whole.
The concept of the volume is thus in many ways broad and innovative. It would be as undesirable as it is impossible for a volume of this nature to seek to include chapters on every aspect of the topic. The book helps to define a field of study and to suggest some of the issues that are most significant in it, both in their ancient setting and in their relationship to modernity. It structures an approach to this multifaceted topic, without any pretence of being more than a model of how to begin. The many insightful thought-pieces will be valuable in exploring aesthetics, ancient and modern, for years to come.
Some limitations are worth noting briefly. In this volume, ‘ancient aesthetics’ means ‘Greek and Roman aesthetics’; there is nothing on the aesthetics of other ancient Mediterranean cultural and religious groups. Nor is there any separate reflection on theological or political aesthetics as such, even though relevant issues arise in several individual chapters, such as those on anthropomorphic statues, poetic autonomy and inspiration, the sublime, values, and morality. In my view, these omissions would have been worth at least a comment in the introduction, since they are important in cultivating the conversation between ancient and modern aesthetics, as well as in the commonality across the different arts.