L h x l t d n l nt t r t r n(r vAndrew Lear

Classical World, Volume 103, Number 1, Fall 2009, pp. 120-121 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/clw.0.0145

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of this archaeological evidence, taken from the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture (located in what is now Romania and Ukraine), clearly shows contact between this culture and the Romans (e.g., the use of Roman construction practices in some buildings and the presence of Roman cultural artifacts). In Kulikowski’s view, this culture was Gothic and supports his thesis of the Roman creation of the Goths.

According to the description given in the front matter of this book, the volumes in this series are intended to summarize “the main events and key characters, the consequences of the conflict, and its reception over time,” and to evaluate “the textual and archaeological sources for the conflict” critically. This book fulfills these objectives admirably. Its summary of the conflicts between the Romans and the Goths is lucid and readable and its critical evaluation of the various sources of evidence is valuable. It is engag-ingly written and does a nice job of synthesizing received wisdom with more debatable views. The book also contains detailed glossaries of biographies and of ancient sources, several maps, and an extensive section on suggested further readings, all of which enhance its usefulness. It should also be noted that production values are high; the maps are well produced (even though three of them are necessarily spread over two pages), the volume is sturdily bound, and typos have been kept to a minimum. The book provides a handy, accessible overview of the subject matter and can therefore be recommended to students and more experienced scholars alike.

University of Texas at Austin MARC PIERCEClassical World 103.1 (2009)

Sandra Boehringer. L’homosexualité dans l’antiquité grecque et romaine. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2007. Pp. 405. €35.00 (pb.). ISBN 2-251-32663-4.

Same-sex love in classical antiquity has of course been the subject of an enormous quantity of scholarship in the last thirty years. When we say “same-sex love in antiquity,” however, we generally mean male-male love, as this was a central theme in Greek literature, culture, and art, as well as a significant one in the Roman world. There are few references to female-female love in our ancient sources, and it has consequently suffered from a relative lack of attention even in this period of intense concentration on issues of gender, sex, and sexuality. Boehringer presents the first coherent account of the evidence on this topic, from Sappho to Lucian.

The difficulties that Boehringer faced in writing this book are considerable: there is only a handful of evidence on this topic, and much of it is fragmentary. The Greek sources in particular are each so isolated historically—from the entire classical period, for instance, there are only three references in Plato—that they do not provide enough of a historical context. Boehringer, however, uses the small body of evidence as an opportunity. She gives such a thorough account of each piece’s historical and literary context—and of the other erotic discourse from its period, place, and/or genre—that she manages to derive a remarkable amount about each source’s attitudes. She even takes the risky step of interpreting the general silence of the different periods of Greek culture on this topic, arguing for instance that our Archaic sources do not regard female-female desire as part of the erotic realm. It is of course easy to dismiss a priori any argumentum ex silentio, but given that there is some slight but definite evidence for female-female erotic relations in the ancient world, Boehringer may be right to see our source’s silence as requiring interpretation; in any case, her arguments on this point (as on so many) are solid and intriguing.

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If I have a complaint about this book, it is that Boehringer never sums up her conclusions, either at the beginning of the book or the end; instead, at both ends of her book she discusses methodological questions. In the body of her book, Boehringer argues forcefully against many ideas now commonly accepted about female-female love in antiquity. By placing her sources in diachronic order, for instance, she shows that the opprobrium connected with this kind of love in Roman or Imperial authors (in particular Martial, Juvenal, and Lucian) who connect it with gender deviance appears nowhere in our Archaic, Classical, or Hellenistic Greek sources. This (along with many more complicated points) is a striking and valuable contribution to scholarship on this area and should be emphasized clearly.

As a vase scholar, I would also suggest that Boehringer might have in-cluded more vase-painting in her volume. She shows an impressive grasp of iconographical interpretation (as she does of myth studies as well), but while I believe she is correct in the interpretations that she presents—both of scenes she views as erotic and of those scenes that she does not—there are a num-ber of other scenes that she might have considered. I see strong parallels to pederastic courtship in NY 06.1021.167, and such vases as Mississippi Univ. 1972.3.72, on which women are portrayed (as, again, pederastic couples some-times are) with a cloak linking them, are highly suggestive. Both of these vases are illustrated in Nancy Rabinowitz’s “Excavating Women’s Homoeroticism in Ancient Greece: the Evidence from Attic Vase-Painting”—in N. Rabinowitz and L. Auanger (eds.), Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World (Austin 2002)—to which Boehringer refers several times.

These are, however, truly minor quibbles. Boehringer’s book is a very important addition to the study of gender and sexuality in antiquity. It is not only the first book-length study of its topic, it also addresses it with an admirable combination of scholarly caution and boldness and will I believe be the standard reference in this area for some time to come.

Wabash College ANDREW LEAR Classical World 103.1 (2009)

Tessa Rajak, Sarah Pearce, James Aitken, and Jennifer Dines (eds.). Jew-ish Perspectives on Hellenistic Rulers. Hellenistic Culture and Society, 50. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 363. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-520-25084-0.

In opposition to the consistent practice of biblical scholars to treat the Greek Bible merely as an aid in correcting its Hebrew original, the contribu-tors of this fine volume (Dines, Grabe, and van der Kooij) wholeheartedly embrace Elias Bickerman’s half-century-old call to research the Septuagint in its own right and in its Hellenistic context. Traditionally, the Hellenistic Jew-ish literature in Greek that emerged around the time of the Septuagint under the names of Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha fell in the domain of biblical scholars, and not of classicists, whose expertise was challenged because of their insufficient grounding in Semitic languages. Now, however, bringing classical and biblical studies together has become a guiding principle of the “AHRC Parkes Greek Bible in the Graeco-Roman World Project,” which in 2003 sponsored an international colloquium on “Representations of Hellenis-tic Kingship.” In this volume, the project’s editorial board collected sixteen conference papers which are not only well rooted in both Hellenistic history and Jewish literature, but also thoroughly and successfully committed to put-ting “the spotlight on both sides” (4).

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