Poetry and Number in Graeco-Roman Antiquity by Max Leventhal (review)

Reviewed by: Poetry and Number in Graeco-Roman Antiquity by Max Leventhal Serafina Cuomo Poetry and Number in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. By Max Leventhal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2022. Pp. xii, 231. This book is an exploration of the presence of numbers—more specifically, of counting and arithmetic—in Greek and Latin poetry. Not only does it document such a presence, thus demonstrating that ancient literary culture did not operate in isolation from the numerical (20), but also it examines what numbers do as poetic expression. The most obvious counterpart to Leventhal's book is Reviel Netz's Ludic Proof: Greek Mathematics and the Alexandrian Aesthetic (Cambridge 2009), except that Leventhal's analysis travels in the opposite direction from Netz's: not to argue that mathematics sometimes worked like poetry, but that numbers have a key place in the development of poetic culture since its formation (8). Indeed, one of the texts recurrently cited and discussed is a passage from the second book of the Iliad which articulates, simultaneously, both the impossibility of the poet's enumerating of the whole Achaean army and the limits of the poet's capacities to capture and describe the world (3). Leventhal has produced a book which is both a literary study, relying heavily on inter-textuality, and a cognitive one. The chapters are devoted to different case studies, from Callimachus to late antiquity. Leventhal explains that the chapters can stand on their own, but that overall they support the general claim. In fact, the chapters are connected by links of intertextuality and [End Page 181] ancient reception of the earlier texts, providing important evidence about how the uses of counting and calculation were understood within the practice of literary production and what the expectations were of the reader's numerate abilities as they changed through the centuries. Chapter One has Callimachus at the centre, but goes all the way back to Aristophanes' Frogs in order to present different perspectives on the application of arithmetic to poetry or, to put it otherwise, the possibility or desirability of quantifying poetic production. More specifically, both the passage in Aristophanes and (later) Callimachus engage with the issue of how many lines a poet ought to produce, and whether number (of lines) is preferable to weight (of the poetry in those lines). In Frogs the abundance of Euripides' verse is contrasted to the heft of the more sparse Aeschylean production. The question is further contested in the Hellenistic period; in "Reply to the Telchines," which is part of his Aetia, Callimachus indicates that number of lines ought to be unimportant, even as (Leventhal reminds us) he was himself the author of a catalogue of works in the Library at Alexandria which included a line count for poetic works. Chapter One also looks forward from Callimachus to Catullus' poems 1, 5, and 7 (and further, Martial), where the entanglement of quantity and quality, number and poetry, is further developed and, as Leventhal argues, made to express both literary criticism and views about the relationship between poetry and reality. Chapter Two moves from well-known authors like Callimachus and Catullus to Leonides of Alexandria, a contemporary of Nero's, and author of isopsephic epigrams. Isopsephy made use of the fact that, at this point in time, Greek numerals were written using letters of the Greek alphabet, with extra signs added for some numbers—hence, the alphabetical numerical notation system. The double use of signs for letters and numbers allowed for sophisticated number and letter games, in which a certain number could be resolved as words and, above all, vice versa: words could be transformed into their numeric equivalents by either transposing them directly or by adding them up. Leventhal demonstrates that Leonides, an Egyptian who dedicated several of his poems to the emperor and his wife, tried deliberately to create an intertextual connection with Callimachus, while attempting to revive a strong connection between arithmetic and poetic criticism, which would have shone an even brighter light on his abilities to forge both verse and calculation. This combination is manifested to an extreme in Archimedes' Cattle Problem, the focus of Chapter Three and a...

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