Constructions of Childhood in Ancient Greece and Italy ("Hesperia" Supplement 41) by Ada Cohen, Jeremy B. Rutter

424 PHOENIX alphabetical dictionary of common nouns. Here Henderson's translation technique is at its weakest. Why is the title of Book 10, de vocabulis, rendered as "on epithets" (rather than simply "on words")? Does the mimetic technique in rendering homo ab humo as "man from manure" (for, e.g., "human from humus") serve to enlighten or mislead? After thisalphabetic interludethegrand scheme is shown to be resumed inBooks 11 to 17 with the discussion of themes arranged under the over-arching topic of nature, taking us from man and monsters, through the world and the earth, via the trappings of civilization, to rocks, metals, agriculture, and botany. In Book 18 the rural peace is shaken by theintroduction of war,which leads inthefinaltwobooks to whatHenderson identifies as themain "lifeways"(199) that make urban civilizationpossible: ships,clothing,food, dining, transport, tools, and harnesses. The book endswith a conclusion (210) showinghow thecurriculum mapped out inthe Etymologiae was to form the basis of the early medieval educational focus on the creation of truthfrom words. A finalappendix (212) containsa useful account of the careerof the firstmodern editor of the Etymologiae} Wr. M. Lindsay, together with a summary of earlier scholarship on Isidore. The great achievementof thisbook is toprovide themodern reader with a clear and meaningful path through what can appear to be a haphazard mass of material. It offers a convincing explanation of the work's structure in terms of the world view of Isidore and his contemporaries. It has little to say on the question of sources or on what we know of Isidore's technique of composition. In fact, Isidore seems to be working from slips, like card indices, inserting information from his reading with little change to the language of the original. Places where no etymology had yet been found in the sources may have been leftwith simply an unexplained head-word. Henderson's translation of etymologies, never an easytask,isoftenilluminating despite theoccasional lapse. His languageis imaginative and exuberant, perhaps in places obscure, but for those who persevere the book provides an inspiring introduction to amuch underestimated classic. University of Leeds Robert Maltby Constructions of Childhood inAncient Greece and Italy. Edited byAda Cohen and Jeremy B. Rutter. Princeton: American School of Classical Studies atAthens {HesperiaSupplement41). 2007. Pp. xxv,429,178 ills.,8 tables. In recent years, children's history has attracted a great deal of inter-disciplinary attention,revitalizing the subjectto suchan extentthatitfinallyseemspoised tobecome a field in its own right. The collection under review reveals just how dynamic research on thesubject has become.This handsomevolume istheproductofa 2003 conference hosted byDartmouthCollege, andheld inconjunction with the Hood Museum's exhibit, Coming of Age in AncientGreece:Images ofChildhood from theClassicalPast. Like the exhibit's catalogue, which contains topical articles by specialists and non-specialists, Constructions of Childhoodhelps to shedmore lighton culturalattitudestowardchildren,especiallythose of the Bronze Age Aegean and classical Greece. There is a satisfying mix of articles driven by conventional and unusual approaches to the primary evidence, and contributors engage with old and new methodological problems, offering a balance between quantitative and 1W.M. Lindsay (ed.), Isidori Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum LibriXX (Oxford 1911). BOOKREVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 425 exploratory analyses. The chronological range of the twenty contributions is daunting, but the editors attempt to give their two-millennia span some coherence by employing "a set of social or experiential themes that link children of the ancient Mediterranean across time and space? (xix): families, socialization and enculturation, rituals and life transitions, gender and representation, burial, commemoration, and childhood and the classical tradition. The articles reflect generally some of the ongoing theoretical challenges of the subject (e.g., the struggleto formulatea precisedefinitionof childhood), but demonstrateabove all that intellectual energiesarebeing channeled intothe writingof children's historyinfreshand inventive ways. What ismost stimulating about this collection is the sheer predominance of articles that treat material culture. Most are devoted to practical investigations of iconography and mortuary remains, forms of evidence that have been seriously under-utilized in writing the historyof ancient childhood. Anne Chapin, for instance, studiesdepictions of boys inTheran frescoes as a way of learning more about social constructions of gender in one pre-historic society. With great effect, she employs modern studies of human physiologicaldevelopmentto identify consciouslyrenderedage distinctions...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.