Writing Authority: Elite Competition and Written Law in Early Greece

446 PHOENIX “sentimentality.” Here she mingles, to a degree not encountered in her earlier, more artifact-driven chapters, archaeological analysis with philosophical speculation. She observes that the Greeks, in common with all other pet-keeping cultures, used companion animals like cats and dogs to fill human needs for love and attachment, and one might label as “sentimentality” such practices, observable on Greek pottery remains, as portraying dogs and goats with apparent smiles on their faces or with humanlike eyebrows. Calder maintains that this bizarre practice may reflect deliberate anthropomorphization since Greek painters were otherwise “acute observers of animals” (82). Painters may have sought thereby to remove the distance between themselves and their animals and to hint at some degree of interspecies kinship. The difficulties that Calder, as an archaeologist, experiences when she addresses theoretical aspects of the human-animal encounter are particularly evident in her sixth and final chapter (99–115), which is devoted to philosophical and ethical topics, what she terms “animals in the abstract” (99). Only a few artifacts are referenced in this chapter, which takes up such thorny issues as the question of rationality in non-human species, philosophical justifications for the vegetarian lifestyle, and the complex and much-studied concept of “kinship” (oikeiosis) between human and non-human animals that was used by Greek philosophical schools to debate whether non-human animals are “like” enough to human beings to merit inclusion in the sphere of human justice.4 Highly theoretical subject matter of this sort feels out of place in a volume otherwise distinguished by its meticulous discussions of artistic remains supplemented by citation of practical-minded agricultural authorities, giving Calder’s final chapter a somewhat “tacked on” feeling. The reader will at least come away from Calder’s volume with an appreciation for the fact that the Greeks had no concept of “animal rights” (116), and that many of their interactions with animals reflected a deep conviction of the “otherness” of non-human species which generally arose from a belief in the innate intellectual inferiority of animals. While readers whose acquaintance with Greek views of human-animal interactions is conditioned by the study of philosophical authorities such as Aristotle, Plutarch, and Porphyry are not likely to find Calder’s treatment of more theoretical issues enlightening, all readers will find much of interest in her analysis of the astonishingly abundant and varied artistic treasures that depict human-animal interactions in Greek antiquity. Duquesne University Stephen T. Newmyer Writing Authority: Elite Competition and Written Law in Early Greece. By Jason Hawke. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2011. Pp. x, 285. The greatest challenge for students of archaic Greek law is the scantiness of extant contemporary sources. It is no surprise, then, that scholars often base their theories on 4 The concept of oikeiosis is much more sophisticated than Calder’s brief discussion suggests. It was used, especially by the Stoics, whom Calder does not mention, to argue that humans were intellectually so unlike other animal species that they had nothing in common with them and that humans could therefore use animals as they pleased, an idea that survived Greek antiquity and has had devastating consequences for human treatment of non-human species. The literature on oikeiosis is vast. Excellent studies include S. J. Pembroke, “Oikeiosis,” in A. A. Long, Problems in Stoicism (London 1971) 114–149 and G. Striker, “The Role of Oikeiosis in Stoic Ethics,” OSAPh 1 (1983) 145–167. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 447 their reading of classical or later sources such as Aristotle and Plutarch. This, Hawke argues, has led them astray by making them generally assume that archaic written law was a response by the lower classes to judicial abuse perpetrated by the elite, a means for simple people to protect their rights against wealthier and more powerful citizens. Such ideas, frequent in classical Athenian sources, are anachronistically projected back into the archaic era. Instead, Hawke argues that in the beginning written law was devised by the elites only and reflects their concerns, not those of lower classes: “[W]e should understand the appearance of written law as a means by which elites attempted to regulate their own competition for prominence and sought...

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