Wonder and the Marvellous from Homer to the Hellenistic World by Jessica Lightfoot
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Wonder and the Marvellous from Homer to the Hellenistic World by Jessica Lightfoot Maria Gerolemou Wonder and the Marvellous from Homer to the Hellenistic World. By Jessica Lightfoot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2021. Pp. x, 260. Lightfoot's objective, described in the prologue, is to "open up the subject of ancient wonder as a more comprehensive and coherent field of inquiry in the modern world for the first time" (2). The author discusses various facets of thauma from Homer to the Hellenistic period to highlight its importance both as an aesthetic response and as a philosophical and literary tool. While this approach to wonder is not completely novel, Lightfoot's study on the role that thauma plays in the relationship between the human and the divine, animate and inanimate, near and far, familiar and unfamiliar provides interesting insights. The book does not offer a chronological reading of thaumata; it rather functions as a Wunderkammer, that is, as a repository for various wondrous objects, events, etc., and reveals connections between the uses of thauma in different periods, authors, and genres. [End Page 370] The second and fourth chapter discuss thauma as a model of aesthetic response. To this well-studied aspect,1 the author adds a spatial and a temporal dimension: aesthetic thauma in Plato, she argues, when describing something which is "hidden" and lies "inside," such as the intellect, can prolong perception and lead to curiosity and cognitive advancement (see Theaetetus); on the other hand, thauma which refers to outer appearance is a temporary feeling of bedazzlement (see Charmides). In ekphrastic descriptions of objects, on the other hand, the split between outside and inside collapses: the exterior of the objects described, which are either god- or man-made (see, e.g., Achilles' shield in the Iliad; gems in Posidippus' epigrams), is admired due to its mimetic power, which can go as far as reproducing internal animative forces (e.g., motion). Now, it seems that both the ekphrastic and the philosophical wonder externalise the technê and skills of an artisan or intellectual. The fourth chapter explores cases of acoustic marvels which manage to blur the boundary between the animate and inanimate, gods and mortals. While both chapters offer some interesting insights, a theoretical discussion on the aesthetics and perception of viewing (thauma idesthai) and hearing (thauma akousai), which could have strengthened their arguments, is missing.2 The third chapter is dedicated to the genre of paradoxography, and discusses both the "textual thaumata" found in the Hellenistic library and the oddities of the natural world. According to the author, paradoxography is not about providing enough evidence around a wondrous observation; what guarantees the wonder's veracity in a paradoxographic discourse is the reference to the initial observer of the thauma. The chapter responds convincingly to previous scholarship on paradoxography that describes the genre as merely "popular" rather than scientifically oriented3 by emphasizing exactly the effort of paradoxographers to create "new bodies of purely textual marvels" (57). The chapter also examines how the Herodotean thôma and Aristotle's concept of wonder influence the paradoxographic wonder. The argument presented here is not entirely new.4 The Herodotean type of wonder, argues the author, fosters curiosity about distant lands, customs, objects, etc., that are unfamiliar to Greeks, and tests the boundaries between belief and disbelief, in the same way later paradoxographers do, but unlike Herodotus, they do not present their own judgement on the credibility of thauma. The Aristotelean wonder, moreover, provides the paradoxographer with the material itself. The paradoxographer selectively presents some of these wonders, without giving any context, i.e., without offering "the complicated reasoning which the philosopher builds up to explain away an apparent inconsistency or anomaly" (74). This increases thauma since it recreates for the reader the moment when the quoted author first observed, for instance, "strange and inexplicable zoological specimens or processes" (78). [End Page 371] Chapter Five, which explores wonder both as "an emotional and cognitive response" to recognition (108), is the most stimulating part of the book. Starting with a discussion of the famous scene of the Lytra and the mutual social recognition between Priam and...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".