Deixis and Frames of Reference in Hellenistic Dedicatory Epigrams by Flavia Licciardello (review)

Reviewed by: Deixis and Frames of Reference in Hellenistic Dedicatory Epigrams by Flavia Licciardello Joseph Day Deixis and Frames of Reference in Hellenistic Dedicatory Epigrams. By Flavia Licciardello. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter (Trends in Classics Supplement 125). 2022. Pp. xviii, 461, 19 figures. Recent years have witnessed an explosion of scholarly interest in Greek epigram, and matters of deixis, especially the interplay of speaking voices and addressees, often receive significant attention. Four chapters in M. Baumbach, A. Petrovic, and I. Petrovic (eds.), Archaic and Classical Greek Epigram (Cambridge 2010) treat deixis, as does one in F. Cairns's Hellenistic Epigram (Cambridge 2016); M. Tueller's Look Who's Talking (Leuven 2008) is mainly devoted to aspects of deixis. In fact, nearly every student of epigram must engage with this complicated topic. Licciardello's broad study is therefore quite welcome, especially so for its choice of period and genre. Licciardello succeeds in her goal, namely, to analyze Hellenistic dedicatory epigrams formally as communication. Her inquiry centers on the phenomena D. Meyer highlighted in Inszeniertes Lesevergnügen (Stuttgart 2005), namely, the communicative acts staged in the texts (18): "With their different speakers and different characters that are addressed, epigrams often present themselves as lively acts of speech, which follow analogous rules to those of any oral communication." The "rules" here are those formulated by K. Bühler (Sprachtheorie [Jena 1934; tr. Amsterdam 1990]) to describe the ways in which speech interacts with context through expressions indicating the characters involved and their location in space and time. Such language reflects a speaker's viewpoint or "deictic centre," from which "a frame of reference radiates, within which the elements indicated by deictic expressions are situated" (21). Licciardello is systematic and thorough. Chapter Four, for example, examines epigrams that retain the traditional epigraphic format of the "speaking object" as "deictic centre," at its simplest, "So-and-so dedicated me." She articulates her analysis by addressee: divine (section 4.1), human (the passer-by, 4.2), and unclear (4.3). In the sections, she scrutinizes texts for personal, spatial, and temporal deictic references, a triple division that reappears in discussions of dialogue epigrams in Chapter Three and the dedicator as speaker in Chapter Five. Does Licciardello go beyond formal analysis? Chapter Two, which surveys deixis in pre-Hellenistic inscribed dedicatory epigram, largely does not. Except in a few partial exceptions (CEG 286 and 429), the frame of reference is the eternal presence of the object before the god; the human passer-by who reads is absent deictically, "not directly [End Page 164] involved in the communicative act staged" (74). Licciardello therefore sees weakness in arguments, such as this reviewer's in Archaic Greek Epigram and Dedication (Cambridge 2010), that epigrams were composed to facilitate readers' active engagement. She does admit that readers could "feel" like active participants in a communicative act; though not addressees, they "overhear" the dedication speaking to the god (43–44, 51–53, 70–74, 80–86, 125–131). This idea is not developed, however; it strays too far from formal analysis. In Chapters Three to Five, on the other hand, Licciardello examines such Hellenistic deictic innovations as, respectively, true dialogue between the object and an external voice, human addressees, and dedicators as speakers; here, in clear and perceptive treatments of the texts, she explores the effects sought by these innovations. In Chapter Four, for example, she considers ways "the poet can enlarge the frame of reference of the text and lead the reader's attention towards elements which are not present in the context of reception" (234). An inscription illustrates such expansion with political implications (her no. 010 = IG IV2.1 590B), but especially interesting are treatments of two epigrams for dedications at the shrine of Arsinoe-as-Aphrodite Zephyritis (nos. 008 = Call. 14 HE and 012 = Posidipp. 116 AB = 12 HE). In them, the deictic field expands backward, forward, and outward from the traditional hic et nunc of an encounter with the dedication to the Ptolemaic, or even Greek, world, thereby reinforcing Ptolemaic political and cultural aspirations (143–160, 187–204, with a helpful discussion, also at 278–286, of...

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