The senses have become something of a hot topic in the last few years. Much of the work has been led by scholars at Concordia University's rather grandly titled Sensoria Research Team, such as C. Classen, D. Howes and A. Synnott, whose co-edited cultural history of smell, Aroma, remains a landmark study. Also influenced by French work such as A. Corbin's The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, academic studies of all periods have been trying to establish a better understanding of the ways in which people experience the world through their senses. Rather than seeing the body's senses as immutable from one culture to another, such approaches have sought to show how cultural reactions to certain sensory inputs have been constructed by the social context in which they are experienced. Acting as the gatekeepers to the mind and the body, the senses are therefore seen as mediating the individual's experience of the world they inhabit, shaping and framing their understanding as they do so.
S. Harvey's excellent work, notably her Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination, was one of the first and most significant contributions in this field to the ancient world. Others, such as M. Bradley's Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome, showed that the whole question of what constituted colour and how it functioned was a matter of substantial debate in antiquity. With this new edited volume the editors hope to move the debate forward by showing, not only how important and culturally specific were ancient views of the senses, but also how interconnected and mutually affecting. From the ‘wine-dark sea’ on, ancient writers often turned to intersensual metaphors to help them convey the sensual complexity of their subjects. Whether it was ‘green taste’ or ‘garlicky poetry’, the volume argues that such synaesthetic thought permeated literature, but also affected the whole range of ancient thought, from philosophy to oratory.
Arranged chronologically the thirteen chapters cover a variety of contexts regarding the translation of experience into language and the roles played by the senses in ancient aesthetics, conceptions of the mind and the emotions. The range of material under consideration is huge. J. Porter, for example, looks at a broad range of Greek texts to show how poets from Homer to Pindar and even nonsense inscriptions used language synaesthetically to establish a blend of meanings that more accurately reflected the complex sensory nature of experience. P. definitely wins the award for best chapter title, ‘Haptic Herodotus’, where she looks at the ways in which Herodotus employed his tactile faculties to engage with ‘the other’. R. Rosen focuses on the ambivalence in Plato's thought about the senses. Are they there to be appreciated and sought in beauty or actively transcended? J. Katz takes us to recent twentieth-century writing and how synaesthesia has affected the reception of classics, by looking at how Saussure found a concealed relationship between sound and meaning in ancient anagrams and anaphonie. The book ends with B.'s ‘Beyond Narcissus’, which examines how the many treatments of the Narcissus myth, from Lacan to Freud and Picasso, all use the image of the mirror. Highlighting this dominance of the visual paradigm in much art and literature, he argues that we should embrace Ovid's more sensually nonsensical approach.
One of the volume's main themes is the attempt to reverse what it calls the ocular centrism of the western world. Resisting the hierarchies of the senses which place vision at the top, the book tries to overturn the view of the text as something simply to be viewed and understood. It tries to recapture the more complex sensory experience that ancient texts often tried to recreate in the reader or hearer. This is a worthy aim. But although it is true to say that sight has regularly been privileged in modern academic thought, is it true to say that the western world as a whole suffers from such a vision-complex? When individuals communicate today they still rely on the mix of the unspoken, the visual, the tactile and the heard to convey what they mean. Indeed, the importance of the non-visual is one the unquestioned assumptions of popular psychology. The ancient world was undoubtedly a sensorially different place from today and its literary culture used the senses in its own particular ways, but the emphasis on alleged ocular centrism risks condemning the modern world to the status of a sterile panopticon.
Inevitably a book that tries to cover so much will leave gaps. I would have liked something on the role of the senses in religion, which infused almost everything about the ancient world. The range of texts that are being studied here can also leave the reader with a diluted sense of what synaesthesia might actually mean. Does the fact that Plato was ambivalent about the senses really help us understand what Herodotus is trying to achieve? It will be interesting to see if future research in this area can distinguish between the workings of different groupings of the senses. Or whether they changed over time. Above all, I would have liked something which challenged the idea that synaesthesia was universally applicable in antiquity. Or if it was, did the senses affect different parts of society differently? How the senses related to power is a crucial issue. The ways in which certain forms of sensory expression were denigrated was fundamental to the ability of those at the top of society to reinforce their domination of various subordinate groups, from slaves, to the poor, to women. Touch, for example, whether in the form of beatings or kisses, was an important marker of social status. Conversely, the senses were one of the main avenues left open to these oppressed groups to try to assert their own value, whether it was in the tactile skills of the loom or the ways in which a fisherman felt the weather. Accusations concerning the alleged misuse of the senses also became a central part of rhetorical attempts by the elite to control their own behaviour. As it is, we are left with a slightly too gentle view of the senses, which engages with the pleasanter more aesthetic side of the ancient world. The book is designed to be the front-runner for a series of books by Acumen examining each of the senses in turn. I hope that the later books bring out more of the darker, dissonant, rougher, fetid and bitter sides of ancient life.
The book would have benefited from a better spread of topics. Three of the chapters relate to reception studies, three more concentrate, albeit from very different angles, on Greek Comedy. This imbalance is perhaps the inevitable consequence of a book that results from a conference. But the book does an excellent job of showing what a rich and varied vein is there to be tapped and will surely succeed in its main aim to stimulate further interest in this area. The volume will be a core book for anyone interested in working in this field, and the subtlety and range of its contributions mark an important step in the advance of sensory studies into antiquity.
