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Shane Butler and Alex Purves (eds), Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses. Durham: Acumen 2013. Pp. viii + 220 incl. bibliography. ISBN 978-1-84465-562-5. 17.99 paperback. Jo Day School of Classics, University College Dublin joanna.day@ucd.ie

This edited volume derives from a conference held at UCLA in 2010 and is the first in the new series published by Acumen on The Senses in Antiquity. The synaesthesia of the title should not be confused with the neurological condition whereby sensory stimuli cross perceptual boundaries, e.g. sounds having colours. The editors explain, in the Introduction, that the book is synaesthetic because it embraces all the senses and aims to move beyond a visual paradigm to explore the rich intersensory experiences of Classical antiquity. In this aim, they are bringing to Classical studies an approach pioneered in the 1990s by David Howes, Constance Classen and Anthony Synnott, collectively working at Concordia University as CONSERT - the Concordia Sensoria Research Team. Their explorations of the social and cultural life of the senses led to numerous ground-breaking publications1 that have influenced diverse fields within humanities, ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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For example: David Howes (1991) The Varieties of Sensory Experience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press); David Howes (2003) Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press); Constance Classen (1993) Worlds of Sense: Exploring the

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from archaeology to film studies. In striking contrast to archaeology, however, where sensorially-informed methodologies have brought new insights into thinking about the past and publications are becoming plentiful, 2 previous forays into a sensory approach to the Classical world have been somewhat disparate,3 and an entire volume on the topic is to be welcomed. One of the main premises of sensory studies is the extent to which ocularcentrism has become embedded in the modern world as the dominant paradigm. This apparent hegemony of vision has influenced everything from our language (I see what you mean) to how we learn about the world (through telescopes, microscopes, computer screens and words). Whether Descartess separation of the mind from the body, Aristotles hierarchy of senses or early Christian denial of bodily sensation is to blame (and all have been ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Senses in History and Across Cultures (London: Routledge); Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott (1994) Aroma: the Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge). 2 For example: Jo Day (ed.) (2013) Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology (Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations); Robin Skeates (2010) An Archaeology of the Senses: Prehistoric Malta (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Yannis Hamilakis (2014) Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory and Affect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). + 3 For example: Mark Bradley (2009) Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); David Potter (1999) Odor and power in the Roman empire In Constructions of the Classical Body, J. Porter (ed.) 169-189, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Classen, Howes and Synnott (1994), Chaps. 1-2; Charles Feldman (2005) Roman taste. Food, Culture and Society 1:8-30. An Open University conference held in London in November 2013 focused on Senses of the Empire: Multisensory Approaches to Roman Culture, also to be published as a collected volume.

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accused), paying attention to tastes and smells, sounds and touch, has long been considered unscholarly. How then to explore beyond the visual in a medium that itself demands to be read? In contrast to the childrens popular Roman Aromas, with its scratch-and-sniff patches providing the reader with an olfactory experience of ancient Rome,4 this volume relies on ancient texts to illustrate its synaesthetic approach. The thirteen chapters in this volume range widely from Homer to Quintilian, and flirt with all of the five senses as recognised in a modern western sensorium (vision, hearing, touch, taste and olfaction), individually and in a more multisensory manner. The volume opens with Porters consideration of the Muses, or more precisely, why their number varies and why they can be singular (The Muse) or plural. Taking these personifications of the arts as a synaesthetic unity, he moves on to show how ancient arts need to be perceived with more than one sense. For example, Greek lyric poets like Pindar used synaesthetic language that blended the sounds of the words, their meanings, and their kinaesthetic integration into the performance in other words a sound is being seen. Two case studies illustrate his point, one with reference to sensory clashes in Seven Against Thebes, the other examining a skyphos with a nonsense inscription. This latter ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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Mary Dobson (1997) Smelly Old History: Roman Aromas (Oxford: Oxford University Press).+

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is one of the only attempts in the book to engage with things rather than text, and Porters convincing argument would have been strengthened by reference to the work of Houston and Taube on synaesthetic material culture.5 Purves study of haptic Herodotus demonstrates how the historian called upon the sense of touch to bring him (and his readers) closer to the truth. This knowing through feeling draws upon the concept of haptic geographies espoused by Rodaway6 and serves as a valuable check on assumptions that seeing equates understanding. Purves illustrates his case with well-chosen examples, such as when Herodotus touches the skulls of dead Egyptian and Persian soldiers (Histories 3.12) their respective hardness or softness is indicative (to him) of exposure to the suns rays, and his classification of races as hard or soft according to the haptic affects of their dress or the landscape they inhabit. The role of touch in the stories of Smerdis (3.69) and King Rhampsinitus (2.121) bookend the chapter. In contrast, sound is the focus of Paynes contribution, which examines two ancient attempts to represent animal communication in human language in Aristophanes Birds and the Cynegetica attributed to Oppian. Rather than synaesthesia, he focuses on the concept of paraesthesia, ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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Stephen Houston and Karl Taube (2000) An archaeology of the senses: perception and cultural expression in ancient Mesoamerica. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 10, 261-294. 6 Paul Rodaway (1994) Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place. London: Routledge.

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developed via an introductory section on the wood-birds song in Wagners Siegfried. The complementary chapters by Tel and Clements both deal with Aristophanes and the trangressing of sensory boundaries within his comedies. Tels chapter takes olfactory conflict as the theme, demonstrating how the rivalry between Aristophanes and Cratinus is played out as a clash of odours. Clementss engaging study of taste-looks (e.g. looked mustard of the Council in the Knights) draws together a wide range of evidence to explore the concept of !"#$%.+ In his inability to pin the word down to an acceptable translation or even to a single sensory realm, he emphasises that we must appreciate the existence of epistemologies other than our own where sensory experiences can be conceptually conjoined. + Things take a philosophical turn next, as Rosen provides a meditation on philosophical synaesthesia, and Volk introduces Maniliuss cosmos of the senses. The tension between aesthetic experiences and the intellectual contemplation of them is shown to be at the core of Platos thinking on Beauty. For Manilius, visual perception is only the first step in understanding a universe that engages humans through all their senses. For him, the sounds of the cosmos and the astronomer-poet sing together, and the signs of the Zodiac see, hear and even touch each other (vision was understood as a tactile phenomenon in antiquity).

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Fully sensing bodies are discussed in Walterss chapter which explores what death means for our senses according to Lucretius and Lucan. The mutilation of Gratidianus deprives him of sensory faculties one by one, leaving his eyes until last; thus Lucan enables him to witness his fate. For Lucretius, however, the sense organs will not work when separated from the body; sensation is only possible when body and soul combine. Walters then digs deeper to reveal how the sensual aspects of death pervade the work of both authors. Bradley has already established his reputation as a scholar of sensory experiences,7 and here treats the reader to a discussion of his theory on the object-centered nature of ancient colour perception. A study of purple draws attention to the olfactory aspect of this dye extracted from shellfish, and he also ponders the multisensory experience of ancient spectacle and how this was conveyed in literature. 8 In contrast, Dozier focuses on visual metaphors of clarity and obscurity in Quintilian. Good oratory is synaesthetic in that it enables the audience to see as well as hear, although a good orator leaves some things shrouded in darkness, only allowing the audience to see what he wishes them to see. This theme leads Dozier to some illuminating comments on the ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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Bradley 2009. For a study of the multisensory experience of Roman sacrifice, see Candace Weddle The sensory experience of blood sacrifice in the Roman imperial cult. In J. Day (ed.) (2013), 137-159. +

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contrasting manipulation of light and obscurity in rhetoric and poetry. The final three chapters move beyond ancient texts to their reception or roles in later works. Keilen delves into Ovids Banquet of Sence by Chapman (1595) to explore layers of sensuous encounters with beauty: by the poems protagonist Ovid when he comes upon Julia bathing; by Chapman as he produces the poem; and by the reader whose senses are entangled in the experience of reading. This chapter also contains a useful summary of centuries of academic scepticism about the senses. Katzs playful contribution looks at Ferdinand de Saussures interest in anagrams and more specifically in anaphonie, hidden links in a text between sound and meaning. Saussure found support for his theory in works by Homer, Lucretius, and Vergil, for example, but as Katz points out, these may be accidental occurrences and certainly Saussure seems to have abruptly stopped this work in 1909 (not so sure, as ludic Saussurian scholars might put it?). Interestingly, Katz reveals that Saussure himself appears to have been a synaesthete, a condition that perhaps enhanced his work with on the relationship between seeing and hearing by giving colours, shapes and smells to sounds. The volume closes with Butlers chapter Beyond Narcissus. This wide-ranging piece dances between Lacan, Cocteau, Dali, Freud, Picasso, and Ovid, a key source for the Narcissus myth. Linking all of these together is the

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idea of the mirror, its blurring of the subject/object distinction, and the dominance of vision over other senses in art and literature. The presence of these final three chapters in a book on the ancient senses could be queried, but if the function of a volume like this is to cross boundaries and inspire different ways of perceiving the past and thinking about perception in the past, then their inclusion is indispensable. As a whole the book is well-edited with only rare errors in spelling, and includes a unified bibliography at the volumes end containing a wealth of references to sensory studies. The only jarring note was the use of in-text references in Keilens chapter in contrast to the footnotes of every other offering. One might also have wished for a deeper exploration of the Aristotelian understanding of the senses touched upon by several of the authors. The subsequent volumes in the Acumen series each will be devoted to a single sense of the canonical five and, on the basis of this offering, are much anticipated. It is hoped, however, that the editors have plans to include some studies based on material culture as much as texts; after all, it is through these material things too that both the ancients and contemporary archaeologists, museum visitors, and scholars make sense of the Classical world.