This collection of essays is a productive venture into the intersection of Classics and the burgeoning field of media studies. As such, it balances both a critical appraisal of media theory’s long-standing interest in the ancient Mediterranean with analysis of media in Greece and Rome in their own right. Pantelis Michelakis’ introduction (Chapter 1) provides a valuable survey of this two-handed approach employed by the chapters that follow.
Several contributions interrogate the use of Classics by prominent media theorists. Till Heilmann (Chapter 2) qualifies Friedrich Kittler’s curious fascination with the Greek alphabet as an expression of the late theorist’s ‘media realism’ (32), that is, his focus on the physical reality of content communicated by media. As a sonic designator of both language and music as well as mathematical notation, for Kittler, the Greek alphabet was an ‘ontological machine’ and ‘universal medium, (re)presenting or “presencing” everything that matters in early Greek culture’ (39–40). While Heilmann vividly contextualizes this problematic position, Frank Haase’s contribution (Chapter 5) on the origins of media theory in Hesiod and Plato risks Kittler’s missteps with claims such as ‘western metaphysical thought is genuinely rooted in the invention of the Greek phonetic alphabet’ (118), a stance that perhaps makes more sense for Plato, who at least discusses alphabetic writing technology. That said, the piece’s medial structures for the circulation of Hesiodic poetry (122, 127) are helpful and complement recent attempts to describe transitions from oral to written culture (see, for example, J. Ready, Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics (Oxford 2019)). For the 19th century, Adam Lecznar (Chapter 11) triangulates attitudes towards the technological mediation of the Presocratics, especially Parmenides, with the classical reception of Nietzsche, who famously embraces the enhancements of the typewriter ‘to collaborate with thought’ (274–75), and Heidegger, who favours ‘the hand and not the machine … the immediate and not the mediated’ (285) and externalizes technology to Presocratic thought and beyond (289).
If Kittler exemplifies how not to theorize with ancient Greek media, the bulk of contributions present more successful ways to source origins for types of mediation in the ancient Mediterranean. Using the sphrēgis (‘seal’) of Polycrates (Hdt. 3.40.1–43.2) as a case study, Verity Platt (Chapter 3) argues for Greek seals, such as the intaglio on rings (daktuloi), as media for the fundamental cultural technique of impression. Besides giving us such ubiquitous metaphors as ‘sign’ (from Latin signare, ‘to stamp’), ‘type’ (from Greek tupos, ‘impression’) and others, seals ‘take us beyond representation to a materially embodied ontology of the image’ (61) and help us reflect on ‘processes of transmission, communication, and interpretation’ through ‘meta-sphragistic’ discourse (72). Moving from dactylology to diagrammatology, Duncan Kennedy (chapter 4) places diagrams between mathematical attempts to prove theorems and philosophical abstractions of geometrical form and metaphysics. Emmanuel Alloa (Chapter 6) outlines three types of mediacy in Aristotle: the ethical (to mestotēs), the logical (to meson) and the sensory (metaxu). It is in the latter that Aristotle departs from his predecessors by arguing that all five senses are mediated by something, for example, sight by the diaphanous (to diaphanēs, 158), that is shared in common (to koinon) by the sensing and the sensible (163). Mediacy thus ‘indicates the capacity to take on the form of something without being (it)’ (165, emphasis original). Another highlight of the collection is Patrick Crowley’s reassessment of the medial value of Parrhasius’ prize-winning painting of a curtain (Chapter 9), in which he convincingly argues that the success of the trompe l’œil is not due to its realism or naturalism but to the fact that Parrhasius coordinated lines of sight and drawing and ‘let the geometry of vision itself produce the media effect of protrusions and recessions—the optical illusion of bulk and stuff—within his famous lines’ (236). Similarly, Genevieve Lively (Chapter 10) considers Roman elegy’s ‘concerns with its own materiality and mediality’ (239) through Wolfgang Ernst’s media archaeology.
The classical resonance of modern and contemporary art and its mediality, whether visual or textual, occupy the remaining chapters. Karin Harrasser (Chapter 7) expands on the subtle (subtextilis) haptics of Diego Velázquez’s Las hilanderas (c. 1657) (with brief reference to Aristotle’s Metaphysics) to explore the current state of tactility and ‘teletactile technologies’ (178–82) in recent media theory. Ulrich Meurer (Chapter 8) investigates the affinities of traditional and media archaeology through Canadian artist Henry Jesionka’s Ancient Cinema (2012) and its collocation of numerous proto-cinematic media such as the slight variations of figures on shards of painted Roman glass found in the Croatian town of Zadar (196–97). Finally, Maria Oikonomou (Chapter 12) outlines the algorithmic decisions in the processes of migration, with Odysseus and his various refractions, including in George Hadjimichalis’ Crossroad installation, as elucidative guides. As the first of its kind, this volume is essential reading for students and scholars interested in media with and in Graeco-Roman antiquity.
