This book makes a valuable contribution to current scholarly debates about Athenian civic ideology and social memory. Barbato applies to a range of relevant Athenian settings a productive methodological framework derived from the New Institutionalism in the social sciences (which ‘envisions institutions as ensembles of rules, practices and narratives which condition the behaviour’ of those operating within them: 10). The annual public funeral, the lawcourts and tragedy are front and centre for Barbato, but he also pays significant attention to the non-logographic speeches of Isocrates and (where possible) to evidence from the Assembly and Council, and makes some use of historiography, mythography and art. Chapter 1 sets out the book’s aims and methodology, chapter 2 demonstrates how many opportunities classical Athenians had for immersion in their city’s mythology and chapter 3 surveys the discursive parameters of the individual institutional settings. The core of the work (chapters 4–7) consists of a series of examinations of how four major Athenian myths are treated across specific institutional and extra-institutional contexts, and how the values they promote (for example, Athenian resistance to hubris) are inflected accordingly. These case studies underpin Barbato’s main contention in this book: that the Marxist and ‘culturalist’ models that have influenced most modern studies of Athenian ideology can be reconciled by taking systematic account of the distinct discursive parameters that the democratic institutions imposed on what was produced within them, making it possible to see the differences between Athenian presentations of the same mythical events as a matter less of doublethink and more of contextual determination. For Barbato (215–18), Athenian ideology was ‘dynamic’ (and constituted by continuous practice within the institutions), ‘constructive’ (and not evolved as cover for a fissile social fabric), ‘normative’ (that is, prescriptive of what citizens should believe) and ‘bidirectional’ (a shared enterprise of mass and elite). Barbato brings out some of these characteristics more thoroughly than others, but the picture that emerges is a unified one, and largely convincing.
The four case-study chapters focus in turn on the myths of Athenian autochthony, of the city’s assistance to the children of Heracles, of its defeat of the Amazons and of its role in the aftermath of the expedition of the Seven against Thebes. Barbato’s individual discussions are judicious and balanced; consistently strong are his analyses of Lysias’ Funeral Speech, which features prominently in all four chapters. The discursive parameters that shape this speech’s treatment of its myths are undoubtedly those of the public funeral, but the speech’s status as a text probably not intended for delivery in that context (40) could have been interrogated further. It seems to matter, because Barbato’s most important claim about the non-logographic speeches of Isocrates is that their private intended audience and their fictiveness, despite the real-world contexts several of them assume, gave Isocrates the freedom to fashion in them versions of the myths which reflect the discursive parameters of more than one institution, or indeed to step beyond such parameters entirely (140, 178, 205–09). If Lysias’ Funeral Speech belongs in this category, too, that may affect its capacity to represent the discursive parameters of the public funeral authoritatively (for example, this institution’s potential for disseminating ‘topical’ values: 99–103). There is a wider point here about the difficulties inherent in the prescriptive approach the book adopts: of the oratorical texts considered, only these works of Isocrates are said to have the scope to reflect the discursive parameters of multiple institutional contexts. That may be true for the treatment of mythical material, but if this book’s model is to be applied to the study of civic ideology in Athenian oratory in general, then it will need to account for the presence in many surviving law court speeches of extended and recognizable co-options of the discursive parameters of institutional or extra-institutional settings other than the one currently being addressed. Likewise, the identification of a ‘prime function’ (15) for the discourse of each institution to the exclusion of other possible functions may work for the public funeral, but when applied to the law courts, Assembly and Council, it risks oversimplifying what orators in those settings would prioritize when formulating argumentative strategies, which were complex responses to a variety of contextual considerations and not only the discursive parameters imposed by the relevant institution.
These caveats notwithstanding, Barbato’s achievement in establishing a solid and yet adaptable framework for future applications of the New Institutionalism to ancient Greek history is considerable. His study is supported by an up-to-date bibliography, though his discussions of tragic politics would have benefited from fuller engagement with the work of David Carter. He writes clearly, communicating his methodology accessibly in the first chapter and conducting the main discussion efficiently and economically. The book is also very well organized, making it easy to use.
