14               

proem – it is captatio benevolentiae; fr. 115 is part of the ensuing narratio. The thought
is perhaps that as bard and healer and prophet Empedocles is indeed immortal, but as
Empedocles he is like everyone else a sinner. Or might we suppose that while fr.
146+147 suggest that in a penultimate reincarnation bards and healers and prophets
are not as such yet ‘gods highest in honour’ (although they may next time become so),
fr. 112 is meant to show us Empedocles anticipating his moment of transformation?
After his excellent start, in the later and more free-wheeling chapters T. seems to me
to wander himself. There are plenty of thoughtful observations and suggestions (e.g.
on the restraint Empedocles shows in using his religious inheritance, or on how the
transformation of reincarnation might be conceived by him as a form of evolution).
But comparison of Empedocles’ literary strategy with some of those adopted in
Platonic dialogues doesn’t come o¶ (T. gets more e¶ective mileage from the model of
Parmenides’ proem, as well as – with Sedley – from Lucretius’s). Expressions like
‘perdure’ and ‘aver’ creep in. There are some mistakes: e.g. on the basis of Socrates’
elaboration of Protagorean relativism at Tht. 157e¶., Plato is said to have accepted
‘grudgingly’ that delusions, dreams and hallucinations couldn’t be dismissed as
lacking all reality (p. 188). Philosophical logic is not T.’s strong suit. He proposes that
for Parmenides, when ‘thought or language is not successful, and does not make
contact with what-is, it is nothing, as opposed to being false’ (p. 155). So what of fr.
8.50–2? The claim that they are ‘nothing’ seems to be supported (p. 153) by reference
to fr. 6.4. But here Parmenides says only that mortals ‘know nothing’. A little later T.
argues that he can’t pick out what-is by contrast with something else – for there is
nothing else. If we attempt to do it, ‘we are treating “what-is-not” as if it were
something’ (p. 156). Isn’t that precisely what speaking and thinking falsely would
consist in?
There is a useful index of passages, and a selective general index. The bibliography
needed another vetting: aside from spelling errors, two pieces by Wilamowitz have
strayed in under Vlastos, and Sedley’s Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek
Wisdom, frequently referred to, is omitted. Notes are endnotes, numbered for each
chapter separately – but there is no header indicating which. This makes the job of
consulting them unnecessarily tedious.
St John’s College, Cambridge M. SCHOFIELD
m.schoµeld@joh.cam.ac.uk

THE GREEK CONCEPT OF NATURE

N     ( G. ) The Greek Concept of Nature. Pp. x + 265, ills. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2005. Cased, US$70. ISBN:
0-7914-6373-7.
doi:10.1017/S0009840X05000089

N.’s book o¶ers an accessible and fairly succinct account of Presocratic philosophy
as historia peri phuseôs (cf. Plato Phd. 96a, never cited by N.: ‘the oldest and most
trustworthy statement as to the name originally given to science’, Burnet). It is rather
lopsided in coverage. An opening chapter discusses ‘the meaning of peri phuseôs’,
and a µnal chapter o¶ers a rapid survey of ‘the historia peri phuseôs from
Xenophanes to the Atomists’. The meat comes in extended treatments of Hesiod and
Anaximander in two middle chapters: useful interpretative surveys, usually

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                15
indicating adequately the range of options scholarship has identiµed. N.’s Hesiod
and Anaximander are fairly familiar µgures (Charles Kahn’s in·uence is apparent
with Anaximander as elsewhere). Novelties when they come are speculative,
sometimes wildly so. Thus absence of any sign of a ritual context for Hesiodic myth
(on the Babylonian model) is due to the collapse of Mycenaean civilisation and the
demise of divine kingship (pp. 55¶.); Anaximander’s concentric rings may have a
political analogue – the aristocracy, the new middle class, the peasantry (pp. 85–8);
above all, a lot more can be said about the map Anaximander is said to have
constructed – both the speciµc cultural parameters of its production and the details
of its cartography – than anyone has hitherto conceived (pp. 92–112).
N. insists on reading all the major Presocratics as consciously dedicated to the
production of writings encapsulating the outcome of historia peri phuseôs. He is
uneasily aware that evidence for use of peri phuseôs as a book title earlier than the
mid µfth century .. is highly dubious (pp. 16–17), but doesn’t let that stop him
treating e.g. Xenophanes (p. 115) or Parmenides (p. 135) as setting out to write
poems whose ambition was precisely to give a rational account of phusis. Many
readers will feel that this approach unhelpfully homogenises the variety and
unexpectedness of the intellectual personae constructed by di¶erent Presocratics,
and the range of literary forms and strategies they employed. Any thought that
Xenophanes might be satirising Milesian meteorology disappears; the cutting edge
of the radical critiques of historia peri phuseôs mounted by Heraclitus and
Parmenides is blunted; and Empedocles is saddled with the old story of a scientiµc
Peri phuseôs contrasted with a religious Katharmoi – though N. seems to wobble on
this issue (compare p. 141 with p. 146).
The Greek Concept of Nature is an English reworking of L’origine et l’évolution du
concept grec de “physis” (1992). One of the theses of the French original which has
survived intact is N.’s claim that from Anaximander on all writings peri phuseôs
contained ‘three elements: a cosmogony, a zoogony, and a politogony’ (p. 113).
Nobody would query cosmogony or zoogony. But of course it is commonly supposed
that discussion of social and political order was notably missing in the generality of
such writings in the sixth and earlier µfth centuries. Heraclitus is the sort of exception
that only proves the rule. Concrete evidence is ordinarily thought to be µrst available
otherwise for Archelaus, who is late enough to be re·ecting the shift of interest
towards speculation about the polis and the di¶ering roles of nomos and phusis in
human a¶airs usually associated with the sophists (see Kahn’s important article of
1981 – not cited by N. – in Kerferd (ed.), The Sophists and their Legacy). N.’s idea that
all the Presocratics did ‘politogony’ is therefore distinctive. It was trenchantly
criticised in Jaap Mansfeld’s review of L’origine (Mnem. 50 [1997] 754–8).
What does Presocratic ‘politogony’ add up to? For Anaximander, see above. In
Xenophanes’ case a theory of the origin of civilisation would for N. count as
politogony – but he is doubtful whether the supposed evidence will stand up
(pp. 118–19). A single paragraph on Pythagoras refers to the testimonium on
everlasting recurrence, and discusses whether or not this excludes any idea of human
progress (p. 125). With Parmenides (pp. 139–40) and Empedocles (p. 146) N. has not
got much to o¶er beyond Gregory Vlastos’s proposal back in 1947 that the use they
make in cosmology of the concepts of justice and equality re·ects the growing
attraction of democratic ideals. On Anaxagoras N. gets more mileage than most
scholars from DK 59A30: according to his cosmological model, ‘every individual
mind like every individual citizen is equal, but in order to live in peace and harmony,
the citizens must submit to the rule of law, the dispensation of nous, the true archê in

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 16               
the democratic paradigm and modeled after the cosmic republic’ (p. 152). In sum:
‘politogony’ turns out to be what Gwil Owen used to call ‘coloured balloons’ – fun to
play with, but ...
St John’s College, Cambridge M. SCHOFIELD
m.schoµeld@joh.cam.ac.uk

R        (A. ) Sophrosyne and the Rhetoric of Self-Restraint.

Polysemy & Persuasive Use of an Ancient Greek Value Term.
(Mnemosyne Supplementum 259.) Pp. xii + 375, µgs. Leiden and
Boston: Brill, 2005. Cased, €85, US$115. ISBN: 90-04-14251-7.
doi:10.1017/S0009840X050009X

A central moral term such as sôphrosunê naturally has a broad range of meanings,
which will cluster around one or more basic ideas. These core senses may vary over
time, and also among di¶erent social classes, ethnic groups, or other fractions of the
population. The only way to understand such a term is to explore its use in context,
remaining sensitive to possible disparities in usage. Sophistication in linguistics and
modern semantic theory is desirable, in so far as these disciplines alert the scholar to
the dangers of oversimpliµcation and excessive conµdence in one’s own intuitions.
Beyond this, the crucial skills are those of close reading and literary intelligence, that
is, the ability to perceive how a word is coloured by the narrative situation in which it
occurs. The investigation of such terms thus consists principally in a series of textual
exegeses, and these demand, as well, a thorough immersion in the relevant secondary
literature.
Adriaan Rademaker is an excellent reader, and he brings to the study of sôphrosunê
all the requisite skills; his book is an important contribution to understanding the
word itself, and it sheds light on many individual passages. R. is guided by the method
of cognitive linguistics, which holds that ‘the meaning of a term is a cognitive concept
that is structured as an open category, consisting of various groups of uses …
connected with each other in a network by family resemblance’ (p. 25); that is, all
share some features with some other members, but any two uses (those at the extreme
ends of the spectrum, for example) may have little or nothing in common. There are,
however, one or more ‘prototypes’, that is, relatively central uses of the term.
Inevitably there will be borderline cases: linguistic categories are not clear-cut in the
way that so-called classical approaches to deµnition suppose. Two people, then, may
be sôphrôn in quite di¶erent and all but unrelated ways, and it may be hard to µt some
who are so described within the ostensible parameters of the concept. Armed with
this model (such as it is), R. proceeds to investigate the central or prototypical uses of
sôphrosunê and related terms in chapters devoted to Homer, archaic poetry, each of
the three major tragedians, µfth-century historiography, and Aristophanes and the
orators, summing up the resulting ‘network’ of meanings in a penultimate chapter
before concluding with an examination of Plato’s arguments concerning its meaning
in the Protagoras, Laches, Gorgias, Republic, Statesman and Charmides, against the
backdrop of its contemporary uses.
R. goes over much the same material as Helen North did in Sophrosyne:
Self-Knowledge and Self-Restraint in Greek Culture (Ithaca, 1966), although her book
The Classical Review vol. 56 no. 1 © The Classical Association 2006; all rights reserved

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