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The proposition is arresting, to my mind probably right, but in any case well worth contestation by those who want to argue differently. He emphasizes the striking paradox that ‘democracy failed politically but it succeeded culturally’ (804) so that ‘a monarchic Mediterranean rise to a culture marked by debate and pluralism’ (801). He argues for the historical formation of an Athenian canon, the establishment of different (‘meta-literary’) canons foregrounding different genres, especially around Alexandria, in the Hellenistic era and the development of a ‘sheer proliferation of variety’ among the Hellenisms of the Roman empire and late Antiquity.
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This has the entailment that culture, the canon it enshrines and the continuing practice of ‘scientific’ investigation and dialogue were capable of flourishing under varieties of autocracy, throughout the history of the ancient world and into its modern Western receptions. Netz’s principal contention is that what we think of as the canon of (particularly Athenian) literature was the product of the polis and Athenian democracy-not the politics of the democratic experiment but the agonistic pluralism of intellectual debate that occupied a social space away from the state and its ideologies. The book is generous, engaging and very widely learned (I was particularly amused by the various comparanda with Russian literature, notably romantic duelling poets who managed to die well before passing their literary prime). Third, as a Stanford Classicist, he belongs to what we might venture to call a distinctive school within the discipline, one that has used quantitative measures and significant comparativism to make some signal contributions (one might cite the names of Josiah Ober and Walter Scheidel here, as well as the Stanford Literary Lab and its major projects in digital and computational humanities). Second, as a historian of ancient intellectual life, he is extremely well versed in the complications of the survival and interpretation of papyri, from which he draws the bulk of his empirical evidence. First, as a brilliant historian of mathematics, he does understand numbers and statistics (much better than Keith Hopkins, whose early and often amateur ventures in the papyrological numbers game Netz frequently corrects, with some generosity and humour). Reviel Netz brings three distinctive qualifications to this comprehensive history of the development of the Greek literary canon.