Beyond Greek concerns relationships between Hellenic and Roman culture. It makes us realize that the image we have of Romans slavishly imitating that culture is simplistic. The book delves into the traditions of authors we barely, if ever, have heard mentioned in our study of Latin–Livius Andronicus, Naevius, Ennius, Accius, and only later, Plautus and Terence. It tells of Odyssey-like national epics like the Aeneid, reveals annals/histories well before those of Titus Livius on whom we depend for our knowledge of Romulus and Remus and the lured seizure of Sabine women, andshows the critical early influence of songs and hymns, and later florescence of drama and comedy in both cultures.  It places that complex relationship within a larger context of nearby societies that did not creatively incorporate the literature and culture of absorbed societies. It reveals the “translation program” of the Romans as a surprisingly improbable development that to us students of the development of modern capitalism oddly recalls the way that Puritanism acted as a catalyst to the development of a unique version of that economic form: “Why Roman literature did not develop before the third century B. C. is a real puzzle.” (4) More than that the book deals (4) with “the fact that there is a literature in Latin when there should really not have been one.”

The post- (First) Punic War date of 240 (B. C.) stands out as a watershed. Yet it took a hundred years before the tragedian Accius wrote his important Didascalia that represented Roman literature as a continuation of the Greek. “Between 240 and 140 the Roman engagement with Greek culture underwent a series of fundamental redefinitions. . . .” (6)

  Feeney’s first chapter challenges our sense in a global village that translation is normal. (17-18) He goes on to point out that translation is usually limited at that time, typically as a unidirectional reflection of relative power. Interpretation is a different process. He leads us to the conclusion that literature turns out to be “that which does not get translated.” (40) It seems that Romans translated subjects of practical use, leaving, we may say, the ornamental. He emphasizes a comment (45) by a pioneering scholar, Friedrich Leo, that “Livius Andronicus invented the art of translation.” In all this grand sweep Feeney covers ground we never think of, cultural materials we are not aware of, and disciplinary issues few of us have any grasp of.

He seems to translate all important passages from Latin and Greek while curiously leaving lesser ones, invariably short, untranslated for those of us with little or nothing to hold on to in those languages.

Beyond Greek is addressed to a person somewhere between a sophisticated general reader and a specialist in the field, given considerable disciplinary jargon: Demotic (if we forgot our ancient [Egyptian] history), calque, canon, foreignizing, domesticating, L1, L2, and a few others the reader gets used to more than understands if she does not look them up. Drawing a map of that portion of the Mediterranean world discussed would much have helped comprehension.

“As a New Zealander. . .” (252, n. 39) explains an occasional “British” phrase an American notes and easily passes over: “get some purchase on,” “one-off occasion,” “ring-fenced.” Bemusement will curl the lips of the careful reader as Feeney passes through a few pages spotted with tautology– (114) here what the reviewer takes as a triple, “the ‘middle ground,’ with its remarkable shared koinē,” a coin shared amidst hands.

Feeney’s work exposes a chasm in our knowledge and fills it up. Today, when learning a bit of classic language is left to fortunate legatees at prep schools, or to those taking an edifying university elective, young people might find the inspiration to study, may I suggest, before Latin, Greek. Greek sets the hoof more surely on case given the more focused article as against a Latin ending that jumps among cases, if not declensions. Moreover, the deeply breathed Greek packs feelingful energy into cognition. The scholarly Feeney stands too far above his early struggles to remember to point out such benefits.

© 2016 Anthony P. Bober

A.P. Bober has studied a psychology spanning Skinner and a humanistic-clinical view based on existential phenomenology and had been a PhD candidate in a substantive yet philosophic European-based sociology including the “critical” view. His teaching augmented courses in group theory/”small-group developmental dynamics” (lab) while introducing “sociology of knowledge” and “issues in biological anthropology,” with publications in the first two fields. Currently he is writing a book on mystical experience as metaphorically tied to neuroendocrinology.