7
Where to Look for Books
Athens in Berkeley

In the early years of this century Jane K. Sather was left a considerable sum of money by her husband, a banker.^[1] Living in Berkeley at a time when bankers were still honored there, she was generous to the local university, donating a granite bell tower, a bronze campus gate, and other things less monumental. Among these, and at President Wheeler's suggestion, were two academic chairs, one in history and the other a visiting professorship in classical literature, broadly conceived.

The first holders of that chair were invited to teach and not to write books. The very first of all—to digress for a moment—was John Linton Myers of New College, Oxford, who arrived in 1914, just ahead of the First World War. Leaving Berkeley, he went immediately into the Royal Navy and was given command of a small gunboat. The Sather professor of just fifty years later, Sterling Dow of Harvard, in a little book about those who came before him, tells this story about Myers. A huge and unexpected British battleship steamed into waters—near Greece, of course—where Myers had orders to let no ships pass. Interpreting orders to the letter, Myers ran up flags that spelled out "Stop or I'll open fire." The battleship, steaming on, replied, also in flags, "Does your mother know you're out?"^[2] Myers was subse-

[1] This chapter is based, in part, on an account of the Sather Lectures in the California Monthly , December 1979.

[2] Fifty Years of Sathers (Berkeley, 1965).

quently knighted—for another action, I think—and came to Berkeley a second time in 1927, after the professorship had been transformed, and produced a celebrated book entitled Who Were the Greeks? , the sixth volume in the series of Sather Classical Lectures.

When we began in earnest to look for books, the best intellectual beginning we had, thanks to the Sather series, was in classical history and literature. By 1950 there were twenty-two volumes, and in the following year three more came into print, including two of considerable importance: The Development of Attic Black-Figure , by Sir John Beazley of Oxford, and The Greeks and the Irrational , by E. R. Dodds of the same university. Here we had something to build on if we knew how.

At first glance one might think the Sathers came about because the president of the University when the Press began was a professor of Greek, Martin Kellogg, and his successor, whom I call inventor of the old Press, was Benjamin Ide Wheeler, professor of classical philology. But neither had anything to do with them. Theirs was a press of serial monographs. Wheeler, as we have seen, thought books too commercial for a university; he established the Sather lectureship but there were no books until after he retired.

The transition began in 1920, one year after Wheeler, when the power of appointment passed from the president's office to the departments of Greek and Latin. Two professors of Greek, Ivan Linforth and George Calhoun, suggested that the professorship might be given formal distinction if each visitor were asked to deliver a number of public lectures that could be made into a book. Calhoun, it seems, must even then have had the scheming instincts of a publisher although he did not become manager of the Press until several years later. He asked that the lectures be prepared in form suitable for publication and expressed hope that the first volume might be devoted to Homer.

So began a great book series, by now perhaps the best in the classical field, a happy future that could be hoped for at the beginning but not predicted. Few book series rise out of mediocrity. A great series, like a great anything else, cannot be had quickly, nor can it be

Ward Richie's title page for Beazley's 
Development of Attic Black-Figure (1951).

bought with high fees, if one has them, or with the promise of California sunshine, a promise not always fulfilled. The results can be controlled, in part at least, one hopes, by choosing the lecturers carefully, by appointing them a few years in advance, allowing adequate time to prepare a manuscript. More important, at a later time, is the quality of the already published books; if truly good, these can be a

challenge to those who lecture and write after them. And another challenge, at least in later years, was the number of distinguished scholars in the audience, those in the classics department as well as classicists in other departments, such as history, comparative literature, philosophy, art history.

Perhaps even more important is the small matter of luck, particularly with the first few books. Without early distinction not much can be expected later on. Calhoun, if he was the prime chooser, must have been both shrewd and lucky. The very first book, The Unity of Homer (1921) by John Adams Scott, not only began at the beginning with the Iliad and the Odyssey but turned out to be enormously and widely influential. Epoch-making, Sterling Dow called it. It made the case for a single author of the two epics at a time when many considered them a patchwork by different authors writing at different times. Scott summoned up a vast array of evidence and won the day—at least for his own day. The series began not with a monograph but with a bang.

After this epic beginning there were volumes on other topics, Greek and Roman, history and literature, some of them highly regarded. But every few years the lecturers came back to the first fascination, the first arena, where the Homeric question continued to excite study and fan controversy. Fitting enough, we may agree, since the two epics were the centerpiece of education in the ancient Mediterranean world—a world that made us what we are, for better or worse, and in spite of attempts to claim otherwise.

One might think that 2,600 years or thereabouts—the time passed since the Homeric poems were written down—would suffice for scholars to reach some sort of agreement on their character and meaning. But no. Questions about them have continued to be hotly debated. Among new theories was that of Milman Parry—who happened to be a student in Berkeley at the time Scott lectured—that the two epics were composed orally and transmitted by memory and voice from one generation to another, with what changes we cannot be sure. A related development was the vast increase of knowledge of folklore and myth, ancient and modern. But the most striking change

of all came about a hundred years ago when the old Sacramento banker Heinrich Schliemann dug up Troy, Tiryns, and Mycenae.^[3]

Before Schliemann and his more scientific successors little was known about the actuality of Bronze Age Greece. After them there was the picture, incomplete but dazzling, of a brilliant Mycenaean civilization on the mainland and a more or less contemporary Minoan culture on Crete. Both were destroyed, the Mycenaean about 1200 or 1100 B.C., and Greece then slid down into what is called the Dark Age—whether the darkness properly describes the time itself or only our lack of knowledge about it. In any event the archaeological remains become fewer and lower in quality; the syllabic writing attested by the tablets from Pylos and elsewhere disappears; writing of any kind seems to be unknown for three or four hundred years until the appearance of a Greek alphabet, derived in part from the Phoenician. In the intervening years the Mediterranean world had changed out of recognition. (All this is over-simplified, of course.)

The Homeric poems purport to describe Mycenaean events but were not written down until much later, when the alphabet was available, and in a kind of Ionian Greek.^[4] So where did they come from, and what are they? What society do they portray? How do they relate, or do they relate, to the Mycenaean world revealed by excavation? Who was (or were) Homer?

The Sather professor in 1930 was Martin Persson Nilssen of the University of Lund in Sweden. His book, The Mycenaean Origins of Greek Mythology , marshaled evidence to prove that the body of Greek myths that we know from historical times goes back in reality to the much earlier Bronze Age. Among other evidence, it is the cities and places of that age, authenticated as such by archaeological digs, that play a central role in the myths. So the memory of Mycenaean times,

[3] Although Schliemann's stay in California was brief, it was during the great gold rush. He demonstrated his ability to make money and became an American citizen.

[4] A mixture of Ionic and Aeolic, according to Bernard Knox in an attractive discussion of the Homeric question, part of his introduction to Robert Fagles' translation of the Iliad (New York, 1990).

transformed and re-imagined into the cyclic stories used by dramatists and others, carried over the Dark Age and into the later and familiar classical Greece. Nilsson's book made possible a whole new way of looking at Greek literature and religion. It has been reprinted many times in paperback, most recently with an introduction by Emily Vermeule, whose own book is described below.

In 1945 came Rhys Carpenter of Bryn Mawr, whose Folk Tale, Fiction, and Saga in the Homeric Epics makes much of folk and mythic material but finds little that is Mycenaean in the two poems. He prefers northern and European elements; and he believes that the epics were composed rather late, not long before they could have been written down, and that there were two authors, one fifty years earlier than the other. The Iliad , he says, was composed from traditional material or saga; the Odyssey from folkloric elements.

Those who prefer history to myth were more attracted to Denys Page's History and the Homeric Iliad , delivered as lectures in 1957 and published in 1959. For Page, the Trojan War really happened, although not as described in the epic; it was a sort of war of succession after the collapse of the Hittite empire in Asia Minor. Textual and archaeological evidence, including the tablets from Pylos, are examined to make a compelling case for an Iliad that is much older than Carpenter will allow. Although the form that comes to us is largely Ionian, "after hundreds of years have elapsed, the Iliad still displays the story of Troy in its Mycenaean setting." Page's book is two books in one. The text moves along, swiftly, with a high degree of intellectual excitement. The notes are for the specialized reader, whose Greek had better be good and who might profitably know a little Hittite.

An equally exciting and more visual Sather came out in 1979: Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry by Emily Vermeule, a classicist and archaeologist at Harvard, whose chief specialty is again the Bronze Age. Vermeule explores, in hundreds of incidents and illustrations, the poetry and especially the iconography of death: reliefs, vase paintings, rings and gem designs, decorated cups and bowls; sea monsters, sirens, Harpies, phallos-birds and ba-birds, winged and other daimons. In a witty and lighthearted manner that belies or per-

Achilles and Penthesileia. From an archaic 
bronze shield strap from Olympia.

haps saves the subject matter, she considers burial practices; the nature of the soul (like a bird that flies from the body at death); ways of existence in the kingdom of Hades; the relation between mortality and immortality, and how to go from one to the other; the number of people killed in the Iliad (243); "the interpenetration of war and love, like the two sides of a drinking cup." Achilles, slaying the warrior-woman Penthesileia, "felt a shock of love for the Amazon queen just as he plunged his spear between her breast and throat." Or, quoting Quintus Smyrnaeus, he "could not control the grief in his heart, because he had killed her, and had not taken her as his glorious wife."

But I go on too long about one aspect of the series, and with Vermeule have brought the story up beyond the building period that is my subject. The books have never been all Homer. One of the 1951 volumes mentioned above, Beazley's book on black-figured vases, be-

came a standard, if specialized, work for students. Years later I worked with Dietrich von Bothmer of the Metropolitan Museum to bring out a second edition with unchanged text but new notes and illustrations, published in 1986.

The other 1951 book, The Greeks and the Irrational , by the Irish scholar E. R. Dodds, may be the most celebrated of all the Sathers; it later became a mainstay of our paperback list and is still in print. If others opened a new vision on the Homeric world, Dodds suggested a fresh way of viewing the entire Greek experience. The common view, promoted by sentimental Hellenists, saw the Greeks as an eminently rational and well-ordered people, always in control of themselves. One wonders how this could be, given the violence of Greek history and the fury and madness that run through the literature (such as in the Bacchae of Euripides), but the thought persisted of a culture as serene and balanced as classical statuary. Employing the techniques of anthropology and psychology, Dodds assembled evidence for the other, the nonrational, element in Greek thought and behavior. Even the great Age of Enlightenment was also an Age of Persecution, and in any event did not last long. "An intelligent observer in or about the year 200 B.C. might well have predicted that within a few generations . . . the perfect Age of Reason would follow." It did not, of course, as it later failed to follow the hopes of the philosophes of the eighteenth century and the rationalists of the nineteenth. Reason, it seems, is a precursor of astrology, romanticism, revolution, and their ilk. In our own age of unreason, we can feel all too much at home with Dodds' view of the ancient world.

But fine as these books were, in the early 1950s there were only two or three that were both current and notable. Too few to make a list, they gave us a possible springboard. If we pleased a lecturer, we could ask about other books on the drawing board and could get introductions to friends and colleagues. If the lecturer were British, as so many were, we could get in touch with his London publisher and offer to take American editions of later books or of other books in the field. As the publisher of Dodds and Beazley, we were not just any hungry American press; we had some standing; new

books would join a respectable company. Thus, after publishing K. J. Dover's Sather lectures on Lysius, we later obtained his books on Aristophanic comedy and on Greek popular morality.

There were pitfalls, of course. Most British firms were pleased to sell American editions; many of their more scholarly books could not easily be financed without a joint publisher. But there were others that demanded a return in kind, and we had little to offer. A couple of firms refused to deal with us unless we would sell them British rights to the entire Sather series, and that we preferred not to do, fearing that the series might become only half ours. One London firm—Methuen, I think it was—kept us on a sort of blacklist until the then managing director retired. Later we did considerable business.

One afternoon in Bloomsbury an editor handed me an untidy typescript, and the next day I read away hours over the Atlantic. The pages were amended and added to and written over, almost like a Proustian proof, but around and underneath the markings the reader could detect one subtle mind at work on another. This was the manuscript of Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo , which we published in 1967 together with Faber & Faber. An intellectual and spiritual biography, it became a sort of classic and a long-time steady seller in paperback. It also gives a vivid picture of Roman Africa, which Brown has called the intellectual powerhouse of the later Western empire. Carthage was then the second city in the West. It is chastening to be reminded that North Africa at that time had been Romanized, civilized, for more centuries than our own country has yet survived, and that in Augustine's youth, in the mid fourth century, it was perhaps more prosperous, better ordered, than it has ever been in the 1,600 years since then. Good social history can help us see ourselves small.

Late antiquity, from about 200 to 700 A.D., has also been one of the dark ages, in the sense that we have known little about it. Scholars, concentrating on classical Greece and on the Roman republic and empire in the days of intrigue and glory, have paid these later centuries little attention. "It was a great civilization in itself," says Brown, who is one of those who have in recent years given special attention to this period. It was there all along, of course, but hidden behind

the idea of Decline and Fall. The great Gibbon, dazzled by the Antonines, was not always sympathetic to what came after them. "I have described," he wrote, "the triumph of barbarism and Christianity." But Brown and others have pointed out that there was no decline and no fall; the political superstructure may have collapsed, but the texture of town and country life remained much as it was, with northern barbarians happy to be absorbed into Roman culture. The transformation was gradual as long as the Mediterranean world remained intact. "We live round a sea," said Socrates, "like frogs round a pond." Some think there was always a kind of unity until it was broken by the Muslim conquest.

Throughout these centuries there was both continuity and change. The living classical tradition, wrote Brown, "never stood still; it adapted to the rise of Christianity, the end of paganism, the formation of Rabbinic Judaism, the Arab invasions, and to many silent secular changes." The close study of this complex Mediterranean world has become in recent decades a major field of scholarly endeavor. Brown himself, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, when we first met him, later came to this country and joined the Berkeley faculty for a number of years. In 1979 he proposed to the Press the publication of a series of books to be called The Transformation of the Classical Heritage, with himself as general editor. There are nearly twenty books by now. So one thing leads to another in list building. A single book, imported almost by accident, may multiply itself years later and in ways not expected.

The line of causation is not always so clear. On another day in London, and without thinking of consequences, I took from a small English firm a book of essays entitled The Shadow of the Parthenon . The author, although English, was teaching at the University of Texas, and in Austin one day I invited him to the Driskill Hotel for a drink. Finding it easy to talk, we kept in touch. Years later, after retirement, I read the manuscript of Peter Green's Alexander to Actium , a large history of the Hellenistic age, and brought it to the Press. Meanwhile, during the long editorial gestation of this book, a number of Berkeley scholars had proposed another new book series to the

Press, this one to be entitled Hellenistic Culture and Society. In part, I think, the idea for the series grew out of a large book sponsored just before retirement, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome , by the great scholar Erich Gruen. The Roman conquest of the Greek world, so often looked on as a phase of Roman imperialist ambition, is here viewed by Gruen from the other direction, seen in its Hellenistic context, with Greeks and Romans interacting and with the former sometimes manipulating the latter. The book is important, said F. W. Walbank of Cambridge, not only in relation to Roman expansion but for thinking about "any aspect of imperialism in other periods and contexts."

Peter Green's book became the first volume in the new series,^[5] reminding me of my own dictum that a successful series should start with a bang—a big book and not a monograph. Again, we are talking about books in a field that is not new but has been neglected and is beginning to receive fresh attention. The Hellenistic age, the three hundred years or so between the death of Alexander and the Roman empire, has often been looked down on as an inferior time of quarrelsome monarchs and literature of little consequence. However that may be, it was a time of important change, when the eastern Mediterranean world became Greek in culture, at least on the upper social levels, and remained Greek through the Roman centuries and early Christian times. Having been neglected by all but a few, it is now a fertile area for study.

If I seem to dwell too long on trans-Atlantic maneuvers, this is perhaps because they appear more dramatic than home ventures. But the actuality was never so over-balanced; Erich Gruen was only one of many local authors. Jock Anderson of classics, erudite in more areas than I can mention, wrote on Xenophon, on military practices, on hunting in the ancient world. An editor tells that she once took some proofs to Anderson's office. His table was buried under a deep layer of books on many topics, journals, reprints, lecture notes, parts

[5] The four general editors are Gruen of the history department, Anthony W. Bullock and A. A. Long of classics, and Andrew F. Stewart of art history.

of manuscripts; there was no place to spread out the proofs. For a moment Jock looked bewildered, as he sometimes could, but only for a moment, and then the problem was solved. A long arm swept the assorted wisdom onto the floor.

The wide-ranging Tom Rosenmeyer of comparative literature, subtle critic of many literatures, ancient and modern, at home in philosophy and drama, wrote about Theocritus and the European pastoral lyric,^[6] then moved on to produce the elegant Art of Aeschylus and Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology . Meanwhile he found time to invent and act as general editor of a book series called Eidos: Studies in Classical Kinds. The first volume of this was a graceful account of the ancient lyric, by W. R. Johnson, who had meanwhile moved from Berkeley to Cornell to Chicago.

In 1964 W. K. Pritchett of Berkeley brought out the first part of his Studies in Ancient Greek Topography in the monographic series in Classical Studies. He continued—and continues—these studies, with six parts or volumes now in print. And there are five volumes of a parallel work, The Greek State at War , this one published in book form. Kendrick Pritchett's style is not the continuous narrative; he chooses topics or aspects of his large subject and treats each one discretely and exhaustively. Peter Green called him "the most formidable topographical bloodhound on a specific trail." And in a letter to me the late historian Sir Moses Finley of Cambridge, one of our Sather lecturers,^[7] wrote that The Greek State at War had moved to the status of a monument."

WKP is famous among scholars for dealing with the terrain itself as well as with artifacts and written records, scorning those who do topographical studies from a corner by the fire. At age eighty he was still climbing Greek mountains, walking ancient roads, and identifying forgotten sites, examining battlefields. He is also a great defender of the ancient historians against modern detractors. Woe to those

[6] The Green Cabinet (1969; paperback 1973).

[7] Author of The Ancient Economy (1973; second edition, 1985).

who impugn the veracity of Herodotos without completing their own homework; they will be demolished when the next volume comes out. Perhaps politely, perhaps not, but demolished. Quite recently a reviewer in the TLS called one of Pritchett's books "a disorganized, bad-tempered masterpiece . . . but a masterpiece for all that."

Pritchett, when he was chairman of classics, conceived the idea of an annual volume of shorter studies in Greek and Latin literature, history, philosophy, art, and other areas, nearly all by scholars from the several California campuses. I was able to get the Editorial Committee's approval, and the volumes, entitled California Studies in Classical Antiquity , appeared for about a dozen years. Bound in cloth and sold as books, they were a sort of cross between book and monograph series. Although there were enough classical writers on all our campuses and in several departments to provide articles, and although the rules of admission were not rigid, the publication could never quite avoid the look of a house organ, and the Editorial Committee eventually decreed that it be replaced by a true journal, open to all comers. In 1982 it became Classical Antiquity , with a board of five editors, and is still published under that name.

This may be a fitting place to say something about the role of the editor or publisher in building a book list. Most publishers, I think, are not true scholars, who like nothing better than burrowing in the depths of library or archives. Some like me, are not temperamentally suited to long, patient research but are fond of what can come out of it. Looked on charitably, the publisher may be an amateur of scholarship, amateur in the sense of lover. Less charitably, he or she may be called a sort of camp follower but not, we may hope, in the sense intended by the schoolboy who so translated hors de combat .

Publishers and authors are dependent on each other, forever thrown together. More compatible than printers and publishers, I think, but still not always happy with each other. The relation has been called one of odi et amo , with the amo not always apparent. A letter once came to the German publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag,

proclaiming that one of the signs of Napoleon's greatness is that he once had a publisher shot. This from a sociologist.^[8] A better-known detractor, about whom we have published a few books, Ezra Pound, once wrote of publishers and their readers: "These vermin crawl over and beslime our literature . . . and nothing but the day of judgement can, I suppose, exterminate them."^[9] It is sometimes easy to smile at Pound's strong statements, but in this instance a reader for the publisher Duckworth, Edward Garnett, had recommended that James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist be "pulled into shape" and made less "sordid."

The publisher is usually a generalist, interested in many things, shoes and ships and sealing wax, Archilochos and the Zapotecs, excited not only by the results of the best study and research but often by the tools and methods used, the kind of thinking brought to bear. In a field chosen for cultivation the publisher may wish to learn something about what is known to scholars, what is obscure, what is controversial—learn enough to ask good questions, not always an easy matter, as demonstrated by television interviewers. Indeed, the publisher must know enough to pass judgment, after advice from knowledgeable people—who often disagree—on the importance and quality of manuscripts. But one must recognize one's limits, never challenge the scholars' expertise in their own fields—even on occasions when they may seem wrong-headed. The warning applies to both kinds of editing. The copyeditor who once majored in the field of the manuscript in hand will sometimes tend to do too much. On an occasion I know of a too-knowledgeable free-lancer who held up a manuscript for three years.

I came to the classical field accidentally and late, after working with literary translations, Latin American books, art books. Wishing to plug a hole in my education, I sat in on classes in ancient Greek taught by the same Kendrick Pritchett mentioned above and then by

[8] Siegfried Unseld, The Author and His Publisher (Chicago, 1980), 1.

[9] Quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Boston, 1988), 294-95.

Ronald Stroud, and so came to an interest in current classical studies. Or perhaps it was the other way around: the seeking of classical books impelled me to learn some Greek. Years have passed, and memory is not always precise. At about the same time my wife and I spent some weeks in Greece with our neighbor D. A. Amyx, professor of art history, and family. All this, together with sporadic reading, gave me some small knowledge of the field and a feeling for what was going on within it. By then I was old hand enough to avoid the error of some junior editor—claiming to know too much. But I knew what to look for and how to go after it, including the use of patience. It took fifteen or twenty years of pushing—not without irritation—to badger Dick Amyx into finishing his great Corinthian Vase Painting of the Archaic Period (3 volumes, 1988).

Prodding authors does not always work. At intervals over many years in London and Chicago and elsewhere, and by correspondence, I tried to get the noted historian Arnaldo Momigliano to turn loose of his Sather lectures, written but not, he said, in final form. He gave me early on and for safekeeping a copy of the first version. Years later over tea in Knightsbridge he pulled out of his briefcase the revised manuscript and let me look but not get firm hold on it. Back into the briefcase it went—for a little more checking, said he. More years passed; he died; the manuscript was found among his papers and was published in 1990, thirty years after the lectures were spoken in Berkeley.^[10]

On another less than happy occasion the next Sather lecturer wrote to the classics department that he wished to speak on a topic used on another occasion—thus to make double use of lectures and writing. This would never do, of course, but no one in the department wished to tell him so and incur his wrath. So the publisher was elected fall guy, requested to bell the cat, to pass the black spot. Publishers, at such times, are expendable. And if Paris was worth a mass to Henri IV, good will at home in Berkeley was worth an enemy abroad. Like other bearers of bad news, I was executed—socially,

[10] The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography.

The director at his last Editorial Committee meeting. 
Drawing by Uli Knoepflmacher, a member of the Committee.

snubbed in Berkeley, ignored at one dinner party while the great man talked to my wife but not to me. He has never turned in a manuscript.

On a more happy note, the telephone rang early one morning in my London hotel, and I was dispatched by Bill Anderson, chairman of classics, to Cambridge to deal with another designated lecturer, who had threatened to walk out at the eleventh hour. The problem was settled—by our giving in, of course—and the lecturer, the same Moses Finley mentioned earlier, became friendly enough to read many manuscripts for me in the years that followed.

After I concentrated some attention on the field, and especially when trips to London became regular, the list grew rapidly. And it happened by the accident of appointment that for a time in the sixties and seventies there was no classicist on the Editorial Committee. So

I slipped into making the formal presentation of manuscripts in ancient history and literature. Like all other manuscripts, of course, these came with reports from outside referees, but still it was usual practice that each work be examined and presented by an academic member. That the Committee was content to have me do this is a tribute, I think, to the mutual confidence built up in two or three hundred all-day meetings since Press and Committee joined forces in 1949. Everyone seemed happy enough, but shortly after my retirement the Committee requested that a classicist be added to their number. I wondered: did they miss me, or did they fear that I might have misled them? Since then a number of classicists have served. One of them, Ronald Stroud, told his colleagues that we then had the best classical list in this country. I would never have said so much, but it was good to have someone else make the claim.