The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander.

Hunter, Richard

By PHIROZE VASUNIA. Classics and Contemporary Thought, vol. 8. Berkeley and Los Angeles: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2001. Pp. ix + 346. $45, 29.95 [pounds sterling].

Egypt appears already in the earliest extant Greek literature (cf. Homer, Iliad 9.379-86 on the wealth of Thebes) and never goes away; by later antiquity it is a dominant presence on the Greek horizon (c.f., e.g., its central place in the Aithiopika of Heliodorus). In the classical period, Egypt is the subject of a fascinating ethnography and history in the second book of Herodotus, makes many appearances in Attic tragedy (Euripides' Helen is actually set there), and it was to Egypt that Plato claimed to trace some of his most important political philosophy. Vasuina's new book aims to explore this Greek engagement with Egypt in certain central authors and texts of the classical period (Aeschylus' Supplices, Herodotus, Plato, Isocrates' Busiris), and to consider how this lengthy engagement may have influenced both Alexander's incorporation of "this antique land" and what Greeks and Macedonians (to say nothing of more modern "travellers") did with Egypt, how they "saw" it, once they had it. Let it be said at once that this is a serious, bibliographically thorough, and intelligent book on a very good subject, and deserves a wide readership, not just among classicists, but also among those interested in cultural exchange and history more generally. Vasunia's book is informed by a judicious use of comparative material, particularly from the Middle East and India, and--as is appropriate for the series in which it appears--by a very up-to-date theoretical awareness, particularly in the areas of colonial and gender studies. It is attractively produced and engagingly written, with only occasional infelicities ("Death is a telos in the Greek imagination ...," p. 50).

The "Egypt" of Greek literature is, of course, always a country of the imagination, however familiar with the land of the Nile some Greeks actually were (and had been from at least the seventh century B.C.). Vasunia's book is thus rightly concerned principally with Greek "representations" of Egypt, though it might be thought that he rather labors this point; it will not come as a great surprise that Greek representations of Egypt are exactly that, i.e., Greek: thus Herodotus' all-encompassing textual domination of Egyptian time and space "insists on the authority of the Greek observer at its core" (p. 13). Moreover, it is clear that, in degrees that vary from writer to writer, the engagement with an "other" Egypt is an engagement with one-sell Thus, for example, in his discussion of Aeschylus, Vasunia focuses on the Danaid women's abhorrence of the possibility of sex with "hypervirile" black men as (inter alia) an exploration of tensions within the city of Athens itself, and indeed within individual Athenians. "If we twist Freud's famous question ... and ask instead What does the Greek man want?, the plays give the answer that the Greek man wants to do precisely what the Egyptian men are attempting to do in these plays ... Egyptian men are realizing the desires of the Greek male spectators who are watching the dramas" (p. 73). I am bound to say that, taken at face value, this seems to me a surprisingly unnuanced view of how the "othering" of myth and drama work at the level of psychology.

Rather happier, I think, are Vasunia's enlightening discussions of Herodotus' representation of the map of Egypt and of the "otherness" of Egyptian space more generally (pp. 87ff.) and of the various Platonic exploitations of the idea of Egypt (Phaedrus and writing; Timaeus, Critias and the Atlantis story) where Vasunia has much of interest to say about, e.g., how we can move from differences in the practice of and attitudes to writing to cultural and ideological difference. Vasunia is properly aware, and makes good use of that awareness, that we must not "repress the encounter of Greeks and Egyptians through the reductive idiom of binarism, [but] rather.., read that encounter within a more productive language of difference" (p. 137).

For this reader the least satisfactory chapter was perhaps that devoted to Isocrates' Busiris, though it may be churlish not to welcome serious discussion of a work which hardly groans under the weight of a critical tradition. Here again, however, it seemed to me that Vasunia is insufficiently trusting of his readers, who surely do not need it explained at great length that the parodic rhetoric of this epideixis reinforces rather than undermines conventional attitudes to its subject.

It would certainly be unfair to end on a note of criticism. This book opens up for general discussion a number of important issues in the Greek worldview and does so in a way that allows us to see why these issues still matter. It is, therefore, much to be welcomed.

RICHARD HUNTER

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE