摘要：Based on her doctoral thesis, Alexandra Bounia explores the 'archaic period' in the historyof collecting in the longue dur¨¦e of European tradition. She describes the type of collectionsduring this period as 'the early hoards and grave goods, the accumulations of Greek templesand open-air shrines, the royal collections of Hellenistic kings, the art and curiosity collectionsheld by the Romans, and the relics treasured by the medieval princes and the church' (p.1).The period examined is particularly interesting because it marks an age of transition fromcollecting as commemoration of triumph in war and for holy dedications to collecting for itsown sake, an intellectual and social phenomenon with associated practices such as artpatronage and the emergence of the individual collector driven by a variety of personal motivesand ideological and social demands. Of Pearce's (1995, p. 55) four phases in the developmentof collecting, (archaic, early modern, classic modern and postmodern) this is the earliest andthe least understood; consequently this book fills a significant gap in our knowledge and isan important addition to the literature of historical museology.The author uses the works of four Latin writers ¨C Marcus Tullius Cicero, Gaius PliniusSecundus, Marcus Valerius Martialis and Titus Petronius Arbiter ¨C who lived and wrote duringthe first century BCE and the first century CE as her key sources to explore attitudes to collectingin the classical world. Their views are mapped against four key parameters, antiquarianism;the gift exchange tradition; identity; and time and space, in order to identify the motivations forcollecting. There are, of course, difficulties in 'reading' ancient texts as sources of data, andBounia devotes the whole of the first chapter to this issue, dissecting the work of Ricoeur andBarthes to find a methodology to enable historical 'reality' to emerge from classical documents.Having elected to read the works in the light of Ricoeur's 'Analogue', she is aware that eventhis approach is problematical, noting 'What we can reach is interpretations of this world, orperceptions of the interpretations of this world' (p. 41).
