A book like this is very long overdue, and Anderson has given us exactly what we needed: a succinct and engagingly written overview of the subject, with enough detail to be genuinely enlightening to professionals in both folkloristics and classical studies.
The intersection of these two disciplines has been a difficult one for most scholars to navigate successfully. Few people in either discipline have any training in the technical tools necessary for serious research in the other, as Anderson points out in his opening chapter, “‘Or Some People Say’: Definitions and Approaches.” There has been a long history of folklorists overlooking relevant classical material or being unable to find and read it in the original Greek or Latin; and of classicists making uninformed judgments about folklore and the nature of folktale, and remaining disastrously ignorant of the International Tale Type Index. Recent research has improved on this gap--witness, e.g., the collaboration between folklorist Alan Dundes and classical scholar Lowell Edmunds on Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook (2nd ed. 1995), or William Hansen’s Ariadne’s Thread: A Guide to International Tales Found in Classical Literature (2002). What had still not appeared, however, was a guidebook like Anderson’s, which attempts to survey the wide range of folklore discoverable in the ancient Greek and Roman world, and to connect it to modern categories and parallels.
After the introductory chapter already cited, Anderson follows with chapters on “Fountains of Tradition: Some Sources of Folklore in Antiquity”; “Passing it On: The Transmission of Folklore”; “Traditional Forms: Folktale, Myth, Fairy Tale, Legend”; “Folk Wit and Wisdom: From Fable to Anecdote”; “The Personnel of Folklore: From Nymphs to Bogeymen”; “Folk Customs, Luck, Superstition”; “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: The Natural World in Popular Perception”; and “Medicine and Magic.” A final tenth chapter, “Conclusion,” is too brief at four and a half pages to bring an adequate sense of closure to all that we have been shown, but it does successfully bring out one of the cardinal points Anderson has been making: the Greco-Roman world not only shows considerable continuity with the culture of the ancient Near East, but also “does not stand too far apart from the picture we might gather of the folklore of Modern Europe” (190). Throughout the book, Anderson has argued for continuity rather than revival when we see ancient customs, rituals, sayings, or stories still alive in our modern world, and most readers should find him persuasive. One marvelous example, likely to be unknown to most classicists or folklorists, is that the boys’ game often called “Buck, buck, how many fingers do I have up?” was played in ancient Rome and the language used was virtually identical: “Bucca, bucca, quot sunt hic?” (46). This game is widely reported from England to India (although missing in parts of Eastern Europe), and many American readers will, like myself, remember it from the streets and playgrounds of our youth.
Anderson’s treatment of all his topics comes across as reasonable and balanced, and his coverage of ancient folkloric subject matter and its sources is usually first-rate. However, his chapters sometimes seem a little too short for all that he wishes to cover. They average about twenty pages, which leads me to wonder whether he was constrained by a page-limit set by his publisher. Some of his discussions would have benefited from greater length and more inclusion of material, and readers with classical backgrounds may find that topics on which they are especially well-informed could have been treated more extensively. I found this to be true of chapter 5 on “Folk Wit and Wisdom: From Fable to Anecdote,” which strives to cover many important short verbal genres. Some omission was no doubt inevitable, but I was surprised to find no mention of the maxim (Greek gnome), or of Aristotle’s important discussions, in both his Rhetoric and his Poetics, of proverbs and maxims and how they differ from one another--a topic that has engaged modern paroemiologists. Anderson’s discussion of the anecdote is good, but could have been enriched by reference to the memorable examples preserved in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers. The apothegm is also not mentioned, where a reference to Plutarch’s several collections of “sayings” (Greek apophthegma) would have been appropriate (Sayings of Kings and Commanders, Romans, Spartans, and Spartan Women, all available in vol. 3 of the Loeb Classical Library edition of Plutarch’s Moralia). Also, there should have been some mention here of the massive proverb collections from late antiquity known as the Corpus Paroemiographorum Graecorum (Corpus of Greek Paroemiographers). It does appear in Anderson’s Bibliography (as Paroemiographi Graeci), but the reader is left with no understanding of what a rich source this is, representing the labor of many ancient collectors.
The only other complaint one might raise concerning this very useful book is the author’s largely unsympathetic treatment, in his introductory chapter, of theories whose influence was once very strong but has faded in recent years. Freudian and Jungian theory, structuralism, sociological interpretations, and the myth-and-ritual approach were certainly oversold by many of their advocates, but Anderson seems more interested in emphasizing their shortcomings than noting what valid insights might be preserved from these approaches. In noting Walter Burkert’s impressive attempt to create a new kind of ritual-based interpretation of myth, Anderson’s discussion is much too brief to do justice to all that Burkert has written. Similarly, his discussion of Marxist theory is too short to say anything meaningful. Again, a reader must wonder whether such abridged discussion is the result of the writer’s inclination to brevity or editorially imposed page limits.
Any shortcomings I have mentioned are minor compared to the great merits of this book, which extend to its very useful bibliography and list of Web resources. The last attempt at a survey of Greek and Roman folklore was William Halliday’s book of that title published in 1927. An updating was sorely needed, and Anderson performs the job admirably.
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[Review length: 983 words • Review posted on December 5, 2007]