Phillip S. Horky (Ed.). Cosmos in the Ancient World. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Cosmos in the Ancient World brings together an interdisciplinary set of essays on the Greek concept of kosmos, and its Latin translation mundus, in Greco-Roman literature, philosophy, and visual culture. Over half of the contributions in the volume are concerned with Greek philosophical texts, which makes sense considering this is the specialty of the editor, Phillip Sidney Horky.
Chapter 1, by Horky, revisits the question as to when kosmos came to denote “cosmos” in the English sense of the word as opposed to abstract “order,” its earliest meaning in surviving Greek literature. The study takes the fresh approach to this inquiry of including doxographical evidence—later summaries of earlier philosophers and philosophical school—namely, the writing of the early-imperial philosopher Favorinus, who says that Pythagoras “was the first to call the heavens kosmos.” Horky works backward from Favorinus’ claim, creating a chain that connects it to more reliable fifth-century evidence.
In Chapter 2, Aurnaud Macé re-considers what it means that the fifth-century philosopher-poet Parmenides characterizes his own poem metaphorically as a “kosmos of words.” By importing metaphorical language from the Homeric epics into his philosophical poem, and then questions the truth claims of poetry, thus casting doubt on the very possibility of humans words to reliably translate the world into a kosmos of words. One is not completely convinced by Macé’s claim that readers of the Homeric epics would have expected kosmos to be a source of truthfulness (p. 46), as this important premise seems to be a generalization based almost entirely on one line in Odysseus’ praise of Demodocus in Odyssey 8.
The term diakosmēsis, “orderly arrangement” and debates over its meaning in fifth-century philosophy is the topic of Malcolm Schofield’s third chapter. He shows that, contrary to scholarly consensus, the Pythagoreans should not receive primary credit for developing the philosophical use of the term. Rather, a number of different philosophers and philosophical schools debated its meaning and pivot on it as a point of disagreement and debate.
Chapter 4 by Monte Ransome Johnson does the useful work of analyzing the status of kosmos in the works of Aristotle. The chapter asks why Aristotle is dubious of the concept and prefers other terms, especially ouranos, “heaven(s)” to denote world-order. Johnson demonstrates that Aristotle tends not to be interested in the discipline that would come to be called cosmology, and for him, kosmos is primarily used as an epexegetical tool to assess and reject arguments of his predecessors. As such, Johnson argues, Aristotle’s contributions to cosmology have perhaps been overemphasized.
Chapter 5 by George Boys-Stones, the first of two essays on Plato, turns from cosmology to ethics. Standard readings of Platonic ethics find them concerned more with a person’s internal life rather than their behavior. Boys-Stones counters this narrative by re-reading a key locus for this idea: the speech of Diotima in the Symposium (210a4-c7), where she describes the rungs on the “ladder of love” by which a person comes to behold true beauty. Countering the prevailing interpretation of the passage, the chapter argues convincingly that Diotima relates a four-step process culminating of a vision of the soul in action. This, in turn, is more consistent with Platonic ethics elsewhere, as beautiful actions by the likes of Socrates can enable us to see beneath the ugly surface to inner beauty.
Chapter 6 by Luc Brisson collects the key evidence in Plato’s Laws for the polis-kosmos analogy developed throughout. Education, the allocation of magistracies, and even the circular shape of the ideal city and its surroundings all contribute to ordering the individual life like the kosmos. As a result, the sophistic opposition between nomos and physis is erased as law becomes the expression of nature.
We turn from Platonism to Neoplatonism in chapter 7 by Paulina Remes, who considers the implications of cosmology on Plotinus’ moral philosophy. Remes’ reading identifies a rare glimpse at a Neoplatonist theory of practical ethics, which is for the most part absent from the philosophical school. Just as Boys-Stones shows that Diotima’s theory of virtue involves the actions of a person in the world, Remes shows that Plotinus conceives human action as being relational and situation. The virtuous person must understand and come to grips with the particularities of his or her own place and situation in the kosmos.
Chapter 8 by Carol Atack offers a diachronic reading of the crucial kosmos-polis analogy from Homer to the third century. She seeks to rebut a tradition that reads the analogy as being heavily influenced by a democratic Athenian worldview and shows instead that there was considerable innovation in the history of the analogy that tends towards not democratic but aristocratic ideology.
Renaud Gagné’s ninth chapter is an elegant study of the metapoetic implications of the important metaphor The Kosmos Is a Chorus in epic, tragedy, and epigram. While critics tend to be more interested in what the tenor (the kosmos) of the metaphor has to say about the conceptualization of the vehicle (the chorus) and Greek theology, ideology, and narrative, he shows that world-making authors also project various elements of chorality onto the physical world. These projections reveal subtle reflections of poets’ attitudes towards the relationship between their art and the natural world.
In Chapter 10, Robert Germany illustrates that Roman dramatists were sensitive to the similarities between dramatic production and augural practices. Roman augury involved a process of contemplatio, or the cordoning off of a templum or square space on the ground and in the sky. Heavenly events observed from the terrestrial templum in the celestial one had augural significance. Thus, the process is comparable to that of watching a play. Roman authors deployed images of augury in their plays for comic and cosmic effect as it drew attention to the dramatic “world” of the play and offered metacommentary on the religious significance of the dramas, performed at religious festivals. Sadly, the young author of such a brilliant chapter, seamlessly incorporating allusions to Heidegger, Kant, and Duck Amuck, died during the publication of the volume.
Chapter 11 by Gilles Sauron investigates Roman buildings designed to imitate the kosmos. Incorporating both literary and archaeological evidence, Sauron shows that Romans were keenly interested in designing spaces that mimicked the experience of an individual in the world, and that these designs were always conditioned by philosophical, ideological, or political messages. The reading experience of this chapter would have been greatly aided by images of the literary buildings reconstructed and the archaeological remains described.
Chapter 12 by W. H. Shearin contrasts theories of the sublime that emerge out of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and the sixth book of Seneca’s Naturales Questiones. He does so by analyzing how both authors deploy the concept of the “limit” as a point of overlap between the nature of human knowledge and that of the physical world. For Lucretius, his belief in the infinity of worlds makes certain knowledge impossible, and the sublime vision of his poem is the depiction of heroic defiance of imperfect human knowledge that characterizes the relatively limited general principles Epicureans proposed. For Seneca, by contrast, since the divine is in all things including the human mind, omniscience is theoretically possible and sublimity is encountered by approaching it through the encyclopedic effort to “know nature” (nosse naturam, NQ 6.4.2).
The final chapter, also by Phillip Horky, traces the notion of “cosmic breath” from Pre-socratic and Stoic philosophy through the Jewish philosopher Philo, the Gospels, and Paul’s Epistles. Whereas for Pythagoras and the Stoics cosmic “breath” permeated the entire kosmos linking the human and non-human worlds, Philo and the early Christians tended to conceive of divine breath as distinguishing humans from the natural world. For Philo divine breath was grounds for differentiating human and animal intellective capacities that God breathed into the world (rather than the kosmos itself breathing). Taking this idea further, early Christians tended to conceive of the Holy Spirit that existed among the Christian community, uniting not the kosmos so much as the Christian kosmospolis.
Victoria Wohl’s “Afterword” takes its cue from an enigmatic fragment of Heraclitus: “The most beautiful kosmos is like the sweepings at random of things scattered” (2B 124 Diels Kranz). As she highlights in her recap of the articles, the beauty of kosmos is that it can traverse many different domains of thought and richly connect them through analogy. Indeed, as the book makes clear, kosmos is a meta-system that spawns meta-systems, creating analogies between cosmology, theology, politics, ethics, rhetoric, architecture, etc. As Wohl insightfully observes, it is by the very nature of kosmos that its theoretical horizons ever expand in a nomadic, rhizomatic, and thus disorderly way. It is therefore characterized by a fundamental akosmia, and its endless forms might be said to constellate less another kosmos than what Deleuze, following Joyce, called a “chaosmos.”
As these remarks apply to kosmos they too, in the best of ways, apply also to Cosmos in the Ancient World. The very organization of the book and its balance of more traditional ancient philosophy with innovative readings of poetry, prose, and archaeological remains testify to the robust image of kosmos the volume produces. Beyond the remarks above on some of the individual papers, I do not have much at all to say as a critique of the book. There could have been a more even balance between chapters devoted entirely to Greek literature (10 in number) to those devoted to Latin (3). Relatedly, it is somewhat misleading to imply that mundus as the only Latin translation of kosmos, as the volume does a number of times (pp. 9-10, 213). To be sure, in Latin cosmological writing the primary technical translation of kosmos as “world” or “world-order” is mundus, but if the volume teaches us anything it is to be cautious of reading kosmos as it is deployed in one theoretical domain without also bearing in mind its denotations elsewhere. Latin authors also refract kosmos through other words, like ornatus (ornament), cultus (refinement, elegance), decor, and decus (decorum, proper behavior), even if those terms also have other primary Greek analogues.
I make this point not to quibble about semantic details, but rather because I think it reveals a broader question about translation. As Wohl (pp. 295) writes, kosmos “denotes ‘the cosmos,’ in our modern sense of the term, but also beauty, ornamentation, and order.” The polyvalence of the same term referring both to order and ornament (in certain senses a paradox) is a primary challenge of translating kosmos. In my own dissertation, for example, I sometimes translate kosmos as “makeup.” The volume, however, and especially Horky’s framing introduction, are interested almost entirely in the first meaning, as kosmos is used especially in natural philosophy and especially cosmology. He notes Wohl’s distinction between order and adornment at 6n.26, but gently dismisses the latter in the context of early Greek laws and does not say more on it. The importance of retaining both meanings is visible, for example, in the opening lines of Gorgias’ Encomium to Helen:
The kosmos of a polis is manpower, of a body beauty, of a soul wisdom, of an action virtue, of a speech truth, and the opposite of these make for akosmia.
Surprisingly, Horky sees here a distinction between “order” and “disorder” in kosmos and akosmia (p. 7). This, however, feels like a bit of a stretch, as Gorgias seems to mean kosmos here not as “order” but as “ornament,” or “crown,” as it is often translated in, say, Pindar, when he speaks of a victor of an athletic competition receiving the kosmos of a laurel wreath (e.g. Pindar, Olympian Ode 3.13). Finally, as one scholar has pointed out, it is particularly difficult to find a sense of purposeful arrangement in the description of the purple-stained bridle as a kosmos in the Iliad (4.145; Puhvel 1976: 156).
I look forward to future scholarship that builds on this excellent book to further explore the peculiar polyvalence of kosmos and its philosophical and literary ramifications.
Del A. Maticic, PhD Candidate in Classics, New York University. del.matcic@nyu.edu
Works Cited
Puhvel, Jahn. 1976. “The Origins of Greek Kosmos and Latin Mundus. American Journal of Philology 97(2): 154-67: 156.