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

• Author: Hunter, Richard
• Position: Book Review

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...