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Palmyra: An Irreplaceable Treasure by Paul Veyne

Palmyra: An Irreplaceable Treasure by Paul Veyne Paul Veyne, Palmyra: An Irreplaceable Treasure, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 88 pp. This book is an elegant, short tribute to a major site in the Syrian desert, severely damaged by ISIS rebels, though, at the moment, “liberated.” Its buildings, largely of the second century AD, attest an eastern declaration of Roman imperial rule, and those of the third century declare the presence of a true Roman “metropolis,” with all the necessary architectural trappings. Roman styles in architecture and sculpture became current from Britain to the Euphrates, and were here adjusted to a desert setting, a monumental “caravan city” for routes east, but also a center for Roman power in the Middle East. Veyne’s essay dwells on the city’s role as a vassal of Rome under a local dynasty that regarded its realm as virtually its own, notably under their queen, Zenobia, who, in barely two years, extended her rule to Egypt and Arabia and even eyed Europe until stopped by the Emperor Aure - lian. She was both “an oriental queen — and a true Roman citizen” in a city that still reveled in its oriental banquets. The ruins of Palmyra have enticed travelers no less than its history has fascinated scholars. It remains to be seen how easy it can be to restore and rebuild what can be so easily destroyed, but Palmyra’s fame relies on more than its monuments, and the site will never lose its appeal. — John Boardman doi 10.1215/0961754X-4254048 Ezra Pound, Posthumous Cantos, ed. Massimo Bacigalupo (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2015), 220 pp. Part extraordinary lyrical beauty, part cantankerous political mania, part his- torical vignette, part reverie, and part dark imprecation, its elements immiscible and its organizing compass rendered unusable almost as soon as the project got underway, Pound’s Cantos exists as one of the great high- minded disasters of li- t erary modernism. As the patient, caretaking, and devoted editor of this volume rightly says, “the only continuous and irreversible story that we can make out in its turbulent pages is the poet’s own life, his travels and sudden departures, his pitfalls and misadventures, his aesthetic youth, his maturity increasingly occu - pied by economic projects, the day of reckoning of his incarceration, the relatively serene twilight of his final years.” Sifting through the mass of jottings and frag - ments that Pound left upon his death in 1972, Bacigalupo has assembled a portfo - lio of items, long and short, that served Pound either as drafts of the cantos that were published, as notes to himself, or as poetic gestures bearing little specic fi Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/common-knowledge/article-pdf/24/1/165/518229/0240165.pdf by DEEPDYVE INC user on 22 August 2019 L i t t l e R e v i e w s 16 5 http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Common Knowledge Duke University Press

Palmyra: An Irreplaceable Treasure by Paul Veyne

Boardman, John
Common Knowledge , Volume 24 (1) – Jan 1, 2018
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Copyright
Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press
ISSN
0961-754X
eISSN
1538-4578
DOI
10.1215/0961754X-4254048
Publisher site
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Abstract

Paul Veyne, Palmyra: An Irreplaceable Treasure, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 88 pp. This book is an elegant, short tribute to a major site in the Syrian desert, severely damaged by ISIS rebels, though, at the moment, “liberated.” Its buildings, largely of the second century AD, attest an eastern declaration of Roman imperial rule, and those of the third century declare the presence of a true Roman “metropolis,” with all the necessary architectural trappings. Roman styles in architecture and sculpture became current from Britain to the Euphrates, and were here adjusted to a desert setting, a monumental “caravan city” for routes east, but also a center for Roman power in the Middle East. Veyne’s essay dwells on the city’s role as a vassal of Rome under a local dynasty that regarded its realm as virtually its own, notably under their queen, Zenobia, who, in barely two years, extended her rule to Egypt and Arabia and even eyed Europe until stopped by the Emperor Aure - lian. She was both “an oriental queen — and a true Roman citizen” in a city that still reveled in its oriental banquets. The ruins of Palmyra have enticed travelers no less than its history has fascinated scholars. It remains to be seen how easy it can be to restore and rebuild what can be so easily destroyed, but Palmyra’s fame relies on more than its monuments, and the site will never lose its appeal. — John Boardman doi 10.1215/0961754X-4254048 Ezra Pound, Posthumous Cantos, ed. Massimo Bacigalupo (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2015), 220 pp. Part extraordinary lyrical beauty, part cantankerous political mania, part his- torical vignette, part reverie, and part dark imprecation, its elements immiscible and its organizing compass rendered unusable almost as soon as the project got underway, Pound’s Cantos exists as one of the great high- minded disasters of li- t erary modernism. As the patient, caretaking, and devoted editor of this volume rightly says, “the only continuous and irreversible story that we can make out in its turbulent pages is the poet’s own life, his travels and sudden departures, his pitfalls and misadventures, his aesthetic youth, his maturity increasingly occu - pied by economic projects, the day of reckoning of his incarceration, the relatively serene twilight of his final years.” Sifting through the mass of jottings and frag - ments that Pound left upon his death in 1972, Bacigalupo has assembled a portfo - lio of items, long and short, that served Pound either as drafts of the cantos that were published, as notes to himself, or as poetic gestures bearing little specic fi Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/common-knowledge/article-pdf/24/1/165/518229/0240165.pdf by DEEPDYVE INC user on 22 August 2019 L i t t l e R e v i e w s 16 5

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Common Knowledge – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2018

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