Latin literature

Let us start with a wonderful book that shows us not only Plautine comedy, but also Republican literary culture in a new light: Emilia Barbiero's fascinating exploration of the role played by letters in Plautus’ comedies.¹ In five chapters dedicated to Bacchides, Persa, Pseudolus, Curculio, and, finally, Epidicus and Trinummus, she develops a powerful argument for the intricate metatheatric implications of the writing, reading, forging, or not-opening of letters on the Plautine stage. Countering a scholarly trend that tends to emphasize the role of improvisation, collaboration, and preliterate forms of theatre in Plautus’ comedies, Barbiero shows that the use of letters in Plautus’ comedies – without exception employed for amorous affairs – rather points to a deep concern with writing as the basis for acting and that they can be understood as mirrors of the text within the text and as mise-en-abyme of the origins of Plautine comedy in a script.

Letters, Barbiero demonstrates in a rich and exciting discussion, are a powerful tool for scheming and deception, and they create intricate constellations of a comedy-within-a-comedy, reflecting the very production of the comedy itself, both its script and its enactment, but also issues of translation, creativity, originality, authorship, and ownership in a highly conventionalized genre that is actually defined by the very repetitiveness of its themes, plots, and characters. In an intriguing ‘postscript’, Barbiero asks us to rethink the widely-held belief that literacy was uniformly low in antiquity: in Plautine comedy, at least, characters of both genders and all kinds of social backgrounds, including slaves – but, interestingly, excluding freeborn women – very naturally communicate in writing. Some of the jokes of Plautus’ comedies presuppose literacy in their audience, and Plautus himself must have worked from textual copies of his Greek models. While allowing for the influence of non-scripted dramatic forms on Plautine comedy, Barbiero makes a compelling case for the role of writing both in the plays’ production and in the middle Republican period more broadly. A highly recommended read for anyone interested in Republican literature and the intricacies of letters and letter-writing in general.

Letters are also the focus of a fascinating volume edited by Anna Tiziana Drago and Owen Hodkinson, on ancient love letters.² Noting that there is a clear gap on research on this topic, the editors, quite rightly, call for an approach that crosses the boundaries between Greek and Latin literature, antiquity and late antiquity, literature and non-literary papyri. They have published a thought-provoking volume that shows the sheer breadth of literary forms that can be classified as love letters, the interaction of different genres, and the literary intricacy of many of these letters. The volume opens with a section on structural perspectives on ancient love letters: Ingela Nilsson seeks to define the genre of ancient love letters in light of modern genre theory, Rafael J. Gallé Cejudo maps out the fringes of ancient love letters, their relationship with ancient epistolary treatises as well as with other genres – a theme that recurs throughout the collection – and surveys some of the key themes of Greek erotic epistolography. Ewen Bowie traces the sending of personal messages as ‘proto-letters’ through song in archaic Greece, and Patricia A. Rosenmeyer offers an intriguing piece on the way love letters evoke physical presence, while acknowledging the body's absence. One of her conclusions is that in the affective exchange between friends, the language of the body is mostly used metonymically, while in letters expressing erotic love, traces of the body left behind on the letter, like blood or tears, are foregrounded, synecdochally allowing direct contact with physical traces of the absent beloved.

The contributions of the second part examine the way Plato's philosophical exploration of love is reflected in the letters purporting to be written by him (A. D. Morrison), the connection of Philostratean love letters with the corpus of his letters as a whole (A. Pontoropoulos), as well as the intertextual strategies in the love letters by Aristaenetus (A. T. Drago). Owen Hodkinson takes the discussion of the generic identity of love letters further by examining the relationship between Philostratus’ Erotic Epistles and Latin elegy. While any certainty about the existence of an intertextual relationship between, say, Ovid and Philostratus remains elusive, the prospect of such a dialogue between Second-Sophistic Greek and Latin literature is certainly intriguing. Ovid's Heroides, of course, cannot be absent from such a volume, and Zara Chadha presents a stimulating reading of Hypsipyle's letter to Jason (Heroides 6) as a curse and a magic ritual intended to exact revenge for Jason's treatment of her – even while Hypsipyle distances herself from the magic her rival Medea is known for.

In the volume's final section focusing on ‘cultural issues and backgrounds’, Émeline Marquis reads the erotic letters of Alciphron as an example of the gradual individuation of the genre of love letters, and Melissa Funke studies the – seemingly unmediated – subjectivity and the self-fashioning of the female voice in ancient fictional love letters written by men (Ovid, Achilles Tatius, Alciphron). Steven D. Smith broadens the volume's focus with an exploration of the role of the eunuch in a letter by Theophylact Simocatta from the first half of the seventh century ce, showing how the eunuch is figured as a sign of epistolary longing. The volume closes with an equally fascinating paper by Lucio Del Corso, in which he discusses the rare examples of love letters from Egypt, written in the lovers’ (or haters’) own hands. He very interestingly notes that, while we find hardly any expression of people's amatory sentiments in extant Hellenistic letters, the letters of Roman soldiers from the camps of the Eastern desert from the Flavian and Hadrianic age show no such restraint – just one more example for the way the volume opens up a window onto the many shapes in which love letters can come, while crossing the boundaries between cultures and literary genres.

Research on Cicero, too, is absolutely thriving – with Tobias Reinhardt's magisterial edition of and commentary on the Academici libri (‘Academic Books’) and Lucullus,³ Anthony Corbeill's commentary on De haruspicum responsis (‘On the Responses of the Soothsayers’),⁴ and with James Zetzel's wonderful study of the relationship of Cicero's De oratore and De re publica (‘On the Orator’ and ‘On the Republic’).⁵ The book is a highly insightful read for specialists in the field, but Zetzel's engaging style also makes it a very good guide for those who want to start exploring these two Ciceronian works and their literary and intellectual context. In the first part, Zetzel focuses on De oratore: its characters and setting, its connection with Cicero's own past, the history reflected in the dialogue, its argument concerning Cicero's theory of rhetoric and the place of rhetoric in Rome, the relationship of rhetoric and oratory to Greek – especially Platonic – philosophy, and their place in Roman intellectual and public life.

The second half starts with a discussion of the similarities and differences between De oratore and De re publica and moves on to a discussion of what we can reconstruct about De re publica and to what extent the parallels with De oratore can help us with that, the definitions of res publica and populus offered in the dialogue and the progression of its argument, its discussion of different forms of constitution as well as of the history of Roman government, and the debate on justice in Book 3. The final section on the Somnium Scipionis (‘Scipio's Dream’) does a very good job at elucidating the interplay of the literary and philosophical tradition in which it stands (especially Plato's Myth of Er, but also Homer, Callimachus, Ennius, and Lucretius), its historical and philosophical context, as well as its connection with the strands of argument running through De re publica. In the course of the discussion, Zetzel touches upon questions that are central to but that also point beyond the two dialogues in question, such as Cicero's view of historical change – political, intellectual, and moral – the relationship between Greek theory and Roman practice, or indeed between rhetoric, politics, and philosophy. Zetzel ends his conclusion with thought-provoking observations on the similarities between Cicero, Catullus’ Poem 64, and Lucretius in their reflections on progress, decline, the passage of time, and Rome's position vis à vis Greece. There is a lot to be learned from Zetzel's book – about the two Ciceronian dialogues in question, on which it will undoubtedly become a key work, but also on Ciceronian philosophy and Roman literature much more broadly.

Bobby Xinyue manages to throw new light on a much-discussed topic, in three much-discussed authors: the representation of Augustus’ divinization in the poetry of Vergil, Horace, and Propertius, the poets who witnessed the transition from Republic to Principate at first hand.⁶ In four chapters and an epilogue, Xinyue traces the poets’ first grappling with the changing parameters of libertas in Augustan Rome in Vergil's Eclogues and Georgics and in Propertius, as a new civic security comes at the cost of political subordination and Augustus’ power becomes ‘simultaneously overwhelming and indispensable’ (31); Rome's transformation from Republic to Principate as reflected in the language of divinization in the poetry of Vergil, Horace, and Propertius from before and immediately after the battle of Actium; Horace's presentation of Augustus’ apotheosis and Roman conquest in his ‘Bacchic’ and the so-called ‘Roman Odes’ and how it impinges on his artistic autonomy; and the inevitability of Augustan Rome, as sketched out in Vergil's Aeneid and placed in a dialogue with an occasional reinstatement of historical contingency, with Vergil self-reflexively drawing attention to the implication of his own art in the construction of the new Augustan myth of origin. The book's epilogue discusses Horace's poetic vision of the perpetuation of the Augustan Principate as anticipated in his fourth book of Odes.

Throughout, Xinyue pays close attention both to the explicit deification of Augustus in the poetry of the time, but also to passages in which his closeness to the divine sphere is merely suggested. A focus of the discussion is the interaction between the role of the princeps and that of the poets who immortalize him in their works, but also take the liberty to critique the profound changes that he brings about, including the changed role of poetry itself. For both Vergil and Propertius, Xinyue concludes that their poetry dramatizes the process of how they glorify Augustus and question the narrative of his divine power, but ultimately have to realize that they will need to acquiesce in it. As Xinyue convincingly shows, the language of deification in Augustan poetry becomes a powerful way for the poets to enter into a political discourse, akin to ‘political theorists’ (27). Xinyue very nicely draws other pieces of evidence into his discussion, such as Augustan coinage and architecture. This allows him to anchor his discussion persuasively in the broader political discourse of the time. I sometimes still felt that perhaps a bit more room could have been given to a discussion of the question of free speech and whether – as well as to what degree – we have to assume Augustan influence on the poets. Another much-discussed question, to be sure, but addressing it a bit more explicitly might have helped to ground Xinyue's discussion even more firmly in the historical context. Overall, however, Xinyue shows very successfully that the theme of Augustus’ deification provides the poets of the time with a powerful means for a nuanced articulation of what Augustus’ rise to a unique position of power meant for Rome and Roman poetry, as well as more generally for the interplay of political power and poetic authority.

Another book that I very much enjoyed is Kirk Freudenburg's exploration of ‘Virgil's Cinematic Art’.⁷ Freudenburg aims to address both non-specialists and scholars of Vergil – not an easy task in which he, to my mind, fully succeeds. As he shows, cinematographic technique provides a very fruitful lens through which to explore the Aeneid and Vergil's narrative art. In a careful examination of both well-known scenes of the Aeneid that are rich in visual impact, such as the ecphrasis of the temple doors in Carthage in Book 1, and ones that are less often studied, such as the simile describing Juturna driving Turnus’ chariot in Aeneid 12.471–80, he demonstrates that Vergil's technique is not fundamentally different from that employed in modern film: for instance, just like in film, the text can first establish a viewer, then show what he or she is seeing, and then return to the viewer to register his or her reaction, and just as in a film, it is up to the viewer/reader/listener to make sense of the individual shots, to fill in the gaps, and to create for themselves the ‘bigger picture’. Freudenburg powerfully reminds us that when reading the Aeneid it is important to keep in mind that many of the scenes depicted in that epic are focalized through a character who is looking on and whose perspective profoundly colours the way a scene is described. In this way, he successfully shows, the text actually gives us access to a much fuller emotional life of the epic characters than is often assumed, and a visual story is told that in fact often runs counter to what the text says on the surface.

Freudenburg convincingly draws on cinematography, the reception of the Vergilian text in paintings and manuscript illustrations, and a close examination of the text itself. He eloquently shows even the general reader who does not have Latin how much the Latin text itself, with its word choice and word order as well as its sophisticated intertextual relationship with Homer, Apollonius, Lucretius, or Catullus, matters for gaging the visual, emotional, and interpretive impact of a scene or a simile. He manages to reveal new insights about the Aeneid, even in passages that scholars have been working on for a very long time. For instance, I think I had always missed the rich anticipation of the future that is contained in the many visual details of the magnificent feast to which Dido invites the Trojans near the end of Book 1, and I particularly enjoyed Freudenburg's perceptive exploration of the role of colour imagery in the introduction of Camilla – in contrast with the conspicuous sparsity of colour in the night raid of Nisus and Euryalus – and the interpretive impact that it entails. At the end, Freudenburg issues a powerful plea for a ‘philology of close seeing’ (155) and the importance of a careful and knowledgeable reading of the kind he performs throughout his book: by paying close attention to the details of a scene, visual and otherwise, we gain access to another kind of story that might nuance, problematize, or even run counter to the narrative surface, and that invites us to reflect about our own investment in the text and our interpretive choices. The book should therefore be an essential read for students, both as a guide to the Aeneid itself and as a model for what a close and perceptive reading can accomplish, but also for scholars, who will see the Aeneid from a new angle and will come away from it more attuned to the cinematics of other Latin texts and the interpretive impact of visual cues.

We remain – mostly – in the Augustan age, but move on to a different topic: the garden. Victoria Austen presents an intriguing analysis of ‘the boundaries of the ancient Roman garden’, in a thought-provoking study in which she brings texts into a productive dialogue with material and visual culture.⁸ Using theoretical frameworks such as Soja's ‘Thirdspace’ and Derrida's concepts of the parergon (‘addition’) and the supplement, Austen sets out to discuss the way Romans of the late Republic and early Empire conceptualized garden boundaries as prone to undermining the division between inside and outside, practical and aesthetic, sacred and profane, art and nature, and real and imagined, arguing that garden boundaries should more fruitfully be conceptualized as frames that both delineate space and load it with meaning (9). She structures her work around the three key types of gardens that she identifies in her introduction: the utilitarian, the sacred, and the ornamental garden. In the first chapter, she very interestingly explores the – metaphorical and physical – boundaries around the garden of the old Corycian in Vergil's Georgics, also paying attention to the dynamics of time in this passage and analysing the multiple ways in which this garden simultaneously is and is not part of the agricultural world of the Georgics. She continues this exploration by focusing on the preface to the tenth book of Columella's de agri cultura (‘On Agriculture’) and by discussing to what extent the poem on gardening in this book is both a necessary element in and an ornamental supplement to Columella's didactic and post-Vergilian literary programme.

In her next chapter, Austen turns to architecture and studies the lower, botanical friezes of the Ara Pacis side by side with the Garden Room in the Villa of Livia, paying particular attention to the way these representations of gardens – or vegetation – keep reframing the boundaries of inside and outside, nature and culture, while also fitting into Augustus’ complex iconographic and architectural programme. Austen suggests reading the Ara Pacis as a kind of sacred grove dedicated to Augustus, part of the new sacral-idyllic cityscape of Augustan Rome. The third chapter sets Pliny's villa letters 2.17 and 5.6 side by side with Villa A at Oplontis with its rich garden architecture, focusing on how both keep blurring the distinctions between architectural and horticultural elements, between inside and outside, between art and nature. The book very nicely ends with a short reflection on the garden description in the messenger speech in the fourth act of Seneca's Thyestes (641–82), as an example of the boundary-straddling character of the garden being taken too far, which leads to the complete collapse of all boundaries. I was not always equally convinced by all of Austen's interpretations – for instance, by her claim that Pliny's use of viridia (‘greenery’) in 5.6.38 suggests the term viridaria (‘small, enclosed gardens’) and that Pliny therefore turns outside into inside and vice versa (131). Overall, however, this is a stimulating book that certainly invites more work along similar lines, showing the rich layers of meaning and perspectives that can be inherent in the interstitial space of the garden and in its boundaries.

Eva Werner dedicates a monograph to poems 3.8–18 of the corpus Tibullianum, the poems transmitted under Tibullus’ name.⁹ Belonging to the exceedingly small body of works supposedly authored by a woman, these poems – some of them written in the voice of a Sulpicia about her love affair with a certain Cerinthus, some written about that love affair in the voice of others – have received a lot of scholarly attention, and very different hypotheses about their authorship have been advanced. Rather refreshingly, Werner does not aim to take a stand in the debate on the poems’ authorship, but discusses the role of gender in these poems strictly within the texts themselves, irrespective of their authorship, which, she rightly claims, we cannot ascertain from the texts themselves. After introductory chapters on reception theory, gender studies, and an overview of previous research on the Sulpicia poems, Werner provides a detailed individual analysis of the eleven poems in question, mainly focusing on the perspective of the narrative voice, on their key themes and motifs, and on their gendered dimensions. Her discussion is generally thorough and perceptive, and she makes good use of literary parallels with other elegiac texts. She concludes that the poems urge both their ancient and modern readers to recognize the general constructedness of gender stereotypes, for both men and women. Despite Werner's – very sensible – eschewing of the debate on authorship, I would have loved to hear a bit more from her about what difference it would make whether we imagine this sophisticated gendered discourse in the hands of a female or a male poet, or as the result of some highly cultured play within a circle of poets.¹⁰ However, Werner makes it impressively clear that the construction of gender in these poems is in any case interesting and worthwhile, irrespective of the question of authorship.

Fabio Tutrone offers a new commentary on the earliest of Seneca's extant writings, his Consolatio ad Marciam (‘Consolation to Marcia’).¹¹ In the introduction, he covers the date of the dialogue (written under Caligula, i.e. between ad 37 and 41, probably at some point after ad 39), its cultural and historical context, its aims and models, but also Seneca's use of sources in the ad Marciam (the main inspiration behind which, he is keen to emphasize, is by no means just the work of Posidonius of Apamea) as well as its structure and the textual tradition. In his thorough commentary, Tutrone presents a balanced account of questions of textual criticism, he covers Seneca's style and imagery, including the frequent use of legal, medical, and military language, the structure of the dialogue and the progress of the argument, Seneca's use of exempla (‘examples’) and their historical background, as well as the relationship of ad Marciam with Seneca's later works. I particularly liked Tutrone's comments on the philosophical background of the discussion, the way it is embedded in Roman culture and the way Seneca adapts the former to the context of the latter, building his own persona as ‘a Stoic consoler of the Roman elite’ (98). Tutrone also has interesting remarks on how Seneca shapes the dialogue to suit his female addressee, as well as on echoes of Latin texts in poetry and prose, such as Cicero, but also Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, and Lucan. He includes remarks on the ‘Nachleben’ (‘afterlife’) of some of the topoi (‘recurring themes or motifs’) in later contexts, including Christian ones, but also in literature and film. The commentary thus creates a very full and well-rounded picture of Seneca's dialogue about a topic as universally human and timeless as grief.

Moving on to Flavian – and later – epicists, we come to Tim Stover's new assessment of Valerius Flaccus’ influence on his epic successors, in which he shows that Statius, Silius Italicus, and Claudian all allude to Valerius’ Argonautica in key passages of their works and fashion their relationship with him in various ways.¹² Stover addresses the tricky question of the chronological relationship between Valerius, Statius, and Silius in his introduction, but he decides to start from the assumption that Valerius was indeed the first of the three and that Statius and Silius were reacting to him, rather than opting for a more complex model of the interaction of these largely contemporary epic authors. Perhaps, in the discussion of individual text passages, Stover could have brought up here and there the possibility that the direction of influence might have been the other way round. Yet, at the same time, the version of the story that Stover tells does present a very compelling picture of Statius’ and Silius’ intertextual relationship with Valerius, so there is a lot to recommend about this approach.

In detailed discussions of individual passages that are full of good observations, Stover shows that Silius Italicus takes Valerius’ epic as an esteemed model and as his starting point in a programmatic passage in Book 11, the song of Teuthras in Capua, that marks the turning point of the war against Hannibal. This war, for Silius, becomes the culmination of the historical events set in motion in the Argonautica, which he also uses in other passages to enrich his own epic. In the Thebaid, Statius enters into an agonistic relationship with Valerius, turning what is ambivalent in the Argonautica into an expression of unmitigated horror. Interestingly, in the Achilleid, the same Statius styles himself not as an antagonist to, but a successor of the Argonautica, who openly claims the epic as one of his models. Yet Stover also emphasizes that the story of Valerius Flaccus’ influence does not end here: Claudian, in the proem of his De Raptu Properpinae, programmatically positions himself as a successor to Valerius and uses the Argonautica throughout to add richness and nuance to the texture of his epic.

Some of the intertextual parallels with Valerius that Stover spots with a keen eye at times did not seem particularly strong to me at the beginning, but Stover always managed to convince me that the broader context involved actually makes them resonant and adds new layers of meaning to the text. Interestingly, Valerius’ epic, which begins with the word prima (‘the first’) is indeed often invoked as the starting point of mythical or historical events, and his representations of civil war as well as of Medea provide a particularly powerful touchstone for his successors. It would have been interesting to see Stover go into a bit more detail about the three(or more)-way intertextuality between Valerius, his successors, and Vergil or other predecessors who are often evoked at the same time and who become part of this rich epic texture. Stover discusses two examples of such a ‘combinatorial imitation’ to good effect in the introduction (3–7) and sometimes brings in Valerius’ model Apollonius and a few times also Vergil, but otherwise decides to keep his focus on the influence of Valerius alone, to prevent the discussion from becoming unfocused, as he says in the introduction (3). Personally, I would have liked to hear what Stover would have to say about this broader literary dialogue, but I take his point and, even so, Stover has written a very insightful book that throws new light on the impact that Valerius had on the epic tradition and shows that he was taken seriously by his successors as a sophisticated epic voice that deserved – and still deserves – to be heard.

Duane W. Roller presents the first modern English commentary on the geographical books (Books 2–6) of Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia (‘Natural History’), which form the longest extant geographical treatise in Latin.¹³ Roller pays close attention to Pliny's sources, including ancient maps, to the peculiarities of and confusions or gaps in his account as well as to its structure, but he also lucidly explains Pliny's comments on cosmology and natural phenomena, religion, myth, as well as the cultural and historical anecdotes that are sprinkled through his account. I was particularly intrigued by Roller's perceptive comments on the ideological implications of Pliny's way of presenting the geography of the ancient world. Roller illustrates his commentary with maps provided by the Ancient World Mapping Center,¹⁴ which is currently working on a digital and searchable map of Pliny's Naturalis Historia that will certainly become an invaluable resource, making the geography of the ancient world and Pliny's presentation of it even more tangible. For now, however, Roller's work is equally invaluable – as a detailed and learned guide through Pliny's geography and to the complex geographical and learned traditions that stand behind it.

A monograph by Vasileios Pappas, finally, takes us to the middle of the sixth century and the six elegies by the poet Maximianus (not including the poems of the Appendix Maximiani), which make up a rather substantial elegiac output of 686 lines.¹⁵ These poems bring the story of ancient elegiac love poetry full circle: originally – and obviously wrongly – published under the name of the first Roman elegist, Cornelius Gallus, as Pappas explains (19–24), Maximianus’ elegies resume the tradition of Latin love elegy after an interval of almost 500 years. Pappas argues that these elegies can be read as a highly self-conscious contribution to the elegiac tradition. Their author shows himself fully aware of the works of the Augustan elegists, especially Ovid, and keeps alluding to them, while breathing new life into the elegiac genre under very different political and historical circumstances, and with new poetic ideas. As Pappas shows in a careful analysis, we see a number of reversals of elegiac topoi, as the poet-lover is no longer the young and penniless lover and slave to his dura domina (‘hard mistress’), but becomes an old man, a dives amator (‘rich lover’), and durus dominus (‘hard master’) himself, inheriting some traits of the elegiac puella (‘girl’), such as gratia (‘grace’) and forma (‘beauty’), who is engaged in both negotium (‘business’) and otium (‘leisure’), in a new type of love elegy that ultimately turns out to be an ‘elegy without love’, where love must give way to a chaste way of life.

The structure of Pappas’ argument is simple, yet effective. The book is divided into six chapters, one for each of the six elegies. Each of them starts with a short summary of the poem and a discussion of the different genres that are incorporated into their elegiac ‘host’ genre (such as epic, comedy, satire, the novel, hymns, or prayers), followed by a discussion of the metapoetic hints to be found in the poem. While Pappas is not the first to argue for metapoetic elements in these elegies,¹⁶ he does detect new metapoetic meaning in them and nicely weaves them into a discussion of the main interpretive issues at stake in Maximianus’ poetry, including their political meaning. At the same time, the work opens up many more questions for future research. For instance, I would have loved to learn more about the relationship of Maximianus’ elegies with the genre of amatory epigram that flourished roughly simultaneously in sixth-century Byzantium and that Maximianus probably came in contact with in Constantinople, as Pappas mentions (10; 186). It would also be very interesting to explore a bit more to what extent the ‘mixing of genres’ that Pappas identifies as an important feature of Maximianus’ elegies, in line with a more general trend of late antique literature, differs from the – also highly self-conscious – generic play that we find in Augustan elegy. As Pappas nicely shows, then, the story of ancient elegy does not end with Ovidian exilic gloom, but it is a very exciting field in which many more questions remain to be explored.