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Reviewed by:
  • Latin Poets and Italian Gods
  • Darja Šterbenc Erker
Elaine Fantham. Latin Poets and Italian Gods. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. xii + 229 pp. Cloth, $55.

Which kind of gods and religious experience does Elaine Fantham study in her book on Latin poets and Italian gods? Instead of a fruitless quest for the origins of religion, Fantham examines minor gods in Latin literature. The idea for writing a book on “Italian” gods stems from the laudes Italiae in Augustan literature and the range of the discussed passages on gods of Rome and Latium is impressive, from Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Fasti and Metamorphoses to Statius’ Silvae and Carmina Priapeia. This study of religious beliefs and literary representations of the gods reveals a vivid picture of ancient worship of the minor gods, especially as portrayed in Latin literature. In addition, Fantham pays attention to earlier Greek and Hellenistic models of the poetic representations of the gods in her discussions of different kinds of texts (elegies, epics, epigrams, inscriptions).

My review will concentrate on the notion of religion and gods presented in this book. The first part of the book (“Honouring the Italian Gods”) consists of three chapters (“Rustica Numina: Country Gods of Italy and Their Reception in Roman Poetry,” “Virgil’s Gods of the Land,” and “Ovid’s Fasti and the Local Gods of the City”), which originally comprised a series of public lectures for a general audience. The second part, entitled “Counter-Examples, and the Triumph of Artistry over Fading Devotion,” consists of three further chapters (“Ovidian Variations: From Friendly Flora to Lewd Salmacis and Angry Acheloüs,” “Gods in a Man-made Landscape: Priapus,” and “Gods in Statian Settings”). Whereas the literary evidence presented in the first part concerns the worship of these gods, the second part with its “Counter-Examples” discusses poetic representations of the gods which according to the author do not have a direct connection to the religious life and worship of the gods; therefore, Fantham speaks of “fading devotion.”

In her preface Fantham describes Ovid’s Fasti as “replete with echoes and reconstructions of primitive Roman worship” (ix). Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Fasti depict “the devotion and will to believe,” but non-Roman myths in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in the second part, stand for “detached fantasy” (ix). Fantham’s stated purpose is to provide “a better sense of what was gained and lost when Rome’s increasingly cosmopolitan culture moved beyond Augustus’ renewal or re-creation of Italian religion to replace piety with fantasy and emotional detachment from Italy’s countryside and its gods” (xi). The underlying idea of the book is that the worship of the agricultural gods, nymphs, and forest-gods was a real, authentic religion of the Latins. But, Fantham’s is a modern conception of what real, authentic religion in ancient Italy was supposed to be. Unfortunately, this notion of religion does not take into account the recent research on Roman religion which concentrates on the epigraphic evidence (as well as many other kinds of textual evidence, including literary) and stresses the dominance of orthopraxy (correct ritual performance) over a close, emotional relationship between the god and the worshipper. Such work, acting as a corrective to the assumption of an [End Page 693] ancient, authentic, emotional relationship with the gods in supposed agricultural rituals as imagined by James Frazer at the end of the nineteenth century, could have been usefully incorporated (e.g., J. Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion [Bloomington 2003] and M. Beard, J. North, and S. Price, Religions of Rome [Cambridge 1998]).

In the first chapter Fantham outlines the evidence for the survival of cults of rustic demigods and stresses the fact that rivers and springs were conceived by the ancients as gods and nymphs and were worshipped in various cults. Thus, each river or spring was worshipped individually, and the traces of many different local spring nymphs or river gods remain in numerous inscriptions. The inscriptions dedicated to the nymphs presiding over healing springs range from fulfillment of vows to nymphs who healed a person to the defixiones in which the petitioner asks the nymphs to curse a rival. Fantham also presents various...

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