Tarpeia: Workings of a Roman Myth by T. S. Welch (review)

This book is an important addition to the scholarly studies that have analyzed particular figures in myth (e.g., G. Steiner's Antigones, 1984; S. Mazzoldi, Cassandra, la vergine e l'indovina, 2001). Feminist scholarship in particular has found this a fruitful way to draw out the complexity of the iconic female figures of Greek mythology (N. Loraux, Façons tragiques de tuer une femme, 1985; Clauss and Johnston, ed., Medea, 1997; R. Blondell, Helen of Troy, 2013). Such studies attempt to rescue mythic figures from being oversimplified in their broader reception ("Antigone the principled rebel," "Cassandra the hysteric," "Helen the unfaithful wife," "Medea the child killer"). Welch's book is no exception, but differs significantly from its intellectual forebears. First, she has chosen a Roman myth; Welch's book enriches the still rather thinly-populated study of Roman mythology, joining such works as T. P. Wiseman's Remus (1995). Moreover, precisely because this is a Roman myth, Welch can analyze topics only Roman mythology presents, such as Vestality. She does so by taking seriously, and developing cannily, Mary Beard's bold assertion that Roman myth must be approached differently from Greek myth. Roman mythology is much more concerned with exemplarity, with offering a paradigm on how to fit (or not) into Roman tradition, and thereby become Roman (or fail at it). Concentrating on the function of the myth, rather than its content, allows Welch to link the shifting elements of Tarpeia's myth to what different peoples and historical periods need the contradictions of the holy traitor to do—chiefly (Welch argues) to reflect the changing complexities of belonging to and in Rome.

Three larger divisions that sort the ancient witnesses between Roman Republic, transition to Imperial Rome, and Imperial Rome, subsume 10 chapters. Welch's authorities range from Fabius Pictor, chronicler of the second Punic War, to Plutarch, who saw the demise of Rome's first dynasty, and the chaotic transitions to its second and its third. However, she does not confine herself to literary evidence, laying under investigation testimonies to Tarpeia's legend drawn from numismatics, visual art, topography, law, ritual, and religion. Her multifarious evidence allows Welch to historicize Tarpeia's legend in each stage of its transformation. She can thus ask and answer such questions as: when Tarpeia appears across Rome's history, albeit often in brief and fleeting aperçus, what in each case is the variety of cultural work she accomplishes? How does Tarpeia help Rome negotiate its own changing ideas of itself, and help outsiders situate themselves in relation to the empire? Welch is at ease with the contradictions in the evidence—for example, that traitors were thrown from the Tarpeian rock, while the tomb of Tarpeia was a place of veneration. Welch mines such paradoxes in order to illuminate the internal tensions traversing Roman and non-Roman views of individual and state, gender and ethnicity, the risk and benefits to Rome posed both by its "insiders" and its "outsiders."

Chapter 1 lays out in broad terms the dyadic categories of thought that guide Welch's analysis by detailing Tarpeia's affinities with Medea, Helen, Ariadne and other "traitorous women" (e.g., woman as exploiting a weakness / herself being a weakness). This introductory chapter elucidates the conceptual constants that punctually reappear across these myths of perfidious women, constants that portray Woman as simultaneously same and other in relation to the paradigmatic human subject, Man. This gendered contrast becomes a useful conceptual tool when historical crises (such as civil war and its aftermath) besiege identities collective and individual, forcing their renegotiation.

Within the rest of Part 1, Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted respectively to the historians Fabius Pictor and Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi. Welch unfolds how Tarpeia functions in the context of the civil wars of the Republic's last century, wars that vexed Roman control of the Italian peninsula. As Welch shows, Pictor's Tarpeia reflects Roman anxieties about the problematic Italic...