Roman Literary Cultures: Domestic Politics, Revolutionary Poetics, Civic Spectacle ed. by Alison Keith and Jonathan Edmondson (review)

This collection is dedicated to the great Latinist Elaine Fantham who taught at the University of Toronto from 1968 to 1986. Although she then moved to Princeton as Giger Professor of Latin, she returned to Toronto in 2000 to resume her reign as beloved doyenne of the cordial Toronto Latin community. Many will remember her uninhibited contributions to National Public Radio's Weekend Edition. President of the American Philological Association from 2003 to 2004, honorary president of the Classical Association of Canada from 2001 to 2006, she nurtured several generations of classicists (myself included) while continuing to write until her life's end; this volume includes a nine-page list of her publications. The editors worked hard to put the book in her hands in time, and it was on her desk, already annotated, when she died in July 2016 at the age of eighty-three. The book is full of tributes in the present tense: Alison Keith, "her friendship is a source of ongoing pleasure"; Jarrett Welsh, "her cheerful presence, wit, and erudition continue to shine in Toronto."

Accordingly, this book is Whiggish throughout: progressive, egalitarian, and inclusive of women – noteworthy in a field that, when she entered it, was none of these things. The word "revolutionary" recurs. The editors divided the book into sections headed "Domestic Politics," "Revolutionary Poetics," and "Civic Spectacle"; oxymoron suits Elaine, who was always a study in opposites, combining intellectual rigour with free thought. The book's title derives from the dedicatee's masterly overview of Latin literature, Roman Literary Culture, but this collection leans towards the social-history side of that book's perspective. Historians of women will find important treatments of rape in Ovid's Fasti and its connection to the family dynamics of the first Roman dynasty (Fanny Dolansky), of the relation between the names chosen by Roman love poets for their beloveds and the real-life occurrence of these names in the epitaphs of Roman slave women (Alison Keith, continuing earlier work), and of an older woman's onstage claim to sexual prowess in a lost Roman comedy (Jarrett Welsh). Historians of slavery will find a stimulating analysis of the presence of slaves behind Pliny's letters, as Sarah Blake argues for a model of symbiotic authorship – a valuable chapter for graduate teaching.

The section on "Revolutionary Poetics," with five of the thirteen articles, addresses literary critics interested in genre, intertextuality, and narrative structure (particularly C. W. Marshall's study of significant transitions in Ovid's Metamorphoses); the section's remarkable range, from Ovid to Lucan to Silius Italicus (Elizabeth Kennedy reading Aeneas through Hannibal) attests to the dedicatee's own serious interest in Latin both on and off the beaten track. Moreover, just as Ovid links "domestic politics" with poetics, Lucan links poetics with "Civic Spectacle," as Jonathan Tracy argues for Lucan as an advocate of the free circulation of knowledge, as opposed to Vergil's vision of a society "in which all spheres of knowledge are placed strictly under elite control."

General readers will be challenged by the technicalities of Christer Bruun's chapter on a problematic reference in Varro to excess moisture in houses, or by Welsh's learned analysis of a fragment of Afranius, or by Clifford Ando's definitive demonstration of the flexibility of the Roman state in accepting "The Rites of Others" (another chapter useful for graduate teaching). These chapters, however, should not be missed by scholars seriously interested in Varronian satire and the theme of excessive luxury, in the Roman water supply, in what can be known of gender performance in the togata, or in Roman religion.

Finally, all readers should take a good look at the Magerius mosaic, which appears in Jonathan Edmondson's chapter on Apuleius and municipal bigwigs as donors of bloody spectacles. In Edmondson's lively translation, this lurid dining-room floor advises the viewer: "This is what it is to possess wealth...