Latin Poets and Italian Gods by Elaine Fantham (review)

The Olympian gods have received their fair share of attention in classical scholarship. Elaine Fantham, in her recent book based on the Robson lectures delivered at the University of Toronto, Latin Poets and Italian Gods, chooses instead to focus on lesser known divinities associated with specific places in Rome and the Italian countryside. The book maintains hints of its original oral format: Professor Fantham offers up witty conversational asides, and approaches her subject with an engaging open-endedness, as if she were not so much presenting iron-clad conclusions as opening and passing around a box full of interesting objects for others to contemplate. The book’s prose style is free of the paratheoretical jargon that continues to weigh down much contemporary scholarly writing.

In Chapter 1, “Rustica Numina: The Country Gods of Italy and their Reception in Roman poetry,” Fantham states her aim of reconstructing “the natural and supernatural world of the Italian smallholder” (5). She begins with a survey, in Roman authors from Ennius to Ovid, of rural gods, both native Italian and transplanted: Faunus, Silvanus, Pan, the Camenae, Pales, Priapus, the nymph Juturna. She attempts in this opening chapter to assess the prominence of the various deities and their importance in Roman cult. Chapter 2, “Virgil’s Gods of the Land,” explores the representation of rural divinities and sacred spaces in the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid. Roman rustic divinities are anti-intuitively scarce in the Eclogues, which Fantham explains by suggesting that Virgil’s poetry is more Greek and literary at this stage than truly Roman. The Georgics mark a transition to a more recognizably Italian world of agriculture and work, while Books 7–12 of the Aeneid afford Virgil an opportunity to imagine the sacred landscape of early Italy. In Chapter 3, “Ovid’s Fasti and the Local Gods of the City,” Fantham searches for references to authentic religious rites and attitudes in an author known for being a playful and sometimes devious manipulator of fictions. Whereas Ovid is more often viewed as a poet of the city than of the countryside, the city of the Fasti, as Fantham shows, is replete with sacred groves and the divinities that inhabit them. In the end, Fantham is tantalized by the elusive hints of a “poet who can oscillate between the authenticity of antiquarian research and the imaginative delight of sheer invention,” lamenting that “it is our loss that we cannot always distinguish between them” (89).

The difficulty of extricating authentic religious material from literary invention influenced by Greek literary tradition perhaps explains the subtitle of Part II: “Counter-Examples, and the Triumph of Artistry over Fading Devotion.” The peculiar wording of this title helpfully recognizes the sometimes conspicuous distance of Roman literary divinities from quotidian rural piety, yet also brings up several questions: whose devotion faded? The smallholders of the Italian countryside, or only cynical urban poets like Ovid? If the latter, should we assume that, in earlier poets, devotion was uncompromised by irony, fiction, and artistry? Fantham, however, is bracingly terse when it comes to methodology and interpretive macro-narrative, preferring to follow the sometimes crooked path of individual passages and puzzles.

In the book’s final three chapters, Fantham traces the representation of divinities both Greek and Roman through a selection of passages in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Priapean poetry by various authors, and Statius’ Silvae and Thebaid. Chapter 4, “Ovidian variations: From Friendly Flora to Lewd Salmacis and Angry Acheloüs,” takes as its premise the reverence shown to Italian gods on the one hand, and stories of the more “violent and undisciplined” (95) gods of Greece and Asia Minor on the other. Fantham contrasts the wild behavior of some mythical rivers of the Greek East with Ovid’s positive focus on the Italian figure Flora, although, as Fantham herself argues, Ovid may have had his own reasons for favoring a goddess associated with moral license and erotic display (98–100). In Chapter 5, “Gods in a Man-made Landscape...