Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic by A.M. Keith (review)

HUMANITIES 187 Sullivan is conventional in her assessment of the meanings of these terms; her contribution lies principally in the extensive database she provides for the occurrence of these words in Euripides, with over seventy pages of appendices demonstrating combination of the seven terms with epithets, participles, and their appearance in cognate verbs, adverbs, etc. She is cautious about arguing for Euripides as revolutionary in his use of the terms, preferring in her (brief) analytical comments to see him as primarily a traditionalist, who only occasionally reflects the sophistic thinking of his age, such as occurs with nous in Helen. One limitation of using the lexical approach to understanding Euripidean psychology is the fact that the terms are found in tragedy, a literary genre that explores and plays with the liminal and superhuman regions of cognitive and emotional experience, and double entendres abound. When in Bacchae, for example, there are references to >wisdom= or >good judgment= we routinely expect to find a contrapuntal dialogue between the conventional and cultic understanding of terms indicating intelligence. Equipped with Sullivan=s book, we can tackle these larger questions with a wealth of comparanda. (BONNIE MACLACHLAN) A.M. Keith. Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic Cambridge University Press. xii, 150. US $52.95 It is a pleasure to welcome this book, which offers interesting new perspectives on the role of women in Latin epic. More precisely, A.M. Keith=s study shows how ancient gender norms were both inscribed in the epics and interpreted by Roman commentators and educators in their program of male elite socialization. Following the format of this always stimulating series on Roman literature and its contexts, Keith offers an overview of some of the pervasive gender patterns found in Roman epic, covering an impressive range of epics from Ennius to the Imperial writers Silius Italicus, Valerius Flaccus, and Statius. Close readings of ancient texts are informed by diverse and illuminating perspectives offered by feminist theory, literary criticism, and cultural history. All passages are translated, making the book accessible to all scholars interested in Latin epic, as well as in the cultural constitution of gender asymmetry in ancient Rome. The opening chapter (>Gender and Genre=) argues that epic was viewed in antiquity as >a genre primarily concerned with masculine social identity and political identity.= Thus Keith=s gender-specific reading of the poems is a strategy which has a long interpretive tradition. Chapter 2 (>Epic and Education=) traces the social and institutional contexts in which Latin epic was first read and interpreted. Keith stresses the role of education in the reproduction of Roman social and gender relations. As a component in the curriculum, epic served to constitute elite male virtue and to legitimate 188 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 male dominance. Keith, however, recognizes that the epics themselves often invite contradictory and more complex readings that the ancient commentators leave unexplored. The following three chapters explore three thematic associations of the female in epic. Chapter 3 discusses the pattern of the assimilation of woman to landscape (>The Ground of Representation=). Through such characters as Ennius=s Ilia in the Annales, Caieta and Lavinia in Vergil=s Aeneid, and Hypsipyle in Statius=s Thebaid, among others, Keith shows how epic poets >repeatedly feminize the ground of heroic action through the symbolic and literal immersion of specific women into the topography of epic,= thus valorizing the gendered opposition between a feminized nature and a masculinised culture. Chapter 4 looks at the role of women as instigators of war (>Exordia pugnae: Engendering War=). Here Keith suggests that the contemporary prominence of upper-class Roman women and the use of Cleopatra in Augustan propaganda offer several points of contact with Vergil=s representation of the militant female in the Aeneid. The later epics of Lucan (Julia, Cornelia, and Cleopatra), Silius (Juno [Hannibal]), Statius (Furies, Argia, Lemnians, Jocasta), and Valerius Flaccus (Lemnians) are shown to conform to this pattern also. Finally, in chapter 5 (>Over Her Dead Body=) Keith explores the pervasive sexualization of female death in epic, in which a beautiful female corpse often serves as the catalyst for the reestablishment of political order. In another series of illuminating and original close readings, including Ennius (Ilia...