The Cultural History of Augustan Rome: Texts, Monuments, and Topography ed. by Matthew P. Loar et al. (review)

Publishers are invited to submit new books to be reviewed to Professor Michael Arnush, 53 Warren Street, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866; email marnush@skidmore.edu.

This edited collection, the product of a 2014 conference at Notre Dame's Rome Global Gateway, asks "what the texts in, on, and about the city of Rome tell us about how the ancients thought about, interacted with, and responded to the city during the transition from Republic to Empire" (1). Given the enormity of the topic, this slender volume makes no claim to comprehensive treatment. What it offers, instead, is a high-quality sampling with suggestions for future research (8-9) that will reward anyone interested in responsions between Augustan writing and building.

D. S. Levene, in "Monumental Insignificance: The Rhetoric of Roman Topography from Livy's Rome" (chapter 1), identifies conspicuous absences of topographical and monumental detail where we might most expect them in Livy. Levene suggests that the history is "more concerned with giving an impression of a real environment than evoking the actual city of Rome" (20), supplanting the urban environment as a repository of exempla legible to audiences abroad.

In "Cicero, quid in alieno saeculo tibi? The 'Republican' Rostra between Caesar and Augustus" (chapter 2), Thomas Biggs compellingly tracks the process by which the Rostra was reimagined as a "pluperfect" "meta-monument" to the lost Republic, thanks to late-Republican physical and performative interventions including the mise-en-scène of Cicero's corpse on a structure bearing Antony's name and Caesar's memory (36).

Peter Heslin, in "The Julian Calendar and the Solar Meridian of Augustus: Making Rome Run on Time" (chapter 3), expertly corrects the belief that the obelisk in the Campus Martius was "preordained" to serve as a gnomon within a unified spatial plan "by an all-seeing Augustus" (71). The meridian is better understood as an "afterthought" among ad hoc continuations of Julius Caesar's calendrical reforms, a pharaonic counterpoint to the senatorial Ara Pacis whose conscription into later emperors' building plans has enhanced confusion about the pavement date.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta's "Monument Men: Buildings, Inscriptions, and Lexicographers in the Creation of Augustan Rome" (chapter 4) examines the relationship between Augustus' architectural renovation of Rome and the contemporaneous boom in orthography, lexicography, and epigraphy, with special interest in questions of access, antiquarianism, and "how documenting the monument came to involve monumenting the document" (82) within this text-rich environment.

In the archaeological first half of chapter 5, "The Porticus Liviae in Ovid's Fasti (6.637-648)," Maddalena Bassani interprets the Porticus Liviae and its shrine to Concordia as a public reclamation of the lavish domus left to Augustus by Vedius Pollio.¹ On the literary side, Francesca Romana Berno analyzes Ovid's response in Fasti 6 as a failed attempt to square criticism of contemporary luxury with praise of "the magnificence of Livia's monuments as testaments to moral sobriety" (116).

The Greek ekphrastic epigrams on Myron's Cow have struck many—notably Michael Squire²—as meditations on mimesis itself, not particularly engaged with the statue's spatial context after its likely relocation to Rome among the armenta Myronis that Propertius 2.31 places on the Palatine. In "Greek Poets on the Palatine: A Wild Cow Chase?" (chapter 6), Carolyn MacDonald reads several epigrams against this Augustan landscape as glimpses into an elusive "Greek discourse on the uses and abuses of Greek art in the Caesars' city of marble" (127).

Building from the familiar observation that exile splits Ovid into a body that must remain in Tomis and books that may return to Rome, Stephanie Ann Frampton's "Ovid's Two-Body Problem" (chapter 7) analyzes epigraphical intermediality in the exile poetry as part of Ovid's bid to render himself more permanent in the city, notably via Tristia 4...