Walking in Roman Culture by Timothy M. O'Sullivan (review)

Depending on who you are and what you are doing, walking can be work, play, or display. Given the discomforts of urban Rome, mere displacement from point A to B less notably motivated the elite Roman than peripatetic forum ostentation, triumphal procession, or his ultimate parade, the nobleman's funeral cortège. Candidates promenading into the forum escorted by their retinues (deductio), or Augustus processing on the ara pacis, or philosophical wannabes strolling through their villas' artificial landscapes hardly resemble marching legionaries or thieves skulking through dark Suburan alleys. Imperial-period leisure walkers respond to pedantic philosophical influence, medical prescription, and inclinations to make tiny political statements (Sen. Tranq. 4-5). Despite accelerating attention to Roman spaces, no previous monograph isolates Roman walking practices. O'Sullivan's six chapters demonstrate that ambulations are and were important "conscious cultural acts," entirely distant from Romantic Wanderlust. Roman walking was "not only . . . moving through space" but a "marker of identity," an elite's self-conscious masculine performance with audiences expected (7; women's pedestrian motions are neglected). O'Sullivan repurposes aristocratic Roman walking as ideology, pose, and even fad.

Gait, pace, and postures convey personal identity—unconscious, subconscious, and conscious performances of self—identity modulated by gender, age, class, and status ambitions (chapter 1, e.g., servus currens Acanthio's entrance [Merc. 111ff.]). When slow-strolling, name-dropper Horace claims incedo solus, he takes a philosophical posture—ignoring his accompanying, bodyguard slave (Sat. 1.9, 1.6). Cupid's seductive disguise in Aeneid 1 (690, cf. 10.640) imitates little Ascanius' gressus. The acquired (or mimicked) aristocrat's incessus competence, like vultus or "face," features in behavioral manuals as prompts to reveal or disguise intentions. Failing racial identifiers, gait and garb (ungainly togas) helped to distinguish servile from free persons, and manly, respectable acquaintances from effeminate, sexually available parties (cf. Cic. Cael. 49). O'Sullivan notes that, although elite ideology insisted that proper stride and comportment were ingrained and natural, Latin texts nevertheless paradoxically encourage "walking lessons."

O'Sullivan examines Seneca's arguments that a person's walk mirrors his mind, sauntering along—or wandering from—the Stoic road to virtue (chapter 2). Nero's Seneca knew to "watch his step." Thus, tragic characters remark others' anxious and hesitant steps. His philosophical tracts decry running around, errant stumbling, and hurriedly knocking down others (Tranq. 12)—not surprisingly, moving like the comic slave.

Chapter 3 attractively interrogates ambulatory rituals, republican processions through ideologically charged topographies of Rome, and the emperors' strategic reuse of those traditions. The roster includes togate candidates and women's deductio into marriage—theoretically their only parade, from one domestic locus and status to another (Verginia's spoiled deductio: 58-59). Quintus Cicero's deductores held a status higher than his adsectatores or salutatores—quotidian republican escorts eventually transformed into spectacles of royal entourages, the imperial comitatus, as Pliny and Tacitus unhappily remark. Plebeian secessio offers a missed opportunity to discuss walking/removal as nonelite, group political expression.

Cicero deemed villa walking (ambulatiuncula) suitable settings for intellectual activity (chapter 4: "Cicero's Legs"). The protected domestic peristyle prevented impediment to his, or Pliny's (Ep. 3.1, 9.36), Hellenic philosophizing— "little chance of getting lost or hurt" (100). The younger Seneca's theoretical ambulatio focuses chapter 5, emphasizing the Roman love of landscape. These ancient Disneyworlds, painted otherwheres and gardens of historical make-believe, offered the Academy, Lyceum, Eurotas, Canopus, or even Underworld (106). Although Solon's theoriê established the travel-abroad paradigm, intellectualized exotic space at home was more comfortable—let your mind do the walking while you imagine strolling with Socrates or Epicurus (Sen. Brev. Vit.14).

O'Sullivan finally reexamines the imperfectly preserved "Odyssey landscape" frescoes, framed by pillars to suggest a portico. He claims they required a walk-about in their now unknown original location and layout—domus, atrium, peristyle? (chapter 6: fifteen images unfortunately too muddy to decipher). The art-promenade concept is attested (Vitr...