Écrivez-moi de Rome. . .: Le mythe romain au fil du temps

Arnaud Tripet's book ranges widely across literary representations of Rome from antiquity to the present, analyzing major texts, from Virgil and Horace to Alberto Moravia and Michel Butor, as symptomatic expressions of contemporary attitudes toward the Eternal City. As might be expected from the author of earlier studies on Petrarch, Montaigne, and humanism, the book's dominant chapters address Renaissance views of Rome. They do so in an engaging, idiosyncratic way. Possessing enormous erudition that spans Western culture, Tripet dispenses with the usual trappings of scholarly footnotes in favor of a (highly) selective bibliography appended to the end of the volume. He likewise dispenses with any effort to pursue a single thesis as he offers, in separate chapters, variously detailed readings of complex lyric, narrative, and dramatic texts. These readings provide intelligent, supple, consistently illuminating insights into each author's evolving relationship with the highly charged, highly mobile myth of Rome. The sum, it turns out, equals the best of its parts, and they are many.

Tripet's consideration of the Renaissance begins with a chapter on authors at the beginning and near the end of the period: Petrarch and Montaigne. Both writers sought a retreat from public life: Petrarch at Vaucluse and Arqua, where he contemplated ancient values as a refuge from, and a solution to, clerical abuses in papal Avignon; Montaigne at his chateau on the Dordogne, where he greeted many of these ancient values with skepticism but allowed his sense of their historical distance to clarify his response to the crisis of the French Wars of Religion. The next chapter offers the book's lengthiest treatment of a single author with its focus on Du Bellay's Antiquités de Rome and Les Regrets. Perhaps for its detailed focus, I value it as the highlight of the volume. Tripet makes a genuine contribution toward explicating many unappreciated subtleties of Du Bellay's poetry, as he analyzes the tensions that it sustains between suggesting visual images of past and present Rome, while yet offering a sophisticated critique of the latter through elusive imitations of classical verse and contemporaneous satire. Tripet's examination of Du Bellay's thematic structure in these sequences and of its relationship to the author's ideas about literary purposiveness, as already sketched in his Deffence et illustration, is particularly valuable.

Shakespeare's representation of Rome in Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus occupies the book's fourth chapter. Against the sheer volume of scholarship and criticism on these plays, Tripet's unfettered approach allows his argument to find a new direction. Each play dramatizes a turning point in ancient Roman history, but in each play this point redirects its historical players back to a status ante quem. In Julius Caesar, the forces that march against tyranny wind up accelerating tyranny as civil war marks the end of the Roman Republic. In Antony and Cleopatra, the ascendant Roman Empire demolishes the world order envisioned by its hero in a countervailing form of extravagance. In Coriolanus, strategically reverting to the dawn of the Republic, the hero manages to oppose the mediocrity of the new order to itself and, thereby, to undo the gains that he had fought so hard to achieve.

Two subchapters on the Roman tragedies of Corneille and Racine offer contrasting analogues to Shakespeare's treatment of history. In Horace, Cinna, and Polyeucte, Corneille dramatizes the impact of sacrifice and self-sacrifice upon the collective state. Taking his cue from a Jesuit culture of rhetoric that privileged ancient Rome as a model of heroism and magnanimity, the playwright represents the ordeal of the Horatii at the foundational birth of the republic, the pardoning of Cinna upon the birth of the empire, and the martyrdom of Polyeucte upon the rise of Christianity. Conversely, Racine dramatizes problems that issue from the concentration of power and domination in the hands of a single ruler during Rome's imperial age. In Britannicus, Rome is compromised when young Nero takes every opportunity to reinforce his personal control and self-control. In Bérénice, Rome compromises Titus when it bends him to its laws and customs, destroying his personal ambitions and his love for the heroine.

The nearly three hundred pages of this book that address topics in the Italian, French, and English Renaissance present fresh insights, arresting comparisons, and illuminating close readings. Grounding his analysis in scholarship, though not belaboring his own research, and refusing to construct a metanarrative that neatly resolves differences among its key players, Tripet offers us a long, sometimes provocative view of a long, always provocative history.