CUP (2024) h/b 927pp £150 (ISBN 9781108421089)
This huge volume aims to tell us, as Michèle Lowrie puts it (p.758), ‘what Latin texts we read, how we read them, and why.’ Eighteen major scholars give us a snapshot of their work, pointing towards the future as well as assessing the past. In a short review I can only highlight some of the more notable and controversial points of this encyclopaedic volume.
Several chapters look critically at the ‘canon.’ Why is it that so many scholars (and the Oxford Latin Dictionary) regard AD 200 as the terminus of Latin studies? Why are we narrowing our horizons, when we ought to ‘consider the millennium of Latin texts of post-Roman, pre-modern Europe as part of [our] territory’ (p.150)? We should be looking at all the Latin which is not usually read as literature: the legal writers, the grammarians, the ‘substantial corpus of inscribed Latin verse’ (p.827), inscriptions of all kinds—as well as the whole ‘material culture’ within which the texts are situated. The chapters on Mediaeval and Neo-Latin open up the treasure-trove of ‘late’ Latin: Justin Stover uses pastoral poetry and ‘mannerism’ as hooks on which to hang a fascinating tour of Mediaeval Latin, from the comically overblown to the more nuanced. Neo-Latin poets could write about everything from ‘the bilge-pump and the barometer, the electric harpsichord to the airship’ (p.367), and while lots of this remains unedited and untranslated, there are encouraging signs that online websites and book publishers are now making this ocean of unexplored Latin more navigable.
Times have moved on from the heady days of Derridean deconstruction, but some old problems raised by theory have not vanished. Alison Sharrock, in her essay on ‘Author and Identity’, explores the perennial question of the ‘authority’ of the text and the persona of the speaker. Are we reading the direct thoughts of the ‘flesh-and-blood Ovid’ or a constructed poetic self (‘Ovid’)? Latin poets can use avatars as mouthpieces—the most glaring example being perhaps Horace Satires 1.8, where the text purports to be words spoken by a statue of Priapus—but are they speaking in propria persona the rest of the time? The persona theory has been used to excuse the inexcusable—and Sharrock gives this theory an airing in the case of Love elegy: Amores 1.7 and 2.7-8 are poems where ‘Ovid’ openly admits to domestic violence and the exploitation of a slave, and where the speaker expresses attitudes which are triggering to modern audiences. Interrogation of the poet’s persona, as the poet explores the darker side of the male psyche and the ways in which people can manipulate rhetorical ploys to excuse bad behaviour, might help us towards a better reading.
O’Rourke and Pelttari, in their chapter on intertextuality, show us how the old ‘unidirectional optic’ of ‘allusion’ has shifted to the wider concept of ‘intertext’. Where we used to list Virgil Aeneid 3.97-8 as ‘imitating’ Homer Iliad 20.307-8, we can now see reciprocal traffic in which ‘the Aeneid invites us to read out from it a Virgil who harnesses the intertextual potential of allusion to reconfigure the epic tradition in such a way as to make Homer anticipate and accommodate its successor’ (pp.214-5).
James Uden ably shows how ‘reception’ has replaced the old ‘classical tradition’ with its air of cultural elitism and insularity. He proposes reception as resistance, citing Mary Wollstonecraft, who translated Epictetus, earning grudging admiration but also a lot of carping at her ‘theft’ of literary laurels. Writers who were denied the educational route into Classics pitch their work as a rebellion against expectations of their race, gender, or class. Therese Fuhrer takes a fascinating walk through the educational traditions of every country which has taught Latin in the last few centuries, homing in on how the different traditions of scholarship have played out in the scholarship on major authors such as Horace and Propertius.
Jaś Elsner use material culture to shed new light on Virgil’s account of the Carthaginian temple (Aeneid 1.453-93). Myles Lavan, in a chapter on Latin literature and Roman history, shows us the ‘wronged trader’ from the Vindolanda tablets (pp. 830-3) and a letter written to a provincial governor, in which a totally innocent slave had been tortured but whose master is nonetheless praised for humanitas. Katharina Volk looks at the status of philosophy amongst Roman writers, seeing Catullus 76 within the Epicurean world-view and showing how a poem which is ‘not… a reflection on philosophical doctrine’ (p.725) may still use Epicurean ideas. Volk homes in on Cicero, whose philosophical work when he retired from front-line politics in the 40s BC produced some of the best philosophy in Latin. Michèle Lowrie shows how the Roman constitution was not codified but imbibed along with the ancient tales which reinforced their shared values. She ends her chapter on ‘political thought’ with a brilliant re-reading of the end of the Aeneid in all its multifaceted complexity, showing how this primal act of Roman authority is fraught with political baggage and ambiguity.
Simon Goldhill closes the book with a stunning account of the interplay of Greek and Latin in the Roman world, as the ‘colonisers and the imperialist speak the cultural language of the colonised and defeated’ (p.858). Goldhill brilliantly shows that, while ‘the power of language and the language of power go hand in hand’ (884), with Romans still using ‘the rhetoric of national linguistic purity when required’ (p.888), we readers need to move beyond the tired clichés that Greek has the best literature and myths, while Romans had the orgies and armies. He concludes: ‘To understand the cultural hybridity at the very heart of Europe’s self-understanding, along with the arguments weaponised against it in the name of purity of national identity, remains a pressing task to which the study of classics and classicism is uniquely well placed to contribute’ (pp.897-8). Mary Beard echoes this, in a short but poignant ‘envoi’, as she reminds us of the need to ‘keep Latin centre-stage’ or else risk losing ‘the point of many cultural debates over the last two millennia’. You have been warned: but this is a strong and positive peroration, worthy of a wonderful book.
There are places where the reader might feel overwhelmed by the range and complexity on display. We may need (as Uden reminds us in the case of reception) to be professionals in more than one discipline to do justice to these texts (and to have the humility to call in the experts where necessary), but the rewards are there to be had. I was saddened by what James Clackson describes (p.604) as the ‘fissiparous’ nature of his discipline, with people split into mutually suspicious camps: Myles Lavan also laments the conflict between (some) historians and (some) literary critics, with the historians annoyed by the theory-bound indeterminacy of the critics while the critics get irritated that their precious texts are being seen as just ‘sources.’ James Clackson comments (p.563) shockingly on the way ‘linguists can be heard sometimes describing the latest theories of their literary colleagues as “not even wrong”’.
Nor is the promised land of the digital future here yet: while the web can massively increase the availability of texts and resources online, it carries the double whammy that the ones currently available are often out of copyright (and outdated) while the good stuff is all unavailable to those of us who live outside the academic ivory tower as it is hidden behind expensive paywalls (a fact acknowledged by the editors on p. 34). I hope that more open access to scholarship online will engage greater numbers of people in the study and the lifelong enjoyment of Latin literature. The payback, as evidenced on every page of this outstanding book, is well worth the effort.
John Godwin