Wisconsin (2016) p/b 288pp £50.95 (ISBN 9780299303846)
This book is an examination, mainly, of the dream, the dreamscape and the purpose of dream-narrative in Roman elegy. It is expensive, but extremely dense, bursting with clever insight and thought-provoking comparison between elegies and contemporary art and architecture.
The title also suggests that dream sequences in elegiac poetry are to be compared with items of Roman art and architecture. This is made into a rather good case by S., in the main; she has found an interesting niche and exploits it to the full, as indicated by length size and depth of her bibliography and detailed notes.
S.’s method is to concentrate on specific poems from all three major elegists. In two introductory chapters, which take up nearly a quarter of the book, S. looks in detail at the language and, one might say, the topography of vision and appearance in elegiac poetry, a genre which turns appearances into an art form, of course. This ranges in considerable detail from Cicero’s philosophical work to Lucretius’ attempts to define the matter in his verse. Specifically, S. focuses upon Dido’s dream, in the Aeneid, and Ilia’s, from Ennius’ Annales; there is also extensive, if not always novel, linguistic comment on the language of dreams and visions, particularly on videri.
S. comes into her own in her examinations of specific poems (Tibullus I, 5; Propertius II, 26a and III, 3; Ovid, Fasti III, 1-42). Now, these exegeses are as interesting for what they tell us of the poetry and the poet’s purpose as they are for the perceptive links made to specific, contemporary (or near-contemporary) artefacts. S. uses her chosen poems as a launch pad to others and brings in Prop. I, 3 and II, 31 to elucidate her masterly, astute and original examination of III, 3 (this is where Propertius dreams himself onto Mt. Helicon). This leads to an examination of caves and statues in art in which astute use is made of the Villa of Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale.
For example, Propertius’ first line is an echo of Ennius’ claim to be a ‘second Homer’, but Propertius glosses this simply to recast himself as a great poet, all this accomplished with a visus eram and an interview with an Apollo whose stance resembles that of a well-known, indeed clichéd statue of the god (pp. 136-46).
The most enjoyable chapter is that on the Rape of Rhea Silvia (=Ilia, a nice ring-composition) in the Fasti; this is preceded by a useful introduction to the passage qua elegiac oeuvre, which is necessary to the understanding of S.’s approach to this section of the poem. The passage is exhaustively mined for meaning, but the reader is never out of breath. This is followed by a résumé of artistic portrayals of the myth, whereby S. makes the convincing claim that most representations of the incident were determined by Ovid’s version of the tale.
Terry Walsh—Ratcliffe College