Princeton and Oxford (2025) h/b 195pp £14.99 (ISBN 9780691249124)
Here is another volume in the wide-ranging Princeton series that prints extracts from classical texts in Loeb style—Latin or Greek on the left-hand page, translation on the right—offering ‘How to’ guidance on anything from Making Money and Caring for Animals to Not Giving In, Healthy Living, Running a Country and many more.
The volume under review features four passages from Vitruvius, four from Cicero, two from Seneca, two from Juvenal and others from Plautus, Nepos, Pliny the Younger, Strabo, Plautus, Bibaculus and Velleius Paterculus, together with two diagrams (‘A Roman townhouse’ and Pliny the Younger’s country villa), notes, sources of the passages and further reading.
In N.’s introduction, Varro (d. 27 BC) sets the tone: what is required is utilitas and elegantia in every aspect, ‘so that we can have a place where life’s pleasures can be experienced’. As the two diagrams suggest, the book concentrates on the townhouse and the villa, the former for business and the latter for relaxation, dealing with everything from budgets to redecoration and the importance of infrastructure.
The townhouse was usually single storey, and it rooms overlooking streets were often turned into shops or rental accommodations. The atrium was its quintessential feature, the religious centre of the home and its social hub. The many smaller rooms served as bedrooms and in some cases as work-places. The larger main rooms were superbly decorated with wall paintings and mosaics, and it came to be common to have a peristylium, a colonnaded garden, at the end of the house, where fine statuary would be on display. The house’s front door would open directly onto the street, and would enable passers-by to look through the entrance-hall to the atrium, where the great and good could be seen networking away, right through to the peristylium at the back.
The villa never developed a formulaic layer layout. The main purpose of these often massive constructions was both to provide guests with every possible luxury (including the full suite of cold and heated baths) and to open up the view, to those inside, onto the magnificent landscape in which it was located, with it statuary, ornamental gardens, parks, shrines, gazebos and so on, often replicating the decorations on the walls of the main rooms. But such villas raised the question: what about the rustic simplicity of the old Romans who made Rome what it was? The elegantly translated passages illustrate all these concerns, while also dealing with the problems of life in the city where buildings collapsed, caught fire, were put on sale with misleading descriptions and so on.
Classics for All has reviewed nearly thirty books in this excellent series, and this one strikes your reviewer as one of the most enjoyable. Any one of them would make a splendid gift for those, young or old, at home or in classrooms or seminars, who love the languages.
Peter Jones