First up for review here is a timely collection of essays edited by Joseph Farrell and Damien Nelis analysing the way the Republican past is represented and remembered in poetry from the Augustan era.Footnote ¹ Joining the current swell of scholarship on cultural and literary memory in ancient Greece and Rome, and building on work that has been done in the last decade on the relationship between poetry and historiography (such as Clio and the Poets, also co-edited by Nelis),Footnote ² this volume takes particular inspiration from Alain Gowing's Empire and Memory.Footnote ³ The individual chapter discussions of Virgil, Ovid, Propertius, and Horace take up Gowing's project of exploring how memories of the Republic function in later literature, but the volume is especially driven by the idea of the Augustan era as a distinct transitional period during which the Roman Republic became history (Gowing, in contrast, began his own study with the era of Tiberius). The volume's premise is that the decades after Actium and the civil wars saw a particularly intense relationship develop with what was gradually becoming established, along with the Principate, as the ‘pre-imperial’ past, discrete from the imperial present and perhaps gone forever. In addition, in a thought-provoking afterword, Gowing suggests that this period was characterized by a ‘heightened sense of the importance and power of memory’ (320). And, as Farrell puts it in his own chapter on Camillus in Ovid's Fasti: ‘it was not yet the case that merely to write on Republican themes was, in effect, a declaration of principled intellectual opposition to the entire Imperial system’ (87). So this is a unique period, where the question of how the remembering of the Republican past was set in motion warrants sustained examination; the subject is well served by the fifteen individual case studies presented here (bookended by the stimulating intellectual overviews provided by the editors’ introduction and Gowing's afterword). The chapters explore the ways in which Augustan poetry was involved in creating memories of the Republic, through selection, omission, interpretation, and allusion. A feature of this poetry that emerges over the volume is that the history does not usually take centre stage; rather, references to the past are often indirect and tangential, achieved through the generation and exploitation of echoes between history and myth, and between past and present. This overlaying crops up in many guises, from the ‘Roman imprints’ on Virgil's Trojan story in Aeneid 2 (Philip Hardie's ‘Trojan Palimpsests’, 117) to the way in which anxieties about the civil war are addressed through the figure of Camillus in Ovid's Fasti (Farrell) or Dionysiac motifs in the Aeneid (Fiachra Mac Góráin). In this poetry, history is often, as Gowing puts it, ‘viewed through the prism of myth’ (325); but so too myth is often viewed through the prism of recent history and made to resonate with Augustan concerns, especially about the later Republic. The volume raises some important questions, several of which are articulated in Gowing's afterword. One central issue, relating to memory and allusion, has also been the subject of some fascinating recent discussions focused on ancient historiography, to which these studies of Augustan poetry now contribute: How and what did ancient writers and their audiences already know about the past? What kind of historical allusions could the poets be expecting their readers to ‘get’? Answers to such questions are elusive, and yet how we answer them makes such a difference to how we interpret the poems. So Jacqueline Febre-Serris, for instance, argues that behind Ovid's spare references to the Fabii in his Fasti lay an appreciation of a complex and contested tradition, which he would have counted on his readers sharing; while Farrell wonders whether Ovid, by omitting mention of Camillus’ exile and defeat of the Gauls, is instructing ‘the reader to remember Veii and to forget about exile and the Gauls’ or whether in fact ‘he counts on having readers who do not forget such things’ (70). In short this volume is an important contribution to the study of memory, history, and treatments of the past in Roman culture, which has been gathering increasing momentum in recent years. Like the conference on which it builds, the book has a gratifyingly international feel to it, with papers from scholars working in eight different countries across Europe and North America. Although all the chapters are in English, the imprint of current trends in non-Anglophone scholarship is felt across the volume in a way that makes Latin literature feel like a genuinely and excitingly global project. Rightly, Gowing points up the need for the sustained study of memory in the Augustan period to match that of Uwe Walter's thorough treatment of memory in the Roman republic; Footnote ⁴ Walter's study ends with some provocative suggestions about the imperial era that indeed merit further investigation, and this volume has now mapped out some promising points of departure for such a study.

Although her subject is the representation of time, and her material is also Augustan poetry, Hunter H. Gardner's study of the way in which time is gendered in Latin love elegy takes a rather different approach, joining an ever-growing body of scholarship that fruitfully applies modern critical theory to the interpretation of Latin literature.Footnote ⁵ Here the particular debt is to Julia Kristeva's theories about gender, time, and subjectivity, which inspire Gardner's analysis of love elegy in terms of Kristeva's chora and ‘women's time’. This methodology generates some interesting readings of numerous individual poems and of the corpus as a whole, especially around the themes of youth, maturation, coming of age, death, and immortality. Love elegy is a peculiarly Augustan genre, and Gardner is also concerned to explore how the configuration of time (and especially the way that it seems to work differently for men and for women in poetry) is shaped by the social and political milieu in which the poems were written. In many ways the overall vision of elegy that she articulates is (disappointingly?) conventional: love elegy reflects resistance to the pressures imposed by the new regime on young men, depicting the amator’s withdrawal from his civic duties into a life of timeless love and leisure. However, the individual readings are consistently stimulating and sophisticated, with insights well grounded in detailed textual analysis, and this is a valuable contribution to the study of Latin love elegy, which demonstrates the rewards to be gained by studying ancient literature through the lens of modern theory. On the other hand, it is perhaps not a book for beginners either to theory or to love elegy; the language can be rather opaque and it is dense with theory in a way that on occasion renders its argument obscure.

Gowing also flags up in his afterword to Farrell and Nelis’ volume another subject meriting attention from scholars: the influence of ancient art and visual representations of the past on Roman authors’ historical understanding and on their literary deployment of the past. Basil Dufallo's excellent diachronic study of ecphrasis, The Captor's Image, does not offer precisely this, but is nevertheless a contribution to the same project, especially in the earlier chapters, of taking seriously the relationship between Latin literature and contemporary art and architecture, as well as interpreting literature in the light of wider cultural issues.Footnote ⁶ Dufallo begins by rejecting what he describes as the ‘standard’ view of ecphrasis as primarily a metaliterary device allowing the poet to write indirectly about writing. Rather, he takes ecphrasis to be first and foremost a means of exploring the competition between Hellenic and Roman cultures, and his focus is on descriptions of ‘art that is somehow Greek’ (1) by authors that are (one might say) somehow Roman. His book is about the changing dynamics of interplay between Greek and Roman and between literary and visual arts; in essence, his argument is that an ecphrastic description encourages the Roman reader to scrutinize his or her identity as Roman, and its relation to Greekness, and through his series of detailed and nuanced readings of selected passages from Latin literature he shows how this is done over and again in all manner of ways. Placing them within his overarching programme, he has new things to say about some well-trodden passages such as the infamous coverlet of Catullus 64, the Aeneid’s frieze in the temple of Juno, the temple of Apollo at Cumae, the shield of Aeneas, Statius’ equestrian statue of Domitian, and the gallery scene in Petronius’ Satyricon, as well as many other less mainstream ecphrases, such as the description of the farting wooden Priapus of Horace's Satires 1.8, which is seen to mobilize references to ‘Aristophanic social critique, Socratic irony, Callimachean literary refinement, and Epicurean ideals’ (11) in order to create an anti-civil war polemic. For a book that ranges over such a wide span of literary texts (from Plautus to Apuleius and Philostratus), this monograph has a remarkable intellectual coherence, and it repays sequential reading of the chapters; there are also many useful moments of internal cross-referencing between chapters. Its chronological organization enables Dufallo to tell a story about the development over time of ecphrasis as a Roman cultural practice, which both shapes and is shaped by the literature that he analyses.

Rich cultural interplay is also a prominent theme in Carole Newlands’ engaging new book about Statius, which emphasizes from the start the poet's bi-cultural status and vision: a Latin poet from Greek Naples, son of a Greek poet, whose themes range from Greek myth to the Roman high life.Footnote ⁷ Certain assumptions, spelled out in the Introduction, frame her account: Statius’ poetry reflects the troubled political times in which he wrote; he thought of himself as both a Roman and a Neapolitan, with an intense commitment to both cultural centres, and his poems mediate between Greek and Roman cultural traditions for an increasingly cosmopolitan milieu; the poems are ‘bold experiments in adaptation to a new era’ (8). Newlands sees Statius as a ‘deeply eclectic, intertextual poet’ (9) and this is reflected in her own writing, as she brings to her discussion insights not only about Statius but also about Valerius Flaccus, Silius, Martial, Ovid, Seneca, and Catullus, to name but a few. Chapter 2 aims to set the record straight about a few ‘Misconceptions about Statius’ and is a nice way of bringing us up to date with a balanced discussion of recent scholarship on the poet (including, of course, Newlands’ own substantial contribution to scholarship on the Silvae in particular). Alongside discussion of Statius’ engagement with the poetry of his contemporaries and of his treatment of otium as a serious philosophical and social practice, a key misconception is tackled: that implied by the label ‘court poet’ by which Statius has long been known. Newlands sets out here the argument that he did not enjoy any special patronage from Domitian nor did he work largely to commission. She also gives a nuanced summary of the recent decades of scholarship around ancient panegyric (flattery? subversion? measured praise?), and ends by treating Statius as an outsider poet who experiments boldly with praise poetry, developing a new encomiastic language. The following chapters approach Statius’ oeuvre thematically. Chapter 3 (‘Boundaries’) ranges over subjects such as the new conceptualization of space under imperial rule, civil war and the violation of boundaries, the fluid boundaries of water used as a metapoetic device, the pushing of generic boundaries in the Silvae, and the way in which the device of ecphrasis is used to explore the issues of boundaries. Nicely integrating analysis of the poems themselves with discussion of their reception, Chapters 4 and 5 explore the themes of education and of mourning and the female voice. Finally, Chapter 6, ‘Between Rome and Naples’, returns to the theme of Statius’ own dual identity and explores his treatment of the region of Campania, and in particular his skilful response to its negative stereotyping by other Latin authors. This is not a systematic introduction to the poet by any means, but rather a consistently engaging and stimulating overview, fluid and meandering rather than highly structured, and crammed with insights and detail. A particularly good feature (although this may be confusing for novice Statius readers) is the way in which Newlands skips back and forth between the Silvae and the epics as she unfolds her themes, thereby enacting her own suggestion that all the poems be read together as part of a coherent project; very few scholars do this, and her own practice here makes an excellent case for it. Reading the book, one is regularly seized by the urge to put it down and go in search of the Latin poetry itself to follow up some of its suggestions; what better introduction could there be to an author? Amid a wealth of high-quality recent research on Statius, this text feels particularly refreshing: it takes a step back from the poetry itself in order to situate and understand it fully in its historical and cultural contexts. In this it amply fulfils the remit of the Classical Literature and Society series in which it appears: to consider the poetry in its original social context. And it does indeed have ‘plenty to offer classical scholars’ while being ‘ideally suited to students’ (Editor's Foreword, vii). Newlands’ vivid portrayal of Statius and his world responds to our twenty-first-century desire to find literature participating in history, reaching out beyond the confines of the text, confirming that for us poetry is more exciting to read when it seems to be part of a dynamic and sometimes dangerous cultural scene, and to be edgy and innovative. As Alain Gowing's afterword to Farrell and Nelis’ collection makes clear (and as we see from the other books reviewed here), the future for the study of Latin literature is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and it is particularly important that the discipline continues to develop in close dialogue with social historians and art historians, among others.