Anyone writing a book on a topic straight after Denis Feeney risks walking deep in his shadow and will go to some trouble to distinguish their account from his — or so I thought beginning Forsythe's Time in Roman Religion. His tactic is a startling one: the first, and only, time I found Feeney's 2007 Caesar's Calendar was in the bibliography, though his 1998 Literature and Religion at Rome does get a single mention (49, n. 1) in a footnote that lists previous bibliography on the ludi saeculares. Feeney is not the only living Romanist to get this kind of treatment: one solitary 1979 article by North accompanies Beard-North-Price's 1998 Religions of Rome; Beard gets two articles, Rüpke's 1995 Kalender und Offentlichkeit seasons the text so lightly as to be barely detectable … the list could go on for some time. It is not carelessness or the polite omission of a particular modern text here and there: it is virtually systematic.
F. thus effectively evades most approaches to religion and the calendar that postdate the mid-twentieth century; we are not unlikely to find ourselves amidst Victorian debates when modern (if that is still the word) scholarship is discussed. My first impression was that F. was engaging for the most part in the kinds of speculation and argument that characterized the world of Frazer, Fowler, Rose and their contemporaries but even this is not the case: The Golden Bough gets very cursory mention. Thus, for example, on p. 48, we are reminded that Mannhardt's 1877 interpretation (Wald und Feldkulte) of the argei was disputed by Frazer in his 1929 commentary on Ovid's Fasti. Even then, F. wants to keep both: ‘Frazer's latter point is quite valid, but the parallels adduced by Mannhardt are equally compelling’.
Ignoring the way that more than cursory mention of secondary scholarship generally peters out before getting much further than the 1980s, the forward-from-1850 perspective is surprisingly distracting. In order to engage with F.'s account, the reader must repeatedly touch base with their own sense of bigger questions more than should concern them at any particular moment: which questions should matter in religion? So with the argei I was wondering what rôle should speculations about etymology and vegetation spirits play in a discussion. He lost me when we met ‘baffled … antiquarians of the late Republic and early Empire … contriv[ing] fanciful explanations’ (48). Whereas I was thinking that their comments were quite interesting in their own right — they can convey a little more to us than just ‘bafflement’ if we give them a chance.
This profound lack of contemporary discussion makes it very difficult to make judgements about F.'s speculations which are, I should stress, based on a genuinely detailed knowledge of the ancient sources but presented with almost no reference to the ways we currently make sense of religion or texts. For instance, we get virtually no sense of how particular sources might be positioned — the kind of thing that Feeney, for instance, does so well. This vacuum means that F. is generally offering pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we are no longer especially concerned with assembling: the questions have changed and so it is difficult to know where to put his answers even if you find them persuasive.
A review is no place to outline virtually ab initio the kinds of arguments a contemporary discussion could or should involve: to engage in debate here would require me not just to outline F.'s position but to contextualize it in more recent work before finally offering comment. I indulge only briefly with regard to one theme already alluded to (which haunts much of the book): ‘authenticity and coherent meaning only at time of origin’ and its ever-present sidekick ‘religion in decline’ is a pair of workers that not many of us miss: after all, they rarely pulled much of the weight they promised.
F. gives us six chapters, connected loosely by an interest in details of the Roman calendar: a preliminary examination of the calendar; the ‘days after and other curiosities’; the argei (with which I have engaged briefly); the ludi saeculares; the Magna Mater and the taurobolium; and the non-Christian origin of Christmas. They vary a little in the great detail of ancient material and parallel neglect of recent scholarship — which is frequently dismissed even when it does feature — but none go beyond erratic and cursory mention of the maturing approaches of the last saeculum. This means the book is of very limited use to readers: s/he is advised to plunder the book for ancient references but urged to go elsewhere for a framework for understanding Roman religion and time.
