This book represents a continuation of the work undertaken by the Latinist section of the Special Research Group on ‘Institutionality and Historicity’ (Sonderforschungsbereich 537) organized at the Technical University of Dresden, which over the course of a decade sponsored colloquia and produced a series of edited volumes on the production and transmission of the mos maiorum in Republican literature. The present work builds upon those empirical and methodological foundations to examine Roman values in the literature of the early Principate (mostly Julio-Claudian, with Nepos and the younger Pliny as the chronological outliers). The emphasis on literary texts will strike many readers as restrictive, when so much work on the communication of Roman values has centred on ritual practice and material culture. Some attention had been granted to these issues in previous instalments of the series, but their impact on this volume is mostly incidental.
The narrower focus allows for a more cohesive discussion, at least, even as it exposes the disciplinary confines in which it was produced. If the field of classics (if not Altertumswissenshaft) must have its own version of Pierre Nora's Les Lieux de mémoire, this is what one might expect it to look like. In contrast to the maddeningly amorphous, but also occasionally brilliant, collections of Erinnerungsorte der Antike edited by E. Stein-Hölkeskamp and K.-J. Hölkeskamp (2006; 2010), the contributions that make up Römische Werte und römische Literatur constitute a more tightly focused group of studies, which explicate the most relevant passages with fulsome references, the predictable theoretical sound and fury, and a minimum of razzle-dazzle.
The collection's chronological specificity is unequivocally a benefit. Roman values obviously meant something different in the competitive aristocratic ethos of the middle Republic than in the more monopolistic political environment (and broader cultural horizons) of the early Principate. Indeed, the peculiar problem of the system that Augustus created was that innovations in practice were presented and, in theory, accepted as a restoration of traditional values. The result was a sustained ambivalence about the past, which manifested itself in various ways.
The first three chapters treat the most obvious aspect of this uncertainty: the response of Augustan-era authors (Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Propertius, and Livy) to the dominant political narrative of peace, stability, and respublica restituta. The arguments advanced are compelling enough (I found Heil's reading of Prop. 2.31 — the only sustained discussion of a monumental complex other than the Forum Augustum — particularly engaging), but an overly blinkered concern for whether and how much each poet or historian supported the ‘official line’ tends to obscure the nuances of the larger ideological conversation in which these writers were participants. For example, Mutschler notes that two of the three references to libertas in the Aeneid refer to the founding of the Republic, but goes on to suggest that the poet sought to de-emphasize the constitutional implications of this term by playing up the external threat of Lars Porsenna's invasion in each case. This move works better with Cocles and Cloelia on the shield of Aeneas (8.646–51) than with Brutus in the underworld, fated to execute his own sons for conspiring to restore the Tarquins (6.817–23). More importantly, it overlooks the fact that the underlying sense of both passages, that the preservation of freedom requires personal sacrifice on behalf of the common good, is rooted in one of the central themes of Vergil's epic (tantae molis erat, etc.). This notion of self-sacrifice was also central to Livy's understanding of libertas, which P. Witzmann characterizes as anti-Augustan(!) in a subsequent chapter.
Whether they embraced these changes or not, Romans living in the new era needed to find new values (or at least new ways of construing the old ones). This process of reinvention and reorientation is explored more successfully in subsequent chapters, which highlight efforts to balance ancestral tradition against the opportunities for innovation opened up by the changing social conditions of the early Principate. As the centres of power receded from public view, private life and its pursuits (otium) took on greater significance as arenas for the performance of virtue among the Roman élite. In the second trio of studies, the articulation of new models for élite self-fashioning are explored in Nepos' Life of Atticus and Pliny's Letters, which have been mined for this purpose before, as well as in such relatively under-studied texts as the Elegiae in Maecenatem and the Laus Pisonis (discussed in the exceptionally substantial contribution of H. Krasser). The final three chapters examine this reconfiguration of the relationship between the personal and the political from the more populist perspective of such ‘new’ literary forms as declamation, Valerius Maximus' thesaurus of historical exempla, and the Fabulae of Phaedrus.
By virtue of the manner of their presentation, individual chapters inevitably will be carved out and read by specialists working on particular authors or types of text. Taken as a whole, however, this book offers the reader with broader interests in the cultural history of the early Principate, particularly issues of community and identity, much to think about. There is a remarkable coherence across the contributions, even if they do not add up to a comprehensive account of Roman values and how they operated in this period.
