Modern critics express dissatisfaction with major characters in Roman literature with surprising frequency: the Virgilian Aeneas, for example, has been denigrated as a colourless and uninspiring hero. Such instances of discomfort, however, often indicate that we are missing something: the ‘disconnect’ between modern expectations and ancient culture exposes a problem worth examining. In this spirit, J. Mira Seo has undertaken an ambitious reassessment of characterization in Latin poetry within its Roman context.
S. observes that modern misunderstandings of characterization in Roman poetry derive from misleading expectations of ‘psychological roundedness’ (ix). She argues for an ‘intertextual and semiotic’ as opposed to ‘mimetic’ approach (5): Roman poetic characterization, S. suggests, can be read ‘as a form of literary allusion’ (15). S. is perhaps necessarily concise in this introductory discussion of ancient and modern conceptions of character and self, but the brief references to figures and phenomena as diverse as Descartes (5), Flaubert (6) and Romanticism (9) bring up many unanswered questions: the large-scale opposition of modern and ancient, while heuristically sound, belies a complex history only glanced at here. (Freudian psychology, for example, is not explicitly discussed.) Still, the overall point is well taken: an appreciation of the intertextual dynamics of Roman literary works should motivate a different mode of attention to their techniques of characterization, one that is not solely based on the expectations of psychological or novelistic realism.
This insight is supported by discussion of the ‘distinctly Roman approach to the self’, which is seen as ‘aemulatory, referential, and circumscribed by traditional expectations of society’ (15). S. points in particular to Roman concepts of decorum and persona, aspects of rhetorical training, and M. Roller's analysis of exemplarity in Roman culture (CPhil. 99 (2004), 1–56). The striking density of intertextual reference in Latin poetry has all too often been viewed as an inevitable outcome of the increasing Hellenistic refinement of the Roman doctus poeta. S.'s discussion, by contrast, points the way toward a true sociology of Roman intertextuality that would allow literary allusion and the ‘“habit” of Roman exemplary thinking’ (15) to be viewed in terms of a shared cultural matrix.
In exploring this perspective, S. assigns a privileged rôle to Ovid. Ovid's overt emphasis on rhetoricity, repetition, convention and ‘the fundamentally constructed nature of the world’ (17) makes him a paradigmatic case for S.'s line of interpretation (‘the Ovid code’, 16–18). I find this approach intriguing, but problematic: Ovid is not the main subject of any of the book's subsequent chapters, yet a (simplified, 18) version of his poetics is granted hermeneutic scope over other authors. The final section of the introduction looks at Apollonius as a forerunner of Roman poets' treatment of literary characterization, and in particular, examines his ‘palimpsestically layered characterization’ of Thetis (31). This section helpfully complements the previous discussion of the Roman background, yet with that end in mind, it would also be interesting to know what is not Roman about Apollonius' approach.
The core of the book is devoted to case studies examining characters in works of Roman epic and tragedy: Virgil's Aeneid, Lucan's Bellum Civile, Seneca's Oedipus, Statius' Thebaid, and in an appendix, Seneca's Phaedra. In each instance, S.'s claims are amply supported by interpretations that are insightful and well informed about the current state of research. Especially impressive are S.'s masterful unpacking of the sometimes lethal aesthetics of hair in epic poetry and Flavian culture (ch. 4), the richly erudite and highly original analysis of Amphiaraus' literary genealogy as intra-textual vates in Statius' Thebaid (ch. 5), the acute examination of the problematic workings of exemplarity in Lucan's Cato figure (ch. 2), and the persuasive reading of Seneca's Oedipus as a ‘work … crowded with textual ghosts’ (ch. 3, 109). At times, the choice of subject matter seems eccentric. Many readers, for example, will want a fuller account of Aeneas' characterization than is allowed by S.'s narrow focus on the Paris subtext in ch. 1. On the other hand, subtler, less prominent aspects of characterization, not to mention minor characters themselves, sometimes offer deep insight into an author's approach (123).
A more fundamental potential objection concerns the book's massive emphasis on the semiotic and metadiscursive aspects of characterization. Ch. 4 concludes: ‘… in the figure of Parthenopaeus, Statius’ epic thematizes the affective emotionality of grief' (145). This is no doubt true, but it is worth pointing out that Statius' narrative of Parthenopaeus' death not only ‘thematizes … emotionality’, but also arouses emotions in the reader. There is an undeniable mimetic dimension in Roman characterization, which is one reason why these literary works engage us in the first place. S. knows this, but focuses on a less well understood aspect of Roman characterization in order to make a powerful and valid point. Still, it is tempting to imagine a sequel to this study articulating a more synthetic model of the relation between the ‘mimetic’ and ‘semiotic’ components of Roman poetic characterization.
S.'s book offers an important new approach to the study of characterization in Roman poetry through a series of rich, innovative readings of major Latin texts. Particularly exciting is the prospect this book offers of integrating the study of literary intertextuality with sociologically oriented research on exemplarity, rhetoric, and Roman concepts of self.
