This slim but wide-ranging volume (comprising a brief introduction and seven essays) offers a series of reflections on the rich interrelationship between literary texts, material culture and urban space which constituted Augustan Rome. A concern with this interrelationship is scarcely novel, but the contributors aim to shift the focus away from individual authors and the politics of their engagement with the Augustan city, to consider a much wider range of texts, particularly inscribed texts, and their role in generating a distinctively written Rome.
D. S. Levene, in his incisive and erudite contribution, underlines the relative absence of marked topography in Livy's history. Noting particularly the limited attention given to the Palatine (a part of the city critical to the articulation of Augustus’ self-image), Levene suggests Livy was less invested than some of his contemporaries in the emperor's transformation of the city. Certainly Livy rarely dwells on individual monuments and locations. Yet there are key points where places do matter; while the speech of Camillus (in Book 5), arguing against a proposed transfer of the city's population from Rome to Veii, may, as Levene notes, be lacking in topographic detail, its thrust, asserting the paramount importance of specific places to the cult of Rome's gods, surely resonated closely with Augustus’ paraded commitment to religious reconstruction. Levene argues compellingly, however, that Livy's history, expecting from its readers no real familiarity with the city of Rome as a place, aimed to communicate its account of what it meant to be Roman in a way that could include an audience who might never have seen Rome itself. Livy's own written monument takes precedence over the material structures of the city.
The next two contributions, Thomas Biggs on the ‘republican’ rostra and Peter Heslin on Augustus’ solar meridian, focus on specific individual monuments. As Biggs makes clear, references to the rostra in texts concerned with the Republic's grisly end (several are preserved by the Elder Seneca) tend to elide the fact that the platform was reconstructed in a new position by Caesar and subsequently rebuilt by Augustus. These authors are concerned rather to reinforce its symbolic role as a site of republican free speech, redeployed to showcase Caesar's corpse, then Cicero's head and hands (a plan mapping the monument's changing position would have been helpful, as would the inclusion of a key passage from Cremutius Cordus, alluded to in otherwise baffling terms). Heslin's brilliant detective work on the circumstances of the creation of Augustus’ solar meridian informs a persuasive, if highly technical and necessarily speculative, reading of the remains of the monument. The meridian, he argues, served to commemorate Augustus’ correction, in his new role as Pontifex Maximus, of the pontifices’ initial mistakes in operating the Julian calendar (the Roman calendar was thus realigned with the solar year). A rare departure from the use of Latin in official monuments, the Greek inscriptions in the pavement (not to mention the hieroglyphics on the gnomon) served ‘as a sign of something foreign and powerful’, marking Rome's command over Alexandrian learning.
Dan-el Padilla Peralta's subtle and wide-ranging discussion reflects on changes to the control and production of antiquarian knowledge under the new regime, and on the relationship between antiquarianism and the proliferating inscriptions of the Augustan city. Varro's antiquarian writings in the Late Republic drew on ancient inscriptions, as well as on documents squirrelled away in the cellae of temples (accessible only with the cooperation of temple custodians), or in family archives. This distributed expertise, Padilla Peralta suggests, was significantly disrupted with the advent of the principate. Augustus, as he monopolised temple restoration, at the same time secured privileged access to temple archives, publicising some documents and perhaps suppressing others. The antiquarian Verrius Flaccus (who served as tutor to Augustus’ grandsons) was responsible for composing and annotating the monumental calendar at Praeneste (the Fasti Praenestini), which marked the anniversaries of key events in the establishment of the principate. At the same time, as Padilla Peralta underlines, Flaccus’ lexicographic project itself incorporated epigraphic elements. A lemma on the Porticus Octavia appears to include the text of an inscription commemorating Gn. Octavius (the original builder of the Porticus), whose distinctive terminology suggests it should be associated with the monument's Augustan restoration (showcased in the Res Gestae). Lexicography, Padilla Peralta persuasively argues, incorporates and naturalises the transformation of the city's monuments.
The literary–archaeological collaboration of Maddalena Bassani and Francesca Romana Berno zeroes in on the Porticus of Livia, constructed on the Esquiline on the site of the house of Vedius Pollio, which the owner had bequeathed to Augustus (who then tore it down to make way for his wife's commission). Bassani maps the topography and hydraulic infrastructure of the site, while Berno charts the moral ambiguities in Ovid's account of the replacement of Vedius Pollio's luxurious private residence with Livia's magnificent porticus. Vedius bears a notable resemblance to the figure of Lycaon, guilty of challenging the gods and punished by Jupiter as vindex in Ovid's Metamorphoses. But, as she nicely underlines, the moral distinction between public magnificence and private luxury might be difficult to sustain, when a structure lavishly appointed for public enjoyment bore a close resemblance to the private building it replaced. The translation unfortunately slips in some places—the Younger Julia (108) was Augustus’ granddaughter, not his niece.
Carolyn MacDonald conducts us back to the Palatine on the trail of Myron's heifer, a creature whose figurative form is ecphrastically evoked by a succession of Greek epigrams in the Garland of Philip, circulating in the mid first century c.e. While most of these poems have no obvious Roman (indeed topographic) context, several of the epigrammatists who write about the heifer seem to have had Roman connections. Propertius (2.31.7–8) refers ambiguously to four Myronian cattle in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo Palatinus (Myron's sculpture itself was certainly in Rome by 75 c.e., located in Vespasian's Forum Pacis). Offering suggestive insights into the specifically Roman resonance of cattle on the Palatine (evoking Evander, Hercules, the Lupercalia), as well as probing the epigrammatic politics of mimesis, reproduction and adaptation, MacDonald presses four epigrams from the Garland to yield (implicit) reflections on Rome's ‘spoliation-cum-replication’ of Greek culture.
Stephanie Ann Frampton's elegant discussion of Ovid's poetic corpus analyses the poet's expressions of anxiety concerning the vulnerability of his work (described in corporeal terms), as well as his person, as he languishes in exile, noting his particular interest in inscriptions, real and imagined. While papyrus might be fragile, the lapidary text had an appealing fixity for Ovid; Frampton tracks epigraphic echoes in his poetry (evoking particularly autoepitaphs, which give voice to the deceased). She also detects echoes of his poetry in later epigraphic texts, a striking testimony to their afterlife (even if her reading of a graffito from Herculaneum, now lost, is perhaps over-optimistic). Here, as often elsewhere in this impressive collection, the impact of the epigraphic on the literary emerges with particular and vital force.
The editors suggest their approach may serve as a paradigm for studying the relationship between words and things, the material and the textual, which is at the heart of classical studies. They certainly succeed in capturing the fraught potency of the inscribed word, of the monument real or imagined, in the Rome of Augustus.
