This volume is based on the papers given at a 2013 London conference on ‘Psychogeographies in Latin Literature’, which sought to apply to Latin literature the methodologies of the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities, that is to say the attention to the representation, symbolism, psychology and ideology of space in cultural and literary discourses. The project is a timely one, in an area where, with a few exceptions, Hellenists had stolen a march on their Latinist colleagues. The title of the book of the conference is in homage to Henri Lefebvre's foundational La production de l'espace (1974), and theoretical approaches to the topic, mostly French, are woven into many of the contributions.

Further unity is given to the volume by the editors’ exemplary and lengthy ‘Introduction’, which helpfully sketches out the theoretical backgrounds and generously locates the individual chapters within a road-map of the larger themes. The chronological range reaches from Catullus to Augustine, but most chapters deal with early imperial texts (from Horace and Propertius to Tacitus and Juvenal). Unsurprisingly the focus is heavily on the implication of the spatial in the political, and on the construction of the subject with reference to the spaces of the imperial city, Rome, and of the larger spaces of Rome's worldwide imperium.

The first four chapters share an interest in movement in space, in and around the city of Rome. The figure of the flâneur, introduced by Baudelaire and much theorised since, informs Efrossini Spentzou's discussion of Propertius’ ‘aberrant itineraries’ in the city of Rome (ch. 1), as the elegist inscribes transgressive geographies in places of seduction, superimposing an erotic subjectivity on the imperial monuments and ceremonies of Augustan Rome, a double vision that Ovid was to explore at length. Diana Spencer also invokes the flâneur in her chapter (ch. 2) on Varro's topographical and etymological disquisitions in De lingua latina (Varro, whom Cicero famously praised (Acad. 1.9) as having led the Romans home when they were wandering as if strangers in their own city); and David Larmour likewise sees the flâneur in Juvenal's traversings of the ‘specular city’ of Rome (ch. 4), in whose spectacles the satirist and his readers are forced to contemplate mirrorings of their own fragmented selves. By contrast, Jared Hudson focuses on vehicular rather than pedestrian motion (ch. 3), asking how far Roman literature invests in the identification of human subjects with their modes of transportation (e.g. Cato's gelding with saddlebags, in contrast to the coxcomb's carriage with his crowd of running slaves).

Maxine Lewis sheds new light on the threefold division of the Catullan corpus from a spatial perspective (ch. 5), through the identification of a distinctive poetics of place in the polymetrics (‘topical’), the long poems (‘neoteric’) and the epigrams (‘abstracted’). Her focus on the association of imperial with more private spaces is continued in William Fitzgerald's fine readings of the thematisation of spatiality in Horace's Odes (ch. 6), in which the poems’ own boundaries and transitions self-reflexively mirror the imperial spaces that are their subject.

Philosophical and theological spaces are central to Catharine Edwards’ discussion of exile and displacement in the younger Seneca (ch. 7), with reference to the Stoic cosmopolis, and to Therese Fuhrer's consideration (ch. 8) of the three cities, Carthage, Rome, Milan, that form the staging-posts, or lieux de passage (with allusion to Pierre Nora's lieux de mémoire), for Augustine's spiritual itinerary in the Confessions.

Imperial spaces once more are the focus of the last three chapters. Shreyaa Bhatt shows how the opposition of the spaces of home and exile is deconstructed in two passages of Tacitus’ Annals (ch. 9), as also in Tiberius’ withdrawal to Capri (in ways that one might note differ from Seneca's construction of cosmopolitan exile). Richard Alston approaches the well-known difficulty of reconciling statements on civilisation and servitude in Tacitus’ Agricola by appealing to an ambivalence based on the tension between the ‘flat world’ of empire's utopia and the resistant memories of a humanitas that occupies a space of freedom in the elite Roman's psyche (ch. 10). Victoria Rimell provides a rousing finale (ch. 11) with readings of the symbolism of the Hellespont and other narrow, and frequently choked, bodies of water from Ovid to Statius, with an emphasis on Lucan, showing yet again the inseparability of the politics and (meta)poetics of space.