You can't get more human than walking. We bipeds have presumably been enjoying our flagship mode of locomotion since that freakish simian ancestor did the first ‘look mum, no hands’ trick — and, surprisingly, got us stuck there forever. O'Sullivan's mission and method is certainly part of the humanities landscape nowadays: take a seemingly boring subject (walking?! come off it!) and show what rich pickings we have forfeited by ignoring it. In some ways, the turf has been well-trodden in preparation. Romanists have looked hard at how élite discourse disciplines the body. In public or private, how you carried yourself was just as important as what you said for nailing the identity ideal. O. slots into this now quite weighty procession of heads of deportment (for example, Corbeill, Gleason, Gunderson), but focuses on gait (‘identity in motion’) as opposed to pose, gesture and dress — all of which have now been scrutinized by the sharpest Foucauldian pupils.
Our author does more than mere following in these footsteps. The book broadly takes stock of walking in two guises: walking as a way of performing and shoring up élite identity (cultural, social, political); and walking as a model metaphor for the Roman to set his watch by, a good way to imagine ‘the mind in motion’. Though the introduction warms up with more on the former, the focus is fairly distributed throughout — and the two strands of this body-mind dyad are, of course, entangled. Ch. 1 covers walking in the flesh, especially its rôle in gender performance; ch. 2 eyes Seneca's philosophical understanding of the gait as advertisement for the mind; ch. 3 reviews city walking and the politics of the Roman élite's ‘entourage’ spectacle; ch. 4 sees the body disappear beneath the mental exercise of ambulatio culture in the Roman villa; ch. 5 takes this ‘intellectual’ walking more seriously, and measures the way the walking metaphor holds up in the field of philosophical inquiry; ch. 6 takes us for a walk (not a ride?) past the famous ‘Odyssey Landscapes’ (first-century b.c. wall-paintings), and shows how they channel the Roman ambulatio via their clever framing and storytelling. The conclusion reels off a discussion of Fellini's Roma to make the point that there is something inherently ‘walkative’ about Rome, the eternally palimpsestic city; something which seems always to raise the problem of human mobility. Just how do we wade through its clogged labyrinth of temporalities?
The same could be asked of the mess of texts that bear on the subject of walking, but O. does a top job of navigating them. The discussion is weighted more to Cicero and Seneca (especially chs 2, 4, 5), naturally due to the shape of their self-consciously philosophical walking and talking (about walking). But O. manages to zip through a host of other material too. His climactic reading of the Odyssey Landscapes shows him a skilled (if at times over-imaginative) mediator of the text/image boundary, and really allows him to strut his stuff as a cultural historian proper (not just a philologist awkwardly walking like one). The range of texts surveyed inevitably makes it difficult to go deep, but on the whole O. treads the fine line well; even his quick treatments add value (such as Valerius Maximus inverting male/female versions of the deductio (58–9)). Sometimes the nuances fall behind at such pace. For example, O. points out that Vitellius’ unripeness for rule in Tacitus, Histories 3 is signalled by his walk (48–9); but judging character from such external, bodily signals is often notoriously hollow in Tacitus. Piso, for instance, is way off the pace on Otho's gait (incessu, Hist. 1.30). When O. handles the Romans appropriation of Greek philosophical theoria via their villa strolls, I also found the theorization a little gaunt and simplistic. Moving freely through the Greekish theme park of an aristocratic Roman villa must have been an assertion of power as much as an attempt at walking in the wake of those dead wise men; the villa was the home front of Rome the cosmopolitan power, and the place where Greek (and other) culture was, quite literally, domesticated into a blunt object of otium. Quibbles aside, O.'s upbeat constitution(al) makes for sensitive reading, and I was only left feeling stranded or underwhelmed in a few isolated places.
For a scholar so attuned to the metaphor of walking, I was surprised to see Latin prose preponderate over the more regular steps of its metrical cousin. Perhaps the pulse of beating verse was just too obvious to be interesting: Statius' Thebaid lagging behind the unfilled big shoes of the Aeneid (Theb. 12.817), the musa pedestris of Horatian sermo (Sat. 2.6.17), the limps and trips of gammy-legged elegy, that suspicious whiff of metapoetics every time Ovid puts a foot in his feet.
All told, the big issue might end up lying with the assumptions of this kind of cultural history. At times, for all O.'s robust callisthenics, it is hard to make out why walking is special, what it tells us about the Roman way of doing, reading and thinking identity, which we did not know before. If culture is a grand connected system, pick any part (dress, speech, gesture, toilets) and voilà: you have a story about the whole. As O. shows, the walk habitually comes in train with other identity markers; and often they say the same thing apart as together. But that message, as it stands, is largely pre-recorded. The story of Roman élite performance anxiety — the regulated self-fashioning of status, gender, cultural identity — seems to have become irresistible to the point of pedestrianism. And perhaps that is simply because it is … gulp … true. If so, plaudits to O. for taking a different route there, and framing so much else of interest along the way.
