Of note in John Scheid's edition, translation, commentary and analysis of Plutarch's Roman Questions (Aitia Romaïka) is S.'s interpretative final section (Aufbau und literarische Einordnung, 175–228). There, S. details his idea that the topography of an area in the centre of the city of Rome serves as an underlying organizing principle of Plutarch's Roman Questions. This section is preceded by the Greek text with facing German translation and a crisply executed and informative commentary.
S. sees a coherent topographical underpinning to Plutarch's work. This topography corresponds to an area bounded by four stopping points: (1) by the Forum Boarium and the Circus Maximus, (2) in the Forum Romanum, (3) near the south-west foot of the Capitoline, and (4) on the Capitoline. S. reconstructs a ‘walking tour’ around these points, arguing that Plutarch's 113 questions can be more or less divided into eight unevenly distributed sets that refer directly or indirectly to places located in, or viewable from, these points. Consequently, multiple returns are required to all stations except (mercifully) the endpoint on the Capitoline. S. provides small map sections as figures showing the walking paths, stopping points and sight lines of the tour.
It is important to S. that this ‘walking tour’ be literally possible either as a walk within the stations outlined or a visual tour from the Capitoline. He has even retraced with colleagues its steps in modern Rome (180). Now, S. does not see Plutarch's text as a tourist guidebook, but as a learned game for those in the know or a primer in Roman customs for young people (228). Either way, S. views the text as inextricably tied to the layout of a discreet area of Rome and wants to show how Plutarch bids his audience to refer to or recall this topography (228).
S. admits his topographical framework for the text is neither explicit nor self-evident (207), but he succeeds, after many contortions, in making it fit. S. has his work cut out for him from the moment Plutarch directly refers to topography. The first location mentioned by the text (Question 3) is the Temple of Diana on the Vicus Patricius, not possibly locatable or viewable from S.'s first station bordering the Circus Maximus and Forum Boarium (181). How does S. arrive at this stopping point? The first nine questions encompass the themes of brides, marriage and women's relations with their husbands and male relatives. S. asserts that we must recall the underlying aetiological myth for Roman marriage, the abduction of the Sabine women, a story traditionally placed in the Circus Maximus (181). But Question 4's explicit topographical reference, the Temple of Diana on the Aventine, pinpoints the first station for S. A viewer could possibly have seen that temple from a location bordering the Forum Boarium and Circus Maximus. The cleverness of S.'s play with the text is on full display when he adds that the tour's starting point makes so much sense because it refers to, albeit ever so obliquely, a mythical starting point of the Roman people: the abduction and eventual marriages of the Sabine women (181).
The simultaneous difficulty with and beauty of S.'s idea is that it is easy to find locations important to Roman tradition in the area he has Plutarch circumscribe, the ancient ritual, political and economic centre of the city. If Plutarch is concerned with explaining Roman customs, then we are naturally to be referred to places in the very area S. marks out. Think of Book 4 of Propertius' elegies (and Tara Welch's 2005 reading of it), a project at least topographically similar to that of S.'s Plutarch, generating as it does vistas and aitia of things in the same area: the Ara Maxima, the Tarpeian rock, a temple of Juppiter on the Capitoline, a statue of Vertumnus on the Vicus Tuscus etc. Such parallels in Roman literature reinforce S.'s idea that this topography is culturally important.
Yet S. goes too far in showing that the topography Plutarch has in mind can be precisely plotted. Ancient readers undoubtedly will have played with Plutarch's text in similar ways, but Plutarch's text's multiplicity of answers to its questions encourages the idea that any such play, topographical or otherwise, has to be less pat than S.'s interpretation permits. Consequently, S.'s closed topographical reading often seems at odds with the spirit of Plutarch's open-ended text that answers questions with answers that are themselves questions.
S.'s work draws welcome attention to Roman topography in Plutarch's Roman Questions. Although many readers will not be completely convinced of the particulars of S.'s ‘walking tour’, he will convince many that Plutarch's Roman Questions take the charged topography of ancient Rome as seriously as did the Romans whose ancient customs Plutarch was interrogating. With a complete package of text, translation, commentary and literary analysis, S.'s volume will encourage its readers to reconstruct their own topographical readings of Plutarch, and those paths that S. has opened are rich with possibilities.
