Motherhood and its representations in art and literature have evoked much scholarly interest in the field of classics in the past few decades. As a phenomenon that is common to all human cultures and that carries a great deal of emotional and ideological weight, it is a particularly difficult topic of study. On the one hand, it is of greatest importance to avoid a universalising approach to the subject; on the other, this can be difficult when the topic is something seemingly so familiar. Motherhood is something that we like to think we know, and that is exactly why we are so easily puzzled (and even threatened) by its strange and inexplicable aspects in different historical and cultural contexts. As it is a subject of which most people have some first-hand experience and predefined ideas, studying it requires a heightened awareness of the researcher's subject position.

McA.'s monograph succeeds laudably in avoiding these pitfalls and makes a valuable contribution to the study of gender and family in the ancient world, while also being an important contribution to the field of classical literary criticism. McA. looks at representations of motherhood in select ‘paradigmatic texts’ from the Roman imperial period: Virgil, Ovid, Seneca and Statius. While the representations of motherhood in many of these sources have been touched upon in several studies in the past few decades, McA.'s book is the first comprehensive analysis of the similarities and differences in Virgil's, Ovid's, Statius’ and Seneca's ways of dealing with the theme. It looks at change or continuity in these authors’ representations of motherhood, and offers a beautifully balanced account of the most significant poetic works of the first century of the Principate.

The book is structured around three independent ‘case studies’ dealing with Augustan epic, Seneca and Statius respectively. This means that the end of the first century c.e. is more emphasised; Seneca and Statius are evidently the areas where McA.'s enthusiasm and expertise can be most clearly observed. Cramming Virgil and Ovid into one introductory chapter might not do justice to the versatility of their poetry. Be that as it may, the Augustan poets and their influence on the later literary tradition are carried along throughout the book – at the end, McA. beautifully ties together the argument by analysing the ways in which Ovidian overtones are utilised and developed further in Seneca's tragedies and how Statius’ epic comments on the neglected and left-behind (yet constantly returning) mother-figures of the Aeneid. Thus, at the end, McA. succeeds laudably in her attempt to study ‘maternal representation in and between literary texts’ (p. 7), and to examine ‘how maternal representation plays out across a range of texts, authors and generic traditions and against shifting historical and political backgrounds’ (p. 8). On several occasions, I felt that including Lucan's Pharsalia in the analysis would have made the book even stronger and filled the gap between the Augustan and the Flavian epic poets. However, the reasons why McA. decided to leave this work out and only refers to it briefly here and there are understandable, as the study is broad and extensive as it is.

McA. examines Roman motherhood as a cultural and a literary construct, and her approach is distinctly theoretical. She combines the traditions of psychology with feminist-influenced literary criticism, and utilises them within the frame of a more traditional classical scholarship. Especially Kristeva's and Irigaray's theories concerning the female subjectivity, the maternal abject and the semiotic female chôra, as well as the psychological experience of motherhood, are particularly influential to her analysis throughout the book. Marrying many complicated and sometimes conflicting critical premises is not easy or unproblematic; however, thanks to her sensitivity to the historical context, and to her ability to reflect on her own writerly position McA. succeeds in providing a balanced, sophisticated study where the theory does not overrule the source material but brings out its various fascinating nuances. The polyphony and the ambiguity of these familiar texts becomes evident, and instead of seeking to ‘liberate’ a female voice within them, McA. raises the question of ‘what reading mothers in Roman literature does to reading Roman literature’ (p. 23).

McA. perceptively examines the paradoxical nature of motherhood in Roman culture, especially in respect of power. Besides being a personal experience, motherhood was an institution and a social construct produced within the frame of patriarchy – thus, while the status of mother provided Roman women with considerable power and authority, it was also a vehicle of patriarchal control over their bodies, lives and sexuality. Therefore, examining what mothers and mother-figures ‘mean’ in Roman literature requires a profound understanding of these sources as elite male-constructed representations of women. As McA. points out, these specific circumstances make motherhood ‘a site of contest’ in Roman literature, with multiple ideological, moral and political overtones (p. 6). One of the most intriguing and challenging attempts of the book is to trace the Roman mother's subjectivity in these works – in the early imperial literary sources, mothers and mother-figures are everywhere but, as McA. points out, the Roman mother herself seems ‘a slippery, shadowy figure, a kind of vanishing point in our understanding of Roman culture. Fundamental to it yet only peripherally visible, her subjectivity remains hidden between the lines’ (p. 7). Another aspect of the book that shows its broad perspective and open-minded approach is the attempt to examine the significance of motherhood for the construction of Roman masculine (heroic) identity. This is something that has not been given much attention in earlier studies of the Roman gender system and its literary representations, and especially for the study of Roman war epic the matter is absolutely crucial. McA. draws attention to differences in the style of Augustan and later imperial literature; she points out that the literature of the end of the century breaks free from the Augustan ‘foundational texts of Roman identity … which celebrated an exemplary masculine self that subordinated itself to the state’; ‘instead of optimistic glorification of the Roman imperial project we find anxiety’, even rebellion towards the master narratives of Roman identity and the ‘huge ideological vacuum’ and uncertainty (p. 51). This is an important observation as it connects the representations of motherhood with the wider, ideological framework that influenced the production of these texts.

At times, I was left hoping for further discussion about the particular historico-political context, and how it influenced the imperial authors’ readings of Roman motherhood. McA. points out the active, ideologically influenced reconstruction of the concepts of family and motherhood in the Augustan period, and how the line between public and private was blurred when it came to reproduction and mothering. Moreover, she rightly states that in the Augustan rhetoric and imagery the mother functioned as a stabilising term: it ‘does not just operate as a reassuring symbol of permanence, continuity, and fecundity after a time of social rupture and upheaval; in addition the invocation of the maternal as origin signifies a move to a deeper “truth”, meaning that can be fixed, the prospect of an epistemological and ethical certainty that stands above and outside messy post-civil war masculine politics’ (p. 34). This is a perceptive reading – I feel that the question of ‘imperial control’ over the meaning of motherhood could have been brought up more often in the book, and discussed in terms of all the texts analysed. The abundance of maternal imagery in the Augustan propaganda, and the lack thereof in the Flavian one is pointed out, but perhaps more could have been made out of this notion.