This book on Flavian Campania collects seventeen papers presented in 2015 at a conference organised by A. Augoustakis, C. Buongiovanni, J. Littlewood and A. Sacerdoti. After a general introduction, the first section surveys the presence and significance of Campanian geographies in Flavian literature. The two following sections explore the treatment of Campania by Statius and Silius Italicus respectively, while the epilogue focuses on the reception of Statius’ poetry by Campanian humanists.

The collection provides a good exploration of the literary and political significance of Campania in Flavian literature, with an emphasis on the ways in which the inherent contradictions of this bilingual, Greek-Roman region influenced the Roman cultural and literary imagination. Characterised by a fertile countryside and a pure sea, Campania was a famous holiday destination for wealthy Romans who often owned estates there. Home of the Sybil and birthplace of both Virgil and Statius, Campania was also a celebrated hub for literary otium for both Roman poets and their patrons. Yet, especially after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 ce, this volcanic land, which an extensive literary tradition identifies as the entrance to the Underworld, was also perceived as a dangerous place of death and devastation, reminiscent of the violence of the mythic fights attempted by the giants against the gods. By adopting different methodological approaches, the chapters successfully explore how Flavian literature variously describes this region as a land of change and rebirth but also of deceptive beauty and destruction. In so doing, the book suggests that the duality of Campania was often exploited by Flavian authors both to renegotiate their relationship with their literary models and to explore the political and sociocultural contradictions of their time.

The book provides an original contribution to both Flavian studies and the explorations of Campania in the literary sources. As the editors acknowledge in the introduction, this is not the first publication on literary visions of Campania, and it builds upon important studies such as those by J.H. D'Arms (Romans on the Bay of Naples [1970]) and I. Fielding and C.E. Newlands (ICS 40 [2015]). Nevertheless, this is the first study that specifically focuses on the significance assumed by Campania in the Flavian literary imagination, a theme that has been only partially addressed in recent years by E. Stärk (Kampanien als geistige Landschaft [1995]), Augoustakis (ICS 40 [2015]) and Newlands (Generic Interactions [2010]). More importantly, the variety of methodological approaches adopted by the authors to examine how and to what extent Campania is a vehicle of poetic and political reflections in Flavian literature makes this book of interest to many scholars working outside the relatively narrow field of Flavian studies. Different from its predecessors, this collection has fully benefited from the new approaches to literary spaces prompted in recent years by the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in the Humanities (D. Spencer, Roman Landscape [2010]). In particular, it nicely cross-fertilises two emerging scholarly trends, namely the idea that cityscape and narrated spaces can be saturated with literary and political meanings (V. Rimell, Martial's Rome [2008]), and the reading of Flavian Campania as a Graecised self-projection of Rome on a land apparently described as antithetical to the Urbs (Newlands, Statius, Poet Between Rome and Naples [2012]). In so doing, this book further advances both intertextual and landscape studies while showing the benefit of setting in dialogue texts belonging to different genres, along the path recently pointed out by A. König and C. Whitton (Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian [2018]).

The first section opens with a rich overview by Buongiovanni on the origin and significance of the cultural diversity that we find in Campania and on its literary descriptions by Statius, Martial and Silius. Someone less used to the concept of retroactive or synchronic intertextuality (cf. König and Whitton [2018]), might disagree that Martial's description of Neapolitan chestnuts (Ep. 5.78.14–15), published around 90 ce, sarcastically alludes to Statius’ Silv. 3.5, published around 93 ce. Nevertheless, this complex intertextual reading successfully shows how descriptions of Campania provided the occasion for literary reflections and intertextual renegotiations of poetic authority. By focusing on the role played by water in the ps.-Senecan Octavia and in Martial's description of Agrippina's death, L.D. Ginsberg reflects on how the memory of Nero's tyranny is reworked by the Flavian descriptions of the Bay of Naples. The comparative exploration of a series of explicit and silenced intertexts as well as of epigraphic sources suggests that the water's refusal to collaborate with Nero becomes an image of what M. Dewar (Leisured Resistance [2014]) has defined as ‘the leisured resistance’ of the Campanian people against the excesses of the imperial power. Shifting the focus to fire, D. Krasne examines the passages of Valerius’ Argonautica in which Campanian landscapes resurface through metaphoric allusions to the zone's volcanoes and to the giants that, according to ancient thought, were imprisoned under them. Valerius’ decision to collocate Typhon under the Bay of Naples is read in the light of the well-established association of the myth of gigantomachy with civil wars as a politically meaningful Romanisation of the Argonautica’s geographies. This theme is further explored by N. Manioti, who sets Greek and Latin texts in dialogue to show how, while prosaic texts generically use the name Inarime to mean the island of Ischia, Flavian epicists use it to refer specifically to the island's volcano, hinting at the politically loaded risk that the giants (an image of political instability) might be reawakening. The section ends with two articles on Martial. In the first, É. Wolff freely uses the concept of heterotopia (M. Foucault, Des espaces autres [1984]) to offer a biographical reading of Martial's poetry by noting how the poet's attitude towards Baia radically changes after Book 6, when the coastal town, initially praised for being pleasantly antithetic to Rome, turns out to be a worsened image of Rome's vices. M. Neger completes this exploration by suggesting that Martial uses the conflicting features of Campania – a land as fertile as dangerous – to reflect on the multifaceted, polyhedral nature of his own poetry. In its rich comparative and intertextual analysis of Greek and Latin texts belonging to different periods, genres and media, this section offers not only an overview of the symbolic functions assumed by Campania in Flavian texts, but also a better understanding of the poetic and political potential of narrated spaces as conceptualisations of different sociocultural, autobiographical and literary issues.

The second section explores how and to what extent Statius’ references to Campania felix shape the poetics and politics of the Silvae. Through a New Historicist reading of the catalogues of Campanian places featured in Silv. 3.5, 4.3 and 5.3, P. Esposito suggests that the poet's emphasis on restoration is not merely encomiastic, but actually provides us with important information on the cultural and everyday life of Campanian towns. G. Rosati's fascinating chapter on Silv. 3.1 suggests that Statius’ mythologisation of Campanian landscapes through ecphrases and allusions depicts Pollius’ villa as a toy-empire that reproduces and miniaturises Flavian court-life. This theme is further expanded by F. Bessone's analysis of Silv. 3.1 and 3.5 that brilliantly shows how the depictions of Campanian landscapes and buildings reify the complexity of Statius’ own poetry and its aspiration to conciliate cultural conflicts and aesthetic tensions. A glimpse of this complexity is given by A. Lóio's re-examination of Silv. 4.8, which nicely blends the philological discussion of two textual conjectures with the consideration of the ways in which the poem can be read as a historical source for the history of Naples. By re-reading the same poems from a psychological perspective, A. Sacerdoti finds in Statius’ style and word choice symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that can be linked not only to the Vesuvian eruption but also to the status of permanent volcanic instability of Campania. Of course, Statius’ Campania has recently attracted a remarkable degree of scholarly attention (e.g. Newlands [2012] and A. Klause, The Classical Outlook 91 [2016]). Nevertheless, by originally bridging and further developing Newland's political reading of the Silvae (2002, esp. 154–98) and Rimell's socio-psychological study of miniaturisation and closure in imperial poetry (The Closure of Space [2015]), this section proposes an original and fresh re-reading of the Silvae.

The final section on Campania at war in the Punica is extremely valuable as Silius’ treatment of landscape is still largely unexplored (M. Fucecchi, Maia 42 [1990]; F. Morzadec, Les images du monde [2009]; Augoustakis, ICS 40 [2015]). Fucecchi's introductory chapter shows how Campanian landscapes shape the Punica’s epic narratives by both enhancing the opposition between Scipio and Hannibal and thematising the moral and political issues of Silius’ time. Further delving into this theme, T. Biggs suggests that Campania, as a land of otium and lust, interferes with the warfare by slowing down Hannibal while extinguishing his military ambition. This function is especially acknowledged by the proleptic ecphrases of the temple of Liternum (6.653–716) that foreshadow Hannibal's defeat. Offering an intertextual reading of the fictional ecphrases featured in Teuthras’ songs and of Silius’ description of the doors of Apollo's temple, A. Keith reflects on how Campanian monuments symbolically present Hannibal as an inversion of Virgil's Aeneas, while meta-poetically embodying Silius’ renegotiation of his Augustan models. By applying to the Punica the idea of Campania as a divine and chthonic land, C. Stocks's study of gigantomachy shows that the region's inherent duality embodies both the liminal status of Hannibal as a monster and would-be-god, and the tensions pervading Silius’ poetry. The section is concluded by E. Pyy and M. van der Keur, who use the notion of heterotopia (cf. Wolff's chapter) to explore the ominous political significance for Flavian Rome of the intertextual depiction of Capua as a new Carthage and a new Troy. In the book's epilogue Fielding provides an original discussion of Statius’ Campanian reception by the Neapolitan humanists Panormita and Pontano. In addition to providing one of the richest treatments of Silius’ landscapes currently available, this section successfully bridges the analysis of narrated spaces with that of the proleptic function of Silius’ ecphrases proposed by S.J. Harrison (‘Picturing the Future Again’ in Brill's Companion to Silius Italicus [2010]), while further developing the study on gigantomachy in post-Virgilian epic (P. Hardie, Epic Successors [1993]).

While one might regret the lack of more articles on Valerius Flaccus, whose Argonautica features multiple, although indirect, allusions to Campania, this book constitutes an important and solid contribution to the study of Flavian Campania. More broadly, in its cross-fertilisation of intertextual, cultural materialistic and psychological approaches to the study of landscape, ecphrases, gigantomachy, silenced intertexts and spatial ‘closures’, this book originally and helpfully pushes the boundaries of both intertextual and landscape studies, prompting greater awareness of the necessity of setting literary texts in dialogue with non-literary, visual and even spatial narratives (cf. Z. Newby, Art and Inscriptions [2007]; K. Milnor, Graffiti and the Literary Landscape [2014]).