This collection honours the life and career of Judith Peter Hallett. The breadth and the quality of the contributions in this volume attest to Hallett's influence on classical scholarship. Nineteen essays are organised into three sections – Roman Literature, Gender and Reception – areas to which Hallett herself continues to make important contributions. In their introduction the editors offer an impressive biography of the dedicatee.
The first section includes six original essays on Roman writers from Cicero to Petronius, applying diverse perspectives such as psychoanalysis and the celebrity paradigm. E.S. Gruen argues that Cicero's deployment of xenophobic and racist stereotypes is opportunistic, used only in the interest of persuasion. G. points to a Roman ‘relativism’ found in Cicero's De republica as evidence of the weakness of the stereotypes. M.C.J. Putnam focuses on Virgil's engagement with Lucretius' De rerum natura and the phrase frigidus sanguis (Virg. G. 2.482; Aen. 10.452). P. argues that the chill blood which comes over the poet faced with grand Lucretian themes expresses the universal fear of death. M.B. Skinner works from Quint's 1993 Freudian reading of the Aeneid 1–6, in which he locates traumatic repetitions of the fall of Troy. S. applies this reading to Aeneid 7–12 in order to understand Venus' furor and its association with the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. S. notes that the resolution of Juno's furor is complicated by Venus', which motivates Aeneas' final act and is memorialised in Pompey's and Caesar's duelling Roman temples to the goddess.
Two chapters on Ovid follow. L. carefully catalogues the rhetorical devices which mirror and augment the theme of duo in una in ‘Ceyx and Alcyone’ (Met. 11). L. argues that Ovid's verse, in its ubiquitous doublings, demonstrates a lack of boundaries and a loss of selfhood. T.P. Wiseman explores the trope of the vates, comparing the historical use of the word and the experience of divine inspiration to passages in Fasti. W. paints a vivid picture of the potential performance context of Ovid's Fasti, arguing for a diverse audience of Romans in the fora and circus, where poets and prophets recited verse side-by-side. Rounding off this section, S.K. Dickison offers a compelling reading of Petronius' Widow of Ephesus (Sat. 111–12) as a celebrity, whose story turns on the tension between a performed public persona and private behaviour.
The second group of essays offers five chapters on Roman gender as historical, discursive and constructed, spanning from the first century b.c.e. to the fourth century c.e. A. Richlin, using techniques employed to reconstruct the poetry of male authors such as Gallus, creates a Letters to Cicero collection from Cicero's responses to Terentia (Fam. 14.1–9, 11–24). The exercise reveals a strong, brave woman who used her influence to manage Cicero's reputation and property, and cared for their family in his absence. The next two essays focus on Augustan poetry. J. Fabre-Serris argues that Virgil, Horace, Propertius and Ovid adopt the Gallan Phyllis to articulate the code of passion appropriate to each generic context. These intertexts, in return, offer clues which allow F.-S. to reconstruct Phyllis in Gallus' Amores. T. Van Nortwick argues that Aeneas' series of encounters with women (Juno, Venus, Dido, Sibyl, Camilla and Lavinia) shows a progression towards removing feminine influences. Turnus' murder, V.N. argues, marks the hero's final transition into wholly masculine leadership.
G. tracks Perpetua's shifting gender expression throughout the martyr's account of her imprisonment and its frame. G.'s essay focuses on Perpetua's last vision, where she fights an Egyptian man. G. demonstrates that Perpetua's description maintains a linguistic hermaphroditism, for she uses a feminine participle (facta) to describe her metamorphosis into masculus (10.7) and shifts to masculine adjectives when describing herself as part of the group. In the last essay of this section, H. Harich-Schwarzbauer considers Serena's familial influence on the emperor Honorius as it is represented in Claudian's carmina minora 46–8. H.-S. argues that Serena's woven gifts to the emperor – feminine, domestic products – recommend an imperial role as figurehead rather than military leader.
The final section is the largest and has the broadest scope, covering the reception of the ancient world from Martial to modernity. This section begins with P.'s application of G. Agamben's ‘bare life’, a person who is both excluded from the protection of the state while being regulated by it, and whose life is deemed expendable. P. argues that the ‘bare life’ constructed for outsiders by Roman imperial sovereignty, illustrated by Martial's Liber Spectaculorum, nurtured a strong alternative Christian community. Martyr narratives appear to reclaim their identity and self-worth in the face of the ‘bare life’ proscribed by Roman sovereignty. H.M. Lee considers the historical attitudes towards professional athleticism and the nineteenth-century revival of the Greek ‘Olympics’. L. compares three physician-philosophers – Galen (second–third century c.e.), Mercuriale (sixteenth–seventeenth century) and Brookes (nineteenth century).
The third contribution to this section represents the first published study of Alessandro Piccolomini's Italian translation of Xenophon's Oeconomicus, La economica (1540). D. Robin's reading includes his comic dialogue, La Raffaella, published perhaps as a companion piece to La economica. R. asks why Xenophon's ‘misogynistic’ work may have interested the Italian thinker who dedicated both dialogues to Frasia Placidi de Venturi, a noted female intellectual. R. demonstrates how Piccolomini reworks Xenophon's dialogue, removing misogynistic and sexually explicit material and adding the art of discorso to the divine gifts given to men and women. Next, J. Donawerth offers a study of the reception of racial categories in Shakespeare's Othello. D. argues that the name, Bianca, marks this character as N. African because it is derived from the Italian term for the N. African Moors, bianchi. D. explores how the inclusion of a second African character further complicates Shakespeare's exploration of race, gender and identity.
Moving into the nineteenth century, L.T. Pearcy analyses the reception of Talfourd's Ion in antebellum Philadelphia. P. demonstrates how performances of female actors in ‘breeches’ roles like Ion offered an opportunity to explore American masculinity and femininity. Young men played by women expressed the femininity of this age group; adult women who played these roles, however, were praised for a lack of gender ambiguity. C. Stray describes Victorian women's reception of the Classics in the university settings of Oxford and Cambridge. S. demonstrates how curricula and evaluation were more or less accommodating of the newly integrated female students.
The last two essays turn to the twenty-first century. N.S. Rabinowitz considers Rhodessa Jones' ‘Medea Project’. In the process of reappropriating ancient myth, incarcerated women frame their experiences, allowing them to reclaim agency. In Slouching to Armageddon, for example, the women imagine the ‘real’ Pandora as a gift-giving figure who benefits humans. J. Adamitis and M.-K. Gamel explore the influence of J. Shay's work on the Athenian citizen-soldier and the theatre. They also respond to J. Goldberg's 2011 Chronicle of Higher Education article, where she noted students' increasing demand for dialogue about war trauma. As their piece demonstrates, Attic tragedies offer modern audiences an opportunity to reflect on personal experiences of war. The authors call upon ‘academics and community members’ to create ‘engaged’ performances which attempt to address the need for communal conversation about war trauma – much like the ‘community theatre’ in Athens.
Given the diversity of the material covered in this collection, the notes and bibliography are sensibly located within individual chapters. Subject and passage indexes at the end of the volume aid scholars who wish to focus on themes or authors. While this reader's interest drew her particularly to contributions such as Skinner's Freudian reading of traumatic repetition in the second half of Virgil's Aeneid, Richlin's recovered Letters to Cicero, P.'s formulation of the Roman ‘bare life’ and Robin's analysis of Piccomolini's La economica, she found that, overall, the variety of the contributions offered a pleasurable and thought-provoking read.
