Motherhood: a biological universal; and yet, such a complex issue in the twenty-first century! Mairéad McAuley's new study of motherhood offers fresh and provocative readings. In eight chapters (including the introduction) and an epilogue, M. seeks to disclose the meaning of motherhood and mothering in Latin epic and tragedy, dividing her study into three parts, each dedicated to a period of Latin literature: Augustan, Neronian (Seneca) and Flavian (Statius).

In her introduction, M. asks her reader to reflect on what a (Roman) mother is, a loaded question, since motherhood is a ‘site of contest’ (6), often manipulated for political, cultural and ideological reasons. Roman mothers ‘reproduce Rome’ by bearing sons and by propagating and guaranteeing Roman values. M. employs an array of theoretical approaches (especially Kristeva and Irigaray) that help us understand the cultural construction of maternity. She acknowledges that her own approach is ecletic, profiting from psychoanalysis but also moving beyond its confines.

In the second chapter (‘Maternal Impressions’), M. begins with Virgil's Aeneid and Georgics, unearthing two opposing alternatives in the narratives of the Augustan poet. The voice of dissent is exemplified by Dido and other mothers, who challenge and threaten to subvert patriarchal structures. From the perspective of ‘maternal impressions’, that is, how the mother's mind moulds the embryo's disposition, M. creatively discusses Dido's wish for a parvulus Aeneas, a wish that remains unfulfilled. But whereas the Aeneid tends to marginalize and repress mothers to the edges of the heroic, manly narrative, in the Georgics we are presented with a different picture: Cyrene is cast as the ‘loving presence and source of empowering knowledge and action in the world, necessary for individual and social progress' (111). And M. is correct to a certain degree in juxtaposing the two images of motherhood and mothering in the two poems, but cannot completely erase the dark tone cast by Orpheus' dismemberment in the narrative of the didactic poem.

In the following chapter (‘Matermorphoses’), we turn to Ovid to look at transformation through the lens of porous and mutable female bodies. Ovid privileges the maternal monologue to emphasize the metamorphic potential of maternity, as is seen in scenes of births, like Alcmene's or Myrrha's. But, as M. correctly observes, in the strange world of the Metamorphoses, mothers give life while they also take life quite easily, perhaps an echo of the patriarchal fantasy of mothers contributing to birth and death. Procne, Althaea or Hecuba become the other, the Kristevan abject, and it is precisely this aspect of motherhood that appeals to Ovid's experimentation with the subject in extremis. M. submits that mothers in extremis are the central focus of Ovid's exploration.

In the second part of the book, M. moves on to Seneca, in three chapters dedicated to prose works and tragedies. Opening the discussion with the Consolatio ad Helviam, M. proposes we look at this ‘textual’ mother as a reflection and refraction of Seneca's own identity. The tragic mother Helvia is aligned as a proxy to the exiled Seneca — her many miseries reflect the philosopher's own. At the same time, maternal grief becomes the springboard to showcase maternal virtus. Helvia rises up to the same stature as many a female exemplum of the Roman past.

Ch. 5 looks at the Medea and Phaedra, the two most iconic female figures of Senecan drama. Grotesque, cruel, monstrous: just a few names often used to describe these two heroines. M. asks why Seneca depicts with such fascination bad mothers/wives in his plays: unlike the positive influence of the vir-like Helvia, the tragic heroines become the other, the destructive force of motherhood that wreaks havoc and threatens to uproot societal norms and structures.

In the following chapter, M. returns to psychoanalysis (almost absent in the previous chapters on Seneca) as a hermeneutic tool to understand Andromache's dilemma in the Troades: to respect her dead husband or save her son. According to M., Andromache's ambivalence is explained by the ‘dynastic and reproductive pressures coniugium places upon Roman women’ (270), that is, the wife's rôle as mother but also the child's symbolism as pignus that solidifies the bond between spouses.

M. dedicates the final two chapters to Statius' Thebaid and Achilleid. The civil war at Thebes emphasizes the coexistence of maternity and warfare, as Statius becomes obsessed with the origins of the city and Oedipus' family, admittedly a complex issue. M. provocatively engages in a discussion of the equation of womanhood with motherhood and the womb: Jocasta is fashioned after Cornelia and Veturia by Statius, as she intervenes to save the brothers, while her womb is utilized as a ‘source of authority’ (332). But it is this womb that is the centre of incest in her case. The mother's body becomes abject and turns into a war zone.

In the chapter on Statius' Thetis and Atalanta, M. traces the limits of maternal knowledge: Thetis cannot stop Achilles' path to glory and death, and neither can Atalanta Parthenopaeus'. And yet, Thetis creates alternative narratives of gender identity, even though these narratives are bound to fail because of the nature of heroic epic. M. astutely interweaves such narratives of the maternal knowledge and power in Statius' poems with the ending of the Thebaid, the famous farewell to his poem: according to M., Statius fashions his epic as a ‘mother’ mourning for the prematurely lost ‘son’, Virgil, while at the same time, the Thebaid follows the Aeneid as a loyal ‘wife’. Such gendered reading of the end of Statius' epic on the Theban civil war provokes one last question which admits no easy answer: what do we do with mothers' stories in martial, manly epic?

Beyond doubt, M.’s monograph is packed with insightful readings and analyses, some less successful than others, but all quite intriguing, as she brings together disparate texts in the difficult task of uncovering the female voices.