Near the end of Statius’ Thebaid, shortly before the sons of Oedipus clash in their fratricidal duel, King Adrastus shouts an anguished question to the Argive and Theban armies (Theb. 11.429–30): spectabimus ergo hoc … nefas, ‘will we, then, bear witness to this atrocity?’ Questions like this are asked throughout Latin literature and form a central leitmotif of this volume: when violence is on display, will – and why will – we watch it? The answers that this book provides to these and related questions are not on balance groundbreaking; indeed, as the eleven chapters move chronologically through Latin literature from Republican comedy to Christian authors in late antiquity, each chapter works largely within established scholarly conversations about each author or genre. Still, a volume like this is long overdue: the editors have assembled an impressive collection of senior scholars to conduct a wide-ranging examination of one of the most prominent features of Latin literature, its pervasive violence.
I discuss each individual chapter below; my overall criticisms of the volume are few. We may regret with the editors (p. xiv) the impossibility of a truly comprehensive study. The editors name Horace's Epodes and Martial's epigrams as avenues left unexplored; I myself missed the Theban material of Seneca and Statius (Oedipal sight/sex/violence, set in a dark mythological altera Roma) and the commentaries of Caesar (interesting per se and as a potentially fruitful counterpoint to the chapter on Lucan). But this only means that there are more books like this to be written. As it is, the volume offers fine generic, temporal and methodological variety, while remaining admirably integrated in its approach; indeed, the introduction and cross-references bind the volume together unusually well.
The editors’ introduction offers abundant examples to show the centrality of violence to the Roman world, its myths and its various literary genres. The editors then invoke various moments from the contributors’ chapters to explore the volume's key themes: violence and power, gender, and the reader. The handling of modern debates about violence and their connection to ancient theory (Plato, Aristotle, Seneca) is particularly agile; notable too is the first of many useful parallels with cinema to be found throughout the volume. The introduction ends with a focus on the role of the reader in responding to textualised violence (pp. 42–3), a topic of particular urgency in contemporary scholarship on violence in the media.
In Chapter 1 D. Konstan and S. Raval examine violence in Plautus. Here we find the first of several rejoinders to a traditional ‘explanation’ of violence in Latin literature, namely that it panders to the ‘low taste’ of the Roman audience (a particularly easy charge to make against Plautus’ audience of so-called ‘rural bumpkins’ [p. 47]). Instead, Konstan and Raval remind us that Plautus was a wartime author, and argue that the violence of his plays reflects the repressed anxiety of Roman citizens in wartime. Their overall point, sometimes hampered by the need to summarise the labyrinthine plots of the five plays they discuss, is that violence reaffirms the social order, i.e. the dominance of the citizen male, while at the same time demonstrating its fragility.
Gale's chapter on Lucretius is next, and is a standout. Her well-organised overview places the violence of the DRN in three contexts: Epicurean therapeutic practices (‘shock tactics’ to treat resistant pupils), Roman spectacular entertainment, and Greek and Latin epic. The Roman arena is a frequent topic in discussions of Latin literary violence, as is the dialectic between audience engagement and alienation that Gale explores; this, however, usually refers to gladiatorial spectacles, and I am not sure if the dialectic extends to venationes as easily as Gale assumes. But the exploration of Lucretius’ inglorious, anti-epic war narratives is excellent, as is the brief but refreshingly honest coda: different readers will inevitably read Lucretius’ violence differently.
Turning to Horace's Satires, P.A. Miller offers the volume's first overt use of theory: Foucault's discussion of the shift in the Victorian period from a regime of state-sponsored punishment to one of self-discipline, which various scholars have compared to an analogous shift during the transition from the Roman Republic to the Principate. Miller uses this framework to construct a nuanced (if not particularly innovative) discussion of the shifting concept of libertas from Lucilius to Horace. In this focus, Miller also offers the volume's first modified definition of violence: ‘I do not mean just physical assault, but the deployment of coercion and differentials of power and force’ (p. 88).
D. O'Rourke follows with a striking chapter on militia amoris and domestic violence in elegy. These topics have been explored before, and O'Rourke joins the fray by arguing that militia amoris was not a nonviolent metaphor, but rather a violent reality, and that the resulting collapse of the love/war polarity threatens elegy's counterculture value. But in the latter half of his argument O'Rourke adds an unexpected urgency to his subject matter by explicitly situating this literary militia amoris in the three realities – both ancient and modern – of domestic violence, military violence in civilian life and sexual violence in wartime. The modern parallels are not, in the end, fully integrated with the ancient context, but O'Rourke's approach is thought-provoking.
Chapters 5 and 6 are the longest (38 and 35 pages) and make contrasting use of the flexibility apparently offered to the volume's contributors (the shortest chapter is B.J. Gibson's, at 17 pages). First, C.E. Newlands writes on Ovid's Metamorphoses and Fasti. Familiar topics arise, such as sexual violence and voyeurism, but for Newlands the key issue is Ovid's interrogation of a series of power relationships: between genders, between gods and mortals, and between Ovid and the emperor. Newlands works through several excellent close readings (Actaeon, Procne and Philomela, Marsyas), with periodic useful references to Ovid's reception (Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Titian's Flaying of Marsyas). Her analysis is confidently wide-ranging, lucid and affecting: the chapter is one of the volume's best.
J. Henderson then writes on ‘Seneca's Audionasties’, i.e. the Controversiae, and in this volume he has perhaps found the perfect venue for his inimitably aggressive prose. I staggered away from 35 pages of Hendersonian verbal violence – ‘In (non-performing recording angel) Seneca the El Dorado's nostalgia-trip, the lead soloist Porcius Latro does the business for Augustan logomachy that gives his long-lived friend the stand-in superhero he needed to guide posterity through the contrary debating game, pioneering the trail out to boss the empire’ (pp. 180–1) – feeling decidedly punch-drunk.
There follows an ambitious chapter by D.F. Kennedy on the younger Seneca's Phaedra, focused on representations of violence as attempts to make traumatic events intelligible: in this case, the particular trauma of Hippolytus’ dismemberment, which is made to serve as a criticism of both literary and scholarly attempts at understanding. This chapter offers another of several salutary responses to critical dismissals of Latin literary violence, especially those critics who would dismiss as merely ‘absurd’ Theseus’ vain attempts to reassemble Hippolytus’ body parts (pp. 227–9). Kennedy's forceful reply to these critics continues to some extent Henderson's treatment of literary criticism as itself a violent exercise – in this volume, it seems, even the most idiosyncratic of parts be made to fit into the coherent whole (Theseus would be jealous).
After Kennedy's stimulating work, the collection tips back towards oracularity with E. Spentzou's examination of Caesar in Lucan's Bellum Civile. Spentzou offers another modified definition of violence: transgression of cultural, social, political, psychological or emotional order. I confess to some disappointment that, in this volume of all places, Lucan's dazzling physical violence was not tackled head on. Spentzou mostly works in a theoretical register – Kant on the sublime and Kristeva on the abject (but with a less than fully satisfying focus on the abject as a mental, not physical, phenomenon [p. 263]). Her style tends towards long block quotes interspersed with energetic but sometimes mystifying interpretation. She sets out in this chapter not to explain Lucan's Caesar (p. 266) and succeeds.
Following the boldness of the previous three contributors, Gibson's short and straightforwardly philological chapter on Tacitus comes as somewhat of a relief. Gibson's views on violence as a concept are resolutely sensible (the philologist's favourite pose): ‘violence is what other people get up to, never one's own side’ (p. 269). The bulk of the chapter comprises a survey of the word vis in various authors and especially in Tacitus. The term emerges as ambiguous: ‘force’ or ‘violence’? In Tacitus it is associated with four subjects: the emperor, other commanders, Rome and other states, and the army. The goals of this chapter are modest (although it bears remembering that we will not be able to look up vis in the TLL anytime soon), but Gibson succeeds in underscoring the tight connection between power and the legitimacy of force/violence in Rome.
The volume concludes with two excellent chapters on later Latin prose. First, W. Fitzgerald analyses Apuleius’ Golden Ass, employing a narratological approach to explore the structuring role of violence in the novel's episodic narrative. Like several other chapters, Fitzgerald swerves slightly away from focusing exclusively on violence; instead, he works with violence as a manifestation of cruelty (‘Cruelty is a richer concept than violence, and can be more easily attached to intentions’ [p. 288]). Nevertheless, in Apuleius ‘violence is described in some of the most exquisite Latin prose ever written’ (p. 286), and Fitzgerald offers several riveting looks at the phenomenon; his brilliant close reading of ‘The Bailiff's Tale’ (8.22) as an abstraction of a cruel narrative (pp. 291–5) is the best passage in the volume. Excellent as well is his observation that cruelty is also inherent in readers’ complicity with a fickle narrative that shifts rapidly from one character's perspective to another (pp. 302–5).
Finally, Scourfield provides the volume's most extensive discussion of eroticised violence, in Christian martyr-literature. Focusing on Jerome's Letter 1 (not technically a martyr narrative, but steeped in the conventions of the genre) and Prudentius’ Peristephanon 14, Scourfield treads some familiar methodological ground – Mulvey on the gaze, comparisons with Ovid – and makes some expected points – the executioner's (useless) sword as a symbol of impotence in Jerome's narrative and as an object of desire in Prudentius’. But Scourfield's handling of the complex dynamics between authors and readers is excellent, particularly his discussion of how we are ‘supposed to’ read the sexualised violence of Prudentius’ narrative (a metaphor in the service of celebrating Agnes’ pious virginity) and how we may rather choose to read it in the twenty-first century (with a focus on the countercultural force of Agnes’ desiring gaze). Readers, then, once again come to the fore, and in particular our responsibilities in confronting violent texts (p. 337).
I cannot say, in the end, if I have emerged from this volume a more responsible consumer of violence, but I have certainly emerged a more knowledgeable one.
