This collection of papers finds its origins in a conference in Geneva in 2007. Paying an immediate tribute to its inspiration from A. Gowing's important 2005 work, Empire and Memory: the Representation of the Roman Republic in Imperial Culture, this volume explores the phenomenon of memory with a more sustained focus around the transitional ‘Augustan’ period (however flexible such a label may prove to be) and, more specifically, the role of the Augustan poets as active contributors to the process of historical evaluation of the Roman Republic. A fine introduction from the co-editors sets out some of the key issues to be explored: what aspects of the Roman Republic are recalled and to what ends? What elements are repressed or consciously omitted? At what point is the Roman Republic acknowledged as a memory, and what moment(s) of decisive transition is/are advanced?

All the papers are valuable in their own right, with the full range of Augustan authors covered, and I will only have space here to touch on papers which offer some of the more interesting perspectives on these introductory questions.

Taking note of the paucity of Republican figures or events in Ovid's (purportedly) vast temporal poem Fasti, F. treats the figure of Camillus, and his apparent founding of the first temple to Concord, as a test case for Ovid's treatment of the Republic. A comparison between different dedications of a temple to Concord, conducted formerly by Camillus and more recently by Augustus and Tiberius (Fast. 1.637–50), offers, on the surface, a celebration of the present: concord now relies on the harmony within one (imperial) family, and the monument can be seen to celebrate the overcoming of a foreign aggressor rather than a civil disturbance (as was the case with Camillus). In constructing his praise in this way, Ovid has exercised discretion by omitting a further famous dedication to Concord, by L. Opimius in 121 b.c., following the murder of C. Gracchus. Implicit gestures to his readership to remember, however, encouraged by the evocation of Juno Moneta and couched in the oblique reference to Camillus as Furius (‘the maddened/discordant one’?), help to bring to mind these more bloody occurrences in Republican history when concord had been officially ‘declared’, and paint a potentially worrying picture about the permanence of such harmony for the present. By just such playful means is Fasti ‘designed to stimulate rather than to delimit historical memory’ (p. 85).

P. Hardie focuses on Aeneas’ narration of Troy in Aeneid 2 and shows the ways in which it is overlaid with a full range of future memories from the Roman period, from the time of the early kings to Julius Caesar. Most interestingly for a study of periodisation, Hardie explores the complexities of reading the death of Priam and the sack of Troy as symbolic of the fall of the Roman Republic. In one sense, the downfall of Troy, and Aeneas’ subsequent need to escape to found a new political order, can be read as a positive allusion to the beginnings of Empire. But the tree metaphor used of Troy's end (Aen. 2.626–31) subtly complicates matters: has the tree (of Republicanism) been uprooted or just cut down? If the latter, the implication is that it could re-sprout …

N. offers a convincing analysis of Virgil's focus on periodisation in Georgics, a move which reflects its production during a period of significant political change (c. 36–29 b.c.). Virgil moves the reader backwards and forwards in time between pre-Actium civil war gloom and post-Actium celebration and hope for the future, a strategy all the more striking for its contrast to the consciously linear progression of the didactic instruction/lesson. N. argues that the complexity of Virgil's work is deliberate and should not be simplified, as to do so would be to obscure the poet's intention to make the reader experience different temporal viewpoints and, in so doing, engage in an act of periodisation centred on the events at Actium.

Tension between pre- and post-Actium perspectives is also the focus of M. Gale's analysis of references to Caesar across Virgil's works. Gale shows how, through intertextual engagement with Catullus and Lucretius, Virgil subtly brings together in the figure of Caesar the same set of ‘awkwardly clashing aspects of his character’ (p. 295) that Augustus himself experienced and had to negotiate: Caesar as god and legitimiser of Augustus’ power, but also symbol of the danger and folly of excessive power/greed. In their different papers, then, both Gale and N. reveal Virgil's tendency to combine ‘Imperial’ and ‘Republican’ perspectives and, in the process, question the extent to which attempts at positive discourse for a new age should (can?) ever leave behind or forget the awkward aspects of the past.

While I enjoyed all the papers, I offer two general points of criticism concerning the collection as a whole. First, it is not clear what ordering principle had been adopted for the papers, as they appear neither in alphabetical order by scholar's surname nor by ancient author/theme/poetic type. In particular, Ovid's vast temporal works (Metamorphoses and Fasti) and Virgil's corpus (and indeed, within that, Aeneid 2 specifically), might have been particularly useful points around which clusters of papers could have been gathered. When reading Delvigo's paper about the shades of Republican figures that lurk behind characters in Aeneid 2, I found myself wanting to discover how widespread this strategy was in Aeneid 2, the extent to which it recalled the Republic rather than the Roman regal period, and the link between the fall of Troy and the fall of the Republic. As noted above, these are issues which are taken up in Hardie's paper, and a greater sense of dialogue might have been achieved between these papers if they (along with others which have important things to say about Aeneid 2, such as Labate) had been grouped together. The volume as a whole shows the ways in which Virgil's corpus puts forward a variety of important transitional moments in recent Roman history – Pollio's consulship (see Trimble), as well as Pompey's death and Actium – and again papers located together might have brought out these broader Virgilian tactics more clearly. Finally, the papers on Republican moments in Ovid's Fasti (by F. and Fabre-Serris) might have sat particularly well with Gladhill's fascinating paper on the Republican spirit that imbues mythological time in Metamorphoses, centred on the figure and house of Fama.

Second, I have some reservations about the overall fit of some of the papers. Most papers deal, to a greater or lesser extent, with Augustan negotiations of past Republican time, be that in historical/political, literary/intertextual and/or cultural terms. Moreover, the papers are representative of Augustan poetry in general in the particular attention they give to the most recent phases of Republican history, the civil wars and the rise of Octavian. However, despite special pleading in the Afterword, and within individual papers (pp. 147, 162) – and notwithstanding the slipperiness of terms of periodisation with which the volume is centrally concerned – this reader did not feel that the (albeit interesting) papers of Jolivet (Lucan's engagement with Caesar), Jacquier (Boudelaire's appropriation of Virgil's Buthrotum in nineteenth-century French poetry) and Deremetz (Augustan poets’ negotiation of the early kings of the Roman regal period) really fitted the volume as defined in its introduction.

Neither of these small reservations detracts, however, from the high quality and wide-ranging nature of the papers, which will prove to be an important read for any scholar of Augustan poetry and Roman enquiries into its complex past.