I would like to start with a book by Luca Graverini that aims to bring back to our reading of classical texts what has been deemed a somewhat ‘lesser’ and less ‘scholarly’ way of reading: the immersion of a reader in a text.Footnote ¹ Graverini’s argument is that, even in the most dispassionate philological reading, we cannot not be immersed in the narrative. His discussion is grounded in an intriguing interaction of rhetoric, linguistics, intertextuality, narratology, philosophy, social psychology, and neurocognitive studies and shows very well how the study of immersion is deeply interwoven with more traditional critical trends. This approach allows him to shed new light on four key aspects of readerly immersion, i.e. the visual, emotional, bodily, and intellectual engagement with a text. In his introduction, he carefully prepares the ground for this analysis, by discussing which traces of an immersive approach to reading can already be found in ancient literary theory and practice. He also pays due attention to the methodological complexities of readerly immersion: especially the fact that we can never know how exactly different readers respond to a text, both in antiquity and nowadays, and that these responses are likely to keep shifting back and forth between immersion and distancing, between an immersive and a more reflective way of reading.

The book is structured in five chapters, in which Graverini discusses elements of language that encourage immersion and effects of presence: syntactical features that create effects of vividness, surprise, and emotions, but also explicit and implicit deixis, spatial and temporal; the visual immersion encouraged by ekphraseis; the metaleptic spread of emotions from the fictional world to external readers, embedded reader advice, and metalepsis; as well as cognitive dissonance, empathy, and the ethical dilemmas associated with them, especially in the context of Senecan tragedy. Not surprisingly, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses furnishes Graverini with many striking case studies, but also the comedies of Plautus, Vergil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Petronius’ Satyrica. With a phenomenon as subjective as immersion, not all of the case studies might convince everyone, but overall, he makes a very good case for an overdue shift in our reading habits that takes immersion as well as the reader’s emotional and physical engagement seriously, and his perceptive readings offer powerful tools for further research along these lines. Even though Graverini claims that his book is not designed to have immersive power (314), it is a wonderful read and I warmly recommend it, as it sharpens both our analytical and our immersive, empathetic capacities as readers of ancient (and modern) narrative.

From here, let us move on to Roman comedy. Mario Telò himself characterizes his book, entitled ‘Roman Comedy against the Subject’, fittingly and intriguingly, as an ‘exercise in hypersensitive philology’ (220) that aims to make us rethink familiar categories of author, literary character, genre, and title. The book is an attempt to decentre the subject while foregrounding the objects in the Plautine plays that revolve around a titular object: Cistellaria, Aulularia (‘The Pot of Gold’), Rudens (‘The Rope’), as well as Eunuchus, read as ‘generic, unnamed, sexualized yet ungendered (human) container’ (8).Footnote ² Telò’s post-subjective approach is self-consciously ‘critical-theoretical rather than cultural-historical’, as he considers the ‘counterimaginaries, broadly defined as queer and neuroqueer’ (11) inherent in the titular objects of these Plautine plays. In his discussion of Cistellaria, Telò takes the ‘interwoven materiality’ (45) of the titular object as conjuring a sense of distributive authorship that problematizes the notion of intellectual property; in the chapter on Aulularia, he identifies ‘autistic poetics’ in the construction of Euclio’s character and in the play’s dramatic form; in that on Rudens, he offers a new conceptualization of the geometries of genre and family triangles as ‘a plural siblinghood of objects’ (160); finally, Eunuchus is read as revolving around a ‘(de)human(ized) container’ (186), a play with a non-title, as though it were called ‘Untitled’.

As what Telò would classify as a ‘neurotypical’ reader (although I am not sure whether we should really emphasize this distinction quite so much, and whether it is actually that clear), I found the book not an easy read, but a challenging and, ultimately, very rewarding one. While I have sympathy for Telò’s general ‘critical-theoretical’ approach, I did sometimes wonder whether his readings might not indeed have profited from thinking a bit more about how they would have resonated with a contemporary Roman audience. Nevertheless, I greatly admired the close attention Telò pays to the language, the sounds, and wordplay in Plautus’ comedies, the hidden ‘counterimaginaries’ he brings to light, as well as the very productive use he makes of a wide range of critical theories, but also modern films and artworks, in shedding new, provocative, and thought-provoking light on Plautus’ comedies.

Yelena Baraz has written a ‘Very Short Introduction’ to Cicero, which I enjoyed a lot.Footnote ³ Starting by saying that ‘Cicero would have hated this book’ (xxix), as both his style and his interests were too expansive for a ‘very short introduction’, Baraz very admirably manages to fit the key aspects of Cicero’s life and works into the short and highly accessible format of the series: beginning with Cicero’s death, the events leading up to it, and the reception of his legacy, and working her way forward through his background as homo novus (‘new man’), his political career, his oratory, philosophy, and poetry, as well as his network of relationships as seen through his letters. Baraz shows very well how Cicero’s life and works are all closely interwoven, all sharing the deep concern for the Roman state, its traditions, the enrichment of the Latin literary language, and the existence of the Republic, at the time when it was just about to come to an end. I particularly enjoyed the short chapter on Cicero’s poetry and on how, for him, poetry was again closely intertwined with his other commitments, political, literary, and philosophical, as well as with his views and values, while also holding a special emotional appeal for him. Baraz also comments on the literary features of bits of Cicero’s works, making these also accessible to the non-specialist. She mentions the enormous influence that Cicero and his works had throughout history, in terms of politics, literature, and philosophy, while spicing up her account with lively details that Cicero’s speeches and letters give us access to, such as the humiliation of Cicero having to wait for Caesar when he was late for their appointment. For those in a hurry to find their way into Cicero’s vast oeuvre, and even for those who are looking for a highly readable account that brings Cicero’s life and works together, the book is a highly recommended read – maybe one that, despite the short format, even Cicero would have liked, after all.

From the very short introduction to something much more expansive: Trimble’s magisterial commentary on Catullus’ poem 64.Footnote ⁴ A substantial introduction covers the poem’s literary, political, and cultural context, its relationship with visual art, with Greek models and myths, its literary forms, reception in ancient literature and modern scholarship, and the text of the poem is followed by a critical text and commentary. In her text, Trimble is happy to accept conjectures, which she discusses in the commentary in a balanced way. The commentary itself is very detailed and perceptive and pays close attention to questions of textual criticism, to the poem’s models and reception, and to its language, as well as interpretation along the lines of the key themes singled out for discussion in the epilogue. Here, Trimble offers a reading of the poem as a whole, focusing on the representation of space and time in words and pictures and on the interplay of verbal artistry and visuality; the human subject and how it responds to representations and artefacts, but also to experience in general; and the possibilities for a response of judgement that stands above or outside the viewpoint of the individual human being, with all its limitations, who is involved in a story or in a picture. The epilogue elegantly navigates between these key themes and shows how masterfully they are interwoven by Catullus. At the same time, it gives the commentary, for all its wealth of detail, a remarkably unified feel. Trimble has produced an immensely valuable resource for students and scholars alike, helping them to appreciate the richness of this highly allusive and sophisticated poem.

Virginia Fabrizi turns her attention to Livy’s ab urbe condita and analyses the way space functions in the narrative.Footnote ⁵ Livy’s work, she observes, is focused both on the city of Rome and on Rome’s expansion into the wider world, as well as the interplay between both, which Fabrizi sets out to explore. Her methodological grounding is the sociological work that has been done on space as well as the scholarship on space as a narratological category. In the first chapter, she starts from the city of Rome, in particular the forum, the Curia, and the vertical space of the Capitol, and traces the way space here intersects with time. She also discusses the different meanings that are attributed to these places, as they reflect, even embody, internal division, reconciliation, and Rome’s rise to power. Throughout the monograph, but in this chapter in particular, the use of a map would have been helpful for the reader in navigating the spaces discussed – even though, as Fabrizi mentions, maps would not have been used in antiquity as a help for understanding texts (14). In the next chapter, the discussion focuses on the seven hills of the city, but also liminal spaces such as the river Tiber, walls, and gates. Again, it becomes clear that Livy associates the different sites of the city with specific political meanings.

An interesting question that keeps coming up is what Livy would have made of the spaces of Rome in the books covering the Augustan age, for which the Periochae naturally provide rather faint cues at best. Here, it would have been interesting to learn a bit more about what distinguishes Livy’s construction of space from that of other authors, or how Livy fits into a broader discourse of space in other Augustan authors – that question would probably break the boundaries of the monograph, but it might have been interesting to at least reflect on it a bit. Next, she discusses the military spaces of the ab urbe condita, such as camps and battlefields, and analyses the way their representation is bound up with questions of military ethics, victory, conquest, Roman identity, order vs. disorder, as well as shifting power relationships within the Roman citizen-body itself. The final chapter is dedicated to the role of space in the construction of gender norms. Fabrizi focuses on the interplay of public and private spaces and their importance in creating and upholding gender roles, as well as on spatially subversive acts by women and the way they can, at times, productively use the liminal spaces in between to wield a power that they are barred from in public. While some of the main conclusions of Fabrizi’s work might not be too surprising, I found some of her insights thought-provoking, such as the interplay of space and control – and the Romans’ constant fear of losing it – or the fact that Livy gives fairly little information on the physical features of the countryside surrounding Rome, presenting the city as a profoundly humanized, political, and sacral space from the very beginning, rather than a part of the natural landscape. Overall, then, this is an insightful analysis, which deepens our understanding of Livy’s narrative technique and of the role of space in historiographical narratives.

From space to failure: Christoph Mayr interestingly studies the representation of weakness, failure, and misconduct in the way the authorial personae of Horace’s Satires, Ovid’s exile poetry, and Seneca’s Epistulae Morales represent themselves.Footnote ⁶ His aim is to show that the admission of fallibility, somewhat paradoxically, ultimately serves important goals in the self-representation of these authorial personae, as it allows Horace to comment on other people’s vices more effectively, Ovid to try and secure help and further his image as a competent and innovative poet, and Seneca to show how he himself experienced and dealt with fallibility, both moral and in terms of his physical health, to encourage his student to find his own way to progress towards wisdom in the Stoic sense.

While Mayr’s discussion is careful and perceptive, I thought that it could have profited from a more thorough definition of its terms and grounding in ancient conceptions of failure. What Mayr discusses in Horace’s Satires, and, in part, in Seneca’s Epistulae Morales, is certainly explicitly termed or closely connected with the Latin word vitium (‘fault, failing, vice’), but in the case e.g. of physical weakness (termed ‘körperliche Fallibilität’, which might betray the somewhat forced nature of the argument), it is not entirely clear whether the ancients would in fact have classed it in the same category. Particularly in the discussion of Ovid’s failure to achieve a recall to Rome or to accept his exile and his physical and psychological weaknesses resulting from it, I was not completely convinced that this interpretation has full support from the text. Tellingly, the key term that would have fit better with Mayr’s topic, Ovid’s error, is only mentioned in the very last sentence of the book’s conclusion and is not discussed in detail in the chapter dedicated to Ovid. To my mind, the argument would have been more insightful both for the literary implications and for the ancient understanding of vitium had it been more consistently focused on failures and vices actually connected with those terms. Overall, however, the book is still a thought-provoking read that will hopefully lead to further engagement with the role of failure in ancient Rome and Roman literature as well as its ancient conceptualization.

We stay with Ovid and come to Peter Kelly’s book on ‘Ovid and Plato. Disturbing Realities’.Footnote ⁷ The title is a bit misleading, though, since Kelly really discusses the interplay of Ovid’s poetry with a much broader philosophical tradition, including authors such as Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Lucretius, with the aim of adding Plato to the mix, a philosopher whose connection with Ovid has been much less discussed in the scholarship. In structuring his work, Kelly focuses on some of the most ‘philosophical’ passages and aspects of the Metamorphoses, but also of Ovid’s other works, from amatory poetry, over the Fasti, to his poetry from exile: the chapters are dedicated to chaos and the creation of the world; Phaethon and the flood; Janus from the Fasti and his connection with cosmic creation; Archimedes and his model universe in Book 6 of the Fasti; Pythagoras in Metamorphoses 15; the ‘philosophy of desire’ in the amatory poetry and Metamorphoses; as well as the connections between Platonic philosophy and Ovid’s exilic poetry, before ending with a very brief outlook on the connection that was established in the eleventh and twelfth centuries between Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Platonist and Neoplatonist views of the cosmos.

In his discussion, Kelly brings to light the complex philosophical underpinnings of Ovidian thought and the way he both sets his work apart from and alongside Platonic, and other, philosophical enquiry. Ovid, he argues, deconstructs binaries between nature and culture, reality and representation, as well as poetry and philosophy, or myth and philosophical enquiry, showing us a world in constant flux that resists being pinned down to one overarching conception of the universe and philosophical principle, other than constant change and ontological, epistemological, and textual flux. I enjoyed the way Kelly carefully analyses the complex interplay of different philosophical approaches in Ovid’s works, which includes discussion of how Platonic ideas might have been mediated through other texts, such as Cicero’s translations of Plato. Kelly also invites us to read Plato in a different, more Ovidian, and more ironic light, an idea that I liked a lot. He handles an admirably broad range both of philosophical texts and Ovidian works. One corollary of this approach, though, is that we end up, somewhat paradoxically, with a surprisingly monolithic image of Ovid, strongly coloured by his Metamorphoses, as a poet of constant flux and of the deconstruction of boundaries and certainties. It might have been interesting to see more about the different Ovids that we have across his very broad oeuvre and the different genres in which he writes, and more attention to the boundaries that Ovid does uphold and reaffirm, even while he is creating such a fluid universe. Overall, however, there is much to learn from Kelly’s wide-ranging and stimulating book.

Alessandra Tafaro offers a thought-provoking exploration of the relationship of Martial’s (literary) epigrams with inscriptions and inscribed objects.Footnote ⁸ In the first chapter, she intriguingly places some of Martial’s epigrams side by side with inscriptions, often ones in which the reader, or passer-by, is addressed directly, and discusses their shared concerns about literary thefts, authorship, and the interplay of ephemerality and poetic monumentality, and what this means for Martial’s own dialogue with his readers, including the exhausted, bored, or lazy ones. In the second chapter, she turns her attention to the Liber spectaculorum (‘Book of Spectacles’) and the Apophoreta and unearths connections between the epigrams in this book and inscriptions and images referring to the gladiatorial games, including ones that mark the seating order in the amphitheatre. She nicely situates Martial’s epigrams in this material context and discusses the political implications emerging from this connection. She also pays close attention to the way in which the spectacles in the arena are turned into visual artefacts in the epigrams, and what this means for the materiality of Martial’s epigrams and for the temporal dynamics of simultaneously compressing and stretching the time of the games. The political aspects are taken further in the third chapter, where Tafaro examines the interplay of the second edition of Martial’s Book 10 with the damnatio memoriae which monuments and inscriptions mentioning Domitian fell victim to.

In the final chapter, she discusses Martial’s Xenia and Apophoreta, connecting them specifically with a habit of compression, quotation, distillation, and fragmentation, as they use short or even one-word tags to refer to literary works. This strategy she sees at work also in the graffiti of Pompei, where they coexist with more quotidian forms of writing. I sometimes wondered whether Tafaro was not overstating her case a bit here, and whether, in these cases, there really is a connection with the material life of texts in graffiti, or whether this is not simply a widespread literary technique – which Tafaro acknowledges (209; 227), referring to the well-known case of the tag arma virumque (‘arms and the man’) referring to the Aeneid. Overall, however, her book makes a thought-provoking case for the existence of a closer connection between Martial’s epigrams and material epigraphic culture than is often assumed, while also keeping an eye on the Saturnalian dimension of Martial’s epigrams, as well as their interplay with Hellenistic epigram and authors such as Catullus, Vergil, Ovid, and Statius. In the epilogue, Tafaro places her work in the context of current research on authorship in the ancient world and attempts to revise some of the hierarchies between categories such as ‘popular’ and ‘elite’, ‘literary’ and ‘sub-literary’. I found myself wondering, though, whether the fact that this book, with Martial’s name in the subtitle, is not rather a testimony to the power of the named, canonical poet to subsume anonymous epigrams into his elaborate literary artefacts, ultimately proving, once more, the power of such hierarchies. Overall, however, I enjoyed Tafaro’s book, which is certainly a stimulating contribution to Martial’s poetry, as well as to the broader question of the interplay of literature and material culture.

Thirty years after the publication of Michael Robert’s ‘The Jeweled Style’ profoundly changed the perception of late-antique Latin poetry, much has happened in the scholarship on late antiquity, and so a reappraisal and continuation of Robert’s work is necessary, which Joshua Hartman and Helen Kaufmann set out to offer in their edited volume.Footnote ⁹ In two parts, it assesses the formal features of the jewelled style as well as its relationship with late-antique aesthetics. In their short introduction, the editors state that they took the approach of ‘re-wilding’ scholarship on the jewelled style, in order not to shut down new avenues of inquiry but rather to encourage individual new approaches. With a topic as distinctive and clearly defined as the jewelled style, this approach works well, as most contributions are nicely focused on the key theme, shedding new light on it from different angles. The gist of the volume’s first part is that elements of the jewelled style can be found even before and after late antiquity, and even in Greek as well as prose texts. One paper is based on computational philology and natural language processing, showing that, as Roberts claimed, the use of heavily enumerative lines in late-antique poetry was indeed steadily rising, compared with earlier works. The papers of the second part place the late- antique jewelled style in its contemporary context, both pagan and Christian, and in a dialogue with other ‘jewelled’ texts or with works such as Augustine’s Confessiones, which deliberately, and for religious reasons, adopt a rather different, plainer, and ‘non-jewelled’ style. In an afterword, Roberts himself reflects on the genesis and development of his thoughts on the jewelled style, as well as on the question of the relationship between poetry and ceremony. Overall, the papers illustrate very nicely the continued power of the concept of the jewelled style, and the critical nuance required to detect it, but also the exciting insights it can provide into questions of education, literary unity, literary aesthetics and their religious implications, as well as the interplay of language and art.

Finally, Simone Mollea offers a very exciting study of the term humanitas (‘humanity’) and its use as well as wider historical and cultural context in the imperial age,Footnote ¹⁰ in the first volume to appear in a new series, LUMINA, dedicated to key concepts of Greek and Roman antiquity and their reception. In an age where the meaning and value of both ‘humanity’ and the humanities are facing major challenges, the book is a welcome reminder of the complexity of the term humanitas, the many meanings it can have, and the very different uses it can be put to, often – but by no means always – intermingling and oscillating between superior education (the Greek παιδϵία) and a benevolent disposition towards humans (the Greek φιλανθρωπία). In a fascinating and detailed study that goes well beyond previous work on humanitas in its temporal scope, Mollea briefly discusses the supposedly very first use of the term by Terence as well as in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, followed by the complex, rhetorically powerful, and influential use of humanitas by Cicero. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Cicero’s use of the term reappears as an important influence and point of comparison throughout the volume, and Mollea very briefly hints at the process of how, starting from the Ciceronian phrase studia humanitatis in pro Archia 3, the term ‘Humanities’ developed. Mollea ends every chapter with a very short analysis of the adjective humanus in the authors under discussion, from which it emerges that the adjective and the noun did in fact go their own separate ways and that the adjective tends to take on the rich meaning of the noun only when used in its comparative or superlative form.

The main chapters are dedicated to the pagan use of humanitas from the Trajanic to the Theodosian age: in the age of Trajan, i.e. in Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, and Suetonius, where humanitas first reacquired socio-political predominance over clementia, promoting a new climate of respect and collaboration among Roman citizens; in the Antonine age, i.e. in Apuleius, Gellius, and Fronto, who all employ humanitas in less politically engaged ways, each sticking to one major aspect of it rather than exploiting its polysemy; in the pseudo-Quintilian Declamationes Minores and Maiores (‘Minor’ and ‘Major Declamations’), where the use of the term is less refined than in Cicero and Apuleius and where its educational component hardly plays a role at all; in Eumenius’ Oratio pro instaurandis scholis (‘Oration for the restoration of the schools’) from the late third century, which restores the Ciceronian sense of humanitas; in Firmicus Maternus in the age of Constantine, where humanitas is consistently conceptualized as civilization, overlooking its educational dimension; under Theodosius, i.e. in Ammianus, where the notion of feigned humanity comes into play and where humanitas, and the Roman empire with it, are in decline, as well as in Ausonius and Symmachus, among others, who all testify to the socio-political renaissance of humanitas; and in the Hermetic Asclepius, a text of uncertain date written in opposition to Christianity, in which humanitas denotes the essence of man. From Mollea’s nuanced study tracing the fate of humanitas, it emerges clearly how closely this polysemous term is tied to the changing political climate of its times and how powerful its employment can be – an important lesson for our own times.