It is complicated. Such is my all-too-crude distillation of the arguments concerning the interplay of Greek and Roman culture in Italy, which coalesce intriguingly and convincingly in this collection of essays. If there were anyone left who might subscribe wholesale to Horace’s pithy catchphrase – Graecia capta, and all that – in its Manichaean simplicity, binary divisions and role reversals, they would do well to consider the layers and reduplications of quotes, intertexts, visual references and bounced ideas on display here. Exploding the siloes of ‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’, and not content to trace linear paths from the influential to the influenced, the essays often juggle multiple texts, multiple genres and multiple media at once. Several are triangular in orientation (A. Keith, Dufallo, N.B. Jones, Faber, L. Graverini), looking at how three artists or writers, spanning wide geographies and time frames, referred to each other or, what is more, noting how one may have used one of the others and then used that relationship to generate their own valences. Material culture and literature intersect with regularity, as they should in a world of sophisticated associations (again, Dufallo; again, Jones; in addition, R. Roth, D. Šterbenc Erker, E.K. Gazda, M. Mogetta). In some cases ‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’ have little relevance at all within zones of fundamental overlap, like southern Italy, Cisalpine Gaul and Asia Minor. As I said, it is complicated, this volume. But it is also, for the most part, scintillating, dynamic and full of surprising new discoveries.
The collection is divided into five sections, each with two essays that roughly follow the chronological order of their topics. In basic terms, these sections cover philosophy, politics, material culture and literature (but it is more complicated than that), with the fifth venturing beyond Italy to consider Roman encounters with Hellenism in the East.
The first essay, ‘Pythagoras and Alcibiades in the Comitium, or: The Sculptural Representation of Greek Subjects in the Forum, ca. 320–220 bce’, by Roth, wrings broad but sensible conclusions from brief references to public portraits set up in the Forum, first, of Greeks placed by Romans (including the two in the title); then, of Romans placed by Greeks (from Thurii, in gratitude for help against Tarentum); and finally, of Romans placed by Romans (victims of transgressions by Teuta of Illyria). The portraiture, Roth notes, was simultaneous with the origins of the cult of Fides, itself borrowed from the Greek reverence of Pistis, which bespeaks the arrival of diplomacy as an elite concept in Roman public space. The essay is shrewd in affording a degree of agency in decisions over images of Hellenic allies in Rome and in identifying the focus of Rome’s ambitions not on glory but on respect for trans-Mediterranean relations.
Roth’s is a fine essay, but it is not really about philosophy, though that is the section that contains it (the portrait he discusses is of Pythagoras, after all, not of Pythagoreanism, one might say). Keith in ‘Roman Epicureanism’ goes further in tracing a history of ideas as a case of Roman Hellenism. Her contribution is to highlight vestiges of Epicureanism in Roman poetry, not prose, the latter of which has been emphasised ever since Quintilian. For this to be new, of course, Keith must look beyond well-trodden Lucretius, which she does successfully by marshalling lines in others that not only directly cite Epicurean celebrities like Philodemus (Horace, Satires 1.2), but also, more intriguingly, embody Epicurean thought, albeit less explicitly, such as Virgil’s Georgics and Statius’ Silvae, among others. As Keith points out, the essay complicates the notion that Epicureanism was marginalised in the chaos of the Late Republic in favour of an alleged fad for Stoicism; rather, the ‘sect’ was ever flourishing (p. 75).
In ‘Augustus’ Hellenistic Divinization in Ovid’s Fasti and Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars’ Šterbenc Erker argues that Augustus’ deification, itself a species of Roman Hellenism, can be seen as ‘unstable and internally incoherent’ (p. 80) when viewed along passages of irony and ambivalence in the works of her title. For example, humorous divinisations in Ovid betray his cynicism towards the project, such when a deified oven is said to have given rise to the Roman festival Fornacalia. In the case of Suetonius Šterbenc Erker concentrates on the catalogue of the subject’s physical infirmities (sections 79–82) – everything from arthritic fingers to kidney stones. The extent to which the biographer intended to challenge the body’s ultimate transformation, however, remains unclear; for soon after this we find Suetonius approvingly reporting Atia’s miraculous conception in a temple to Apollo, an anecdote that Šterbenc Erker deployed earlier as proof of Augustus’ self-presentation as quasi-divine (p. 86).
Šterbenc Erker’s Augustan culture is passed to Dufallo almost as a baton for the essay ‘Hellenic Horses: Domitianic vs. Augustan Hellenism in Statius, Silvae 1.1’. Through analysis of intertexts with both Virgil and Virgil’s Homeric models Dufallo shows how Statius portrayed Domitian as taking a step beyond Augustus in commissioning his monumental equestrian portrait: for example, in observing the face of Domitian on high in the puro … aere (Stat. Silv. 1.1.32) he evokes, and strikes a contrast with, the obscuro … aere that enveloped Aeneas as he approached Dido’s Carthage (Virg. Aen. 1.411). How Statius writes is also seen as an element of Domitian’s Hellenism: the Silvae both exceed Virgil and Horace and also channel the court poetry of Theocritus and Callimachus. The result is a more independent and confident Hellenism on Domitian’s part, enhanced by Dufallo’s overview of building programmes, foreign policy and other initiatives.
Beginning the volume’s section on art and performance, Jones, in ‘Space and Time, from Greek Myth to Roman Art’, lays out the problems for identifying Hellenism in Roman material culture, the most famous of which is the non-survival of Greek models. A deft solution is Jones’s consideration of, not how Greek works of art, but rather how episodes of Greek literature were conveyed pictorially. For example, three frescoes of the Cyclops Polyphemus – from Rome, Boscotrecase and Pompeii – are set against accounts by Homer and Theocritus. While the pictures share some attributes, such as the importance of landscape, each plays with space and time in different ways, locating the monster in different positions, aspects and states of motion. Going further, Jones quotes Virgil’s ecphrasis of pictures of the Trojan War as encountered by a gob-smacked Aeneas at Carthage in order to show how art engendered ‘active, forceful experiences’ (p. 152) and thus served as performance in its own right. Quotation of Virgil was welcome; one might have benefited from the same for Homer and Theocritus.
In ‘The Statues of Nike from Oplontis: Decor et Duplicatio Revisited’ Gazda looks at two ‘pendant’ statues of Nikai that were part of a long line (60m) of sculptures along the east side of a pool, as interleaved with flora – cypress, lemon and oleander famously identified by archaeo-botanists. Bearing characteristics of both the Berlin type of Nike and attributes of the School of Pasiteles from southern Italy, the statues are tantalising for the theme of the volume. Gazda considers them both in the short range, for their placement within a complex reminiscent of a Greek gymnasium with agonistic associations, and in a larger scope, for their relation to other Nikai/Victoriae nearby, such as in frescoes in the atrium that were created in an earlier phase of the villa and which heralded military victories.
In Faber’s ‘Revisionist Representations of Early Latin Poetry: Horace and the “Hellenistic” Aesthetics of Ennius’, readers encounter analysis of three Hellenisms – (1) the multi-cultural contexts behind Ennius’ works, (2) Horace’s challenges to Ennius’ status as an innovative precursor, many of which, Faber shows, were faulty in ways that served Horace’s aesthetic ambitions for originality, and (3) themes and techniques shared simultaneously by Ennius and his contemporary Lycophron, following a convincing re-dating of Lycophron’s Alexandra to the early second century bce and a geographical shift from Alexandria to southern Italy. The section on Lycophron is the piece’s most original contribution, positing the two artists working in close proximity in a borderland both figurative and literal.
The motivating link discerned by Graverini in the two works referenced in his essay, ‘Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, Vergil’s Eclogues, and the Varying Challenges of Greek Genres’, turns on the texts’ shared interest in the ‘sweetness’ of literature or music, a characteristic that he suggests was generally ascribed by Romans to Greek poetry, especially as inspired by Callimachus. But this sweetness, Graverini argues, was hardly pleasant, as Roman audiences could be ‘proudly conservative’ and ‘traditional’ (p. 231), and thus unwelcoming of Hellenic styles. To get around this, according to Graverini, Apuleius referenced Virgil with an intertext involving ‘whispers’ (which Graverini sees as alluding to sweetness): the lepidus sussurus that Apuleius promises in his prologue brings to mind the levis sussurus of bees that lulled Tityrus to sleep in Virgil’s Eclogue 1. The piece can be frustrating, as passages that are meant to prove observations of ‘sweetness’ are at times given only in English translation, and perceptions of the Roman reading population as monolithically ‘highbrow’ (p. 230) seem to be undercut by allusions to ‘the decidedly philhellenic’ nature of the second century ce.
By the term ‘genesis’ in his essay, ‘Roman Hellenism and Republican Architecture: The Genesis of the Corinthian Order’, Mogetta is speaking of a process, one that encompasses far-ranging geography and multiple rungs on the social ladder. Mogetta’s is the kind of topic that non-specialists have forgotten to wonder about, and a surprisingly complex story emerges once findspots, stylistic elements, construction techniques and the humans involved in the Corinthian style are all charted, from the elite who commissioned the architecture to the craftsmen who worked on it. Impressive prosopographies abound, such as in the relationship between the Seleucid hostage Antiochus IV Epiphanes and the Italian architect Cossutius. The piece is rife with technical vocabulary (‘oblong parallelepipedal modillions’, p. 267), but by the end readers are rewarded with a sound conclusion: Italians of all stripes were involved in the conceptualisation of Corinthian-capital architecture as part of a communis ratiocinatio (p. 276), not a wholesale ‘implantation’ of Greek styles in Italy.
S. Dillon’s essay, ‘Portraiture in the Greek East in the Roman Period: The View from the Athenian Agora’, is an outlier in the collection, but welcomed all the same. It does not deal with Italy, and, what is more, its central thesis is that what was going on in Rome or in Italy more broadly was felt very lightly on the ground in Athens. That is, portraits dating to the Roman period in and around the Agora have more in common with the classical and Hellenistic pieces that, Dillon shows, had endured from the past and were still crowding public spaces. While a few images of the imperial family have received scrutiny as significant, Dillon shows that they were in fact a minor presence in the urban landscape.
Taken together, the essays in Dufallo and Faber’s collection succeed in avoiding the famous trap for edited volumes, where contributions do not always cohere: rather, questions are sustained and echoed – and answered, though with complications – across these ten chapters, and, perhaps more importantly, appetites are whetted for new research to come.
