Approaching a book that I have contracted to review tends to make me a more resistant reader than I normally would be, on the lookout for places I might quibble, for weaknesses in the argument or overlooked opportunities that might give me something to write about. As I began reading Anke Walter’s new Oxford volume, Festivals in Latin Literature: The Poetics of Celebration, I confess that I was feeling a little dismissive: the book seemed to be surveying a wide range of genres, cherry-picking passages that mentioned festivals and discussing them with only the slightest hint of a theoretical or methodological framework. The author seemed to have made odd choices by not treating Roman drama and by leaving Ovid’s Fasti mostly out of the discussion. At times the inclusion of not just ‘festivals’ but more general ‘festivity’ seemed to water down the topic. As I continued reading, however, W. gradually and coherently demonstrated with growing complexity Latin authors’ awareness of festivals as ‘narrative moments of particular importance, raising particular expectations and inviting us to pay particular attention’, and their use of festivals ‘to reflect on their own narrative agenda and larger questions like the political impact of their texts, on the course of Roman history, or on the changing face of epic commemoration’ (46). Her topic is not what we know about Roman festivals, but rather the use of festivals in literature and the exploration of the idea of a ‘festive poetics’ that interacts with generic expectations, literary history, memory and more.

W.’s introduction provides a fairly extensive broad overview of festivals in Greek and Latin literature, a brief section on previous scholarship and theoretical approaches to festivals and festivity and an even briefer section on her ‘methodological approach’. While my initial (resistant) read found these last sections a little light, I came to see this as a real strength of the book. The analysis is theoretically informed and thoroughly grounded in current scholarship but wears its theory very lightly and points to secondary scholarship primarily in the notes. Her readings stay closely tied to the ancient texts and are extraordinarily well structured and signposted with subheadings and clear introductions and conclusions to each section. This will make the book very usable and accessible for scholars and even for undergraduate students.

The introduction also explains clearly W.’s choice of genres, authors and works; brief treatments of festivals in Roman drama, oratory, philosophy, biography, novel, etc. demonstrate that other choices could have been made. She focuses her analysis temporally in the late Republic and early Empire and on just four genres, choosing authors and works with sufficient richness in the treatment of festivals to make the inquiry fruitful. In the end her study centres on elegy (ch. 1: ‘Festivals in Love Elegy’ on Tibullus and Propertius and ch. 2: ‘Elegiac Appendices: Sulpicia and Ovid’s Tristia’), Horace’s Odes and the Carmen Saeculare (ch. 3: ‘Festivals in Horace’s Odes’), the post-Vergilian epic of Ovid, Valerius Flaccus and Statius (ch. 4: ‘Festivals in Epic’) and the historical narrative of Livy and Tacitus’ Histories (ch. 5: ‘Festivals in Historiography’). Ovid’s Fasti is excluded on the grounds that its obvious focus on festivals has received ample attention, but it will sneak in here and there to enrich other readings, especially in the elegiac chapters. Likewise, the Aeneid’s treatment of the Hercules Invictus festival in Book 8 is too well studied to merit W.’s focus but will prove a crucial intertext for the discussion of epic.

There is not space here to summarise W.’s smart observations on the varied ways festivals and festive days function in the genres and authors she discusses. In the broadest terms, she repeatedly and cumulatively demonstrates the capacity of festivals to be turned to the purposes of the genre and the author, serving both to structure their works and to contribute to major themes. So, for example, W. shows that in Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica, the author uses Bacchic or ecstatic festivals narrated to or observed by the Argonauts in the first half of the epic to structure the journey and to raise questions of the meaning of pietas. In the second half, aside from Medea and Jason’s wedding, festival images appear only in similes, all evoking mad or ecstatic worship and all connecting to Medea. In addition to the particulars of any given occasion, festivals in general bring to the table their own associations with community and identity, the public sphere and political power, time’s passage and temporal recurrence, deep time and memory, liminality and disguise, and all of these come to play in the Roman authors’ use of festivals. W. regularly attempts to connect her readings with the political world the authors were working in, but this is perhaps the least developed part of her discussion; she is most successful in this regard in her discussions of Ovid’s Tristia and Statius’ Thebaid, and of Livy and Tacitus in the last chapter.

All told, W.’s book adds much to our understanding of the functions of festivals in Latin literature and, as she suggests in her conclusion, her approach may also help us understand more fully the cultural power of festivals in the Roman world.