This volume of essays originates from the conference panel ‘Travel and Geography in Latin Elegy’ and proposes a rich and inclusive investigation of the representation of travel and mobility in Latin poetry from the early Republic to the fifth century c.e., intersecting poetics with socio-cultural, political and historical aspects. While drawing on the ‘spatial turn’ of Classical scholarship, the volume also engages with current interests in mobility and interconnectivity within cultural and material studies, as well as focusing on travelling outside Rome and across the entire basin of the Mediterranean. By adopting a more interactive definition of space as ‘travel’, ‘geography’ and ‘empire’ in Latin poetry, this contribution fills a gap within recent publications on the topic. Although the core chapters focus on Augustan poetry and, specifically, elegy, there is a clear intention to widen the literary canon and the definition of ‘poetry’, especially thanks to the engagement with epigraphic evidence, and to the tenth chapter on Late Antiquity. The eleven chapters, arranged in chronological order of topic, propose a variety of approaches and methodologies with an extremely cohesive final result, thanks also to the multiple but shared thematic strands of the contributions and to the frequent cross-mentions throughout the chapters.

The introduction, by Micah Young Myers and Erika Zimmermann Damer, examines the interaction of poetry, politics and culture in Horace's representation of travelling in Odes 1.3 and Satires 1.5, and exemplifies the breadth of approaches to be expected in the rest of the collection. In the editors’ words, this volume explores ‘the complex relationship between Latin poetry, Roman identity, imperialism, and travel and geospatial narratives’ (4). Ch. 2, by Amy Richlin, officially opens the volume with a socio-cultural interpretation of Plautus’ comedies. Rather than examining theatrical ludi in ritual contexts, she draws attention to those held in mercantile and trans-state fairs. Richlin's dynamic reading of Plautine comedies through this ‘nexus of theater, shipping, trade, human trafficking, and religion’ (25) is compelling, even if at times a little loose. Sara Lindheim, in the third chapter, is also concerned with the geographical and cultural variety of Rome's boundless expansion in the Late Republic and its interaction with Catullus’ poetic identity. Her Lacanian interpretation provides a unifying lens to analyse the geographical diversity registered in Catullan poems. The potential for unrestrained movement is felt in the outward push of travel poems, as well as in the non-Roman Otherness of certain poetic figures, and determines a dynamic fragmentation of the Catullan poetic subject.

In the fourth chapter, Eleanor Windsor Leach leads us into the Augustan age, by considering representations of Arcadia in Virgil and Ovid, with an additional investigation of Statius’ reception of it in the Thebaid. She focuses on the counterintuitive association of Arcadia with labour and harshness, on which Roman authors rely when importing this Greek utopian and escapist poetic fantasy into their own poetry and into Augustan political discourse. Alison Keith's chapter engages with Augustan elegy (Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid) and examines female agency in representations of and references to travelling. She argues that the elegiac poets’ jealousy for their mistresses’ mobility showcases the tension between the freedom of means that these women enjoyed and the social scrutiny to which they were subjected because of their status. Keith, through epigraphic evidence, also sheds a welcome light on other silent figures, like slaves and female relatives, that may have been travelling with these women. With the sixth chapter, we stay for a little bit longer with gendered readings of Augustan elegy. Paul Allen Miller suggests a Lacanian analysis of Tibullus 1.7, and argues that the poetic representation of Messalla, Tibullus’ patron, as Osiris, the Egyptian god, reveals the poet's ambivalence towards Rome's politics and culture. Messalla/Osiris, identifiable with Lacanian Law, allows for Tibullus’ artistic pursuits but also denies their realisation. The Lacanian contextualisation, though at times hard to follow, nicely innovates traditional discourses on the engagement of Augustan poets with politics. In the seventh chapter, Erika Zimmermann Damer explores movement within Rome as a gendered and politicised activity by analysing the correspondence between poetry and reality of recommended itineraries in Ovid's Ars amatoria. While routes for young men aim to intercept those of promenading girls, young women are led on a formative tour of Rome, imbued with Augustan and Roman values.

In the eighth chapter, Carole Newlands leads us into Flavian Rome and examines the ‘geopoetics’ of Statius’ propemptikon in Silv. 3.2 and its intertextual and intergeneric dialogue with Lucan's Bellum civile. This is a brilliant and dynamic reading of the theme of travelling and of its reception in different political discourses. Lucan's locations are embedded in Statius’ poem ambiguously: on the one hand they figure the pacified world resulting from Rome's imperialism; on the other, they do not completely erase Lucan's original political and social anxiety, still to be found at the heart of the newly pacified empire. Sarah Blake then examines how the social, cultural and poetic nuances of travel and movement in Martial's epigrams negotiate the poet's own cultural identity as both Spanish and Roman. The author explores how the low socio-cultural status of paid dancers from Cadiz informs the metapoetic meaning that they assume in Martial's work: just like his little poetry book, they travel around and, as prostitutes, are a low form of entertainment enslaved to the pleasure of the audience.

In the tenth chapter, Grant Parker explores the poetics of travel in Late Antiquity by comparing Ausonius’ Mosella and Rutilius Namatianus’ De reditu suo. The author argues that, in both these works, poetic memorialisation shapes the topography of Roman colonies, determining a strongly subjective rendition of the geographical landscape. The eleventh chapter, by Alexander Meyer, nicely closes this volume with a reflection on the interaction between travellers and poetic inscriptions found on funeral monuments along imperial roads. The chapter widens the understanding of what constitutes Latin poetry and points to the poetic network that this kind of poetry will have created, by running in parallel with main roads. It could, however, have been more appreciative of the elitist nature of these texts and the boundaries that they would, nevertheless, have set up. Despite the fact that ‘individuals of all social statuses’ (210) travelled on these roads, slaves and foreigners will not have read Latin easily, if at all. In this sense, the circulation of poetry, even if opened to the wide (Romanised) world, remained an elite business, that also created division and separation between Roman and non-Roman individuals.

The book is an exceptionally well assorted and coherent collection of essays that meaningfully develops the current scholarly conversation on movement and space in Latin poetry. The varied approaches allow us to understand, from multiple perspectives, the complexity of the poetics and politics of travel, mobility and geography within the imperium sine fine, from Rome to the furthest provinces, and beyond. The volume will be of use to scholars, as well as to graduate and advanced undergraduate students. In line with its central theme, the book can be perused in a mobile and transitory way, by reading the chapter of interest, or it can provide an enjoyable read ‘all in one go’.