If classical philologists can agree on anything, it is that the Muse of Latin literature is a self-conscious one. Readers have long delighted in identifying metaliterary gestures and metaphors in canonical and non-canonical works alike. R.-J.'s debut monograph is a sturdy new brick in this edifice. This book contends that Roman authors, artists and builders were keenly sensitive to the ways in which construction was a process involving many agents and forces and that they had a sophisticated way of preserving and activating memories of that process. By ‘construction’ R.-J. means not only architecture but also the creation of statues, obelisks, roads, bridges and subterranean drains.
The book is divided into two parts. The first two chapters (forming the first part) are the most innovative and exciting sections of the book. Therein R.-J. reads a diverse and fascinating collection of Latin prose works against a number of objects and inscriptions in order to identify a rhetoric of building and construction that exists across different written and visual media. The second part is a more traditional batch of close readings, in which R.-J. surveys various ways in which Latin poets make use of the imagery of building to guide readers in their appreciation of the poet's works.
The first chapter explores how three different media – epigraphy, visual art and literary documentation – invite readers to reflect on the processes of construction. This chapter deftly reads many monuments, including Trajan's column, the Obelisk of Theodosius and the Tomb of the Hateriii in dialogue with reports of construction and monumental transportation in Caesar and Ammianus. The chapter makes a compelling case that material and textual constructions alike were invested in drawing attention to the processes through which they were composed, augmenting artefacts with evidence of how they were made.
Chapter 2 considers a range of written responses to Claudius’ effort to construct a subterranean canal to drain the Fucine Lake. After laying out the archaeological and art historical evidence for the project, the chapter surveys extant reactions to it in imperial Latin literature, ultimately concluding that ‘the Fucine Lake thus turns out to be a battleground of rhetoric’ (p. 99). R.-J. demonstrates how Pliny, Suetonius and Tacitus dialogued about the seen (and unseen) of the rhetoric of hydro-engineering.
The remaining chapters consider how Latin authors deploy processes of building as sophisticated metaphors. Chapter 3, on the metaphor of the city as text in Manilius, Propertius and Virgil, is slightly less satisfying than the rest. While the reading of pedagogical metaphors in Book 2 of Manilius' Astronomica successfully treats an understudied author, it is difficult to find anything especially new or surprising in the treatment of Virgil. In reducing the city to the architecture within it, R.-J. largely varies a theme of the study of the architectural metaphor for poetry, which she acknowledges is one of the most famous literary figures in Greek and Roman literature (pp. 102–6).
The final two chapters, both on Statius, cement the poet as creatively self-reflexive in his treatments of building. Chapter 4, on Statius's Silvae, makes a compelling case that Statius’ poems about the creation of works of art are unified by a series of key themes and strategies, including speed of construction, emphasis on sound, the presence of rivers and the raw materials of the work's title. These themes, R.-J. contends, ultimately serve the metapoetic ends of making the process of construction resemble the process of literary composition. Chapter 5 reprises the metaphorical link between city and poem seen in Chapter 3, but focuses instead on how Statius’ Thebaid contrasts the city of Thebes, destroyed over the course of the epic, with the poem, a work that stands the test of time and enjoys a greater permanence in its construction. Here, it is argued, Statius contrasts himself favourably with Amphion, the mythic founder of Thebes, who erected walls by singing the stones in place. Whereas Amphion's construction came tumbling down in the war, as Statius narrates, his own epic survives intact. Finally, a short and most ingenious concluding chapter considers similar dialogues between construction and literary composition (both journalistic and epigraphic) in the revival of ancient Rome in Mussolini's Italy.
This is, without question, an impressive book. R.-J. is a fine reader of Latin texts, which she analyses in refreshingly clear and inviting prose. It is largely free of errors in editing and content. One of the most valuable accomplishments of the work is that it encourages philologists to think about the processes of creation as precisely that: processes.
However, I note two minor shortcomings that should be considered as conversations about this important topic continue. The argument, first of all, feels somewhat undertheorised and, therefore, somewhat lacking in a strong conceptual lexicon. In many ways, the fact that the book traffics lightly in theory is a virtue, given how impressively lucid and effortless R.-J.'s style is throughout. But the hermeneutical scaffolding in the introduction could have been strengthened with some selective readings in contemporary process philosophy and its complement of new ontological theories. This is especially the case with R.-J.'s somewhat confusing notion of ‘madeness’, which denotes for her not the artificiality but the processuality of an object that inheres in its finished state. Similarly unclear at times are her notions of ‘construction’ and ‘building’. Given the capaciousness of these concepts, referrable to both monuments and buildings and bridges alike, it may have been helpful to make clear what did not count as construction for a Roman.
Secondly, I found the book's insistence on concluding that construction sheds light on the metapoetics of Latin literature a bit disappointing. Given the insistence on turning back to the metaliterary, and more specifically to the aesthetics of the metaliterary, the book does not have time to address many of the questions it raises. How do phenomena such as the environment or intercultural contact during the process of building play into the rhetoric of ‘madeness’? How do we incorporate more materially minded approaches to the processes of literary composition, such as that of genetic criticism? And, finally, how do we contrast the (largely elite) agency of authors with the much more diverse and subaltern agencies involved in the processes of construction? In her treatment of the draining of the Fucine Lake, for example, R.-J. spends a lot of time thinking about the elite agents involved – poets, historians and the imperial family –, but spends little to no time considering the slaves who did the dirty and extremely dangerous job of digging the canal. If we are going to offer up a comparison between the work of engineering and that of writing poetry in the 2020s, I think we should address the extreme power differential of the people involved in the respective constructions. Of course, this can remain a metapoetic gesture; we may consider, for example, T. Geue's (JRS 108 [2018], 115–40) reading of the power imbalances in Virgil's depiction of labor in the Georgics. But it is one that does not overemphasise the soft hands of Amphion over the hard labour of Zeuthus – a key binary at play in R.-J.'s chapter on the Thebaid but not fleshed out as thoroughly as it perhaps could be. These are, of course, but small suggestions, and Building in Words remains a most worthwhile and delightful read for scholars of Latin books and monuments.
