‘Sex and the city’ might have made for a good title of Haug’s monograph, if it had not already been snapped up by another De Gruyter publication in Classics. For Haug’s book analyses the role of urban space in shaping erotic experience in Roman literature and epigraphy: how the Latin love elegists and Martial describe rendezvous in the porticos, the circus and baths of the city of Rome, and how graffiti sexualise the townscape of Pompeii. Haug, a leading archaeologist, brings some of her expertise and theoretical frameworks to the territory of other disciplines: literature and epigraphy, each treated in one part. This interdisciplinary take is exciting and – alongside the other book under review, Tafaro’s – offers a showcase for how much we can gain by analysing cityscapes through the simultaneous lenses of literature, epigraphy and the material record.

Readers will profit in particular from the theoretical insights that Haug’s archaeological perspective offers. Affordance, co-spatiality and atmosphere are three key concepts that help to explain what may have made places in the cityscape erotically charged. Affordance is, I suspect, the concept with which students of literature are already most familiar, not least because of C. Levine’s work on the theme (Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network [2015]). Haug brings spatial precision to this concept while never falling into the trap of taking literary descriptions as simple, unfiltered evidence for material reality. Porticos and their role in the Latin love elegists are among Haug’s principal examples of architectural affordance, that is, the actions that the built environment offers or makes possible: we learn how porticos, columned, shaded walkways, afforded non-directional strolling as well as turns and sudden appearances from behind columns that allowed for the desired ‘chance’ encounter. It is a titillating discussion and ‘Verweilarchitekturen’ (‘architecture that allows for lingering’, p. 42) is a wonderfully evocative term. One may question, nevertheless, whether the Portico of the Danaids, part of Augustus’ new complex for Apollo on the Palatine, was quite as fundamentally unerotic as Haug suggests. After all, the Danaids were punished with eternal toils in the underworld after they had resisted love – this is at least Horace’s tongue-in-cheek interpretation of the myth at Odes 3.11. This poem would have rewarded discussion, especially alongside N. Pandey’s perceptive reading of it in her monograph, which similarly combines close literary analysis with attention to the material record (The Poetics of Power in Augustan Rome [2018]).

Co-spatiality is another concept that matters for cities. It takes all sorts of people to make up a city; and environments packed with different people work as everyone can go about their own business in the same space: the Roman circus would have accommodated sports lovers as well as lovers’ lovers. The urban space, Haug argues, is full of such co-spatialities as it allows for various experiences. To remain with the circus: the oval shape of the circus affords the vision of the spectacle but also affords spectators to look at one another. The gender-mixed, packed space further allows for close contact with love interests. This is Haug’s analysis on the basis of Ovid’s poetry, and Ovid’s interest in Roman monuments and his talent for finding erotic affordances at every corner make this some of the most suitable material for Haug’s approach.

Atmosphere is a concept that featured prominently in Haug’s earlier work on Pompeii. The goal there and here is to treat atmosphere not as a vague notion, but as the demonstrable result of the built environment: the placement of light and shadow, along with nooks and walkways, creates affordances that can generate an erotic atmosphere. Haug sees the book as a way of relating the built environment to emotions, and a variety of emotions that are linked to erotic experience offer case studies for this larger goal. Thus we hear that the built environment of the circus, the excitement about the races and the heated atmosphere the place creates are conducive also to an erotic atmosphere: ‘der Circus ist hier unmittelbar Mit-Akteur im Liebesgeschehen’ (p. 47).

Pompeii offers an urban space different from Rome, on a smaller scale, but featuring a rich trove of hundreds of graffiti. Haug’s focus lies on the urban space on which erotic graffiti are inscribed: which buildings include erotic graffiti and which ones do not? Where are several graffiti on the same theme juxtaposed? And what do sexual graffiti say about the place on which they were written? The last question is particularly fascinating, and Haug’s discussion of deixis is rewarding: ‘Titius fucked here’ is a common type of graffiti, but while the deictic pointer ‘here’ might be unexceptional in a brothel (if still strengthening the sexual nature of the place), such pointers are more curious on the facade of a building on a busy street. Whatever the truth-value of such statements, Haug seems right to stress the effect on recipients: sex penetrates the bustle of urban life. Another important pay-off of her discussion of deictics is the distinction between graffiti about male–female and male–male sex: the latter cannot be found in public spaces and are restricted to tabernae; here these deictics might point to spaces that allowed for male–male sexual and textual encounters that were sex-positive.

Haug’s book looks like a hefty volume at first sight, but much of its heft is due to its luxurious production that includes a large format, colour photographs or maps on almost every page and a lavish appendix. Co-edited by the author, K. Göttsch and E. Laufer, this appendix collects sexual graffiti from Pompeii and makes up about half of the book’s length: short comments and German translations make this appendix not only eminently useful but give us contemporary versions that are clear, direct and would not be out of place in the urban graffiti landscape of modern-day Germany: ‘Fortunatus, leck den Arsch!’ (CIL IV 4954). Haug’s text is a short and engaging read, comprising just 151 pages divided into two parts (also available online as an open-access edition). Haug perhaps misses a trick by not mentioning the anagram ROMA and AMOR (notably on a Pompeiian graffito, CIL IV 8297, and a substantial bibliography). But on a less elementary level, Haug’s methodology invites literary scholars to ask new questions of their own material. Haug’s eye is firmly set on monuments in the cityscapes of Rome and Pompeii, but her conceptual framework seems equally promising for the study of purely literary monuments: for example, what are the affordances of Juno’s temple in the Aeneid, the atmosphere of Diana’s grove in the Metamorphoses or the co-spatiality of Homer’s Troy, where not everyone is a warrior and urban space accommodates many simultaneous forms of life?

The city of Rome, inscriptions and literature are also the main themes of Tafaro’s book on Martial’s epigrams. Epigram literally describes a text written on something, and the genre’s heritage lies in verse inscriptions on tombs and dedicatory objects. Some of the most exciting research on Greek epigrams in recent years has looked precisely at this DNA of the genre and analysed the playful ways in which literary epigrams constantly look back at their inscriptive and material origins (e.g. P. Bing, A&A 41 [1995] or M. Baumbach, A. Petrovic and I. Petrovic [edd.], Archaic and Classical Greek Epigram [2010]). At first sight, Martial seems a less obvious candidate for such an approach: where Book 7 of the Greek Anthology lets us read no less than 748 poems that purport to be tomb inscriptions, opening with a whopping eight versions on Homer’s tomb alone, Martial has always seemed a different kettle of fish. Largely through Martial’s subsequent influence, the very connotations of ‘epigram’ have shifted: anyone complimented in English for an ‘epigrammatic style’ is usually praised for writing briefly and wittily rather than on stone. And yet, Tafaro’s careful study shows that the topic needs to be reconsidered: her book sets out to ‘investigate Martial’s multifaceted dialogue with epigraphic texts and explore how the poet reimagines the tropes of poetic monumentality by engaging with a variety of writing forms and textual media’ (p. 1). Martial’s epigrams, too, invite comparisons with inscriptions and are deeply shaped by the material environment of Rome.

Individual chapters tease out the relationship between Martial’s poems, inscriptions and the material record through numerous close readings. Tafaro follows important work by W. Fitzgerald (Martial: The World of Epigram [2007]) and R. Höschele (TAPA 137 [2007]) and shows how readers make their way through Martial’s poetry collections like wanderers who walk through a graveyard of tomb inscriptions (Chapter 1). Martial’s book of epigrams about the Colosseum is compared to an official dedicatory inscription in the Colosseum as well as to gladiatorial graffiti: Martial strives for the monumentality of the former while preserving the wit of the latter (Chapter 2). Where Romans were quick to eradicate inscriptions that celebrated Domitian after his fall, Martial, too, revised his epigrams, enacting a quasi-inscriptional damnatio memoriae in his revised, second edition of Book 10 (Chapter 3). Finally, the Xenia and Apophoreta, which collect poems about presents for the Saturnalia, offer particularly close connections between epigrams and inscriptions: the epigrams are gift tags of sorts and sometimes accompany foodstuffs, just like the stamped letters on some carbonised loaves from Herculaneum (Chapter 4).

A particular strength of the book is its detailed analysis of literature and epigraphy side by side, frequently finding wit already in inscriptions and never assuming that influence runs only from high literature to epigraphic texts. To pick just one of many illuminating close readings: Tafaro discusses the inscription commemorating the completion of the Temple of Minerva in the Forum Transitorium (CIL VI 31213 = CIL VI 953). The inscription itself is a palimpsest. Among the all-too-similar names and titles of the Caesars, ‘Germanicus’ is the giveaway: it reveals that the inscription was originally cut for Domitian before being adapted for Nerva. Tafaro argues that Martial performs a strikingly similar operation on the page. Epigrams 10.28 likewise celebrates the Forum Transitorium and attributes the building to Caesaris donis (‘Caesar’s gifts’). In the revised second edition readers naturally understand the reference to Nerva; yet the book’s first edition celebrated Domitian, while Martial had already made this Forum a central motif of his Domitianic poetry. To borrow Tafaro’s own apt metaphor, there is something genuinely palimpsestic about Martial’s epigrams.

Or take Tafaro’s careful discussions of verbal parallels in Martial’s epigrams and Latin inscriptions: a gift tag epigram for a form of sodium carbonate used in cosmetics and baking begins by emphasising that not any country bumpkin might know it by its Greek name aphonitrum (14.58): rusticus es? (‘you’re a peasant?’). Tafaro notes that the expression is lifted from Virgil’s Eclogues, where the hapless lover Corydon tells himself rusticus es, Corydon (‘Corydon, you’re a peasant’). Interestingly, this very Virgilian tag can also be found as graffiti in Pompeii’s urban landscape (CIL IV 1527). Here and elsewhere Tafaro points to an affinity in style between Martial’s epigrams and their inscribed counterparts: tags and incipits become sites of allusion, while brevity, wit and monumentality characterise both.

In analysing literary and inscribed poetry side by side, Tafaro’s study makes a substantial contribution to the line of inquiry opened by K. Milnor (Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii [2014]) and P. Kruschwitz (e.g. BICS 59 [2016]). The book is firmly grounded in scholarship on both Latin inscriptions and Greek epigram. Precisely because of that broad engagement, one wonders whether a still greater dialogue with Greek epigrams would have furthered the book’s goals. Only a single poem from the Greek Anthology appears in the index, and comparisons with gift-tag epigrams by Crinagoras or arena epigrams from Philip’s Garland might have strengthened Tafaro’s argument further. Likewise, readers may miss engagement with E. Gunderson’s recent study of Martial and Statius (The Art of Complicity in Martial and Statius [2021]) or S. Blake’s work on the Xenia and Apophoreta (e.g. Arethusa 44 [2011]). More minor issues concern the occasional omission of page references in citations of major monographs (e.g. pp. 28 n. 10, 80 n. 21, 98 n. 112, 205 n. 160) and a somewhat enthusiastic fondness for situating Martial after much that has been before: his poetry is described as ‘post-Ovidian’, ‘post-Hellenistic’, ‘post-epic’, ‘post-Augustan’, occasionally ‘post-holiday’ and eventually ‘post-Domitianic’. But these are quibbles. The book offers a new look at Martial through detailed comparisons with inscriptions – as a result a much richer, more materially grounded Martial emerges, and one who stands closer to the Greek epigrammatic tradition.

The two books complement each other remarkably well. Both ask how texts, inscriptions and urban space interact, yet they do so from opposite vantage points: Haug scrutinises literature through the eyes of an archaeologist, while Tafaro looks at inscriptions through the eyes of a literary critic. Both books demonstrate how much is gained when literature, epigraphy and the material record are read together rather than in disciplinary isolation. This contributes to a broader rethinking of the city of Rome three decades after C. Edwards’s Writing Rome (1996). Edwards’s influential book showed us that Rome was made not only from brick and marble but also from words, and her elegant readings remain fundamental. Haug and Tafaro build on this, but also show how sustained interdisciplinarity can bring different aspects of the ancient city into view. It is no coincidence that inscriptions and graffiti matter so much for both books: as texts inherently linked to setting and materiality, the epigraphical record has proved particularly revealing for approaches that cross disciplinary boundaries. Together both authors show how much remains to be gained from giving close attention to the monumental letters, the scribbled insults and the textual constructions that make up the written city.