Anyone scanning academic titles over the last fifty years might get the impression that everything was always already ‘invented’: a search of the titles category in my university library catalogue gives me 1640 hits for ‘The Invention of …’! Mercifully, Kachuck eschews this trend. As he puts it, ‘The age of Virgil did not invent the solitary sphere … but it did heighten that sphere's contradictions to a pitch of unprecedented, and long unparalleled, clarity’ (246). Nevertheless, the historical claim is important: ‘Writers of this [Virgil's’] age struggled to give form to an idea that would go on to prove immensely influential thereafter: that literature might serve as a space of one's own for writers and readers, for dancers and spectators, for rulers and ruled alike.’ K. lists as the conventional candidates for the ‘inventions’ of solitude: Augustine's monasticism; Petrarch's humanism; Montaigne's scepticism and Romanticism; he is generous throughout with comparisons and allusions to the ‘solitary’ culture of later periods. Within the Roman world, Seneca might be a more obvious candidate for a study of the solitary sphere, but K.'s subject is, at its broadest point, ‘the solitude of literature itself’, which, together with the contradictions of the solitary sphere, provide him with an analytical tool for his readings of Cicero, Virgil, Horace and Propertius. His readings make a convincing case that this is a fruitful angle from which to approach his chosen writers.
Cicero is obviously the odd man out in a book on the age of Virgil, but K. contends that Cicero's disillusionment with the political world leads him to lay the groundwork for the solitary sphere of the Augustan poets in his books and letters from the mid-forties to his death. Idealisation pervades these works: for oratory, Cicero substitutes the ideas of oratory and of the orator, and similarly with figures of political authority, and even with the deceased Tullia; friendship, in De Amicitia, is a form of longing for a friend idealised in memory. As these examples show, K.'s understanding of the solitary sphere is broad, but does not stretch the concept beyond breaking point.
Virgil's Eclogues gets a chapter to itself. Pastoral was to become a privileged site of solitude, but K. pushes this connection back (pace Poggioli) to the inventor of the genre: the first Eclogue is not a dialogue, but two monologues that look past each other. Pastoral's location of song in a resonant environment is another form in which the genre imagines the solitude of literature, a solitude which pertains to the reader as well as the poet. (Not every reader will agree with K. that Virgil's singers are as ‘unobtrusive to the solitary reader’ as the diminutive figures in Campanian ‘sacro-idyllic’ painting). The thread of K.'s argument that focuses on the solitude of the reader culminates with the solitary readers of elegy (‘ut tuus in scamno iactetur saepe libellus/quem legat expectans sola puella viro’, Propertius 3.3.120). In the Aeneid the reader's solitude reflects that of the characters to whose internal world the reader is privy, characters who are ‘alone with their thoughts and anxieties’.
Another strain of K.'s argument is to show that poets of the age of Virgil were particularly concerned with the power of poetry to constitute its own social reality. In the case of Propertius, whose poetry abounds in solitude words, we oscillate between seeing the world through the subjective solitude of the poet and seeing the solitude of the poet from the perspective of the objective sociality of the world (220). Similarly, K. comments, à propos Horace Satires 1.10, ‘The point is not that this book has an imagined community: it is that the imaginary quality of this community is so obvious’ (168).
Besides the more extended readings of the period's major writers, K. gives us some intriguing lagniappes: pantomime, in which a single, solitary dancer performs all the roles, flourished in the age of Virgil, and is symptomatic of its solitary sphere. Anticipations and groundlaying for Augustan solitudes in Catullus (and Cicero) are balanced by aftermaths in Ovid, Phaedrus and Manilius. The last of these features in an extraordinary passage from the Astronomica (2.136–44), which casts him as ‘solitary astronaut’, outdoing even Lucretius’ Epicurus.
K. has given us a new lens through which to look at some very familiar texts, and at a period of literary history usually more associated with the public than the solitary. His readings of selections from most of the important poetic works of the period are close, enlightening and refreshing, though they occasionally tend towards the ingenious. Erudition and wide learning are on display throughout, and serve to locate the Augustan age in the broader history of solitude. This is a dense, original and thought-provoking book.
