MacD. begins her new book with a paradox. The political and social elite of ancient Rome, especially in the later Republic and the early Empire, were at one and the same time entranced by the artistic products of their Greek predecessors, neighbours and colonial subjects, and felt the need to assert their indifference to the fineries of Greek cultural production. In his speeches for the prosecution of C. Verres (in 70 bce) for corruption during the latter’s governorship of Sicily, much of which had previously been colonised by Greek speakers, the orator and statesman Cicero explicitly contrasts a Greek love of finely crafted objects with a pragmatic Roman blindness to the wonders of those objects. But in his personal correspondence Cicero reveals that he takes a great deal of joy in the same kinds of works. Cicero is not unique: author after author offers some version of the same story, while the vast archaeological record of Rome shows both a deep engagement with a Greek artistic past and the participation in an ongoing, common visual language of the wider Hellenistic Mediterranean. ‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’ artistic identities were, evidently, both very real in the minds of ancient writers and quite difficult to distinguish on the ground.
The question of how to reconcile the apparently contradictory positions occupied by figures like Cicero, without simply accusing them of hypocrisy or doublespeak, has long been an animating feature in the study of ancient Roman art and visual culture. It underlay, in various guises, the formation of the study of ancient art history in the early modern period; it was fundamental to attempts to define Roman art within professionalised museum and university settings at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries; and it has seen significant renewed attention in the past few decades. And yet, as MacD. demonstrates with scholarly precision and ambitious creativity, the question has not been settled. Indeed, it may be impossible to settle, since it gets to the heart of what constitutes an identity, or even a culture, in the first place.
MacD. offers new ways into the issue by emphasising both the locality of identity in Roman-controlled Italy in the period under consideration, which was by no means uniform, and a globalised environment, in which cultures possess neither reified, discrete independence nor claims to hierarchical priority. Instead, she suggests, people, practices, ideas and things fluidly circulated throughout the Italian peninsula and beyond, albeit contingently and under the shadow of Rome’s imperial power. MacD. focuses on responses to encounters with art as part of an active process of identity creation, and gives particular attention to ekphrastic texts and inscribed images. The book is filled with erudite and enlivening readings of both texts and images, and it productively applies modern theoretical apparatuses to ancient material.
Chapter 1 looks to poetic responses to the Temple of Apollo Palatinus in Rome, vowed by Octavian after the victory at Naulochus and dedicated just before his assumption of the title of Augustus. The chapter begins with Greek epigrams on Myron’s bronze statue of a cow, four versions of which, according to Propertius, surrounded the altar of Apollo on the Palatine. It also examines Latin poetry on the temple complex proper, including its architectural sculpture and the decoration of the surrounding portico. MacD. highlights how, although these two sets of poems are dealing with the same space, they take dramatically different approaches. The Greek poems stage a world in which the sophistication of the cow’s Greek identity may be read as an act of resistance to Roman imperial power, while the Latin texts tend to view the temple complex’s image programme as a metonym linking military and cultural conquest.
The second chapter examines the Temple of Hercules Musarum constructed by Fulvius Nobilior and the Porticus Philippi built around it under Augustus. Where the thematic of the initial chapter was on spatial relations, here MacD. focuses on questions of time and identity. The texts on the temple and portico make the familiar claim that military victories first brought the Romans into contact with Greek art, but they also reveal the inescapable intertwining of Greek and Roman. Not only were Greek, Latin and other Italic speakers in close contact long before Rome’s imperial expansion across the Mediterranean, there was also, effectively, never a ‘pre-contact’ Roman identity to return to. Rather, the construction of both Greek and Roman artistic identities only ever happened in tandem with one another.
In Chapter 3 MacD. examines ekphrastic accounts of private art collections, with special emphasis on imperial authors such as Petronius, Statius and Martial. She shows once again how the cultural and the political intertwine, as Roman collectors are characterised not just by appreciation for but especially control over Greek artistic products and the long histories that gave rise to them. The examples examined traverse boundaries from the knowledgeable elite to the hopelessly gauche pretender, and from the fictional to the apparently real. The power dynamics implicit in the act of art collecting are tied up with potential concerns about the collector’s aesthetic taste or connoisseurial refinement, which threaten to invert the assertion of control through the revelation of ignorance or insensitivity. This potential instability, MacD. suggests, was a product of the globalised environment of the Roman polity, in which flux, rather than stasis, was the norm.
The fourth chapter examines works of art from Rome and Roman Italy inscribed with Greek texts. Rather than prioritising either the visual or the verbal, MacD. approaches these objects as conjoined ‘imagetexts’, following work by W.J.T. Mitchell. The case studies span a range of media and contexts – painted walls, hand-held objects like the Iliac tablets, and the relief stele with depictions of gods, muses and the crowning of Homer found just south of Rome at Bovillae. MacD. emphasises the deliberate dialogism of these objects by showing how they create a doubly coded viewer/interpreter, who is at one and the same time an educated, clever participant in Hellenistic literary and artistic high culture and an almost inevitably imperialist appropriator of that culture.
The final chapter looks to works of art, all wall paintings, inscribed with Latin texts. Where the inscriptions of the previous chapter played especially on the creative appropriation of Greek identity as a form of high culture, these tend instead to evoke the everyday and even the obscene as explicitly Roman, and often suggest moral rather than aesthetic responses. Yet they can also be highly sophisticated, and, as MacD. notes, the contexts of the imagetexts range widely across social strata. They should be seen, accordingly, as attempts to actively construct an ideology of the Roman as deliberately counterpoised with its Greek equivalent, neither of which could exist without its counterpart.
This is one of the most striking aspects of the book: it suggests that the very idea of a Greek artistic identity should be seen as a dialogic, and occasionally agonistic, component of the process of creating a Roman one. It was not simply the case, to follow MacD., that artists, writers and viewers in Roman Italy in the later Republic and the early Empire were responding to an already defined, clearly demarcated sense of ‘the Greek’. Instead, such an identity was actively created in response to and alongside the emergence of ‘the Roman’. Neither could have come into being without the other. This is a powerful and productive provocation, which has the possibility to open many further areas of study to renewed inquiry.
