This time last year my review concluded with the observation that the future for the study of Latin literature is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and that we should proceed in close dialogue with social historians and art historians. In the intervening period, two books from a new generation of scholars have been published which remind us of the existence of an alternative tide that is pushing back against such culturally embedded criticism, and urging us to turn anew towards the aesthetic. The very titles of these works, with their references to ‘The Sublime’Footnote ¹ and ‘Poetic Autonomy’Footnote ² are redolent of an earlier age in their grandeur and abstraction, and in their confident trans-historicism. Both monographs, in different ways, are seeking to find a new means of grounding literary criticism in reaction to the disempowerment and relativism which is perceived to be the legacy of postmodernism. In their introductions, both bring back to centre stage theoretical controversies that were a prominent feature of scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s (their dynamics acutely observed by Don Fowler in his own Greece & Rome subject reviews of the period) but which have largely faded into the background; the new generation of Latinists tend to have absorbed insights of New Historicism and postmodernism without feeling the need either to defend their importance or to reflect upon their limitations. Henry Day, in his study of the sublime in Lucan's Bellum civile, explicitly responds to the challenges issued by Charles Martindale, who has, of course, continued (in his own words) to wage ‘war against the determination of classicists to ground their discipline in “history”’.Footnote ³ Day answers Martindale's call for the development of some new form of aesthetic criticism, where hermeneutics and the search for meaning are replaced with (or, better, complemented by) experiential analysis; his way forward is to modify Martindale's pure aesthetics, since he expresses doubt that beauty can be wholly free of ideology, or that aesthetics can be entirely liberated from history, context, and politics. Reassuringly (for the novices among us), Day begins by admitting that the question ‘What is the sublime?’ is a ‘perplexing’ one, and he starts with the definition of it as ‘a particular kind of subjective experience…in which we encounter an object that exceeds our everyday categories of comprehension’ (30). What do they have in common, then, the versions of the sublime, ancient and modern, outlined in Chapter 1: the revelatory knowledge afforded to Lucretius through his grasp of atomism, the transcendent power of great literature for Longinus, and the powerful emotion engendered in the Romantics by the sight of impressive natural phenomena such as a mountain range or a thunderstorm? One of the key ideas to emerge from this discussion – crucial to the rest of the book – is that the sublime is fundamentally about power, and especially the transference of power from the object of contemplation to its subject. The sublime is associated with violence, trauma, and subjugation, as it rips away from us the ground on which we thought we stood; yet it does not need to be complicit with the forces of oppression but can also work for resistance and retaliation. This dynamic of competing sublimes of subjugation and liberation will then help us, throughout the following chapters, to transcend the nihilism/engagement dichotomy that has polarized scholarship on Lucan in recent decades. In turn, Lucan's deployment of the sublime uses it to collapse the opposition between liberation and oppression, and thus the Bellum civile makes its own contribution to the history of the sublime. This is an impressive monograph, much more productively engaged with the details of Lucan's poem than this summary is able to convey; it brought me to a new appreciation of the concept of the sublime, and a new sense of excitement about Lucan's epic poem and its place in the Western tradition.

The key claim of Luke Roman's book is that ‘autonomy’ in a variety of forms (poetic, financial, political, philosophical) is central to the way in which Roman poets ‘organized their rhetoric of self-definition’ (18), and that its importance emerged from specific conditions in Roman society in the shift from republic to empire. Like Day, Roman aims to persuade us that the aesthetic and the ideological need not be mutually exclusive categories (e.g. 10), and one of the key themes to emerge from his study is that of the co-implication of autonomy and social instrumentality. There is more collapsing of the binary in this book, too. Roman's starting point is the claim that in recent decades critical trends have polarized in relation to the concept of aesthetic autonomy, either fetishizing it (New Criticism) or rejecting it outright (New Historicism). He argues that both critical trends conceive of autonomy in absolute terms, and insist that we make a choice between literature that is free, pure, and self-contained, and literature that is conversely impure and ideological, serving ends beyond itself. As he explains how this false binary has hampered the appreciation of ancient literature, his tone is overtly challenging. It is useful to warn us, for instance, that ‘one recent critical trend has been a kind of automatic scepticism regarding any large-scale claims about cultural change or literary historical shifts’ (24), but things turn nasty when ‘doctrinaire postmodernism’ is in the crosshairs: ‘This knee-jerk impulse causes postmodern criticism to be congealed with the kind of unvarying rigidity which ought to be the very opposite of its intention’ (24). Such bracing reminders of the limitations and pitfalls of critical approaches are salutary, even if the targets are rather general. What is especially provocative, however, is the way in which Roman positions himself above the fray; while existing approaches to ancient literature are repeatedly characterized as ‘fads’ and ‘faddish’, he emerges as the voice of reason between the unhelpful extremes of positivism and postmodernism. His stated aim – a worthy one – is to ‘revive the lost art of generalization’ (24) so as to be able to tackle big questions, and he intends ‘neither to mistake iterated rhetorical topoi for sociological truth, nor to dismiss such narratives as mere rhetoric’ (32). All this sounds admirable, but find me the scholar who would not sign up for this manifesto; declaring that you intend to avoid the pitfalls is not the same as doing so. How, then, does he steer his course between this methodological Scylla and Charybdis? His stated strategy is that of applying to Latin poetry Adorno's insight that aesthetic detachment from society is itself as a socially significant act. Where does this take us? After the provocations of the introduction – and the criticism of postmodernism's failure to challenge established grand narratives (24) – one might expect a provocative paradigm-shifter of a book. In fact, however, readers will find little to challenge them in the chapters that follow, which chart the familiar story of the development of Latin first-person poetry from Catullus, through the Augustan poets, to Persius and Juvenal, Statius and Martial, against the backdrop of social and political change. Roman's attractively written discussion of these Roman authors is easy to swallow – perhaps because it is somewhat pre-digested (the art of generalization is partly to smooth over with eloquent confidence any uncertainties and ambiguities.) The tension between autonomy and instrumentality does in practice provide rather a helpful frame for a diachronic study of Latin poetry, and enables Roman to bring out some of its particular concerns; his readings of the authors are usually enriching, and his account of what these authors were intending to convey and how it constitutes a response to historical context is usually a satisfying one, if rarely surprising. I like his description of early Augustan poets as ‘travelling light’ (98–9), and Horace's reduction of Lucretius’ Epicurean philosophy is nicely articulated. However, in contrast to Day's study of the sublime, this book does not leave one feeling that one has learned anything about autonomy, nor that the concept has provided a new approach to Latin literature. In fact, Roman's handling of autonomy strips it of its complexity – it comes to mean little more than independence from a variety of constraints. In practice, much of the theoretical apparatus of the introduction might have been dispensed with. Indeed, Roman does concede that the Latin version of autonomy ‘lacks theoretical tightness’ (18) – a useful get-out clause, perhaps? Early in the book he informs us that ‘both writers and members of the political class…value autonomy’ (16); I was left wondering whether a more interesting project might have been one that explored what it might mean for someone not to value autonomy – a much more challenging idea for us moderns.

Nora Goldschmidt's skilful exploration of the relationship between Virgil and Ennius will certainly illuminate our readings of both the Annales and the Aeneid.Footnote ⁴ Indeed, with its engaging fluency, its broad cultural perspective, and its integration of insights from important German and Italian as well as Anglophone scholarship, it will provide a useful resource for bringing the fragmentary and elusive Ennius squarely into mainstream university teaching on epic. And it is a fairly accessible read, despite the density and detail of its literary readings: chapters are short and lucidly argued, and each ends with a summarizing conclusion. An appendix of verbal parallels between the Aeneid and the Annales is a useful addition. Goldschmidt emphasizes the literary and cultural role of Ennius’ epic poem in shaping and communicating the Romans’ memory of their own history; the subject of the first chapter is the reception of Ennius’ poem in the first century bce, the backdrop against which Virgil himself read and engaged with the work. By this time it had been established as a national classic (the Roman answer to Homer), studied in schools, and casually quoted and misquoted. For Virgil, the Annales was the canonical Latin poem and the touchstone for Roman cultural memory and identity. The aim of Goldschmidt's book, then, is to trace the process by which Virgil deliberately went about appropriating for his own epic the cultural role that had previously been established for the Annales. One strategy was to stake his claim to the period of Roman history prior to Ennius’ own subject, thus making the Aeneid the prequel to the Annales, transforming his own belatedness as Ennius’ epic successor into a newly minted precedence. Goldschmidt shows how Virgil pre-colonizes the sites of memory that had become so significant to the Romans thanks to Ennius’ epic. He hardly mentions the Punic Wars – they are a ‘notorious gap in the shield’ (119) – yet memory of them seethes below the surface of the poem. For instance, Virgil ‘pre-writes’ Ennius’ Punic Wars in his own Italian wars (133). Sicily is an especially important site of memory, fundamentally evoking for the Romans the First Punic War, and Goldschmidt brings out the ‘traces of future history’ (114) to be found in Aeneas’ Sicilian adventures that foreshadow the subject matter of Ennius’ poem. Exempla – so fundamental to Roman cultural memory and ethics – are another terrain on which Virgil engages directly with Ennius, and this is the subject of Chapter 5. Here Goldschmidt shows how Virgil exploits the inherent flexibility of exempla to ‘dislodge the old poet from his authoritative position as the preserver of exemplary memory’ (154), by giving new meaning to the exempla established in the Annales. The urgency of Virgil's reworkings suggests to Goldschmidt that Augustus was overstating the case when he claimed that traditional exempla were being forgotten in his own day (192); this final chapter makes a valuable contribution to the broader discussion of Roman exemplarity.

Kristina Milnor's study of literature and Pompeian graffiti comes at Latin poetry from a very different angle and yields valuable results.Footnote ⁵Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii treads genuinely new territory in its innovative interdisciplinarity, synthesizing literary criticism and contemporary cultural theory with study of material culture; it makes an exciting contribution to our understanding of ancient literary culture. Milnor begins by convincing us that the social significance of graffiti in the ancient world was rather different from what it is taken to be today. We tend to categorize writing that we find in public spaces as either official and sanctioned (road signs, publicity hoardings) or transgressive and even threatening (subway spray-can). For the ancient Romans, the boundary between the two was much less clearly defined. A crude scrawl added to an election poster, for instance, need not be the clash of opposing voices that it would be today. Milnor also draws our attention to the particular material and performative aspects of graffiti that set them apart from other forms of writing but also give them something in common with familiar epigraphic modes. Like tomb inscriptions and letters, with which she draws productive comparisons, graffiti often address their readers with urgency, and also make a lasting record on the wall; they embrace an interesting tension between immediacy and monumentality. The material context is important for their interpretation: graffiti interact with their surroundings and they also invite us to reflect on the moment when they were written. Envisaging graffiti at the intersection between writing and performance, Milnor's discussion also makes a useful new contribution to ongoing scholarly debates about the complex relationship between orality and literature. Literacy is in itself a social practice, and graffiti simultaneously perform literacy and are ‘performative of their own popularity’ (ix). The Roman state did not produce verse (59), so verse graffiti represent an alternative mode to official inscriptions with which they shared wall space. Milnor shows that such verse quotations are represented as the work of individuals, and function as an assertion of individual identity. Quotations from canonical literature are not simply echoes of that literature, but also take ownership of it; Milnor digs beneath the surface of this phenomenon. The frequency with which the Aeneid’s opening lines arma virumque – words at once laden with cultural baggage and in themselves literally meaningless – are found on Pompeian walls is not just straightforward testimony to the popularity of this influential poem. In Chapter 5 she reveals that almost all quotations from the Aeneid relate in some way to the immediacy of communication; they are mostly in the first-person voice, many are taken from speeches, many are direct addresses such as warnings or entreaties. Milnor's work abounds with insights, generated from careful interpretation and incisive argument; she brings a refined literary and theoretical sensibility to the study of graffiti, and in turn uses these material remnants from ancient Pompeii to open up understanding of new aspects of the consumption of literature in antiquity.

There is yet more on the far reach of Latin epic in Philip Hardie's enticingly titled The Last Trojan Hero, which traces the every-changing significance of Virgil's Aeneid over the millennia and down to the present day.Footnote ⁶ As he shows, every century has discovered the poem anew, and has found in it its own wisdoms about death, love, war, empire, philosophy, science, or religion. The rich potential of this epic poem is evoked through its later reception; with Hardie as our guide we wander through the great works of Western literature, the poetry of Dante, Petrarch, Milton, Shakespeare, Eliot, and Heaney, past the paintings of Rubens, Tieopolo, Poussin, and Turner (courtesy of some lovely colour plates), and into the darker and more obscure corners of Virgilian reception: the feverish dreams of medieval monks, Elizabethan anxieties about the queen's marriage prospects, sixteenth-century syphilis, Punch cartoons. Such a wealth of fascinating material might risk seeming dilettantish in the work of another author, but here it is underpinned by the profound understanding of the poem and its reception which Hardie brings to the study (although a reference to ‘the popular science-fiction series Battleship [sic] Galactica’ [18] suggests that the author is less at home with contemporary culture!). There is an early frisson when Hardie speaks in prophetic voice of the tradition's finality: ‘I do not foresee a time when the Aeneid could again be labelled a central classic for contemporary literature’ (18). It becomes clear through the subsequent chapters, as the history of the Aeneid’s reception is unfolded, that this claim is saying something significant about profound cultural changes that have taken place over the last century or so. And yet the twists and turns in the cultural life of the Aeneid are revealed to be so diverse and often so unexpected that anything is still possible. In Hardie's expert hands the ‘bewildering diversity’ (19) of interpretations to which Virgil's Aeneid has been subjected over the centuries becomes a seductive unfolding of a series of ideas about underworlds, the figures of Dido and Aeneas, empire, colonization, leadership, love, humans in the landscape, and the transition from pagan antiquity to the Christian order. The book's ambitious scope and lightness of touch are designed primarily for a general readership, but scholars and students too will find it exciting in its breadth and illuminating in its depth.

A. J. Boyle makes another monumental contribution to his Senecan tragedy project with his new edition and commentary on Medea.Footnote ⁷ This has the same constitution as his earlier commentaries on Octavia and Oedipus: daunting heft, with a new text and a parallel translation which is especially designed to enable the play to be performed, accompanied by the comprehensive introduction (some of which necessarily reworks material from Boyle's earlier commentaries) and the very extensive and detailed commentary with its primary emphasis on guiding the reader's navigation and interpretation of the play. It is a formidable work and will be indispensable for anyone reading the play.

At the other end of the scale is a slender volume of poetry, aimed at ensnaring the general reader with a fresh look at Ovidian erotic transformation.Footnote ⁸ A selection of passages from Ovid's works have been translated into accessible contemporary verse by Jane Allison. They conjure scenes from Ovid's love affair with Corinna, and then run through some of the tangled tales from the Metamorphoses arranged in five thematic sections: ‘Looking’, ‘Taking’, ‘Ruining’, ‘Wanting Someone Too Close’, and ‘Switching’. Delightful colour plates of ancient artworks illustrate many of the Ovidian episodes. This is Ovid transformed for the modern reader, but the project is also rooted in scholarship, with foreword and introduction (provided respectively by the leading Latinists Elaine Fantham and Alison Keith) setting the ancient Roman scene and explaining the alien complexities of Roman sexuality.

In a very different vein, Denise McCoskey and Zara Torlone have produced a clear and straightforward primer for the reading of Latin love poetry – a definition that here stretches beyond the love elegies of Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid to include at one end the poetry of Catullus and at the other Ovid's exile poetry and the emotional turmoil of his yearning for his home country.Footnote ⁹ A concise introduction offers basic background information about politics and law; in the ensuing chapters the various approaches and contributions of scholarship over the decades are neatly summarized, with particular focus on exploring the poetic strategies that carefully create within the poetry the impression of immediacy and genuine passion. This is a decidedly more prosaic work than the elegiac piece by Efrossini Spenztou praised in my previous review here;Footnote ¹⁰ their treatment is sensible rather than exciting. Indeed, in their attempt to distance the reader from the apparent immediacy of the poetry, and to explore instead the mechanisms by which the effect of passion and immediacy is achieved, at times they risk expunging passion from the story altogether. In their discussion of the complex relationship between author and ego, and the tricks and traps of first-person poetry, the authors cite the famous Catullus 16, in which the poet launches a violent and obscene verbal attack upon his friends because they have made the mistake of equating Catullus with his ‘soft’ poetry (19–20). Catullus’ blunt and heated denial that his readers can read through his verses to the man himself complicates matters by being itself figured poetically as an immediate address to the reader, provocatively undermining simultaneously both attempts to read his poetry biographically and attempts not to do so. With their description that ‘Catullus calmly explains’ that his verses need not be taken literally, the authors drain Catullus’ poem of all its rage, its humour, and its provocation. A comparison with Eminem, of whose songs this poem is strongly reminiscent (and whom they have already cited on xiii) would have enabled them instead to demonstrate that poetry can be at the same time archly metapoetic and suffused with rage or other emotion; in Eminem's music the emotion, the cleverness, the artistry, and the jokes all undeniably and uncomfortably coexist within the same lines. Indeed, the echo of Eminem's famous lines ‘I am whatever you say I am / If I wasn't why would I say I am?’ in their summary of Catullus’ injunction as ‘believe me when I say that I am not who I said I was’ (20) pushes this helpful comparison close to the surface, but it is left untapped. This volume does not so much evoke the poetry and passion of the ancient poems as offer tools for approaching them in more pragmatic fashion; for this reason I think it is more likely to be of interest to students beginning to tackle the poems than to a more general reader.

In the recent past there have been some scholars who have gone so far as to argue that Ovid never left Rome at all, and that his exile poetry, all those books of the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto documenting the horrors of his years in the frozen wastes of Tomis, are nothing but an extended literary exercise in hyperbole and literary artifice, and utter invention from start to finish. Garth Tissol gives this radically sceptical thesis considerable attention in the introduction to his Green and Yellow commentary on the first book of Epistulae ex Ponto, not so as to lend it weight but rather to use it as a way of addressing certain interpretative issues.Footnote ¹¹ In particular he explores the significance of hyperbole in Ovid's poetry, and its status as a valid literary trope despite our modern tendency to recoil from its excesses and so find it ineffectual. He also considers related anxieties about how one might use Ovid's poetry as a historical source and whether the use of literary tropes might detract from historical veracity. Tissol piques the newcomer's interest in this collection of poems by describing it as a gallery of literary portraits of amicitia in all its various forms, with a series of specific named individuals from intimate friends to powerful patrons (2), and by articulating the place of these poems within the history of Roman letter-writing, drawing on Horace's Epistles to create a ‘generic novelty’ (2), and then itself a model for Pliny the Younger's letter collection (26). The commentary is very thorough and linguistically detailed; indeed it verges at times on the cluttered. Its comprehensiveness, however, will be especially helpful to less advanced Latin students, who will find that almost every grammatical construction is identified for them. The interpretation is careful and there are several judicious amendments to the Loeb translation (e.g. 68, 116). There are also helpful explanations of the multiple allusions to other literary works, especially Ovid's own, and comments on characteristic Ovidian style.

Sander Goldberg's commentary on Terence Hecyra is an excellent contribution to the same Cambridge series.Footnote ¹² His introduction brings out the particular fascination of this play, with its documented history of failed performances, its tantalizing plot, its intelligent struggle against generalization and cliché, and the unusual intimacy that its monologues create between the onstage characters and the audience. But first Goldberg provides, with masterful concision, a superb introduction to the whole of Roman comedy, adeptly integrating a wealth of scholarship into an accessible story that moves from the first ludi Romani of 240 bce, through the relationship of Roman theatre to its Greek precursor, to the particular material conditions of Roman performances. Questions of performance are given special emphasis; different performances animate the script in different ways. The Hecyra’s own chequered stage history – the first performance abandoned when the crowd was distracted by the rival attraction of a tightrope walker – helpfully highlights the role of an audience in a play's success; the meaning of scenes and the evaluation of characters in the play are also dependent on how the actors play them and how the audience receives them. The introduction goes on to shape and guide the student reader as an interpreter of alien literature in an especially satisfying way. On pages 19–25 Goldberg poses a series of possible questions designed to open up for exploration a range of possible readings: How does the play structure and shape the audience's response? How does Terence handle stock characters and the expectations they arouse? Where is the play's moral centre? What comparisons are productive? These strike me as the most useful set of questions one could ask for, equipping a student with an approach which is likely to bear fruit when applied to any ancient text.

Juvenal's vigorous, entertaining, and disgusting attack on women is a resounding classic of a satire that no doubt deserves its place in the commentary series. However, this third Green and Yellow commentary is a far less promising guide for students.Footnote ¹³ The introduction, although it also contains much useful material, threatens to throw them a long way off the interpretative track. Dutifully outlining key issues in recent scholarship on the poem, and especially on the implications of persona theory, Lindsay and Patricia Watson dwell on the question of whether the reader is supposed to side with the speaker in his diatribe against women, or whether we are intended to find his attack on women over the top and unconvincing. Leaving aside the fact that it might be more productive to allow such questions to remain open – asking the students to consider their implications Goldberg-style, rather than feeling the need to come down on one side or the other – the methodology by which they reach their conclusion that the diatribe is supposed to be unconvincing is extraordinarily maladroit; indeed, I am surprised that it slipped past the series’ editors. When, having discussed the literary tradition within which Juvenal was writing, they confirm that Juvenal inherited his tropes of invective from previous writers and assert ‘In sum, J.’s rhetoric of misogyny is, in its thematic and ideological conception, altogether literary and tralaticious’ (35), there is already the implication that this somehow detaches the poem from contemporary Roman reality, rendering it a harmless literary exercise. From pages 40 to 48 their argument is that ‘the criticisms levelled by the satiric voice of Satire 6 are, for the most part, counterfactual or anachronistic’ (40). Juvenal's attack on women as impossible to be married to, they continue, cannot be taken seriously because it is refuted by a wealth of epigraphic evidence in which wives are praised for their good qualities. Of course, they hasten to add that these eulogies of dead wives are also formulaic, but their conclusion that ‘the truth must lie somewhere in between’ (41) is not only banal but also entirely misses the point about satire. And so it goes on, as they ‘test his…complaints against historically verifiable facts’: did women really fancy gladiators? Not often. Were they over-educated harpies? No, that's an anachronism. In support of their approach, in a footnote on page 40 the authors cite Dan Hooley on Juvenal's ‘faithlessness to fact’,Footnote ¹⁴ but this is unfair to Hooley, who is clear about how rhetoric works in a society and that it is not merely a case of acquiescing to fact or rejecting fiction: Juvenal's satiric voice plays on the fears of his fellow-citizens, much as current anti-immigration rhetoric inflames by playing on the existing fears of contemporary Britons; those fears and their consequences – and the societal relationships that generate them and that are established as a result of them – are real, regardless of the accuracy of the claims made by the politicians who fan their flames. For an example of the authors’ faulty logic applied to the text, let us take the phrase venus ebria (‘the drunken lechery of women’) at line 6.300. This formula preys on the traditional fears of Roman men that women who drink alcohol will become sexually unleashed. In their commentary ad loc. Watson and Watson judge that this fear, and hence the invective trope, is meant be seen as anachronistic on the grounds that by Juvenal's day it had become acceptable for women to drink wine (165). Let us test this logic with a modern analogy: I take it that it is perfectly socially acceptable for women to drink alcohol in Britain today. Does this mean that the trope of the drunken slut who deserves everything she gets has lost its bite in contemporary culture? Far from it; it is regularly deployed with genuine anger and no small real-world effect in the arguments of mainstream newspapers, twitter trolls, and legal professionals in relation to rape trials. Similarly, Watson and Watson tell us: ‘the claim that women don jewels only to commit adultery is both tralaticious and counterfactual, something that must have been palpable to any Roman reader’ (47). Consider in comparison the claim, in a modern-day context, that a girl wearing a short skirt and make-up is sending out a signal of sexual availability that mitigates any sexual assault against her. Such a claim may seem palpably untrue to many contemporary readers, and yet it is also one that has considerable purchase in many contexts, and indeed often has material consequences for real people. The authors seem to appreciate neither that cultures are not monolithic, nor that invective is instrumental, even when it is deployed in satire rather than, for instance, the law court. In the twenty-first century, violent and misogynistic rhetoric is notoriously deployed in attempts to silence the voices of high-profile women (most classicists will have heard, at least, of the recent experiences of Mary Beard). In such a climate it seems not only a missed opportunity to show the contemporary relevance of Juvenal's satire, but downright irresponsible to play down the potential of invective to be a powerful tool of social control. This commentary hamstrings Juvenal's satire, representing it as an irrelevant museum piece in its own day, let alone for us, and misses a golden opportunity to consider it in all its pulsating and pertinent nastiness.