The times we live in have proved favourable for the study of the relationship between Rome and Carthage in Latin poetry (E. Giusti, Carthage in Virgil's Aeneid [2018]; N. Goldschmidt, Textual Monuments, CP 112 [2017]). B. enters the debate with an important volume drawn from his 2014 Yale dissertation. The book switches between history and the history of literature, and it offers an in-depth analysis of the growing maritime empire of Rome (since the First Punic War) and the development of multifaceted marine poetics linked to the birth of Latin literature.
After a clear premise, which speaks to a solid method of investigation based on the interaction of literary texts and archaeological/numismatic evidence, in five chapters and an enjoyable epilogue, B. studies the impact of Rome's first victory over Carthage in the newborn historical epic poetry (Naevius), then in the Augustan (Horace, Propertius, Virgil) and Flavian (Silius Italicus) age.
B. follows the path traced by fundamental studies on early Latin literature such as the monographs by M. Barchiesi and S. Mariotti, and most recently by D. Feeney: he reads the first maritime adventures of Rome against the background of Livius Andronicus’ translation of the Odyssey, in an intertwining of politics and poetry that is also found in the chapter devoted to Naevius. In fact, the Bellum Poenicum sees Rome's self-glorification as a victorious maritime power, and the urbs itself becomes the protagonist of a celebratory historical epos for the first time. History and literature intertwine to create a space of cultural memory.
The book develops around the cultural memory of the First Punic War, kept alive thanks to the monuments in the Forum (especially the rostra), subjected over time to a complex process of re-semantisation. Starting from the reception of the event among contemporaries up to the political manoeuvres of the Augustan and Flavian ages, the cultural memory of the First Punic War is filtered through different points of view. Chapter 3 focuses on the concept of cultural memory and its (contemporary) manipulation, becoming the methodological core of the book.
The appropriation of such an identity myth by the central power is linked to multiple political purposes: in the delicate phase, when the republic became a principate, Octavian / Augustus’ propaganda echoes the clashes of the First Punic War to identify new and different enemies (Sextus Pompeius or Marc Antony) and makes the battles of Naulochus and Actium a revival of the Aegates. Back to the roots of the empire, Octavian underlines a continuity in innovation, reflected in monuments such as the rostral columns of Naulochus and Actium placed in the Forum next to the rostra of the First Punic War. A careful reading of some Horatian odes (especially the Roman ones, e.g. 3.5; 3.6) and of some passages by Propertius (2.31; 2.1) has the great merit of offering readers an accurate ‘celebratory topography’ of the urban space, in the light of Octavian's naval victories. This chapter might have benefited from an even more in-depth comparison with the urban sections of Ovid's Amores and, above all, Ars amatoria, discussed only in passing.
B. highlights a similar connection between the Augustan present and the Republican past in the analysis of the ‘Carthaginian’ passages of the Aeneid, with an accurate survey of the relationships between Naevian fragments and Virgil's poem. Chapter 4 offers, among other issues, a particularly interesting feature: building the city of Dido as darkly foreshadowing the fate of the destroyed Carthage after the Punic Wars, predicted in Aeneid 4. N. Horsfall had already pointed out that ‘only Mercury's intervention prevented the premature outbreak of the first Punic war’ (N. Horsfall, ‘Dido in the Light of History’, in Oxford Readings in Vergil's Aeneid [1990], p. 130), and B. follows the trail offered by the future ‘narrative possibilities’ identified in the text. The First Punic War's presence in the Aeneid thus belongs to a ‘temporal system’ (p. 18) that mixes up the past and the (Actian) future of Roman history, within crucial places of memory (lieux de memoire).
The chapter also offers a stimulating intertextual discourse: the speech of Atilius Regulus in Hor. Carm. 3.5 interacts with the voice of Virgil's Aeneas, another hero who visits Juno's temple in Carthage, admired by the Horatian Regulus. Accurately based on textual evidence, similar comparisons help us to understand the value of Augustan propaganda, which brings back the war spirit of the clash with Carthage.
Chapter 5 (devoted to Silius Italicus) offers another complex intertwining of the points of view of Romans and Carthaginians. B. argues that ‘there is no epic Punica without the Bellum Punicum, no understanding of the second war without the first’ (p. 199). With an important contribution on Naevius and Silius Italicus, B. reviews the passages of the Punica in which the memory of the Aegates (also handed down by the pro-Roman ekphrasis of the temple in Liternum, which Hannibal orders to be destroyed) haunts the Carthaginian cultural memory. Flavian politics also appropriates the maritime myth of the First Punic War to celebrate its power, in direct line with the Augustan precedents, as B. demonstrates by referring to numismatic sources. The author does not hide, however, the paucity of evidence of these sources; certainly no naval victory can be traced in the exploits of the Flavians comparable with the Aegates, Naulochus or Actium. Perhaps, in this section, the discussion on the ‘naval myth’ and its poetic and political implications in the Flavian age could have benefited from a mention of the Argonautic myth. True, Valerius Flaccus does not refer to the First Punic War, but a poem focused on the reconstitution of a unity (one could say of an imperium) through the rewriting of a navigation myth could have broadened the horizon of discussion (see e.g. T. Stover, Epic and Empire in Vespasianic Rome [2012]).
The most stimulating point of this chapter is a particular consideration of cultural memory through the representation of family ties. The first two Punic Wars weave together a fruitful dialogue in Silius Italicus’ poem – a dialogue also between different generations. Insisting on one of the key themes of epic, genealogies, Silius Italicus peppers the work with episodes comparing fathers and sons (starting with the oath of Hannibal as a child in the shrine of Dido). B. explores this motif in the story that Maro, veteran of the First Punic War, tells to Serranus, son of Atilius Regulus. In the account of Regulus’ exploits and his glorious death, the past becomes true in the present, in a legacy – ideally transmitted from father to son – which reads the Hannibalic war in the light of the First Punic War. The insistence on family ties and on the attempt made by the children to equal and overcome the deeds of their fathers, seems almost, at the end of the chapter, to reverberate on the genetic relationship that binds the Punica to the Bellum Poenicum, the first to the second war, ancestors to descendants, a crucial issue in all three Flavian epics (to B.'s bibliography now add M. Fucecchi, Il futuro del passato [2020], esp. Chapter 1).
Though it does not offer a personal interpretation of the works discussed, this is a rich book, written with outstanding clarity; it addresses crucial problems from various milestones of Roman history and literature. It will be worthwhile reading for anyone interested in the origins of Latin literature, cultural memory and the poetics / politics of the Empire.
