Flaws are more impressive than perfection. As shown by this collection of essays, from several points of view Rome is a symbolic space of aberration (in its etymological sense, from the Latin ab-errare, i.e. ‘a wandering’, a deviation ‘from the normal type’, ‘from the path of virtue’). Slavery, tyranny, homosexuality, sexual perversion, narcissism, masochism, corruption and moral decay represent the dark side of the Eternal City, which is at the same time one of the most everlasting symbols of culture, beauty and freedom. Nevertheless, the various and rich chapters of this volume deal not directly with Rome, but with the reception of Roman errors and flaws through the glass of literature, art history, cinema, philosophy and sociology, spanning from Michel de Montaigne and Étienne de La Boétie to Victor Hugo, and from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James to the cinema of Lous de Feiullade, the director of The Roman Orgy (or Héliogabale, 1911).
The fundamental starting point is C. Martindale's notion of reception as developed in Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (1993): that ‘we cannot get back to any originary meaning [of an ancient text or other artefact] wholly free of subsequent accretions’ (p. 8), and meaning ‘is always realized at the point of reception’ (p. 231); accordingly, Classical scholarship is to be considered ‘a category of reception that engages with the ancient world and has the capacity to change that world and its inhabitants’ (p. 215). But D. also stresses the necessity – argued by most recent theoretical studies (among others, he quotes the 2010 volume of Cultural Critique dedicated to ‘Classical Reception and the Political’) – to introduce and investigate new themes concerning the collective and the political field, in order to improve cultural engagement and critical awareness in contemporary societies.
Set in chronological order, the essays have a double (or else multiple) perspective that stems from Roman culture and society, but is focused on modern representations and their theoretical milestones. According to Sigmund Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, for example, Rome is not simply ‘a human dwelling-place’, but a psychic space, a ‘mental entity with just as long and varied a past history: that is, in which nothing once constructed had perished’ (p. 235), as we have in R. Fletcher's final chapter about Julia Kristeva's interpretation of Rome through the character of Ovid's Narcissus and the psychoanalytic theory of narcissism. By rewriting Freud's Rome, Fletcher argues, Kristeva sketches a city that creates and, at the same time, destroys the intense desire it constantly raises. This way Rome makes herself immortal according to a dynamic of memory and nostalgia that characterises both Ovid's Metamorphoses and the afterlife of the poet (who has been mysteriously condemned to exile due to carmen et error).
A psychoanalytic approach also foregrounds, at least partially, other essays such as M. Formisano's ‘“Im Sinne der Antike”: Masochism as Roman Error in Venus in Furs’ and M. Wyke's ‘The Pleasures and Punishments of Roman Error: Emperor Elagabalus at the Court of Early Cinema’. This latter analyses The Roman Orgy, a silent movie that brought ancient Rome into a new – ‘visual, kinetic, ephemeral’ (p. 210) – way of seeing the world. Cinema represents Elagabalus’ ‘extreme transgression of gender, religion, and imperial power’ (p. 210), by emphasising what ancient historiography recounts and mirroring the luxury of both the contemporary film industry and French society of the time.
In general, one the most intriguing fils-rouge of the volume is the analysis of the effect produced by the overlapping images of Rome through the centuries and in different cultural contexts. We may consider the notion of masochism in M. Formisano's analysis of von Sacher-Masoch's Venus im Pelz (1870), where sexual perversion coincides with an idea of a ‘Roman error’ connected with erotic passion, as it has been differently shown in the poetical works of Lucretius, Ovid and Apuleius; through the figure of Venus dressed ‘in furs’, moreover, we find a complex symbology that connects the pagan (Roman) Mediterranean world to Christian northern Europe, with an uncanny effect. Not unlike what we read in Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva (1902), the famous story (not mentioned in the volume) that inspired Freud, this tale ends with a paradox, as Severin's masochistic fantasy, according to Formisano, ‘will be healed not by an external factor but precisely by that very fantasy’ (p. 169).
The dark side of Rome, her dangerous but inspiring force, as argued by C. Edwards in ‘The Romance of Roman Error: Encountering Antiquity in Hawthorne's The Marble Faune’, revives another symbol of Roman culture and art: the Faun of Praxiteles. In Hawthorne's tale, Edwards suggests, the anthropomorphic features of the statue seduces a group of American students and draws them into a sort of labyrinthine ‘anti-pilgrimage’ through the Roman catacombs (p. 131). In this context, error may become synonymous with sin, from a religious point of view that juxtaposes pagan antiquity, Catholicism and the American protestant understanding of Rome. A similar effect is provoked, according to J.C. Rowe in ‘The Roman Aura in Henry James's Daisy Miller: A Study (1878)’, by the character of Daisy Miller in her sublime theory of flirt. In this case the Roman landscape, and especially the Colosseum, has a crucial function because it expresses the same conflicting images evoked by Daisy: on the one hand, beauty vs sickness (malaria or ‘Roman fever’ of which the young woman dies); on the other, the intersections between ‘the English Romantics, classical Rome, and European Christendom’ (p. 203).
As anticipated, the volume gives much space to political and collective themes, in themselves and in their interrelationship with literature. In ‘Correcting Rome with Rome: Victor's Hugo's Quatrevingt-treize’, M. Lowrie and B. Vinken use Hugo's perspective to look at the political and literary concept of civil war that has been developed through ‘a plethora of tropes for conceptualizing internal disturbance’ (p. 179), and within a dialectical process of reception that implies the reciprocal correction of errors and misunderstandings. It is not paradoxical, therefore, that Rome herself has offered, along the centuries, ‘the very framework for resisting Rome’ (p. 190). In the political field, another crucial motive for reading Roman history and its imagery though the lens of error is the debate between freedom and slavery, as shown by both M. Malamud's engaging essay ‘Receptions of Rome in Debate on Slavery in the U.S.A.’ and J. Connolly's wide and richly documented chapter ‘Past Sovereignty: Roman Freedom for Modern Revolutionaries’. Connolly starts from the notion of libertas as a model for modern revolutionary experiences, without omitting some paradigmatic literary characters such as Brutus, Lucretia, Curtius, Cato etc., and exploring its political developments, whereas Malamud more specifically moves from historical facts to compare Roman slavery and American slavery.
M. Bizer's ‘Whose Mistake? The Errors of Friendship in Cicero, La Boétie, and Montaigne’ and C. Williams's ‘Friends, Romans, Errors: Moments in the Reception of amicitia’ may also be considered as complementary. Bizer starts from the influence of Étienne de La Boétie on Michel de Montaigne's Essais, displaying their debt to Roman culture. But he also brings to light significant changes. More precisely, if in the Roman world friendship was deeply connected with the sphere of politics, as proved by Cicero's work, Montaigne transforms it into a supreme, absolute good; this way, ‘by naming his essay De l'amitié, Montaigne engages with Cicero's De amicitia and provides corrections to both Roman friendship and Cicero's analysis’ (p. 42). The literary and philosophical development of the Latin concept of amicitia involves a linguistic and stylistic reception (‘the language of amicitia’, p. 73), thus implying errors, misunderstandings, corrections and adaptations. Williams revolves around the concept not only throughout Montaigne's work, but also by connecting his thought with the thesis of two modern books: The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis (1960) and Friendships: an Exposé by Joseph Epstein (2008).
I will end with C. Vout, the author of the first chapter, ‘The Error of Roman Aesthetics’, because I particularly appreciated her reinterpretation of Rome's use of Greek art as a paradigm of fruitful reception. Although posterity sees many Roman works of art as an imperfect reproduction or a simple copy of a Greek model, in Roman art Vout valorises what J. Roberts (The Necessity of Errors [2011]) called ‘the productiveness of the error’, especially regarding the transgression of naturalism and rationality. This way, art opens a space for seeing more or seeing further. At the same time, as we read in the premises of this chapter, ‘reception studies have recognized that texts and images are not finished, but born, when they leave the study or workshop. Classical studies is not a linear trek back to a particular moment or ancient proof, but a labyrinthine route through webs of translations’ (p. 15).
