The back-cover blurb announces this volume as ‘an exploration into the many layers of meaning in Roman texts and images’. The editors’ introduction, after a brief nod to ‘the findings of neuroscience’ (which appear to guide the idea of ‘a second gaze’ in the title) and a segue via Aristotle to the idea of mimesis as founded on repetition and hence a second gaze, offers a conspectus of theoretical terminology for the guiding principles of the book. That turns out to be a rather wide ‘glossary of terms and topics’ — notably ‘concepts that start with “inter-” (intertextuality, -mediality, -disciplinarity etc.)’ as well as ‘para’ and ‘meta’. Once this gets to ‘epi-iconics’ and an entire paragraph on DNA (13–14), I confess that this reader at least was lost. The insistence on giving an equal weight to literary and art/archaeological material is refreshing; the focus on ambiguity in questions of text and image (particularly in relation to sexuality) is a bit restricted and disappointing, since this effectively reprises a large literature from the last 40 years. Most problematically, I remain unclear about what the specific purpose of the book’s intervention actually is — i.e. what the editors and authors really mean by the ‘second gaze’ — if it is to be anything more than a handle on which to hang a bunch of contributions in German, Italian and English to a perhaps once stimulating conference.
The essays that follow purport to be organised around two key questions: ‘interests pursued by certain recipients in history’ and ‘interests that we ourselves might pursue’. I have no idea what this means, beyond the obvious, and the papers themselves are not divided in any clear way. Each paper is followed by its own bibliography and there is no attempt to link or interconnect the chapters in any way. In general, the chapters are well balanced between literary and archaeological accounts, but few deal with both art and text together. I. Sassi offers a reading of the variety of gazes around Apuleius’ ekphrasis of Diana and Actaeon in Byrrhyna’s atrium in Met. 2. M. Rossetti examines the under-defined idea of ‘intervisuality’ alongside intertextuality in Augustan astronomical poetics as it draws on Aratus. These are distinctly literary offerings with little visual or archaeological genuflection. The next article by A. Miranda is entirely the opposite. Drawing on the essential recent work of Rubina Raja and her equipe in Aarhus, she uses the archives of the Danish excavator of Palmyra, Harald Inghold, to cast a second gaze on a world now hugely vitiated since the Syrian civil war that began in 2011 and demolished most of Palmyra. Obviously, this is important, but how it and Miranda’s discussions of memory relate to any of the earlier or following literary-critical papers is beyond me. Nor does E. Dal Chiele’s paper, which follows — on quoting, translating and paraphrasing poetic ‘reuse’ in Cicero’s philosophical work — help at all in clarifying where the argument of the book might be going.
The miscellany, with its very deliberately anachronistic historical bricolage of chapters, continues. R. Szeider’s article explores the references in Hadrianic buildings to Augustan architecture in what is a brief summary of a doctoral thesis. C. Ballestrazzi contributes an account of the nineteen poems in Book III of the Palatine Anthology, probably produced in the Christian era, that describe the reliefs of the now lost temple constructed in honour of the second-century b.c.e. Pergamene queen Apollonis. The paper by I. Foletti and M. Okáčová on ‘early Christian multimedia visuality’ explores the mosaic apses of Rome, from the early fifth to the seventh centuries, read against their inscriptions: this is a rare case of a juxtaposition of material-cultural and literary analysis in a single chapter by acknowledged experts in both areas. R. Sporleder takes up the ‘invitation to look twice’ at the Roman terracotta Campana reliefs (dating from the first centuries b.c.e. and c.e.). F. Sommer examines the intertextuality of theonyms in Roman pre-Christian curse tablets. E. and S. Günther investigate some of the complex signals given off by the iconography of the silver coinage issued by Mannos Philhomaios, subject-king of Osrhoene in Mesopotamia in the 160s c.e. N. Berlin discusses the reconstructions of an Augustan period house at Tyndaris in Sicily. A. Reinhardt returns to the Campana reliefs, this time looking at re-uses of terracotta plaques in new contexts: one does wonder why this paper was placed so far from the other on the same topic. The chapter by D. Falkemback Ribeiro looks at inscribed trees in the pastoral poetry of Vergil and Calpurnius Siculus. That of M. Paschalis explores recusatio in Horace’s Odes IV, especially in relation to Vergil’s Eclogue VI. M. Kersten studies different aspects of secondary gazing that can be applied to a passage in Vergil’s first Georgic. No conclusion or index is supplied.
The reader can see the problem. Perhaps my summary description above — constrained by the reviewer’s obligation to mention all the papers — is unfair or unrepresentative in some way. But, despite the high quality of some of the contributions, the whole is a mess which no amount of genuflection to words beginning with ‘inter’, ‘meta’, ‘para’ or ‘epi’ can save or justify. Writing personally now, I do not see the point of edited volumes that just bang together whatever stuff is available, with no clear linkage or argument and whose varied subjects have no relation with each other (despite more or less valiant attempts in the introductory pages to profess some bigger purpose). We (still) have properly peer-reviewed journals for that kind of thing. To justify a volume, one has to have an argument and make a point, so that the collected materials are more than merely an accumulation of spolia. This book has not even attempted to do that.
