This volume comprises a collection of essays developed from a 2013 conference at King's College London, ‘Psychogeographies in Latin Literature’, that explores the presence in Latin literature of both ideological representations of space and individual reappropriations of such representations. In doing so, it illustrates how these distinct spatial discourses continually combine to produce heterogeneous cultural spaces within Rome and its empire. The volume's title reflects its primary source of theoretical inspiration, H. Lefebvre's influential La production de l'espace (1974, trans. 1991), which posits an ongoing ‘trialectical’ relationship between physical space and the contrasting ways in which cultural space is continuously ‘produced’ by discourses of power and by the individual. The essays in the present volume avoid discussing literary descriptions of physical space, focusing instead on the latter two elements, especially on everyday experiences and adaptations of space produced by hegemonic social forces. The result is a stimulating collection that attests across a broad temporal and generic range of texts (Varro to Augustine, various genres of both poetry and prose) how Latin literature serves as both evidence for and a medium of the production of cultural space.
After the editorial introduction, the volume's eleven essays follow, linked to neighbouring essays by shared spatial themes: Chapters 1–4 centre on heterogeneous journeys and roadside encounters; Chapters 5–6 explore meaning generated via contrasts between different spaces, while Chapters 7–8 analyse philosophical spaces; the final three chapters (9–11) address ‘the individual's interaction with … empire’ (p. 17).
In the face of the ideological discipline that the Augustan regime imposes on the public spaces of Rome, Spentzou argues in Chapter 1 that we can find a reappropriation of such spaces in the amatory itineraries of flâneur-like figures in Latin love elegy of the period. Such disruptions in imperial spatial discipline are not oppositional; rather, the two spatial discourses interweave the individual's identities as lover and as citizen to produce liberating moments of tension, overlap and ambiguity between these social scripts.
In the most conceptually challenging chapter, D. Spencer describes how the associative logic of Varro's etymologies and aetiologies in De lingua Latina empowers Roman readers to undertake their own idiosyncratic dérives (‘rapid transitions through multifarious scenes and ambiances’, pp. 51–2) through Varro's configuration of late-Republican Rome, which privileges memories of its ‘rustic, natural overlay’ (p. 64). Readers are thereby able to fashion their own interpretations of the cityscape and, in so doing, their own understandings of their Roman identity. Varro emerges as an innovative spatial theorist sensitive to ‘inhabited, cultivated space as a product of time’ (p. 65). Next, J. Hudson demonstrates that scenes of transportation and the roadside encounter throughout Latin literature constitute an expressive spatial medium for articulating character within Roman ethical discourse. A variety of Latin texts use questions of vehicular agency to explore how much control and autonomy these wayfarers exert in their lives, while the physicality of vehicular conveyance may prove degrading or a suitable obstacle for the moral man to transcend. Despite sometimes appearing trivial, these scenes of travel are not simply topoi, but frequently stage ‘more abstract discursive conflicts’ (p. 90) with an understated efficiency. Such scenes are especially significant for Latin literature in light of the particular significance of longer-distance vehicular transport to Roman culture. In his chapter on the specular nature of Juvenal's satire, D. Larmour argues that specularity can offer us our mirror image made whole, yet estranged from us, even as it produces unexpected correspondences between us and other persons or things that we mirror with. Juvenal's specular Rome offers a nostalgic reflection of the city's idealised past alongside a jaded and fractured image of a postlapsarian present that endlessly defers the satirist-narrator's search for stable loci of self-definition, rendering him a flâneur-like outsider-observer and thus paradoxically establishing his credentials as a satirist. At the same time, various forms of mirroring within the collection lend Juvenal's poetry a limited degree of indirect coherence.
In Chapter 5 M. Lewis analyses the diversity of Catullus’ spatial poetics through close readings of poems featuring Lesbia in each part of Catullus’ body of poems, polymetric, neoteric and the elegiac epigrams: they each contain their own distinct spatial poetics, which Lewis respectively terms ‘topical’, ‘neoteric’ and ‘abstracted’. The specific spatial terms used in topical poetics create a concrete physical context; literary and allusive neoteric poetics contrasts mythical spaces of the past with the ‘here and now’ that the narrator and his speakers are associated with; negligible spatial context generates a sense of abstraction and generality. Lewis's intriguing assertion that such an abstracted poetics also produces a sense of interiority merits further discussion, given the inherently spatial connotations of this pose. Fitzgerald's contribution focuses on how spatial terms in the poetry of Catullus and Horace's Odes endow their poems with a spatial quality. References to the imperial periphery around a poem's initial or terminal ‘edges’, in contrast to an enclosed and often idyllic ‘here’ in its middle, frame the composition as an empire-like space that may alternately shrink back from or confidently strain out towards the unfamiliar or threatening entities that lie beyond its boundaries, forming a subtle spatial discourse that telegraphs the poet's concern with locating the proper ethical limit-ations for human conduct. At the same time, such spatial terms and intricate verbal spacing within the poem lend the interior space of these compositions a variety of shifting spatial-ethical trajectories (e.g. expansion, contraction) that grant the poet's discourse further depth.
In Chapter 7 C. Edwards analyses Seneca's philosophical works in order to explore the significance of spatial belonging for Roman Stoicism. There is a tension between Stoicism's tendency to deny the moral significance of particular physical locations, especially Rome, to one's sense of belonging, and the abiding influence of Rome and its culture. The Stoic's primary attachment is to the intangible cosmic city of the wise, an inner disposition-qua-omnipresent homeland that coincides with a sense of detachment from one's local affiliations. Conversely, ‘the journey towards the cosmic city is plotted on a distinctively Roman landscape’ (p. 176), while Seneca's use of heroic Roman itinerants and exiles as moral exemplars suggests that, like Stoic wisdom, Romanitas too might be detached from Rome. Next, T. Fuhrer argues that Augustine's records of his sojourns in Carthage, Rome and Milan in the Confessions by and large do not bear the cultural and political associations that they carried during his lifetime and fail to reflect the amount of time that he spent there. Rather, Augustine privileges what Lefebvre terms ‘abstract’ (i.e. conceived) space, whereby each stopping place (‘lieu de passage’) is invested with the meaning that Augustine ascribes to his experiences, coming to represent an expressive node in his psychogeographic journey towards salvation.
S. Bhatt contrasts the spaces of Rome and self-exile to the imperial periphery in Tacitus’ Annales, using her analysis to criticise Lefebvre's claims that hegemonic power produces social space in and out of literature, as well as Said's similar favour for top-down agency in his characterisation of exile as a state of separation from one's home, this latter model corresponding to the logic behind the imperial Roman political system's use of exile as a legal punishment. Instances of voluntary exile in Tacitus challenge the hegemonic discourse that the exilic condition necessarily marks a separation from home and the source of values and authenticity, for in these case studies home is found far from Rome. In Chapter 10 R. Alston explores with reference to Tacitus’ Agricola how empire's totalising spatio-temporal system ruthlessly flattens out local variation at both imperial centre and periphery, the latter instantiated in Agricola 21, where Agricola oversees the Britons reproducing Roman urbanisation and culture, generating ‘the utopian city’ (passim), located ‘nowhere and replicated everywhere’ (p. 254). The only locations that stand outside of this totalising imperialistic reproduction of space are the psychic spaces of memory and historiographic literature, only accessible to cultured elites who have survived empire's destruction. This inner, spiritually disengaged stance benefits from empire's security while excusing continued service to its institutions, thus showing how ‘there can be good men even under bad emperors’ (Agr. 42.4). In the difficult but rewarding final chapter, V. Rimell explores how the liminal function of straits and narrow waterways across the Latin poetic tradition informs our understanding of both writing and empire. The strait's narrow, fluctuating form figures the possibilities for continual innovation on literary loci criss-crossed since time immemorial by previous narratives, and its confinement of the ocean's bulk aptly figures a ‘choked’ epic expansiveness hemmed in by stylistic constraints. Similarly, these waterways can serve as constraining receptacles for civil war that alternately intensify and limit its force.
Most contributions are written lucidly, although the somewhat elliptical writing style of several chapters in a volume already replete with critical theory unduly slows the reader down and unnecessarily renders their arguments less accessible to disciplinary outsiders. Viewing the volume as a whole, it is unfortunate that little discussion is given to the choice to concentrate on Latin literature. Given the volume's explicit focus on Latin literature in an era of increasing scholarly attention to contemporary Greek texts, it is regrettable that the editors do not address the question of what, if anything, is distinctive about the spatial poetics of Latin literature vis-à-vis Roman-era Greek literature (cf. pp. 5–7, 20; Lewis and Rimell distinguish how space is produced in Latin literature from modes of production in earlier Greek literature). Such a topic would be a worthy avenue of inquiry to pursue, now facilitated by the ample insights of the present volume.
These criticisms aside, this volume is a significant contribution to the study of the cultural production of space in Latin literature, in particular due to the wide range of critical theory that it productively draws on. As a result, these creative essays not only shed light on the particular authors and subjects that they treat but also demonstrate methodologies and theoretical approaches that might be reapplied to new inquiries to yield further insight. To offer just one promising example, one might productively reapply Fitzgerald's ideas on the ‘space of the poem’ to Statius’ Silvae. Where Fitzgerald characterises Horace's poems as empire-like spaces, how might we describe the shape of Statius’ villa poems (esp. Silv. 1.3 and 2.2), which describe private estates as miniature empires that stand in implicit counterpoint to Rome? Whether the Latin authors examined in this volume spatially reproduce the hegemonic discourses of their day through their writing or whether they adapt them to their own purposes, the contributors to the present volume provide ample evidence for the pivotal role that Latin literature plays in ‘the cultural formulation of space’ (p. 2) in Roman society.
