Annually recurring Roman festivals – the subject of W.’s engaging study – are special moments of demarcated time, away from the conventions of everyday life, occasions for religious conversation and social interaction, places for stories that connect past, present and future, and sites of political power and negotiation. The interaction between Roman literature and Roman festivals has, to date, naturally focused around the most overtly religious poem of the Roman period, Ovid’s Fasti. W. complements such studies by examining a select number of non-religious Roman texts that feature festivals, not only to assess their depiction and function across time and genre, but also to determine the extent to which there is a shared discourse, a ‘festive poetics’ (p. 4).
W.’s wide-ranging survey of festivals in Greek literature (pp. 7–25) provides a fitting introduction to the allure of the topic for different writers: as an occasion set apart from ‘regular’ civic or martial activity, the festival becomes an important narrative moment and a dynamic and unpredictable space, just as suited to celebrating peace and community and fostering deep contemplation as it is to hosting violence, crime and deceit. Latin literature takes up the mantle with equal enthusiasm (pp. 25–38), naturally concentrating on festivals in a specific location, Rome, and their interplay with the political and private spheres of Roman life.
Having established the dynamic context for the ancients’ handling of festive time, W. focuses on specific authors and genres across republican and imperial Latin literature: the love elegy of Tibullus (including the Appendix Tibulliana) and Propertius; Ovid’s Tristia; Horace’s Odes and Carmen Saeculare; post-Virgilian epic; and historiography (Livy and Tacitus).
The first case study, on Tibullus (pp. 54–76), reveals immediately the value of a collective analysis of an author’s treatment of festivals. Tibullus weaves several festive days into his oeuvre (rural festivals, birthdays, military and liturgical commemorations), which, for the most part, provide a pointed contrast to his private erotic timeline. In the festive poems Tibullus is a successful producer of carmina, whose lofty and celebratory tone ensures that they become long-lasting gifts for their recipient(s). The poet’s amatory moments, however, unpredictable or undefinable in their timing, reveal the inefficacy of his carmina, shunned by the beloved in favour of more expensive, material gifts or – more insultingly – magic, a shady form of carmina to which the poet is sometimes forced to resort. The representation of love in each type of poem is also markedly different: if the festive poems tend to focus on marriage, children and familial longevity, the amatory output foregrounds love of the moment, youthfulness and promiscuity, unrestrained by civic convention. Hybrid personality as he is, the poet ultimately finds a suitable divine avatar in the figure of Apollo, who is cast simultaneously as authoritative religious singer and hapless lover (Tib. 2.3–5).
If the festive-amatory constellation in Tibullus operates largely by contrast, Propertius opts for greater interaction and, often, antagonism between the elements (pp. 76–100). Propertius’ treatment of the festival days of Apollo and Isis (Prop. 2.31–3) gets caught up with the erotic theme of jealousy between lovers. In a similar vein the festivals of Propertius’ fourth book, the purportedly Roman aetiological project (Prop. 4.1), become sexual battlegrounds for cultural memory. Rome’s birthday (Prop. 4.4), the battle of Actium (Prop. 4.6) and the cult of Hercules (Prop. 4.9), all traditionally sites of male endeavour, get puella-rised, as Tarpeia, Cleopatra and the women of the Bona Dea write themselves into these events through various poses of defiance. There are some excellent discussions of individual poems, especially Prop. 4.4 (pp. 84–8) and Prop. 4.9 (pp. 92–6), although I missed some attention to the programmatically placed poem on Vertumnus (Prop. 4.2): does Propertius, like Tibullus before him, identify for himself a suitable divine avatar, Vertumnus, an emblem of gender fluidity and religious ritual within the same entity?
The use of festivals in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is also effectively explored, as the epic poet operates in counterpoint to both Virgil’s treatment of festivals in Aeneid and the poet’s own contemporaneous pose as instructor of the religious calendar in Fasti (pp. 186–98). Aeneid and Fasti advertise festivals as human institutions, markers of civilised society that provide a sense of continuity across times. Festivals in Ovid’s epic, however, showcase the heightened power of the gods to create discontinuity (by transforming humans), so much so that the poet himself feels obliged to enter into hymnic mode, in praise of Bacchus, in order to distinguish himself from fellow (but impious) singers of epic stories, the daughters of Minyas (Met. 4.1–415; pp. 192–4). Humanly instituted festivals, by contrast, are associated with ill omen, and they provide occasions to action the heights of religious and human crime, as demonstrated in the story of Tereus and Procne (pp. 195–7).
Festivals become even more widespread, and multifaceted, when one turns to the more temporally invested genre of historiography. Livy uses festivals collectively, as a means of showcasing the importance to Rome of ritual communication with the gods, and as general moments of connectivity between times, to reflect upon changes in festive proceedings over the years owing to cultural tastes. But Livy can also choose to elaborate on specific festivals to foreground key messages. When the Macedonians defile their own festivals, they simultaneously provide a negative foil for Roman piety and offer a latent warning of the decline to come in Roman civic and religious order, as exemplified by the Bacchanalia scandal (pp. 232–52) – and, later, by the religious perversions of Nero, as detailed by Tacitus (pp. 261–3).
My main criticism concerns the coherence of some of the individual case studies. W.’s decision to combine in a single study both private annual commemoration (birthdays) and public festivals can feel a little jarring in places. It works well for the cluster of birthday-oriented poems in the Appendix Tibulliana (3.11–12, 14–15; pp. 113–23) and for the discussion of Ovid’s Tristia, where private birthdays and public religious festival (Liberalia) serve the shared purpose of writing the exiled poet and his sorry plight into Roman cultural memory (pp. 124–40). But the discussion of the single Propertian birthday poem (3.10, pp. 80–2), while interesting in itself, might be seen to distract from the ongoing negotiation between private love and public Roman religious festivals across Books 2–4.
The chapter on Horace’s Odes (pp. 142–82) strikes me as the least well integrated. It certainly maintains an interesting conceptual thread: the poet poses as both a delayer of festive time and an official Roman orchestrator of the festive moment, within the full cycles of time, especially in the Carmen Saeculare. But two of the Odes discussed – 2.11 (a symposium, pp. 149–52) and 3.14 (a celebration of Augustus’ return from Spain, pp. 158–64) – stand outside the stated remit of ‘calendrically recurring rituals’ (p. 5). This may be due to the fact that the core of the discussion, as W. acknowledges (p. 142 n. 1), is taken from an earlier publication with, one assumes, a freer remit with regards to festive time (A. Walter, ‘Festive Time in the Poetry of Horace’, in: A. Walter [ed.], The Temporality of Festivals. Approaches to Festive Time in Ancient Babylon, Greece, Rome, and Medieval China [2024], pp. 39–57).
These minor quibbles aside, W. should be congratulated for such a deep and wide-ranging meditation on the role of festivals in Latin literature, set very thoroughly within existing scholarly conversations. The structure is logical throughout, with regular signposting of key messages. Errata are very few, and the presentation is consistent and professional (but for the slightly unusual feature of not italicising abbreviations to ancient works).
