The fons et origo for this volume is a panel on Anna Perenna held at the annual meeting of the Classical Association in 2015. It was a panel moderate in size (three literary papers) but mighty in influence. Uncovering Anna Perenna has emerged a mere four years after the panel and includes ten chapters and at least seven sub-disciplines: literary criticism, art history, archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, topography and reception. The volume is lively and engaging, well worth the time to read it.
Anna Perenna is a puzzling and elusive figure in Roman myth. She is known chiefly from Ovid's treatment of the Ides of March in Fasti 3. After describing the boisterous festival in her honour on the Ides, Ovid offers several possibilities for her identity: she is Dido's sister, who sought refuge in Italy with Aeneas and was there deified; the Moon, Themis or Io; a nurse to Jupiter; an old woman from Bovillae who aided the plebs during their secession; and/or a prankster who thwarted Mars when he sought a liaison with Minerva. Ovid's text pulls together many other strands in Anna Perenna's Roman tradition. His first possibility sends us back to Naevius, Virgil and Varro, and ahead to Silius Italicus. In some of these sources the alert reader can find traces of Ovid's other possibilities, such as her deification or a more developed relationship with Aeneas. Anna of Bovillae, Ovid's sixth possibility, evokes the politics of social class in Rome. This aspect surrounds a Sullan-era coin depicting Anna Perenna and perhaps her appearance in first-century bce drama. Indeed, the festival Ovid describes (noted also in the fasti from Antium) and the raunchy story with which he concludes match the tone and style of Roman mime, and we know of one from the first century bce entitled Anna Perenna by the playwright Decimus Laberius. Her appearance in Varro's Menippeans might also signal a burlesque aspect to her worship. Two other sources – a description of her worship by Martial and votive inscriptions in iambic senarii recently found in Rome – attest further variations in Anna Perenna's cult, both in location and practice. The senarii also bring drama into play.
Ovid unsurprisingly dominates the volume, with six of the ten chapters engaging significantly with his Fasti. The other four chapters treat the votive inscriptions; the Republican coin; the Aeneid; and a possible identification of Anna on Roman relief sculptures, including the Ara Pacis. But the editors wisely break the book into thematic rather than source-based units, the better to put the sources in dialogue with each other. The first section, ‘From Carthage to Rome’, includes three chapters. S. McCallum's ‘Rivalry and Revelation’ argues that Virgil alludes to but underplays the Varronian tradition of Anna's love affair with Aeneas while at Carthage, while Ovid reveals and even revels in alternative traditions, including in his first Anna narrative a ‘sustained, thematic focus on sisterhood, recognition and erotic conflict’ (p. 31). In ‘Calendar Girl’ J.S. McIntyre reads Anna in Silius Italicus’ Punica as a linchpin in the looping literary saga of Carthage and Rome. At the pivotal moment in the Second Punic War Juno encourages Anna, now a goddess, to prompt Hannibal to attack the Romans at Cannae. Silius draws on Virgil and Ovid, Livy and Lucan to construct a character whose recurrent ‘betweenness’ exposes tensions in Roman imperial ideology. Third, G. McIntyre links the so-called Tellus panel on the Ara Pacis to other similar compositions – notably a strikingly similar relief panel from Carthage – to argue that the central figure is ‘Not Just Another Fertility Goddess’ but quite possibly Anna Perenna. In her nymphic instantiation she offers peace and fertility to the Roman state. As a place deity, she is also imperialistic, marking new territory such as the Augustan colony at Carthage. Running through this first section is awareness of and attention paid to Anna's contribution as a Carthaginian to the Roman project. This section persuasively situates Anna as an important character-type in Roman myth: the naturalised foreigner.
The second section, ‘Anna and her Nymphs’, comprises three chapters that focus on Anna as a divine figure. D.J. Wright, in ‘Anna, Water and Her Imminent Deification in Aeneid 4’, traces the verbal manoeuvres through which Virgil evokes Anna's extra-textual cultic identity as a water-nymph and sponsor of fruitfulness. In this she overlaps with Juturna, another watery sister-nymph who, despite her own fruitful cultic identity outside the text, cannot save her in-text sibling from a death caused by Aeneas. A. Everett Beek, in ‘How to Become a Hero’, takes up Anna in Ovid's Fasti as ‘one of the few female characters who achieves apotheosis without suffering a sexual attack’ (p. 83). Beek traces Anna's heroic characterisation as a person who, like Aeneas, flees her ransacked city, leads other refugees to safety in Italy, resists hostility there and becomes a tutelary deity. These features – including an apotheosis that retains her chastity – confound her gender identity. In ‘Instability and Permanence’ A. Blennow presents the three inscriptions from the newly-discovered cult site of Anna Perenna in Rome as markers of change rather than bids for permanence. The inscriptions, from this perspective, mark a change in the relationship between the dedicatees and the divine recipient (Anna) from contractually obligated to each other, to free from obligation. Blennow is cautious with her conclusions, refusing to define the nature of the contests for which the victorious dedicators made their initial vows. She concludes only that Anna was worshipped at the site with or as a nymph or spring and that she had the power to grant wishes.
Part 3 turns to Anna as ‘Champion of the Plebs’. T. Ramsby's ‘Ovid's Anna Perenna and the Coin of Gaius Annius’ explores Anna's identity on a denarius from 82–1 bce minted by Gaius Annius (Luscus). Annius was sent as proconsul by Sulla to remove Sertorius from Spain; he was successful, in part owing to superior numbers and in part owing to important defections from Sertorius’ troops. Annius’ use of Anna, Ramsby argues, was a calculated move to claim for himself a special relationship with the goddess, especially her role as benefactor of the plebs, which Ramsby reads back from Ovid's Anna of Bovilla. In the other chapter in this section, ‘Infiltrating Julian History’, C. Newlands focuses on Ovid, ranging widely over the Metamorphoses and the Heroides as well as Ennius’ Annales to argue that Anna is a truly subversive, and not merely Carnivalesque, figure in the Roman imagination. Julian history, Newlands shows, was an ongoing process that foreclosed the horizon of cultural memories (p. 145). Ovid's expansive Anna sits next to and repeatedly extends that horizon. Characteristic of Newlands's scholarly oeuvre, a subversive posture need not be dour: her reading of Ovid emphasises laughter and wit, community and ideological pluralism.
Two chapters bracket the collection and act as introduction and conclusion. T.P. Wiseman leads with ‘Anna and the Plebs: a Synthesis of Primary Evidence’. Eschewing generic conventions of introductions (such as a description of the volume and its position in scholarly debate), Wiseman instead makes an argument: that Anna was a goddess for the plebs beyond, and before, Ovid's explicit aition of Anna of Bovillae. The bulk of his analysis centres on the first century bce, when class identity – now manipulated by masters – contributed to the grave crisis of the state, but it includes changes in the cult's location and practices in the imperial period. Wiseman is especially sensitive to ephemera (such as theatrical performances) and echoes. This chapter makes for riveting reading. Part 4, ‘The Afterlife of Anna Perenna’, contains one chapter but acts also as a conclusion to the volume. J. Hudak's ‘Riverrun: Channelling Anna Perenna in Finnegans Wake’ finds Anna at play as Anna Livia Plurabelle, ‘Bringer of Plurabilities’ (p. 162 = FW 104.2). Hudak looks both within FW and without to uncover James Joyce's obsession with Ovid – Ovid's themes, his words, his generic creativity, his authorial persona and his influence. This chapter identifies the character Anna Livia Plurabelle as a metaphor for literary influence itself, herself a river flowing and overflowing. This reading sits well with the novel's sustained meditation on circularity and cyclicality; indeed, it helps the reader make some sense of the novel, arguably the most difficult one yet written in English.
The best result of this volume is that its readers gain a sense of the Roman mythic mindset that embraces fluidity rather than fixedness. Virgil's readers could hold in mind an Anna as erotic rival even as that tradition was muted to foreground the pious sister. Ovid's readers knew Virgil's Annas and met a handful of others, co-present even if some are denied and others endorsed. Silius Italicus mixed and matched elements into a new Anna. Viewers of the Ara Pacis or the coin of Annius could see a nymph or Anna or each in turn or both at once, whether they knew the literary sources or not, and victors fulfilling a vow (or readers of Virgil) could see Anna, nymph and spring as three faces of the same concept. Each chapter emphasises Anna's plurality, but the collection as a whole dazzles with the realisation that her identity and function is a matter of ‘and’ rather than ‘or’.
The chapters are all worthy contributions to the discussion about Anna Perenna, though I remain unconvinced about individual points. S. McCallum's ‘Rivalry and Revelation’ leaves me still unsure how to tell the difference between allusion that suppresses and allusion that evokes, though the light she sheds on Anna's erotic aspect is welcome. Also, despite the other heroic, masculine aspects of Anna that Beek uncovers in ‘How to Become a Hero’, I cannot read rape out of Anna's apotheosis in Ovid's Fasti. Finally, G. McIntyre admits that identifying the fertility goddess on the Ara Pacis is a hard sell; I am a tough customer on this, but my scepticism does not detract from the overall effectiveness of her argument that the figure of a river nymph makes for powerful imperial propaganda, beyond the obvious flaunting of fecundity.
The book's most compelling chapters are those that situate Anna, or some given treatment of her, in the broader cultural context. Blennow's chapter says more about Roman religious sensibilities than it does about Anna in particular. J.S. McIntyre's entry uses Silius Italicus to probe the function of a marginal figure in knitting together cultures and epochs. Ramsby's study sees one instantiation of Anna as a function of its particular moment in history, and Newlands's essay is a concentrated assessment of literature in the young empire. These chapters should become staples on bibliographies beyond Roman myth.
The editors are to be lauded for an excellent book.
