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Latin literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2023
Extract
As always, it is hard to do justice to the many intriguing books that came out over the past months. I will try to give an overview of at least a few of them, from Republican literature over two imperial ‘Classics’, the Aeneid and the Fasti, over Ps.-Quintilian's Declamations and Apuleius, fourth and fifth-century commentaries, all the way to a lesser-known work from the fifteenth century. Let us start, however, with an exciting volume on ‘Roman Law and Latin Literature’, edited by Ioannis Ziogas and Erica Bexley. In their introduction, the two editors sketch out the relationship between law and literature, emphasizing the points of contact and the intricate relationship between the two. While the Law and Humanities movement, they argue, has been so far strongly focused on law, with literature playing an ancillary role, Ziogas and Bexley aim to redress that balance ‘by showing how literature anticipates, imitates, supplants or complements law's role in constituting rules and norms’ (3). The contributions in the volume cover a wide range of authors, from Naevius, Plautus, and Terence to Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, and Lucan. With her discussion of the role Latin literature played in shaping Roman concepts of legality, in the absence of a codified constitution, Michèle Lowrie provides a very good starting point to the volume, one that a couple of other contributors keep referring back to. There is a chapter on the jurist Marcus Antistius Labeo by Matthijs Wibier, Nora Goldschmidt traces the emergence of the Foucauldian author function in the interaction between law and literature in third-century bc Rome, and John Oksanish argues that Cicero, in De oratore (‘On the Orator’), adopts the theoretical and terminological frameworks of Roman property law to authorize the orator's power over various domains, a strategy also adopted by Vitruvius, to mention just a few of the topics covered. The concluding paper is a thought-provoking piece by Nandini Pandey, comparing Roman and American legal and literary practices around freedom, opportunity, and (in)equality.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
References
1 Roman Law and Latin Literature. By Ioannis Ziogas and Erica Bexley. London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022. Pp. x + 308. 10 b/w illus. Hardback £95.00, ISBN: 978-1-35-027663-5.
2 I. Ziogas, Law and Love in Ovid. Courting Justice in the Age of Augustus (Oxford, 2021).
3 Disorienting Empire. Republican Latin Poetry's Wanderers. By Basil Dufallo. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. x + 317. Hardback £55.00, ISBN: 978-0-19-757178-1.
4 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology. Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC, 2006).
5 The Politics and Poetics of Cicero's Brutus. The Invention of Literary History. By Christopher S. van den Berg. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. xiii + 290. Hardback £75.00, ISBN 978-1-10-849595-0.
6 Atomism in the Aeneid. Physics, Politics, and Cosmological Disorder. By Matthew M. Gorey. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. ix + 174. Hardback £35.00. ISBN: 978-0-19-751874-8.
7 P. Hardie, Virgil's Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford, 1986).
8 Die Festdarstellungen in Ovids Fasti. Hermes Einzelschrift 123. By Maria Hirt. Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2022. Pp. 469, 1 b/w image, 3 b/w tables. Hardback £70. ISBN: 978-3-51-513203-9.
9 For example, Miller, J. F., ‘Ritual Directions in Ovid's Fasti: Dramatic Hymns and Didactic Poetry’, CJ 75 (1980), 204–14Google Scholar; Ovid's Elegiac Festivals. Studies in the Fasti. Studien zur klassischen Philologie 55 (Frankfurt am Main, 1991).
10 A. Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince. Ovid and Augustan Discourse (Berkeley 1997).
11 Silius Italicus. Punica, Book 3. Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary. Oxford Commentaries on Flavian Poetry. By Antony Augoustakis and R. Joy Littlewood. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 416, 12 b/w figures, 4 maps. Hardback £145.00, ISBN: 978-0-19-882128-1.
12 Delz, J., Silius Italicus. Punica (Stuttgart, 1987)Google Scholar.
13 Le Declamazioni maggiori pseudo-quintilianee nella Roma imperiale. Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 394. By Andrea Lovato, Antonio Stramaglia, and Giusto Traina. Berlin, de Gruyter, 2021. Pp. viii + 498. Hardback £112.50, ISBN: 978-3-11-073710-3.
14 Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. By Evelyn Adkins. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022. Pp. xii + 277. Hardback £72, ISBN: 978-0-47-213305-5.
15 Vergilius orator. Lire et commenter les discours de l’Énéide dans l'Antiquité tardive. Studi e testi tardoantichi. Profane and Christian Culture in Late Antiquity 20. By Daniel Vallat. Turnhout, Brepols, 2022. Pp. 388, 1 b/w table. Paperback £ 63.60, ISBN: 978-2-50-359583-2.
16 Isotta Nogarola's Defense of Eve. A Latin Text of the De Pari aut Impari Evae atque Adae Peccato with Running Vocabulary and Commentary. The Experrecta Series, Women Latin Authors. By Finn P. Boyle, Siria A. Chapman, Dhru Goud, Thomas G. Hendrickson, Siddhant Karmali, Kennedy Leininger, Justine A. Stern, and Amelie Wilson-Bivera. Pixelia Publishing, 2022. Pp. 106. Paperback £7.99, ISBN: 978-1-73-703302-8. Available for free download at: <https://pixeliapublishing.org/isotta-nogarolas-defense-of-eve/>, last accessed 28 November 2022.