Reviewed by: Arms and the Woman: Classical Tradition and Women Writers in the Venetian Renaissance by Francesca D’Alessandro Behr Seán Easton Arms and the Woman: Classical Tradition and Women Writers in the Venetian Renaissance. By francesca d’Alessandro behr. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 292. Hardback, $89.95. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1371-1. Francesca D’Alessandro Behr argues compellingly that greater attention to the reception of the Aeneid and other classical texts should inform interpretation of two Italian language poetic compositions: Moderata Fonte’s Floridoro (1581), a chivalric romance set in the generation after the Trojan War, and Lucrezia Marinella’s L’Enrico, overo Bisantio acquistato (Enrico, or Byzantium Conquered, 1635), a romance-epic celebrating Enrico Dandalo and the Venetian part in the Fourth Crusade’s conquest of Byzantium in 1204. In preparation for later close readings and larger arguments, the introduction presents humanism’s role qua classical education in 17th-century Venice in stimulating thought about alternatives to the social order and the contingent nature of gender roles. Chapter 1) Floridoro, like the Aeneid and Orlando Furioso, ends immediately after a duel. Unlike them, the victor, Risamante, is a woman who spares her fallen foe. One influential reading identifies this as a refusal of closure designed to preserve the author’s freedom from masculinist norms requiring that the hero kill their adversary. Floridoro’s ending is consistent, counters Behr, with two important tendencies in the reception of the Aeneid from antiquity onward. First, it both imitates and diverges from Vergil’s model in order to resist certain aspects and embrace others. Second, in order to avoid celebrating the ascendency of any given character, Fonte follows poets like Lucan in undoing the Vergilian fusion of closure and total victory. Behr argues persuasively that Fonte adapts Vergil’s plot in which Aeneas overcomes the open-ended trauma of defeat through closural victory over Turnus. In Floridoro, it becomes Risamante’s act of closural clemency that overcomes the masculinist norm identifying brute force with virtue. (Chapter 2) While Fonte’s Risamante demonstrates conclusively to her defeated male adversary that women may eclipse men in any respect, Lucrezia Marinella depicts warrior women as dwelling inside the dilemma of the masculinist norm. In L’Enrico, Meandra and Emilia fight for Byzantium and Claudia for Venice. Meandra and Claudia test their virtue in a duel and kill each other. Emilia’s arrow kills the noble Venier as he pursues spoils – a reversal of the similar death in the Aeneid of Camilla, an Italian warrior. Emilia, however, ultimately accepts the [End Page 238] futility of further destruction and returns to her woodland home, where she lives out a pastoral existence. (Chapter 3) L’Enrico depicts Venetian military exploits, but also features voices deeply critical of their impact on women. Desire for reputation draws Venetian Lucillo away from Clelia and Byzantine Corradino from Areta. Lucillo dies ingloriously in a storm and Corradino is killed in battle. The elegiac sympathies of Ovid’s Heroides – poems styled as letters from mythical women to their lovers – inform how the two women respond to their undeserved suffering, and problematize the masculinist values that cause it. (Chapter 4) These episodes counter the stigmatization in male-authored epics of women’s perspectives on the impact of masculinist enterprises on their lives. Marinella intensifies these episodes through allusion especially to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Heroides and Amores. (Chapter 5) The ill-fated Venier is waylaid on the island of the enchantress Erina, who counsels him that return to the Venetian-Byzantine conflict means death as well as glory. Alternatively, he can stay, living peacefully in the pastoral space of her island. Venier chooses war; and Erina tries again. Erina takes Venier aloft in her magical chariot from which he can gaze upon the cosmos and enlarge his perspective. Still unpersuaded, he leaves and is slain by Emilia. (Chapter 6) Venier’s choices, observes Behr, underscore the competing perspectives of the episode’s pastoral and epic frames. His return, praiseworthy in epic, remains lamentable in the pastoral context. One model for Venier’s brief acquisition of cosmic perspective is Aeneas’ poignant witness in the Underworld...

This article argues that Thucydides represents the story of the Eurypontid Spartan kings, Archidamus and Agis, as a coherent, meaningful narrative spanning his text. Early on, Archidamus worries that his generation might leave war to their children as a kind of inheritance. His son Agis then does inherit the war, more literally than any other figure. The consequences of this malign bequest become clear as Agis comes to violate the traditional value system represented by his father. Formal naming of both men throughout their stories encourages the reader to view their appearances not as a series of isolated events but as a single narrative depicting the corruption of their family.

Reviewed by: Fantasy in Greek and Roman Literature by Graham Anderson Kelly E. Shannon-Henderson Fantasy in Greek and Roman Literature. By Graham Anderson. London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. Pp. xii + 222. Hardback, $112.00. ISBN: 978-0-367-13990-2. Graham Anderson, who has published widely on such topics as fairy- and folktales in antiquity, the ancient novel and literature of the Second Sophistic, offers here an investigation of “fantasy” in ancient literature: where we can find it and how it manifests in different genres, writers and time periods. He defines fantasy as “any material that is felt to be impossible (or nearly so), in contrast to the normal workings of the real world” (1), but also considers important the Greek term phantasia, translated as “imaginative conception” (2). Part I, “Themes of fantasy,” comprises over half the volume and is basically a typology of what Anderson considers to be the main types of ancient fantastic literature: “Otherworldly conversations” (Chapter 2) held with the dead or the gods, but also including fictionalized letters; fantastic beasts (Chapter 3), both the speaking animals of fable/Old Comedy and mythological monsters like the Minotaur and centaurs; “Fantastic voyages” (Chapter 4) such as travelers’ tales and stories of utopian societies like Atlantis; “Dreams, apparitions, horror” (Chapter 5), where dreams are treated in the same category as stories of cannibalism and necromancy; “Some fantastic aspects of myth” (Chapter 6) such as katabaseis but also including retellings of myths in general (e.g. Pan and Syrinx, 85–86); “The ultimate myth: Metamorphosis” (Chapter 7); dinners as sites of fantasy (Chapter 8), ranging from mythological banquets to discussions of dinners in the satirists and Petronius; and “Planting the phallus: sexual fantasy” (Chapter 9), discussing the inventiveness of the Carmina Priapeia alongside sex scenes from various texts. Part II is comparative, considering how prose vs. poetry handles material such as Polyphemus’ love for Galatea, Europa’s abduction, and general erotic themes (Chapter 10, “Verse fantasy into prose”); and the ways Homer and Philostratus imagine a heroic past (Chapter 11, “Inventing the past in Homer and Philostratus). Part III (“Fantastic texts”) contains basically case studies in how different texts handle similar motifs. Anderson compares Old Comedy with Lucian’s dialogs [End Page 381] (Chapter 12) and the ascents to heaven in Lucian’s Icaromenippus and Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis (Chapter 13), and does a deep dive into Lucian’s True Histories (Chapter 14). Part IV considers the contexts in which fantastic stories may have been told in antiquity, such as to entertain children or guests at symposia (Chapter 15); discusses modern literary critics’ definitions of and approaches to fantasy and shows how these have some overlap with the ancient material (ch. 16); and offers a few “Conclusions” (Chapter 17). The range of material on offer here is impressive: Anderson takes us through literature from Homer to the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, in Latin and Greek, with the occasional nod to possible Near Eastern antecedents. Anderson states in the preface, “By the end of the book, I hope to have reached a point where I should have wished to have started in the first place” (ix). This remark encapsulates the book’s shortcomings: even after finishing it, the reader may feel that little advancement has been made in terms of understanding what ancient fantasy is or why it matters. The lack of a clear definition of “fantasy” is an impediment. Only in the second-last chapter does Anderson begin to consider literary-critical definitions of the term. He mostly seems content to let his views on the subject emerge from the large volume of examples he assembles, and it seems that his preferred definition encompasses both the modern “fantasy” and the ancient phantasia. It is not clear, therefore, how Anderson’s “fantasy” is different from fiction; is there really no difference between the imagining of mundane things that could plausibly have occurred but did not and the creation of a story that is “impossible” given “the normal workings of the real world?” Anderson gestures toward, but does not explore, this difference (192). This broad-church approach means that it is difficult to understand what...

Reviewed by: Killing for the Republic. Citizen Soldiers and the Roman Way of War by Steele Brand Rose Mary Sheldon Killing for the Republic. Citizen Soldiers and the Roman Way of War. By Steele Brand. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019, Pp. xix + 370. Hardback, $34.95. ISBN 978-1-4214-2986-1. Killing for the Republic is designed to show how citizen armies came into being on the Italian peninsula. Brand shows how the Roman Republic transformed average farmers into ambitious killers that were able to conquer the Mediterranean world. He believes Rome somehow instilled something violent and vicious in its soldiers that made them more effective than say the Assyrian, Persian or even Macedonian soldiers of previous empires. In order to prove his case, Brand reconstructs five separate battles that he believes represent particular moments in Rome’s constitutional and cultural evolution and show how the Roman citizen-soldier triumphed over the best warriors of the day. These battles are Sentinum, New Carthage, Pydna, Mutina and Philippi. Part One describes the ancient republican citizen, his life and his priorities. Part Two describes his Republic. Parts Three and Four give an abbreviated account of Rome’s Republican wars and Rome’s citizen-soldier ethos. Part Three, in particular, describes the triumph of Roman armies as they conquered the Mediterranean world with an emphasis on Sentinum as “Rome’s breakout years” (xviii). Part Four covers the last chaotic years of the Republic and explains how the Republic’s ideal citizen soldiers perished shortly after its greatest exponent, Cicero, died. He argues that civic virtue could have been recovered and that the culture of warlordism and selfish ambition of the Late Republic could have been overcome. In this, he may stand alone. The book tries to engage with recent debates on the nature of Roman militarism, republicanism and federalism. His description of the Roman Republic as manifesting three overreaching themes conducive to citizen armies: liberty, divided sovereignty and participatory citizenship, will be nothing new to students of Polybius. More controversial is his claim that modern republics misidentify their troops as citizen soldiers. He does not consider what National Guard soldiers today do, i.e. sign up for short terms then go back to their civilian lives, as being the equivalent of a Roman soldier signing up to fight the Veian War and then returning to his farm. He obviously does not think VMI, the Citadel or Norwich University turn out what they advertise. Brand believes he must explain the heritage of the citizen-soldier for a culture that has “forgotten who he is and why he fights” (xv). Graduates of the above-mentioned institutions might take umbrage. So might [End Page 117] Greek scholars when he refers to Athenian democracy and hoplite citizen-soldiers as “Hellenic novelties.” He seems to share the ancient aristocratic prejudice that Athens was “too democratic.” Social historians will note that every reference to the “Roman citizen” in the book is male. There are no women in this story; apparently Roman soldiers all gave birth to themselves and their sons. Brand’s glorification of the citizen soldier, the American family farm, and the greatness of old military leaders is nothing new to anyone who has read Victor David Hanson’s Western Way of War. It is a politically reactionary and ultimately unattainable ideal. The original Arcadian state will not return in an age of technological urbanism. Utopianism is emotionally satisfying, but its inherent political contradictions come dangerously close to being irrational. This neo- conservative rural utopianism is a fantasy not unfamiliar to those who have seen the movie Gladiator. Americans become wistful about the times when it was generally believed that an individual could achieve the American dream through hard work and commitment to family, God and country. What we have here is the same utopian pseudo-populism where American family values interject themselves into the ancient Roman zeitgeist. The problem with this vision is that writers who use idealized visions of the past often have little regard for the level of accuracy that preoccupies professional practitioners of Clio’s craft. There is no weighing of the sources, no analysis of their reliability, simply an appropriate...

There are a number of invisibility rituals in the Graeco-Egyptian papyri whose presence in the corpus suggests that achieving invisibility was of interest to some in late Roman Egypt. But did anyone actually believe that such acts were possible? After highlighting the observations of various ancient (and modern) authors on this question, this essay turns to recent insights from Sarah Iles Johnston on the relationship of narrative technique and belief regarding Greek myth and considers how such techniques might have helped to affirm the validity of certain invisibility tales across time and space in the ancient Mediterranean world.

In this article, I consider the sex-strike in Lysistrata in the light of contemporary medical theories. I suggest that the young women who perform the sex-strike feature as (symbolic) Hippocratic patients who struggle with the symptoms of the condition of the “wandering womb.” Although some scholars have noted the medical vocabulary with regard to male pathology in Lysistrata, there is no study to date which considers the female sex-strike in the context of medical pathology. Through the perpetuation of the women’s pathological condition by means of the sex-strike and the overt manifestation of their disease, men are forced to comprehend fully and appreciate the importance of the reproductive role of women in the city. In this way, the traditional medical idea of the female as an unstable object, always in need of being brought into equilibrium and stability, is manipulated in the play by the women, who make the men realize the dangers their war policy entails: far from just threatening them with suspension of sex, the women force the men to face the real danger, sterility and cessation of reproduction.

This paper explores the significance of Oppian’s engagement with Callimachus (Hymn to Zeus and Epigram 1) in Halieutica 1.80–92. Both Callimachean allusions operate on two levels: (i) Oppian alludes to a specific phrase or set of phrases found in the Hellenistic poet; and (ii) he engages with linguistic or philological debates just as his Hellenistic predecessor. These allusions, furthermore, contribute to the exploration of profound epistemological questions that lie at the heart of Hal. 1.80–92.

This article examines the different ways in which the Odyssey and the Telegony represent the relationships between immortals and mortals—the immortality theme. They draw upon that common theme but inflect it in contrasting ways: whereas the Odyssey’s protagonist rejects immortality and embraces mortality, the protagonist of the Telegony does the opposite. In the end, though, both of these poems critique immortality. Analysis of these poems’ different inflections of the immortality theme provides insights into how themes could be used competitively in archaic Greek poetry as well as how the same theme operated similarly and differently in various traditions.

Statius’ Silvae are part of a lengthy Roman literary tradition of justifying temporary or permanent retirement from public affairs in favor of the productive use of otium. Praiseworthy uses of otium typically involved liberal studies such as philosophy and poetic composition, pursued either during a temporary period of rest from public duties, or as the occupation of permanent retirement. This paper examines how Claudian and Sidonius adapted some aspects of Statius’ otium motifs in order to praise addressees who faced very different social and political circumstances from the Flavian era. Achilles’ seclusions at Scyros and Troy provide these poets with a mythological narrative of withdrawal and return. The paper concludes with discussion of Ennodius’ adaptation of Statius’ motifs in the unexpected context of an epithalamium.