Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Response: Tucci on Santangeli Valenzani on Tucci, The Temple of Peace in Rome. Response to 2018.11.05

Response by Pier Luigi Tucci (pigitucci@hotmail.com)

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Santangeli Valenzani's review is unfair especially in making a number of incorrect and often incoherent criticisms and never addressing my major points. In particular, he has a recurrent objection regarding the title of my book, which suggests to him that it is 'a complete picture' and 'a complete treatise' on 'the state of the art of the Templum Pacis.' Although he cites the subtitles of my two volumes—Art and Culture in Imperial Rome and Remodelings, Conversions, Excavations—he forgets them immediately and reiterates his criticism on the title as a mantra; yet, these are precisely the themes I explore in my book, which I never present as a monograph on the Temple of Peace. Putting aside the minor issue of the book's objectionable title, let me address the few specific criticisms he makes.

1. The reviewer thinks that 'the title of part V (The Templum Pacis in the Middle Ages) is completely misleading seeing that the whole [second] volume deals exclusively with one of the halls that made up the monument—the one converted in the 6^th century into the church dedicated to SS. Cosmas and Damian—which actually constitutes only a small part of the entire Templum Pacis.' In fact, the second volume begins with the 'metamorphosis' of the halls of the Templum Pacis located next to the Sacra Via, from their 4^th-century remodelling (ch. 9-10) to their conversion into a Christian basilica (ch. 11-12). I begin part V (ch. 13-15) with a summary of the transformations of the square of the Templum Pacis relying on a report by the reviewer himself (p. 636 n. 25 and p. 681 n. 1; see also p. 492 n. 1 for the commercial structure and p. 734 n. 3 for the cemetery), despite his claim that the events 'that occurred in the area of the old Forum … are practically never cited nor even fleetingly mentioned.' In chapter 16 I follow Renaissance antiquarians and looters at work in the Templum Pacis and I comment on the discovery of the Forma Urbis in 1562. Ch. 17 deals with the urbanization of the whole area in the early-17^th century, which allows to date ad annum the modern walls excavated by the reviewer. Ch. 18 sheds light on the demolition of the side walls of the basilica under Urban VIII, the archival records of which contribute to the identification of the Domitianic library hall. Ch. 19 examines Tocco's excavation in the hall of the Forma Urbis (1867) and, among many other trenches, a test trench in the square. Finally, ch. 20 covers the 20^th-century excavations beneath the monastery that brought to light the rear side of the portico, many column shafts and even a Corinthian capital. Therefore, how can the reviewer conclude that 'a much more correct and truthfully accurate title' would be 'The Transformations of the Church of SS. Cosmas and Damian'?

2. The reviewer claims that 'in some cases the book has already been outdated by the results of the latest research, particularly in the cult-room,' where 'studies conducted on the podium of the statue of Pax have revealed a complex sequence characterized by three phases of gradual structural enlargement … Likewise, the analyses of the architectural decorations are irremediably surpassed by the study of hundreds of marble fragments.' But he undercuts his criticism in the next sentence: 'Naturally these lacunae cannot be attributed to Tucci.' Further, the new evidence simply confirms my guess that the Severan podium could hide or replace a pre- existing Flavian phase (p. 117) because of its similarity with the Domitianic T-shaped podium inside the temple of Via delle Botteghe Oscure (p. 439 n. 5).¹ In general, the latest finds corroborate my 'theory' that either Vespasian and Domitian wished to emulate Augustus.²

3. The reviewer complains 'Tucci's theories are always voiced without the minimum doubt.' In fact, I say 'in my view' six times in the first two chapters (pp. 21, 22, 30, 34, 87, 99) and I repeat this, or something similar, many other times in the rest of the work.

4. As for my comments on the plan of the sewer system 'on the sole basis of a photograph' that I took outside of the site enclosure (which does not make the photograph inaccurate), BMCR readers may wish to know that I visited the excavation and, instead of a sewer, I noticed huge Republican walls (depicted in the same photo [Fig. 5]) that are still missing from the reports and plans published to date. Moreover, I wrote that the plan is 'conjectural,' not 'unreliable,' because most of the sewer system is still buried.

5. Santangeli Valenzani criticizes my presumed 'acritical use of false news spread by the press' during the reconstruction of seven columns in 2015, 'without ever citing the publications of those responsible for the work.' I am afraid that he overlooked p. 44 and the endnotes 116-117, 121, 125-126, 128-129, 133 (at pp. 422-424), in which I not only cite and quote those authors but I also comment on their statements.³

6. The reviewer ends by regretting he cannot 'discuss in detail the different theories' which he says 'are always articulated in a thorough and detailed manner, in some cases argued with objective forms of evidence' and then says that 'other conjectures are contradictory, and in the absence of certain proof, it is impossible to reach some form of definitive conclusion.' So, the reviewer can spend 500 words on my 'misleading' title but has no time to discuss my thoroughly articulated theories which he admits are based on actual evidence, or even the ones that are 'contradictory' (whatever that means) and impossible to prove for certain, or the ones where my reasoning is 'not particularly convincing.'

7. In the latter case, the reviewer's only attempt to discuss my theories is a failure. He claims that I support 'a decorative and symbolic function' of the Forma Urbis: in fact, I have always dismissed the former, in previous articles and in my book (pp. 126-154 and especially p. 152, where my proposed 'triumphal / celebrative / symbolic / religious' function of the marble plan is opposed to a 'decorative' or 'practical' one). He says that I give 'a long digression' on maps being used as Fascist propaganda 'which demonstrates the exact opposite of what is argued,' but does not say what 'the exact opposite' is or how a 'digression' can be part of an argument. In fact I argue that public marble plans, from antiquity to Fascist Italy, were actual 'monuments' and I conclude that the Forma Urbis might have had a religious significance—a point missed by the reviewer.⁴

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Notes:

1.   In 2014 the podium of Pax was believed to be entirely Severan in date, whereas the latest investigations brought to light a Domitianic phase characterized by a podium that recalls, so the excavators say, precisely that of the temple of Via delle Botteghe Oscure: A. Coletta, F. Montella, in Roma Universalis. 2018. Eds. A. D'Alessio, C. Panella, R . Rea. Milan: Electa, p. 180.
2.   As regards the architectural decorations, once it has been established that the capitals of the cella featured cornucopiae and bucrania, it makes no difference whether the relevant fragments are ten or one hundred, considering that I discuss the religious character of that unusual, open cella and its relationship with the Ara Pacis Augustae. The identification of three fragments of a clipeus different from those of the Forums of Augustus and Trajan—cf. P. Pensabene, F. Caprioli, in Roma Universalis. 2018. Eds. A. D'Alessio, C. Panella, R . Rea. Milan: Electa, p. 215 n. 12—is particularly welcome, because it confirms the existence of my proposed attic story.
3.   Three articles that reiterate the preliminary information appeared too late to be cited: see BullCom 115 (2014, but published in late 2016), RendPontAcc 89 (2016-2017) and Roma Universalis. 2018. Eds. A. D'Alessio, C. Panella, R . Rea. Milan: Electa.
4.   The reviewer says that the debate on the function of the Forma Urbis is 'one of those classic ongoing controversies in which it will be impossible to reach generally shared conclusions'; however, it should suffice to read my pp. 143-144 to realize that for many scholars (including the present writer) the debate is closed.

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Peter Schertz, Nicole Stribling (ed.), The Horse in Ancient Greek Art. Middleburg: National Sporting and Library Museum, 2017. Pp. v, 145. ISBN 9780996890533. $30.00 (pb).

Reviewed by Carl Shaw, New College of Florida (cshaw@ncf.edu)

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The Horse in Ancient Greek Art is the outcome of a somewhat unlikely union between the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the National Sporting Library and Museum, "a modern temple to the equine." This beautifully presented collection contains five chapters on various horse-related topics from antiquity, 55figures within these chapters, and an appendix with 75images of items from the exhibition. Although this is not the type of book to present a particular argument, its contributors engage meaningfully with current scholarship in their substantive discussions of visual and historical evidence. The essays mostly cover content for a general audience, but are consistently interesting (even though there is a fair bit of repetition by the end), and all photos of vases, coins, friezes, and other objects are of exceptional quality.

Schertz and Stribling note in the Preface that visitors to the National Sporting Library and Museum "may not normally think of themselves as 'ancient art people,'" and the exhibition on which this book is based was the first time ancient art had been displayed in the museum. This fact clearly informed the book as a whole, but especially the first chapter, "Hippomania," by N. Stribling, which functions as an introduction of sorts for the non-expert. The author discusses in broad terms the importance of ancient art, the appearance of ancient horses, myths that include horses, ancient vessels and their uses, athletic games, and chariots. Although general, the material makes helpful references to other chapters in the book and presents fascinating historical facts and a range of images, both familiar and unfamiliar.

In "Noble Steeds: The Origins of the Horse in Greek Art," S. Hemingway similarly examines well-known and less-known images, as he follows the early artistic development of the horse. He looks at examples from the Mycenaean Bronze Age through the Iron Age into the Geometric and Archaic periods. He tracks representations of the horse and horse narratives in Greek visual art, including the first instances of the (surprisingly scarce) representations of the Trojan Horse.

Myth and narrative are the primary focus of "Mythological Horses in Ancient Greek Art," where J. Oakley discusses many of the predictable examples (Pegasus, Diomedes' man-eating horses, the Trojan Horse), but he also treats less common examples and even expands very briefly into hybrid creatures (the centaur, the satyr/silen, the hippalectryon, and the hippocamp). It becomes apparent as one reads this chapter that famous mythological horses are rarely regular horses, but are much more frequently supernatural in some way.

S. Pevnick's and P. Schertz's studies move between the mythological and the historical world. In "From Myth to History: The Chariot in Ancient Greek Art," Schertz provides a valuable consideration of various technical aspects of the chariot, including a surprisingly interesting discussion of construction methods. He also uses ancient art to present the various uses and styles of chariots, from the military to racing, and even basic mule carts. Pevnick's look at "Riders and Victors: Competing on Horseback in Archaic and Classical Greek Art" examines horseracing in a similar vein, with a thorough discussion of races, festivals, and prizes in relation to ancient art.

Much like the previous authors, Mattusch uses a number of interesting images for her discussion of "Ancient Greek Horsemanship," but she focusses above all on literary evidence. She discusses a range of authors (Xenophanes, Aristophanes, Simon of Athens), but the bulk of the chapter presents a synopsis of Xenophon's On Horsemanship. This non-canonical text is fascinating. It is remarkable how much of Xenophon's discussion still holds true, and the descriptions of muzzles, bits, and snaffles (among other things) engage throughout.

The Horse in Ancient Greek Art is a wonderful reminder of the interdisciplinary nature of Classics. There has been plenty of scholarship on horses in antiquity, but most of it is written by classicists for classicists. This collection of essays and images represents the possibilities of a more popular approach to Classical intersections. Not only is it a beautiful and interesting study, but it also exposes readers who may not think of themselves as "Classics people" to the joys of classical art, history, and literature.

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Kathleen Riley, Alastair Blanshard, Iarla Manny (ed.), Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xviii, 382. ISBN 9780198789260. $100.00.

Reviewed by Julianna K. Will, York University (juliwill@yorku.ca)

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[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

In an 1885 Pall Mall Gazette review of James McNeil Whistler's "Ten O'Clock" lecture, Oscar Wilde suggests that "an artist is not an isolated fact; he is part of a certain milieu and a certain entourage." Unlike many of Wilde's witty maxims, this particular statement should not be startling or revolutionary — it is merely true. Wilde, no matter how much we admire him as "modern," was still an Oxford-educated Irish man living at the end of the nineteenth century. To discuss and examine properly his body of work, it is vital that we understand not only how Wilde stands apart from his peers, but also how he fits into the broader frame of the late-Victorian canvas.

In the "Introduction" to Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity, Kathleen Riley positions the book as an answer to the question Simon Goldhill poses about Iain Ross's Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece: "why [does] Wilde's classicism meri[t] dedicated examination" when his "knowledge of Greek and his treatment of classical subjects by and large seem remarkably ordinary and usual for the time?"¹ To argue that the ubiquity of classical education in the late Victorian period should preclude examination into its influence on an amateur classicist such as Wilde is to suggest that we, in fact, treat him in isolation. The eighteen essays collected in Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity do no such thing; the book adeptly fulfills its mission statement "to demonstrate in what ways Wilde's classicism is typical, in what ways heterodox or distinctive, and where it is situated in relation to Victorian social and intellectual frameworks" (Riley 9). Divided into five sections, the book moves from Wilde's early classical education at Trinity College Dublin and at Oxford, to sections on Wilde as dramatist, Wilde as philosopher, Wilde as novelist, and finally Wilde and his Roman influences. The book is undoubtedly Greek heavy. Riley rightly calls the Roman section "unique" (Riley 14) in that studies in Wilde's classicism typically focus solely on his Hellenism, but, as Iarla Manny points out in his excellent essay, most of what we, and the Victorians, understand of ancient Greece has been filtered through Roman interpretations. One hopes that this collection can serve as a starting point for a more thorough investigation into Wilde and Rome.

The first four essays highlight the usual suspects among the classicists who most profoundly influenced Wilde's own brand of classicism — J. P. Mahaffy, Benjamin Jowett, Walter Pater, and J. A. Symonds — but introduce fresh insights and new avenues for future inquiry. Alastair J. L. Blanshard, for example, discusses the shaping of Wilde's Hellenism primarily through its opposition to that of J. P. Mahaffy (his Trinity professor/tutor), and how these views translate into contemporary issues of nationalism, faith, sexuality, and social class. Of particular interest is Blanshard's argument that Wilde's lifelong preoccupation with reconciling his Catholic and pagan impulses begins with his trip to Greece with Mahaffy in 1877, and that, due to this trip, Greece becomes the mental landscape for Wilde to imagine "issues of faith and the divine" (Blanshard 31). Applications of this landscape to Wilde's writing would no doubt prove a fruitful avenue for further study. Blanshard's essay nicely complements one of the high points of the collection, Iain Ross's "'Very Fine and Semitic': Wilde's Herodotus," where Ross explores the ways in which Wilde "Hebraizes" the Halicarnassian. Specifically, Ross highlights the biblical cadences of Wilde's Herodotus translations and the Semitic annotations he makes to the text. The latter constitutes "a striking concession to Hebraism by this most committed of Hellenists" (Ross 67). Close analysis of Wilde's work shows him already complicating Matthew Arnold's distinction between the Hebrew and Hellene.

The second section deals with Wilde as a dramatist. John Stokes and Clare L. E. Foster foreground the various conditions in which Wilde was exposed to ancient Greek drama, and in the process, Stokes chronicles a shift in Wilde's sympathy for Hegel's ideal of the plasticity of Greek art and culture, which shift allowed for a theory of Greek art which accepts an inward turn towards the psychological. This movement towards the psychological elements of Attic drama transitions into several essays centred on the plays of Euripides, from Isobel Hurst's discussion of Euripidean-inspired tragicomedy in Wilde, to Kostas Boyiopoulos's reading of Salome as an inversion of tragedy inspired by Euripides's Hippolytus. Boyiopoulos deftly centres his comparison through the theme of transgressive desire and egocentric himeros (unrequited eros), which he argues is a tragic plot unique to Euripides, and applies it to the often-neglected subplot of Narraboth's himeros-inspired suicide. Boyiopoulos argues that the suicide is driven to completion by excess and exaggeration, and, like Phaedra's suicide in Hippolytus, is rendered tragic by its uselessness. Wilde is and was well-known as a figure of excess and exaggeration, and Boyiopoulos's association of Wilde's combinations of "seriousness and flippancy" (Boyiopoulos 158) with an intellectual engagement in the conventions of Greek tragedy supplies not only a richer analysis of Salome, but a new lens through which to read Hippolytus. Kathleen Riley's "'All the Terrible Beauty of a Greek Tragedy: Wilde's 'Epistola' and the Euripidean Christ," continues to illuminate the narrative of Wilde's special interest in Euripides, offering De Profundis as its "culmination" (Riley 13).

Two essays concerning Plato's Republic and Wilde are particularly fascinating. Leanne Grech returns to Wilde's Oxford education and highlights the new curriculum's pragmatic relationship with the British Empire. Grech connects the "professionalization" (Grech 168) of the Greats curriculum with Wilde's aesthetics and his adaption of Plato's imagined republic into a disturbing dystopia where, ironically, Greek (and Victorian) culture can exist only with "slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work". ² Grech offers Wilde's recognition of Greek slavery as a "dark counterpoint" (Grech 169) to the "sweetness and light" of Matthew Arnold's Hellenism, which could also invite comparison to Walter Pater's "darker stain" across which strikes the "sharp, bright edge of high Hellenic culture." Indeed, Grech's synthesis of Wilde's own imagined, and ultimately socialist, Utopia invites further scholarship on Wilde in relation to other Utopian writers at the turn of the century. Marylu Hill also investigates how Wilde's understanding of Plato's ideal state translates into his writing, this time in relationship to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Hill draws parallels between the Republic and Dorian Gray's emphasis on the soul, and most strikingly between Lord Henry Wotton and Plato's "anti-philosopher," a man of the "best human character" who in consequence becomes all the more corrupt when he falls. The similarities between the anti-philosopher and the language Wilde uses to describe Wotton are striking, and suggest a "rebuke" (Hill 235) to Wotton's "New Hedonism" as anti-philosophical. Hill suggests that this new reading of Dorian Gray extolls "Basil's and Sybil's embrace of the Socratic eros," which Hill reminds us is, according to Plato's Symposium, the only true way to attain real wisdom.

The last five essays of the collection offer a Latin perspective on Wilde and Wilde's diverse canon. Iarla Manny's analysis of Dorian Gray through the lens of Ovid's rendition of the myth of Orpheus in the Metamorphoses stands out as one of the most compelling essays in the collection. Manny connects Ovid's Orpheus to a mythological paradigm he identifies in the essay, in which the central male figure blames his female lover for dying and so swears off women. Manny deftly identifies the misogyny connected to both Greek and Victorian justifications for homosexual love (both Plato and Symonds throw women under the bus when they argue that to love men is to love what is superior) and uses it to critique Dorian's complicated relationships with both men and women in the novel. Although his analysis of Dorian Gray is fascinating, Manny also makes an important observation about Ovid in the late Victorian period in general, pointing out that although Ovid is "conspicuously absent" (Manny 268) from the Greats curriculum, the bulk of his work (Metamorphoses, Fasti) remains "the most important, and indeed, handiest, ancient source of information on Graeco-Roman myth and legend" (Manny 269). Although Walter Pater may have been happily reading his Homeric Hymns, and so knew that, to the archaic and classical Greeks, Narcissus was only a flower grown to snare Persephone, the common parlance of ancient myth in the nineteenth (and even twenty-first) century is shaped by the later Hellenic and Roman versions.

The assembly of Victorianists and Classicists from multiple disciplines in this volume has created a multifaceted successor to Iain Ross's Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (2013), and offers new contributions not only to studies in Oscar Wilde and the late Victorian period, but also reciprocally to Classics. This reciprocity in itself may be the answer to Goldhill's question, why study the classicism of an amateur Victorian classicist. Wilde's academic study of the classical world may have ended when he left Oxford, but his imaginative engagement with the literature and history of ancient Greece and Rome imbues everything he wrote. It is this creative element of one of the nineteenth century's most flamboyant figures that is perhaps the most "Greek" characteristic of Wilde, for as this volume demonstrates, he did not just study the ancient world in order to contribute to a canon of knowledge, but instead, like the Greeks and Romans before him, continued to rewrite and adapt the myths and philosophies to his own purposes. Any good student of the Classics knows that there is no "canon" when it comes to the Greeks, no one true story, no one original myth. There are only endless, contradictory versions.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations, xiii
List of Contributors, xv
Introduction: Taking Parnassus to Piccadilly (Kathleen Riley), 1–15

I. Wilde's Classical Education
1. Mahaffy and Wilde: A Study in Provocation (Alastair J. L. Blanshard), 19–35
2. How Wilde Read John Addington Symonds's Studies of the Greek Poets (Gideon Nisbet), 37–55
3. 'Very Fine and Semitic': Wilde's Herodotus (Iain Ross), 57–67
4. Wilde's Abstractions: Notes on Literae Humaniores, 1876–1878 (Joseph Bristow), 69–88

II. Wilde as Dramatist
5. Beyond Sculpture: Wilde's Responses to Greek Theatre in the 1880s (John Stokes), 91–106
6. Wilde and the Emergence of Literary Drama, 1880–1895 (Clare L. E. Foster), 107–126
7. 'Tragedy in the disguise of mirth': Robert Browning, George Eliot, and Wilde (Isobel Hurst), 127–140
8. Death by Unrequited Eros: Salome, Hippolytus, and Wilde's Inversion of Tragedy (Kostas Boyiopoulos), 141–158

III. Wilde as Philosopher and Cultural Critic
9. Imagining Utopia: Oxford Hellenism and the Aesthetic Alternative (Leanne Grech), 161–174
10. 'All the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy': Wilde's 'Epistola' and the Euripidean Christ (Kathleen Riley), 175–194
11. Burning with a 'hard, gem-like flame': Heraclitus and Hedonism in Wilde's Writing (Kate Hext), 195–208
12. Cosmopolitan Classicism: Wilde Between Greece and France (Stefano Evangelista), 209–227

IV. Wilde as Novelist: The Picture of Dorian Gray
13. Wilde's New Republic: Platonic Questions in Dorian Gray (Marylu Hill), 231–250
14. From Eros to Romosexuality: Love and Sex in Dorian Gray (Nikolai Endres), 251–266
15. Oscar as (Ovid as) Orpheus: Misogyny and Pederasty in Dorian Gray and the Metamorphoses (Iarla Manny), 267–285

V. Wilde and Rome
16. Wilde and Roman History (Philip E. Smith II), 289–304
17. The Criminal Emperors of Ancient Rome and Wilde's 'true historic sense' (Shushma Malik), 305–320
18. 'I knew I had a brother!': Fraternity and Identity in Plautus' Menaechmi and Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (Serena S. Witzke), 321–335
Bibliography, 337–358
Index, 359–382

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Notes:

1.   Quoted by Riley, pg. 9: Goldhill, S. (2014), Review of Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece by I. Ross, Classical Philology 109.2: 185.
2.   Quoted by Grech, pg. 169: Wilde, O. (2001), The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Prose, ed. L. Dowling (London), pp. 247.

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Nestor Kavvadas, Jerusalem zwischen Aachen und Bagdad: Zur Existenzkrise des byzantinischen Christentums im Abbasidenreich. Jenaer mediävistische Vorträge, 6​. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2017. Pp. 116. ISBN 9783515118798. €29,00.

Reviewed by Mary Alberi, Pace University (malberi@pace.edu)

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Nestor Kavvadas' book highlights the paradoxical fortunes of the Greek orthodox community in late eighth- and early ninth-century Palestine. On the one hand, three of Jerusalem's patriarchs, Elias II, George, and Thomas, acted as intermediaries, making possible a series diplomatic exchanges between Charlemagne's court at Aachen and Harun-al-Rashid's court in Baghdad. As a result of their activities, the prestige of Jerusalem's patriarchs rose to such an extent that they were able to send their own envoys to Aachen. On the other hand, despite the patriarch's enhanced prestige, increased use of Arabic and widespread conversion to Islam threatened the cohesion of the caliphate's orthodox Christian community. Kavvadas argues that Christians in Syria and Palestine began converting in such large numbers that Islam rapidly became the region's majority religion in these same years. Rather than offering a systematic account of diplomatic exchanges between Charlemagne, Harun al-Rashid, and Jerusalem's patriarchs, Kavvadas explores this paradox, with occasional forays into its larger implications for long-term relations between Franks and Muslims.

Amid the endemic violence and destructive raids which damaged a number of orthodox communities, Kavvadas singles out as most representative of the difficulties confronting the orthodox community a destructive Muslim raid on the monastery of Mar Saba, the caliphate's largest Greek orthodox monastery, located about ten kilometers from Jerusalem, in March 797. Mar Saba's aristocratic monks left their monastery for high ecclesiastical office in Jerusalem and abbacies in neighboring monasteries and, as in the case of John of Damascus in the dispute over icons, influenced the outcome of theological controversies in Constantinople. The damage inflicted on Mar Saba in this raid precipitated a major crisis throughout the caliphate's Greek orthodox community by weakening the monasteries upon which Jerusalem's patriarchal church relied for stability and for maintaining Greek orthodox identity in a rapidly changing environment. In Kavvadas' view, the Muslim raiders who attacked the monastery in March 797 understood the monastery's importance to the patriarchal church and acted out of political motives. According to the account written by the monk Stephanos, the Muslim raiders ordered the monks to hand over one of their number, Thomas, later abbot of St. Chariton and patriarch of Jerusalem (807-820). Kavvadas interprets this singular demand as evidence of the raiders' determination to capture a monk who had played a leading role in negotiations leading up to Charlemagne's dispatch of ambassadors to Harun's court that same year. When the monks refused to surrender Thomas, the raiders killed twenty of Mar Saba's monks.

For Kavvadas, this raid exemplifies the untenable position of Jerusalem's patriarchal church in the chronic intertribal wars between the Yamani and Quais, the "southern" and "northern" Arabs, in Palestine and Syria. He identifies the raiders of March, 797 as Yamani, members of an Arab military elite still resentful of the Abbasid overthrow of the Umayyads and the loss of power which followed, as Palestine and Syria became remote provinces in a caliphate centered on Baghdad. The raiders wanted to take Thomas prisoner because of his contacts with their enemies at the Abbasid court, the Barmakids, with whom he had cooperated in arranging diplomatic exchanges between Harun and Charlemagne. Yet by 797 the factional disputes of Harun's court had weakened the Barmakids, and they could no longer protect their clients, including the monks of Mar Saba, in Palestine. Kavvadas also considers the attack on Mar Saba as an expression of ethnic and cultural conflict between Arabs and the eastern Iranians, led by the Barmakids, who had risen to prominence under the new Abbasid regime centered on Baghdad. Wary of secular learning, the Arabs rejected the Greek and Persian philosophy and science introduced into Islamic culture through Barmakid patronage. Kavvadas considers Barmakid support of diplomatic contacts with the Franks, for which they sought the cooperation of Jerusalem's patriarch, to be another sign of their openness to the world outside the caliphate. Such emphasis on the Barmakids, however, tends to push Harun's motives into the background. Kavvadas attributes the mutual hostility of Franks and Abbasids to the Byzantines and to the Umayyad regime in Spain, perhaps too briefly. By omitting consideration of Constantinople's political weakness, however, Kavvadas misses an opportunity to broaden his examination of Jerusalem's wider significance for what he suggests was a major shift in the relationship of the great powers of the early medieval Mediterranean and the transformation of Late Antiquity into the Middle Ages.

Kavvadas argues that the conversion of Christians to Islam in large numbers occurred rapidly as a direct response to Muslim attacks on Mar Saba, Jerusalem, and many other Christian communities in the closing years of the 790s. Yet given the history of decades-long unrest in Syria and Palestine, the conversion of Christians to Islam in large numbers, if it occurred at this time, seems less a sudden change than a response to chronic insecurity and a desire to avoid increasingly burdensome restrictions on the Christian community's religious autonomy.

More problematic is Kavvadas' assertion that Charlemagne's patronage of the Jerusalem church and the presence of Frankish monks and nuns in Jerusalem signaled the arrival of a third major power in the region. Kavvadas revives the old, and now discredited, notion of Charlemagne's protectorate over Jerusalem and suggests that the intrusion of Frankish power into the region destabilized Palestine, provoking Muslim attacks on Christian communities like Mar Saba. It is hard to see how this might be so, for Charlemagne lacked the military resources necessary to intervene decisively in Palestine. Moreover, much of the evidence Kavvadas brings forward to support his views about the effects of Frankish power in the eastern Mediterranean comes from eleventh-century France, where legends about Charlemagne were incorporated into contemporary crusade ideology.

Kavvadas' discussion of Charlemagne's interest in Jerusalem centers on the importance of the Holy City in his court's imperial ideology and for his imperial coronation in Rome in 800. Kavvadas highlights Alcuin's leading role in affirming Jerusalem's significance for this imperial ideology in a discussion of Alcuin's Letter, Epistola 214, written shortly after Charlemagne's imperial coronation by Pope Leo III in Rome.¹ A brief reference in this letter to his joy at the imperial coronation, which monks from Jerusalem attended, supports Kavvadas' argument that Alcuin considered their presence essential for the coronation's legitimacy. Yet Alcuin's letters mention Charlemagne's diplomatic contacts with Jerusalem twice only, without much elaboration, and his reticence about the presence of envoys from Jerusalem at Charlemagne's imperial coronation may not support Kavvadas' sweeping claims. Perhaps Kavvadas is correct in suggesting that Alcuin's reserve arose from his unwillingness to associate Charlemagne too openly with Jerusalem's patriarchate on account of its extensive ties to a rival imperial capital, Constantinople. In placing so much emphasis on Alcuin, however, Kavvadas seems to disregard Michael McCormick's recent findings in Charlemagne's Survey of the Holy Land, which point, instead, to the influence of Adalhard of Corbie, Charlemagne's cousin and one of his foremost advisors, in promoting diplomatic contacts with Jerusalem and, by implication, with Charlemagne's imperial coronation.²

Kavvadas' book appears at a time of increased scholarly interest in ties between the Frankish kingdom and Abbasid caliphate. A short study, it offers an interesting assessment of the role played by Jerusalem's patriarchs in diplomatic contacts between Aachen and Baghdad in the late eighth- and early ninth centuries. In effect, Kavvadas redirects the focus of studies on this topic, offering new insights into the patriarchal church's insecurity as well as its vital role in high-level diplomacy. His book raises important questions about the significance of Jerusalem for Charlemagne, beyond his obvious intention to provide material assistance and support Frankish foundations in the Holy City. Moreover, Kavvadas offers insights into the lines of patronage which linked Jerusalem, on the frontiers of the Abbasid caliphate, to its political center in Baghdad. He demonstrates that court politics and factionalism in Baghdad had a direct influence upon the welfare of Jerusalem's patriarchal church. Kavvadas' study is also significant in affirming the importance of Jerusalem and its network of monasteries in the Judaean desert in sustaining orthodox Greek identity, as the Arabic language and Islam were spreading more widely through Palestine.

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Notes:

1.   Acuin, Ep. 214, ed. Ernst Dümmler, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae IV: Karolini Aevi II (Berlin, 1895), p. 358.
2.   Michael McCormick, Charlemagne's Survey of the Holy Land: Wealth, Personnel, and Buildings of a Mediterranean Church between Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Washington, D.C., 20ll). ​

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Elena Giusti, Carthage in Virgil's 'Aeneid': Staging the Enemy under Augustus. Cambridge classical studies. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 334. ISBN 9781108416801. £75.00.

Reviewed by Claire Stocks, University of Newcastle (claire.stocks@newcastle.ac.uk)

Version at BMCR home site

Elena Giusti's brilliant book on one of the most studied works in Latin Literature, Virgil's Aeneid, offers a fresh perspective by shifting the focus from Aeneas and his proto-romanitas to Carthage, Rome's legendary antithesis. Giusti weaves a tale of two halves, with the first two chapters of this book focusing on Virgil's employment of barbarian tropes to present the mythical—and fictionalized—Carthage as Rome's 'other', evoking memories of the Greeks' treatment of the Persians on the tragic stage as well as looking forward to Augustus' war with Cleopatra and Egypt as well as the Parthians. At the same time, she argues, Virgil's Carthaginians also play the role of Trojans and so establish themselves as Rome's mirror, a position that ties in well with the images of civil-war that also lie latent within Books One to Four of the Aeneid. In chapters three and four, Giusti shifts focus to consider the interaction between Virgil and Livy, and their shared fictionalizing of Rome's past. Virgil's willingness to forgo temporal consistency in the Carthage episode allows him to present it as a mythical, 'fake' aition for the three Punic wars, and Giusti argues convincingly for multiple allusions to all three of these wars in this episode.

Giusti begins by focusing on mid-republican literature and Rome's portrayal of Carthage within it. Despite working with material that is at times (extremely) fragmentary, Giusti constructs a convincing reading of Carthage as Rome's 'other', in a manner reminiscent of the Greeks' portrayal of the (Persian) barbarian. In stating her case, Giusti makes clear the importance of Greece within this discourse as Rome's republican authors explore not only the dynamic between Rome and Carthage at this time, but also how this relationship reflects upon Rome's status as a city and cultural hub in relation to Greece. The Greeks, Giusti argues, offer Rome a model for how to approach the process of self-definition and how to use the barbarian other as a means of exploring issues of polarity and analogy between peoples. The irony, as Giusti touches upon it here (and explores in greater detail later) is that Carthage rarely, if ever, is portrayed as a 'barbarian' foe by Rome's authors. Of particular note is the discussion on Plautus' Poenulus. Here, Giusti argues for a deliberate similarity in the playwright's portrayal of Carthage and Rome, which she suggests may result from the fact that both find themselves in the position of 'other' in relation to the trend-setting Greeks: from a Greek perspective, both Carthage and Rome could be considered the barbarians.

After arguing convincingly that the portrayal of Carthage in mid-republican literature underscores its portrayal in Roman texts thereafter, Giusti progresses in chapter two to a more direct discussion of Virgil's Aeneid, as she explores the parallels between the Carthaginian Dido and literary models that include Medea, Helen, Atossa, and, of course, Cleopatra. In the multiple roles assumed by Dido, we can see a reflection of Carthage itself, and its vacillation between playing the role of Rome's 'other' as well as its 'self'. On the one hand, Virgil continues the mid-republican trend of presenting Carthage as Rome's equivalent to the Persians: "Thus the Persian-Carthaginian parallel bolsters a sense of Roman national identity in continuity with the Greeks" (127). Yet, since Virgil is writing under Augustus, his Carthaginians are also parallel to the Parthians. Casting Carthage as the enemy that poses a contemporary threat serves an important function—namely evoking the metus hostilis, 'fear of the enemy,' which Rome has arguably not experienced since the third Punic war. That Rome, so its authors would have us believe, has not had an enemy since the Carthaginian wars, has played a decisive role in setting the city on a path to civil war, most recently in the war between Octavian and Antony. In associating Carthage with Parthia, therefore, Virgil suggests that the threat of another civil war will be avoided, as Augustus reignites Rome's fear of the enemy through a war with the Parthians. Yet, Giusti argues, the constant analogies between Virgil's Carthage and Rome demonstrate that the threat of civil war cannot be forgotten and that Virgil's text repeatedly evokes the painful memories of such a conflict, not least because it was through such conflict that Augustus established his principate.

In chapter three Giusti turns her attention to Livy and to the association that Virgil appears to build between Carthage and Troy. The importance of reading Livy and Virgil together is stressed, as is the fact that the relationship between the two authors has not received the attention that it merits. It is at this point that Giusti introduces one of her strongest arguments and an ingenious solution to the temporal inconsistency of Virgil's Carthage episode. The problem, as Giusti reminds us, is that it is impossible to calculate exactly how long Aeneas stays in Carthage. The episode itself implies a stay of some length, but once Aeneas returns to Sicily in subsequent books, Virgil suggests that very little time has passed since Aeneas was last on the island. The crux of the matter, Giusti argues, is that Virgil's audience would have known that any meeting between Dido and Aeneas, even a legendary one, could not have taken place since there is a discrepancy of several centuries between the dates recorded by Rome's authors for the fall of Troy and the foundation of Carthage. The fictionality of this episode, Giusti concludes, was deliberate and the temporal inconsistency within the text draws attention to this fact: "The encounter is a fable that everyone knows to be false" (174). Our understanding of the role of fictionality in Virgil's epic, Giusti argues, can be improved by considering how this epic stands in relation to Livy and the use of Fama by both authors as a means of blurring the boundaries between myth and history. By means of several case studies, including a comparison between Livy's account of Hannibal's attack on Saguntum at the start of the Second Punic war and Virgil's Carthage episode, Giusti demonstrates the dialogue between Virgil's and Livy's works. The chronological inconsistencies that both appear to embrace highlights their "authorial power" (196) and illustrates their desire to build ideological discourse into their portrayal of history, irrespective of whether they are writing epic or historiography.

Chapter 4 focuses predominantly on Books One to Four of the Aeneid, which we are to view as a unit within the epic (if we assume a tripartite structure for the work). Throughout this chapter, Giusti offers examples of Virgil's allusions to all three Punic wars, arguing that when read as a whole, Virgil's Carthage episode serves an historical allegory for that conflict and thus looks beyond the obvious association between the pairing of Carthage and Dido with Egypt and Cleopatra. Book one of the epic employs multiple allusions to Naevius, among other sources, to draw parallels with the first Punic War. In Book Four, Giusti argues, Virgil then builds a link between Dido and Hannibal and the second Punic war, which again draws him into debate with Livy, especially Book 30 of his history. Finally, she argues that the death of Dido is reminiscent of the destruction of Carthage after the third Punic War. Once Aeneas has left Carthage and hosts the Sicilian ludi in Book Five, Virgil concludes his depiction of this historical allegory by presenting scenes that allude to Rome's ultimate triumph. Woven into this narrative of the rise and fall of this city, Carthage, is a reminder of the rise and fall of another city, Troy. In paralleling Carthage with Troy, Virgil reminds his readers of Carthage's function as a mirror for Rome and its Trojan origins. Yet at the same time, Virgil makes a distinction: whereas Carthage, like Troy, will succumb to destruction and the tragic, cyclic, effect of history (such as we see in Livy), Rome is apparently capable of rising above this, despite its recent civil war. For once the civil wars are over and Augustus has come to power, Hannibal's curse in Aeneid Book Four no longer seems so threatening: "Augustus has demonstrated that the arrow of time can be turned back as far as the Golden Age, so that the end is now projected in a far-removed future for those who still accept a cyclical view of history. This is the real power of the Augustan Re-evolution" (267).

Throughout the whole of this book, there is one concept to which Giusti repeatedly returns: namely the importance and power of tragedy to underscore Rome's response to, and evaluation of, its wars with Carthage, and itself. From the beginning of chapter One, where Giusti notes the emergence of the barbarian other on the Greek tragic stage, through to the trauma of Rome's recent civil wars, this book observes the tragic modes present in (e.g.) historiography and notes Virgil's employment of tragic models and tropes in his portrayal of Carthage in the first four books of his epic. This "common thread" (20), as Giusti refers to it, helps to unite an argument that at times verges on becoming fragmentary due to the many ideas that circulate throughout her book. Overall, the vision and scope of Giusti's work is impressive, although it still bears some of the hallmarks of a PhD dissertation in its structure and argumentation: the chapters are very long and contain multiple sub-sections, some of which, potentially, could have been developed into their own chapters. There are, however, frequent summaries of the argument throughout, which serve as useful points for the reader to stop and evaluate what he/she has read. In addition, whilst the argument is dense and at times fragmentary, the research behind it is impeccable. The ideas are impressive and Giusti frequently summarizes the history of Virgilian scholarship on key issues relating to the Aeneid in a manner that will make this material both accessible to undergraduates and incredibly useful. The typos are few, and the book as a whole is well produced. This is a worthy addition, therefore, to the body of scholarship on Virgil's epic.

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