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Joseph Farrell and Michael C. J. Putnam, eds., A Companion to Vergil’s Aeneid and its Tradition. Malden, Mass. and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Pp. xiv + 559. Hardcover, £130.00/$209.95. ISBN 978-1-4051-7577-7.

Reviewed by Lee Fratantuono, Ohio Wesleyan University

The contemporary proliferation of companions to and readings in classical topics can be traced to Stephen Harrison’s exemplary compilation of classic articles on the Aeneid (Oxford, 1990), which set a high standard for one-volume excursions on a single ancient subject. And, in a previous generation, the late Steele Commager produced his Virgilian contribution to the “Twentieth-Century Views” collection (Prentice Hall, 1966) with similar success. The present volume is a most worthy successor to those two venerable predecessors, and, like other “Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World,” the contributions are new, not reprinted from journals common or more obscure. The Harrison and Commager volumes reprinted great masterpieces of Virgilian criticism, papers produced in seemingly simpler, not too say more innocent days for critics of Latin poetry. The papers assembled for the Farrell–Putnam volume emerge in arguably more challenging times for Virgilian scholars, both because of the tremendous advances in Virgilian Quellenforschung (due largely to Damien Nelis, a contributor to the present work, and Nicholas Horsfall), and (depending on your point of view) the light or shadow shed on Virgil by more contemporary literary approaches and theories.

Overall, these are happy days for Virgilians, not least for the forthcoming Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia edited by Richard Thomas and Jan Ziolkowski. Like its massive Italian predecessor, which Farrell and Putnam reference at the start of their introduction, the Thomas–Ziolkowski work attempts nothing less than a comprehensive guide to Virgiliana. The aims of the present work are more modest, despite the omnibus title. And principal among those aims is the desire to say something new (not an easy desideratum in Virgiliana).

The Farrell–Putnam companion is easy to assess for the second part of its title, the Aeneid tradition, which actually occupies the majority of the book’s space. Fully four of the five sections of the companion are concerned with the Virgilian reception, and here there is much indeed that is new and presented in useful form. Part II is devoted to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, where Sarah Spence on the Dares and Dictys legends (surprisingly understudied) and Craig Kallendorf on “Vergil and Printed Books, 1500–1800” provide especially helpful essays. This section would have been vastly improved by a separate article on the Aeneid reception in French literature; an article on the Old French Roman would have been most welcome, let alone the pervasive influence of the Aeneid on the French Renaissance. Part V, like Part II, is more or less chronological in survey, and concerns “Modern Reactions to the Aeneid.” Here, Susanna Morton Braund offers a fascinating look at Aeneid translations that rewards close study.

Part IV is devoted to the “American Aeneid” and the reception of the poem in the history of the United States. Michèle Lowrie’s paper, “Vergil and Founding Violence,” is best here, with important consideration of the question of Roman exempla; this is the sort of article that can and should readily be assigned with profit to graduate Aeneid seminars. Indeed, Lowrie’s paper is, I would venture to say, a new classic of Aeneid criticism, one which blends the best of old and new tools of literary study, a provocative study whose implications go beyond the geographic and temporal boundaries of this section of the collection.

Part III, which focuses on the Aeneid in music and the visual arts, is probably located where it is in the collection because the subject matter largely falls in chronology between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century. This is a difficult section because of the vastness of the material, as even a cursory glance at Reid’s mammoth Oxford compendium reveals. Regrettably, here again the French are somewhat underrepresented, especially in music, though space considerations must have weighed heavily on the whole enterprise. Glenn Most’s chapter on “Laocoons” is especially noteworthy.

The book’s first section is entitled “The Aeneid in Antiquity,” and is overall the strongest of all. There is much gold to mine here: “Vergil’s Library” by Nelis; a lucid and succinct chapter on the Aeneas legend by Sergio Casali; a marvelous discussion of “Vergil’s Roman” by Jay Reed; a consideration of the theme of exilic poetry with reference to both Virgil and Ovid by Putnam; and a treatment of inconsistency and the nature of “unfinished” epic by Jim O’Hara that repays close examination.

One of the great strengths of the Harrison Oxford Readings was its superlative survey of the history of Virgilian scholarship, itself worth the price of the volume. No companion that seeks to cover as much ground as the present work can hope to produce a similar overview for the sake of the perhaps mythical general reader who will approach the collection, or for advanced undergraduate and graduate readers who suffer from feeling both lost and, perhaps, too embarassed to ask for a roadmap to an overgrown wood. If anything, the chapters of Part I of the present compilation offer the best overview to the “problem” of the Aeneid, even if the reactions to the problem in literature, music, and the arts—the whole Nachleben that Parts II-V seek to explicate, not to say control—offer too daunting a field for any one volume to handle without omission and shortchanging.

Many of the modern “companions” to antiquity, at least in hardcover incarnation, are prohibitively expensive for those who might most profit from ownership. The Farrell–Putnam Aeneid companion is not only worth the publisher’s exorbitant cost, but a book every anglophone Virgilian of these confused and confusing, yet happy and blessed days for Latin poetry enthusiasts, will cherish.

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Alan Kaiser, Roman Urban Street Networks. Routledge Studies in Archaeology 2. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Pp. xvii + 249. Hardcover, $125.00/£80.00. ISBN 978-0415-88657-4.

Reviewed by Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, Brandeis University

The bulk of Kaiser’s book focuses on four well-known ancient cities, Pompeii, Ostia, Silchester, and Empúries, in order to provide an innovative consideration of their urban street networks. While interest in Roman thoroughfares and traffic movements has been growing in recent years (see, for example the work of Ray Laurence and David Newsome, Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: Movement and Space (Oxford, 2011)), Kaiser claims to have made the first analysis of Roman streets to combine archaeological and philological evidence (p. xv).

Kaiser’s quantitative methodology for assessing the organization of street space derives from the world of urban geography. Concepts such as “access analysis” and “space syntax,” for example (see Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge, 1984)), provide a way to study accessibility and connectivity across a Roman city. While Kaiser’s study largely confirms older suppositions about the organization of space and street networks, his data creates a conversation among these four cities through the comparisons drawn between and among them that is the most valuable feature of the book.

The introduction and the first two chapters lay out the historiography and methodology for the rest of the book. Kevin Lynch’s five elements of an urban network—“paths,” nodes,” “edges,” “landmarks,” and “districts” (Kevin Lynch, Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass., 1960)) —serve as the basis for Kaiser’s argument that the Romans came to understand their cities through “paths” (streets) leading from one type of urban environment to another.

Chapter 1, “Textual Evidence for Roman Perceptions of Streets and Plazas,” shows that the Latin names for urban thoroughfares were more culturally charged than today’s words for streets, such as alley and boulevard (p. 45). Modern names of streets are based more on physical characteristics, whereas the Romans tended to divide streets into two types: main roads (via and platea) and side streets (angiportum and semita). The Romans used main streets for social displays and categorized them accordingly.

Kaiser’s second chapter “Defining and Analyzing Street Networks in the Archaeological Record,” attempts to sharpen such generic labels as “main streets” and “side streets” by applying simple numeric data to draw conclusions about a street’s role in its city network. The first index for a street is its “depth” from outside the city in terms of how many other streets or squares one must pass through to move from the city’s edge to the street under consideration (p. 53). A street leading directly from a city gate would have a depth of one. Depth from the forum is his second index, and this involves counting the number of streets away from the forum (p. 54). The number of intersections a street shares with other streets serves as Kaiser’s third index for determining “how well a particular street integrates or segregates the streets of the city” (p. 56). Finally, Kaiser’s fourth index undertakes, to the degree the archaeological evidence allows, to assess how much a given street was open to cart traffic. Kaiser’s primary analytical tool for the depth and intersection data is a comparison between the number of different types of buildings (residential, commercial, etc.) along a given street and the number we would expect if there were an even distribution of those buildings throughout all streets of a city. To give one example of how this data plays out in terms of how streets knit cities together: at Pompeii we find that shops are disproportionately concentrated on streets with a lower depth from the city gates.

Each of the subsequent four chapters investigates a single city and puts Kaiser’s analysis to the test. Pompeii (chapter 3) Ostia (chapter 4), Silchester (chapter 5), and Empúries (chapter 6) all have a majority of their intramural area exposed through excavation. Kaiser proceeds formulaically as he outlines historical background, layout, and topography for each city; discusses the structure of the city’s streets; and then assesses how well we can identify uses of buildings along the streets from the archaeological record. Kaiser then devotes a section of each chapter to analysis of the city’s street network on the basis of the four indices spelled out above (street depth from city gates, street depth from the forum, the number of intersections a street had, and its accessibility for cart traffic). Finally, each chapter identifies and discusses the primary and secondary streets along with the forum and any plazas. Extensive tables supplement plans of the cities, and color-coded maps showing different uses of space are available at an online supplement to the book (http://faculty.evansville.edu/ak58/streets/).

The concluding chapter 7, “Streets, Space, and Roman Urbanism,” argues that the example of Neapolis/Ciudad Romana illustrates the potential for applying the book’s methodology to urban sites that are only partially excavated. The organization of space at Neapolis differed markedly from the other case studies, since the role of its agora was an integral space through which traffic moved. Kaiser hypothesizes that this phenomenon resulted from Neapolis’ Greek heritage, a point strengthened when he compares Neapolis to its immediate neighbor, Ciudad Romana, whose sparse remains nevertheless echo the previous case studies. When statistical anomalies arise in the Neapolis case study, however, Kaiser explains them away with reference to specific circumstances, which weakens his overall argument. Furthermore, the rigorous statistical analysis throughout the book might have yielded more results if used to explore tensions between the urban ideals laid out in texts and the realities played out on the ground.

Nevertheless, Kaiser’s strongest contributions come from his comparative analyses of Roman cities. Individual chapters will help scholars specializing in each city, but the book as a whole reveals urban dynamics that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Kaiser provides critical context for sites like Pompeii that can occasionally be taken as “typical” or paradigmatic for Roman urbanism. All in all, Kaiser brings a new and scientific approach to these cities and offers other scholars of Roman urbanism a strong set of tools for exploring other street networks and the placement of buildings along them. It is unfortunate that the book is so expensive and so completely bereft of photographic images of these cities. Kaiser’s approach, however, gives us new perspectives on Roman urbanism, even if some angles he pursues must remain elusive. He convincingly elucidates many problems that can arise when modern assumptions are used to explain anything in the Roman city.