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Molten Color: Glassmaking in Antiquity. By Karol B. Wight. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2011. Pp. 128; 92 color and 2 b/w illustrations, 36 line drawings, 1 map. Paper, $20.00/£13.99. ISBN 978-1-60606-053-7.

Reviewed by Susan Walker, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

The well-chosen cover photograph of a multi-colored ribbon flask, a product of early imperial Roman glass-making, illustrates both the sense of flow in the title and the visual appeal of this short survey of glassmaking in antiquity. Recently appointed Director of the Corning Museum of Glass, Wight has retained her sense of wonder at the technical brilliance of ancient glass, and communicates her passionate interest in glassmaking throughout the book. The work is addressed to a non-specialist audience.

A short introduction makes the modern reader aware of the omnipresence of glass in our daily lives; a first chapter explains what glass is and how its properties have been exploited. Good use is made here of illustrations from early books. Wight alludes briefly to the advances made in recent decades in our understanding of the chemistry of ancient glass. The map of the Roman Empire is puzzling: the sites marked on it require explanation as centers of glass-making at various times in antiquity. An historical overview begins with the earliest techniques used in Bronze Age Mesopotamia and Egypt: casting, core-forming and mosaic glass. Wight moves on to the Mediterranean of the first millennium BC, where there is a frustrating lack of surviving glass of monumental scale, but where gold-glass was first exploited and Hellenistic glass-makers developed mosaic glass to new heights of perfection. The processes of core-forming and making mosaic glass are well explained and clearly illustrated.

Much space is devoted to the glass of the Roman Empire, for the Romans exploited to spectacular effect the newly discovered technique of glass-blowing. Raw glass was exported to Europe from Judaea and Alexandria. Early imperial control of the Alpine regions allowed the exploitation of abundant local resources of metal and wood to turn glass from a small-scale, luxury product into a convenience for the masses. Secondary workshops employed glassmakers using iron blowpipes; these could hold heavier gobs of molten glass than the earliest known pipes of glass or ceramic found in Judaea. Large containers were produced, and, most significantly for the future of the craft, glass could be recycled.

Glass thus acquired a much wider range of uses, which are explored in the last chapter of the text. The excellent photographs are not scaled but dimensions are given in the captions, along with a brief description of the glass’s function and technique of manufacture and, most usefully, a museum inventory number. A glossary explains technical terms printed in bold font in the text. The layout of the chapter headings is irritating, set within the first page of text.

The focus of Molten Glass is technological and exclusively focused upon the Getty Museum’s collection. In the preface, the author explains that the book draws upon an exhibition prepared in 2006. Temporary exhibitions of ancient glass have been a major source of scholarship in recent years: within the short bibliography Wight refers to another influential display organized by technique: Glass of the Caesars, held at the British Museum and other venues in the late 1980s. Vitrum: Il vetro fra arte e scienza nel mondo romano, held in Florence in 2004, produced a catalogue of lasting value, perhaps omitted because the publication, edited by M. Beretta and G. Di Pasquale, is in Italian. I missed any recommendation to read E. Marianne Stern’s seminal article “Roman Glass-blowing in a Cultural Context”, AJA 103 (1999) 441–84. Scholarship on ancient glass is international, with significant publications in all the major European languages, comprehensively summarized and critically reviewed every five years by Marie-Dominique Nenna in Revue Archéologique.

Notwithstanding these limitations, Wight gives her readers a valuable, well-illustrated and clear account of the techniques of glass-making in antiquity as seen through the remarkable collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum. The museum would do well to commission a series of similar books on the making of other classes of object within its collections.

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Virgil. By R. Alden Smith. Blackwell Introductions to the Classical World. Chichester and Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Pp. x + 210. Hardcover, £70.00/$99.95. ISBN 978-1-4051-5949-4.

Reviewed by Christopher B. Polt, Carleton College

To introduce an author like Vergil broadly but briefly to audiences of students and scholars alike requires deep and sweeping knowledge, the practiced eye of a seasoned teacher, and writing that is both clear and engaging—all traits that Smith brings to his contribution to Blackwell’s series of Introductions to the Classical World. The centerpiece of the volume consists of three brief but heady studies of the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, each of which is analyzed using a different thematic lens; these are framed by four chapters that try to contextualize Vergil’s work within its literary and socio-political milieu and to explicate its winding journey from the poet’s death to today, and the volume closes with an ample selection of suggestions for further reading. Smith has produced an admirable and useful introduction that should become a standard starting point for students on initial and subsequent excursions into this complex poet, although as a whole the book suffers from a somewhat hazy sense of its audience and needs to be supplemented carefully for beginners to use it effectively.

The three central chapters offer lucid introductions to Vergil’s works that explicate each clearly while at the same time tying them all together through a sustained and wide-ranging analysis of Vergil’s relationship with prior literature and of the complex dualities that permeate each work. In Chapter 3, Smith examines the Eclogues in terms of “dialogue,” primarily between pairs of complementary and contrasting poems in the collection, but also between individuals within each poem and between Vergil and his predecessors, especially Theocritus. Using a series of readings of paired poems, Smith sensitively brings out the persistent presence of “two voices” throughout the Eclogues, illuminating the balance and tensions between rural/urban, male/female, life/death, and light/weighty poetry. He also touches briefly on Vergilian metapoetics, a topic that he takes up in greater depth in his fourth chapter on the Georgics. Here Smith analyzes the poem book by book through the theme of “wisdom,” especially poetry’s power to teach wisdom about common human experience. He maintains his focus on contrasting pairs and the balance of optimistic and pessimistic that he sketches in Chapter 3; rather than finding the same equilibrium displayed in the Eclogues, though, he shows that the narrative movement of the Georgics continually flows from positive to negative and back, highlighting the presence of both sides in human civilization. As with the preceding chapter, Smith keeps an eye on Vergil’s interactions with his predecessors, particularly Hesiod and Lucretius. In Chapter 5, Smith also analyzes the Aeneid book by book, paying special attention to the ways in which the theme of “mission” plays out in the poem and sets it apart from the Homeric epics. Vergil’s dualities remain a major interest of Smith’s here—Greek/Roman, Trojan/Italian, success/failure, heroism/humanity—but in place of the Eclogues’ balanced tension and the Georgics’ ebb and flow, Smith argues with clarity and nuance that the Aeneid works to reconcile these competing elements at it moves towards the telos of Rome’s founding.

These three studies can each be read individually with benefit and enjoyment, but much of their strength derives from the interesting ways in which Smith relates the poems to each other and to the three primary themes that he explores. Chapter 1 aims to set out some of these connections explicitly, though it manages this less successfully, as many of its sections are too compressed or vague (e.g., on Vergil’s “Model Reader,” whom Smith promotes as an ideal that readers should emulate but whose precise qualities he sketches only loosely), wander into relatively obscure and seemingly unconnected material (e.g., on Turcius Rufius Apronianus’ subscription in the Codex Mediceus), or require more knowledge than a novice reader would have (e.g., on Vergil’s poetic models). This last issue also detracts from Smith’s sketch of the historical Vergil in Chapter 2, which (quite refreshingly) avoids rehashing the standard narrative derived from the ancient vitae, but in doing so assumes the reader already knows a fair amount of this biographical information. His discussion of the socio-political context of the 1st century bce, however, is accessible and touches on many issues that are central to Chapters 3 through 5.

The real gem of this book comes in Chapter 6, where Smith offers a wonderfully concise and comprehensible overview of the Vergilian manuscripts with examples of textual problems that he teases out carefully to show why and how editors emend; teachers who wish to introduce textual criticism to advanced Latin students or to explain how Vergil got from ancient Rome to modern readers will find this section a superb resource. Chapter 7 rounds out the book with a rundown of some of the many ways in which Vergil’s work has influenced literature, visual art, music, and culture from his death up until today, with welcome nods to artists who rarely appear in Classical scholarship (e.g., Ursula LeGuin and the singer Dido), but as with Chapter 1’s outline of Vergil’s models, novice readers will likely struggle in the flood of unfamiliar names. Chapter 8 closes the volume with ample suggestions for further reading that will be especially useful for those teaching Vergil for the first time, including much readily accessible material that can be used to fill those gaps in Smith’s book that will present difficulties to newcomers to Vergil and Classical literature.

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A Roman Verse Satire Reader: Selections from Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. By Catherine C. Keane. Mundelein, Illinois: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 2010. Pp. xxvi + 142. Paper, $19.00. ISBN 978-0-86516-685-1.

A Martial Reader: Selections from the Epigrams. By Craig Williams. Mundelein, Illinois: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 2011. Pp. xxx + 185. Paper, $19.00. ISBN 978-0-86516-704-9.

Reviewed by Osman Umurhan, University of New Mexico

Keane and Williams offer engaging Latin readers that familiarize students with the distinct features of Latin satire and epigram and aim to advance the language-reading skills of Latin students at the intermediate level. They offer a varied range of selections (as the Latin Readers series prescribes), as well as a well-organized and elegant presentation of the material that exposes the delights of reading the genres of satire and epigram for the novice Latin reader. In addition, the readers do well at illuminating the challenges and rewards of their respective genre with accessible notes on major themes, language (grammar and syntax), some trends in major scholarship, vocabulary, suggested further reading, and other media (maps, illustrations, and occasional URL links to online content, such as to images of partially preserved multi-story buildings at Ostia and Herculaneum at www.vroma.org and an online map of Imperial Rome from William Shepherd’s Historical Atlas). In the following, I will offer some observations about each book separately, since Keane and Williams are ostensibly working on different authors and genres.

Keane’s introduction opens with a generous survey of the four canonical Latin satirists—Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal—that includes “characteristics of the genre,” a general overview of their works (and as they relate to her choice of selections), and an explanation of style and meter. Since a separate volume could easily be dedicated to each satirist, Keane expertly condenses the material by offering the student incisive remarks on important issues pertaining to all the satirists, including the satirists’ use of personae, reflections on social and political mobility (Lucilius and Juvenal), philosophical self-examination (Horace, Persius, and Stoic philosophy), expression (or suppression) of anger, and the use of rhetoric (sententiae, locus de saeculo) and mythology. In addition, what Keane’s Latin selections may overlook (e.g. Horace’s programmatic Satire 1.10 or Juvenal’s Satire 10) is adequately offset by larger discussions of specific satires that convey to the reader a fuller and more comprehensive sense of each author’s oeuvre.

Keane’s array of Latin selections also speaks well to her definition of the genre when she states that “It [satire] documents daily life and customs, reflects on historical events and figures, and articulates and scrutinizes particularly Roman values” (ix). Some selections include “A definition of virtue” (Lucilius, Satires, fragments 1196-1208), “Greed and its manifestations” (Horace, Satire 1.1.41-79), “The satirist’s philosophical and ethical roots” (Persius, Satire 5.21-51), and “Unchaste women on display” (Juvenal, Satire 6.60-102). The occasional map of Rome detailing its urban layout and of Italy, as well as a few illustrations of graffiti and sculptors of comic actors are a welcome addition as visual aids to the student’s understanding of Rome’s cityscape, its environs, and the culture’s artistic output. The commentary is also very useful to the student, with brief explanations headlining each selection that include: the content of the upcoming selection; thematic and/or literary echoes to other satires or selections in the reader itself (highlighted in bold font); and resonances with authors outside the genre proper. Moreover, Keane often in the notes supplements explanations of tricky grammar and syntax with references to Gildersleeve’s Latin Grammar (annotated as “GL”) and Bennet’s New Latin Grammar (“B”). I believe these markers can encourage students to acquaint themselves with more advanced supplementary grammar aids also necessary for those who continue Latin at the advanced levels and beyond. In the main, Keane’s reader offers a compact yet thorough introduction to the extensive Latin satiric tradition.

Williams’ Martial reader offers rich strategies for reading the author’s fifteen books of epigrams, with his choice of selections often acting as thematic “teasers” for the book as a whole. In the preface Williams states his desire to empower his reader to appreciate the reading of Martial cover to cover, unlike its traditional appreciation in the form of “bits and pieces” (ix) as light fare after the tough prose of a Cicero or Sallust. In this spirit, Williams, like Keane, offers in his Introduction a concentrated analysis of major components and issues informing a deep understanding of Martial. These topics consist of the author’s life, the work’s publication and manuscript tradition, the history of the genre of epigram (and its affinities with other existing Greek and Latin literary genres, such as the invective of the iambic tradition), Martial’s significant use of names, use of personae and the autobiographical “I”, and a very accessible guide to the scansion and reading of the elegiac couplet, phalaecian hendecasyllable, and scazon.

Most impressive is Williams’ “tips for reading” that encourage the reader to understand “questions of structure” beyond the reading of individual epigrams themselves. To this end Williams poses salient questions to the student when reading the epigrams, such as how the internal structure of the couplet (the hexameter and pentameter pair), and the couplet itself, either as a monodistich (two-line poem) or within an extended series, conveys sense and “progressions in thought and language.” It is also for this reason that Williams does not offer any introductory treatment before each selection in the commentary section, with a view to encouraging the student to “decipher and unpack” Martial’s language and style on her/his own terms. Where difficulties of sense or syntax arise (as they often do!), however, Williams offers ample assistance for clarification without either giving away any final punch lines or undermining the students’ reading and interpretive efforts. Williams offers a most valuable approach to reading Martial in this regard, one that many other commentaries geared towards intermediate readers would benefit from.

In sum, any intermediate student interested in these more challenging genres will greatly benefit from these well-executed, accessible, and affordable collections. My only minor reservation with these readers lies not with the commentators’ choices, but with the series’ restriction on the length of Latin that the commentator can treat (about 500-600 lines), which ostensibly precludes the examination of a satire or a book of epigrams in its entirety. The upshot to this, however, may lie in Keane’s suggestion to pair a look at the verse satirists with Martial’s Epigrams, in which case both Keane and Williams together would serve as an effective Latin commentary duo for any school or university term.

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Forgotten Stars: Rediscovering Manilius’ Astronomica. Edited by Steven J. Green and Katharina Volk. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xix + 342. Hardcover, £79.00/$150.00. ISBN 978-0-19-958646-2.

Reviewed by T. H. M. Gellar-Goad, Wake Forest University

(Table of contents available at http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/ acprof:oso/9780199586462.001.0001/acprof-9780199586462)

The late-Augustan didactic poet Manilius has largely been eclipsed in the passions of Anglophone classicists by his predecessors Lucretius and Vergil. This enlightening volume—a fusion of philosophical, epistemological, literary-critical, and reception-studies approaches—endeavors to correct course by gathering some of the luminaries of Latin poetry to put Manilius’ Astronomica under the telescope. From my vantage point: mission accomplished.

Space here allows only a brief flyby of the 17 contributions to this rich constellation of Manilian scholarship, while homing in on a few of the work’s brightest stars. Katharina Volk’s introduction gives a structured, thematic overview of prior scholarship, keyed to the current essays, while Elaine Fantham provides a perfunctory précis of Roman thoughts about celestial phenomena. Thomas Habinek, in a dense but worthwhile chapter, sets Astronomica up as evidence for diachronic change in Stoic physical theories, against the scholarly conventional wisdom of a static Stoic physics. Daryn Lehoux starts strong, discussing Manilius’ embrace of scientific and mythological explanations simultaneously (he’s a Stoic “consciously writing allegory,” 50) as an exemplar of ancient discourses of knowledge, but her conclusion is rather nebulous.

John Henderson, presenting Manilius in control of both material and poetics, undertakes a stellar m(i/a)croanalysis of a problematic early passage (1.215–46). No gravity here: all fun and eccentricity, showing systematic linkages between Manilian words and “worldview,” Hender.’s jargon playing up the artistic value of Manilius’. Discontinuity isn’t proof of failure in Manilius’ imagery—it is his imagery. Hend., as only He. can, blasts off on a journey t(hr)o(ugh) the cosmos, where we voyagers can observe new horizons of Maniliness and Manilian curiosity.

Wolfgang-Rainer Mann, on the same wavelength but a different trajectory, offers two instances (both focused on the didact’s implied student) where repositioning a supposed Manilian “contradiction” within the mindset of a sophisticated but non-expert Stoic resolves the issue. Mann and Henderson diverge from Volk, who sees Manilius’ contradictions as “the unintentional … by-product” of his using traditional discourses and metaphors (107)—like Lucretius, but on accident. Volk constructs a useful typology of Manilius’ inconsistencies and suggests that Roman readers may not have experienced them as such. But her argument is essentially that Manilius isn’t in control of his text—and while skirting the black hole of authorial intent, I’d say that such assessments seem inconsistent with this volume’s overarching spin on Manilius as a poet equal to his (Augustan) age.

Stephen Green’s sociopolitical reading of Manilius’ didaxis strikes me as the book’s zenith, its most provocative, innovative chapter. Green—reading, frankly, from his own subject-position—argues that Manilius deliberately constructs a lesson doomed to fail, a didactic addressee prone to despair and resistance. Why? “[T]o ensure that astrology remains an … ultimately inaccessible craft” (135), thus unthreatening to the Emperor. This resolution of the failure of Manilian didaxis is better than merely attributing it to poetic/authorial inadequacy, but I’m not yet persuaded that didactic failure equals “a subtle form of imperial propaganda” (138). Missing from Green’s argument: the “Mega nepios” anthology (MD 31) focused on the addressee in didactic, particularly Mitsis on the rocky relationship between the Lucretian didact and his addressee Memmius.

Wolfgang Hübner’s imagery study shows that Manilius’ carmen and res are very closely related—figura is both a stylistic device and an astronomical entity. Duncan Kennedy, like Lehoux, uses Astronomica as an instance of competing narratives in science historiography. He furthermore identifies Manilius’ thematic interest in “the power of mathematical ratio to realize Rome’s faltering imperial fantasy” (186). Patrick Glauthier’s well-executed word study shows Manilius depicting his poetry as the stars’ remuneration for their services (viz., influence on earthly affairs).

Monica Gale argues persuasively that formal set-piece digressions (e.g.: the Myth of Ages) become a characteristic feature of didactic in which any predecessor, not only the most recent, is (by “accretion,” 206) a valid intertext. Manilius’ “anthropology” inverts Hesiod, Lucretius, and Georgics while contrasting with Aratus; his plague and war scenes in late Book 1 invert Lucretius and extend Georgics; his version of the seasons links Roman imperium with stellar influence. All three digressions are, for Gale, markedly pro-Augustan. Josèphe-Henriette Abry (whose essay was posthumously revised by Green) sees Manilius’ Milky Way, digression on the lengths of days, and description of the inhabited world as modeled on or in dialogue with (respectively) the Forum Augustum, the Horologium, and the “Map” of Agrippa, all in an exhibition of ancestral virtue, worldly power, and imperium sine fine. In other words: cosmos reflects Roman empire. James Uden presents Manilius’ anomalously unerotic Andromeda epyllion as a “‘figurative space’, where themes and motifs from the poem can be explored and recombined in new, metaphorical forms” (236).

Enrico Flores, the first of a small-but-super cluster on the reception of Manilius, uses allusions to Astronomica in Claudian’s In Rufinum as evidence that Manilius was writing about Augustus while Augustus yet lived. Manilian verses praising Augustus serve as a fitting intertext for Claudian’s praise of the Augustus Honorius. Caroline Stark explores how Lorenzo Bonincontri and Giovanni Pontano use Manilius’ “anthropology” and epistemological views in reconciling deterministic astrology with Christian free-will doctrine. Stephan Heilen investigates Bonincontri’s modification of Manilius to make comets, though ill-omened, nevertheless a possible agent of positive moral change (by scaring people into better behavior). Heilen also produces a partial edition of Bonincontri’s commentary on his own De Rebus Naturalibus et Divinis.

All told, Forgotten Stars is an admirable collection that opens fruitful new pathways for inquiry into Manilius’ Astronomica. This book—like Manilius himself!—is required reading for scholars of ancient philosophy, didactic poetry, and Augustan literature.