Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic by J. Farrell and D. Nelis

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 363 to the Seleucids on the part of the Mauryans, since it was sealed with a dynastic marriage , an act which has been connected by some to a vassal relationship.3 Reinforcing this view is the fact that Chandragupta relinquished 500 elephants to Seleucus i as part of the treaty, which might be understood as a payment of tribute. A parallel can be found in the anabasis of Antiochus iii, who in ca 210–208 b.c. recognized the rule of Euthydemus i over Bactria in exchange for a dynastic marriage and tribute in the form of elephants (cf. Polyb. 11.34, 8–10). As for Megasthenes’ Indika, there is nothing in it that specifically suggests that the Seleucids had given up any claims to India. Indeed, as Kosmin himself acknowledges, such ethnographic descriptions are usually viewed as an expression of colonial domination (53–54), so the reader is left wondering why Megasthenes ’ Indika stands as the lone exception to this tradition. For Kosmin’s argument to succeed here, there needs to be empirical evidence in support of his interpretation of the Indus Treaty and its relationship to Megasthenes’ Indika, but none is provided. More startlingly, after describing the ideological meaning of Seleucid royal travel itineraries as acts intended to constitute sovereign space, Kosmin acknowledges that “there is simply not enough information to examine in detail the transformations in meaning of kings’ travels over the empire’s almost two and a half centuries” (179), although this is precisely what he has done throughout Chapters Five and Six. What Kosmin gives the reader is a thoughtful exegesis of the rather scant evidence for Seleucid claims to territorial sovereignty over their vast domains. If his interpretation at times lacks empirical contextualization, this is largely due to the fragmentary state of the evidence itself. However, Kosmin’s use of the “Spatial Turn” as a lens to examine some of the ways the Seleucid kings created and exercised political sovereignty as strangers in a strange land is, on the whole, a valuable contribution to Seleucid scholarship. Nipissing University Richard Wenghofer Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic. Edited by J. Farrell and D. Nelis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. Pp. xi, 393. This volume of fifteen essays probes how Augustan poetry remembers the republican past. This indirect question inspires its own questions: how are we to understand “how,” as means or manner? What do we, or they, mean by “republican”—a set of events (which years?), a form of government, or a way of life? What do we mean by “Augustan” poetry, or by “remembers”? The conference that gave rise to this volume (Fondation Hardt, Geneva 2007) surely brimmed with lively conversation, and the resulting volume is extraordinarily nuanced in suggesting answers and further questions. The editors’ introduction and Alain Gowing’s afterword each thematize the papers in fruitful, though different ways. Several themes emerge, each of which I will treat in turn. The first theme is periodization. Several papers grapple with how Augustan authors and readers divided the past into eras. Damien Nelis’s “Past, Present, and Future in Virgil’s Georgics” stands out here, as he explores “Virgil’s construction of narrative trajectories and temporal patterns,” which make “the experience of reconstructing the linear progression of historical time a vital part of the experience of reading the text” (249). In 3 R. Strootman, Courts and Elites in the Hellenistic Empires: The Near East After the Achaemenids (Edinburgh 2014) 93–95. 364 PHOENIX “Catullus 64 and the Prophetic Voice,” Gail Trimble traces how the speaker of Eclogue 4 garners authority by blending the voice of the narrator and the fates of Catullus 64. Virgil’s prophetic voice, foretelling a new golden age, can be counted as reliable because of that authority; this golden age is as certain as the now-confirmed prophesies in Catullus 64. Trimble’s paper explores how looking back can structure looking forward, but it relies on some formulations that are perhaps misleadingly simple, particularly, that blended authority is greater authority, and that Virgil’s optimism overwrites Catullus’ pessimism. Monica Gale, in “Virgil’s Caesar: Intertextuality and Ideology,” also deals with periodicity by examining the variety of...