Latin literature

Abstract

As always, it is hard to do justice to the many intriguing books that came out over the past months. I will try to give an overview of at least a few of them, from Republican literature over two imperial ‘Classics’, the Aeneid and the Fasti, over Ps.-Quintilian's Declamations and Apuleius, fourth and fifth-century commentaries, all the way to a lesser-known work from the fifteenth century. Let us start, however, with an exciting volume on ‘Roman Law and Latin Literature’, edited by Ioannis Ziogas and Erica Bexley. In their introduction, the two editors sketch out the relationship between law and literature, emphasizing the points of contact and the intricate relationship between the two. While the Law and Humanities movement, they argue, has been so far strongly focused on law, with literature playing an ancillary role, Ziogas and Bexley aim to redress that balance ‘by showing how literature anticipates, imitates, supplants or complements law's role in constituting rules and norms’ (3). The contributions in the volume cover a wide range of authors, from Naevius, Plautus, and Terence to Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, and Lucan. With her discussion of the role Latin literature played in shaping Roman concepts of legality, in the absence of a codified constitution, Michèle Lowrie provides a very good starting point to the volume, one that a couple of other contributors keep referring back to. There is a chapter on the jurist Marcus Antistius Labeo by Matthijs Wibier, Nora Goldschmidt traces the emergence of the Foucauldian author function in the interaction between law and literature in third-century bc Rome, and John Oksanish argues that Cicero, in De oratore (‘On the Orator’), adopts the theoretical and terminological frameworks of Roman property law to authorize the orator's power over various domains, a strategy also adopted by Vitruvius, to mention just a few of the topics covered. The concluding paper is a thought-provoking piece by Nandini Pandey, comparing Roman and American legal and literary practices around freedom, opportunity, and (in)equality.