Leisured Resistance: Villas, Literature and Politics in the Roman World by Michael Dewar

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 189 patron of Statius’ Silvae and Martial’s epigrams. The special contribution of this chapter is to show how complex the relationship is between art object, patron, poet, and reader. It will be clear from what precedes that this book offers fresh and innovative readings of Latin ecphrases. Whereas some readers may find the occasionally polemical tone in the sharp differentiation between ecphrasis as mode of social-historical discourse and as literary device unnecessary (e.g., 2, 82, 242), this series of essays presents a new approach to a much-studied topic and will reward the reader with numerous insights. University of Waterloo Riemer A. Faber Leisured Resistance: Villas, Literature and Politics in the Roman World. By Michael Dewar. London: Bloomsbury (Classical Essays Series). 2014. Pp. xiii, 130. In five elegantly written chapters, Dewar surveys Roman literature from the fall of the republic to fifth- and sixth-century Roman Gaul to determine attitudes about one of those well-recognized and integral elements of Roman upper-class society, the villa. Dewar’s is a discursive method that moves adroitly between prose and poetry selected from this broad span of time. He challenges the long-held perceptions articulated by Zanker, that “the phenomenon of the villa was originally a kind of social safety valve” (12) so that through private life and luxury an “already enfeebled” aristocracy could acquiesce to one-man rule (13). Rejecting such static explanations, Dewar carefully investigates his literary sources in context, to show that in each generation, the villa offered something beyond “mere vulgar ostentation and shallow escapism” (16). Every villa is at once similar and distinct. It has a particular owner in any given era, and subsequent owners with varying degrees of awareness of its history. At the same time, every villa also conforms to architectural, cultural, and social definitions and affords a space in which to exercise political power, distilled all the more by the villa’s very remoteness from the public sphere. Dewar’s chronological treatment of deep context allows us to see the development and reception of predecessors over time. By carefully analyzing the political and poetic forces at work, Dewar is able to demonstrate that the role of the villa in Roman society was more dynamic than has been generally recognized. Without an introduction, the book plunges into Chapter One, “Cicero and the Generals ,” which takes as its starting point an anecdote from Plutarch. Wanting to acquit himself of the sordid troubles between Cicero and Clodius, Pompey retreated to his villa in the Alban Hills, and when a desperate Cicero showed up on his doorstep, Pompey instructed his slaves to tell the guest that he was not home. Dewar detects similar behaviors in Seneca’s De Brevitate Vitae and Horace Epistle 1.5: wealthy men in high demand sneak out the back to avoid unwanted visitors. Further examples of those for whom the villa is “a private place where political activities were suspended” (3) include Domitian and Hadrian in the hills beyond Rome, Pliny and Nero on the Bay of Naples, and the different owners of the infamous villa at Bauli, from Hortensius, consul in 69 b.c.e., to Symmachus, whose letter to his father composed in 375 c.e. hints at Symmachus’ own connection to Bauli, either “through a dowry or a later inheritance” (11). To the generally held notion that “such estates were often primarily investments,” Dewar adduces Cicero 190 PHOENIX as witness that villas also offered “genuine repose, while also serving as an expensive means to advertise cultural capital” (15). Chapter Two, “Martial, Statius, and the Epicureans,” returns to Bauli, scene of the murder of Agrippina the Younger, one of Nero’s crimes which precipitated the Pisonian conspiracy. Yet resistance to the regime also took place in a villa, specifically when Seneca, accused of complicity in the plot, ended his life. To these episodes memorably narrated in Tacitus’ Annals, Dewar posits a third: the end of the Annals surely would have told of Nero’s death, which also occurred in a villa. Thus, when Dewar turns to the age of Domitian, “a generation later” (35), the poetry of Martial offers a much different paradigm. His...