Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept by William Fitzgerald

Abstract

374 BOOK REVIEWS MARGARETHA KRAMER-HAJOS Dartmouth College, Margaretha.T.Kramer.Hajos@dartmouth.edu * * * * * Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept. By WILLIAM FITZGERALD. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. 240. Hardcover, $55.00. ISBN-13: 978-0226 -29949-5 Evoking the triple triumph held by Octavian after the battle of Actium, Vulcan’s shield in Aeneid 8 displays multiple ethnic groups in a wondrous and variegated array drawn from the far corners of empire. Such assortment highlights the Roman concept of variety as both an aesthetic and a political idea, an ancient precursor to our modern concept of diversity. Rich in such examples, William Fitzgerald’s book, Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept, offers a deeply engaging exploration of the classical roots and manifestations of varietas as an idea that circulates in multiple, overlapping discourses of antiquity— philosophical, imperial, aesthetic, linguistic—with a force-field that continues to shape contemporary thought. With a far-ranging discussion that begins with nuanced philological probing of the semantic fields of varius, including its Greek brethren (e.g. poikilos, daidalos), Fitzgerald unpacks the manifold ways that the ‘varietas complex’ radiates through different genres, authors, tropes, and historical periods. The reader encounters patchwork juxtapositions that exemplify varietas not only as the subject of Fitzgerald’s book but also as a principle organizing his selective analyses. Through five chapters, an introduction, and conclusion, Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept provides provocative readings of disparate texts that call attention to a neglected aesthetic vision inherited from antiquity. The introduction lays out the “why” of the book, challenging the normative critical pursuit of formal ‘unity’ in the works of classical authors, and advocating instead for a principle of “non-assimilation” or an aesthetics of variety that eschews balance and embraces the rhetorical abundance of copia. Chapter 1 excavates the rich veins of Greek and Latin meanings that run through words etymologically or semantically connected to the ‘varietas complex’ in passages of English poetry, including Matthew Arnold, Shakespeare, Pope, and Louis MacNeice. Classical authors—Cicero, Catullus, Ovid, Horace, Vergil and Plautus—serve to explicate and display such semantic range, with a focus on the visual and phenomenological meanings of varius and its kin. In the second chapter on “Variety’s Context,” Fitzgerald gives an erudite and hopscotch overview of scholarly, philosophical and artistic defenses and BOOK REVIEWS 375 formulations of variety, exploring particularly the conceptual nexus of varietas, nature, human artistry, and God. Displaying a masterful and varied range of his own, Fitzgerald juxtaposes the role of varietas in the theodicies of Christian texts with Vergil’s deployment of the concept in the first Georgic. Questions of aesthetic pleasure in relation to varietas dominate the rest of the chapter, with analysis of its temporal dimension as a corrective to boredom and satietas, and its visual aspect, often expressed in metaphors of jewels or mosaics, as ultimately an aesthetics of political diversity; thus, Flaubert’s Salammbo evokes ethnic variegation as a brilliant multiplicity symbolized by the heterogeneous sparkle of precious stones. Further examples drawn from contemporary art, whether the Haida sculpture of Bill Reid or the video installations of Nam June Paik, as analyzed by Fredric Jameson, demonstrate the relevance of varietas as a concept with a claim on our multicultural society. This chapter puts to rest any doubt that such classical concepts persist as hermeneutic lenses for self-reflection. Chapter 3 homes in on three specific Latin authors, Pliny the Younger, Lucretius, and Horace, to examine how they engage variety as an aesthetic principle that shapes the world-view of their texts. Here, Fitzgerald eschews the wide-ranging analysis and broad scope of the previous chapters and focuses in depth on varietas as a textual strategy. For Pliny, it serves to alleviate the anxiety of a single pursuit, reinforcing provisionality and intermittency as characteristics of the elite life (88). Lucretius, in turn, prizes variety as nature’s abundance, or copia (recalling, as Fitzgerald indicates, the connection with Ciceronian rhetoric). The Epicurean author’s analogies between the multiple permutations of language and the variously arranged atoms of the universe are provocatively set against the verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The discussion of Horace in this chapter...