BOOK REVIEWS 381 Whenever one publishes, one risks the misfortune of being too early for important new material. Theozotides’ decree for the sons of dead democrats (but not his proposal attacked in a speech by Lysias) is attributed to the first restoration rather than the second by A. P. Matthaiou:1 in one footnote Shear notes the forthcoming publication and expresses doubt but does not know Matthaiou’s arguments. Shear builds a good deal on the decree of Demophantus and other documents quoted in Andoc. 1, but a strong attack on the authenticity of those documents will be made by E. M. Harris and M. Canevaro,2 and if that attack is judged successful some of her points will be undermined. There is still room,then,for further discussion, but this is a good book which containsmuch worthy of discussion,and it deserves a warm welcome. P. J.RHODES University of Durham,p.j.rhodes@durham.ac.uk * * * Roman Landscape: Culture and Identity. By Diana SPENCER. Greece & Rome New Surveys inthe Classics, no. 39. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press for the Classical Association, 2011. Pp xvi + 236; figs. 1–20 (6–20 in color).£14.99/$21.99. Diana Spencer’s new contribution to this on-going Classical Association series combines broad topical coverage of her subject with searching theoretical inquiries into its conceptual meaning within the culture of Roman intellectual and practical life. As a term for the verbal comprehension of space and environment Spencer’s “landscape” is not a simple equivalent of either entity, but, more broadly , a perceptual interaction of ancient Romankind with nature and the inhabited world. Roman landscapes meet us in a variety of written and pictorial forms, alternatively urban and rural, some wild and untamed, some strictly ordered, some as the obvious products of idealizing fantasy, some advertizing their laborious cultivation. Many seem infused with symbolic values that bear upon current political ideology, cultural memory, Roman self-fashioning. Spencer’s six chapters develop these ideas through examination of literary representations drawn from 1 A.P. Matthaiou, Τὰ ἐν τῆι στήληι γεγραµµένα(Athens,2011) 71–81. 2 E. M.Harris &M. Canevaro,“The Documents in Andocides’ On the Mysteries,” CQ n.s. 62 (2012),forthcoming. 382 BOOK REVIEWS Varro, Horace, Vergil, Columella, Pliny and Statius and, in the material sphere, examples from painted representations of the late Republic and early Augustan period as well as archeological reconstructive treatments of the lost gardens of Sallust on the Pincian and Pompey’s theater porticus. Given, however, that the very conceptualization of landscape is a post-classical creation of European writers and artists, Spencer occasionally reminds us how the visions of North European and Romantic painters have shaped our aesthetic preconceptions while such Roman testimonies as that of the Younger Pliny’s descriptions of his two villas have served as models for the design of European aristocratic and public parks and gardens, such as the ordered prospects of Kensington or the sculpture enriched fountains and alcovesofthe VillaSciarra. In her introduction Spencer draws upon several recent theoretical discussions of perception and spatial dynamics to establish the semiotic context. She lays out two comprehensive categories of Roman landscape awareness: landscapes of poetic imagination that conduce to aesthetic pleasure and those of the agricultural countryside that come to figure in the ideological self-definition of Roman character, yet the two categories allow for overlap which is to say that the fertile prospects developed by Roman agronomy can possess their own versions of idealized beauty. In the following chapter the prototype for aesthetic appreciation and the tradition of the so-called locus amoenus is Socrates’ stroll with Phaedrus by the extra-urban River Ilissus. Echoes of this evocative scenario appear in the garden ambience of Epicurean philosophers and the Roman design of the philosophical garden which, in Cicero’s dialogues, often becomes a setting for discussion of hot issues in contemporary politics. Aesthetics, however do not disappear from consideration with this chapter but remain the informing spirit of “Those Happy Fields” which explores a literary union of pastoral imagination with idealization ofthe real countryside in late Republicanpoetryand agronomicwriting. The chapter entitled “Time and Motion” shows landscape as a structure to be realized progressively through narrative, whose paradigmatic...