BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 197 and I are in complete agreement that meter matters, or that it may at any moment matter, in our reading and interpretation. Harvard University Richard F. Thomas Freud's Rome: Psychoanalysis and Latin Poetry. By Ellen Oliensis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2009. Pp. xi, 148. Ellen Oliensis's book provides provocative, witty, and highly enjoyable analyses of themes we might consider “psychoanalytical” in the poetry of (mainly) Virgil, Catullus, and Ovid. Divided into three chapters (“Two Poets Mourning,” “Murdering Mothers,” and “Variations on a Phallic Theme”), plus Introduction and Afterword, Freud’s Rome does not evince a belief in Freudian theory—nor does it show complete scepticism either. Instead of psychoanalysing fictional characters in Latin poetry (a mode of reading favoured by psychoanalytic critics in the early and mid-twentieth century), in order to excavate their unconscious wishes (whether murderous or incestuous), Oliensis is interested in “the textual unconscious,” moments when the text seems to say something at odds to what appears to be the authorial voice/intention. Intriguingly, the textual unconscious erupts in Catullus, Virgil, and Ovid when issues of mourning, relationships between mother and child, and signification of sexual difference are addressed, issues which Freud himself analysed. Latin literary studies has recently benefited from ebullient psychoanalytic criticism from Michael Janan, Paul Allen Miller, and Erik Gunderson, work which Oliensis addresses . The scholarship of Gunderson, Janan, and Miller, however, is more informed by the seminars of Jacques Lacan. Oliensis’s return to Freud, then, offers a challenge to literary critics. But it is not Oliensis’s contention to defend Freud for his misogynistic, homophobic, and imperialist logic, but to show that Freud has got us interested in what we do when we mourn; what we think about our relationships with our mother; and how we understand sexual difference. Rather than trace Oliensis’s stimulating readings, let me consider just one in the first chapter on mourning, which examines this topic in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Catullus’ poetry. More precisely, “what will engage me in this chapter,” Oliensis writes, “is the way mourning infiltrates, as if without the mourner’s knowledge or consent, texts which are not officially ‘elegiac’ at all” (17). For example, in Catullus 65, a cover letter for Poem 66, the poet is “devoted to his dead brother, keeping him continually in view, and yet sailing away, abandoning him at the lapping margin of Lethe” (29). Catullus’ poetry anticipates Freud’s insights into what it means to mourn. Oliensis’s analyses are most fun when she attends closely to the texture of the Latin (as she does continually through the book). So she reads (30) the simile that closes 65: But even so, in the midst of this overwhelming sorrow, Hortalus, I send you this translation of Callimachus, lest perchance you should think your words, entrusted in vain to the shifting winds, have slipped my mind, as when an apple, sent as a lover’s secret gift, rolls out of a maiden’s innocent lap, the apple she put, poor forgetful thing, under her delicate dress, and which is shaken out when she jumps up at her mother’s approach; and it races headlong in slanting downward course, while she feels the conscious blush wash across her sad cheeks. (Catull. 65.15–24) Oliensis eloquently argues that this “Callimachean apple bears the burden not just of the poem but of the forgetting that is entailed in producing the poem: the apple carries (the 198 PHOENIX aborted memory, the cast-off image of) the brother” (31). Intriguingly, “what matters for my [Oliensis’s] purposes is that everything takes place as if the simile took Catullus as unawares as the apple takes the girl” (32). The apple drops out of the mindless girl’s lap, just as the poem for Hortalus (Poem 66) emerges out of Catullus’ mind, despite forgetting to mourn for his dead brother. Remembering Hortalus entails forgetting his brother. The apple does not just represent the fruit of his poetry, but also how he must forget his brother in order to produce his poetry. But Oliensis does not seek to locate a psychological secret in Catullus’ unconscious which the text might...