sehepunkte 12 (2012), Nr. 7/8

Diana Spencer: Roman Landscape

This short book presents case studies drawn from the first centuries BCE and CE, with a brief "Envoi" on Hadrian's Villa. The theme that unites them is the polymorphous term "landscape". Because analyzing the many faces of landscape means adopting a multi-faceted approach, this book begins with a preface defining a melange of cocktail-party words, including autarky and entropy, isovist, ontological and scopophilia, among others. Spencer uses them to make a very interesting contribution to the rhetoric of landscapes in the late Republican and early imperial period.

Chapter 1 ("Introduction") begins by discussing Marc Augé's ethnological approach to place, which helps conceptualize the ways in which people recognize themselves in their surroundings. It then turns to discussions of phenomenology and social memory although treatment of the latter is limited largely to Pierra Nora. A general reader will appreciate the fact that this theoretical grounding is not meant to be exhaustive. The author quickly pivots to points of more cultural specificity.

Considering a letter of Cicero, for example, written to Atticus from Puteoli in April of the year Caesar's demise, she suggests that the locus amoenus trope deployed by the orator "conjure[s] up a range of cultural anxieties that add ethical chiaroscuro to the light and shade of pastoral's typical landscape" (11). In deliberating between an appreciation for the hills or the pleasure of the seaside promenade, Cicero, she suggests, is giving voice to an intensely political dilemma: Should he ally himself with the consuls, including Antony, or throw his lot behind the faction of Brutus? In this reading, the rhetoric of landscape serves as a tool for framing present concerns. Some bibliography on Cicero's letters, or Latin epistolary conventions, might have helped to support the argument.

The second chapter treats "Landscape and Aesthetics" and emphasizes the ways in which writers use these ideas to construct a moral vision. Catullus 61 uses the abundance of Mount Helicon and its organized garden of springs and grottoes to goad the reader to reflect upon fertility and marriage and "how best to foster a positive relationship between individual and collective" (24). Statius uses the topography of Rome in Silvae 2.3 to bring out a tension between tamed and untamed nature. As the nymph Pholoë runs through a prequel version of the first-century capital, her course "straddles a range of semiotic systems": from the monstrous realm of Cacus, later memorialized by the eponymous Palatine steps, to the farmland of the Quirinal, built up with insulae and domus. Here, Spencer suggests, the rhetoric of landscape helps to capture the "ethical chiaroscuro" that falls between social control and unbridled wilderness. I myself wonder whether the gray areas might have deserved a little more comment. A trip through the Quirinal in late Flavian Rome involved coming face to face not only with the hill's domiciles but with the Templum Gentis Flaviae, a monument which Statius mentions elsewhere (Silv. 4.2.60, 4.3.18-19, and 5.1.240). A prominent part of the landscape, its meaning no doubt had some significance to the poet and his readers.

The third chapter confronts the "artificial quality" of the tamed-untamed trope (30). Here, Spencer is right to draw attention to the "contrived extremes of agricultural and urban life" that pop up frequently in "late Republican discourse" (32). Varro's discussion of farming, for example, has much to offer the social and cultural historian about the construction of elite male Roman identity. Works of Cato, Virgil, Columella and Varro all, in fact, repay new reading when set against the ideas of Roman city life which lurk behind their texts. In this short but evocative chapter, Spencer touches upon the vibrant debate about "traditional Roman values" that occupied so many writers of the late Republic and informed their ideas of citizenship and identity (46).

Chapter four begins with some of the most opaque language of the book: "A combination of memory and experience, plus a landscape's signs, routes and axial lines, enable [sic] us to make meaningful connections between landmarks, nodes, and isovists" (49). What follows is reading of Aeneid 8 which contrasts the world as Aeneas sees it with the landscape of an Augustan reader. A treatment of Statius Silvae 4.3.20-26, praising the construction of a new "superhighway", the Via Domitiana, complements the Vergilian reading of space, time, and movement (56).

The final two chapters are the most substantial. Chapter 5 offers a look at "Italy and the Villa Estate". A rhetorical question helps focalize an essential point: "Did typical Romans ever really prefer the self-denying virtue that conservative and elite mores valorized?" (78) Summarizing recent archaeological work on the symbiotic nature of town and countryside, Spencer concludes that late Republican maiores are much more "reactionary" than descriptive. I believe that she is right.

The balance of Chapter 5 examines the role of landscape rhetoric in the "Roman literary imagination" (101). The result is a compelling look at how writers used these concepts to fashion ideas of what it meant to be Roman. The inclusion of a model of Pliny's Laurentian villa represents an admirable attempt to show how material culture can illuminate the process of identity formation. An early 20th century "imaginative reconstruction", the model is replete with "formally planted garden" and helps Spencer evoke a "Technicolor world [...] where everything is a little more like itself than reality admits" (114-15). The image may work for a general reader, but specialists will know that the owner of the villa at Palombara and its reconstruction are far from certain. It might have been worth while to broaden the discussion by including mention of other residences along the coast, such as that at Castel Porziano. A look at Carlo Pavolini's Ostia (2006) could have been useful.

Chapter 6 incorporates material evidence more substantially. Here, the author analyzes paintings from the Villa Farnesina and Villa of Livia at Primaporta, among others. Spencer is at her most insightful when she shows how the painted world of the Villa Farnesina provided a highly visible contrast to the world beyond the windows. Traffic on the Tiber, pedestrian traffic on the nearby Pons Agrippae, and the comings and goings of the naval arsenal all made for a bustling environment outside the villa walls (150). The paintings, in short, have a highly rhetorical component that shaped the reality of those who interacted with them. I think Spencer could have stressed this dynamic aspect of material culture more forcefully throughout her examples. There are many works, such as Alfred Gell's Art and Agency (1998), that could have provided guidance and given the treatment of material culture a greater theoretical foundation.

Overall, however, this book will speak to many readers. Specialists on the rhetoric of late Republican and early imperial period will find Spencer's treatment of Latin literature highly stimulating. Students and researchers seeking an introduction to landscape studies will find a helpful set of case studies drawn from the classical world while historians and archaeologists will find a useful discussion of how landscapes can contribute to the study of what it meant to be Roman in the first centuries BCE and CE.