Bettina Reitz-Joosse's gripping and innovative study of Roman literary representations of construction processes probes how texts work to commemorate building(s) and themselves. This fascinating book bridges more culturally and/or intermedially attuned approaches to literature and those teasing out the intricacies of Latin metapoetics, valuably enriching both. R.-J.'s main focus is on literary reflections (and distortions) of dominant perspectives on how building takes place, but this work should stimulate further attention to the representational dynamics of occlusion in both physical construction and literary production.
An engaging Introduction frames the topic, surveying past approaches and laying out the book's blueprints — an appealingly diversified row of case studies progressing, roughly, from more tangible to most poetological. Preliminary visits to real and literary re-construction sites (in Lower Manhattan, on the Capitoline) suggest powerful links between ancient and modern memorialising tendences that will resurface.
Ch. 1 shows how ‘madeness’ is built into physical monuments, and their literary portraits, and how both shape reception. First, inscriptions spell it out: Trajan's Column moved a mountain, say its words; complex operations get summed up with a curt, authorising fecit (etc.), patronage/ownership trumping others’ labour. Even in the Novara baths inscription and Nonius Datus’ cippus the detail redounds to the credit of those in charge. Second, reliefs draw the gaze: inscriptions trumpet the victorious raising of ‘Theodosius’’ obelisk, but its reliefs direct viewers to join the imperial grandstand and (re-)watch the monumental erection; the Haterii Tomb commemorates construction with its protruding crane; the Basilica Aemilia frieze shows an ancestor Aemilius(?) on the job: a builder's (i.e. manager's) portrait; Trajan's Column's scenes deploy ranks of serene Roman (base-)masons against ragtag Dacians scrambling with would-be walls, the re-imaging of turf-chunks as opus quadratum obliquely touting the new Forum's dazzle. Third, literature can cooperate, even outdo: Caesar bridged the Rhine, no sweat (he proclaims) — no bridge remains; Pliny commemorates the wondrous triumph of obelisk transport, dutifully recording Augustus’ dedication of the ship that hauled his first Egyptian pillar to Puteoli — it burned; Ammianus’ Constantius II is made to go one better, snagging the obelisk that got away in Heliopolis, committing no sacrilege whatsoever, and hoisting it aloft for all Rome/the world to see.
Ch. 2 deftly investigates this material-textual interface as applied to an unwieldy, and most drawn out, ‘Big Dig’, the draining of the Fucine Lake, initiated by Claudius (eventually completed by a nineteenth-century prince). For Romans, did this practically invisible engineering marvel/assault on nature succeed? The debate's terms are set by an opposition between cynical Tacitus (unhinged Nero-Xerxes failing to channel Avernus to Ostia) and sanguine Pliny (economic opportunity piped into Bithynia). Material representations celebrate the Fucine project's value, e.g. an inscription plugging Trajanic renovation, the Torlonia panel's pleasant lake-village panorama with proudly showcased capstans. But literature tends to descry ‘boondoggle’. For Pliny, the project simply defies description: panegyric difficultas? But Tacitus supplies the missing spectacularity by dramatising Claudius’ disastrous engineering ‘victory games’: assaulted nature strikes back, unmastered. Suetonius first says, ‘Mission Accomplished’, adducing Pliny's conspicuously absent metrics, but then restages Tacitus’ naumachia as a farce starring clownish Claudius.
The book's phase two (chs 3–5) locks onto literary building's most poetological aspects. It's a sturdy-yet-sleek composite: city-foundation, construction aesthetics, the mythical wall-charmer Amphion. Breaking ground with Greek architectural metapoetics, ch. 3 initiates an intertextual archaeology of Latin poetological city-building — a rewarding test pit. First, twinned, over-the-top Manilian similes unveil a concerted attempt to reclaim, by reworking Virgilian building blocks, an ‘epic’ theme of city foundation for (astronomical) didactic. Next, Propertius’ (4.1) pious verse-walls emulate Romulus’ physical ones (like Augustan rebuilding), and his novel Roman elegy ‘rises’ like resurrected Troy. Last, re-readings of the Aeneid's unfulfilled city-foundations (including implicitly Rome's) buttress the post-Virgilian pair's claims, metapoetically, to complete the epic's unfinished work.
Statius is R.-J.'s special guide through two more chapters on metapoetic construction. Sharp readings of the Silvae's ‘engineered’ memory of the building process of three monuments — Domitian's equestrian statue (1.1), Pollius Felix's Hercules temple (3.1), the Via Domitiana (4.3) — mark out the panegyric stress on speed, noise, divine support and harnessing nature, features then reanalysed programmatically. Statius is indeed ‘laying it on with a trowel’ (Hercules works construction, Pollius’ quasi-Epicurean ‘great spirit’, magno pectore, now the god's heavy-lifting ‘big chest’), but also demonstrating a showy new poetics: construction speed also figures this extemporiser's arch reversal of the Roman-Callimachean ideal of years-long composition; building-site racket also blares Statius’ big/loud sound (Hercules will join in, grande sonabit, as builder-bard, getting down on the bowstring turned gutbucket). The ‘double recusatio’ uncovered here is enticing, and valuably complicates ‘Lumber’'s poetics. Ch. 5 spotlights the Thebaid's Amphion to size up its myth of the poet as wall-building civiliser. The groundwork is laid with a survey of Greek and Roman Amphion(s) — Euripides-Apollonius-Horace seemingly under his spell, but tragic Seneca adumbrating those bewitched walls’ ultimate collapse. Thence R.-J.'s acute cross-sectional readings of the Thebaid's glimpses of Amphion tell a tale of poetic fortification's inevitable downfall — yet Statius’ ‘un-founding’ of Amphionic Thebes lets him rise above his (own) mythic prototype.
The Conclusion faces a spectre haunting Roman ‘madeness’: destruction. Literary monuments, besides outlasting their architectural analogues (Tacitus’ historical ‘obituary’ of the torched Capitoline Jupiter temple, a textual rebuilding), can flip demolition's and construction's values. Pliny's Panegyricus reenacts the (transitory) melting-down of Domitian's statues, memorialising damnatio memoriae as a quasi-purificatory rite. Metaliterarily, Pliny's sculpture-felling also performs a hatchet job on Statius’ (panegyric) statue of Silv. 1.1, panning his (un)Horatian conceit that both would stand the test of time.
An eye-opening Epilogue braves discomfort to revisit Roman construction's afterlife during the ventennio fascista. R.-J. tracks the regime's wall-to-wall coverage of rebuilding projects through a flood of media, highlighting eerie continuities alongside a distinct emphasis on bodily participation (Mussolini himself pictured getting his hands dirty). The Fascist construction of romanità is examined unflinchingly via the obsessively memorialised extraction, hauling and erection of the 300-tonne monolith honouring Mussolini dux (still standing in Rome, unlike the looted Axum Stele, returned to Ethiopia in 2008). A revealing look at the accessory Latin Codex Fori Mussolini traces the reception/misappropriation of Roman strategies of textual commemoration.
