Matthew Fox, Roman Historical Myths . The Regal Period in Augustan Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) 269 pp. $65.00; ISBN 019-815020-2.

Fox's book is part of the Oxford Classical Monograph Series and, therefore, is based on a doctoral thesis in Literae Humaniores. Like most dissertations, published or unpublished, it is a mixed bag: there are some perceptive formulations and insights, while other parts of the discussion fall short of that standard. As so often, it is the issues that guarantee continuing discussion, and Fox's treatment of them at least is a contribution that can't simply be brushed off.

To take the perspective most relevant to this journal: the regal period was a matter of reception for the Romans throughout the Republic and the early principate. Peter Wiseman's recent book on Remus is an exemplary illustration of the vagaries of such historical myths and of the influences and circumstances that shaped their reception over time. This perspective is largely missing in Fox's monograph, who begins with Cicero and then discusses Dionysius, Livy, Propertius' Book 4, and Ovid's Fasti; strictly speaking, then, not all pertinent passages from Augustan literature are being analyzed. As a result, the treatments of the regal period by the various authors that are included appear as givens and Fox discusses them either as such or in the general Augustan context. The reception vacuum is not filled by Chapter 2, "Some Theoretical Considerations," especially if "theory" comprises the references to Hayden White and Gadamer that leave hardly any traces throughout the rest of the book. There are some useful methodological remarks, however, on current orthodoxy about matters Augustan, plus a sensible one-sentence definition of the book's aim: "It is in part the purpose of this book to assemble what are the very varied accounts of the regal period without subjecting them to a unifying model" (p. 42).

What could have been put usefully into this chapter, however, is a central issue that undulates throughout this book without ever being channelled into any precise direction, i.e. the distinction and overlap between myth and history. Fox is well aware that modern categorizations can only be anachronistic and he knows of recent sophisticated work, like Graf's, that does some justice to the nuances of the phenomenon. The boundary between history and myth in Greco-Roman times was extremely fluid and its discussion would have benefitted from a more inclusive perspective. Since the theme is recurrent and Fox is perfectly capable of dealing intelligently with some of its particulars, such as Dionysius' markedly different perspective from Polybius', a concise analysis of both problem and methodology would have been helpful instead of leaving them at loose ends. The discussion of Livy's animadversions on the subject lacks grip, and ad hoc definitions like "[Ovid's] inclusion of Servius . . . responds to the fact that his historical tradition was contaminated by myth" (p. 209) just do not make a lot of sense in view of the constant fusion of the two spheres. One of the functions of Greco-Roman myth, as has been recognized by writers from Michael Grant to Claude Calame, was precisely the historical one. Fox sometimes comes close to seeing more "history" in the prose authors and more "myth" in the poets, but he knows better and concludes that they all were trying to close "the gap between the mythical and the historical" (p. 235). Some of us would argue that this gap was smaller than the mythical missile gap between the U.S. and Russia during the history of the Cold War.

The quality of the individual chapters varies. The attention to Cicero is most welcome not because Cicero is necessarily the precursor of the "ideology" of the Augustan principate, but because the transition from the late Republic to the Augustan dispensation was marked by less demarcation than later centuries have been prone to posit. Fox has some good observations on the idealized princeps, especially in the context of the post-Gracchan Republic, though they could have been greatly enhanced by reference to the works of Lepore and Wickert. Similarly, as for the apprehension of Augustan perspectives, the absence of any mention of Peter White's fundamental book is startling. This again leads to some muddled perspectives. On the one hand, Fox succinctly articulates his concern about trends of scholarship that are as fashionable as they are woeful: "The anti-authorian stance assumed in the descriptions of a dissenting Augustan literary counter-culture has become something of an orthodoxy, with a disagreeable tendency to enforce a premature ending of interpretation, and a habit of measuring all kinds of literary utterance against one standard: literary artists were uncomfortable under autocracy" (p. 42). Or, further along on the same page: "It strikes me as one of the most enduring difficulties of modern classical scholarship that it has attempted to assimilate the insights of more adventurous disciplines, but has remained fixated on the matter of authorship. Work on individual authors still to a very large extent occupies the central ground within the discipline" and, one might add, a disproportionate number of course offerings of graduate programs in particular. Yet, in the end, Fox resurrects the old dichotomies and clichés in his Conclusion: the individual voice of the poet versus the political sphere, the "bleaker version of Rome's development" versus "the ideology of the pax Augusta, that multimedia demonstration that Augustan Rome was the culmination of all history," the "pessimistic view" versus "the dominant version," and so on. The interpretive solution to all this constructed bafflement is the familiar cant of irony; "irony" and "ironic" occur six times within the short space of pages 232-233. A sensible case can be made, however, that the reason for the timeless appeal of the Augustan poets has precious little to do with the notion that their creativity was one-dimensional and consisted mostly of the manufacture of irony. Contradictions were a hallmark of the Augustan age and we are better off letting them stand than either to tidy them up or label them with shallow sobriquets.

As always, however, there is enough food for thought. Fox's lengthy chapter on Dionysius is a good complement to Gabba's recent book as it views the Antiquitates Romanae from a larger perspective than Asianism vs. Atticism. Fox is attentive to the character of Dionysius' audience, i.e. Greeks, and to his moralistic purposes. A fundamental theme surfaces, but is disrupted by the length of the discussion: Rome in the age Augustus is returning to her early virtues and since the earliest Romans were Greeks, they are, in fact, Greek virtues. Consciousness of them was never lost because Dionysius, in a passage helpful for heightening modern awareness of multiculturalism in ancient Rome, emphasizes that Rome evolved by the incorporation of her former enemies and slaves (1.9.4); many of these, of course, were of Greek descent.

As for Propertius Book 4, Fox commendably stresses the experimental nature of that collection of poems: "Early Rome provides the material from which the poetic experiments of book 4 are fashioned" (p. 181). Fox is right in rejecting the narrow view of Propertius' departure in terms of subversiveness, though he still buys-too much, in my opinion-into the perceived fundamentalism of that departure, ignoring some previous experiments especially in Book 3. Similarly, and this also applies to his chapter on Ovid, he uncritically accepts the premise of "the requirements of the genre," which supposedly are at variance with the "historical" subjects. Such notions would benefit from greater scrutiny. Genrezwang has become another convenient hermeneutic crutch, but the case for its validity in Roman elegy is a particularly good example of its shaky foundations. We are dealing with a phenomenon limited both in time and in the number of authors. The perspective of reception is more than apropos and has been astutely formulated by Ruurd Nauta in connection with bucolic poetry. Genre is a matter of reception and develops through reception. The literary work that is the first example of a genre ipso facto comes into being when that genre does not yet exist: "Erst wenn sich ihm andere Werke anschließen, entsteht eine "historische Familie," deren "Familienähnlichkeiten" zunächst davon bestimmt werden, welche Merkmale des ersten Werkes die späteren Werke aufgreifen. Anders ausgedrückt: die Gattung und auch die gattungshafte Identität des ersten Werkes entstehen erst in einem Prozeß der Rezeption."¹ Are we justified to use the term genre, let alone postulate that it exerted inherent pressures, for the poetry of the elegists whose explorative differences are larger than their similarities?

In the end, then, Fox's book does not break much new ground. It is a sensible antidote to the subversiveness fallacy that tends to be presented by its practitioners as proof of sophistication; in that sense, Fox's efforts can be considered an advance on some recent work on the Fasti, for instance. Still, an even wider framework is needed for an understanding of the dynamics of the reception of the regal period on the part of the Romans and for the abiding presence of that subject in their discourse.

Karl Galinsky
University of Texas at Austin

¹ "Gattungsgeschichte als Rezeptionsgeschichte am Beispiel der Entstehung der Bukolik," Antike und Abendland 36 (1990) 120.