VARIOUS MEMORY STUDIES
No TL;DR found
Abstract
equivocations and surrender of the Tarpeia exemplum to his reader’s judgement (pp. 139–45) and by Propertian Tarpeia’s subjectivity, voiced desire and personal uncertainty (pp. 174–5). In these and other tellings, we learn how Rome’s transformations under the Caesars transmute Tarpeia. In Part 3, W. discloses how Simylus (Plut. Vit. Rom. 17), Dionysius (Ant. Rom. 2.38– 40) and Plutarch (Vit. Rom. 17–18) employ the TM as a lens on reciprocal belonging and acculturation between Romans and Greeks under Rome. In Chapter 8, we find that Simylus’ elegiac Tarpeia betrays Rome to the Gauls during the Gallic sack, due to her longing for Brennus (pp. 225–38); W. reads this revision of the TM as a way to engender familiarity for Roman history in a Hellenistic Greek audience, for they too had suffered at the hands of another Brennus (pp. 234–6). Chapters 9 and 10 reveal how Dionysius and Plutarch move freely between different variants of the TM, play with language and tradition (pp. 242–8, 256–67) and grapple with the blurring of shared identities and the reality of Rome as caput mundi (pp. 253, 273–83). W.’s brief conclusion wrestles with the afterlife and persistent attraction of the TM for contemporary audiences, and with the ways in which it provokes questions about alterity and belonging in today’s world (pp. 284–8). This volume is meticulously researched and W.’s excellent translations, footnotes, appendix of other ‘treasonous girls’, bibliography and indexes are eminently useful. However, some stylistic choices limit the accessibility of the volume. W. is prone to cryptic or poetic subtitles and to scattering her text with virgules and turns of phrase that echo Henderson (p. xii). While this may delight some readers, it may also bamboozle the unwary. Furthermore, I found myself yearning for some substantial commentary on how Roman women might have engaged with the TM: how would Hortensia or the addressee of the laudatio Turiae have responded to Pictor’s or Piso’s tellings or to handling the denarii or to viewing the Basilica Aemilia Frieze? At times W. appears to have a fundamentally pessimistic view of women’s roles in Roman society; this view is not in line with the latest research by J. Hallett, A. Richlin, M.-L. Hänninen, C. Schultz, J. Rüpke, E. Hemelrijk and others. But, alas, a reader cannot have everything. W.’s tour de force reminds us of the many paradoxes at the heart of the ‘creation, perpetuation, and expansion of the Roman state’ (p. 288), for Tarpeia captured Roman minds and captures our own.