Damien Nelis

A considerable body of recent scholarship has been devoted to investigating the ways in which societies remember, studying not only what they construct as memorable but also why and how they do so. Adopting a narrower focus, this volume examines the ways in which different aspects and images of the Roman Republic are created and exploited by the Augustan poets. Our subject immediately suggests two obvious strategies:on the one hand, emphasis on a strictly historical project; on the other, concentration on versions of literary history. The latter has been more popular and influential in recent Latin scholarship, but the former has not been without its adherents, as the lively debate in recent historical research has fought over the value of ancient literary sources for reconstructing the early history of Rome and, crucially, for the origins of the Republic and the struggle of the orders. Simultaneously, recent work on Livy has provided strong support for a pre-Actian dating for the b...

The papers published in this volume were first delivered at a colloquium entitled ‘Lucain et Claudien face à face. Une poésie politique entre épopée, histoire et panégyrique’, which took place at the Fondation Hardt, in Vandoeuvres, near Geneva, in November 2012. The contributors, an international team of scholars, take the reader from broader considerations of both poets in relation to politics and ideology, generic positioning, construction of individual characters and strategies of panegyric, to a stronger focus on investigating precise examples of intertextual dialogue between Claudian and Lucan. In general, these essays are implicated in, or have implications for, other topics, such as Latin poetic style, history and the uses of mythology, the Roman epic tradition, and the whole question of the development of literary cultures and how they are received.

The Classical Review vol. 61 no. 1 © The Classical Association 2011; all rights reserved this was a ‘national insurgency’ or rather a mutiny led by a former Roman commander. All this allows him to contribute to the debate on the historical relevance of the battle: was it the ‘turning point’ or just one battle gone wrong, one with no major impact on Roman policy? Unlike many recent studies, W.’s does not end in A.D. 9, but traces the continuous Roman advances towards the Elbe. This enables his readers to see the battle in the Teutoburg forest with the historian’s benefi t of hindsight and to put the events of A.D. 9 in a more sober perspective. Finally all that remains for W. to do is to explain how this recent interest in the battle can be understood: fi rst he pursues the long and sometimes fi erce debate on localisation, referring to ‘more then 700 theories’ advanced so far, including the Kalkriese hypothesis which has become so central for tourism in Lower Saxony. In light of the numismatic evidence, on which W. is a specialist, he remains prudently noncommittal. A last and regrettably short chapter traces the myth of Arminius from early modern to recent times. While many recent books on the battle published in the hope of attracting a wide readership tend to assume that it is possible to ‘reconstruct’ fully the events of A.D. 9, and while the present book is not free from minor errors and typos, W. has succeeded in presenting all the evidence in all its contradictions. Unlike most competing volumes, this up-to-date, sober, and highly readable study takes its audience seriously and makes it possible to see what conclusions the ancient evidence allows, and what remains unclear. Given the attraction of ‘Herman the German’ for some nationalist groups, it is to the author’s, and the original publisher’s, credit that a short version of W.’s views was made accessible in 2009 in a booklet distributed by the ‘NS-Dokumentationszentrum Köln’, a centre for the documentation and study of Nazi ideology, which is part of the city museums in Cologne. Entitled ‘Die Erfi ndung der Deutschen. Rezeption der Varusschlacht und die Mystifi zierung der Germanen’ (‘The invention of the Germans: reception of Varus’ battle and the mystifi cation of the Germans’; note that English, unlike German, does not allow for a difference between the modern-day inhabitants of Germany and the ancient Germani), and edited by the director of the ‘Kölner Infound Bildungsstelle gegen Rechtsextremismus’ (‘offi ce for information and education against right-wing extremism’), Hans-Peter Killguss (ISBN 978-3938636-12-1), it studies and debunks the nationalist reading of the battle. Here, as in his major book, W. demonstrates how little we actually know, and how a careful and reasonable interpretation of both the material and the literary evidence must not be replaced by crude, ahistorical assumptions.

All editors who place a mark of punctuation within these lines (the great majority) put a comma after tibicen; a few leave them unpunctuated, but say nothing about the construction. It therefore seems timely to recall the note of W. Heraeus on Martial 5.56.9 fac discat citharoedus aut choraules; this runs as follows, nescio an Hor. a.p. 415 tibicen cum didicit iungendum sit. This seems right to me. Apart from Martial, there is the corresponding use of didáskein in Greek (e.g. Plato Meno 94b toútouv . . . i ppéav mèn e dídaxen; other instances in LSJ s.v. didáskw at the bottom of 421b and top of 422a), which is brought into Latin by two native Greek speakers, Ammianus Marcellinus (16.8.10 tonstrices docuit filias) and the freedman Echion in Petron. 46.7 destinaui illum artificium docere, aut tonstrinum aut praeconem aut certe causidicum, who slips back from Latin into Greek idiom. I do not pretend that this significantly alters the sense (‘has trained as an oboe-player’), but our grammatical conscience demands to be satisfied.