In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Roman Literature, Gender, and Reception: Domina Illustris ed. by Donald Lateiner, Barbara K. Gold, and Judith PerkinsTeresa RamsbyDonald Lateiner, Barbara K. Gold, and Judith Perkins eds. Roman Literature, Gender, and Reception: Domina Illustris. New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2013. x + 337 pp. 5 black-and-white photos. Cloth, $125.Although the Festschrift appears less frequently in publication than it once did, the incentive to publish one is heightened when the honoree (...) is someone with such an extensive record of influence upon and participation within the discipline. This is certainly the case with Judith P. Hallett. She has done stalwart service for the profession, having held many titles and leadership positions in the major Classics organizations, and has mentored many young academic professionals, as is attested in several of the chapters of Roman Literature, Gender, and Reception. This collection appropriately reflects the many strands of scholarship with which Prof. Hallett has fruitfully engaged in her career, and a complete list of her works appears in an eight-page list at the end of the volume.The introduction of the book is a short biography entitled “Judith Peller Hallett: An Introduction to a Force of Nature,” by Donald Lateiner and Amy Richlin. The essay describes the significant obstacles for a woman in academics in the 1960s and 1970s. The insensitive remarks of students and professors are hurtful enough to encounter in these pages, but it is revealed here that she lost her funding in her second year of graduate school—not because she had fallen behind in her studies—but because she got married. Despite this, she did complete her Ph.D. and held her first position at Boston University for seven years before landing happily at the University of Maryland. The essay also makes note of her wide-ranging participation in the promotion of women in academia and in literary enterprise: she was a founding member of the Women’s Classical Caucus in 1972. Professor Hallett is a key pioneer in the study of female voices and writings by women in the Roman world, bringing the attention of Classical scholarship in particular to Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, and the poet Sulpicia. The introduction offers a warm and quite personal tribute to her as scholar, teacher, mentor, and friend.There are nineteen essays in this collection. The table of contents offers [End Page 682] a glimpse of the breadth of Professor Hallett’s interests and the wide circumference of scholarship relevant to her own work. The editors, Donald Lateiner, Barbara K. Gold, and Judith Perkins, have brought together an impressive array of scholars whose works cover a wide variety of perspectives from a variety of periods, genres, and disciplines. Almost all the essays in the book contain a note or a few sentences to honor and thank the dedicatee, and some (such as Richlin’s and Wiseman’s essays) contain a structure of argument built around some facet of Professor Hallett’s lines of inquiry. That said, other than the loose, tripartite structure outlined in the title, there is no essay by the editors to tie the pieces of this collection together, and there seems little momentum within the collection itself besides the personal connections of writers to the dedicatee.The first section on Roman literature contains six essays. Erich Gruen, in “Cicero and the Alien,” challenges the attributions of bigotry or racism to Cicero’s writings on the other. Gruen systematically parses and contextualizes the comments Cicero makes about foreigners and sees a consistent analysis that condemns even the Romans when their actions fall short of what Cicero sees as the key principle of good government, namely, that participation of all members of a polity should be viewed as essential to the health and wellbeing of the state. In “Frigidus Sanguis: Lucretius, Virgil and Death,” Michael Putnam shows that, although Lucretius was ready to discount the power and fear of death through his examination of philosophical principles and scientific phenomena, Vergil was not so convinced. In the Georgics and the Aeneid alike, Vergil poetically expresses the notion that “death ever impends and the fear that it engenders cannot be argued... (shrink)

In 2003, Konstantinos Zachos published an article in the Journal of Roman Archaeology on an elaborate tropaeum in the hills north of the Actian promontory, built to celebrate Octavian's naval victory at the Battle of Actium. Octavian also significantly enlarged and renovated the old Akarnanian Temple to Apollo Actius overlooking the Actian bay, and he built an entire "Victory City" which was formed from the forced merging of several long-standing communities. Zachos writes this about the patron of the victory monument: (...) "The complex of structures was both a symbol of Octavian's victory and power and also a monument of political and religious propaganda". I suspect that his article has surely, at least in part, inspired recent re-examinations of the impact of the Battle of Actium on the notion of Roman governance, imperial identity in the lifetime of the princeps, and the Roman pantheon in general. Before Zachos' study, Robert Gurval in his study, Actium and Augustus, took the position that the importance of Actium had been overplayed in the scholarship of recent decades, and he attempted to dissociate from Actium the Augustan projects at Rome, preferring instead to empower the poets, particularly Virgil, as a significant source of Actian propaganda. How does one square the events leading up to 31, the events of 31 proper, the concerted efforts of Augustus throughout his career to bring greater glory to Apollo, and the literary results in the poetry of the so-called Augustan age? (shrink)