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This chapter deals with Roman representations of construction in three different media (epigraphic, visual, and literary) and explores which representational strategies are distinctive to one medium or common to different media. The first section deals with a range of building inscriptions, from plain to extremely elaborate, and analyses how they create a heavily stylized image of the construction process, drawing attention to the ‘madeness’ of the structure they adorn as a means of adding to its impact on the viewer. The second section deals with the representational strategies of Roman artworks which depict the process of construction (including the base of the Theodosian obelisk, the Haterii relief, the basilica Aemilia frieze, and the frieze of the Column of Trajan). The final section (‘Literary Memories’) is an analysis of literary accounts of construction: Caesar’s construction of the Rhine bridge as well as Pliny the Elder’s and Ammianus Marcellinus’s depictions of the transportation and raising of obelisks. A number of representational strategies are identified as typical of literary descriptions of construction.

Chapter 5 deals with a mythical version of the construction metaphor: the Greek hero Amphion sang a song which bewitched stones to form themselves into the walls of Thebes. In this myth, poetic composition is not only like building, it is building. Literary representations of this myth are used by many Greek and Roman authors to illustrate the creative power of poetry. Statius’s Thebaid, however, offers a different perspective: as the poem’s nefarious war progresses, Amphion’s musical magic and his walls are shown gradually to lose their power. Victorious at the end of the Thebaid is not the mythical founder-poet, but the poetic narrator, who has sung Thebes into destruction. The myth of Amphion thus reveals troubling implications of the construction metaphor for the wholeness and stability of poetic artefacts: what has been built can also be destroyed.

Building sites are full of movement, look different every day, cause noise, dirt, and disruption. Not many people would describe a building site as beautiful. And yet, the disruptive nature of construction and its impact on all of our senses force us to respond to it. This Introduction presents the book’s theme: literary representations of building and construction in ancient Rome. It proposes that they can tell us about Roman responses to construction: what they may have been, how they were expressed, how they could be influenced and manipulated, what they meant. The Introduction then contextualises the study in terms of recent work on architecture and architectural process in ancient Rome, as well as on the relationship between Roman architecture and Latin literature. Finally, it provides a short summary of the different chapters of the book and a rationale for the order and selection of material.

Building in Words explores the relation between text and architecture in the Roman world from the perspective of architectural process. Ancient Romans frequently encountered buildings under construction—they experienced noisy building work, disruptive transportation of materials, and sometimes spectacular engineering feats. This book analyses how Roman writers responded to the process of building and construction in their literary works. Roman authors tell stories of architectural creation to give meaning to finished monuments. Their narratives can stress technological or logistic mastery or highlight morally problematic aspects of construction, particularly in large-scale engineering projects. While offering descriptions of the process of creating architecture, writers also reflect on the creation of their own works. The metaphor of construction for literary composition is polyvalent: writers use it to comment on the aesthetics or ambition of their literary work, to articulate not only the power and durability, but also the fragility of literature. This monograph places literary texts of the early Roman Empire in dialogue with epigraphic and archaeological material. Through its focus on building as a process, it offers a new perspective on the aesthetics of both architecture and literature in ancient Rome.

The Conclusion of this book explores the theme of architectural destruction, both physical and literary. It recapitulates and contextualizes the results of the study by considering the reversal of construction: representations of destruction and demolition. Revisiting inscriptions and visual representations, the chapter demonstrates how construction and destruction are often effectively played off against each other—only the existence of the alternative can give each activity its full meaning. The Conclusion then analyses this interaction between building and destruction in a passage of Pliny’s Panegyricus which deals with the physical demolition of images of Domitian, but at the same time also performs a literary demolition of Statius’s Silvae 1.1 and the representation of the erection of such images in that text.

This chapter discusses literary representations of large-scale engineering projects. Against the briefly sketched background of larger Roman debates about large-scale construction projects, especially those manipulating the boundaries between land and water, it focuses on one particular engineering project of which several literary accounts survive: the emperor Claudius’s attempted draining of the Fucine Lake in Central Italy. Pliny the Elder, Tacitus, and Suetonius employ different strategies in describing this large-scale intervention in nature, which consisted of the digging of an underground tunnel connecting the lake to the nearby river Liris. The chapter treats the accounts of these three authors in turn, arguing that their descriptions engage each other on a number of themes, and that they are part of a larger debate concerning the legitimacy of human intervention in nature. Of special importance for this moral dimension of representations of construction are the themes of visibility, appearance and reality, violence and war against nature, and of the crossing of boundaries.

This chapter deals with depictions of the process of construction in Statius’s panegyric Silvae. Statius attempts to enhance the impact of certain building projects by representing the process of their construction, while simultaneously conveying a particular poetics of construction uniquely suited to his Silvae. In the prefaces to individual books, Statius creates an image of the Silvae as composed at great speed and heavily improvised. In his poetic descriptions of construction, his emphasis on the fast execution of construction and the noise attendant on it serve to justify the aesthetics of the Silvae, composed at speed and communicating large panegyric sentiments. The poetics which Statius creates through descriptions of construction is (humorously) anti-Callimachean: fast composition and ‘thundering’ are not condemned, but are essential to the Silvae.

This chapter opens with a brief history of architectural metaphor in Greek literature which demonstrates its versatility: it can be employed to comment on the structure, aesthetics, durability, size, or ambition of a literary work. The chapter then turns to one particular architectural image for text production which appears to represent an innovation in Roman literature—the construction of a city. The chapter discusses literary city-building in the work of Vitruvius, Manilius, Propertius, and Vergil, arguing that the specific form each author gives to city-building impacts the way in which the reader is asked to envisage and appreciate the poetic task. The authors’ mutual engagement through their competing city-foundations also allows them to stake out their literary ambitions in relation to one another. What gives the metaphor of city-building its power is the political role of city-building in the Roman Empire during the late republic and its changing cultural resonances during the early principate.

This introduction outlines the meaning of ‘intermediality’, both with respect to the prefix ‘inter’, which does not only hint at interactions ‘between’ media but also at commentary about and phenomena within media, as well as to the concept of ‘media(lity)’. In so doing, it explains and critiques, for those new to intermedial analysis, the major schools of thought which define this field, drawing on Rajewsky, Elleström, Bruhn, Wolf, and their peers. It also demonstrates why intermediality is a useful framework for Classics research using Roman comedy as a case study, and contains chapter summaries for the special issue as a whole.

Landscape can spark armed conflict, dictate its progress and condition the affective experience of its participants; at the same time, warfare changes landscapes, both physically and in the way in which they are later perceived and experienced. Landscapes of War in Greek and Roman Literature breaks new ground in exploring Greco-Roman literary responses to this complex interrelationship. Drawing on current ideas in cognitive theory, memory studies, ecocriticism and other fields, its individual chapters engage with such questions as: How did the Greeks and Romans represent the effects of war on the natural world? What distinctions did they see between spaces of war and other landscapes? How did they encode different experiences of war in literary representations of landscape? How was memory tied to landscape in wartime or its aftermath? And in what ways did ancient war landscapes shape modern experiences and representations of war?In this volume, literary scholars and ancient historians investigate the creation, manipulation and representation of ancient war landscapes in literature. In four sections, contributors explore combatants’ perception and experience of war landscapes, the relationship between war and the natural world, symbolic and actual forms of territorial control in a military context, and war landscapes as spaces of memory. Several contributions focus especially on modern intersections of war, landscape and the classical past.

Summary Italian Fascism anchored its revolutionary ideology in the Roman past, embedding and legitimising changes in every sphere of life through an appeal to a supposedly shared Roman heritage. In this article, we scrutinise these Fascist dynamics of anchoring through an analysis of the Mussolini obelisk in Rome and the Latin text hidden below it: Aurelio Amatucci’s Codex Fori Mussolini. We focus especially on the Fascist manipulation of the obelisk tradition, the significance of Amatucci’s choice of language, and his use of ancient authors within the Codex. We argue that the ‘ground’ in which monument and text are anchored is fundamentally unstable: the Roman past itself is a dynamic and adaptable construction. Obelisk and Codex selectively evoke and (re-)combine a multiplicity of elements – from antiquity to the twentieth century, from the Renaissance to the Risorgimento. In doing so, obelisk and text shape the very tradition in which they anchor.

This article analyses Francesco Giammaria’s Capitolium Novum, a Latin poem describing a tour of the historic center of Rome in 1933, in its historical, architectural, and intellectual contexts. It offers a detailed analysis of three key sections of the poem, which deal with the Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine, and the Ara dei caduti fascisti respectively. The authors show how Giammaria’s poem responds to urbanistic interventions in the city center during the ventennio, and specifically to the Fascist ‘recoding’ of the city as the ‘Third Rome’, with a narrative emphasizing the historically layered nature of Rome. Giammaria offers his own interpretation of the respective importance and interrelation of the city’s historic layers: the rhetoric of his poem is aimed at superimposing Catholic Rome over pagan Rome, and at framing all historical layers of the city, including the Fascist one, as part of its Christian mission and destiny. Thus, Capitolium novum resonates with efforts of intellectuals gathered around Carlo Galassi Paluzzi’s Istituto di Studi Romani, who aimed to promote a cultural reconciliation between Fascism and Catholicism.

Consistently at the beginning and end of books and major sections of De Architectura, Vitruvius reflects on the order in which he presents his material (e.g. 2.10.3; 4.3.3). He frequently stresses that the design of his treatise follows a particular ordo, but never makes explicit what this ordo actually is. The underlying structuring principle, however, is crucial to understanding the treatise’s literary design and architectural theory. On the macro level, as has been little appreciated to date, Vitruvius presents his material in the order in which a city is built from scratch – beginning with the choice of the correct site and the laying out of walls (book 1) and the collection of building materials (book 2), continuing with the construction of different types of building (books 3-7), and finally securing the future flourishing of the city by supplying it with water (book 8), clocks (book 9) and defence mechanisms (book 10). As we read the De Architectura book by book, the matrix of a city comes into being, adaptable according to local conditions or the size of the community (Fritz, 132-3). I argue that this macrostructure also creates an implicit parallel between the creation of a city and the creation of the text itself. As the treatise unfolds, the ideal city comes into being – the De Architectura. On the lexical level, the dominant metaphor Vitruvius uses to describe his own text is not the city (or any type of architecture) but the body. The implications of the corpus-metaphor have been explored in detail (Callebat 1989, McEwen 2003, Oksanish 2011). By using it, Vitruvius suggests that unlike his predecessors’ smaller projects, his own work is an organic whole, made up of its membra, its constituent parts. The metaphor conveys the perfect wholeness and completeness of the treatise as well as its harmonious proportions. What it does not readily seem to provide, however, is a natural ordo, a principle of arrangement. This is delivered instead by the process of city construction. The relation between the metaphor of the body and the more subtle, implicit metaphoricity of city construction lies at the core of Vitruvian architectural theory. The two source domains melt seamlessly into one another, since the city is both the result of human design and like a natural organism which grows and develops in accordance with nature – an ideal expressed, for example, in the famous Dinocrates-anecdote (2.praef). For Vitruvius, the city offered a natural ordo for a book on architecture, but I propose that the macrostructure of city-building also stands at the beginning of a larger trend in early Augustan literature, which relates to the contemporary concerns of colony foundation, as well as to the Augustan project of ‘re-founding’ Rome. The parallel between city and text appeals to a group of authors writing at the same time as or just after Vitruvius, who set up their projects and textual foundations explicitly to parallel or rival Augustus’ own building of a new Rome. For example, Propertius (4.1A) and Manilius (Astronomica 2.772-87) explicitly compare their literary undertaking to the construction of a city in order to make a point about literary ambition and prestige as well as (in the case of Manilius) arrangement (Fantham, Welch 25-7, Schindler 252-72). Their poetic cities even display the same combination of organic growth and human construction as Vitruvius’ macro-city. Analysis of the macrostructure of the De Architectura thus not only offers important insights into Vitruvian conceptions of architecture and literary ambition, but also throws new light on Vitruvius’ position within the literary environment of early Augustan Rome. Callebat, L. (1989), ‘Organisation et structures du De architectura de Vitruve’, in Geertman, H. and de Jong, J. J. (1989) (eds.), Munus non ingratum : proceedings of the international symposium on Vitruvius' De architectura and the hellenistic and republican architecture, Leiden 20-23 January 1987, Leiden, 34-8. Fantham, E. (1997), ‘Images of the city: Propertius’ new-old Rome’, in Habinek, T. and Schiesaro, A. (eds.), The Roman Cultural Revolution, Cambridge, 122-35. Fritz, H.-J. (1995), Vitruv: Architekturtheorie und Machtpolitik in der romischen Antike, Munster. Gros, P. (1992), Vitruve. De L’Architecture. Livre IV, Paris. Gros, P. (1994) (ed.), Le Projet de Vitruve: Objet, destinataires et reception du De Architectura, Rome. McEwen, I. K. (2003), Writing the Body of Architecture, Cambridge MA. Oksanish, J. M. (2011), Building the Principate: A Literary Study of Vitruvius’ “de Architectura”, diss. New Haven. Schindler, C. (2000), Untersuchungen zu den Gleichnissen im romischen Lehrgedicht, Gottingen. Welch, T. S. (2005), The elegiac cityscape: Propertius and the meaning of Roman monuments, Ohio.

Der Pariser Mai steht metonymisch fur die Studentenrevolte der 1960er Jahre, die auch im Verhaltnis zur »internationalistisch« ausgerichteten Arbeiterbewegung des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts — als erste transnationale Protestbewegung gelten darf: »Weltweit zog damals eine studentische Protestbewegung die Aufmerksamkeit auf sich: von Berkeley bis Rom, von Tokio bis Berlin« (Wehler, 312). Getragen wurde sie uberwiegend — daher die Klassifikation als Studentenrevolte oder -bewegung von — jungen Leuten aus dem akademischen Betrieb, aber auch Auszubildende, Schuler und Berufstatige engagierten sich in einer ansonsten eher protestarmen Zeit. Im Monat Mai des Jahres 1968 verdichtete sich in Paris eine Serie von Protesten, die von 1964 bis in die 1970er Jahre um die ganze Welt gingen, mit telegenen »Barrikadennachten« in der franzosischen Hauptstadt aber eine besondere Intensitat und Dramatik entwickelten und wohl am starksten das etablierte politische System durch eine Allianz mit linksgerichteten Arbeitnehmer-Gewerkschaften und Generalstreik herausforderten. Der damals amtierende Staatsprasident Charles de Gaulle hatte seine Demission erwogen (sie erfolgte ein Jahr spater), der um ihn herum gruppierte Gaullismus konnte sich nicht mehr als fuhrende Kraft halten. Aber auch sein Antipode, die Kommunistische Partei Frankreichs, wurde von der antiautoritaren Revolte als alterskrank und sklerotisch ins Visier genommen; zudem sammelten sich linksradikale Sekten trotzkistischer, maoistischer und anarchistischer Provenienz, die nur wenige Mitglieder hatten, aber bis weit ins linksburgerliche Milieu Einfluss gewannen.

This book deals with the use of Latin as a literary and epigraphic language under Italian Fascism (1922–1943). The myth of Rome lay at the heart of Italian Fascist ideology, and the ancient language of Rome, too, played an important role in the regime’s cultural politics. This collection deepens our understanding of ‘Fascist Latinity’, presents a range of previously little-known material, and opens up a number of new avenues of research. The chapters explore the pivotal role of Latin in constructing a link between ancient Rome and Fascist Italy; the different social and cultural contexts in which Latin texts functioned in the ventennio fascista; and the way in which ‘Fascist Latinity’ relied on, and manipulated, the ‘myth of Rome’ of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy. Contributors: William Barton (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies), Xavier van Binnebeke (KU Leuven), Paolo Fedeli (Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro), Han Lamers (University of Oslo), Johanna Luggin (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies), Antonino Nastasi (Rome), Bettina Reitz-Joosse (University of Groningen), Dirk Sacré (KU Leuven), Valerio Sanzotta (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies), Wolfgang Strobl (Toblach).