protests against an “unjust killing.” Anat’s characterizationchanges during the narrative: she desires to possess Aqhat’sbow by any means but weeps after his death, and when sheloses the bow, moves from seeing her violence as a divinepunishment to viewing it as futile. Yatipan’s perspective isdetermined by his role as Anat’s punitive agent: he viewsviolence as a justified means to an end. Among humans,Danil is a righteous king and Pughat an obedient daughter.Both disapprove of Anat’s violence but consider Pughatkilling Yatipan to be justified blood revenge. Sun argues thatthe different characterizations and points of view requirereaders to draw their own conclusions, and then suggestshow the story would have been read by Ugaritian king and amale and female “commoner.” Although the last part of herdiscussion is admittedly hypothetical, Sun does demonstratethat the issue of violence in the Aqhat epic is more nuancedthan has been thought to date. This volume is recommendedfor Ugaritic scholars.

John L. McLaughlinUniversity of St. Michael’s College

ON BIBLICAL JERUSALEM, MEGIDDO, JEZREEL,AND LACHISH. By David Ussishkin. Cheun King LectureSeries 8. Hong Kong: Divinity School of Chung Chi College,Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. Pp. iv + 168; illus-trations. Paper, $90.00.

Based upon Ussishkin’s 2007 lectures at the ChineseUniversity, Hong Kong, this book provides an archaeologicalanalysis of four biblical cities. Of these cities, Ussishkin hasdirected excavations at three of them, and he brings thatexperience to his writing. After a brief introduction to themethodologies and challenges of biblical archaeology, eachchapter contains an overview of the city’s biblical history andits significant archaeological findings. Beginning withJerusalem, Ussishkin summarizes 160 years of excavations,showing evidence for a Canaanite city and later Iron II settle-ments, while concluding that despite recent claims, no evi-dence for David’s palace or a Solomonic city has beenunearthed. Turning to Megiddo, where he codirects thecurrent expedition, Ussishkin explains the controversial“low chronology” of the Iron Age strata, which redates the“Solomonic” city to a century later. He then reviews Jezreeland Lachish, two other digs he recently directed. His analysisof a ninth-century-BCE fortified enclosure reveals thatJezreel was built and served as a military and cavalry baseduring the Omride Dynasty. Another fortress is found at theJudean stronghold, Tel Lachish. The excavated remains ofthis fortress and siege ramp correlate with the Assyrianreliefs depicting Sennecherib’s siege in 701 BCE. Ussishkin’sbook carefully negotiates the inevitable tension between bib-lical text and archaeological remains, and gives the reader anunderstanding of the difficulties with biblical archaeology.The book includes excellent bibliographies for furtherreading, extensive illustrations, and high-resolution photos.

Julye BidmeadChapman University

Greece, Rome, Greco–Roman PeriodP. VERGILIUS MARO AENEIS. Edited by G. B. Conte.Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Pp. xliv + 429. Cloth, $150.00;paper, $45.00.

For many years now, the standard Latin text of Virgilhas been R. A. B. Mynors’s Oxford Classical Text (Oxford1969), which encompasses the Aeneid and also the Ecloguesand Georgics. The volume contains a succinct account of theevidence available from antiquity in manuscripts, scholia(ancient commentaries), testimonia (ancient citations), and afew papyrus fragments, supplemented by material fromearly medieval codices. Now the venerable Bibliotheca Teub-neriana has seen fit to publish a new edition of the Aeneidalone. In his preface, the editor, G. B. Conte, better known asa literary than as a textual critic, argues that the new volumeimproves on the Oxford Classical Text by including reportsof more medieval manuscripts and of some recently discov-ered papyri, and by drawing on recent scholarship, espe-cially investigations of the scholia and their tradition.Despite the increase of material, the critical apparatus is, forthe most part, lucid and accessible, and a check of severalbooks of the poem and of random passages suggests thatConte has been careful and thorough in collecting andarranging the evidence. He has also added something absentfrom the Oxford version: brief but often helpful remarksconcerning variants, punctuation, and interpretation of pas-sages. Nevertheless, it is hard to say exactly how much thisedition contributes to the study of Virgil, since in all of theadded material there seems to be little, if anything, that wasnot already known to scholars. It might be thought that, inhis constitution of the text, Conte’s literary sensibilitieswould come into play, but his version, while sound andjudicious, is only slightly less conservative than that ofMynors. And while, for the sake of completeness, the Biblio-theca Teubneriana obviously needs an up-to-date Virgil, thisvolume would better justify its high price if it included theEclogues and Georgics.

David MankinCornell University

THE ROMAN WEDDING: RITUAL AND MEANINGIN ANTIQUITY. By Karen K. Hersch. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 341; 6 plates. Cloth,$90.00; paper, $27.99.

Hersch aims “to rebuild the Roman wedding” from dis-parate sources, mostly literary but also including artisticrepresentations. Chapter 1 treats types of legitimate andillegal marriage, betrothal, the importance of consent, theslave wedding in Plautus’s Casina (a mixture of Greek andRoman, fantasy, and reality), ridiculed same-sex ceremo-nies, and prohibited days. Chapter 2 revisits the house of thebride, who remained the focal point throughout, whilechapter 3 reviews what happens at the groom’s house. Mostimportant was the procession of the girl (deductio), althoughit is not clear that he who in common parlance “led a woman

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into matrimony” actually escorted the bride. Chapter 4focuses on the religious dimensions, particularly the manygods who play a role in literary accounts—among whom onlythe Lares definitely correspond to actual practice. The con-clusion reviews the ceremony in comparison with themodern American wedding and as a rite of passage like theboy’s assumption of the toga of manhood; and surveysthe surprisingly common horrid depictions of weddingsoutside of the epithalamia. Hersch’s volume is a carefulsurvey of Roman matrimonial ceremonies and their meaningto the ancients. Throughout the volume, one appreciatesHersch’s focus on the opinions of the ancients themselves.The book includes an index of subjects (but not of passagesdiscussed) and an up-to-date bibliography.

John F. MillerUniversity of Virginia

A COMMENTARY ON PROPERTIUS BOOK 3. By S. J.Heyworth and J. H. W. Moorwood. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2011. Pp. xii + 377. Cloth, $125.00; paper, $49.95.

The elegies of Sextus Propertius (late 50s to 2 BCE) rankamong the greatest works of the period that saw Rome’stransition from Republic to Empire. Yet for English-speakingstudents of Latin, they have not been very accessible. Theirtextual tradition is corrupt, Propertius’s language can beidiosyncratic, and many poems are dense with historical,literary, and mythological allusions that require explication.The best commentaries are in German and Italian, whilethose in English tend to be short on detail and long onspeculation. This volume, along with a recent one on Book 4by G. O. Hutchinson (Cambridge 2006), marks a big stepforward. It contains a text based on Heyworth’s new OxfordClassical Text edition (Oxford 2007). This is preceded by alearned but lively introduction with accounts of Propertius’searlier books, the literary and historical background of Book3, matters of style and meter, and the textual tradition, aswell as a glossary of literary terms. It is followed by adetailed, well-organized, and lucid commentary that com-bines explication with overall interpretation based largelyon the authors’ views but acknowledging alternatives.Further assistance is provided by an appendix of Greek andLatin texts with translations, a well-chosen bibliography,and comprehensive indexes. From all of this, readers will beequipped as never before to investigate, appreciate, andbegin to understand a number of Propertius’s most fascinat-ing poems, and it is to be hoped that similar editions of otherbooks of elegies will follow.

David MankinCornell University

ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN SACRIFICE. Edited byJennifer Wright Knust and Zsuzsanna Várhelyi. Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xviii + 330; illustrations.Cloth, $74.00.

Originating in a 2008 conference on sacrifice in ancientMediterranean religions (including Greek, Roman, Jewish,

and Christian), this useful volume offers an up-to-dateexamination of the topic by an interdisciplinary group ofscholars in religious studies, history, and classics. Taken asa group, the fourteen papers espouse the view that thediverse practices and discourses we call “sacrifice” are toovaried to be encompassed by a single definition. The authorsin Part I, “Theorizing Sacrifice,” reject the idea that slaughterand/or aggression are central to the meaning of sacrifice.Stowers, for example, focuses on reciprocity in daily sacrifi-cial practice, contrasting it with the religion of “literatecultural producers” who engaged in variable acts of interpre-tation, while Frankfurter notes that Egyptian ritual practicemarginalized the deaths of animals used for food offerings.In Part II, “Negotiating Power Through Sacrifice,” interest-ing papers by Várhelyi and Nasrallah on the connections inRoman culture between sacrifice and violence suffer from alack of focus, while Salzman’s paper on the survival of sac-rificial practices after Constantine is an important contribu-tion. The papers in Part III, “Toward a Theology of Sacrifice,”explore the boundaries of ancient philosophical critiques ofsacrifice (Rives and Graf), with Townsend focusing specifi-cally on Porphyry’s position vis-à-vis contemporary imperialrequirements to offer sacrifice. Part IV, “Imaginary Sacri-fices,” investigates the productivity of sacrificial ideas inJewish and Christian culture after the daily practices them-selves had disappeared, with a fine paper by Boustan con-sidering Girardian theory in relation to late antique Jewishmartyrdom.

Jennifer LarsonKent State University

FOREIGN CULTS IN ROME: CREATING A ROMANEMPIRE. By Eric M. Orlin. New York, NY: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 248; map. $74.00.

Orlin studies the construction of Roman culturebetween the mid-third and mid-first centuries BCE. Hefocuses on acts of adoption and differentiation, inclusion,and exclusion in the realm of cult, in three domains. First, hereviews occasions in the fifth, fourth, and third centurywhen Rome transferred foreign cults whole cloth into Rome.He also studies distinctions the Romans drew between cultsimported in wartime and those in peace, and likewise,distinctions the Romans drew between foreign godsworshipped at Rome according to Roman rites, and those forwhom the Romans imported priests to perform cult accord-ing to some native rite. Other major foci include the patternof phenomena treated by Romans as prodigies (did they takeparticular notice of phenomena that occurred in territorylegally Roman?) and the conduct of rites. In this latter area,Orlin studies both Roman practice and Roman theorizing,asking to what extent the Romans sought to construct theirreligious practices as distinctive from those of other peoples.Having treated these topics thematically, the final two chap-ters offer a developmental study of the second and firstcenturies BCE. Orlin fails to note the splendid study of thegeographic distribution of prodigies by V. Rosenberger.

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More seriously, by focusing solely on religion, he does notindex his tale to the vast changes under way in the compo-sition of the Roman aristocracy, studied to revolutionaryeffect by K.-J. Hölkeskamp. Nor does he explain why hestudies only cults imported through state action. Nonethe-less, this is a fine book that can be read with profit.

Clifford AndoUniversity of Chicago

THE IDEA OF IAMBOS. By Andrea Rotstein. Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. ix + 388; figures, tables.$135.00.

Ancient literary genres can be defined by the social andhistorical circumstances that gave rise to them, by theirperformance modes and contexts, and by metrical or otherformal criteria. Such definitions, however, do not remainstatic but shift in accordance with new needs and classifica-tions such as educational institutions or editorial practices.In this study, derived from her doctoral dissertation, Rot-stein tackles an old and particularly knotty question con-cerning the meaning of iambos, not in order to arrive at asingle definitive answer but, on the contrary, to trace theevolution of term and its shifting usage. The idea of iambusexhibits a striking development in which the corpus by poetswho are considered iambists, like Archilochus, embraces awide range of topics, performance settings, and formal fea-tures, yet the term is also used in a narrow sense to denotea specific metrical rhythm or to refer to poetry of invectiveand insult. Rotstein meticulously reviews the evidence fromthe earliest, seventh century BCE, to Aristotle in the Poetics,the Hellenistic scholar poets, and the late grammarians, toshow how Archilochus becomes the prototype for the genreof iambus and the poet of abuse and blame. Her monograph,in turn, provides a model for a complex and nuanced discus-sion of an ancient literary genre.

Jenny Strauss ClayUniversity of Virginia

ARBITRI NUGAE: PETRONIUS’ SHORT POEMS INTHE SATYRICA. By Aldo Setaioli. Studien zur klassischenPhilologie 165. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011.Pp. 433. $101.95.

The Satyrica is, apart from two papyrus fragments, theonly ancient “novel” which incorporates poems. Over thecourse of more than ten years, Setaioli has written a seriesof articles in Italian and Spanish publications on most ofthese poems individually, and in this book covers them all(except the two long poems delivered by a poetaster) in arevised English version. He has added a general introduc-tion and three appendices, one of which touches on analleged relationship between Petronius and the Gospel ofJohn’s account of a healing miracle, and another which ana-lyzes contacts between Petronius’ parodic and the Greeknovelists’ serious use of erotic topics. Many of the poemsembody the first-person narrator’s subsequent reflections,after a significant temporal gap on the events that he has

recounted. They are therefore part of the wider context,and are carefully analyzed by Setaioli in this light. He doesnot deal with the poems transmitted under Petronius’ nameby outside sources precisely because they lack a context,though he makes an exception for one. Setaioli displaysadmirable mastery both of relevant Greco–Roman texts andmodern bibliography, and offers thorough, balanced, andacute exegesis. My one criticism is that his defenses of thetransmitted text sometimes strain credulity; likewise in133.3.3-4, he favors a patently absurd “emendation” of anadmittedly corrupt text merely because of palaeographicalfacility. Unfortunately, there is no index that could havedirected the reader to, for example, “Epicureanism.”

Edward CourtneyUniversity of Virginia

CHALLENGES TO THE POWER OF ZEUS IN EARLYGREEK POETRY. By Norika Yasumura. London: BristolClassical Press, 2011 xi + 223. $80.00.

In the Homeric poems, Zeus reigns supreme as fatherof gods and men amid a somewhat unruly divine family.Hesiod’s Theogony recounts how Zeus came to power aftereither defeating or forming alliances with older divinities,deposing his father, and sharing power among the Olympi-ans. But even in Homer we find hints of more seriousthreats to Zeus’s rule in the possibility of a male heirmightier than his father or a rebellion on the part of theother Olympians, especially his wife Hera and his brotherPoseidon. Yasumura summarizes the work of scholars likeSlatkin on Thetis and the dangers of a successor to Zeus aswell as my own work on the Homeric Hymns whereboth Hera and Aphrodite pose challenges to Zeus’ssupremacy—although she does not deal with the Hymn toDemeter in which the goddess threatens not only Zeus butall the Olympians by blocking the venue of sacrifice. Lessconvincingly, the author attempts to link the Gigantomachyto Hera and Poseidon’s resistance to Zeus’s rule. Neitherthe poetic nor the visual record suggests that Zeus’s wife orbrother allied themselves with the Giants against him.Yasumura also does not deal with Zeus’s marital policies,which in many cases are intended to forestall potentialchallenges to his continued domination. Nevertheless,Yasumura offers a useful synthesis of a critical componentof early Greek theological thought.

Jenny Strauss ClayUniversity of Virginia

Christian OriginsSECULARISM AND BIBLICAL STUDIES. Edited byRoland Boer. London: Equinox, 2010. Pp. 219. Cloth, £60.00/$99.95; paper, £19.99/$34.95.

In this book, sixteen essays by different voices addressthe relationship between secularism and biblical studies.The first part, “Initial engagement at the forum,” has two

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