How do ancient (or contemporary) portraits display power? Why is that man (or less often woman) a ruler, and how can viewers (or readers), alone or in a crowd, tell that he represents something more than himself? He stands for something, literally in the case of ancient bronze or marble portrait statuary, signifier of a powerful office, and its individual holder, a basileus (‘king’) or an emperor. His power over me and mine is expressed in physical or literary form by the creation and circulation of his image(s), by their intrinsic attributes, materials or context. Images become powerful not just by their creation, but through contemporary social and political rules (or norms) of representation and by their reception. Mass media rely on specific associations in my (or our) culture, state and/or religion to convey not only a ruler's individual appearance and character, but also his office and its ideals, symbols and authority over me and us.

In the last twenty-five years there have been so many ‘turns’ in how the ancient world is approached that you could be forgiven for wondering whether research has tended to simply spin on the spot rather than move forwards in any decisive or meaningful direction. Amongst other things, and in no particular order, the discipline of archaeology, for instance, has undergone spatial, embodied, digital, mobility, ecological, material, symmetrical, relational, ontological, sensory, posthuman and cognitive turns. The specific theoretical and methodological concepts that underpin these directions can vary considerably, but collectively they reflect a shared concern to foreground the complexities of different types of matter in interpretations of past worlds. Many, although not all, also share interests in combining those material complexities with perspectives on experiences of embodiment and/or forms of ‘being-in-the-world’. Within ancient religious studies, a re-orientation towards the sensory, embodied and experiential is well evidenced across recent scholarship, where it is accompanied by a significant paradigm shift away from top-down models of so-called ‘polis’ or ‘civic’ religion, which stress the organising principles and socio-political aspects of religion, towards a focus on ancient rituals as ‘lived’. Both trends have simultaneously stimulated the need to pay close and critical attention to the role of materials in generating ancient religion not as a set of shared beliefs or practices, but as a collection of dynamic and situational lived experiences emerging from ancient people's mutually constitutive relationships with the world.

While different in their approaches, structure and intended readership, the four books reviewed here are connected by their common aim of responding to traditional views of elegy as a minor, ‘softer’ genre, which stands in binary opposition to the magniloquence of epic. These books thus build upon long-established developments in the field of Latin literary criticism, which have contributed to a general reassessment, and deconstruction, of the taxonomic categorisations of Latin texts, and Latin poetry more specifically, pointing out its generic fluidity (e.g. J.E.G. Zetzel, ‘Re-Creating the Canon: Augustan Poetry and the Alexandrian Past’, Critical Inquiry 10 [1983], 83–105; G.B. Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, ed. tr. C. Segal [1986]). Notably, R.O.A.M. Lyne's study on Virgil's Aeneid (R.O.A.M. Lyne, Further Voices in Vergil's Aeneid [1992]) exemplifies this renewed interest in identifying unaligned and ambiguous perspectives (‘further voices’), especially within poetic texts composed in the Augustan or early imperial period. It is no surprise that the elegiac contents have catalysed these underlying streams of ambiguous, unsettled and self-reflective discourse, which – once allowed into the literary landscape of Latin poetry – shake generic boundaries. That Virgil did not write anything that can be formally regarded as elegy, stricto sensu, makes his oeuvre a promising space of enquiry for oblique and subterranean elegiac resonances.