BMCR 2023.09.12 Aspects of Roman dance culture Karin Schlapbach, Aspects of Roman dance culture: religious cults, theatrical entertainments, metaphorical appropriations. Potsdamer Altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge, 80. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2022. Pp. 340. ISBN 9783515133234 Review by Frederick G. Naerebout, Leiden University. frits@naerebout.com Open access [Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]   The study of dance in the ancient world went through a revival during the past quarter century—and in the process came very much of age.[1] But the majority of studies have dealt with the Greek world only. Even when in several instances the subject matter, and in many instances the source material was related to the Roman imperial period, there was never any talk of Roman dance. As to an indigenous Roman dance tradition, whether with roots in deep time or consisting of more recent appropriations, it was largely overlooked, if its existence was not flatly denied. Exceptions were few and far between.[2] The times they are a-changing. Authors such as Zoa Alonso Fernández, Angela Bellia, Laura Gianvittorio-Ungar, Karin Schlapbach, Ruth Webb and Ismene Lada-Richards (all but the last mentioned contributing to the volume under review) have refocussed the discussion of ancient dance towards Roman (-period) dancing. The Brill journal Greek and Roman Musical Studies has also been instrumental in this respect. As a sign of the times, we have this wide-ranging volume on Roman dance, arising from a conference held in Fribourg in 2019. Most revealing of the change that has taken place is that Fritz Graf’s contribution on dance traditions in Greek poleis is here subsumed under “Roman dance culture”. How right he is; I stand corrected: my own study of Greek dance (Attractive performances. Ancient Greek dance: three preliminary studies, 1997) in fact dealt with Greek and Roman dance and should have made that explicit in its title. That this Roman dance culture was rich and vibrant is made abundantly clear in Karin Schlapbach’s excellent lengthy introduction, and by the fourteen chapters of this book. There are three sections: dance in a religious context, dance in a non-religious or not primarily religious context (here called ‘spectacle culture’) and a smaller, third one, ‘Discourses’, that feels a bit like the odds and ends that did not fit the other sections, although it could have been as important a section of the book as the other ones. One also may wonder whether ‘spectacle’ is the right word to use when trying to distinguish the ‘worldly’ from the ‘religious’, if that distinction is valid at all: in her introduction, Schlapbach rightly observes that the categories are not mutually exclusive (p.25) and that dance “served perhaps also to connect various dimensions of Roman culture that we tend to think of as separate” (p.28), giving examples of the ways in which different forms of dance (and other cultural phenomena) were intertwined.