The volume under review, based on papers delivered at the Vergilian Society's Symposium Cumanum in 2013, is a welcome addition to the scholarship on Aeneid 6. Gathering thirteen stimulating, challenging and rewarding essays by some of the leading researchers in their fields, it specifically aims to interrogate the dynamics of reception through Virgil's underworld book, analysed both as a significant artefact of the reception of prior Greek and Roman literature and culture and as ‘an inflection point, to which authors time and again return in order to meditate on life, death, and rebirth’ (p. 7). While its coverage is by no means comprehensive – the contributions focus primarily on the Latin literary tradition –, the collection ranges widely through time and space, each chapter examining ‘a precise moment of literary reception and refraction’ (p. 7). Somewhat against the grain for a reception-oriented collection of this kind, the papers are not organised chronologically. Instead, readers are made to follow in Aeneas’ footsteps through Aeneid 6, from A. Barchiesi's opening chapter on the woods of Cumae to G. Parker's concluding study of his departure through the Gates of Sleep. This distinctive arrangement is one of the volume's strengths, tying together its eclectic subject-matter while helping to maintain a consistent focus on Aeneid 6 as ‘the overarching, organizational principle of its reception’ (p. 8).
The collection starts off on a strong footing with Barchiesi's contribution, which analyses Virgil's novel construction of the Cumaean silvae as a katabatic space via a sensitive comparative analysis of woods and wildernesses in earlier epic poetry. By combining this underworld with the idea of a first encounter with wild Italy, Barchiesi argues, Virgil points up the proto-colonial implications of the narrative, while the Trojans’ early interventions on the Cumaean landscape, including deforestation, in turn anticipate the infrastructure works conducted by Agrippa in the Avernus area. This leads into E. Pillinger's fascinating study of Statius’ Silvae 4.3, his poem celebrating the completion of the Via Domitiana from Rome to Cumae. Pillinger contends that Statius uses the dynamics of distance, time and speed, as experienced by a traveller on the new road, ‘to describe his own navigation of literary history’ (p. 31) in relation to Aeneid 6, a literary excursion that culminates in a surprising encounter with the Sibyl. The immediacy of the poem's short hendecasyllabic lines (which, at 163 verses, suggests the carmen figuratum of a long, narrow road), the directness of the journey and the din of the road's construction, Pillinger observes, complement the Sibyl's ‘strangely straightforward’ (p. 38) flattery of Domitian, as Virgil's priestess is transposed into the Silvae's world of hyperbolic imperial praise.
Leaping ahead to the Victorian era, M. Kilgour examines Mary Shelley's treatment of the theme of prophecy in her post-apocalyptic novel The Last Man, which recounts a narrative purportedly pieced together from the Sibylline leaves. After a wide-ranging survey of medieval and early modern literary receptions of Anchises’ revelation of the Roman future in Aeneid 6, Kilgour connects Shelley's fatalistic view of history in The Last Man to the tragic death of Marcellus, the latter seen by the author as foreshadowing her own devastating recent loss: ‘As Virgil had foreseen, the future is simply a repetition of the past, the replaying of the untimely death of young men who for Shelley are all figures for her drowned husband [Percy]’ (p. 72). As in the Aeneid, Kilgour remarks, the novel's densely allusive texture – drawing on a dizzying array of other authors in addition to Virgil, from Homer to Fénelon and Marvell – merely ‘increases the sense of predetermination: the story has already been written, and is just replayed over and over’ (p. 72). M. Soranzo's chapter examines allegorical interpretations of the golden bough by Baptista Mantuanus and Giles of Viterbo, two mendicant friars from early Renaissance Italy. Providing rich background information on both authors, Soranzo shows how Mantuanus and Giles blended humanistic learning with the allegorical tendency of late antique and medieval commentators, simultaneously ‘adapt[ing] their exegetical practice to the distinctive spirituality of their orders’ (p. 90). In Soranzo's reading the friars’ distinctive approach to Aeneid 6 is best understood as ‘a case of how religious identities were negotiated against [the] competing options’ (p. 78) offered by the Church and other institutions of learning in the early modern period.
We advance to the underworld with M. Herrero de Jáuregui's analysis of the brief, transitional passages that describe Aeneas’ movement through the infernal regions. His chapter carefully situates the manner of Aeneas’ walking within the various poetic and ritual traditions of katabasis, taking into account Homeric and tragic antecedents, the Orphic Tablets and Plutarch's description of the experience of mystic initiates (fr. 167 Sandbach). It concludes with an interesting discussion of the Roman context, noting the affinities between Aeneas’ walking tour of Hades and the male initiation ritual, the deductio in forum (p. 106). Engaging in an excellent close reading of many passages, Myers untangles the complex interactions between Virgil's portrayal of dead lovers in the lugentes campi (Aen. 6.440–76) and representations of the underworld in Latin love elegy before and after Aeneid 6, concentrating in particular on the Virgilian response to Tibullus 1.3. As Myers argues convincingly, the phrase durus amor (Aen. 6.442) foregrounds the intergeneric polarity between Virgil's epic underworld and the elegiac Elysium of his Tibullan model, where tener amor (1.3.57) awaits lovers and love poets; by characterising love as durus and locating it by contrast in the lugentes campi, he suggests, Virgil offers a corrective to Tibullus’ Elysian afterlife, which had conspicuously ‘elide[d] the disappointments and disasters of love’ (p. 126).
Following neatly on, A. Keith examines Ovid's varied allusive interactions with Aeneid 6, from his first book of love elegies to his poetry of exile. Keith's treatment of the house of Sleep in Metamorphoses 11 (pp. 138–42) is a particular highlight, skilfully explicating the poet's self-reflexive emulative engagement in this passage with the whole of the prior epic tradition concerning the relationship between Sleep and Death. Gladhill then proceeds to the Neronian age with a lively discussion of Virgil's tragic reception in Seneca's Hercules furens, Phaedra and Oedipus. Seneca is shown to activate Aeneid 6 ‘at every register of language and narrative’ (p. 169), revealing in the process his keen understanding of Virgilian thematics and atmospherics. So pervasive is the presence of Aeneid 6 that it functions, for Gladhill, ‘almost like a character within the tragedy, something that has an active role in filtering and distilling the content of the drama’ (p. 169). F. Stok contributes a detailed investigation of Servius’ comment on the list of sinners and punishments at Aen. 6.580–620. After highlighting the surprising convergence of Lucretian, Neoplatonic and Christianising exegetical traditions in Servius’ allegorical interpretation of this episode, Stok suggests that his characterisation of Virgil's infernal punishments as poetic fiction – a reading shared by Ambrose, Augustine and Paulinus of Nola – reflects a desire to accommodate the Christian users of Servius’ commentary.
Pressing onward into Elysium, L. Curtis reconsiders Horace's engagement with Virgil's Elysian chorus (Aen. 6.642–62) in the Carmen saeculare, focusing on the poets’ shared allusions to Greek performance culture. As Curtis astutely observes, by adapting Virgil's imagined underworld choreia to the ritual performance context of Augustus’ ludi saeculares Horace ‘appropriates the Roman reception of ancient Greek song culture from epic back to the lyric domain of the public choral voice’ (p. 188). Thus aligning poetic form and function, Horace's generic transformation can be viewed as part of his broader project in the Odes and Carmen saeculare to reclaim ‘for his new Roman setting the pragmatic authority of the Greek lyric tradition’ (p. 199). The following chapter by E. Gowers, another highlight of the collection, investigates Homer's absence among the dead poets of Elysium: while his omission is compensated for in part by intertextuality – the reunion of Aeneas and Anchises alludes, via Cicero and Lucretius, to Ennius’ dream encounter with Homer's shade in the Annales –, Gowers proposes that the poet may not yet have died at the time of Aeneas’ descent. Taking into account Homer's contested birthdate and Anchises’ thousand-year cycle of reincarnation (cf. Aen. 6.748), Gowers goes on to consider the intriguing possibility that, within the world of the Aeneid, Homer will eventually be reborn as Virgil.
J. Mackey offers a nuanced and informative discussion of Monica and Augustine's vision of the saints at Ostia in Confessions 9. Mackey argues that Augustine closely modelled his account on the meeting of Aeneas and Anchises in Elysium, but superimposed a Neoplatonic interpretation onto Aeneid 6 by substituting Anchises’ eschatological speech with a Latin translation of Plotinus’ Enneads. At the same time, Virgil's pageant of Roman heroes offered Augustine a ‘social’ model of revelatory experience (absent from the Plotinian intermediary) that was congenial to his Christian philosophy: ‘… the ascent at Ostia, like the revelation in Virgil's underworld, depicts not merely a vision shared with others but also a vision about others, about another community, whether of saints or of heroes, towards which the visionary, in one way or another, tends’ (p. 234). We take leave of Virgil's underworld, and the volume, with Parker's examination of the Gates of Sleep in the light of spiritualist philology. Following a useful overview of critical approaches to this enigmatic passage from Servius onwards, Parker considers the unorthodox textual practice of W.F. Jackson Knight, which involved the attempt to communicate directly with Virgil's shade. Parker concludes with a thought-provoking discussion of the links between spiritualism and classical philology, and its methodological implications, noting the extreme degree to which spiritualist scholars indulge the interpretive tyranny of the author, who is elevated in death to the position of ‘ultimate arbiter of meaning’ (p. 252).
