There are – stop me if you have heard this one before – very few scholars who could have written this book. In it, H. surveys about 3,000 years of cultural history, from Homer to Battlestar Galactica and the National September 11 Memorial Museum. And he does this, surprising even himself (p. xi), in just over 200 pages, which include some 24 illustrations. (There are fifteen colour plates on eight additional pages.) It is, necessarily, a brisk tour, but rarely a breathless one: H.’s light touch and impeccable judgement in matters of detail make (the illusion of) keeping up with him a real pleasure.

In truth, writing a ‘cultural history’ of the Aeneid is right in H.’s wheelhouse: no one has done more to make reception studies integral to the interpretation of Latin poetry. The design of the volume thus reflects both the remit of this particular assignment and an important aspect of H.’s critical approach – which, arguably at least, is calibrated to the demands of interpreting the Aeneid more than any other poem. In his first book, some 30 years ago, H. effectively turned the tide against ‘pessimistic’ readings by copiously documenting and analysing the abundance and cogency of panegyric elements in the poem within a spacious literary and historical framework; shortly afterwards, in his second book, he acknowledged the power of discordant elements, but interpreted these as somehow latent until they were activated in reception by Virgil's ‘epic successors’, who wrote in the more explicitly repressive and paranoid political climate that prevailed under Augustus’ imperial successors. This most recent study reflects the combined outlook of those essays, together with H.’s more recent work and a generous synthesis of research by many other scholars, projected over not one but twenty centuries of imitation, adaptation and parody.

A chapter outline will illustrate the book's emphases and implicit argument. After a substantial chapter (1) of introductory overview, Chapter 2, ‘Underworlds’, begins in the dark heart of the poem, which here, however, is presented less as a source of infernal energy than as a repository of motifs and ideas and a symbol of the literary past. It is a familiar, but still suggestive, way into a poem that is itself so indebted to its predecessors, and that itself became such a large part of the literary past and the portal to a more distant, less accessible antiquity, over most of the next 2,000 years. The following chapter (3), ‘“La donna è mobile”: Versions of Dido’, confronts the single most problematic, and for many readers the most sympathetic, character of the poem, and does full justice both to the complexity of her representation by Virgil and of her ‘posthumous’ fame. Chapter 4, ‘The Many Faces of Aeneas’, bears an odd title in view of the hero's near facelessness both in the poem and in reception (as H. acknowledges, p. 77), a fact curiously emphasised in the title of the book. In certain ways, this chapter occupies an unmarked position at the end of the book's opening sequence of four, since the next chapter (5), ‘Empire and Nation’, takes the central position and addresses the key idea of how intimately the Aeneid has always been linked to the twin themes of translatio imperii and translatio studiorum. Chapter 6, ‘Imperium sine Fine: The Aeneid and Christianity’, applies the theme of empire to that of religion, while the next (7), ‘The Aeneid and New Worlds’, explores a particular epoch in the poem's imperialist and religious reception, one that has emerged just recently as an area of important and exciting research. The final two chapters offer some edifying relaxation from high seriousness, turning the reader's attention to (8) ‘Parody and Burlesque’ and (9) ‘Art and Landscape’.

H. covers so much territory and is such an agreeable, persuasive and knowledgeable cicerone that one is at a loss to say how the book might have been improved. His very example, however, and the richness of the tradition that he so well surveys, challenge and encourage the reader to envision other lines of approach. Regarding hell, for instance, it seems to me that one could imagine a history of the underworld specifically in the reception of Virgil that would tend to emphasise the pervasive ineluctability of infernal forces in the poem itself, and not only in reception. It may be in reception that meaning is generally made, but is it never actually found? If it is not, then the recurring tendency of Virgil's followers to be variously attracted to hellish themes (a partial list of those H. discusses under this heading would include Lucan, Claudian, Augustine, Fulgentius, Bernardus Silvestris, Petrarch, Verino, Fracastoro, Jonson, Offenbach, Freud, Eliot, Butour, Boland and Heaney) is curiously pronounced. This is perhaps most visible in the greatest of them. Dante's Divine Comedy wallows deeper and deeper into hell throughout its first cantica, before notionally purging itself of infernal associations over the remaining two. But in spite of this purging, it is Inferno that has proven to be the most popular and inspiring of Dante's creations. By the same token, Blake famously took Milton as being ‘of the Devil's party without knowing it’, and the glamour of evil in Paradise Lost remains as real and as challenging today as does Milton's exaltation of hereditary monarchy as the ideal form of cosmic government. It may be in such cases that what seems the obvious or emotionally more compelling interpretation is, in some sense, wrong (although, according to reception theory, what does ‘wrong’ actually mean?), but in a way that produces a creative cognitive dissonance. If so, why might this not be a lesson that Dante and Milton learned from Virgil himself, and one available to Virgil's interpreters, as well?

The common answer to these questions would be that validity is subject to the authority of some interpretative community. H. not only focuses on what have been authoritative and widely accepted readings, but (to develop an earlier point) has done as much as or more than anyone else to organise the current climate of opinion. If most would now align the poem's original or immanent meaning (if one may speak of such) with past receptions that have taken the Aeneid as a model for imperial or religious encomium, that situation is likely to obtain until someone as gifted as H. himself makes a different case. I would not hold my breath. That said, one may keep one's own counsel: some of the most intriguing passages in this book concern those who took up both sides at different times in their lives, like Dryden before and after his conversion to Catholicism (cf. pp. 119–21). Such instances powerfully support the view that meaning is made at the point of reception, while causing the idea that the sum of such meanings defines that of ‘the poem itself’ to rather disappear from view – unless the poem's meaning is, precisely, its resistance against any attempt to privilege one interpretation over another. Perhaps the power of the Aeneid lies not in the role it has played to inspire devotion or scepticism towards the Augustan or any other regime, but rather in its engendering of an endless series of varied and even contradictory reactions. Regarding contradictions, at the end of Chapter 1 H. aptly quotes Walt Whitman: ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’. As does Virgil, and as does this wonderful guide to the wonderful multitudes contained in and inspired by the Aeneid.