This elegant libellus comprises an English translation of B.'s first book together with his paper on the lament of Juturna. A foreword by P. Hardie and an afterword by B. himself bookend the volume.
At what point in the history of scholarship should a 2015 translation of work published in 1978/1984 be situated, especially when the revised edition adds reflections by the author and others on the original work's genesis and reception? This question animates the present volume, not least since B. has written and lectured widely in English in the intervening period. Fore- and afterword (both fascinating) contain much by way of review, tracing the book's roots in the scholarly humus of 1970s Pisa and pertinently positioning it in relation to modern and especially English-language criticism. (The book is also highly valued in Italian scholarship.) The volume's ensemble, then, captures a moment while giving some valuable context on before and after.
The pragmatics of translation have their part to play here too: the reader and ‘her role as epic addressee’ (p. 2) seems more at home in 2015 Anglo-American academic discourse than in 1984 Pisa, even though ‘il lettore … nel suo ruolo come destinatario epico’ is but incidentally masculine. More obviously, La traccia del modello yields to the subtitle, Homeric Effects, but the original leaves its mark throughout: in Hardie's appreciation (p. viii), which cites Hinds citing Fowler (‘the trace/trail/track of the model’); in the shorthand of B.'s retrospective, where he opines that ‘La traccia was bound to disappear without a trace’ (p. 115); and in the translation itself where traccia and cognates are variously rendered, and where due traccie contrastanti is glossed, with metaphysical wit, as ‘two contrasting traces – two tracks mixed’ (p. 90).
Since the original work has been translated intact, with only the new sections citing later scholarship, it retains a strong savour of its time and place. There are gains in the translation, itself a marvel of intercultural cross-fertilisation. Since no native English speaker either today or then would write this book in this way, the Barchiesian effect is defamiliarising and in turn revealing.
B.'s exegetical method and idiom – now lapidary, now expansive, but always demanding the reader's full attention – are reminiscent of G.B. Conte, whose work on Homeric intertextuality in Virgil going back to 1974 is cited generously and often. B. also credits engagement with A. La Penna and M. Bettini, but the core distinction between Homer as ‘code model’ and ‘exemplary model’ is ascribed (p. 124) to Genette's Palimpsestes (1982). In addition to the French and Italian theoretical underpinnings the book is dense with often recherché references to German philological studies of Homer and Virgil. It is a pity that these and many relevant points are hidden away in endnotes rather than as footnotes, as in the Italian edition where they command more attention. The index of modern authors provides a partial intellectual stratigraphy.
Four main chapters all take as their material scenes and structures from Virgil's Patrocleia, the narrative sequence of retributive killing, the allusive contest for the role of the victorious Achilles. The readings are intensely close and muscular. They address first how Virgil had inherited and interpreted Homer, often through tragedy or the philosophical tradition (the afterword sharpens the focus on reading practices as such, and has more to say about the Homeric scholia), and second the interplay in Virgil's poetry of epic legacy and Roman cultural norms. Despite the structuralist and semiological language the book's rhetoric gives a strong sense of Virgil as intending author directing his philologically minded readers to a definite, albeit complex, response to the Aeneid's Homeric intertextuality.
Thus in the first chapter on the death of Pallas the reader should notice (even though Klingner did not) that Pallas himself pulls Turnus’ spear out of his own wound before collapsing in death, and that Turnus presses his foot onto Pallas’ corpse not to retrieve his weapon but to rip off the swordbelt. ‘The two gestures just specified are in fact foreign to the iconographic typology of Homeric tradition’ (p. 18) and direct our attention to Turnus’ fateful act of despoiling Pallas. In making the swordbelt a pivotal motif, Virgil exploits the latent potentiality of the Homeric text, in which the story of the armour of Achilles is ‘realized in a very disjointed manner’ (p. 24). The second movement of the argument focuses on Turnus’ failure to servare modum, a cultural value for which B. identifies strong Roman foundations. From this cultural model ‘an ongoing commentary is cast that allows the reader to ideologize according to his own value system the poem's “Iliadic” content and participate in foreseeing its developments’ (p. 31).
Chapter 2, ‘The Structure of Aeneid 10’, examines the similarities and differences between parallel duels fought by three unequally matched pairs of warriors, involving a crisscrossing of fathers (or surrogate fathers) and sons: Turnus–Pallas, Aeneas–Lausus and Aeneas–Mezentius; this triptych leaves an asymmetry which will only be resolved by the duel of Aeneas and Turnus reserved for Book 12. The hospitality scene at Pallanteum and its echoes entail that the duty of paternal care for Pallas devolves to Aeneas, which will matter in the poem's final scene. While B. made much of the distinction between seasoned and neophyte warriors, in these his juvenilia he was unafraid to correct, qualify, or disagree with such scholarly heavyweights as Heinze, Knauer and Klingner.
Chapter 3 steps back from the Sturm und Drang of Books 10–12 to the scene in Book 8 in which Venus reveals a vision in the sky of the armour made by Vulcan, attended by crashing thunder. All others tremble at the sight, but Aeneas alone recognises the preordained sign of fate and foretells doom for Turnus. Achilles and Oedipus (Soph. OC) provide parallels, but B. puts an equal if not greater emphasis on the echo of Roman civil war portents. Pp. 60–5 offer a fine analysis of the war in Latium as a civil war and the implications of this metaphor for interpretation of the Aeneid.
Chapter 4, ‘The Death of Turnus’, begins with generalisations about Virgil's transformation of the Homeric manner, which are at their most acute and original when dealing with the culturally specific resonances of Homer's formulaic repetitions, especially the ones that appear out of place, as received by Virgil. As one might expect, the discussion of the poem's final scene is complex and nuanced, but one of its high points is the discussion of Turnus quoting Priam's successful supplication to Achilles in Iliad 24 even as he finds himself replaying the role of the dying Hector. This surprising echo informs the choice of dust jacket illustration, a detail from a silver cup from Hoby's Tomb depicting Priam kissing the hand of a haughty Achilles, another paratextual accretion to the 1984 edition.
Juturna supplies a threnodic coda to all those reges et proelia. All these chapters were originally together in B.'s honours thesis, and so the Juturna paper is now ‘reunited with its siblings’ (p. 119). B. surveys form, function, rhetoric, poetic effects and models. Commenting on the tragic elements in the lament of Juturna B. notes that the Aeneid lacks the ‘dialogic’ dimension of tragedy according to which characters can learn from action and change their minds: a sombre conclusion.
The appearance of this translation is a sign of the times, an indication of the ever-growing dominance of English-language Classical scholarship; but it will also capture the much wider readership which the book deserves, and add to its influence.
