How many authors nowadays can say that they have tackled a theme in which ‘sich die Forschung bislang … kaum interessiert hat’ (p. 14)? P. says exactly that, and his claim is quite justified. His theme is Virgil's use of anachronisms, not so much in the stellar passages (which since antiquity have endlessly fascinated) such as Jupiter's prophecy to Venus, the parade of heroes, the Roman scenes on the shield of Aeneas or Jupiter and Juno's ultimate shaping of Rome. He focuses rather on the multiple ‘everyday’ moments in which Virgil narrates the poem on two time-levels, the prehistory of Rome and the Roman present. He examines the technique whereby in the narrative and the similes Virgil uses contemporary Roman terms from Roman architecture, weaponry, military tactics and customs to describe the world of Roman prehistory. Virgil simultaneously ‘prefigures’ the contemporary Roman experience from the vantage point of the past and prompts his contemporary Roman readers to imagine that they are present in the portrayal of their prehistory – tua res agitur, as P. puts it, introducing the term ‘Zeitmontagen’ (‘time-montages’) to describe such moments.
P. is perfectly aware that Virgil's anachronisms have been criticised since the Aeneid's appearance, for example by the influential C. Julius Hyginus (Augustus’ librarian), Aulus Gellius and Servius. Gellius follows Hyginus in objecting that Palinurus’ body cannot have been swept to Velia on the Italian shore (Aen. 6.337–83) because that city only came into being 600 years later, in the reign of Servius Tullius. P. sees this as an intentional anachronism with the aesthetic aim of helping Virgil's readers to relate to the prehistoric event, and he proceeds to approach other anachronisms along the same lines.
Let us look in greater detail at two more significant examples drawn from P.'s extensive study, two from the narrative and two from the similes. For the first, I select the descriptions at Aen. 1.421–9, 446–9, 505–6, 640–2, 697–702, 725–7 of the newly founded Carthage, its buildings and dining-room decorations and arrangements. Many words are taken anachronistically from contemporary Roman architectural vocabulary to conjure up the external architecture and living interiors of a city founded in the ninth or eighth century bce (quite apart from the well-known anachronism of the three or so centuries between the founding of Carthage and Aeneas’ time): for example strata viarum, iura, magistratus, senatus, theatrum (compare the Theatre of Marcellus, erected by Augustus after 23 bce in memory of his nephew, son-in-law and successor), scaena, machinae (building-cranes mentioned at Aen. 4.86–9, and supplied in the Vatican Virgil illustration for the passage in Book 1, which P. prints), fastigia urbis, aerea … limina, testudo (here the technical term for a vaulted ceiling), caelata, sponda, atria, laquearia and so on. One of Virgil's aims was to emphasise the new city's oriental luxury, but P. convincingly concludes that Virgil is exploiting the juxtaposition of two time-levels on which the prehistoric colony and modern Rome are presented as foils simultaneously and mutually illuminating one another. This type of ‘time-montage’ P. calls ‘implicit’ because it does not explicitly specify the borrowings as Roman.
A second major contribution to P.'s argument is his discussion of military weapons and tactics. Here he finds that Virgil deploys older Roman technical terms to mark the prehistoric world of his narrative while superimposing upon it anachronistically modern Roman technical terms in use in his own time to characterise both the Trojans and the Latins and their allies as together forming the beginnings of the future populus Romanus – but also to prefigure events like the Social Wars of 91–88 bce. So, for example, in the catalogue of the Italians the contingent commanded by Aventinus is said to use the pilum, the contemporary Roman term for ‘spear’, but also a dolo or dolon, presumably an ancient term for a pike (Aen. 7.664); the first contingent from Amiternum is called a cohors (Aen. 7.710); and, most significantly, Turnus has an epic round shield, a clipeus, not the contemporary Roman scutum, while his men are likewise clipeata … agmina (Aen. 7.789, 793–4). The army of the Trojan allies the Etruscans is called a legio (Aen. 8.605). So is Volcens’ Latin army of 300 horsemen (scutati, Aen. 9.370), which Servius (on Aen. 9.368) comments was the usual size of cavalry assigned to a Roman legio. In the gathering of both armies to watch the duel between Aeneas and Turnus archaic hastae are made to coexist with contemporary pila and scuta, with the Latin side styled as the legio Ausonidum (Aen. 12.121–30). In the final duel it is Turnus who is made to use a gladius (Aen. 12.789), the last occurrence of the word in the poem, while his weapon previously is constantly called an ensis, the ancient term for the older weapon; the mention of Turnus’ gladius – in a predominantly epic scene – is a final reminder to Virgil's readers that tua res agitur.
By their very nature Virgil's similes are used to bring epic key moments of the narrative into the readers or listeners’ world of experience so that they can relate to them more personally; hence it is no surprise that Virgil introduces explicitly Roman experience into them. P. calls the similes in which this occurs ‘explicit’ time-montages, the first simile of the poem presenting Neptune as a Roman politician. I select as examples P.'s treatment of two, the first of which illustrates the fall of Bitias after he is struck by Turnus’ phalarica, a weapon used in sieges in the Republic. The fall is compared with the crash of a column into the water of the popular Roman beach resort of Baiae (Aen. 9.710–16). The simile describes with graphic visual precision the column's forward tipping, downward falling movement, collision with the surface of the water and settling deep beneath it, after which the sea surges and black sand is stirred to the surface; acoustics are also present in the detail of the sound of the crash causing the nearby islands of Procida and Ischia to quake. P. is right to note that contemporary Romans either must have witnessed directly or could easily have imagined such an event, and have felt the death of an epic hero vividly drawn into their immediate experience.
The second simile compares Juturna's eagerness to keep her brother Turnus from confronting Aeneas to a mother swallow fluttering high in the atrium of a wealthy villa-owner to find food for her nestlings, and making her calls heard in the empty colonnades and around the villa's pools (Aen. 12.473–7). The scenario is decidedly Roman, and the viewer is drawn into Juturna's epic concern by its piquantly peaceful and familiar atmosphere; P. also suggests that in all this there is a hint of a prefiguration of the Roman civil wars.
What might Virgil's aim have been in blending the two time-levels of epic prehistory and the contemporary world? P. regards the question whether there is any role here in the pro- or anti-Augustus debate as less significant than the fact that the assignment of epic and contemporary Roman accoutrement is mixed. The essential aim of the anachronisms is, P. concludes, aesthetic, the heightening of the appeal of the epic for Virgil's contemporary readers.
The book is a model of logical construction in an arresting treatment of a subject never systematically studied before. P.'s illustrations, mostly from the Vatican Virgil, add superbly to the cogency – and charm – of the undertaking.
