Until very recently, students of the two-way relationship between Virgil and the corpus of Latin elegiac poetry had to take their bearings from a limited number of scattered studies. These include E. J. Kenney’s classic article ‘Virgil and the Elegiac Sensibility’ (Illinois Classical Studies 8 (1983), 44–59) and Francis Cairns’s chapter on Dido in Virgil’s Augustan Epic (1989). With the appearance of this collection, and of monographs by Sarah L. McCallum (Elegiac Love and Death in Vergil’s Aeneid, 2023) and Donncha O’Rourke (Propertius and the Virgilian Sensibility, 2025), investigation of this central topic in Roman literary history has been placed on a much firmer footing. The editors and publisher deserve thanks for shepherding this ambitious and substantial volume into print; it is an epic undertaking, and one which has evidently also involved a good deal of love and devotion.

Keith’s introduction goes some way beyond setting the scene and introducing the 22 contributions that follow (though it does both of those things admirably as well), charting Virgilian interactions with the poet’s elegiac forerunners Callimachus and Gallus. The first of four main sections features exchanges between Virgil and contemporary Roman elegy: two chapters uncover polemical attitudes towards elegy in the Eclogues, in Ecl. 1 (Henkel) and 10 (Fabre-Serris), while others examine the themes of the Golden Age (Gardner), of nostos (‘return’; Myers), and of civic virtue (Anagnostou-Laoutides). McCallum teases out funereal and erotic threads in Virgil’s ‘proem in the middle’ at Aeneid 7.1–45 (on which see also her monograph cited above), while Gladhill argues for the presence of the non-literary genre of neniae (the dirge) in Roman elegy with reference to Horace’s discussions of the character and origins of the elegiac genre in the Ars poetica and the Odes. He then relates this to the episode of Nisus and Euryalus in the ninth book of the Aeneid, and in particular to the lament of Euryalus’ mother at Aen. 9.481–97.

The five chapters in Part 2 are united by their focus on Ovid’s responses to Virgil in his elegiac works, including his treatment of the myth of Pasiphaë (previously handled by Virgil at Ecl. 6.45–60) in Book 1 of the Ars amatoria (Pietropaolo), and his lament for Tibullus in Amores 3.9 (Hallett). Virgilian material is revisited extensively in the Fasti, here exemplified in the Ovidian episodes of the Agonalia (Fasti 1; Weiden Boyd) and Anna Perenna (Fasti 3; Papaioannou). Tissol returns to Ecl. 1 and the plight of Meliboeus in his analysis of Epistulae ex Ponto 1.8, in which Virgilian and Tibullan resonances are employed in Ovid’s self-presentation as an exile forced to leave the rustic idyll of his homeland.

Part 3 continues the story by tracing the reception of Virgilian engagements with elegy in Roman literature of the imperial period. Baraz reads Calpurnius Siculus’ second and third eclogues as a ‘response to the tension between the pastoral and the elegiac in the preceding pastoral tradition’ (239), in which the poet succeeds more fully than his predecessor Virgil in integrating and containing elegy within the bucolic world. Lucan’s account of the violation of the sacred grove of Massilia in Bellum civile 3 is presented by Celotto as an instance of Caesar’s amor militiae, a reverse analogue of elegiac militia amoris, in its application of language implying erotic violence to the episode of deforestation. The adherence of the elegiac character Hylas to Virgilian models of heroism in the third book of Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica leads to his downfall, in Blum-Sorensen’s reading; and in Silvae 1.2 and the Achilleid Statius brings epic and elegy once more into dialogue, combining elements from different genres to celebrate the marriage of the poet Stella and to fashion a post-Ovidian epic hero (De Cristofaro). It is tempting to wonder whether the name of Stella’s bride, Violentilla, itself encapsulates a fusion of epic with elegy, in its coupling of a suggestion of violentus (despite the reservations of C. E. Newlands, Statius’ Silvae and the Poetics of Empire (2002), 98 n. 41) with a diminutive form more suited to the register of love poetry.

The collection concludes with six chapters on ‘Vergil’s elegiac mode in reception’. Pandey illustrates how ‘Latin’s foremost epic author has cut an elegiac profile since antiquity’ (301), linking Virgil’s supposedly self-composed epitaph with the elegiac vogue for self-memorialisation and pointing to other later elegiac texts which ‘eulogize, package, and pre-digest’ (313) the Virgilian corpus. Abbamonte notes the rarity of references to the elegiac poets in Servius’ commentary on Virgil and finds his use of Ovid (exclusively the Metamorphoses) compatible with the criticisms of that poet expressed by Quintilian. For Draper, Ausonius’ combination of Ovidian and Virgilian material in Cupido cruciatus serves to highlight the proto-Ovidian credentials of Virgil’s lugentes campi (Fields of Mourning) in Aeneid Book 6. The three final studies examine episodes from Virgil’s vast and varied afterlife in the Italian Renaissance: in Giovanni Pontano’s Eridanus 1.14 (Roman); in the antiquarian elegiac poetry of Francesco Patrizi (author also of a famous nativity eclogue), Elisio Calenzio, Aurelio Serena, and Francesco Peto (Miletti); and in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (Ortiz), where the highly elegiac Virgilian model of Nisus and Euryalus is again prominent.

It is no criticism to observe that even a volume of this size and scope, to which scant justice can be done in a short review, necessarily stops short of comprehensiveness (as Keith acknowledges, 20). There is much more to be said, in particular, on the reception of Virgil in later elegiac texts, on the reception of elegy in later Virgilianising texts, and on the reception of the Virgilian-elegiac compound in later texts of all kinds. In all the areas on which it touches, this is nonetheless a landmark contribution. It will be an indispensable and very welcome port of call for everyone with an interest in Virgil’s ‘radical contamination of epic with elegy’ (18, 20) and its significant footprint in later literature.