It is a great relief finally to have a work on Joyce and a classical author that does equal justice to both. As P. notes in his conclusion, texts used for comparison are too often flattened out in the process, so that, in Joyce's case for example, Leopold Bloom is stood against ‘heroic’ Odysseus and his wife next to ‘patient’ Penelope. Even in studies of Ovid's use of Virgil, the example P. uses, we often end up with a distinctly stodgy Aeneid. In contrast, P. works with a deeply nuanced view of both Ulysses and the Aeneid and, intriguingly, uses Joyce as a way to gain insight into Virgil just as he uses Virgil to shed light on Joyce. The approach eliminates the tired motif of classical ‘allusions’ and ‘parallels’ and realises instead that when one supremely alive work encounters another both gain in complexity. As promised, Virgil and Joyce reaps a rich harvest, not only from considering Virgil's influence on Joyce, but also from considering Joyce's influence on Virgil.

Despite P.’s (quite valid) point that the Aeneid, as a Roman epic of empire, is a surprising resource for a construction of Irish national identity (p. 17), in a way it is even more surprising that Ulysses’ references to Virgil are not more overt. Joyce only played with ancient Greek, but his Latin was superb, and Virgil, an author he knew intimately, lay at the basis of any educated Irishman's classical awareness – even Simon Dedalus can quote Virgil. Ulysses also, quite self-consciously, positions itself, as the Aeneid does, as a national epic, and Joyce was very aware of Virgil's role as spiritual and artistic guide to Dante, arguably the most important artistic influence on Joyce. And as it happens, as P. points out, both works have found themselves at the centre of a scholarly debate concerning their ‘patriotism’: the Aeneid, of course, as both pro- and anti-Augustan and both pro- and anti-imperialist, and Ulysses, once regarded as fiercely anti-nationalist, now often seen as deeply concerned with the fight for Irish independence.

The greatest virtue of P.’s technique appears here, in that it enables him to avoid the black and white, pro- or anti-, view that bedevils scholarship on Virgil's view of Augustus and on Joyce's view of nationalism. Joyce subscribes Ulysses with the dates 1914–1921, reminding us that its composition spanned not only WWI but also the Easter rising of 1916 and Irish independence, which contained the visible seeds of the 1922–23 Irish Civil War (P., pp. 90, 107). Although the dramatic action of Ulysses occurs in 1904, just as the dramatic action of the Aeneid occurs long before Augustus, the novel, like the epic, is deeply informed by political crisis, particularly in ‘Cyclops’ and ‘Circe’, the episodes P. examines in depth. Both epic and novel, however, respond through multiple, complex and contradictory voices. P. is particularly convincing in his argument that, despite the argument that nationalism is a creation of the late eighteenth century, there is a significant interplay between Virgil's sense of collective identity and Joyce's (pp. 4–8) and in showing that Virgil's agenda is, in this sense, ‘nationalist’ rather than imperialist and of ‘Italian rather than Roman nationalism’ (p. 69). Although P.’s sense of multiple layers of significance may occasionally go a bit far, no one versed in either author could fail to appreciate, in both cases, its necessity. Stephen Dedalus does not do grey (U. 1.120), but then the artist of Ulysses, like the Virgil of the Aeneid, is no longer a young man.

P.’s first chapter, on the direct reference of Joyce's ‘Aeolus’ episode to Virgil's deus nobis haec otia fecit (U. 7.1055; Eclogue 1.6) brings the ambivalence of both texts out splendidly by examining how Joyce, in his characteristic manner, subtly and humorously undermines a standard Irish nationalist identification of the Roman and British Empires on one side, and of Greek and Irish opposition on the other (pp. 25–6). P. does a marvellous job of pointing out parallels between the Irish and Roman need for ‘land-reform’ and, while some identifications may be a stretch, such as pairing Stephen's ‘Dublin vestals’ (U. 7.924) with Tityrus and Meliboeus, as matching the industrious and pious against the lazy and improvident (Stephen, after all, rejects the Eclogue quote), the connection between Virgil's ambivalent response to war and empire and Joyce's is very telling indeed. In fact, P. could add that ‘the Athenian fleets at Aegospotami’ cited by Professor MacHugh (U. 7.568) is hardly a sterling example of Greek anti-imperialism.

Just as his first chapter pairs Joyce's undermining a simplistic sense of English / Irish relations with a Virgilian ‘semicolonial’ view of Italy's relation to Rome in the aftermath of the Social Wars (though perhaps with an overly strong focus on Rome's ‘conquest’ and ‘incorporation’ of Italy, as p. 39), P.’s second chapter points to often unnoticed levels of complexity in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses and the Cacus episode of the Aeneid. In uncovering the ambivalence of both Hercules and Cacus through a review of various versions of the story, P. depicts Joyce's ‘citizen’, the champion of a ‘pure’ Ireland, as polyvalent and hybrid as well: ‘As Cacus and Hercules, the citizen is an oppressed rustic, a tyrannical monarch, a violent terrorist, and a heroic liberator’ (p. 44) as well as, like Augustus, a ‘repressive monarch masquerading as a republican citizen’ (p. 67). This excellent analysis of how Joyce satirises ‘pure’ Ireland continues into the next chapter, as P. points out that Joyce rejects Virgil's creation of ‘ancient roots’ as a means to community, but nonetheless constructs, as Virgil does, ‘a unified community out of hybridity and multiplicity’ (p. 69). In a particularly telling application of the idea of ‘the reassurance of fratricide’ (pp. 83ff.), P. points out that Virgil's depiction in Aeneid 7–12 of a civil war postulates an original Roman / Italian unity, one of many features of the poem that allowed Joyce to find ‘in the Aeneid a partner in the contradictions and hesitations of forming a collective identity following a breakdown of empire’ (p. 3).

The multiple voices that P. finds in both Virgil and Joyce sound most poignantly in Chapters 5 and 6, where he explores the parallel between Marcellus in Book 6 of the Aeneid and the appearance of Bloom's dead son Rudy at the end of ‘Circe’. In the ghosts of Rudy and Marcellus, highlighted in Ulysses by the disruption and heterogeneity of the ‘Circe’ episode, and in the Aeneid by the gate of false dreams that Aeneas leaves through (6.893ff.), P. sees the need to accept ‘the loss of a perfect past and acceptance of an imperfect future’ (p. 109). In addition, Joyce's evocation of Marcellus suggests the dangerous instability of purity and violence that resulted in the Irish Civil War. In reading Aeneid 6 through the dead sons, Icarus and Marcellus, who frame the book, P. illustrates the link of mourning and nationalism found in sources such as Anderson (p. 71), and connects the disruption of succession in Marcellus and of paternity with Rudy to a pattern of discontinuity. He then examines Aeneas’ failure to learn from the Sibyl's prophecies, interrupting Virgil's connection of his own Italy back through space and time, and (following Derrida) the gramophone of ‘Circe’ as it makes speech ‘unrecognizable’ by converting the ‘Jerusalem’ of the hymn into a (quite appropriate) ‘Whorusalam’ (pp. 127–9). His conclusion: ‘Although the Aeneid is a text that thematizes the continuity of Italy as a territory and the continuity of the Julian family from Aeneas to Augustus, Joyce's use of Aeneid 6 in “Circe” reveals a poem in which ruptures of families and of language itself resist integration into continuity and meaning’ (p. 138), as his entire work, adds deeply to our understanding of Joyce, of Virgil and of the deepest relations of classical to modern literature.