M.’s new commentary on Aeneid 8, the first stand-alone volume since the 1970s, joins his previous editions of Books 1, 4 and 6 for Bristol Classical Press, now part of the Bloomsbury empire, and his Virgil: Aeneid VIII: a Selection (2016), published by Bloomsbury to coincide with the book's appearance on the OCR A Level specification. Like its predecessors, it is described squarely as an edition for students, and like them it combines astute and level-headed scholarship with a profound understanding of the difficulties likely to be encountered by its audience in a first meeting with Virgil's Latin. M.’s long and highly distinguished career in Classics teaching makes him supremely qualified for the task, and he does not disappoint, whether in his lucid exposition of the years 44–31 bce, his patient explanatory ‘commentary notes’ [sic] on the historical detail of the Shield of Aeneas or in the tour de force of clarity and concision that is his introduction to the Virgilian hexameter. Literary-critical, grammatical and metrical terms are explained in a helpful glossary, and there is a full vocabulary and index nominum. The text is R.A.B. Mynors’ OCT (1969).

M.’s introduction sensibly assumes minimal prior knowledge on the part of the reader, devoting considerable space to summaries of individual books and, in more depth, of Book 8 itself. An extended discussion of Virgil's style addresses both the texture of individual passages and broader questions of pace, tone and intertextuality. Consideration of Virgil's non-Homeric literary predecessors, of Roman antiquarianism and, perhaps most importantly, Augustan iconography, all reflect developments in scholarship since the publication of the respective editions of P.T. Eden (1975), K.W. Gransden (1976) and C.J. Fordyce with J.D. Christie (1977), while a balanced summary of the ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ strands in modern Virgilian criticism provides an accessible overview of this contested territory. Appropriately for a student audience, assistance with the Latin text is given in the notes, via translation as well as explanation.

Comparison with M.’s other Virgil editions reveals the present volume to be somewhat more ambitious in its scope. Rather than focusing primarily on enabling students to translate the text and to understand its allusions, the new Aeneid 8 addresses questions of literary and historical context, of structure and themes and of political ideology, a shift of emphasis that seems designed to appeal to an undergraduate audience. Such a readership, however, is likely to find frustrating the lack of any detailed bibliography and may well query the value of the section on style, which functions primarily as a manual for addressing A Level-esque ‘lit crit’ questions. As a whole, the work bears some signs of hurried assembly: there is considerable overlap with M.’s earlier Selection, while the eight episodes identified in the ‘Summary’ are not mirrored by the subheadings in the text itself.

This is a sober, thorough and informative edition of Aeneid 8, which should find a well-deserved place on student reading lists for many years to come.