This slender and well-presented volume is wholly dedicated to a ‘polyedric’ interpretation of the presence of Erato in Aeneid 7.37. As such, it appears more as a bipartite extended article on the Aeneid’s so-called ‘proem in the middle’ rather than as a monograph in its own right, and it provides an exploration of the passage in all its polysemy rather than a straightforward conclusion on its interpretation. But the careful and learned suggestions put forward offer many rewards.

The book is made up of two self-standing but interconnected sections: the first is dedicated to exploring the relationship between the Muse Erato and Virgil as her vates/sacerdos; the second investigates more in-depth the erotic dimension of Erato and the symbiotic rapport between amor and furor throughout Virgil's poem, with particular attention to Books 7–12. When dealing with the Furies, the author of La trottola di Dioniso (2007, for the same publishing house) is obviously at her best, but that previous work also puts her in a privileged position to explore the sacred connotations of the language of the second proem. Indeed, while Erato's connections with Eros are confirmed both by Virgil's allusion to the proem of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica 3 (perhaps with the mediation of Varro Atacinus) and by Ovid's reception, it is reductive, according to B.P., to interpret this Eros/amor as purely functional to introducing Aeneas’ and Turnus’ fight over Lavinia. While amor is arguably subsumed both into the self-promoting agenda of the Julii (by evocation of both Venus genetrix and Venus victrix, p. 32) and of the Romans as a whole (being the hidden ‘secret name’ and anagram of ROMA, pp. 55–8), it is also the metapoetic and mystic-philosophical dimension of the amor Musarum of the vates that comes under the scrutiny of B.P.’s attentive lexical analysis of the proem's sacred language, where maius opus moveo (Aen. 7.45) recalls both the iunctura sacra mouere (alongside the more obvious bella mouere) and the messianic context of the fourth Eclogue (Ecl. 4.5, magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo) (pp. 44–50).

The second half of the book attempts a more literary interpretation of how amor, and its irrational connection with furor, affects the narrative of Aeneid 7–12. While B.P.’s main point, namely that there is no obvious fixed separation between amor and furor (p. 67), is not particularly new, some of her conclusions about Virgil's obsession with furor throughout his oeuvre are concisely and effectively put (p. 84: ‘la recente dolorosa esperienza delle guerre civili sembra avere acuito in Virgilio la percezione dell'abisso’), while the section also provides innovative suggestions at the narrative level, as B.P. goes on to show Virgil's parallel treatment of Erato and Allecto, to whom the poet gives precedence in Book 7 at the expense of Calliope and Tisiphone, highlighting the similarity between Erato's polyvalence and Allecto's polymorphism (pp. 72–3). That said, other considerations in this second section work less effectively. The final paragraph, dedicated to the killing of Turnus, may fail to convince some readers of the continuous presence of the ‘Erato-signal’ in the final scene, since B.P. chooses to dismiss in a footnote without much discussion the possibly erotic dimension of the relationship between Aeneas and Pallas as ‘fuorviante’ (p. 86 n. 392) and focuses solely on Aeneas’ more general feelings of ‘affection’ for the puer. Similarly, the ready dismissal of the possibly erotic connotations of Amata's love for Turnus somewhat undermines her reading of the parallels between Dido and Amata, who arguably share the common model of Fedra, passed over in silence in this book (p. 76).

A conspicuous absence in the book's analysis throughout is the philosophical dimension of amor and furor. Stoicism, which has played such a major role in our interpretations of the book's finale, is never mentioned, and Epicureanism is present only to be rejected (p. 60); more importantly, the Empedoclean dimension of Eros and Eris, which surely must have been relevant to Virgil as he alluded simultaneously to Apollonius’ Eros in Argonautica 3 and to Ennius’ Discordia in Annales 7, is only referred to in passing (p. 68), while S. Clément-Tarantino's view on amor and Discordia is dismissed in a footnote without much explanation (p. 37 n. 137). One is left to wonder whether the reintroduction of Ennius into the picture as well as of a tighter interrelation between ‘amour-passion’ and ‘amor ferri’ would take B.P. to different conclusions, especially in view of the military connotations of the episode of Dido as an aition of the Punic Wars, and bearing in mind that her curse is also the cause of the wars in Latium (Aen. 4.629, pugnent ipsique nepotesque).

Connected to this is the more pressing issue that the distinct categories of amor that B.P. adopts from J. Dion (Les passions dans l'œuvre de Virgil. Poétique et philosophie [1993]), namely ‘passionate love’, ‘conjugal love’, ‘homosexual love’, ‘filial love’, ‘love for the fatherland’, ‘love of arms’, ‘love of glory’ etc. (pp. 59–61) are really too schematic and narrow to allow for a deeper interpretation of this poem, nor does it help to lock up each occurrence of amor in an either positive or negative compartment. While I am in full agreement with B.P. when she writes that ‘la casistica virgiliana non può essere ricondotta nel letto di Procuste di un rassicurante schema binario’ (p. 83), it seems to me that this binary distinction is nevertheless implied throughout the course of her analysis of those places where ‘positive’ amor turns into ‘negative’ furor or is the root of ‘negative’ and ‘tragic’ consequences for individuals and communities (p. 84). This, I suspect, runs the risk of despoiling that complexity and polysemy of the Aeneid that B.P. herself otherwise successfully emphasises.