This new edition of Aeneid 3 fills more than one gap. It provides lecturers with a user-friendly tool with which to teach the book in intermediate and advanced Latin classes, substituting for both the dated edition of R.D. Williams (1962) and the over-complicated commentary of N. Horsfall (2006). But it also attempts to bridge what is often perceived as a leap in difficulty from A-Level commentaries to the challenges of the Cambridge ‘Green and Yellow’. The first attempt is welcome; the second perhaps reflects an unfortunate lowering of our expectations for Latin undergraduate learning. The edition lacks a critical apparatus, reduces the bibliography to the essential (and mostly Anglophone), duly translates all the Greek and Latin in the loci paralleli, and includes both a useful glossary of difficult words and an ‘Appendix of Major Intertexts’, the latter somewhat reminiscent of high-school literature anthologies.

But the Heyworth–Morwood partnership also has the commentary interspersed with a number of notes engaging with textual criticism at a higher level, in an edition whose text, we are told, ‘has been established anew’ (p. xi) and includes no small number of conjectures. This may have two downside effects: on the one hand, the notes providing the rationale for textual choices, though presented in a simple and engaging manner, sound somewhat out of place in a work otherwise addressed to an undergraduate audience; on the other, the lack of a critical apparatus may end up frustrating more experienced readers.

This said, the commentary is insightful and updated throughout – the edition wholly free of typos. The grammar notes reveal good sense and perspicacity in preventing students’ questions and difficulties, while interpretation is fresh and attuned to the most recent turns in Virgilian scholarship, with a particularly welcome emphasis on Republican epic and tragedy, Catullan intertextuality and Hellenistic texts, such as Lycophron's Alexandra, that have been previously neglected. All this makes the commentary a really welcome addition to our teaching tools. But while the editors want to rescue the book from scholarly judgements of ‘dullness’ or poetic ‘failure’ (p. x), it seems that they forgot to tell the students why reading Aeneid 3 is actually quite an exciting journey. This lack of a bigger picture is felt by the curious absence of a section of the introduction dedicated solely to the book; such a section would have much better replaced the lengthy and uninspiring survey of the Aeneid’s ‘context and themes’ (pp. 35–44).

Aeneid 3 – it is undeniable – has something patchy. But maybe that is where its mysterious strength lies. Not only in the abrupt shifts in genre and tone (from the epic and tragic to the pastoral and comic, highlighted towards the end of the commentary), but also in Virgil's difficult negotiation between the fantastic and the uncanny as he underlines the untrustworthiness of storytelling, in the book's frustrated attempts to engage with ‘wonderlands’ narratives and in the feeling (also brought about by the book's almost complete lack of similes) that Aeneas’ Odyssey lies in the realm of metaphors, allegories and personifications.

Finally, I would have liked to hear more about how the episodic, repetitive and discontinuous character of both Aeneas’ and Virgil's narrative also matches what D. Quint (‘Repetition and Ideology in the Aeneid’, MD 23 [1989], 9–54) has recognised as an important regressive and obsessive trajectory that accompanies the Trojans’ migration as they attempt to come to terms with their traumatic past and shape the contours of their new selves. While the commentary's back cover sells this book as a ‘story of migration’, it is the most humane aspects of this story that somehow got lost along the way.