If a spectre can be said to haunt Virgilian studies, it is surely the spectre of Virgil's own life. A ragbag collection of historical anachronisms, smutty gossip and too-good-to-be-true anecdotes, the ancient biographical tradition has long embarrassed modern scholars. The various ancient Vitae have punched above their weight throughout Virgil's reception, despite their temporal distance (the most important biography, the Vita Suetonii-Donati [VSD], dates from four centuries after his death) and, more damningly, despite their transparent tendency to extrapolate details of Virgil's life from allegorical readings of his works – an uncomfortably shaky foundation for critical investigations. The iconoclastic solution of N. Horsfall, A Companion to the Study of Virgil (1995), pp. 1–25 (the foil for many of this volume's contributions), was to eject the ancient Vitae from scholarly consideration, condemning them as ‘but a step from unabashed fantasy’ and ‘guilty of simple stupidity’ (pp. 19–20). Two decades later, in the wake of several important re-evaluations of ancient author-biography,Footnote ¹ this lively and thought-provoking volume (the product of a 2013 conference in Cambridge) sets out to rehabilitate the Virgilian Vitae from multiple angles. The contributors mostly shift focus from the historical (un)reliability of the Vitae to their status as artefacts of a different time's literary culture and as creative pieces of Virgilian reception. The final two chapters, bravura counter-arguments to Horsfall's revisionary zeal, conversely make a claim for the Vitae as historical documents; these contributions are both the boldest and (for this reviewer) the least persuasive in the book.

The opening trio of chapters forms an invigorating reassessment of the VSD’s position between fact and fiction. Assembling ancient poets’ hints that their works are romans-à-clef, along with an impressive array of ancient critics’ responses to those works, I. Peirano Garrison establishes that the allegorical modes of biography found in the VSD are not a fallacy or mistake but ‘an ingrained interpretative strategy with deep intellectual roots in ancient literary criticism’ (p. 3). Points of contact between the Vitae and the commentaries they prefaced suggest that they are in fact a ‘textually engaged commentary in narrative form’ (p. 19) and were read as such by contemporary audiences. A. Laird, too, sees biography as a specially creative form of criticism. His central insight is that none of the verse quotations attributed to Virgil in the biographical narrative of the VSD (1–46) are by Virgil at all, but rather pseudepigraphic impersonations that infuse Virgil's poetic corpus with an exaggerated sense of the poet's life and presence (ille ego qui …, Mantua me genuit …); the genuine Virgilian quotations in the rest of the VSD (47–66) are all first-person authorial statements too. Laird weaves these quotations together with the Vita Phocae, the pseudepigraphic Culex and the VSD’s account of Virgil's death to find continuities across biography, criticism, poetic imitation and pseudepigraphy alike, all forms that depend on the identity of the poet as much as his poetry. A. Kahane rounds off this section by scrutinising Virgil's paradoxical epitaph (VSD 36): a living utterance by a dead man, a monumentalising inscription unmoored from material space and a ‘site of memory’ that preserves almost no information at all. For Kahane Virgil's epitaph becomes ‘not a biography but a biographic emblem’ (p. 55), a ‘place-marker’ (p. 63) that prompts readers’ meditations on a poet already known to them.

The only surviving verse Vita of Virgil, Phocas’ late antique adaptation of the VSD, has often languished in the shadow of its more popular source. Two chapters here seek to redress this neglect. S. Harrison's detailed commentary gives us a Phocas immersed in both classical and Christian Latin literature, whose self-conscious transformation of prose into verse re-integrates Virgil's poetry back into his Life. For S. McGill Phocas’ self-imposed constraints – the verse form, his opening invocation of the historical muse and his entirely encomiastic approach – open up freer possibilities for creative use of the biographical record: new miracles and prodigies, contrived wordplay and ever-increasing alignment between Virgil's life and works.

Venturing further into the later reception of the Vitae, F. Stok hones in on the limited circulation of the VSD from late antiquity to the fourteenth century, when abridged and bowdlerised versions of the Vita held sway and ‘biographical interest was subordinated to the exegetical intention’ (p. 136). Against this backdrop of streamlined efficiency, the introduction of new material in various Vitae, whether lifted from classical poets like Horace and Juvenal or appropriated from contemporary narratives (pp. 138–45), gives vital insight into the authorial character demanded by these new interpretative contexts. N. Goldschmidt's tour de force of a chapter explores two depictions of Virgil's walk-on roles in Ovid's life. Virgil's later biographical reception is a truly wild ride, ranging from necromancy to womanising, from magnetic mountains to talking statues (see J.M. Ziolkowski and M.C.J. Putnam, The Virgilian Tradition: the First Fifteen Hundred Years [2008]), but Goldschmidt makes a compelling case for seeing even these inventions as bound up with interpretations of the two authors’ poetry. One medieval anecdote, recorded in a codex of the Tristia and in an accessus to Ovid's works, has Ovid climbing a ladder to Livia's bedroom with amorous intent, only to be foiled by Virgil's removal of the rungs. Ovid falls, ‘announcing his crime not by his mouth but by breaking his leg’ (p. 118). Virgil's anachronistic antics on the margins of Ovid's life dramatise Ovid's notorious error (Tr. 2.1.207), his metrical limp (Am. 1.1.1–4) and the rivalrous dynamics of poetic succession found in his works. Goldschmidt pairs this scandal with a sensitive reading of Ben Jonson's Poetaster, in which the characters of Virgil and Ovid become ever more closely intertwined through their relationships with Augustus.

In the final diptych of chapters, H. Smolenaars and A. Powell take a positivistic approach to the VSD, pushing back at Horsfall's claim that almost nothing in the Vita can be taken as uncomplicated historical fact. Despite his title, ‘The Historical Truth of Vergil's Recitation of the Georgics at Atella (VSD 27)’, Smolenaars means to establish the historical feasibility of this anecdote: that Octavian's journey to Rome for his triple triumph in 29 bce could bring him to Atella with time to spare for the recitation. At stake here is the extent of ancient biographers’ freedom to invent: Smolenaars's investigation aims to tighten up the parameters of biographical creativity and to reveal the VSD as both internally coherent and rooted in a sense of historical accuracy. But his reconstruction nonetheless requires a good deal of speculative gap-filling: Octavian travelled to Rome ‘accompanied presumably by Vergil’; his layover in Atella ‘might have been’ the setting for the political discussions rehearsed in Cassius Dio 52.1–40 (p. 168). And the focus on historicity leaves little room for the literary workings of the VSD: that Virgil's sore throat resonates with other accounts of hoarse poets and emergency understudies (Vit. Soph. 4; Livy 7.2.8–9; Σ Pind. Olymp. 6.148a; Eustath. Pind. parekbolai prol. 31–2 BGM), for example, or the way this anecdote transforms the Georgics into a play-script, replete with stage directions for Maecenas’ lines (G. 2.39–46; note lege, 44) and Octavian's physical presence (G. 1.18–25).

In a pugnacious closing chapter, Powell revives the conspiracy theory championed by J.-Y. Maleuvre, La Mort de Virgile d'après Horace et Ovide (1992) – unmentioned here – that Augustus had a hand in Virgil's death. Powell's case rests on several circumstantial factors: the Aeneid was politically useful to Augustus; Virgil's intention to delay publication for three years and then retire (VSD 35) was increasingly troublesome for the emperor; people who obstructed Augustus’ plans tended to die suddenly and inexplicably. I found the most valuable part of this chapter to be Powell's careful tracing of Augustus’ shadowy appearances throughout the VSD: the biography is at pains to avoid depicting Virgil as a paid imperial propagandist (contra Hor. Ep. 2.1.245–7, perhaps), and the precise nature of Augustus’ relationship with him remains conspicuously mysterious (supplicibus atque etiam minacibus per iocum litteris efflagitaret, VSD 31). But Powell's larger claim is undermined by a tendency to argue from silence and to allow temporary hypothetical propositions to become fundamental premises of subsequent arguments.

Overall, though, this volume represents an impressive contribution to its field. The best of the chapters offer wide-ranging and nuanced analyses, re-shape understandings of ancient literary cultures and open up exciting new paths of investigation; the volume's provocations will also prompt fruitful debate.