The title of K.'s book derives from his perception that ‘the Georgics is Virgil's map … which imagines the world from a particular point in time and space, saying to its first readers, “Here is the world, and here is Rome's place in it”’. In this context, K.'s aim is what he describes as a ‘decolonisation’ project to suggest ‘a way of reading the Georgics against the grain, in sympathy with the colonized rather than the colonizing power’ (p. 1).

Part 1, ‘Rome and the Roman Empire, 29 bce’, ‘chart[s] the poem's geographical interests and argue[s] for the political nature of those interests’ (p. 1) and is subdivided into chapters on ‘The World and Its Peoples’, ‘Provincializing Rome’, ‘Civil War’ and ‘All Italy’. It is supplemented by an exhaustive appendix listing the cities, mountains, rivers, lakes and peoples referenced by toponym or ethnonym in the Georgics. Each entry has an index locorum for its appearance(s) in the Georgics and an English translation. The modern names of rivers, lakes and mountains are given, but not those of peoples and places. Unfortunately, this appendix does not list the page locations of the discussion of these toponyms and ethnonyms in K.'s text, and the rather skimpy general index disappointingly lists only some of those discussed and not others. Furthermore, undergraduate or general readers hoping to use this book as a geographical dictionary for unfamiliar names they come across in reading the poem will need to have at least a rough idea of what part of the world they belong to in order to know where to look them up in the appendix, since they are classified there by area (‘the Aegean’, ‘Asia’, ‘Africa’ etc.).

Part 2, ‘Britain and the British Empire, c. 1840–1930’, ‘draws on a range of archival material c. 1840–1930 to investigate the poem's reception in Britain and the British Empire … in an attempt to politicize the Georgics and its tradition’ (p. 2). In the first chapter of this part K. identifies a tendency among its readers, dating back to the eighteenth century and Joseph Addison but continuing into present times, for it ‘to be lauded as a masterpiece of descriptive beauty and technical perfection, in ways which ignore or obscure … any sense of its agrarian, economic and imperial politics’ (p. 57). He traces this ‘aesthetic trend’ to Addison's characterisation of the Georgics in his introductory essay to Dryden's 1697 translation as ‘the most complete, elaborate, and finished piece of all antiquity’. In subsequent chapters K. gives examples of the way in which the Georgics provided a lens through which British travellers perceived foreign agrarian cultures. In particular, he dwells on the way in which three famous lines (2.458–60) of the Georgics (O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint, / agricolas! quibus ipsa, procul discordibus armis / fundit humo facilem uictum iustissima tellus) coloured British perceptions of the inhabitants of these societies as unsophisticated and politically naive – perceptions that, as K. shows, conduced both to invite and validate their imperial subjection.

Virgil's Map is a very useful discussion of the socio-political and economic importance to the metropole of the myriad places and peoples of (or potentially of) the Roman empire referenced by the Georgics, and a good compendium of more modern references to the Georgics in the context of British imperialism during the years 1840 to 1930 (though no explanation seems to be provided of the significance of these start- and end-dates). It also has an excellent bibliography. Its theoretical approach could, however, be better articulated. In particular, K.'s mission to read the Georgics ‘against the grain’ is complicated by equivocation about what he assesses this ‘grain’, that is, the message of Virgil-as-didactic-poet, to be. At first, we are led to understand that it is ‘sympathy with … the colonizing power’ (p. 1), and an observation such as ‘the Georgics brings the peoples and products of the world to the reader in a way that asserts a confident Rome-centric view’ (p. 28) supports this assessment. But on the next page, Virgil is cast in quasi-Marxist terms as a sort of anti-imperialist whose poem is ‘directed not so much at labourers or even at the supervisors of labour, but at absentee proto-capitalists, ruthless extractors of value in a system based on slavery and imperial expropriation’ (p. 29). This is confusing enough, but K. hedges his bets yet further by adducing, early on, a third hypothesis, that ‘the Georgics offers an expansive picture of Roman power in the world, but does not instruct its readers in their reading’ [my italics] (p. 2). Only the first of these three hypotheses (one energetically advanced recently by T. Geue's ‘Soft Hands, Hard Power’, JRS 108 [2018], cited by K.) comports with K.'s exposé-style mission to read the poem against the grain. And only this one makes sense of K.'s implied rebuke of Virgil as a Roman poet who ‘describe[s] places of Roman conquest and aggression in picturesque terms’ (p. 12).

That Virgil does so is an important point. It would suggest that the many post-classical receptors of the Georgics who have appreciated its stylistic aesthetics and thereby what K. calls, somewhat misleadingly, these aesthetics’ ‘depoliticization’ (‘naturalisation’ would be a better word) of Roman imperialism, actually read the work – dare I say it? – in the way in which Virgil intended. If true, this fact could have served to make a thematic connection between Parts 1 and 2, which, as things are, stand curiously separately and without inter-reference. Yet K. makes little of the point, although he does entertain the thought on his concluding page that ‘the Georgics arguably does the same thing that many of its receptions do, aestheticizing places and peoples in ways which obscure and even facilitate the workings of imperial power’ (p. 114).

K.'s quest to ‘politicize’ the Georgics in disregard of its poetic composition speaks to a presumption that message is extrinsic to medium, which may explain his difficulty in determining the poem's ‘grain’: the two are tightly bound in the Georgics, as N. Freer and B. Xinyue's Reflections and New Perspectives on the Georgics (2019) emphasises. Their admonition that the work ‘is written and meant to be consumed as poetry’ (p. 6) is also worth heeding. The artistic ‘perfection’ of the poem (sensitively explicated in several pieces by R.F. Thomas), which in K.'s view has been over-emphasised, in fact works in tandem with, is intrinsic to, and indeed enacts, the political message that Roman imperium is part of the natural global order of things and is seamlessly integrated with it. It does so by virtue of that ‘finely wrought’ style in which, as Addison says (in a passage cited by K., p. 58 and n. 9), ‘one Colour falls away by such just degrees, and another rises so insensibly, that we see the variety, without being able to distinguish the total vanishing of the one from the first appearance of the other’. Addison is referring to Virgil's interweaving of precepts, and the metaphor is derived from needlework, but the same image might apply to the Georgics’ quasi-cinematic fading-in and -out of scenes that transport us effortlessly back and forth between the Italo-Roman/local and the foreign/distant. Importantly, the genius of this montage lies, as Addison said, in appearing ‘Natural’ and ‘unforc'd’, and it is one of the methods by which, as Addison also noted, Virgil ‘loves to suggest a Truth indirectly, and without giving us a full and open view of it’.

Given K.'s interest in the operations of power (his ‘decolonization’ project aims ‘to identify, analyze, and challenge the operation and the legacies of imperial power’, p. 3) and in the Georgics as a ‘teaching text’ (p. 113), a lesson he might have conveyed, had he chosen to explore its synergy of res and carmen, is that classical perfectionism, even (especially?) when ostensibly passively decorative, could, and can, be agential to messages of political power. Donald Trump's recent Executive Order (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/12/23/2020-28605/promoting-beautiful-federal-civic-architecture) calling for ‘beautiful’ public buildings in classical style to reflect ‘the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability’ of America's government is premised on just that assumption and will contribute some by far less inspired efforts than Virgil's to a long, and superannuated, tradition.