Reviewing this sort of edited volume is an artificial exercise, as almost no one except its editors and reviewers will ever read it cover to cover. Such books are quarried — all the more so now that they are largely read as digital objects — not perused. By the same token, few reviewers are competent to offer expertise on such collections as a whole, but I shall do my best.
In a rather defensive introduction, the editors define the volume’s theme as follows: ‘the common purpose of each chapter is to establish the relevance of the Aeneid to its respective contemporary concern’ (6). This is so broad as to be (as the editors also acknowledge) indefinitely expandable. In practice, it amounts to a series of essays on the Aeneid and Something, where the Something can be reasonably categorised as modern or contemporary. This format, even at its best, is inevitably redolent of the university essay.
Many of the Somethings are straightforwardly authors who have used the Aeneid. Michael Stanford on Kipling, Giacomo Loi on Israeli writer Yehuda Amichai and Filomena Giannotti on recent and contemporary Italian writers are all informative, and the first two are particularly insightful. Christian Lehmann takes an annoyingly maximalist approach to finding ‘Vergilian shadows in Zora Neale Hurston’, and Paul and John Hay mar a very interesting report on the 1872 American Aeneid translation of lesser transcendentalist Christopher Pearse Cranch with a muddled account of what is specifically American and transcendental about the work. Far more dissatisfying is Babette Puetz on the Aeneid in children’s author Philip Pullman: Puetz’s attempt to treat Pullman’s stories with the same philological seriousness as Virgil only brings out the former’s relative triviality.
In other essays, the Something to be combined with the Aeneid is a theme, with disparate results. Tedd Wimperis is eloquent on the well-worn topic of the Aeneid and nation-building, but his attempt to bring in modern parallels reads as tacked on for the purpose of aligning his interests with this collection. George Saad sets out the Aeneid as showing the emergence of the modern Hegelian individual — a pleasingly grand thesis, not easy to evaluate. At the other end of the spectrum of vatic ambition, Frances Foster reports on her survey of Aeneid-teaching in three English schools: her sample (44 students and 3 teachers) is too small to be of much significance, and her findings will hold few surprises for anyone who would care enough about this topic to read her report. Far more nourishing is Dani Bostick on trauma and time in the Aeneid: Bostick avoids any crass Oprah-tinted reading of Virgil, and offers instead a subtle mapping of modern concepts of the wounded psyche against the Aeneid’s refrains of loss, exile, grief and fear.
Elsewhere the Something has taken over the essay: J. R. O’Neill seeks to link the Vietnam War Memorial to Daedalus’ temple at Cumae, and Evander Price does the same for the Golden Bough and the Golden Records placed in the Voyager spacecrafts as messages for putative aliens. The Aeneid links are fairly strained, but the Vietnam War Memorial, Voyager and the Golden Records are all fascinating topics; these essays are at their best when they leave Virgil out, but the attempts to bring him in are at least imaginative. The same cannot be said for Nancy Ciccone’s ill-advised ‘The Aeneid and the Syrian Refugee Crisis’. An effort to make this parallel in detail only brings out the crucial difference that Aeneas is a fugitive with an army — yet Ciccone’s politics are clearly the opposite of those which would seek to describe Middle Eastern refugees as ‘invaders’.
Indeed, if a coherent picture emerges, it is less of the Aeneid in the modern world than of the politics of modern scholars of Virgil: these are by and large — unsurprisingly enough — those of the readership of the Guardian or New York Times. The Aeneid is thus presented as a helpful text for thinking about such familiar tropes as climate change, racism, the refugee crisis, rising authoritarianism, the Covid pandemic. On this last front, there is not a whisper of criticism of the lockdowns and coercive vaccination policies that followed them: Loi in particular embraces the former. If the view (which I emphatically share) that such criticism is justified ever becomes normative, its absence from this volume will prove its most striking, if dispiriting, aspect.
That is to assume that this book is destined to a long future, which seems to me doubtful. Apart from Foster’s survey and O’Neill’s work on the Vietnam War Memorial archive, none of these contributions contain much of what previous generations of scholars would have considered research. Rather, despite their apparatus of footnotes and (sometimes copious) bibliography, they are short literary essays, of the sort that would be at home in a review for a general educated audience, if such audiences still knew Virgil. In short, while the best of the book’s essays are pleasant and stimulating reading, they feel hardly less ephemeral than a decent article in a literary magazine. Yet they will doubtless resurface soon in the bibliography of still further ‘research outputs’, as the publication arms race continues.
The above is not meant spitefully — the editors and contributors display much learning and devotion to Virgil, and their attempts to show his contemporary resonance are well meant and largely successful. Doubtless their own thought and teaching on the poet, and that of some of their readers, will be bettered by these efforts. Nevertheless, it is simply very difficult to make a truly penetrating and durable contribution to the mountain of Virgilian bibliography, all the more so in an essay of a few pages on a single Virgil and Something theme. The incentives driving publication in this jejune format, and more generally driving the ceaseless onslaught of edited volumes like this one, are external to the true purposes of scholarship.
The book is carefully edited, with essays cross-referenced to each other where appropriate. There is a substantial index, and no typos worth reporting. I list a few problems. Stanford’s claim (23) that the ‘show of pride’ in Kipling’s ‘White Man’s Burden’ is the colonised’s not the colonisers’ is surely wrong: Stanford is too eager for a parallel with ‘debellare superbos’. Giannotti, or rather her collaborator, Todd Portnowitz, renders Giorgio Caproni’s ‘Enea che in spalla/un passato che crolla tenta invano/di porre in salvo’ by ‘Aeneas, trying/to bear a crumbling past upon his shoulders/toward safety’ (78): what has happened to ‘invano’? Saad’s assertion (217) that in Aen. 4.345-7, 353–9 Aeneas is setting aside his ‘depersonalized passivity’ would have appeared far less convincing had he extended his quotation to 361’s ‘Italiam non sponte sequor’. Price (256, bis) translates ‘hunc tegit omnis/lucus’ (Aen. 6.138–9) by ‘the whole world/hides this’: he has apparently somehow confused ‘wood’ and ‘world’.
