Q.’s new study of Virgil's Aeneid may seem a hedgehog compared with the fox of a book for which Classicists best know him, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (1993). Yet the two have much in common, not least their elaboration of the ‘pessimistic’ theme that the defeated Trojans must re-enact the Iliad in reverse to colonise Italy. While Epic and Empire explores the large-scale narrative transitions by which history's losers become winners, Double Cross takes its title from Q.’s argument that chiastic reversal governs the structure and meaning of the Aeneid at a fractal level. In a trim 190 pages (218 including bibliography and an index listing scenes by book in lieu of an index locorum), Q. proposes nothing less than a grand unified theory of the Aeneid, yielding riches and revelations at every turn for students and scholars alike.
Chiasmus, Q. contends, patterns the epic at all scales, from its narratological crossing of the Iliad and Odyssey to its syntax, imagery and allusive substrate. Rhetorical purists will note that the term Q. favours, ‘double cross’, adumbrates allied figures like paradox, irony, symmetry, repetition and reversal. Its double sense of betrayal also emerges in Q.’s expert unpacking of Homeric intertexts to undermine optimistic interpretations of Virgil's Latin. The sign of the cross thus helps Q. square a scholarly circle, advancing a deeply pessimistic reading of the Aeneid that nevertheless explains the poem's perceived complicity with Augustus. In Chapter 1, chiasmus attains philosophical dimensions (and, to this reader, prefigures Lucan's warring words) as Virgil's means of patterning ‘hostile elements into both affirmative unity and disintegrating contradiction. The Aeneid dreams of peace from inside a state of war: like the Roman nation it describes, it is a poem divided against itself’ (p. 27).
Running headers that correlate each chapter with relevant books of the Aeneid inscribe Q.’s ambition for comprehensiveness atop every page. Among the broadest is Chapter 2, ‘Aeacidae Pyrrhi: Trojans, Romans, and Their Greek Doubles’, which prosecutes Aeneas for colluding with Pyrrhus to topple Priam's house in Book 2, then usurping Pyrrhus’ place as Achilles’ heir in Book 3. Interpreting Aeneas’ literary wanderings in light of Rome's historical hostilities with Carthage, Pyrrhus of Epirus, and Antony and Cleopatra, Q. explores shifting alignments and elisions between foreign and internal enemies. His rapier glints the sharpest, though, when trained on Aeneas himself. After surveying Aeneas’ questionable motivations and characterisation within the literary tradition prior to Virgil, Q. builds a powerful case that Aeneas’ narrative choices in Book 2 betray his own sympathy-garnering version of Troy's fall and expose the hypocrisy behind winners’ lacrimae rerum.
Virgil signals the constructedness of his own narrative, too, through the historically impossible, self-consciously counterfactual meeting between Dido and Aeneas. In Q.’s third chapter, ‘The Doubleness of Dido’, the Carthaginian queen's destruction of the evidence of Aeneas’ visit, dying revision of her life story, and non-acknowledgement of Aeneas in the Underworld all write the Trojan back out of her narrative and stage a tug of war over truth within Virgil's Fama-like text. Of the literary and historical (counter)examples Q. elucidates, Lucretia proves particularly intriguing as the foundational female suicide for a very different state. Dido's ill-fated hospitality towards the Trojans retroactively explains Carthage's reluctance to absorb foreigners, a factor in its ultimate defeat. Rome's success, in contrast, stems from the openness to cultural mixing and power-sharing that Q. ironically attributes to Juno's resistance to Troy's rebirth.
Chapter 4, ‘Sons of Gods in Book 6’, explores cognitive dissonances regarding (im)mortality, justice and succession that run like fault lines through Virgil's underworld and Augustan culture. Of all Q.’s chapters, this one would most benefit from bibliographical expansion, though his modus operandi of ambulating critically through Virgil's epic (in occasional colloquy with leading lights like P. Hardie, A. Barchiesi, D. Feeney and M. Putnam) gives the study a timeless, Elysian air. Virgilian recombination here acquires genealogical dimensions with Q.’s analysis of Anchises and Julius Caesar as doublets who oscillate ontologically between dead fathers and divine guides. The transience of glory, and of heirs like Marcellus, finds proleptic consolation in the labyrinthine patterns of the lusus Troiae, with its promise of generational renewal. In the genetic crossing that most preoccupies Q., Book 6 traces Romulus’ bloodline to Silvius, Aeneas’ child by Lavinia, creating an apparent inconsistency with Jupiter's prophetic exaltation in Book 1 of Iulus’ heirs. This initial split in Aeneas' family tree, onomastically inscribed in Iulus' aggression towards Silvia and Numanus Remulus, exempts Caesar and Augustus from Romulus' fratricidal blood-guilt and represents their supremacy as a reassertion of Julian primogeniture over the longue durée.
Chapter 5, ‘Culture and Nature in Book 8’, examines generic, chronological, even chromatic mixing in Books 7–9 between the green of rustic Italy and the gold of civilisation, wealth and weaponry. (The golden bough, oddly, goes unremarked, as does R. Brooks's 1953 AJP essay ‘Discolor Aura’.) Q. provides an ecologically sensitive reading of the Trojans’ disruptive importation of epic into Georgic-inflected Latium and the Arcadians’ pastoral settlement. Pursuing the latter's Greek cultural associations, Q. argues that Aeneas’ homoerotic relationship with Pallas gestures towards Rome's flirtation with but ultimate rejection of Hellenic culture as sterile; Pallas’ death thus eulogises the ‘Rome that might have been’ (p. 125). Vulcan's underground forging of Aeneas’ shield, in turn, both civilises and replicates the violent impulses behind the Cacus episode, giving symbolic form to the ‘military-industrial complex’ that will govern Rome's future (p. 139). Yet the leafy backdrop against which Book 8 projects visions of Rome's imperial grandeur also prefigures her ultimate lapse into ruins.
Chapter 6, ‘The Brothers of Sarpedon’, demonstrates that Pallas, Turnus, Aeneas, Lausus and Mezentius, as they successively take centre stage in the extended battle narrative of Book 10, each recombine elements of a paradigmatic Homeric sequence in which victor becomes victim: Patroclus’ slaying of Sarpedon and Hector's of Patroclus in Iliad 16. This complex pattern of contaminatio, summed up by a chart on pp. 157–60, complements our by now familiar double vision of Aeneas as a second Achilles with new insight into the ways that the dying Pallas becomes both Patroclus and Sarpedon as he pulls out Turnus’ spear, and Turnus himself ‘ends up playing the Homeric self of his enemy Aeneas’ (p. 167). These are among the most cogent and convincing of Q.’s double crosses, and elicit further questions about the authorial and interpretative practices required to create meaning across such vertiginous literary layers.
More a coda than a conclusion, Chapter 7 reads Aeneas’ final vengeance for Pallas against the lost Aethiopis, in which Achilles kills Memnon to avenge his post-Iliadic lover Antilochus. The evidence is necessarily circumstantial, arrayed in hoops of ring structure with the Troy frieze in Book 1, but invites further inquiry into the many voices that remain unheard within Virgil's polyphonic text. Q. suggests in closing that Aeneas’ slaughter of Turnus, an avatar of his Homeric self, mirrors Augustus’ own need after Actium to become the solution to the problems he co-engendered.
This abrupt ending, like that of the Aeneid, leaves us with more questions than answers, but leaves us doctiores lectores indeed. Like Jupiter's Book 1 prophecy, Q.’s initial situation of the epic and his own reading within history, his ‘claim to be recovering authorial intention’ (p. xii), have long since faded from view. Q.’s fundamentally New Critical interest in textual design leaves Virgil and Augustus flickering shadows behind a poem that, now more richly than ever before, always contains its own negation. The ‘double crosses’ that dance across these pages are ultimately no less Q.’s than Virgil's: footsteps over footsteps in the ongoing waltz by which keen minds quicken eternal matter.
