In this sleek new monograph, H. offers a re-assessment of his Virgilio: L'epopea in alambicco (1991). The English title ‘The Epic Distilled’ points his audience explicitly towards the earlier work with its notice that this is not simply a translation from the Italian, but rather a re-thinking, re-working and re-issuing of Alambicco (pp. vii–viii). In general, the chapters and discussions follow the outlines of the Italian, and some of this is in fact translated. But if Alambicco in a discernible way instigated the broader transition to H.’s magnificent and invaluable commentary series of Aen. 7, 11, 3, 2 and 6 (in order of publication), this new work functions like an epilogue, or, indeed, a ‘distillation’ of many of the insights extracted from the commentaries and tested back against earlier theorems and hypotheses. The result is a breathtaking display of erudition, both of H. and, through his unravelling of the dense web of the Aeneid’s allusiveness, Virgil himself.
The aim here, tested across ten brisk chapters, is to discern as best we can the ‘dialogue’ at play between Virgil and his Augustan readers through their shared knowledge of a vast range of literary and (often) extra-literary sources. H.’s Virgil is a ‘masterly bricoleur’ (p. 2) who, by channelling an array of narrative ‘voices’ (see below), pieces together various elements indicative of these spheres of knowledge (historiography, geography, ethnography, mythology, genealogy and an assortment of antiquarian Realien) in order to challenge his learned – perhaps ‘ideal’ – readers. How well in tune with Virgil's own diffuse sources his readers are determines how effectively they are able to play his allusive ‘game’. Of course, not all readers are made equal, and H. is quick to stress that Virgil's Augustan readers are hugely varied in terms of their learning (pp. 32–3). The accessibility of various allusions is graded on what H. calls a ‘scale of difficulty’ (programmatic outlines at pp. 33–44). This is in itself difficult and inherently subjective stuff, as H. concedes, but it is good to think with when assessing the larger matrix of Virgilian obliquity. (see additionally P. Hardie, CR 44 [1994], 41–2) [the reviewer says ‘I’m so sorry for my blunder, but the citation really must be here’]
The first chapter presents H.’s methodology through an examination of what lies beneath Virgil's Golden Bough at Aen. 6.201–11. This is a gripping display of learning, as numerous sources, readings and theories are dexterously championed or batted aside in an attempt to prune back the oft-held ‘mysterious’ aspects of the Golden Bough (p. 10). Chapter 2 opens with an excellent investigation of library access, usage and functionality in Rome (pp. 17–23), all speculative regarding Virgil's access to materials, but it paints a relatively clear picture of scholarly antiquarianism in Rome from c. 50 b.c.–a.d. 50, within which we can situate Virgil's research. The main part of the chapter ends with a glance towards likely areas where Virgil sought specialist guidance, like natural thaumata, Epic Cycle material, ‘less obvious’ poetic sources and epic scholia (pp. 23–7).
Chapter 3 sets out the details of H.’s reader-response model – outlined above – positing the necessity of a doctus lector to match wits with the doctus poeta. There is a tendency here (as elsewhere) towards somewhat scattershot commentary-style ‘lemmata’ examples with little context and explanation. This is fine and characteristic of H.’s idiosyncratic style, but readers will want (or need) his commentaries at hand to follow references through. Chapter 4 examines Virgil's originality and inventiveness, focusing first on the reworking of the Trojans’ traditional stopping-places en route to Italy, and concluding with detailed discussions of the characters Achaemenides (pp. 53–5) and Camilla (pp. 56–60). The last two sections in particular are useful and demonstrate that the beauty of Virgilian invention lies in cloaking new characters in well-known, almost formulaic details so as not to rupture the narrative through ‘awkward or violent novelty’ (p. 53).
Chapter 5 explores Virgil's manipulation of the mythological Faktenkanon. Of particular value here are the discussions of intratextual tampering with mythic/prophetic ‘facts’, when Dido's curse (Aen. 4.612–20) is set against the events of Aen. 7–12 (pp. 66–8), and the Sibyl's prophecy against actual events when Aeneas reaches Italy (pp. 68–9). Note also the valuable comments on Aeneas' heroisation vis-à-vis his characterisation in the Iliad (pp. 72–3). The discussion then moves to longstanding issues of Virgilian ‘inconstancy’ in Chapter 6, with a particular focus on Virgil's presentation of mythological variants, his threading together of conflicting accounts of mythic stories into one narrative in a sort of Hellenistic-style encyclopedic stockpiling of sources. The argument is that these are not narrative blunders, but rather Virgil's clever acknowledgment of mythic alternatives in his sources. The solitary example of an inconsistency that H. argues Virgil would have corrected had he lived long enough is the double presentation of Palinurus' death in Aen. 5 and 6 (pp. 90–2) – in truth, of course, we will never know.
Chapter 7 details Virgil's tendency to ‘footnote’ his sources, to signal subtly to the reader an earlier influence or ‘mode’ of expression for a particular passage, scene or image. The macro-narrative signal of arma virumque pointing to Virgil's manipulation of the Iliad and Odyssey is the most explicit signpost to the reader, but Virgil alerts us through more subtle cues, for example: ‘Tragic markers’ that point to the ‘Tragic’ tincture of Dido and the Trojans' Carthaginian excursion (pp. 96, 97, 104–5); historiographical overtones in the invocation of Erato at Aen. 7.37–42 (pp. 99–100); and the brilliant suggestion that the tumulus (Aen. 6.754) from which Anchises shows Aeneas the ‘Parade of Heroes’ is functionally a subterranean officer's suggestus, signalling the military-style parade that will follow (p. 98, also p. 14).
There is further ‘footnoting’ in Virgil's phrases ut fama, dicitur, fertur (etc.), and this is the topic of Chapter 8. H. argues that such phrases serve a functional range: from (simply) direct source citation, to a ‘distancing’ from known but troubling, wondrous or improbable events in the sources (or in some cases a combination of these elements); sometimes Virgilian inventions are ‘disguised’ with the dignity of tradition through a footnoting phrase and a nod to a false source tradition (a good, though speculative discussion given our available source material, pp. 127–31). Chapter 9 considers Virgilian anachronism particularly in the Romanisation of Greek and Trojan characters and customs. Note the valuable comments on the Trojans morphing into proto-Romans upon entering the mouth of the Tiber in Book 7 (p. 136) and of sport and hunting in the Aeneid as a nod to the (revamped) culture of Augustan athleticism (pp. 138–40). These and other anachronisms create on a deep socio-cultural level a continuity from the mytho-historic Age of Aeneas to Virgil's present Age of Augustus.
The final chapter is something like a summation. We have been dealing with Virgil's interests in a swath of spheres of knowledge, both literary and extra-literary; these are the ‘many voices’ that Virgil feeds into his poetic composition as part of the larger dialogue with his audience. Who exactly Virgil's audience is becomes a somewhat sticky issue in the book as a whole, and H.’s reader-response model is inundated with a glut of subjective classifications of the, for example, ‘careful/(mildly) informed/(moderately) educated/serious/alert/(positively) learned/attentive (etc.)’ reader. This is a rather cumbersome but perhaps necessary consequence of his ‘scale of difficulty’ in identifying the target market, as it were, passage by passage, for Virgil's many-voiced poem. Though clearly not every one of Virgil's readers will understand the subtlety of each allusion, it is not always clear where and how H. draws the lines of demarcation for an entire reading community. The book ends with a very nice extended commentary-style reading of the ‘wolf-like’ Trojans at Aen. 2.355–69 and the ‘voices’ at work in the passage.
Those familiar with H.’s scholarship will not be surprised at the astonishing display of learning bursting from this book. The allusions and insights he draws upon are at times dizzying, always thrilling and, for this reader, usually convincing.
