Boccaccio wrote that, if we set out to interpret a work of literature, we find ourselves in the same situation as Aeneas when he fled his city in flames. Just as Aeneas prayed to Jove while Troy burned, so Boccaccio believed that, when we open a work of literature, we are as helpless as a man in prayer. F.'s new book is no prayer, however; it is the welcome provocation of a reader happy to hesitate in flames.
If philology is, as Nietzsche claimed, the ‘art of reading slowly’, then F. is a friend of the word. Years have counted up to decades to make this book not merely a model of scholarship to us all, but something scholars rarely achieve. Literature, if we can still pin the word ‘great’ on it as a tail on the donkey, teaches us that, with a book in hand, so much more than our lives is at stake. But, unlike Anchises, F. does not tell us how to read any more than how to live our lives; he shows us how he reads and bids us find our own way home.
But that assumes, after the fashion of F. Cairns (1989), A. Barchiesi (1984/2015) and E. Dekel (2012), that our journey through the Aeneid will be more of an Odyssey than an Iliad, a claim that F. will not make. Since the publication of G. Knauer, Die Aeneis und Homer (1964) the landscape has changed. Scholars raise questions of imitation, allusion, reference and intertextuality to say nothing of readers’ responses. In short, Virgil's intertext has become dynamic and, to borrow a term from Bakhtin's analysis of Dostoevsky, ‘polyphonic’. But this book does far more than arbitrate between the claimants to Knauer's estate. Where other scholars mark their territory in the Aeneid as Argos in Ithaca, F. takes 300 pages to leave the question all but unanswered at our feet: what kind of hero will Aeneas turn out to be? That we must decide between Achilles and Odysseus as mutually exclusive paradigms of ethical heroism, characteristics of which Aeneas seems to exhibit in equal measure, F. demonstrates with shattering clarity in Chapter 1. That neither the club of Hercules nor the faithless Jason nor the epic failure of a Cyclic poem offers a compelling ‘third way’, F. makes clear in Chapter 2. He believes that the point of the Aeneid, to put it bluntly, is to leave its hero stranded in ambiguity between these two epic destinies. The burden of Aeneas’ choice is thus placed on our shoulders as we try to find our way out of this poem.
The Aeneid is thus left somewhere between the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the author's intent has been lost at sea. After D. Nelis, Vergil's Aeneid and the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius (2001), it seems, the allusive programme of the Aeneid has been asked to bear more complexity than we could accuse even the most ingenious poet of. I agree that authorial intent is a Humpty Dumpty term sent on too many errands. And after a tortured courtship with it, F. has ceased to do the author's chores. To modify Calvino's famous aphorism: maybe a classic is a work that will never be able to say what it means.
After reading this sterling book, however, I am left wondering: is not the point of F.'s book to make a claim about the author's intent? When Aeneas plunges his sword into Turnus’ chest, we must decide whether he is exhibiting an Odyssean pattern of heroism (i.e. in the slaying of the suitors) or if he resembles Achilles in the slaying of Hector. Though we cannot avoid choosing, if I have read F. correctly, it is by design that we are kept guessing. And so, if the Aeneid will be more than an inkblot epic, then should we not rather say that some of the author's intentions are inscrutable? For my part I think F. has his finger on the pulse of this poem and is not simply describing his own mind when he says that the Aeneid is a battle for heroic identity even if that battle turns out to be sine fine.
But maybe we do not need the author's intent to secure a conviction. One of this book's singular merits is that, by dismissing the author from the witness stand, it calls the reader up as more than accessory to the crime. In addition to four instances of narrative apostrophe to the reader that might add to his analysis (Aen. 4.401; 8.650, 676, 691), I wonder if F. will go further in his consideration of the reader's participation in the Aeneid. Following M. Putnam, Virgil's Aeneid (1995/2019), Virgil's Epic Designs (1998) and A. Barchiesi, ‘Virgilian Narrative’ (1997/2019), F. dilates in Chapter 3 on Aeneas as a ‘reader’ not only of Homer but also of Rome's destiny written ekphrastically throughout the poem. F. believes that Aeneas’ increasingly impulsive responses to ekphrases can teach us by negative example to slow down and suspend judgement when we read.
What about Aeneas’ reading of signs, omens and prophecies? According to Ennius Venus had given Anchises the power of soothsaying by bird-lore, and yet in the Aeneid this gift of prophecy forsakes him at times. Misreading a prophecy about Teucer, Anchises directs his son to the misbegotten project of founding New Troy on Crete, that land of deception from time foregone. Aeneas emends his father's interpretation after a dream. One question that F.'s book leaves for us to explore is whether Aeneas is any better a reader of divine signs than he is of images. This is a pressing question, since J. O'Hara, Death and the Optimistic Prophecy (1990) shows that the far-sighted prophecies of a nationalistic colour incorporate Virgil's readers into the text, thus placing ‘us’ in the same position as Aeneas who must decipher them. Is it a coincidence that, of the four apostrophes to the reader, three occur in the description of Aeneas’ shield? And yet two millennia may be longer than the eternity that the author hoped for his poem. The ‘us’ of Virgil's intended readership seems increasingly remote from us today. Perhaps the accumulation of complexity in Virgil's allusive design is a function of long time. These days we are lured by the Siren song as much to a hasty reading as to a slow overreading.
The reader steps into the poem; its characters step out. But Juno does not wear the palla of a pop-up antagonist. She comes alive in F.'s analysis as a rival to the narrator himself, teeth set to wrest the story from him in the telling and ensure that it not become another Odyssey. The famous elision (mene͡ incepto, 1.37) at the start of her first aria thus takes on new meaning. She is not merely alluding to the μῆνις of Achilles or Apollo at the beginning of the Iliad; she hears what she takes to be the beginning of an Odyssey and wishes to sing an Iliad instead. Thenceforth all her interventions are at once metapoetry and a foil to the cautious reader. By the end it is not only the Aeneid that belongs to her, but also the language in which it was written. She wanted to be a poet and ended up an editor, content to erase Teucer and the Trojan name from her song.
‘But is he right?’ seems by the end of the book to be a less pressing question than ‘How has he transformed the way we will read this poem?’ Yet we still must ask the former question. Even if I read precisely because I find the author's mind vastly more interesting than mine, when we peer into this text F. helps us to see our reflection as in a shield of inscrutable craftsmanship. And we marvel in delight perhaps at how little we have known of ourselves – Juno's Aeneid makes us not merely reckon with our reflection on the surface of this work but with the artistry of our hands.
It is unfortunate that, through no fault of F.'s, so many infelicities of type beleaguer such a beautiful book; these should be placed at the doorstep not of Cohen Hall but of the Scribner Building in Princeton to ensure that future editions will be scrubbed clean, because we will surely be reckoning with this book for a long time.
