In his description of Fama’s birth from Earth, Virgil wryly slips in ‘as they say’ (Aen. 4.179), reminding us that above all Fama is the child of many parents. Such a self-referential comment may apply to the increasing number of recent publications on fama. S.’s book mainly adds to P. Hardie's thorough study of fama/ϕήμη from Homer to Milton (P. Hardie, Rumour and Renown [2012]). Hardie devotes two chapters (3–4) to Virgil's fama and, even though his monograph appeared while S. was finishing her book (p. 30 n. 70), she does a good job of taking into account this major work.
The introduction begins with defining the key term ‘fictive knowledge’, which bridges the gap between the story world and the readers’ collective perceptions of their own world. S. draws a parallel between the Aeneid and realist novels in order to argue that it is ontologically impossible to detach a text's fictional elements from its realistic lessons. The semantic range of the word fama, which encompasses not only objective information, but also imagination and deception, highlights that rumour can create worlds by describing them, and thus forms a solid foundation for S.’s interpretation. Crossing the boundary between the world of the Aeneid and its readers opens up questions of Virgil's constructions of poetic authority and the ways in which the poem creates and transmits knowledge. A similar dynamic interaction is in play within the epic; divine authorities convey knowledge to the Aeneid’s characters who, in their turn, try both to perceive and to manipulate the gods’ messages. Virgil ultimately merges the Aeneid’s fictive force of divine power with his poetic authority, thus bridging the gap between divine and human creation.
Chapter 1, ‘Introduction’, sets out the main themes and approaches of the book. The translation of the divine word into the human world (a recognition of a prophetic ‘this’ as a material ‘that’) offers a link between fama and pietas, a key concept that aspires to orderliness through remembrance, but also paradoxically blends the objective and orderly on the one hand with the deceptive and transgressive on the other. A study of pietas is central to S.’s book, even though a reader might not guess it from the title. The classifications of fama and the chapter previews at the end of this chapter are helpful, but several sections feel out of place in an introduction. The discussion of fiction in epic and the novel is relevant and convincing, but ultimately distracts from Virgil's epic. It would have probably worked better as a separate article or a final chapter. The analysis of what Turnus sees when Allecto visits him would have also fitted better in Chapter 7.
Chapter 2, ‘Monstrous Fama’, tackles the intriguing connection of the etymologically related fama and fata. S. focuses on the projection of Dido's fictional fama onto Roman history and the ways in which impia Fama (Aen. 4.298) is enmeshed with the destiny of Rome. Jupiter's conversation with Hercules about the inevitable doom of Pallas touches upon the centrality of fama/κλέος in epic. Jupiter's speech (cf. adfatur, Aen. 10.466) about Pallas’ death (fata) is a celebration of epic renown by means of manly deeds, but the god's few words on fame and death simultaneously authorise and minimise epic commemoration. Sinon's deception similarly relies on the paradoxical nature of fama as a concept moving between fictive and collective knowledge, divine words and human lies (R. Cowan, ‘Sinon and the Case of the Hypermetric Oracle’, Phoenix 65 [2011], 361–70, would have been helpful here).
A peculiar mixture of order and disorder fuels monstrous Fama, a chthonic creature necessary for the Olympian gods. Chapter 3, ‘Matter out of Place I: Across the Styx’, further explores the interplay of imagination and remembrance, which engineers fictive knowledge. S. applies the work of M. Douglas (Purity and Danger: an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo [1966/2002]) to Roman concepts of death as posing a threat to purity. Rituals of remembrance are performed for Caieta, Misenus and promised for Palinurus (Aeneid 6), which S. reads as acts of pietas, i.e. attempts to clean the material dirt of dead bodies by commemorating the deceased and inscribing them into familiar Italian landscape. But excessive remembrance can be in turn contaminating, leading to a vicious cycle of pietas as both checking and stimulating transgression. Like fama, pietas defines and breaches the boundaries of conceptual and material dirt.
The brink between metaphor and matter is where the Aeneid’s characters faintly perceive the elusive divine order as they endeavour to figure out what properly goes with what (Chapter 4 ‘This and That’). Aeneas’ interpretation of Iulus’ playful remark about eating mensas, turns ‘tables’ into ‘flat breads’. The metaphorical use of mensae to describe food instead of furniture solves the riddle of Anchises’ prophecy, but the foul stench of Celaeno's similar prediction that the Trojans will end up eating their tables still lingers in the minds of the readers and Aeneas’ men. Aeneas cleans up the harpy's verbal dirt by attributing her words to his father. S. gives a particularly nuanced reading of one of the Aeneid’s most famous inconsistencies but, in my view, she draws an unnecessarily sharp distinction between the readers of the poem and the Trojans within the fiction. Aeneas’ men, like Virgil's readers, listened to Celaeno's words which, as S. notes, are hard to forget.
Chapter 5, ‘Matter out of Place II: Nisus and Euryalus’, revisits the interplay between polluting corpses and conceptual purification, which can translate into a juxtaposition of eternal memory and contaminating grief. The immaterial renown of Nisus and Euryalus’ deeds is measured against the material gifts they will earn. Yet their glory is exemplified by their deaths. S. gives a fine reading of the grief of Euryalus’ mother, which threatens to spoil the glorifying purification of the young men's deaths and poses a threat for Virgil's epic programme.
Chapter 6, ‘The Order of Metamorphosis’, analyses the divine commands of Venus in Book 2 and Cybele in Book 9. S. offers compelling interpretations of the two episodes under discussion but the chapter's two parts are only loosely related to each other. Aeneas tells the story of Venus giving him clarity of vision to see the gods destroying Troy. Venus’ clarification alludes to vividness (enargeia), a rhetorical technique simultaneously employed by Aeneas in order to draw his Carthaginian audience to his past world. Cybele's command exemplifies divine language's power of transformation. S. nicely discusses the power game in the exchange between Jupiter and his mother, and its repercussions on the physical world.
Chapter 7, ‘Slithery Changes’, examines the poisonous changes effected by Cupid and Allecto, two winged deities that are responsible for driving Dido and Amata mad. Madness is a cognitive shift that makes people and characters lose control over the ways in which they perceive the world. The effects of Allecto's deceptive attack on Amata are similar to readers’ experience of fiction. Like the Fury's poison, fiction seeps imperceptibly into our memories. Just as furor both establishes and undermines the poem's authority, so do we perceive the world by a cognitive blending of order and category confusion. This chapter is one of the best, and convincingly challenges and builds on Feeney's influential interpretation in his Gods in Epic.
The last chapter, ‘How to do Things with Birds’, focuses on Juturna's deceptive strategies of delay (Aeneid 12). By engineering an omen, Juturna manipulates conventions and collective memories in order to trick her audience into believing that her omen has a degree of divine authority she does not. Her manufactured sign may bear the signature of a minor deity, but it further comments on how epic relies on tradition in order to generate new memories. An Afterword, ‘Swan Song’, summarises the main arguments of the monograph.
S.’s work is a welcome addition to scholarship on fama, pietas and furor in the Aeneid. Her book is well researched and includes a plethora of subtle and fascinating readings of Virgil's epic. The brief footnotes and infrequency of non-Virgilian primary sources quoted actually attest to S.’s confident command of her material and bring her work into clearer focus. The comparison of epic and novel is interesting and helpful, but not entirely justified. The book is carefully produced and I noticed only a couple of typos which do not distract from the main arguments.
