In his new introduction to the translation of E.R. Curtius' monumental European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, first published in 1953 and recently reissued by Princeton University Press, the Renaissance scholar C. Burrow calls it ‘one of the three most inspiring works of literary criticism written in the twentieth century’ (the other two being Auerbach's Mimesis and Kermode's Sense of an Ending). This is because it shows ‘why literary study matters, and why it is intellectually, and perhaps also politically, important for the critic not to be bound to a single place or time’, and because of ‘its unifying passion for an idea of Western literature’. For Curtius Virgil was at something like the centre for that idea, as being what T.S. Eliot called ‘the classic of all Europe’, a view strongly reaffirmed in Kermode's The Classic. That is what I think chiefly justifies Wiley–Blackwell's decision to publish a Virgil Encyclopedia (hereafter VE), and that of its editors to take the crucial decision to include in it ‘everything of importance that enters into Virgil, that is in Virgil, and that comes out from Virgil into literature, art, and music’. The sheer extent of the emphasis on reception differentiates it from the Enciclopedia Virgiliana (modelled on the great Enciclopedia Dantesca) to whose often fuller and more learned discussions on the ancient material scholars and those with good Italian will still want to return. The new work may not be ‘bound to a single place’ but there is some (acknowledged) narrowing to an Anglo-American Anglophone world and its priorities (more on this in a moment). One justification might be that, for the West today, English has, at least for the time being, assumed the place of Latin as the universal language.
As one often does with such works, I turned first to entries on Virgilian topics on which I myself chanced to be working, both as it happened topics in reception: those on Shakespeare and Tennyson. Both proved to be perfectly serviceable if not quite outstanding, with useful pointers to further reading (another matter to which I will be returning). The one on Shakespeare (which includes most of the principal intertextualities with Virgil, but does not warn readers than many scholars now attribute to Peele some of the more Virgilian parts of Titus Andronicus) is the longest for any single post-Virgilian author, nearly nine columns, where even Dante has only four (an unexceptionable account by L. Pertile). This is surely perverse, as well as reflecting clear Anglophone bias. Shakespeare was stuffed full of Virgil by his schoolmasters, and Virgil makes appearances in a number of plays, in combination with other authors (most notably in Hamlet and The Tempest). In virtue of his being the central figure in the canon of English literature Shakespeare is a not insignificant vector for some Virgilian matter. But Virgil did not profoundly modify his practice or sensibility as a poet (in the way that Ovid in both Latin and English or Plutarch in English certainly did), nor was his response a major reception of Virgil which has significantly affected the ways in which his works were subsequently read. Dante is another matter and, as both maestro and autore, teacher of his craft and pre-eminent classical auctor, Virgil is a central presence in his work, in the Comedy in particular where Virgil is, along with Beatrice and Dante himself, one of the three principal characters, in what becomes a constant dialogue with the Aeneid and its world view, always admiring, but sometimes critical, even adversarial. The disappearance of Virgil, ‘sweetest father’, in Purgatorio 30, in an echo of the lament of Orpheus' floating head for his twice-lost Eurydice in Georgics 4, is one of the most moving moments in the entire poem but also an expression of his spiritual inadequacy. In Curtius' words, the link between Dante and Virgil, is ‘an arc of flame’, which ‘historically … is the sealing of the bond which the Latin Middle Ages made between the antique and the modern world’: ‘only when we are once again able to comprehend Virgil in all his poetic greatness, of which we Germans have lost sight since 1770, shall we wholly appreciate Dante’.
Tennyson is a much more plausible candidate for an English Virgil, and indeed there was something of an attempt in his day to construct him explicitly as such. Tennyson was probably sympathetic to that construction (his love letter ‘To Virgil’, in commemoration of the nineteenth centenary of his death, sounds at times like self-description). But the catastrophic decline in his reputation after his death, at least among the literati, and the general withering of the classical tradition have made that image of him less pervasive today than it might be; however it can be argued that some of Tennyson's poems would give a Latinless reader a better sense of what it is like to read Virgil in the original than almost anything else in English: the verbal beauty, the particular combination of lexis and syntax, the sfumato effects, the undertow of melancholy, the combination of lyric and epic tones. The entry, by T., is a reasonable one, if showing no special knowledge of the subject. But it is odd to say that the poet's copy of Virgil, now in the Central Library, Lincoln UK, was ‘presumably’ the edition of Charles de la Rue (why was the matter not checked?) or that it ‘presumably’ showed him intimately familiar with the Eclogues and Georgics (indeed he was). Much of the information is derived from a single source, A.A. Markley's Stateliest Measures (N. Vance's The Victorians and Ancient Rome should also have been cited). There are fewer experts on the pervasive influence of the classical tradition in the nineteenth century than for earlier periods.
Reviewing works of this kind is a difficult, perhaps a rather thankless task for all concerned; the reviewer tends to carp about a selection of the necessarily innumerable matters where he or she, if in charge, might have taken a different decision, as illustrated in the previous paragraph. What the admiring entry on the Enciclopedia Virgiliana (to which some 800 scholars contributed) says of it is necessarily equally true of the new venture: ‘perhaps inevitably for such a complex and many-authored undertaking, there are disparities here and there’, though for VE the many authors are a mere 350, including most of the best-known names in current Anglophone Virgilian scholarship. So let us start with the broad brush and the overall grounds for not inconsiderable praise. The editors, and their team of advisers and contributors, have acted with truly commendable dispatch (the project was begun in 2006), so that the volumes will constitute a useful snapshot of a broad Virgilian consensus at a very specific moment of time, making the task of future students of Virgil's reception an easier one. The volumes are well designed and produced, easy to use and on the eye, with good size of print and stout bindings, and excellent cross-referencing. They include well-handled subsidia, including a timeline, general index, index of Virgil citations and good quality illustrations. It is hard to imagine a reader who will not repeatedly gain pleasure and profit from the cornucopia of information contained within them, expressive of much of what Eliot termed ‘the mind of Europe’ over so many centuries. Despite the three canonical works being in a single metre, Virgil's own massive command of Mediterranean culture, his vast antiquarian learning, his cosmopolitanism was itself encyclopedic in scope, reinforcing the idea that the epic in its plenitude, its unity in diversity, is a sort of summa of universal knowledge, a microcosm of the universe itself (a favourite word of Virgil's imitator Milton is ‘all’). The rota Virgilii delivers a similar message, expressing, as the too brief entry here has it, ‘the completeness and integrity of Virgil's achievement’ (for more information see J.M. Ziolkowski and M.C.J. Putnam, The Virgilian Tradition [2008], pp. 744–50). We now also have, for a masterly overview of the reception, P. Hardie's The Last Trojan Hero: a Cultural History of Virgil's Aeneid (2014).
Often the most illuminating entries are not those on the great central topics (where a Companion-type essay may be more helpful in providing introductory guidance) but on apparently more marginal matters. For example, how many English-speaking readers have wondered when and why our current title for Virgil's epic became standard? In ‘Aeneid, English title of’ we learn that this form is found first in the seventeenth century (unfortunately we are not given the first recorded example), and that Addison played a ‘decisive’ role in popularising it (earlier the Latin form Aeneis, still preferred by Dryden for his translation, overall the finest in English, or the plural Aeneids, the latter retained by the archaising William Morris for his undervalued version, were used); the spread of the new form reflected French neoclassical influence and a similar shift in the title of Homer's epic, from the plural Iliads. This is one of a number of admirable contributions by Z. himself which are among the best in these volumes (another exemplary entry by him is on the incipit ‘Arma virumque cano’, also used of course as a way of referring to the poem). A revealing entry (‘editio princeps’ by M. Possanza) describes in some detail the first edition of Virgil's works in printed form, published in Rome in 1469, edited by Giovanni Bussi, Bishop of Aleria and based on inferior manuscript texts. It contains after Eclogue 6.30 an interpellated verse cobbled together out of Servius (quantum omnis mundus gaudet cantante Sileno) and parts of what J. Scaliger in 1572 named the Appendix Virgiliana including the Priapea, as well as the Helen episode, thereby determining the traditional line numbering of Aeneid 2. It is good to be reminded that the Renaissance's Virgil was rather different from ours (more Ovidian for one thing, as C. Burrow has pointed out in an important article on the Appendix in PVS 26 [2008], 1–16, unfortunately not included in the bibliography to the generally excellent entry on that collection by I. Peirano) and that the first truly critical edition was not produced until the nineteenth century (by Otto Ribbeck). Traditions are powerful things, but contingencies like the above often play a surprisingly large part in their construction. Several entries provide curious information about the unexpected byways through which Virgil enters the wider culture, including ‘badges, Caribbean colonial’ by E. Greenwood or ‘mottoes and seals of American states’ by D. Pollio. Perhaps the best-known example of this kind of phenomenon is discussed in ‘the dollar bill, American’ (E. Floyd), where the tag e pluribus unum comes from the Moretum by way of The Gentleman's Magazine.
What qualities make for a good encyclopedia entry? Obviously one relishes an element of flair, and the presence of the unexpected, but more sober virtues are most important. The editors themselves express an intention to ‘present a progress report on the status quaestionis’, and ‘to encircle … readers within a ring of reliable factual information, insightful critical perspectives, and balanced theoretical outlooks’. The point about balance is crucial, and is the reason why some lively writers are not ideal authors for such a project. For example, in the entry on ‘Arcadia’ R. Jenkyns summarises the position he set out in an important article in JRS in which he argues that Sannazaro and not Virgil discovered Arcadia. He makes no direct mention of a famous chapter in B. Snell's The Discovery of the Mind (1953), ‘Arcadia: the Discovery of a Spiritual Landscape’, which, for a period at least, became perhaps the most influential account of the Eclogues written by a classicist in the last century. Snell's argument was that the poems are set, not in any actual Mediterranean landscape, but in ‘a far-away land overlaid with the golden haze of unreality’. The argument is vulnerable on some counts (there is no evidence that Virgil thought of his creation as set in Arcadia) and, like all critical readings, Snell's is partial and contestable; but there is truth of a kind and certainly power in his view that the poems ‘represent the first serious attempt in literature to mould the Greek motifs into self-contained forms of beauty whose reality lies within themselves’. Later pastoralists certainly thought so, and the reception of the Eclogues is involved in what they have come to mean and certainly part of the project of VE. It is rather as if one suppressed all mention of A. Parry's essay ‘The Two Voices of Virgil's Aeneid’, on the grounds that it is anachronistic and misconceived. T., with his exceptionally strong commitment to Virgilian pessimism and alertness for subversive elements in Latin poetry, can also be guilty of weighting arguments too much in one direction; an encyclopedia is not the place to say that Propertius' praise of the Aeneid ‘is likely ironic’ (entry on Robert Graves). Nor should C. Burrow have described Dryden's translation as ‘perhaps the most influential English example of a “pessimistic” reading of A. as a poem of loss, exile, and unease with the politics of the present’ without warning the reader that the view of it as a consistent Jacobite allegory has been strongly attacked (in my view rightly), or that very different accounts of Dryden's achievement can, and have, been given.
In terms of overall coverage the approach seems to me generally judicious. I was especially pleased by the prominence given to Virgil's comparatively neglected presence in the visual arts. For example, H. Zerner contributes a splendidly learned (and not at all Anglocentric) entry on ‘Virgil reading to Augustus and Octavia in art’, while S. Smiles has a sympathetic one on Turner, whose lack of Latin meant he knew the works only in translation, though Smiles neglects to mention one contributory factor in rivalry with Claude, who regularly chose Virgilian subjects. More emphasis could have been given to Virgil's impact within the sphere of politics; the Aeneid has been used to underwrite innumerable imperial projects and, for example, is a key proof text for Dante's De Monarchia. I was not sure that having an entry for all names and places in the corpus was the best use of the space, and many of them are rather uninteresting in content. The entry on Ripheus omits to tell us of his subsequent fate in Dante. On the sole basis of Virgil's description of him as iustissimus unus / qui fuit in Teucris Dante puts him, though a pagan who lived before Christ, in the eye of the eagle in Paradiso 20; the placement rebukes Aeneas' bleak concluding comment: dis aliter visum (Dante's God does care). The entry on Angitia might have pointed out that the lines containing this place-name (te nemus Angitiae, vitrea te Fucinus unda, / te liquidi flevere lacus) became famous among classicists when Adam Parry chose them for their ‘lyric cry’ as exemplary of the Aeneid's private voice of lament and giving ‘the essential mood of the author’. I would have liked more attention to editors, commentators and translators, whose efforts kept Virgil readable and, more than that, helped determine in large measure the way he was read. The great La Cerda just makes a separate entry, short and dry; the engagingly eccentric James Henry, scarcely so influential or important, has two fascinating columns (Anglocentrism, or rather Hibernocentrism, again); Jodocus Badius Ascensius, whose commentary was absolutely staple fare in the Renaissance, gets none; R.G. Austin has a longish one. The Americans are in comparison over-represented. There is no separate entry for C. Day Lewis and his translation, culturally important for a time but currently unfashionable (there is, however, an excellent entry on C.S. Lewis, a great critic who wrote marvellously well on Virgil, neglected in the UK academy, but popular in the US, if mainly for confessional reasons). Living scholars are omitted, perhaps inevitably, though this does skew the picture somewhat.
There is also an electronic edition on Wiley Online Library. That raises the question of whether projects of this kind should now have print versions at all (save the trees!). The main reason for retaining them apparently remains the current economics of publishing. The obvious advantage of an online version is that it can be easily searched and also continuously kept up to date (though that can create problems later for students of reception for whom clear publication dates are important) – this will be particularly the case for the bibliographies. The issue of the length allowed for entries also would become less pressing. Some of the decisions about this seem distinctly odd. Antimachus gets a longer entry than Apollonius of Rhodes or Ennius; Conrad a significantly longer one than Hermann Broch, whose Death of Virgil was hailed by George Steiner as representing ‘the only genuine technical advance that fiction has made since Ulysses’ (again one suspects Anglo-American bias). The entry for Gavin Douglas seems brief given the historical importance and high literary quality of his translation of the Aeneid, the first produced in these islands (C.S. Lewis much preferred it to Dryden's; see the fascinating if wrongheaded comparison in his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama [1954]). Editorial policy on length of bibliography is explained (a norm of one per 100 words), but not always adhered to (despite an entry of nearly a page and the importance of the subject, ‘allegory’ has none). Even the most random and cursory examination reveals important gaps: omissions I noticed include F. Cox, Aeneas Takes the Metro under Butor; N. Rudd, Schoolmaster Extraordinary under T.E. Page (an entry without any bibliography); C. Burrow, Epic Romance under Ariosto; in his entry on fama P. Hardie, with unhelpful modesty, fails to include his own massive book on the subject. This is an area where clearly further work will be needed for the online version. Use will doubtless reveal that adjustments may also need to made to the cross-referencing: for example, currently the reader will encounter Dido's Catullan parvulus Aeneas under ‘diminutives’, but not under ‘Catullus’ (with no cross-reference).
But whatever the caveats, this is a significant publication. It should be of widespread use well beyond Classics, and would even be suitable for school libraries, if schools could afford the massive price of purchase. I am glad to have it on my own shelves, for browsing as much as for reference. The editors more than deliver on their hope to ‘contribute, even in a small way, to the continuation of the Virgilian tradition by facilitating the work of those who teach and study it’. The Virgil Society (excellent entry by C. Stray) also appealed in a letter to the TLS, signed by T.S. Eliot, Mackail and others, in 1943 – the date is significant – to ‘the central educational tradition of Western Europe’, and called Virgil ‘the symbol of continuous tradition’. VE certainly bears out that proud claim.
