This slim volume intensively explores the background, representations and implications of Virgil's Ascanius. The monograph demonstrates a fruitful broadmindedness about the function of character in epic as a repository of signifiers and thus a worthy object of semiotic interpretation. While the Aeneid that emerges may be a familiar one to Anglophone ‘pessimists’ preoccupied with the epic's delays, alternatives and inconsistencies (pp. 11–12), the sharp focus on Ascanius and strong intratextual readings provide many persuasive re-evaluations of key individual episodes. The brief chapters juxtapose examples effectively and link together well to make a convincing case for taking Ascanius seriously.

Chapters 2 and 3 on the inconclusive Italian genealogy and troubling Trojanness of Ascanius’ naming establish ambiguities about Aeneas’ Trojan son in the pre-Virgilian tradition that are important for the argument, but contain information and sources familiar to most Virgilians at least since A. Erskine, Troy between Greece and Rome: Local Tradition and Imperial Power (2001). Subsequent chapters feature R.’s skills in drawing intratextual comparisons, and her close attention to Virgilian language and self-allusion generates fresh insights. Chapter 4 links the Andromache and Dido episodes through both women's attachment to a child imago: Ascanius’ disturbing resemblance to the lost Astyanax and the Cupid substitute that intoxicates Dido. R. shows how the Odyssey’s epic discourse of family resemblance and the ideological expectations of Roman ancestral imagines (pp. 65–8) underscore the inappropriate regressiveness of Andromache's comparison: Ascanius is temporarily a ‘ghostly’ substitute in Andromache's parva Troia, and further substitutions (Cupid) and spectral alternatives (Dido's hypothetical parvulus Aeneas at 4.328–9) suggest a troubling proliferation of Ascanius ‘doubles’ within the poem.

R.’s careful attention to the language and associations of Ascanius’ imago yields further results in the following chapter on the lusus Troiae, where she proposes an attractive reading of Ascanius’ address to the mob of Trojan women (pp. 90–100): the conjunction of belli simulacra (5.674) to describe the Troy games activates a ghostly suggestion in the galeam inanem (5.673) Ascanius tosses to the ground. His bid for authority through recognition, en ego vester / Ascanius (5.672–3) thus becomes undermined by the deceptive duplicates implied by this terminology, and instead veers into an ironic potential replay of Pentheus’ failed address to his mother in Euripides’ Bacchae (first observed by J. Conington ad loc. in 1884, as R. notes, p. 97 n. 50). An Ovidian reuse of the Virgilian scene in his Theban narrative provides a satisfying confirmation of the themes of deception and misrecognition (p. 99). The precision of the earlier readings helps to establish the semantic field that makes sense of the Euripidean allusion; in his heroic leap to the spotlight, Ascanius remains strangely invisible, possibly unrecognised and ultimately ineffective as his father arrives to disperse the women.

R. reads Ascanius’ struggle to fulfil adult roles as symptoms of deep ambivalence about the epic's own progress to closure (pp. 13–14). The strongest chapters illustrate two forms of developmental delay in the poem: ‘Protecting Ascanius’ (Chapter 7) highlights the imagery of precious objects in the section ‘Jewel-Like Boys’ (pp. 131–44) and the associated vulnerability of childhood with similar descriptions of other characters, while ‘Growing Up’ (Chapter 8) demonstrates Ascanius’ multiple failures to do so. Although the poem's interest in doomed youths has been well established since D. Fowler's seminal piece, ‘Virgil on Killing Virgins’ in M. Whitby et al. (edd.), Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble (1987), R. presents convincing intratextual links for Ascanius’ visual connection to representations of female warriors (Penthesilea and Camilla) and non-Romans like the Gauls depicted on Aeneas’ shield (pp. 141–2). R. argues:

As R. notes, Flavian epic certainly recognises and amplifies these associations.

Nisus and Euryalus are probably the most memorable doomed youths of the epic, and yet R.’s reading of Ascanius’ underestimated role as commander of their night raid yields equally intriguing new insights. R. first establishes unwitting violence as a childish characteristic in her discussion of Silvia's stag, and then effectively analyses Ascanius’ speech as an example of boyishly over-enthusiastic rhetoric (pp. 156–9). Taking Ascanius’ ‘childishness’ seriously lends greater pathos to this episode; seeing Ascanius as a boy leader playing at war games highlights the emphasis on age difference between Nisus and Euryalus, and the ultimate inadequacy he demonstrates in not coping with the real adult reactions of Euryalus’ bereaved mother. There are no words of consolation, only a hasty removal of inconvenient female grief.

Not all readers will assent to R.’s pessimistic conclusion that Aeneas and the poem seemingly ‘suppress’ Ascanius: ‘His voice, when heard, is swiftly silenced, and after Aeneas leaves to engage in his climactic encounter with Turnus, he simply vanishes’ (p. 189). This is not the only problem with the poem's ending, as readers are aware. Nonetheless, R.’s provocative suggestions flow from a sustained engagement with Ascanius’ characterisation and its place in the epic's poetic economy. The topic is concentrated, and at times, narrowly Virgilian, with only a few mentions of Telemachus in the Odyssey or other significant poetic models for problematic rites de passage, such as perhaps Hylas in Theocritus 13. Ascanius’ artificially prolonged childishness allows the much older Aeneas to marry a nubile Lavinia, whose age and Virgilian descriptions correspond to Ascanius much more closely (pp. 108–10, 138): could this be a strategy adopted from the Odyssey, where Telemachus’ celibacy (in direct contrast with the suitors’ and Odysseus’ sexual activity) signifies his inadequacy to take over as king? Overall, the book is well produced with no obvious typos and with appropriate scholarly apparatus.