The cover of Anne Rogerson's excellent book reproduces the Pompeian fresco showing Iapyx removing an arrowhead from Aeneas’ thigh, as the hero looks away, grimly, from his weeping son Ascanius by his side. The image (almost) perfectly represents the scene in Aeneid 12.398–400: ‘Aeneas is standing there, grumbling loudly and bitterly, leaning on his huge spear, with a great gathering of men around him including the grieving Ascanius, unmoved by tears.’ As R. notes, Virgil's description here unavoidably recalls the earlier Aeneas, ‘immovable’ in the face of Dido's grief: as with Dido, the hero must pay no heed to wound and weeping boy to continue on his destined path. What repeatedly emerges from the scenes between Ascanius and Aeneas is the contrast between the vir's exemplary fortitude, verging on the inhuman at times, and the all-too human vulnerability of his puer. R. shows how, despite his efforts to grow up throughout the poem, Ascanius must remain a child, innocent and full of unrealised potential, in order for his father to be the hero he needs to be. As many have noted, one of the questions the Aeneid asks is what is lost when great destinies are fulfilled, and the corpses that litter its latter half are the most harrowing embodiments of this, youths who will never to grow up to fulfil their potential. But the peculiar dynamic of sentimentality and impassivity in the Ascanius-Aeneas relationship hints another aspect to this: is something also lost, or forgotten, when children do grow up to emulate their fathers and succeed to their ‘destiny’?

R.'s study fully articulates this complex tension at the heart of the Aeneid, which so celebrates the paternal-filial relation as a model for the progress of both epic and empire, yet cannot let its young hero grow up to be like his dad. Often referred to as parvus or puer, the poem stresses his diminutive size and childishness, yet as the future of Rome he has also been dubbed its ‘most important character’ (M. Petrini, The Child and the Hero (1997), 87), even if his role is ‘peripheral’ to the narrative and a foil to his father, the real hero. R.'s book, the first monograph on Ascanius, lays out the fascinating complications to this view revealed by an Ascanius-centred reading of the poem. In her sensitive account, Trojan past and Roman future do not so much unite as clash in the body of this puer: potentially ‘too Trojan’ for the proto-Rome imagined by the poem, the future that Ascanius embodies is both divinely predestined and worryingly uncertain, vulnerable to ‘different desires and competing agendas’ (1). Forever a boy within the text, never to become a man, Ascanius also foregrounds the flipside of epic's ‘aspirational masculinity’ (4) — its vulnerability, palpable not only in the fact that he is the one of the few youths to get out of the Aeneid alive, but also in the very precarity and fragility of hope itself, an emotion which powers Virgil's narrative towards its goal of an idealised future Rome, but which often eludes or deludes its characters. Ascanius carries the burden of the hope of both dynastic succession and also the survival of the young into adulthood, since the poem's emotional charge largely emanates not from its hero's exploits or labours but from its powerful evocations of premature death, making implicit links between fictional doomed youths such as Pallas and Euryalus and the precarious existence of children in first-century b.c. Rome. R. shows well how Ascanius functions symbolically within these structures of collective grief and affect: he must survive Virgil's fantasy history as a sort of corrective to the real-life loss of Marcellus, yet he must also remain a Peter Pan-like figure of unfulfilled potential.

Ascanius is malleable, replicable, a blank screen: R. shows how he is set up as a solution to the epic's problem of its future and a problem in himself, since he cannot but suggest other outcomes, other stories. Virgil trims down to a single son the array of Trojan offspring attributed to the mythic Aeneas but ironically, as the narrative progresses, this makes Ascanius’ projected role in the succession more uncertain, and by extension undermines confidence in the way the poem yokes its narrative momentum to a secure genealogical line. One of the biggest problems is that Virgil states Ascanius will have a younger, Italian half-brother, born from Lavinia, and both sons are differently implied to be founder of the line which ruled Alba Longa. Ascanius is thus simultaneously ‘heir’ and ‘spare’, a victim of Roman ‘genealogical opportunism’, the manipulation of genealogies to fit political and narrative needs (S. Nakata, Phoenix 66 (2012), 335–63). Although Virgil lends validity to the Julian claim by making his Iulus-Ascanius son of Creusa, ironically, Lavinia's son Silvius, not Ascanius, will unite Trojan and Latin blood (6.762), the future blending of the two nations towards which the poem works. R.'s thesis is that Virgil's inconsistency is more than tactful fudge or playful Alexandrianism: rather, the implicit rivalry between sons haunts Ascanius’ progress, generating anxiety around the future and foreshadowing Roman fraternal-civil strife.

R.'s readings are detailed and erudite without losing sight of bigger questions the poem is using Ascanius to ask or obscure. It opens up numerous avenues of enquiry, especially about how the paternal-filial relationship is projected as a model for conceiving other Roman power relations, such as between past and present, ethnic identities and ruler and state. Ascanius’ fate is both predestined and unclear, and R. shows powerfully how, through him, Virgil makes a larger point about the tendency ‘to see what we want in such symbols of the future’ (36). Her Ascanius does not resolve but further complicates binary optimistic/pessimistic perspectives, as she shows how he becomes a ‘figure for the progress of the Aeneid’ (13), poised on the brink of achievement but left hanging, like the ending of the poem itself. This is an excellent book, a model of careful, sensitive interpretation. Its diminutive subject belies its valuable contribution to contemporary Virgilian scholarship, through densely constructed readings and suggestive, capacious conclusions.