What do Hungarian generals, English poet laureates, Italian topographers and Belarusian aristocrats have in common? The answer, according to this volume, is not only a deep cultural immersion in Virgil's poetry, but an active interest in imitating, challenging and transforming it in their own creative endeavours. The Afterlife of Virgil represents the proceedings of a 2014 conference held jointly by the Warburg Institute and the Institute of Classical Studies in their series on ‘The Afterlife of the Classics’, following earlier instalments on Ovid and Cicero. With one art-historical exception, the contributors maintain a decisively literary focus across three main areas, in a formative stretch from Petrarch to the late nineteenth century: the Italian Renaissance, English poetry, and national literatures in Central and Eastern Europe. It is a shame that the volume misses opportunities to draw together the individual vignettes to form a productive dialogue or a unified approach: the chapters themselves make no acknowledgement of their neighbours, and the editors remain silent after a brisk four-page introduction. I also found the brevity of some chapters’ analyses, after necessarily lengthy passages of paraphrase and context, somewhat frustrating. But the best of the chapters offer nuanced readings and sophisticated models of literary reception, and the volume's attention to Virgilian receptions less familiar to Anglophone scholars is to be commended. Overall, too, the rich variety of the material covered makes this book a useful addition to an already crowded field.
Six of the book's ten chapters explore Italian Renaissance responses to Virgil. Giulia Perucchi (ch. 1) opens with Petrarch's use of Virgil as a source of geographical knowledge, in his published works and his private autograph annotations of Virgil's poems alike. Petrarch casts himself as a Virgil-in-reverse, setting the course of his Africa and Itinerarium from Italy towards Carthage and Jerusalem respectively; his reverence for Virgil's authority both encompasses the toponyms, ethnographies and local mythologies of far-flung places and provides a frame of reference and a storehouse of poetic expression for familiar Italian landscapes too (2 n. 6, 3 n. 9). While Petrarch ‘wanders on the borders of antiquity’ (‘perambulan[s] veterum confinia’, Fam. 3.1.1), Elisabeth Schwab (ch. 2) returns us to the heart of Rome, where other Italian humanists sought temporal depth under their very feet. Schwab compares Biondo Flavio's and Poggio Bracciolini's development of Virgil's nunc/olim model for viewing Rome's palimpsestic history from its hills (Aen. 8.348): the former to commend the building works then transforming the city, the latter to deplore Rome's degradation from its Augustan glory. This chapter itself retreads some well-worn pathways (25 n. 44), but Schwab quarries some interesting further observations, particularly regarding the scale of Poggio's narratological reliance on Virgil's model.
Clementina Marsico's chapter on Lorenzo Valla's grammatical exegesis of Virgil (ch. 3) parallels Valla's self-consciously novel philological findings with his sense of scholarly continuity: for Valla, ‘Nonius and Servius are simply ancient colleagues with whom a dialogue can be held’, and ‘only through the correction of others’ errors may research truly advance’ (44). Continuity again comes under the spotlight in ch. 5, as Marilena Caciorgna whisks us on a rapid tour through artistic and literary responses to Virgil's topos of carving messages of love on trees (Ecl. 10.52–4). In many cases, the topos owes more to Ovid (Her. 5.21–30), inviting the question of how far Renaissance artists responded to Virgil alone, or rather blended their models, contextualising Virgilian reception within a larger fabric of other classical influences. David Quint's masterful examination of Poliziano's Stanze per la giostra (ch. 4) finds in it a poetics of ‘recombination’, a mode of imitation paradoxically truer to Virgil's own practices: Poliziano recognises that to imitate Virgil alone would itself be un-Virgilian, since the Roman poet himself imitated multiple models (45). In Quint's persuasive reading, Poliziano's poem becomes less an expression of oedipal paranoia vis-à-vis his forefather Virgil (contra T. Greene, The Light in Troy (1982), 147–70) than a poised, ambitious and richly textured fantasia on Virgilian themes, in full (and productive) awareness of the historical disjuncture separating him from antiquity (61). A final nod to imitative multiplicity comes in Francesca Bortoletti's illuminating chapter on bucolic poetry in the literary circles around Lorenzo de’ Medici (ch. 10), in which the latent theatricality of Virgil's Eclogues blossoms into actual performance, and the artifice of the poetic certamen provides cover for real-life literary rivalry and camaraderie.
Two chapters on Central and Eastern Europe transfer similar questions to less familiar territory. Hanna Paulouskaya (ch. 7) traces vernacular travesties of the Aeneid in late eighteenth-century Ukrainian and Belarusian literature, building on earlier French, German and Russian burlesques. The travesties by Ivan Kotlyarevsky and Vikentsy Ravinski capitalise on folk literature, elite classical education and a historical moment ripe for satirical elaborations of national grievances (101–3). At times they directly parody Virgil's poetry (e.g. the absurdist macaronic rendering of the ambassadors’ meeting with Latinus, 119–21); at others, they generate empathy and common feeling, as in Kotlyarevsky's treatment of Anchises’ prophecy of Rome, ‘written in Ukrainian, told to a person who has just lost his motherland, dressed in the costume of a Cossack’ (121). Máté Vince, in a particularly stimulating chapter (ch. 6), investigates the numerous and self-contradictory Virgilian elements in Miklós Zrínyi's 1651 Hungarian epic poem The Siege of Sziget (1651). Zrínyi's own narratorial presence openly appropriates Virgil's persona, from his own ille-ego proem to his habits of apostrophe (94–7); simultaneously, he abandons Virgilian virtues of careful authorial labour and poetic renown for a pose of practical soldiery (95–7). If the Italian writers above saw danger in falling short of Virgilian perfection, these two chapters demonstrate the cultural gains to be made by ostensibly disavowing Virgilian models even while exploiting them.
Tim Markey's ‘The Renaissance Virgil and the Renaissance library’ (ch. 8) immediately denies the existence of any single ‘Renaissance Virgil’: all early modern readers encountered very different Virgils, according to the editions, commentaries and treatises they read, in contrast to the standardised text and overflowing research libraries modern academics expect. Focusing on Spenser's manipulation of pathos and ethos (128–33) in ‘Maye’ (The Shepheardes Calendar), Markey explores Spenser's consultation of contemporary Virgilian bibliography. He traces a complex, interrelated web of influences for Spenserian pastoral: Virgil himself, Virgil's ancient commentators, Virgil's Renaissance readers and Virgil's ancient commentators’ Renaissance readers — not to mention Spenser's own built-in commentator, the mysterious E. K., reading Spenser's work against the backdrop of all the others. Charles Martindale (ch. 9) seeks Virgilian style and sensibility in English poetry from Surrey to Eliot; Tennyson ultimately takes the laurel. Martindale's methodology will not win over all readers — he is self-admittedly ‘nineteenth-century’ in his critical approach and judgement, and proudly so (138) — but his discussions are always finely sensitive, if occasionally on the dogmatic side.
The volume is well produced and thoroughly illustrated. Errata are few and minor (‘Achemenides’ for ‘Achaemenides’, 3 n. 13; ‘The Court of Pan’ for ‘The Education of Pan’, 79 fig. 19; ‘Alecto’ for ‘Allecto’, 90; ‘Alestes’ for ‘Aletes’, 92; ‘metaphors’ for ‘similes’, 117; erroneous indentation, 126; ‘beach’ for ‘beech’, 127 n. 17; ‘Aminta’ for ‘Amyntas’, 158). Translations are scrupulously provided (but missing for Belarusian, 102, and Italian, 160). There is an index of names, though a thematic index and consolidated bibliography would have been welcome.
