A good deal of recent scholarship on Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica has attempted to come to grips with its ideological ambivalence, its baffling complexity and the frustrating inconsistency of its thematic and figurative modes. Here is a study that bucks the trend. For Stover, Valerius’ epic is a more straightforward text: unswervingly upbeat and positive, it gives enthusiastic and unqualified textual expression to a purported ‘Argonautic moment’, which is to say, a burst of imperialist zeal and expansionist ardour that characterized the earliest years of the Flavian dynasty — which is when, according to S., the epic was composed.

There is much of value in this book, and all scholars of the Flavian Argonautica will need to read it carefully and take its arguments into account. As with S.’s previous work on Valerius, the monograph is full of keen insights and rich observations; a particularly important achievement is its systematic exploration of the influence exerted on Valerius’ epic by Lucan's Bellum Civile. Taken as a whole, though, Epic and Empire does not make a convincing case for its larger assertions.

The study begins with the vexed issue of dating (ch. 1). As the book's title suggests, S. has staked much on a very early period of composition: for him Valerius’ epic is a nearly exclusive product of Vespasianic Rome. This is not easily squared with the evidence. Particularly inconvenient is Valerius’ mention of the eruption of Vesuvius, which occurred early in the reign of Titus, not far from the midpoint of the text as we have it. S. deals with this by proclaiming ‘arbitrary and unwarranted’ (12) the assumption that Valerius composed the books of his epic in their narrative order. That is surely a bit strong: the poem is, after all, missing its ending, and was produced in an age that featured recitation and publication of individual books of epics as they were written, both of which would have encouraged the natural human inclination to sequential composition. In any event, the conclusion that the Vesuvian verses are a late insertion, added as Valerius was ‘putting the finishing touches on his nearly completed epic’ (26) does not sit well with the manifest incompleteness of the poem that has come down to us.

S. initiates his ‘historicizing’ project by elucidating the purported ‘Argonautic moment’, which is to say, the early years of Vespasian's reign, that gave rise to Valerius’ epic (ch. 2). To the extent that these years are characterized as restorative and reconstructive, S. is on solid ground. But for an ‘Argonautic moment’ S. clearly needs something more, well, ‘epic’ — which he conjures up with the assertion that Vespasian's principate saw ‘the inauguration of a new era marked by unprecedented expansionism’ (47) — though in fact it featured neither significant territorial expansion nor ambition thereof. On S.’s reading, the new age of imperialist possibilities under Vespasian — ‘a time conducive to heroic greatness and epic achievement’ (184) — finds its textual counterpart in Jupiter's articulation of a world plan at 1.531–67, whereby the supreme god inaugurates the first age in which heroic greatness and epic achievement are possible (51). S. is oddly insistent that Valerius makes the voyage of Argo ‘the very first epic endeavour of all time’ (46, etc.). Among other problems, this overlooks the poet's adjustment of relative mythic chronologies to have Hercules join the Argonautic expedition after completing his Twelve Labours, that most canonical of epic endeavours, which serves as a precedent and recurring paradigm or foil (depending on your view) for the Argonauts’ and Jason's own activity.

No less fundamental for S.’s upbeat reading is Valerius’ initial invocation to Vespasian (1.7–21), in which the ‘Argonautic’ Vespasian is praised for his military achievements as an officer in the British campaign of a.d. 43. But in eulogizing Vespasian's achievements as a ‘modern Argonaut’ Valerius is referring to events that took place under Claudius, a point that is never properly acknowledged and addressed. If the poet is, as S. claims, celebrating the inauguration of a new post-Julio-Claudian age of expansionism, it is surely an embarrassment that his principal point of reference is expansionist activity that took place some three decades earlier under one of the Julio-Claudian emperors.

In basing his overarching interpretation on these two intriguing and much-discussed passages from Book 1, S. charts a familiar course in Valerius criticism. The problem, as earlier scholarship has repeatedly demonstrated, is detecting meaningful resonances of these ostensibly ‘key’ passages in the subsequent narrative. S.’s preferred solution here is resort to a manner of political allegory. This seems a slightly regressive step, both within the monograph itself, which had advertised a rigorous historicist trajectory, and within Valerian studies more broadly, which has seen more than its share of such hermeneutic flights of fancy. So the seer Mopsus in Book 3 becomes a ‘Vespasianic vates’, charged with healing the traumatized Argonauts after the disaster in Cyzicus (styled a ‘bellum civile’), just as Vespasian had to heal the traumatized Roman state after the civil wars that brought him to power. As with most such allegorical readings, this one is based on subjective perceptions that can neither be verified nor disproved. S. pushes on: just like Mopsus with the Argonauts, so the vates Valerius shows the way for Roman readers, signalling to them that ‘the time has come to leave the past behind, to be cleansed of the awful events of the recent civil wars, and once again to advance with a renewed sense of purpose and hope in the promise of a new political era’; in short, the Argonautica turns out to be ‘a song of purification’ (179).