At first sight, the subtitle of this book suggests an impossible task — to write a cultural history of one of the foundation texts of Western civilization in fewer than 250 pages. Philip Hardie outlines the challenge of the book, designed as a companion volume to Edith Hall's The Return of Ulysses (2008), in an Introduction which sets the tone of the whole enterprise in the glorious breadth and depth of its material. This analysis of Virgilian reception opens by evoking Virgil's presence in the Americas and Australia; from the reverse of the US one-dollar bill to the mottos of the state of Oklahoma, the Brazilian state of Minos Gerais and the city of Melbourne, Australia, there is abundant evidence of Virgil's fundamental importance to a wide range of civilizations. Yet his presence within these new worlds is haunted by the sorrows and injustices of colonization. From the start, therefore, H. alerts us both to the global appeal of the Aeneid, but also the dark ambivalence that haunts the work and its reception. It is entirely appropriate that the Introduction should conclude with Walt Whitman's words from his poem ‘Song of Myself’: ‘Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)’
These multitudes are further explored in nine subsequent chapters which are organized thematically — ‘Underworlds’, ‘“La donna è mobile”: Versions of Dido’, ‘The Many Faces of Aeneas’, ‘Empire and Nation’, ‘Imperium sine fine: The Aeneid and Christianity’, ‘The Aeneid and New Worlds’, ‘Parody and Burlesque’, and ‘Art and Landscape’. As we might have anticipated, there is lucid and probing discussion of Dante, Milton and Tennyson within the ‘Underworlds’ chapter, but through a series of sensitive and close readings, H. also evokes the ways in which the Virgilian underworld informed Freud's thinking, chilled Claudio's visions of death in Measure for Measure and haunted the work of Berlioz and Petrarch. This survey of Underworlds leads us from Lucan to Eavan Boland, from Silius Italicus to Heaney.
Petrarch also features in the chapter devoted to receptions of Dido. Here again H. reminds us of the Aeneid's ambivalence, as Petrarchan poetry draws upon the image of Dido to evoke both her beautiful face, but also the way in which this beauty is distorted by grief and anguish into ‘raging fury’. The Dido chapter also indicates the importance of the Aeneid to women's history, not least to those women who have found themselves in positions of literary authority or political leadership, such as Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth I or Rosario Castellano, a Mexican feminist icon. It is appropriate that the following chapter, devoted to Aeneas, should probe the different manifestations of heroism that have gained prestige at different times. H. points out that there have been surprisingly few studies devoted exclusively to Aeneas, though it is clear from his analysis that a study of the reception of Aeneas would offer valuable insights into what different ages and cultures prize in their constructions of masculinity.
The Aeneid's palpable relevance to the present day is evident in the chapter ‘Empire and Nation’, where H. reminds us of the Aeneid’s crucial rôle in the invention of the European myth of Empire, not least by his reference to Enoch Powell's invocation of the Aeneid in his ‘rivers of blood’ speech in his warnings against immigration. The theme of empire acquires a spiritual dimension in the following chapter, which looks at the way in which the Aeneid was, from very early on, appropriated as a Christian work. Such a dimension serves to deepen the melancholy and nostalgia that is so fundamental to Virgil's work: ‘His Arcadia is not only a midway-land between myth and reality, but also a midway land between the ages, a here in the beyond, a land of the soul that is longing for its distant home’ (145).
A more earthly myth of the ideal home, of a ‘new world’ is examined in ‘The Aeneid and New Worlds’, a chapter that is again astonishingly broad in its sweep of references — from Camões’ Portuguese epic, The Lusiads (1572) to Girolamo Fracastoros's account of Columbus' voyage, alarmingly entitled Syphilis (1530), to Allen Tate's account of ‘playing the American abroad’ in ‘The Mediterranean’ (1932). The more playful dimensions of Virgilian reception are also explored in ‘Parody and Burlesque’, a chapter that begins by looking at Ovid's playful receptions, but also offers colourful accounts of Swift, Scarron and Cotton. This chapter is especially valuable for its reminder of the ludic and scatological writings that have responded to Virgil's work, since it is all too easy to equate Virgil and his afterlife with the melancholy, wistful figure of the Hadrumetum mosaic.
No overview of Virgilian reception would be complete without an account of his importance to visual culture — not just painting and sculpture, but also garden design, as a visit to Stourhead reveals. H. has, necessarily, had to be selective in the artists he mentions, but his comments on Claude and Turner are especially illuminating. The book closes where it began, with an evocation of Ovid in America, as H. discusses the work of Thomas Cole who founded the Hudson River School of painting. It should be noted that the book as a whole is enhanced with lavish illustrations.
One of the many fine qualities of this marvellous book is the light-touched erudition with which H. is able to analyse works from antiquity, from the Renaissance, from the present day. His discussion of Shakespeare is especially fine. My quibble arises from this, and is a churlish one — it is the frustration of ending each chapter and wanting more. H. has achieved a remarkable feat in this survey of Virgilian reception from antiquity to the present day in under 90,000 words, but his readers will wish that he had not been constrained by length.
