This new commentary on Aeneid 3 by S. J. Heyworth and the late J. H. W. Morwood offers a plethora of resources for undergraduate and postgraduate Latin students, the most unusual being an appendix of ‘Major Intertexts in Latin and Greek’, all translated into English, keyed to the relevant pages of commentary. Twenty intertexts are included, the greatest number from the Odyssey, as well as from Pindar, Callimachus, Euripides, Apollonius and Lucretius, four Vergilian intratexts and four Ovidian hypertexts.
The preface is followed by a lengthy introduction (1–64), maps, Latin text, the commentary proper (83–269), bibliography and three indices of names, passages discussed and Latin words. The introduction covers the expected topics (i.e. Vergil's life, times and works; text and transmission); subsections entitled ‘Intertexts and Influences’ and ‘Context and Themes’ are particularly interesting for their intertextual focus. Some students, if rank beginners (as all the translated Latin implies), might find the level and density of information challenging; but advanced students and specialists will be pleased to have such a range of information in one place.
The interesting preface opens with a summary of significant features of Aeneid 3 and explains the authors’ decision to structure the commentary around intertexts as ‘a way into Vergil's handling of a range of sources’. Familiar topics of scholarship on Aeneid 3 are mentioned — e.g. the order of composition of the books of the poem, whether Aeneid 3 was initially a third- or a first-person narrative, the apparent unsuitability of Aeneas’ language in the periplus, the surprise of the adjective infelix applied to Ulysses — but only as topics that will not be the subjects of extended discussion. (Readers are referred to N. Horsfall's commentary on Aeneid 3 (2003) for more detail.) Most interesting, to this reviewer, is the commentators’ rejection of the charge, long brought against Aeneid 3, that it is ‘dull’ (x), even ‘The dullest book of the Aeneid’ (A. W. Allen, CJ 47 (1951–2), 119–23). Even Horsfall writes in his commentary: ‘It would be misleading to hail Aen. 3 as a triumph … the lack of danger, tension, drama, climax … is hardly open to question … Perhaps it is simply unfair or unreasonable of modern readers to hope for some moments of, dare we say it, excitement’ (35–6).
The authors reject the judgement of dullness seemingly without interrogation, which is a shame, because it does capture something important and true. Aeneid 3 feels ‘dull’ because readers anticipate Odyssean heroics. Indeed, Aeneas’ internal narrative to the Carthaginians is elaborately parallel to Odysseus’ to the Phaeacians. (Consider the numbers: Odysseus’ internal narrative takes four out of twenty-four books; Aeneas’ narrative, two out of twelve.) Odysseus recounts his brilliant triumphs, his audacious, self-aggrandising escapes from danger and goddesses; Aeneas, by his own account, is not heroic in any way. (Vergil, not Aeneas himself, narrates his successes.) He tells us of his losses of city, wife and father, the failed settlements, obscure prophecies, dangerous storms at sea. The purpose of this contrast, as has been argued, starting with Aeneas’ first two speeches in the poem with their opening allusions to Odysseus’ words (cf. E. L. Harrison in R. Wilhelm and H. Jones (eds), The Two Worlds of the Poet (1992), 109–28), is to establish the differences, ideological and ethical, between Aeneas and Odysseus, not trying and failing to portray Aeneas as another Odysseus. Books 1–3 develop Aeneas’ other-oriented virtues that make Rome possible. This is a new heroic paradigm: a coherent, alternative heroic ethos is under construction. Vergil uses Homeric traditional material to tell a new story for a new time.
Given this commentary's attention to models, students might infer that Vergil is all about imitation. The Buthrotum episode, however, functions to prove the lifelessness of imitation. Parva Troia (Little Troy), a Pergamus imitating the Great Troy, with its dried-up Xanthus and look-alike gate, finds Andromache, ritually mourning her dead husband by an empty tomb. She is so wedded to the past that, on seeing Aeneas approach, she takes him for dead and wonders at Hector's absence. In her own mind she is still married to Hector, though now ‘transferred’ to his lesser brother as slave-wife. She and Helenus do not speak to each other; their marriage is sterile; there is no thought of a future. So, Rome must not and will not be an imitation Troy, nor will the Aeneid be an imitation Odyssey. (See R. Hexter in C. Perkell (ed.), Reading Vergil's Aeneid (1999), 64–79.) The Achaemenides episode extends this theme. Vergil creates in Achaemenides a new character, a narrator competing with Odysseus, who tells a version of events in the Cyclops’ cave different from Odysseus’ — fewer days, more group-agency, and implicit criticism of Odysseus as a leader who left a man behind. Despite Aeneas’ politeness (3.492–505), Parva Troia does not invite tarrying.
In sum, this beautiful volume contains abundant material to help introduce students to Vergil. Some space could, perhaps, have been dedicated to theorising allusion, especially for its ironic implications. As W. Clausen has shown concerning Aeneas’ echoes of Odysseus, ‘Difference is the meaning of the allusion’ (HSCP 68 (1965), 139–47). The parallel circumstances of Aeneas and Odysseus, both men fearing death at sea and both internal narrators of their stories, allow for extensive contrasting. To what effect(s) does Vergil ‘rework’ a passage from the Odyssey or any other text? That is a question that readers may profitably consider.
