Contexts of War: Manipulation of Genre in Virgilian Battle Narrative (review)

Virgilian scholars have long regretted the lack of attention devoted to the Aeneid's battle scenes. Rossi's book, developed from her Harvard dissertation, fills the bibliographical void. She aims to free Virgil's battle narrative from the overpowering "code model" of Homer's Iliad. Instead she directs the reader's attention to the narrative conventions of Roman historiography and the stock elements and type-scenes employed in the historiographical genre. Their presence and function as distinctive markers of another literary genre within the Aeneid enables Virgil—so Rossi argues—to redefine the generic nature of the epic's martial landscape.

Chapter 1 examines how the urbs capta topos, well established in tragedy, historiography, and oratory, serves as a model for Virgil's fashioning of the fall of Troy in Aeneid 2 and concludes that "through marked allusions to other texts and historical events, other cities partake of a similar fate" (43). The narrative thus reminds Virgil's contemporary reader of the fall of many an Italian town and even Rome herself. Simultaneously Rossi shows how Virgil strikes a tragic note (another genre) when he lets Aeneas relate Priam's last moment in the fashion of a tragic messenger speech. Focalization and sophisticated manipulation of genre work hand in hand to achieve a narrative that aligns itself with Callimachean poetics.

Chapter 2 employs narratology to argue that the epic fabula of books 9–12 can also be read as a tragic "story." By featuring a peripeteia (reversal)—a topos at home in both tragedy and historiography—it complies with the Aristotelian concern for a tragic/epic plot's beginning, middle, and end and allows Virgil to shift "from epic as history to epic as tragedy" (67). Thus whilst the fabula promises the accomplishment of a new order, the tragic "story" problematizes the struggle necessary to achieve this.

The book's second part (chapters 3–7) begins by providing a systematization of type-scenes of collective fighting in the Iliad. Rossi then examines Virgil's response to this scheme, focusing on the un-Homeric narrative feature of empathy—again adopted from historiography—and on the changes applied to the Homeric battle pattern. The epic martial landscape is redefined through the narrator's own present, which casts into question its model's epic code. Furthermore, Virgil's reworking of the rout scene typical in Homer brings further polychrony to the narrative of the Aeneid. In this epic there is no "absolute past" (Bakhtin) that allows the reader to neglect present cares and instead to contemplate events of long ago. Similarly the narrative device of enargeia (vividness)—again also present in historiography—achieves actualization and connects past and present. By reading the final duel between Aeneas and Turnus as a bellum internum (civil war) Rossi reinforces her argument and demonstrates how the audience is caused to engage with the text. The response of the Rutulians, the internal spectators to this duel, "solicits a response from its audience as members of the Roman collective body" (166).

Part three (ch. 8) finally draws attention to the anachronisms in the Aeneid's siege scenes (Troy, Aeneas' camp, Latinus' city) and their origins in historiography. As before, the imagery in these scenes transcends the epic's time system. Pursued by Rossi through the entire epic, the siege imagery reads, when applied to Carthage, as smoothing the way for the foundation of Rome, and when it recurs in the final duel, as questioning the moral integrity of this Roman future.

The book is well signposted and cross-referenced: the reader never loses track, and amongst the carnage comes to discover much that is valuable and carefully argued. In the interests of a wider readership a discussion is sometimes cut short or relegated to a half-page footnote, where specialists will have to search for much that is of interest. But Rossi succeeds in reminding us of the important role of historiography...