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Reviewed by:
  • Virgil, Aeneid 2: A Commentary
  • Alessandro Barchiesi
Nicholas Horsfall. Virgil, Aeneid 2: A Commentary. Mnemosyne Supplements, 299. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Pp. xl, 632. $262.00. ISBN 978-90-04-16988-3.

Although "aimed at the scholarly public" (as the dust jacket states), and not very easy to use in terms of bibliography, this fourth full-scale commentary by Horsfall is formative reading for anyone wishing to teach and explain the Aeneid at every level. For example, the instructor who wants to clarify the meaning and Latinity of 2.377 sensit medios delapsus in hostis will find exactly what she needs: common words, but syntactically a daring Graecism, unparalleled until Apuleius and (especially worthy as a point to make in class) "se delapsum esse would not similarly have excited the reader," so there is a strong contextual motivation for the innovation: it captures the shock and the shudder of the character in action, and the quick pace of the action, in a typical example of Vergil's "subjective style."

There are of course many stimulating suggestions for the specialist as well. The note on 547–50 explains that the idea that Priam will be a messenger of Pyrrhus' virtues to the dead Achilles derives its sarcastic force from the fact that Ulysses had actually been able (or will be able, in epic chronology) to deliver such an exceptional message in the Odyssey, 11.505 ff. Austin's note was not equally lucid in teasing out the Homeric implication. Horsfall is also helpful to future research when he identifies themes and topics that have been insufficiently discussed in the past: note e.g. his long note (à propos line 430) on the representation of priestly figures in martial epic.

The only area where I felt some disappointment is, curious to say for a commentary on book 2, and for a commentary by Horsfall, the city of Ilion: the commentary shows little interest for Troy, so to speak, as a real imaginary place; a place that was inhabited, revived, contested, monumentalized in the Hellenistic-Roman era, and a nodal place about which we can say many more things after the excavations in our own generation. The excellent reports by Brian Rose have done much to make us understand how the epic tradition was embodied and made real by the Hellenistic-Roman city: the important point for me is not whether Vergil actually visited Troy or cared about the material existence of the place, it is more about ways of reimagining Troy that are shared between Vergil's textual imagination and the monumental imagination of visitors, sponsors, and rebuilders. Considering that Horsfall is quintessentially an antiquarian scholar and has made a [End Page 116] fundamental contribution to the "ktistic" and colonial aspects of the Aeneid, he might have said more on Aeneas' Troy as, so to speak, a Homeric colony in the Mediterranean, and about its Romanization.

Alessandro Barchiesi
University of Siena at Arezzo
Classical World 104.1 (2010)
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