Homeric Effects in Vergil’s Narrative by Alessandro Barchiesi (review)

Barchiesi’s La Traccia del Modello was published in 1984. Here now is a translation, augmented by an appendix, a foreword by Philip Hardie, and an after-word by the author. La Traccia has been widely admired for the sophistication of its approach to the way in which Virgil used Homer, including its notion that Hellenistic scholarship on Homer played a part. The Aeneid’s ending, for example, is seen not merely as imitating one passage of the Iliad but as combining various “Homeric effects.” The Aeneid is, in truth, most impressive where it radically departs from Homeric precedent, but in a poem that uses Homer so much, that distance too has its significance. The interest of this translation will lie principally in Barchiesi’s more recent thoughts. His account of his own place in the development of Virgilian scholarship may seem excessively self-conscious, but with a poet as self-conscious as this one it has a certain fitness. A theme that he stresses is the relationship between the study of classical intertextuality and modern literary theory. His view is rather whiggish: Virgilian interpretation is seen, mostly, as gaining steadily in sophistication. Others may think that the zeal among classicists in the 1990s for “theory” (often no better than a dogmatic relativism) looks now like a fashion that promised more than it delivered. Barchiesi is irenic (plaudits on colleagues are widely bestowed), but even he balks a little at the excesses of metaliterary interpretation: “No ancient forest has remained undisturbed, no muddy pond or tiny boast has been left alone by metaliterary readers.” Hardie suggests that La Traccia now seems most dated in admitting the language of intentionality. One might think, rather, that it is the theoretical coloration that now looks a little faded and the fear of intentionality, based on a philosophical confusion between intention and introspection, that now appears passé. Augustan poetry is often described as a blending of tradition and originality; the same may be said of Barchiesi.