The Other Virgil: “Pessimistic” Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture (review)

This is an interesting book, which offers a good deal to appreciate, but it fails in its stated aim. For half a century, there has been a division in the criticism of Virgil’s Aeneid between “optimists” and “pessimists”—in crude terms, between those who maintain that Virgil affirms the Roman destiny and those who hold that he casts significant doubt upon it. Kallendorf ’s purpose is to answer an objection to the pessimists’ view—if this was Virgil’s meaning, why did it take 2,000 years for it to be recognized?—by arguing that we can indeed find pessimist interpreters in earlier centuries, if we look for them. The case seems plausible; the surprise is that Kallendorf is so far from finding the evidence he seeks that he comes near to making the opposite case. In the Renaissance he has found one or two humanists who asserted (for example) that Aeneas treated Dido disgracefully, but that view is compatible with (and has been held with) a fully optimistic reading of the poem as a whole. Much of the book looks at poetic texts, the argument being that if a poet alludes to Virgil and the context is negative, we may suppose that he understood the Aeneid pessimistically. Of course, that does not follow, and if Virgil’s own use of Homer were so understood, a pessimist reading would be impossible. Kallendorf has examples of early Americans who criticized Virgil’s servile adulation of Augustus, and he tries to enlist them on the pessimist side. On the contrary, they saw Virgil as an optimist, and deplored the fact.

Though Kallendorf does not make his case, his book is attractively written and widely learned, ranging from the Italian Renaissance through Shakespeare and Milton (The Tempest and Paradise Lost) to poets in Latin America and the infant United States. He discusses familiar texts engagingly and resurrects some other figures from a deep obscurity. And if he ends up delivering a rather different message from the one intended—well, some have thought that Virgil did the same.