- The Last Trojan Hero: A Cultural History of Virgil’s “Aeneid” by Philip Hardie
It is a familiar claim that Virgil is the most protean, perhaps even the most influential, of the great poets. Virgil as wise man, as asserter (or lately as subverter) of the imperial idea, as anima naturaliter Christiana (Hardie helpfully explains how Tertullian’s phrase got attached to the poet in the twentieth century), as gentle melancholiac—all that is in this book. Its special character lies in its very wide-ranging if somewhat miscellaneous erudition. There are chapters on parody and burlesque (Ausonius making a sexually explicit wedding night out of a cento of Virgilian half lines), on art and landscape (rather a breathless rush), on Virgil’s effect on poems written about or in the New World. There are some wry twists: more than once Hardie suggests that an ancient mode of interpretation that we find curious bears a similarity to some recently fashionable line in modern scholarship. On the famous controversies, he is more concerned to set out the opposing views than to determine between them: this is a brisk spin down the via media, with an experienced driver at the wheel. His book is a mass of facts, accompanied by concise and judicious commentary; the larger questions—what permanent difference Virgil made, whether and how he helped to shape the cultural imagination—are left aside. It is not more than the sum of its parts, but the parts are exceptionally many, and all readers will learn a good deal that they did not know.
Richard Jenkyns, emeritus professor of the classical tradition at Oxford University, is the author of God, Space, and City in the Roman Imagination; The Victorians and Ancient Greece; Dignity and Decadence; Virgil’s Experience; Classical Literature; and A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen.
