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lJO BOOK REVIEWS/CO~IPTES RENDUS DARKNESS VISIBLE: A STUDY OF VERGIL'S AENEID by W. R. Johnson. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1976. pp. xi plus 179. $10.00 In this criticism of the Aeneid Professor Johnson attempts to steer a course which avoids on the one hand the Scylla of the optimistic school (inter> alios PUsch!. Buchner, Klingner and Brooks Otis) and the Charybdis of the pessimistic school represented by the Harvard trio, Parry, Putnam and Clausen. His navigation, not unlike his style, his manner of quotation and his proofreading , is frequently at fault, and tends to bring his adventurous bark much closer to Charybdis. Even in the very title of this study is the bias evident; for "Darkness Visible" (Paradise Lost, 1.63) is an attribute of the "place Eternal Justice had prepar'd/For those rebellious". The link between the quest of pius Aeneas to establish his people and his gods in a new Troy and that of "th' infernal Serpent" to escape from his "dungeon horrible", to make war on Beaven and to corrupt God's unique creation is less obvious to me than to the author. Of his four chapters (I. "Eliot's~lyth and Vergil's Fictions"; II. "Lessing, Auerbach, Gombrich: The Norm of Reality and The Spectrum of Decorum"; III. "Varia ConfuBuB Imagine Re:rwn: Depths and Surfaces "; IV. "The Worlds Vergil Lived in") the third takes up (if we except the annotations from which this reader derived more pleasure and more benefit than from the text) more than half the book and, despite its infuriating distortions and dangerous half-truths, is of most value to those who love Virgil, read all his words and innocently believe that in any credible interpretation of Aeneas:- Turnus, Juno and the Trojan mission consistency with the text must occupy a more honoured place than adherence (even partial) to the views of modern critics, some of whom may not even be competent classicists. Consider a brief anthology of Johnson's opinions: Turnus is an innocent victim of Juno and is truly heroic; Virgil ' s bees in the Aeneid ar€' "ideal symbols of the ideal citizens"; the Dira was sent to Turnus (cf. Aen. 12,869-871); both Virgil and his hero Aeneas are Epicureans. Q-...id multa? liere are some of the blemishes in the text (numerals refer to pages): 66 insoluable, 67 unobstrusive, 69 porphuros, 103 Trolius, 104 Aahives, 115 reliquishing, 119 commision, 123 Illiad, 144 horriyfing, 166 Unischtbare, 161 MacKail, 45 episodeia. Some may be put off by expressions like "a dear little flower mangled by Vagina Dentata" (64), or by his dated slang "good guys and bad guys" (116), "Hector goes down swinging", "what is coming to them" (116), "momentarily" (56). ~\ore serious is his apparent inability to transliterate Greek consistently and the careless omission of words from verse-quotations. One would suppose a classicist capable of seeing that what was printed did not scan! I read this learned but lopsided work twice very carefully. I could not bring myself to read it a third time . H.H. Huxley University of Victoria ...

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