J. R. O’Neill and Adam Rigoni, eds., The Aeneid and the Modern World: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vergil’s Epic in the 20th and 21st Centuries (London: Routledge, 2022). 9781000538823.
Reviewed by Alicia Matz, San Diego State University, amatz@sdsu.edu.
O’Neill and Rigone begin The Aeneid and the Modern World with the question, “Why do we need another book on the Aeneid?” It is true that the Aeneid is one of the most discussed texts from antiquity. Yet by exploring a gap in the scholarship that has existed for too long—the poem’s relevance to modern audiences—O’Neill and Rigoni prove that there is still so much to learn from the Aeneid. This is not your usual reception book, where the influence of the Aeneid is traced through media, but rather an exploration of the Aeneid‘s reception and how the lessons of the Aeneid can be applied to our modern world. It succeeds in opening the door for unorthodox and intriguing avenues of research into the Aeneid today.
In order to fill this gap in literature, O’Neill and Rigoni implemented a methodology that embraced “genuine interdisciplinarity” and “thoroughgoing pragmatism” (p. 3). Seeking to reach beyond the expected audience of classicists, they intentionally make interdisciplinarity a cornerstone of this volume. Given that Classics is an inherently interdisciplinary field, they define interdisciplinarity as a collaboration between a classicist and a non-classicist or a classicist with a background in a different field. In my opinion, they only partly succeed in this goal: there is only one joint article where two people with different backgrounds collaborate (Hay and Hay). The rest of the chapters are all written by people with degrees in Classics who have expertise in other fields (Bostick, Foster, Giannotti, Lehmann, Loi, Puetz, O’Neil, Wimperis) or people with degrees in other fields but whose work is very classically oriented (Ciccone, Price, Rigoni, Saad, Stanford). The editors aimed for interdisciplinarity because they believe the only way to truly understand the Aeneid is to be able to read the Latin (p. 4). I question this insistence, especially given their concern about the closing of Classics programs around the world. Insisting that only people who know Latin can truly understand the Aeneid, when many potential scholars do not have access to Latin at the high school or even college level, automatically excludes a large majority of possible interdisciplinary connections. As for “thoroughgoing pragmatism,” they highlight how the broad range of topics means that each chapter utilizes the methodologies of the discipline the author is approaching the text from and that for scholars who do not have knowledge of Latin, a Latinist helped them interpret the text.
Following the introduction, the chapters are divided into four thematic sections: “The Aeneid and modern literature,” “The Aeneid and modern political discourse and culture,” “The Aeneid and contemporary trauma and identity,” and “The Aeneid in the future.” Each section is introduced with summaries, written by the volume editors, of the upcoming chapters. This organization is very useful, as readers do not need to flip back and forth from the introduction to find the chapter they are looking for. It also helps speak to the coherence of the sections and the book as a whole. While the section on modern literature is the longest, the book is pretty evenly split between literary analysis and the other aspects. These sections feature an eclectic collection of topics: British literature, Harlem Renaissance literature, post–World War II Jewish literature, modern Italian literature, young adult literature, the first American translation, memory and politics, war memorials, trauma and time, refugees, the self and apocalypse, student opinions of the Aeneid, and space exploration. And yet, beyond the thematic organization, I have found that there are two overarching themes that unite these chapters: identity and nationalism.
Given the Aeneid’s importance to Roman identity, it is no surprise that it would play a role in modern identity concerns as well. Lehmann, Loi, Puetz, Bostick, Ciccone, and Saad all examine how the Aeneid is used in modern contexts to discuss identity. All of these scholars expertly show how the Aeneid has helped others confront or reveal their own identities. Of these articles, two stand out. The first is Lehmann, who argues that Hurston’s characters Janie and Tea Cake, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, are rewritings of Dido and Aeneas, and that Hurston does this to “imply the possibility, especially for Black women in American society, of using [classical literature] as a model for success” (p. 35). The other notable article, by Bostick, demonstrates that the Aeneid is important for our understanding of how trauma affects the perception of time, because “Vergil represents aspects of the human condition that are hard to capture in everyday language, namely, the collapse of time and loss of identity in the wake of trauma” (pp. 180–81).
Stanford, Giannotti, Wimperis, O’Neill, and Price, meanwhile, all speak to the theme of nationalism—not just the negative, oppressive aspects of the term, but rather the support of or identification with one’s nation (although the negative aspects of nationalism are not ignored). Given the Aeneid’s history as a national text, this theme is also not surprising. Wimperis explores the negative side of nationalism in both the Aeneid and modern political discourse. He discusses the importance of national memory to politics both for the Aeneid and for modern politicians and shows how both past and present national memory “are a storehouse of effective rhetorical symbolism engineered, with varying fidelity to the actual facts of history, to rouse, persuade, and prescribe” (p. 133). Meanwhile, O’Neill examines a more positive nationalism and uses monuments in the Aeneid and spectator reactions to them as a jumping off point to discuss reactions to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. He shows that it is inherent in the memorial the inability to compensate for the loss that makes memorializing events so hard and shows how this plays out on Juno’s temple in Carthage and the doors of the Sibyl’s temple in Cumae.
There are two contributions that do not fit well into this identity/nationalism binary. Hay and Hay’s contribution on Christopher Pearse Cranch’s English translation of the Aeneid works interestingly with both themes. They argue that Cranch’s translation, which was published just after the Civil War, helped shape America as a country post-war. This translation has importance today, as Cranch’s translation is widely available in an updated form as a Barnes & Noble Classics edition. Meanwhile, as a discussion of how students in modern classrooms react to the Aeneid, Foster’s contribution is an outlier, albeit a necessary one, as it shows how skewed interpretations of the poem can be when one only examines a small section. This study is particularly interesting because it highlights the aspects of the Aeneid that schools could use to advertise Latin to their students, including mythology and “action” scenes, such as battles, while also pointing out serious flaws in the way the text is taught today.
I would be remiss not to mention an important aspect of the contents of the book already mentioned by other reviewers.1 The modern world is a global world, and the contributions in this text fail to address non-Western modernity. While the breadth of the topics treated is astounding and the works of modernity explored do cover creators from a wide variety of backgrounds, there is no discussion of the Aeneid in modern China, Japan, the countries of Africa, etc. Given that the book is a conference proceeding, the editors probably aimed to keep contributors to those who attended the conference. That being said, they could have invited scholars from other non-Western disciplines to contribute to truly make this text a representation of the interdisciplinarity and modernity they aimed for.
As for the structure of the book, there were a few really great aspects, and a few that could have used improvement. As mentioned before, the summaries at the beginning of each section were helpful for contextualizing the arguments to come. Each of the authors also understood they were writing for a broad audience and provided helpful summaries of background information a reader would need to fully understand their argument. However, I wish there had been uniformity in providing translations of the Aeneid: some chapters provided them in text, while others put them in the endnotes. The same can be said for the Latin text: some chapters include the Latin with the translation, others put the Latin into the endnotes or do not include it at all. For a book aimed at a non-specialist audience and one insisting that reading Latin is the only true entré into the Aeneid (see above), including both translation and Latin text would provide a gateway for someone to possibly become interested in Latin.
Overall, this book accomplishes its goal in demonstrating the importance of the Aeneid in the modern world. Each of the chapters provides interesting insight into the varied ways the epic echoes throughout our modern society, sometimes very blatantly and sometimes lurking just under the surface. The best audience for this book is not someone with a casual interest in the Aeneid. Rather, it stands out as a resource for anyone interested in examples of how to incorporate the Aeneid into their own research interests. It would be a useful addition to any course on the Aeneid, or reception courses more broadly, especially given the wide-ranging selection of topics and ample background information. The unorthodox nature of some of the ways in which it points out the Aeneid’s relevance, such as in interpreting monuments and thinking about trauma, provides fruitful new ways of thinking about the ancient world in modern contexts, and both students and nonspecialists alike may find something familiar in the text and become interested in learning more (or learning Latin!).
Table of Contents
Introduction / J. R. O’Neill and Adam Rigoni (1–12)
Part I. The Aeneid in Modern Literature / J. R. O’Neill and Adam Rigoni (13)
1. Empire and Exile: Kipling’s Vergil / Michael Stanford (15–34)
2. Shining light onto Vergilian shadows in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God / Christian Lehmann (35–54)
3. Yehuda Amichai’s “The Times My Father Died” (1959): A Jewish Aeneas in flight from the Holocaust / Giacomo Loi (55–76)
4. forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit: Contemporary Italian writers remembering the Aeneid / Filomena Giannotti (77–94)
5. Philip Pullmann’s His Dark Materials trilogy and the Aeneid: Lyra as an anti-Aeneas / Babette Puetz (95–110)
Part II. The Aeneid and modern political discourse and culture / J. R. O’Neill and Adam Rigoni (111–12)
6. The Patriotic Singer: Christopher Peare Cranch’s American Aeneid / Paul Hay and John Hay (113–32)
7. The Aeneid and the politics of national history / Tedd A. Wimperis (133–54)
8. Daedalus in DC: Vergil and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial / J. R. O’Neill (155–76)
Part III. The Aeneid and contemporary trauma and identity / J. R. O’Neill and Adam Rigoni (177)
9. A matter of time: Traumatic temporality in Vergil’s Aeneid / Dani Bostick (179–97)
10. Dislocated Identities: The Aeneid and the Syrian refugee crisis / Nancy Ciccone (198–210)
11. To know thyself in a world undone: Apocalypse and authenticity in the Aeneid / George Saad (211–29)
Part IV. The Aeneid into the future / J. R. O’Neill and Adam Rigoni (231)
12. The Aeneid for the next generation: An empirical study / Frances Foster (233–46)
13. Aeneas, Anthropocene, and apocalypse, or, Aeneas in space / Evander Price (247–66)
Notes
1. Particularly Martin Linder, review of The Aeneid and the Modern World: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vergil’s Epic in the 20th and 21st Centuries, ed. J. R. O’Neill and Adam Rigoni, Classical Review 73, no. 2 (2023): 525–27.
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