OUP (2016) h/b 160pp £45.00 (ISBN9780198758877)
This is a truly extraordinary book, more workshop manual than explicatory text. The more one reads, the more one will find matters to pursue in other texts, or translate, or compare and contrast, or make judgements on, or any combination thereof. Latin is needed and access to the great (big as well as good) Horsfall commentaries on the Aeneid. Very self-referential, Horsfall, though the footnotes are plentiful, precise and diverse. And who could resist the epithet ‘atrabilious’ for one reviewer? It might be advisable to have Google open, if only to relieve you of all the palaver Virgil might have gone to (Chapter 2, ‘Ceaselessly wrangling in the birdcage of the Muses’) to research his material.
H.’s intent is to show how the Aeneid was written, the choices V. made as he alluded right, left and centre, where he got his information from, or how he invented people, places and things ( and ‘cloaks [them] in learning, reading and tradition’). For instance, in Book 3 Aeneas comes across the Cyclopes, and it is the entirely fictitious castaway Achaemenides who fills Aeneas in, the scene all ‘well-dressed in familiar learned detail, just as though he were an ancient element in the story’. All the information we get on V.’s research, his erudite inventions, his inconsistencies, his plundering of the texts, and, charmingly, his acknowledgement of the fact (dicitur, ut fama, fertur, ferunt etc.) leads us to a greater understanding of what lies there for us to get to grips with. Maybe H. is nudging us closer to reading like the ‘LAR’ (learned Augustan reader). His intent and conclusion could be summarised in his own words: ‘….the neglected study of the poet’s sources helps us towards a better understanding of Virgil as more indirect, indeterminate, polyvalent, more even than previously suspected’.
H.’s style is workmanlike and elliptical. Abbreviations (where they work: the book really ought to have had a list), sentences without verbs, and lashings of humour: there’s the feel of a great and kindly tutorial to the book.
So why The Epic Distilled? Chapter 1, about H.’s method, is called ‘To peel the artichoke’. The final paragraph of the book refers to H. watching a still working: ‘The thin trickle of spirituous liquid that emerges from the spigot seems little reward for the long, loving and precise labour that goes into grappa allo zafferano…. Time, expertise, tradition, and the very best ingredients…….’. So that’s H. as well as V.
Adrian Spooner