Virgil's Double Cross: Design and Meaning in the Aeneid by David Quint

Abstract

414 PHOENIX The situation with Tacitus’ Dialogus could not be more different. Chapter Six, “Tacitus : Dialogus de Cicerone?,” demonstrates that Cicero underpins the entire project of the Dialogus, above and beyond the explicit discussion of Cicero in which the interlocutors engage. Keeline minutely tracks and catalogues the verbal echoes and reminiscences from Cicero’s Brutus, Orator, De Oratore, and probably Hortensius that saturate the Dialogus. It is a remarkable demonstration, supporting his contention that Tacitus’ readers would inevitably have seen and felt the work’s hegemonic Ciceronianism. Ironically, however, this Ciceronian performance ends up concluding that Ciceronian performances are no longer possible due to changed circumstances. Yet I wonder if Keeline overstates, perhaps with Maternus, the decline of the iudicia publica as venues for oratorical performance, and also underrates the centumviral court, the senate, and other forensic venues whose status rose in the early empire. Yet other venues for competitive performance in eloquence, such as declamation (as the rest of this book demonstrates) and recitation, also emerged in this period—after all, the occasion of the Dialogus is a high-profile, politically explosive recitation of a dramatic work written by Maternus himself. The concluding chapter Seven, “Est . . . mihi cum Cicerone aemulatio: Pliny’s Cicero,” reconsiders the hoary question of Pliny the Younger’s relationship with his great predecessor in oratory and epistolography. Keeline contends that Pliny’s emulation of Cicero is constrained by the reduced scope for oratory, for which he argued in Chapter Six. Where else, then, can Pliny invest his eloquence? Epistolography is an obvious place to look. Keeline argues in detail that Pliny’s letter-writing and letter-publishing project is remarkably Ciceronian despite the absence of explicit mentions of Cicero as an epistolographer , and demonstrates the eloquence of which Pliny is capable. This is a persuasive and helpful demonstration; it could conceivably be expanded to cover other new arenas for eloquence mentioned above, in which Pliny also invested. Finally, the short “Epilogue : The Early Empire and Beyond” briefly considers appropriations of Cicero ranging from the early Christians through the medieval period down to contemporary popular culture. All students of the political and literary culture of the early empire are aware of the centrality of rhetoric and of the schools to the construction of that culture. Keeline’s book is a major contribution to the study of these central matters, containing extensive reconsideration and synthesis of prior scholarship and innovative new analysis of rhetorical pedagogy. It will benefit everyone who studies this period. Johns Hopkins University Matthew Roller Virgil's Double Cross: Design and Meaning in the AENEID. By David Quint. Princeton, New Jersey. 2018. Pp. xix, 218. David Quint's VIRGIL’S DOUBLE CROSS: DESIGN AND MEANING IN THE Aeneid is a collection of five reprinted articles (Chapters One, Two, Three, Five, and Six) and two new chapters (Chapters Four and Seven), spanning the years from 2001 to 2018. “Double Cross” in the title refers to Virgil’s employment of chiasmus at the levels of syntactic form and poetical thought. Chiasmus here includes the core ABBA structure recognizable to literary scholars, but also entails a blurry set of conceptualizations, contradictions, reversals, oppositional parallels, intentional divisions, “reversibility and implicit interchangeability” BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 415 (xiii). Words and phrases can show chiasmus, but so too can allusions among texts. Virgil builds into his epic binary oppositions that mingle, merge, and reverse, as themes, characters, and ideologies shift within the ABBA structure. Virgil’s Double Cross is a study in literary chirality. In the “Preface” Quint guides his reader through a short history of optimistic and pessimistic readings of the Aeneid (really from 1950 to 1993). Scholars here appear like New Historical automata, merely reacting to and filtering the war and post-war ideologies and discourses of the second half of the twentieth century, although an evaluation of Virgil’s artistry and its meaning need not be dependent on Operation Rolling Thunder or the Highway of Death. The fact that scholarship is enmeshed in historical and cultural contingency does not occlude a scholar’s objectivity, intuition, imagination, and argumentation, which are based on hard literary data. Quint’s analysis is full of literary facts that exist apart from...