Reviewed by: Walking Through Elysium: Vergil's Underworld and the Poetics of Tradition ed. by B. Gladhill and M.Y. Myers Annemarie de Villiers Gladhill, B. and Myers, M.Y. (edd.) 2020. Walking Through Elysium: Vergil's Underworld and the Poetics of Tradition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pp. 320. 978-1-4875-3264-2. $56.25. This volume engages with one of the Aeneid's most compelling Books, but also one that is most challenging to readers. Book 6 sees Aeneas descend to the underworld where he is confronted with his past, present, and future life, death and reincarnation, as well as with his own unavoidable task of founding a city he will never see. As the title suggests, this volume is concerned with movement, in this case with the movement implied in the literary reception of the poem. The focus is specific, but not exclusive: it covers the reception of Aeneid Book 6 in later works of Latin literature as well as Vergil's reception of earlier works in his own text. 'Walking' in this instance, therefore, suggests both forward and backward movement and implies a kind of dance between the text and the reader. This idea is echoed in the fact that the chapters are not ordered chronologically. Rather, the reader is made to wander, like Aeneas through the underworld, through the different receptions of this underworld. In many of the chapters the idea of walking remains central. In the first chapter, 'Into the woods (Via Cuma 320, Bacoli)', pp. 14–30, Alessandro Barchiesi takes us on a walk to the wooded area outside the Sibyl's cave to consider the geopoetics of the Aeneid. The performative style of the chapter makes the eerie Avernus forest come alive while Barchiesi reminds us that there is no such mysterious wilderness in Homer or Apollonius. In Vergil, this environment becomes 'an obstacle that needs to be explored and tamed' (p. 22) and Aeneas functions as an explorer and proto-colonizer. This is the often-unnoticed originality Barchiesi sees in Vergil's poem – the resistance of the land to Trojan settlement – which reveals the poet's subjective style and his love of the Italian landscape. In a time of climate change and altering landscapes this originality deserves a second look. Moving along, Emily Pillinger takes us on a walk in Vergil's footsteps on the Via Domitiana in a reading of Statius' Silvae 4.3. She considers Statius' employment of time, distance, and speed to reflect the experience of the traveller on this road as well as to reflect on his own 'travels' in literary history, a journey for which Aeneid 6 provides a model with Sybil and all. However, whereas Vergil portrays Aeneas' journey to a vision of the future Rome as a νόστος (signalled by his father's words quas ego te terras et quanta per aequora vectum | accipio! 6.692–93), Rome, for Statius, is both central and [End Page 283] everywhere and its reach through time and space is eternal. The poet, like the traveller, may walk up and down the Via Domitiana endlessly, never really behind another poet but facing a direction of his own choosing. Maggie Kilgour also considers Aeneid 6's vision of a future Rome in Chapter 3 ('In the sibyl's cave: Vergilian prophecy and Mary Shelley's Last Man', pp. 62–76). She looks at Mary Shelley's interpretation of Anchises' prophecy in her apocalyptic novel. Kilgour notes in Shelley an obsession with predicting the future after her husband's fatal yachting accident. Knowing the future without the ability to change it, however, is the most disturbing form of knowledge and it leaves one with a sense of utter helplessness. This is the message of The Last Man, which also reflects Shelley's reading of Anchises' prophecy. Presenting Rome's past and present as a future vision to Aeneas, Vergil portrays history as an endless cycle of death and renewal. Ending with the death of the young Marcellus, Anchises' prophecy offers a vision of an unrealized future, one which Shelley seemed to read as prophetic of her own loss.1 Chapter 4 ('Exploring the forests of antiquity: The Golden Bough and...
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