Homeric Effects in Vergil’s Narrative by Alessandro Barchiesi (review)

Reviewed by: Homeric Effects in Vergil’s Narrative by Alessandro Barchiesi Laurel Fulkerson Alessandro Barchiesi. Homeric Effects in Vergil’s Narrative. Tr. Ilaria Marchesi and Matt Fox, with a new foreword by Philip Hardie and a new afterword by the author. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi, 193. $35.00. ISBN 978–0-691–16181–5. (Originally published in Italian as La traccia del modello: Effetti omerici nella narrazione virgiliana (Pisa: Giardini, 1984).) In the afterword to this volume, Barchiesi mentions that its first version, a Materiali e Discussioni supplement of 1984, mostly went unnoticed in the English-speaking world, with a few notable exceptions. But our author is assuredly not in the same situation as Lou Reed, of whom Brian Eno is, perhaps apocryphally, reported to have said, “The first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band” (fangirls/boys see 121, which lists our very own Sid Vicious, Morrissey, Kurt Cobain, etc.). For one thing, Barchiesi hasn’t released even one crappy album, and for another, he is an acknowledged megastar. Still, when this newly remastered groove first came out, there was nobody else doing [End Page 128] precisely this, combining “German” close readings with attention to context, sophisticated literary theory with an understanding of literature as a cultural artifact. This book, an excellent translation of La traccia del modello. Effetti omerici nella narrazione virgiliana, deserves to retain cult status. Philip Hardie’s foreword provides admirable context for readers who have not previously encountered the book, and Barchiesi’s afterword offers a more personal take, with proposals for further directions. The four original chapters, each a hit single, concentrate on key moments from the second half of the Aeneid, and the appendix contains a piece on Juturna, previously released but not as part of the Italian version. This has been, and continues to be, an important book, setting the terms of debate, or at least clarifying them, in ways both large and small, such that I suspect new readers may not be certain what the big deal was. Barchiesi’s critical moves have become part of the discourse, so common that they are usually unacknowledged. He was, of course, never the only scholar to make these moves (see again 121 and 170 n.4 for some other members of the band), but their lucidity in these five short essays still impresses; chapter 2 in particular shows Barchiesi both doing what he does and explaining how it works. Take, for instance, the point (41, first articulated on 3) that we cannot simply map a Homeric character onto his closest Vergilian counterpart and be done with it, or the notion (17) that the repetitive patterning of Homero-Vergilian narrative structures will have different effects on readers with different degrees of “competence” in the tradition. Both now seem obvious, but were not so in the early 1980s (see too the nice phrasing “aesthetics of regularity” at 51). So too, it is not that Vergilian scholars had been careless, simply that Barchiesi taught us to follow the Alexandrian Homer scholars in paying attention to every detail (76, in the context of epithets). And everybody now knows that Homer is both a literary and a cultural model (4, 49), only available through a complicated fusion of philosophical and religious afterlives, mediated by hordes of wannabe poets/cover bands. But matters were not always quite so clear (as Barchiesi notes in his respectful but trenchant criticisms of Knauer, still an oldie-but-goodie). Speaking of influences, one of the things that neither Hardie nor then-and-now Barchiesi makes explicit (though both have had number-one crossovers here too) is that the approach exemplified here has become standard also for post-Vergilians; its take on epic as intricate variations on a theme is surely relevant to the exciting contemporary scholarship on Ovid, Lucan, the Flavians, and beyond. What Barchiesi showed us as “Vergilian” poetics were never only Vergil’s, having been deployed by Homer himself (71–72), earlier and later Greek readers (74–75, 128), Rome’s first authors (see 55 on history

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