In the Image of the Ancestors

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 183 that the Sibyl’s utterance in the first person at Aen. 6.87 is not meant for Apollo but for herself, so that though inspired by the god she is not completely possessed by him.1 If he is right, then the prophecy does seem to offer a female perspective on the loss and perversion that men’s war brings. Chapter Five confirms the importance of maenadism as it “resurfaces in the act of female lamentation” (144). Andromache, still mourning for Hector, suffers from excessive grief rooted in the past. Taking this and Creusa’s ghost, which teaches Aeneas to moderate his excessive grief, banish tears, and embrace his future, as contrasting lessons in ritual mourning, Panoussi considers other instances, culminating in the burning of the boats by the Trojan women who in Aen. 5 turn against their community. All of these ritual incidents, reflecting a range of issues from community unity to gender protocols, now devolve into the book’s second part devoted to empire and Augustan ideology. Chapter Six on heroic identities sets out to show that Vergil reworks both Homeric and tragic, especially Sophoclean, intertexts of Ajax in ways that illuminate the heroic qualities of Dido and Turnus. Well-developed parallels between Ajax and Dido reveal thematic and verbal contacts, the comparable state of mind of each, their respective curses, and their grappling with ethical and political dilemmas. Ajax similarly lies behind Turnus, who displays a Homeric archetype of military excellence in Book 9, which persists to the end of the epic but descends by Book 10 into tragic despondency and disillusionment. Panoussi’s analyses are intended to highlight facets of the poem’s “articulation of a new definition of heroic (and by extension, Roman) identity” (199), but stop short of defining this new heroic identity. In Chapter Seven on contending ideologies Panoussi does two things: she surveys the role of Augustan cult and ritual in generating popular consent (thereby consolidating power), and she argues for seeing in the ritual intertext of the Aeneid, which stresses the fragility of ritual, a means for conveying opposition, anxiety, and repression within the poem’s overall pro-Augustan reception. This book is likely to interest readers of Vergil and will also appeal to specialists in ritual, Greek tragedy, and Latin and Greek literature generally. Readers will profit greatly from this fascinating book, even if some parts invite criticism. University of Ottawa Raymond J. Clark In the Image of the Ancestors: Narratives of Kinship in Flavian Epic. By Neil W. Bernstein. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (Phoenix Suppl. 48). 2008. Pp. ix, 281. Neil Bernstein's valuable book sheds light on both the idea of the family in Flavian epic and the central poetic strategies of the works of Valerius Flaccus, Statius, and Silius Italicus. The four epics from the Flavian period each receive a chapter, and the idea of kinship as it relates to national identity and mythic origins in Statius’ Thebaid and Silius’ Punica is covered in a fifth. All of these discussions are framed by discussions about the importance of kinship in shaping narratives and poetics in the Roman and epic worlds. 1 H. W. Parke, Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity (London and New York 1988) 79. 184 PHOENIX Bernstein’s definition of kinship in the Roman world encompasses blood, elective, and political relations, and though the epics that he analyzes obviously represent fictive relationships, he maps these sorts of relations onto the realities of imperial Rome. In some instances, the problematic relationships that are portrayed in the epics amount to subtle critiques of the imperial regime at Rome (e.g., 13), while in the case of Silius’ Scipio, for instance, the mythological hero provides a paradigm for Domitian and his regime. Overall, the argument that the Flavian epics engage with contemporary concerns is solid enough and convincing, and a number of analyses of familiar dynamics in the epics provide important insights. However, a few arguments—such as the idea that the absence of Achilles’ parents during his childhood recalls Roman upper-class marriage (112)—seem strained. In addition, while the book focuses on Flavian epic, there were moments, especially when

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