Walking Through Elysium

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 171 Walking Through Elysium: Vergil's Underworld and the Poetics of Tradition. Edited by Bill Gladhill and Micah Young Myers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (Phoenix Supplementary Volume 59). 2020. Pp. 302. WALKING THROUGH ELYSIUM collects thirteen of the papers presented at a 2013 Vergilian Society conference held at the Villa Vergiliana. As the editors explain in their introduction , the scope and aim of the volume evolved between the original call for papers and the ultimate publication of the book. The editors envisioned a conference and a book covering a wide range of topics that would demonstrate the dynamics of reception through Aeneid 6 as a nexus, both receiving earlier Greek and Roman texts and culture and inspiring a broad range of receptions in textual and material culture leading up to the present. They were at least partly motivated by their sense that Aeneid 6 not only continues to be relevant but is also experiencing a particularly intense moment of reception in the early twenty-first century. They cite three examples of disparate receptions: Seamus Heaney’s 2016 translation, Nicholas Horsfall’s 2013 commentary, and the National September 11th Memorial and Museum, dedicated and opened to the public in 2011.1 The vision was a good one, but editors are at the mercy of contributors, and Gladhill and Myers found that the vast majority “of the nearly 130 abstracts submitted ” (3) focused on the reception of Aeneid 6 in the Latin literary tradition. Very few submissions focused on Aeneid 6 as a receiving text and very few focused on material culture. Even Linda Robertson’s paper making the case that the September 11th memorial draws on Aeneid 6 even as it quotes Aeneid 9, though delivered at the conference, did not make it into the volume. The result is a collection of very good papers, unified by Aeneid 6, but with an idiosyncratic focus and without the kind of overarching vision and impact for which the editors initially hoped. Readers looking for something specific will often find their particular interest unaddressed. Readers approaching the volume with an open mind, however, will find much to appreciate in the individual chapters and observations. In an introduction that clearly lays out the aims and challenges of editing the volume, Gladhill and Myers also explain their organizing principle for the chapters. It must have been tempting to put the chapters in chronological order by the subject paired with Aeneid 6, starting with Emily Gowers’s chapter on the reception of Homer and ending with Grant Parker’s on spiritualism in the work of W. F. Jackson Knight and T. J. Haarhoff. Instead, Gladhill and Myers have chosen to organize the chapters by the part of Vergil’s book they focus on, beginning with Alessandro Barchiesi’s chapter on the woods around the Sibyl’s cave and ending with Parker’s on the Gates of Sleep. The focus this puts on the narrative of Vergil’s book helps to unify the volume by resisting the tendency of collections of receptions to fragment the text they analyze. In the opening chapter, Barchiesi’s analysis of silvae and their relationship to katabasis and colonization before and after Vergil begins with a note on the delivery of the conference paper and the importance of presenting the paper in the woods that were its subject. As skeptical as I am about the importance of “being there,” it is hard not to feel that readers of the chapter are missing something. Still, the congenial tone of oral presentation that Barchiesi maintains throughout provides a nice sense that this is a chapter that benefits from being in a conference volume rather than an article that might 1 S. Heaney, Aeneid Book VI: A New Verse Translation (New York 2016); N. Horsfall, Virgil, Aeneid 6: A Commentary (2 vols.; Berlin 2013); https://www.911memorial.org/visit/memorial/aboutmemorial . 172 PHOENIX have appeared anywhere. The sense of a conference reproduced is the right opening tone for the volume. The real strength of the book is in small moments, and no doubt every reader will find different observations and readings that stand out for them. The first of these moments

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