Poetry Underpinning Power. Vergil's Aeneid: The Epic for Emperor Augustus. A Recovery Study by Hans-Peter Stahl

192 PHOENIX 66) they introduce. Erotic crisis, physical incapacity, and flames and burning appear in both 50 and 51. Likewise, the woman-centered features of 66 are present in 65 as well. Thus, the first-person, self-expressive nature of 50 and 65 is intimately connected to the act of translation in the poems that immediately follow them. In Chapter Five, “Constructing Callimachus,” Young suggests that the translation of Callimachus’ “Plokamos” into Catullus’ Latin “Coma” (Poem 66) performs a severing of it from the Aetia like that of the lock from Berenice’s head. Its placement after Poem 65 transplants it to the new context of exchange, established in 65, between Roman author and Roman addressee. Young further argues that Poems 65–66 and 116 show Catullus creating his own version of Callimachus to frame his elegiac collection, establishing himself as an innovating writer of elegy with his own aesthetic through his Romanizing and his creative use of translation. Chapter Six, “Surpassing the Gods: Infatuation and Agonism in Catullus’s Sappho (51),” adds constructively to earlier interpretations such as Allen Miller’s commendable one5 on the function of the name “Lesbia” in Catullus 51. Young’s discussion of ille as a rival poet (perhaps the Calvus of Poem 50) and of Catullus’ name in Poem 51 support her arguments about the appropriating power of translation. In her “Epilogue: Toward a Poetics of Lyric Appropriation,” Young concludes her argument that Catullus’ poetics embraces translation as a path to a new kind of creative originality. Translation as Muse makes an impressive and largely convincing argument about the centrality of translation—in its broadest sense—to Catullus’ poetic enterprise. Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center Ronnie Ancona Poetry Underpinning Power. Vergil's AENEID: The Epic for Emperor Augustus. A Recovery Study. By Hans-Peter Stahl. Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales. 2015. Pp. xii, 488, 1 map. Can the AENEID be viewed as poetry of the human condition (Menschheitsdichtung)? Is Turnus the epic’s tragic hero? Does the text’s rhetorical and logical organization open itself up to any approach that aims at de-Augustanizing Vergil’s epic? Not in the eyes of Hans-Peter Stahl, who in his thorough, well-argued, and persuasive contextual analysis of the plot as well as the main characters’ representation refutes any hoped-for prospects of uncovering an anti-imperial, more humane Vergil in the Aeneid. In doing so, he goes far beyond challenging some of the most noteworthy trends in the recent study of Vergil’s epic for the sake of recovering the authorial intent. The strength of Stahl’s contribution to past and more recent scholarship on Vergil’s epic is that it offers a (con)textual analysis which, based on a close reading and informed by a profound knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, may be regarded as exemplary, even formative. Stahl’s methodical exploration of the Aeneid’s complex plot begins and closes with an assessment of the epic’s final scene. Arguing that the killing of Turnus is dictated by the internal logic of the epic, Chapter One (“Augustan Vergil and the Political Rival”) stresses the importance of interpreting the event in the context of Books 11 and 12, where, according to him, Vergil’s representation of Aeneas’ rival through his actions and reactions 5 P. A. Miller, “Sapphica Puella: The Triple-Faceted Object of Catullan Desire,” in id., Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness (London and New York 1994) 101–119. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 193 is geared toward revealing his lack of heroic ethos. With this in view, his diversionary speech before his death must appear insincere, and Aeneas’ killing of Turnus must be seen not only as inevitable but also as the culmination of the narrative’s logical development. Returning to the concept of the Aeneid’s internal logic, Chapter Seven (“Allocating Guilt and Innocence, II: Turnus, the Impious Opponent”) identifies and analyzes the narrative’s underpinning rhetoric. Based on a close examination of the opening narrative of Book 7, Stahl elucidates how Turnus, by being introduced as an unsuccessful suitor of Lavinia long before Lausus’ oracle is pronounced, is denied innocence by design. In support of the narrative’s...

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