BMCR 2009.01.23, Response to Fratantuono on Morwood

Dugdale on Fratantuono on James Morwood, Virgil: A Poet in Augustan
Rome.   Response to BMCR 2009.01.10


Response by Eric  Dugdale, Gustavus Adolphus College
([email protected])
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To read a print-formatted version of this response, see
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2009/2009-01-23.html
To comment on this review, see
http://www.bmcreview.org/2009/01/20090123.html
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I am responding to Dr Lee Fratantuono's review of James Morwood's
Virgil: A Poet in Augustan Rome in my capacity as co-editor of the new
Cambridge series (Greece and Rome: Texts and Contexts) which this book
inaugurates. I shall avoid the temptation of responding to particular
details because ripostes of that kind often come across as sour grapes.
But in view of the fact that this is the first review of a book in our
series, I would like to provide some clarification of our general
approach, since F.'s  characterization of its intended purpose and
audience is likely to mislead the reader.

The aim of the series is an evangelistic one: to make accessible to as
broad an audience as possible key texts of the ancient world. Through
our series, we hope that many new students will get to discover the
works of Virgil, Cicero, Lucretius and others. F. writes with apparent
disdain of "a syndicated version of Virgil's poems", in which "hundreds
upon hundreds of lines have been consigned to periwinkle boxes". Like
F., I myself prefer reading whole works rather than selected parts. But
how many students nowadays get to read any of the Eclogues or Georgics,
much less to read them in their entirety? Even among students who major
in classics and who read the works in the original, few read more of
Virgil's works than his Aeneid, more of Cicero than a speech or two,
and many read none of Lucretius' poem at all. Thus F.'s comment that
the book is "aimed at an audience that will not be reading the poet's
three works in toto anytime soon" describes a situation that is sadly
true, but one that the book aims to begin to remedy. Far from being
conceived as "a substitute for reading the originals", as F. supposes,
we hope that an accessible translation of excerpts, with notes at the
bottom of the page providing the help necessary for the understanding
of the historical and literary context and with color illustrations
presented as primary sources in their own right, will stimulate
students to explore further.

That is also why there is, as F. notes, "a fair amount of attention to
Virgilian scholarship", though F. draws from this the misguided
"inevitable conclusion that the student is expected to move from this
book to a major monograph on the Aeneid without ever having read the
poem (one gets the sense the bibliography and references that appear
passim are here to facilitate term papers)". Quite the contrary: we
believe that even at their first exposure to Virgil's poems, we can
provide students with a window into the lively scholarly debate that
these rich works provoke and invite them to join in. (On Eclogue 1, for
example, Morwood includes the following quotation and discussion
question: "'By including such images of current events in his poems,
the poet boldly transformed the pastoral genre' (Josiah Osgood, p.
112). Do you feel that the fact that it reflects actual historical
events makes a difference to your appreciation of this poem?") This too
is why the book showcases the rich afterlife that Virgil's creative
genius has inspired in the works of Shakespeare, Coleridge, Milton,
Arnold and Berlioz as well as in visual art, though F. construes this
as a negative: "Any student who can profit from everything M. provides
should be reading Virgil in the first place..." We do not intend to
tell students what to think, to provide a 'key' to the poem or
ready-made references for term papers, or to limit the stimulus
material by trying to guess what a single imagined student might profit
from. Underlying the reviewer's at times vituperative assault on
Morwood's book lies, in my estimation, a fundamental antipathy to the
whole approach of excerpting a text. That F.'s predilections are quite
different is clear from the blurb for his impressive commentary on
Virgil's Aeneid, Madness Unchained: A Reading of Virgil's Aeneid,
Lexington Books: 2007): "The book aims at providing a coherent guide to
the entirety of Virgil's Aeneid, with analysis of every scene and, in
some cases, every line of crucial passages. The book tries to provide a
guide to the vast bibliography and scholarly apparatus that has grown
around Virgil studies (especially over the past century), and to offer
some critical study of what Virgil's purpose and intent may have
been..."

In short, the books in our series are more modest in scope.  But they
aim to introduce a whole new readership to the ancient world and, we
hope, to inspire them to learn Greek and Latin. We are grateful to the
Cambridge University Press for supporting this vision and welcome any
constructive criticism.