I do not think this book was for me. I am sure it has its own passionate audience, just not me. I thank Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with the ARC in exchange for an honest review, and I wish good luck to the author. Hopefully 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗿𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 will be appreciated by the right people.

I'm unsure who the envisaged audience is for this book: not Virgilian scholars or classicists as this book isn't in dialogue with the vast academic literature on the Aeneid; so maybe general interested readers, and possibly undergraduates?

It's perhaps more like those 'the philosophy of... Harry Potter/Batman/Game of Thrones' style books which use a launch pad of a text to explore contemporary issues. This one is especially concerned, given its provenance in 2020, with how we deal with crises and retain that resilience of the title: 'Being Aeneas means one thing: answering destruction with reconstruction'.

The problem for me is that I'm the kind of reader who is unsettled by these kind of easy, over-simplified soundbites: 'being Aeneas' means *not* one thing but many. Indeed, it's precisely the variegated sides to and receptions of Aeneas that help to make the Aeneid so complex, so open and so fascinatingly unfinished. Yes, that idea of the resilience of the Trojans rising from the destruction of their city to metamorphose into proto-Romans is one important reading, but there are equally others (we could also position the Aeneid, for example, as the great epic of migration and refugee-hood).

I felt the same in the chapter on Dido where it is announced that 'more often, women's issues don't even cross readers' minds' - ahem, which readers are that? Feminist criticism of Virgil's poem is extensive, exploring the voices of women and the way they merge with 'other voices' of anti-imperialism; as well as analysing the way the poem interrogates gender, masculinity and heroism as well as femininity.

So I'm not sure that I am the envisaged reader of this book but, that said, it's an enjoyable 'thought piece' tracing one reader's ruminations about a complex piece of literature and how it speaks to contemporaneous issues.