The premise of this book, which P. calls ‘an experiment in reading’ (p. 6), is an extension of C. Martindale's case for reception theory as a mode of reading for meanings ‘which might otherwise have remained invisible to us’, as Martindale put it in Redeeming the Text (1993, p. 49). Can a reading of a modern text, which might have only occasional direct references to Virgil, stimulate new insights into Virgil's texts? In the title P. embraces the possibility that this idea might seem preposterous, like reading Virgil over one's shoulder through a mirror or thinking about Virgil's texts at one remove with another text in between. This approach is based upon a particular mode of allusion, not of a literal kind, which rests upon authorial intention, but of an awakening of new perceptions in the reader, reading ‘backwards’ into Virgil (p. 13). ‘Re-experiencing Virgil through new encounters in art can lead one to make discoveries that give specificity to general ideas, modifying them in the process’ (p. 9). P.'s point is that such discoveries, modifications and revisions are of value in themselves, even if they are anachronistic or beyond the realm of authorial intention. This may, indeed, seem outrageously preposterous to New Historical Classics scholars, who might suspect that we are back in the arena of Wolfgang Iser's reader-response theory via Roland Barthes's freedom of reading with jouissance. Certainly, P. can sound very much like the latter when he points to Virgil's ‘poetic inclusiveness and centripetal force – not only his ability to synthesize his own literary culture, but also the capacity to absorb later creative responses that Virgil himself could not have anticipated’ (pp. 9–10). Except that P.'s ‘later creative responses’ always lead back to a discipline of Virgilian scholarship that informs ‘meaning’: ‘an ancient text may be recontextualized through its reception in ways that may “enrich” subsequent readings, not in the sense of loading them with critical gold, but rather in the sense of proposing new ways for them to mean again, in readings that will depart and differ from previous ones’ (p. 17).

So, after an introduction subtitled ‘Reception and the Figure of Allusion’, P. asks, ‘What can Tom Stoppard's Arcadia (1993) help us see in the Eclogues?’. The chapter answering this question is broken down into 20 short reflections that demonstrate the originality and subtlety of P.'s insights. It has to be said that he assumes a knowledge of Stoppard's complex play, which is set in a single room in Chatsworth House in two alternating periods as, in both, a young precocious woman is in conversations with her tutor about various approaches to the issues of determinism and free-will, ‘the unpredictable and the predetermined’, as the young woman puts it, that result in historical change and loss. For P. this leads to thoughts about the stability and the instability of Arcadia: ‘the interplay between the classical and the romantic, or the regular and the irregular’ (p. 36). In the modern period Stoppard's characters discuss chaos theory with an apparent passing allusion to Thomas Rosenmeyer's famous study of pastoral titled The Green Cabinet. Thinking of pastoral as itself a process, P. reflects, ‘With regard to the pastoral tradition, the “green cabinet” serves as a reminder, not only that pastoral develops by allusion and echo throughout its “odd and accidental history”, but also that allusion and echo are figures of instability as well as continuity’ (p. 38). This, in turn, leads to reflections upon the ironies of Virgil's sense of elegy and his power ‘to irradiate and transcend the cliché of the visionary figure’ (p. 48) in a chapter that comments more upon Virgil than upon Stoppard's play.

This is also true of the following chapters: ‘Virgil's Shield of Aeneas through Auden's “The Shield of Achilles”’, ‘Equivocal Blessings: Georgics 2 through Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey”’ and ‘Mantua via Mossbawn: Virgil via Heaney’. Again, the pattern of short related sub-sections offers not only a developing series of insights, but room for readers’ ruminations between links. P. does not skimp on the scholarship that informs his discussion of his mediating texts and their alternative readings from their own reception. Indeed, critical disagreement about the figure alluded to in the poem ‘Aisling’ by Heaney (whose ideas about Virgil can be conventionally unremarkable, P. admits) suggests to P. that not only is ‘uncertainty about identity precisely what Heaney's poem is about’ (p. 106), but ‘the effect is perhaps deliberately confusing, as vision-encounters often are’ (p. 107). Characteristically, P.'s using this poem to ‘frame and shape a reading of Aeneas’ first encounter with his mother in Aeneid 1’ leads to the question of ‘Which arguments will a comparative reading support?’ (p. 107). Again, allowing for readers’ ruminations, P. begins a new paragraph with: ‘I leave the question open, since an even clearer allusion to Virgil occurs in the poem that immediately follows ‘Aisling’ in North’ (p. 107).

Indeed, the book is concluded by ‘several questions about readers and reading’ (p. 149) through consideration of Vita Sackville-West's two English georgics, The Land (1926) and The Garden (1946). Who is Sackville West's intended reader, as evidenced by the text? What is the satisfaction that might be offered ‘the common reader’? Is it imaginative delight or useful instruction? How does the political and social context affect a reader? How are these questions to be answered for the Georgics? P. comments that, ‘“Being a reader” of the Georgics is not as straightforward as it sounds, precisely because the poet is speaking to us as though he and we were farmers’ (p. 166). The sense of play behind this echoes the serious playfulness in the tone P. adopts through this book. He ends by calling for ‘classicists and poet-readers … to play the reader in an imaginary company of exemplary readers, even as we aspire to the condition of common readers’ (p. 170) who read for pleasure. P.'s questioning attentiveness and imaginative judgements do, indeed, result, as his final sentence hopes for this book, in reading as a pleasure in all its dimensions.