The President and Board of Trustees of the Vergilian Society and the McKay Prize Committee are pleased to present the 2024 Alexander G. McKay Prize for Vergilian Studies to Kirk Freudenburg for his book Virgil’s Cinematic Art: Vision as Narrative in the Aeneid (New York and Oxford, 2022).

Many a study of classical poetry has taken its bearings from modern critical theory. This normally involves applying to a familiar text a hermeneutic framework developed long after the text in question was written. Often the framework was developed to address the challenges of a new art form or cultural practice, or in the context of a self-consciously distinct discipline. Freudenburg’s study of the Aeneid can be considered one of the latest representatives of this trend. Simply put, his approach is to use language and concepts borrowed from film studies to illuminate unsuspected or ill-understood aspects of Vergil’s narrative technique. If this were all that Freudenburg accomplished, the book would still be a major contribution by a leading scholar of Latin literature to the study of the most widely read and studied of ancient Roman poets. In fact, it is much more than that.

To borrow the critical methodology of one field and apply it in another is a service to scholarship and to the principle of interdisciplinarity. At the same time, it tends to reinforce the sense that there exist distinctions between disciplines, not only in the sense that (for instance) one discipline studies poetry and another studies cinema. Especially where any branch of ancient studies is involved, this sort of borrowing tends to reinforce the idea that art forms become inexorably more challenging over time, forcing interpreters to invent new techniques to take the measure of them. Meanwhile, older works and the techniques used to study them are taken to be relatively simple, to the point that they require periodic infusions of new ideas from without to enliven and refresh our appreciation of what they have to offer. This is one way of keeping classical literature and classical studies relevant, but it runs the risk of accepting a presentist intellectual orientation that is so pervasive that it has become an obstacle to understanding antiquity in any other terms.

With a light touch, Freudenburg begins his study by showing that certain narrative devices that are familiar to critics and viewers of modern and contemporary films, and are considered characteristic of the cinematic form, are in fact fairly familiar elements of Vergilian narrative, as well. His first major example is the famous simile in Aeneid 12 that compares Juturna to a sparrow. The critical concept that he most emphasizes here is “hyperbaton,” a figure of classical rhetoric, and he leans heavily on the power of grammatical structures to anchor and ratify more inferential systems of making meaning. However, in contrast to most readings of epic similes, which tend to dwell on the relationship between the tenor and the vehicle of the comparison — why or in what way was Juturna like a sparrow? — Freudenburg steps back and asks about the subject position of the spectator — to whom and why did she appear similar to a sparrow? And in this case, of course, the answer is, Aeneas, because by following her he is tracking his elusive prey, Turnus, whom his sister is trying at all costs to protect from him. Upon making this point, Freudenburg lingers no further within the world of the simile, but shifts suddenly to a self-deprecating admission: “As far as what is typically needed to establish specific lines of sight within any given bit of narrative, this is overkill. As will become clear from examples dealt with later, the visual cues prompting us to inhabit lines of sight that are specific to viewers inside the story do not need to be this obvious to get us to recalibrate and play along. But I have chosen to begin with this example because it is so deliberate and so fully experiential. In its own way, it is a miniature version of what we do when we watch a narrative film, in that it puts us in touch with the step-by-step, constructivist processes that find us making meaning(s) on the fly out of visual information that is being fed to us in dribs and drabs over time” (p. 19).

Freudenburg follows up this admission by informing readers that he has just been introducing them to the concept of “suture,” a cinematic editing technique that serves to tell viewers from whose point of view — i.e., from the perspective of what character within the film — a given sequence of images is being shown. And then we are off to a more detailed exploration of how applicable this and similar concepts are to the narrative economy of Vergil’s epic. But upon reflection, we realize that Freudenburg has already made a much more important point. At the level of narrative practice, “suture” is not a compositional element borrowed from a very different, much later art form and critical discourse to be imposed upon an ancient text, nor even a modern lens through which to inspect that text, in search of otherwise inaccessible insights. It is already there in the warp and weft of the Aeneid itself. That means, to read the poem as if it were a film is not to apply an extrinsic critical framework — an interesting and beneficial one, perhaps, but nevertheless, extrinsic — to an old, familiar work. Rather, it is to understand and articulate how the poem was designed, as a narrative, and to do so on terms that are very much its own.

Moving quickly, and compulsively readably, through a clear introduction and five punchy chapters, Freudenburg leans into this implied insight to show not only that Vergil’s narrative technique anticipates that of the modern filmmaker, but that the ancient poet learned to tell stories in this way from predecessors as far back as Homer himself. In this way, the argument extends beyond the Aeneid or Vergil alone to challenge assumptions, largely deprecated by most classicists but still widely taught in most literary fields, about the categorical differences between ancient and modern narrative as a whole. Later chapters look ahead to episodes of Aeneid reception in the visual arts before the invention of cinema. What Freudenburg does here falls into the domain of classical reception at its most effective in showing how a later interpretation of an ancient text can help us unlock a productive new reading of that text. In this way, Freudenburg effectively sketches a complete history of how specific techniques of ancient narrative were translated by successive generations of practitioners into new art forms in a process that will no doubt continue in some way as long as stories are told.

In sum, Virgil’s Cinematic Art is both a tour-de-force and a model for interdisciplinary studies, and its author, Kirk Freudenburg, is eminently deserving to be recognized as a recipient of the McKay Prize.