Latin Literature

These have been good years for Ennius perennis. A couple of years on from his Loeb renewal,¹ two superb books keep the lifeblood pulsing. Ennius’ Annals. Poetry and History, edited by Cynthia Damon and Joseph Farrell, is a masterclass of a conference volume.² The lucid introduction, a sort of ‘Whither Ennius?’, powerfully situates it in the receding wake of Otto Skutsch's monumental edition and the fresher waves of Ennius and the Architecture of the Annals, Jackie Elliott's powerful challenge to ‘Virgiliocentric’ reconstructions of this fragmentary text.³ As those studies made plain enough in their different ways, reception and interpretation of the Annals are interlocked to a special degree, and the fourteen chapters in this book (plus afterword by Mary Jaeger) roam nicely around and between both.

To sample three. Farrell's ‘The gods in Ennius’, echoing the verve of its Feeneian pre-text,⁴ argues for radical innovation: profoundly influenced by his own Sacred History (which Farrell takes to predate the Annals), Ennius replaced Homeric theology with a Euhemerist one, in which the gods are ex-mortals, deified like Romulus & Co. In a second, more daring argument, the figuring of the gods evolves through the poem: traditional piety gradually gives way to sophisticated rationalism as the narrative progresses from antiquity to modernity. A. J. Woodman (‘Ennius’ Annals and Tacitus’ Annals’) looks for traces of Ennius in Tacitus, as well we might, given Tacitus’ well-known fondness for the archaic. He doesn't find many – an interesting and impressive fact, since few scholars could be better equipped for the job – but proposes two sorts of influence. First, he suggests that ten hexametrical lines dotted around Tacitus’ Annals,⁵ starting with the famous first words, look not just to Sallust and other historians but also (and through them) to Ennius. Second, he canvasses two verbal imitations in Annals 6 (a book fresh in Woodman's mind⁶), on the deaths of Piso pontifex (~ Ennius’ ‘good companion’, Ann. 268–86 Sk.) and of Tiberius himself (Ilia after her dream, Ann. 36–7 Sk.). (The system of citation that Damon and Farrell impose in the volume, and propose to the world, calls those passages rather ‘fr. †8.12 [268–86]’ and ‘fr. **1.29 [36–7]’: academically unimpeachable, when you read their explanation of it [22], but not immediately seductive.) Sander M. Goldberg makes a powerful case in ‘Ennius and the fata librorum’ for not calling Annals the ‘national epic’ of pre-Virgilian Rome. Characteristically attentive to sociological questions, he first argues that citations by a few authorities show nothing about wider reading, then points out how patchy those citations are: even Cicero, one of Ennius’ most devoted quoters, displays familiarity with only a few books, and no one before late antiquity shows any interest in the climactic Book 15. ‘To know it was a big poem…is not necessarily to know much at all beyond the fact of its existence and its utility as a benchmark’ (172): which is to say, Late Republican readers were in a similar position to many undergraduates today.

A signal exception to that rule was Lucretius, as Scott J. Nethercut powerfully argues in Ennius Noster. Lucretius and the Annales.⁷ Nethercut has let his study evolve slowly from a University of Pennsylvania dissertation of 2012, and the decoction has paid off: this is not just an important intervention on two major poets; it's an exceptionally stylish piece of writing. The core argument is simple, and big: Lucretius makes Ennius his ‘primary poetic model’ (2), but in a ‘drastically revisionist appropriation’ (4) – a violent case of tuer le père. Nethercut doesn't identify many new allusions (a hard task in such a limited corpus), but he makes significant contributions, both technical and interpretative. On the technical side he argues, first, that elements of Lucretius’ style which are usually called archaic, such as genitives in -ai and verse-final monosyllables, are rather, specifically, ‘Ennianisms’; and, second, that these are not an inert element of his versification, but are used dynamically, to highlight polemical engagement with Ennian doctrine. The case is attractively made, with the wormwood of stylistic stats stored away in appendices (sixty-five pages!), so as to leave the main text palatable to all comers. Equally well advised, Nethercut sells his arguments as major revisions of received wisdom, but with a matter-of-factness that holds readerly benevolentia captive. A case in point is Chapter 1 (‘Ennius and the Tradition of Republican Epic’, a version of which you can also find in Damon and Farrell's edited volume), which challenges common views of Ennius’ early reception: epic successors did not, Nethercut proposes, adopt the Annals as a generic master-model, but engaged with it critically and allusively (neat close readings of Accius, Furius Bibaculus, and Hostius make the case). Ennian style, then, was not simply the default of post-Ennian epos: and when Lucretius adopts it, we should enquire how, and why.

The other chapters do just that, considering in turn Lucretius’ invocation – and radical rejection – of Ennian cosmology, historiography, and poetology. On the cosmos, Nethercut develops a rich version of the familiar observation that, in describing Homer's topic as rerum natura (1.126), Lucretius constructs the epic tradition in his own image. A twinge of disappointment here (49–51), as we slip into some stretched intertextual claims: when Epicurus ‘dares to lift his eyes’ against religion (1.66–7), Lucretius is comparing him to Hector, not daring to look Ajax in the eyes at Iliad 17.176–7 (but ‘dare’ is not rare, and lifting your eyes and looking someone in the eyes are not quite the same); since Graius homo (ibid.) recalls the Pyrrhus of Ennius (Ann. 165 Sk.), Lucretius is thus complicatedly figuring Epicurus as Greek and Trojan at once – a tall story on a shallow foundation. It doesn't help when we are then told that Epicurus is introduced with a periphrasis, ‘just like’ Odysseus (Od. 1.1; but Graius homo, ‘Greek person’, is not very like ἄνδρα πολύτροπον, ‘man of many turns’). Still, damaged credulity (mine anyway) gets rapid repair in the following pages, which trace an interesting and persuasive plot from Homer to Lucretius by way of Empedocles and others; and the section on lightning (6.357–63) provides an excellent brief example of Lucretius studding his lines with Ennian language while insisting on an altogether different, rationalized account of the universe (59–61).

‘Dynamic and thoroughgoing’ (147) engagement of this sort is traced further on matters historical (Chapter 3, centred on the stirring peroration of DRN 3: Punic Wars, Ancus Marcius, Xerxes) and, most adventurously, poetological (Chapter 4). Starting from the famous clash of poetry and philosophy, Nethercut argues that Lucretius both constructs a literary tradition through which he rewrites Ennius, and (in his philosophy) denies the very possibility of such a tradition. This ‘paradox’ is then solved with a thesis of ‘provisional argumentation’: rather as the opening hymn to Venus entices us into the poem, before Lucretius strong-arms us into denying the very possibility of such theology, so ‘literary affiliation…is a rhetorical enticement with which to introduce his readers to the vera ratio of Epicureanism’ (145). Nethercut's own readers may not drain this draught at first sitting, as he grants (‘This maneuver may seem disorienting…’, 129); but I for one plan to mull on it. Chapter 5, extending the tale into Virgil and Ovid (and…) on Lucretius on Ennius, and testing the arguments of this book in the process, regrettably does not exist: a shame, because there is surely much to say, and Nethercut would surely say it well. Perhaps he will yet.

Poetics of the First Punic War, by Thomas Biggs, has three things in common with Nethercut's book: it stems from a thesis (Yale this time), it is heavily concerned with Republican epic, and it is a pleasure to read.⁸ (A fourth is that Biggs's work, too, can be sampled in the Damon and Farrell volume.) You might guess from the title that Naevius looms large, and you'd be right (Chapter 2), but he gets company from Livius Andronicus (Chapter 1, reading the Odusia as a poem profoundly influenced by the Roman experience of sea war with Carthage), Virgil (Chapter 4), and Silius Italicus (Chapter 5), in whose Punica the Second Punic War is overlaid, we are shown, with persistent shadows of the First (and, therefore, Naevius). The readings that make up these chapters are framed with great ambition: when Biggs announces that ‘reception studies, reader-response criticism, intertextuality, cultural poetics, New Historicism, deconstruction, ecocriticism, semiotics, and methods of critique influenced by the “oceanic turn” and “blue humanities”’ (4) are only the more obvious elements of his method, he doesn't seem to be posing; and Theory with a capital T gets pride of place in the central Chapter 3 (‘Mediated Memories’), where Ennius, Naevius, and others are read in terms of Baudrillard, the Vietnam War, and ‘media criticism’. As for Virgil, Biggs was a shade unlucky that Elena Giusti got there first;⁹ he deals with that in part by deferral, claiming that her book came too late for him to use it, in part directly, with genial comments on the complementarity of their research (viii–ix). In any case, the projects are more than sufficiently distinct; and two good books are surely better than one.

Talk of the Aeneid prompts me to mention Len Krisak's new translation.¹⁰ It is aimed at the uninitiated, to judge from the very basic four-page introduction by Christopher M. McDonough, and the ‘easy read’ spacing. How best to represent dactylic hexameters in English is a perennial question; Krisak's solution is to keep the hexameter, swap dactyls for (loosely) the iambs of English poetry, and write in rhyming couplets, because ‘I feel strongly that the Aeneid is a poem’ (xiii, emphasis in original). Lee Fratantuono on the dust jacket calls the result ‘splendid’, and recommends it as the translation of choice for students. I confess to feelings more mixed –

My poem sings of one man forced from Troy by war.

Fate harried him to find a home on Latium's shore –

on some Lavinian littoral. By land and sea,

Driven by loss, by gods who would not let him be,

By unrelenting Juno's lack of any pity,

He made his gods a home at last, founding the city

Of ancient Alba, then the battlements of Rome.

Speak, Muse. Speak out, and say where Juno's rage came from…

– but perhaps my sense of decorum has been corrupted by too much doggerel in Private Eye over the years.

(I was about to click ‘send’ on these pages when another Aeneid landed on my doormat, the revised edition of Sarah Ruden's already superb translation, now equipped with an introduction and – no easy task – select footnotes by Susanna Braund and Emma Hilliard. Now there's a Virgil well worth buying.¹¹)

At the other end of the scholarly spectrum, Fifty Years at the Sibyl's Heels is a duly solid memorial to the late Nicholas Horsfall.¹² Library shelves groan under the weight of his five Aeneid commentaries, and his final publication was a slim monograph, The Epic Distilled,¹³ but 145 learned articles constitute the core of his prodigious contribution to Vergiliana. Of those, forty-two are reprinted here, representing a good range across time and topics (but image-heavy epigraphy stays out); five are translated from Italian, including the famous piece on Camilla and a colourful pair of notes on Chloreus’ trousers (Aen. 11.177). Ailsa Croft did the doubtless ferociously hard work of chasing up his often recondite references, and took the trouble (again, a lot) to include original pagination, always a useful service in collections of reprints; she also pens the disarmingly pleasant preface, and cannily bookends the collection with a paper on ‘The Poetics of Toponymy’: originally given at a ‘literary gathering in Trieste’ (477), it is gently autobiographical and thoroughly postprandial, ringing out the volume with some leisurely and, unmistakably, Horsfallian lines (‘I defy a reader to find beauty or poetic merit in the names Didcot, Casalpusterlengo, Schweinfurth, or Hazebrouck’, 478).

Still on the Virgil theme, Ashley Carter has produced an attractive two-volume ‘reader’ of the Aeneid for school students, trimming each book down to about a quarter of its length; each double spread contains text, generous vocabulary, a skeleton commentary tuned to language and the ‘stylistic features’ beloved of A-level examiners, and ‘study questions’ (‘In line 344, how is Dido's misfortune emphasised?’).¹⁴ Scott McGill's commentary on Aeneid 11, meanwhile, marks a caesura in the evolution of the Cambridge ‘Green and Yellows’:¹⁵ this is the first time on the Latin side that an existing volume in the series (K. W. Gransden, 1991) has been superseded.¹⁶ McGill doesn't pull punches on his predecessor (‘a thin volume of sparse, uneven notes’, vii), and I think most will agree with the implication that Mark II is substantially superior – not just because, like most Green and Yellows today, it is much longer. The introduction is on the essayistic side, devoted more to thematic interpretation than to technical matters (style, for instance, features only en passant, subordinated within such sections as ‘Aeneas, Pallas and Evander’ or ‘Hunting and War’). Conte's Teubner (the first edition of 2009) serves as the base text, lightly modified; the commentary is balanced and assured. I'm sorry to report a printing glitch which makes many pages (24, 29, 32, 40 in my copy, for instance) look like they got caught in the feeder of a photocopier.

There's evolution, too, not to say a small revolution, in the Cambridge ‘Oranges’, with N. M. Kay's commentary on the first half of Venantius Fortunatus’ Vita Sancti Martini.¹⁷ Sulpicius Severus wrote his prose hagiography of St Martin in the 390s; Venantius (familiar to churchgoers of some traditions for his hymns Pange lingua and Vexilla regis) paraphrased it in verse in the 570s. That makes the Vita by some way the latest text to be turned orange, and the first Christian one (I'm told there were conversations: did it belong in a series with ‘Classical’ in the title?). Kay produces a new critical text, a translation (the first in English, he says), a substantial but very readable commentary, and an accessible introduction, with lucid pages on language and intertextuality and a lengthy discussion of textual matters, culminating in a new stemma. If you remember his fine commentary on Martial 11,¹⁸ you won't be surprised by the philological acuity, and may be impressed by the smooth transition from boy-love to saintly deeds. The introduction more than once warns the uninitiated off Venantius’ difficult verse, which makes the poem itself – and I'll confess this was my first encounter with it – surprisingly approachable: classicizing hexameters, lashings of Virgil, alliteration to turn Ennius green, and epigrams to rival any secular writer: never mind et uiuente uiro intra se sua mortua mors est (1.154, ‘the man lived, and his death died within him’, when Martin survives a taste of hellebore), how about this, on a beggar healed by Martin's kiss: Inclita religio Martini, cuius honore / foedere fida fides formosat foeda fidelis! (1.505–6, ‘Splendid religion of Martin, by whose humanity his faith, firm in its compact with God, makes what was foul fair in one with faith!’)?¹⁹

F-words aside, that last line nicely demonstrates how close Christian hagiography comes to pagan panegyric, so carrying me almost uncontrivedly to a third Cambridge commentary, this time neither Green and Yellow nor Orange, but a non-series book resplendent in imperial purple.²⁰ In around 310, Constantine was treated to a speech of praise at Trier which later became the sixth of the XII Panegyrici Latini. It gets full treatment here from Catherine Ware, in what I think is the first English-language commentary devoted to any of the Pan. Lat. (so beating even the one that most people have heard of, Pliny's Panegyricus).²¹ Well known for her monograph on Claudian,²² Ware is also widely published on prose panegyric, and proves a trusty guide to this one. The introduction is substantial (sixty-three pages), giving ample orientation in the encomiastic tradition, style, and intertextuality, and on Constantine's place in this oration, in Pan. Lat. as a whole (where he takes a central place, addressed in five of the twelve speeches), and in Roman history. The text, from Mynors’ Oxford Classical Text (I hope 10.6 carcarem is the only misprint that crept in), has a facing translation, attractive and (once we are past the tenses of the opening conditional) reliable. The commentary is avowedly literary, but hardly sparing on matters historical; the manner is straightforward and unfettered. So, if you've always wondered about Pan. Lat. but never dared to ask, here's an excellent place to start – and not just for the entertaining lauds of Britannia, fair isle of temperate weather and short nights (9).

Two commentaries to go, starting with more Christian verses in the shape of Prudentius’ Psychomachia. I mentioned Aaron Pelttari's student commentary a year or two back;²³ now comes a weightier tome, the Marburg dissertation of Magnus Frisch.²⁴ The genre explains both that heft and such splendid subtitles in the introduction as ‘1.3.1 Kommentartheoretische Vorüberlegungen’ (‘Prolegomena on commentary theory’), in which it is observed, inter alia, that a commentator needs to think not just about his own interests, but about those of his readers (7–8). That readership apparently extends to people without dictionaries (e.g. 289 ‘lituus steht hier für ein beim Militär verwendetes gekrümmtes Blechblasinstrument’ [‘lituus stands here for a curved brass instrument used in the military’], where ‘OLD s.v. 2’ might have done the trick), but not to those interested in recent Anglophone work on Prudentius: no sign, for instance, of work by Aaron Pelttari, Cilian O'Hogan, or Philip Hardie.²⁵

Back among the pagans, John Godwin's Aris & Phillips commentary on Juvenal Satires 13–16 is a welcome sequel to his matching volume on Satires 10–12.²⁶ The later satires have been the focus of exciting work in recent years, but have remained poor relations in terms of commentaries, especially for students. The most recent one that comes to mind is Ferguson's (1979) on the whole corpus, which I found a handy crutch back in the day;²⁷ compared with that, Godwin's is much fuller, more approachable, and blessed (or cursed) with a translation. The introduction is cut and pasted from Satires 10–12, with only the examples changed: an understandable economy, if surprisingly unacknowledged. Its tone is easy and sure, as readers of Godwin's earlier commentaries will know to expect; the critical position is relatively traditional (a good dose of persona theory), but opens doors to the latest work as well. The commentary itself is long (but these are difficult poems), with ample help on lexis and syntax – straining, as so often in this series, against English lemmata (the dabs of textual critical comment still more so) – as well as plentiful literary parallels, historical context, and interpretative suggestions.

It was about time for a new Loeb of Petronius’ Satyrica,²⁸ if only so that students would no longer be told that it is ‘befouled by obscenity’ and better left out of ‘a gentleman's education’, as M. Heseltine's introduction (1913) has it, even after Warmington's revision (1969).²⁹ Gareth Schmeling has obliged, drawing on the text and translation he put together while working on his commentary.³⁰ To judge from a brief collation, Heseltine/Warmington was constantly to hand; and the result is not vastly dissimilar. The main difference lies in the introduction, which is more liberal on sexual mores – hard to imagine Heseltine calling the ‘Pergamene Youth’ (Sat. 85–7) ‘one of the gems of Latin literature’, as Schmeling does (15)³¹ – if not entirely on message (‘homosexual’ passim), and more radical on the date: Schmeling shows proper scepticism towards the Neronian pseudo-norm, but has been impressed by what seem to me flimsy arguments for Flavian or Trajanic dating, so much so that the dust jacket describes the Satyrica as ‘possibly of Flavian or Trajanic date’. Will that filter into undergraduate essays across the Anglophone world, or will Wikipedia win out? (I read there – today, at least – that ‘a consensus now exists’ for a dating under Nero.) Interesting that the guardians of the Loeb Library let Schmeling devote twenty-eight pages – more than half the introduction – to the manuscripts; they took their revenge, though, by retaining Satyricon on the cover, against his own usage within: some idle traditions, it seems, are just too firm to be rocked.

Schmeling's position on dating makes it a little odd that Seneca's Apocolocyntosis is appended, as it was in the predecessor volume (there translated by W. H. D. Rouse and again revised by Warmington); but it's easy to see why Loeb wanted a like-for-like replacement. Here the introduction is more conservative, toeing the biographical line (Seneca takes revenge for his exile) and freely mind-reading (‘As tutor and advisor to the boy-emperor, Seneca hoped that his student would…’, 458). Whether the translation improves on Rouse, I'm not always sure: it's generally smooth and middle of the road, but the clunkiness of the opening paragraph (477) is hard to fathom: ‘If it pleases me to reply’ for si libuerit respondere (I prefer Rouse/Warmington's ‘If I choose to answer’); worse, ‘But if it is demanded to produce a witness’ for si necesse fuerit auctorem producere: again R/W had it just fine, ‘But if an authority must be produced’. (The same page features ‘Livia Druscilla’, a spelling hard to find even on Wikipedia.) But enough carping, as Trimalchio didn't say (Sat. 36.7).

Two (more) books on ethics now. In Reading Roman Pride, Yelena Baraz traces the language of superbia and related concepts in Latin literature.³² The skeleton of the study is lexical, centred on four terms which denote (excessive) pride (arrogantia, fastus, insolentia, and superbia), and scrupulously constructed: Baraz reports that she worked through every instance of superbus and cognates in the TLL archive. But the superstructure is a rich and elegant weave, as supple close readings are put to the service of a broad argument about Roman attitudes towards pride, and reasons for them. (Testimony in Greek is excluded, but for one bit of Dionysius, 87–90.) In Republican literature, Baraz concludes, there is a flexible but stable ‘core script’ of pride (146), seen always as a negative trait; under Augustus there develops a ‘split’ in discourse (5), notably in the Aeneid, which ‘unsettles’ things ‘by repeatedly creating situations in which different instantiations of pride are made to confront each other’ (147); even then, however, positive manifestations of pride are ‘minor, intermittent, and fragmented’ (10). Briefly put, Romans liked as a rule to think of themselves as anything but proud. (The story looks a little different if horizons are widened to include such positive terms as fiducia and magnanimitas, as Baraz rightly notes, 64–7.)

In Roman Frugality, edited by Ingo Gildenhard and Cristiano Viglietti, seven archaeologists, historians, and literary experts offer ‘the first-ever systematic analysis’ of ‘frugal thought and practice’ in Roman culture (marketing blurb). The chapters work through from the seventh century bc to the High Empire, plus an interesting outlier on Hume and Adam Smith. So does the introduction, a massive and masterly piece of work (108 pages, plus 28 densely printed pages of bibliography). Rather than summarizing the chapters to follow, it fills out and in some cases threatens to overwrite them; it professes to be unsystematic (107), as it had to be, but it's essentially a mini-monograph, taking us in a remarkable sweep from regal Rome through to the Panegyrici Latini and Augustine. Each editor also contributes a chapter: Viglietti on how far archaic Romans were ‘frugal’; Gildenhard in a brilliant and again massive (north of 100 pages) lexical study of frugalitas and cognates, centred on Cicero's Tusculan disputations, but ranging both backwards, to skewer all those scholars who have invented a Republican backstory to Cicero, and forwards, for a rich survey of six Early Imperial prose authors, Valerius Maximus to Pliny the Younger. In fact, ‘edited by’ is a sore understatement: between the introduction and their chapters, Viglietti and Gildenhard have written almost two-thirds of the book themselves, and superbly.

The second volume in Oxford's new series Pseudepigrapha Latina is a collection of essays on ‘the Appendices Vergiliana, Tibulliana, and Ovidiana’, edited by Tristan Franklinos and Laurel Fulkerson.³³ (Time to tweak the series branding, ‘a new series of modern commentaries’.) Talk of the Appendix Vergiliana speaks for itself (chapters on the Ciris, Catalepton, Culex, and Aetna), Appendix Tibulliana too (a.k.a. [Tib.] 3, discussed in four chapters). With ‘Appendix Ovidiana’ the editors coin a matching term to cover the Haleutica, Nux, and Consolatio ad Liuiam (throwing in the suspect bits of the Heroides for good measure): these get five chapters between them, including a robust argument by Stephen Heyworth that Ovid imitates the Ad Liuiam, not the other way around. (Contrast the new Appendix Ovidiana in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, which runs to thirty-four poems.)³⁴ A fourth ‘appendix’ lurks in Gareth Williams’ chapter on the Aetna, in which he posits substantial imitation of Manilius, and dubs the poem (which he dates to the 60s–70s) an ‘Appendix Maniliana’; and the volume as a whole might – and I mean this as a compliment – be seen as an appendix to Irene Peirano's influential monograph on pseudepigraphic Latin poetry;³⁵ certainly her book is a regular object of homage and challenge. There are interesting pages throughout, and the introduction includes capacious reflections on canonicity, authenticity (the editors themselves stay positively agnostic, holding out even for Ovidian authorship of all his ‘appendix’), and intentionality – since, as they well observe, the current trend for reading pseudepigraphy as a knowing game between author and reader is nothing if not intentionalist.

Ancient reception also occupies Mathias Hanses in his study of the ‘life’ of comedy after Plautus and Terence.³⁶ Originating in a Yale PhD, it begins by charting a literary-social history of comedy at Rome, arguing that it remained a live genre into the High Empire (Chapter 1); Hanses then assesses Cicero's heavy use of comedy in his oratory (dwelling of course on the Pro Caelio and Pro Roscio comoedo, but In Pisonem, In Catilinam, and Pro Murena feature too), receptions in satire (covering both explicit references to comedy and intertextuality with the two extant playwrights), and imitations of the Eunuchus by Virgil (Aeneid 4), Catullus, and the elegists.

Post-antique receptions, meanwhile, are the topics of three De Gruyter books just in: Gabriel Siemoneit's Vienna dissertation on the supplements to Curtius Rufus by Johann Freinsheim (1639–40),³⁷ Gegen / Gewalt / Schreiben, edited by Melanie Möller, on responses in German, French, and Latin American literature to Ovid on gender and sexual violence,³⁸ and a thick volume on Lucretius Poet and Philosopher.³⁹ This last stems from a conference held in Alghero in 2017, celebrating 600 years since Lucretius’ rediscovery; hence perhaps the Sardinian tang in ‘Wirkungsgheschichte’ (4) and certainly the focus on the ‘recovery’ of DRN (two chapters) and on its modern reception (seven chapters, ranging from Machiavelli and Jesuit neo-Latin to Leibniz and Tennyson). Five chapters on Lucretius’ philosophy itself precede, led off by David Sedley's ‘Lucretian Pleasures’ and dominated by epistemology; there are also two on ancient reception (Myrto Garani on Sen. NQ and Philip Hardie on Christian appropriation and polemic), and two on iconography.

Some more news in brief now, from (mostly) Berlin. Phaedrus’ Fables gets a new Teubner from Giovanni Zago, the first major critical edition since Postgate's OCT of 1920.⁴⁰ The Compositiones of Scribonius Largus receive copious and handsome treatment from Sergio Sconocchia, with critical text, Italian translation, and learned commentary.⁴¹ Then five dissertation books. Nils Jäger (Göttingen) examines Statius’ Amphiaraus in careful detail.⁴² Jonathan D. Geiger (Heidelberg) presents a computational study of the Latin hexameter from Virgil to Silius Italicus (or, as De Gruyter's website has it, ‘the six great epics from the Augustinian and Flavian periods’).⁴³ Beate Beer's Zurich Habilitation is a theoretically ambitious analysis of ‘Narrativität’ in the Noctes Atticae;⁴⁴ on a related topic, Alfred Lindl's Regensburg dissertation is a narratological study of Tacitus Annals 13–16.⁴⁵ Finally, Tommaso Gazzarri's The Stylus and the Scalpel, a third Yale PhD book, offers a challenging account of metaphor in the philosophical writings of Seneca the Younger.⁴⁶ Don't expect easy reading (e.g. ‘I bring supplemental arguments against the hyperbiologists [sic] slant of cognitivism’, 9) or model Latin (e.g. ‘to contemplare’, 111; ‘the practice of gestatio (also known as lallatio)’, 127); but the ambition – theorizing metaphor with both ancient philosophers and cognitive scientists, and turning that to a striking argument that Senecan metaphor is therapeutic, thus surgical – is palpable, and laudable.

A trio of canonical poets to finish, starting with John Schafer on Catullus’ three books of poetry.⁴⁷ You read that right: the core thesis of Catullus Through His Books is that the extant poems represent a triptych of authorially designed books, dubbed A (poems 1–51, thus finishing with the famous Ille mi par esse), B (61–4, the first four carmina maiora), and C (65–116, the elegiacs), this last divided into C1 (65–8, completing the carmina maiora) and C2 (the rest). This is the latest in a long line of attempts to make sense of the Catullan corpus;⁴⁸ its defining feature is the isolation of poems 52–60,⁴⁹ which by Schafer's account were written by Catullus but excluded for one reason or another from his published collections and/or mauled in transmission; he dubs them Ax, for Appendix Catulliana (another entry in our growing list of Latin poetic appendices, then). This is all efficiently set out in a few opening pages, before Chapter 1 makes the case for Ax in detail; Schafer then reads A, B, and C as books, with a strong focus on symmetry and patterning across poems. The style is an entertaining blend of brash and winsome; it will be interesting to see whether his fellow Catullans agree with Schafer's professedly immodest proposal (1) that an age-old problem has now been solved.

That leaves two lepidi libelli for novices (nice for docti too). Llewelyn Morgan's pocket guide to Ovid is the first Very Short Introduction devoted to a Latin author, and a sympathetic one.⁵⁰ The arrangement is traditional – potted biography, then the poems by order of composition – and the style amiable, straightforward with the odd jokey aside, as on temeraria uirtus in the Calydonian boar hunt (Met. 8.407), ‘which would be good Latin for “toxic masculinity”’ (68). Tales of reception are interspersed, rather than kept for last; they range from St Dunstan, deep in the Ars Amatoria (37–8), to Ali Smith's novel Girl Meets Boy (2007), which brings Iphis and gender fluidity to twenty-first-century Inverness (72–3).

Horace's Odes, meanwhile, is the subject of a superbly readable book by Richard Tarrant.⁵¹ Similarly writing for Latin-less readers, Tarrant gets in abundant contextual information while keeping the tone easy; the close readings of two dozen or so poems that make up the core of the book are similarly effective. There's a nice sprinkling of enlivening detail, as on Venosa, a birthplace shared with the ‘madrigalist and murderer’ Carlo Gesualdo (1), and of modern poetry; the long reception chapter gives unusually well-spread coverage through the Early Empire, late antiquity, and Middle Ages, as well as of the gentleman's Horace of eighteenth-century Britain, and varied faces since.

With that my pleasant liturgy is done. Vale.