Cicero has a unique place in the history of Latin. A political and intellectual figure elevated to iconic status both by his own efforts and by posterity; author of more extant prose – dozens of speeches, the treatises philosophical and rhetorical, and nearly a thousand letters – than any other pagan Roman; model of good style and set-text author par excellence, from antiquity to modernity. So far, so uncontroversial. But when and how did he acquire this place atop the canon? It's a question that Caroline Bishop, Thomas Keeline, and Giuseppe La Bua have each asked, and one to which they offer some interestingly different answers.

Keeline's revised Harvard dissertation is a smart and lively study of Cicero's reception in the early Empire, delimited roughly as 43 bc to ad 117.Footnote ¹ That has become a crowded field recently, and more is soon to come,Footnote ² but Keeline is the first to devote a book to it. At one level, it's a suite of case studies, moving from Augustan and Tiberian declamation through Seneca the Younger to Tacitus’ Dialogus and Pliny's Epistles, with briefer calls on the likes of Manilius, Pliny the Elder, and Juvenal. A chapter on pseudepigrapha sits in the middle, and there are forays into Greek too: Plutarch, of course, but also, pushing further beyond 117, Arrian and Cassius Dio on the Philippics. At another level, it's an argument, that Cicero's reception was formed above all, in fact nigh on exclusively, in the schoolroom. Along the way, Keeline shows (implicitly and incidentally, but amply) that you will make limited progress if you restrict your investigation of Cicero's ancient Nachleben to explicit citations: imitation and allusion are an integral, not to say the largest, part of this tale.

Of the individual chapters, the first is an interesting and original outlier, an experimental reconstruction of ancient pedagogy. Pro Milone is cited often by Quintilian, and is the only speech treated in the extant parts of both Asconius’ historical commentary (mid-first century ad) and the Scholia Bobiensia (probably fourth century, but with material dating back to the first). Keeline draws on all three to sketch a picture of how Roman schoolboys studied a Ciceronian oration – a flattened picture, of course (was Asconius writing for schoolboys?), but a nice idea for packaging the material. (He hasn't finished with Pro Milone: a ‘Green and Yellow’ commentary is in the works.)

Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to declaimers: Keeline traces their ‘textualizing’ of Cicero as the embodiment of eloquence, and argues that even historians’ accounts of his death were informed by declamation. Chapter 4 takes a leaf from Irene Peirano's influential work on pseudepigraphy,Footnote ³ setting out to read ‘spurious’ Ciceronian works not simply as cadavers for dissection by authenticity critics, but as creative imitations. Key texts here are the Sallustian invectives, the speech Pridie quam in exilium iret, and two letters attributed (rightly or wrongly) to Marcus Brutus which castigate Cicero for toadying to Octavian in the fatal months of mid-43 (Cic. Ad M. Brut. 1.16–17). Keeline situates all these in a declamatory aesthetic, and well argues that their imitations of Philippics 2 and more constitute performative allusion, not surreptitious fraud. Chapter 5 inspects Seneca the Younger's less enthusiastic response to Cicero, Chapter 6 that of Tacitus. It's well known that the Dialogus de oratoribus is suffused with Ciceronian intertextuality; Keeline fleshes that out both on the small scale (individual encounters sharply interpreted) and on the large, reading the dialogue as a direct and hard assault on Cicero and Quintilian; the result is a powerful account to be set alongside (and against) Christopher van den Berg's recent heterodoxy.Footnote ⁴ Finally, he considers the Cicero of the Younger Pliny, in another significant contribution on a familiar topic. In the current tussle over Pliny's Epistles, Keeline might be called an enlightened reactionary, convinced of that work's status as edited but fundamentally ‘genuine’ correspondence (288–9) and sceptical of the literary turn in its more extravagant claims, but an abundantly willing and capable player himself when it comes to interrogating intertextuality.

These varied studies, pursued with a rare blend of philological rigour and affable prose, are sewn together by Keeline's overarching thesis: that the Cicero of the early Empire ‘is largely created in the imperial schoolroom’ (2). That claim must have some truth to it, even if we might be cautious in taking Quintilian as representative: if we credit him with leading a ‘Ciceronian revival’ (221 etc.), it follows that some earlier teachers, at least, were less enthusiastic. Whether we can go further, and say that ‘This schoolroom canonization comes to underly his entire Nachleben’ (75), I am less sure. Cicero's appeal as topic and imitative resource for declaimers is abundantly documented; but declamation was an activity for adults (including Cicero) as well as teenagers; and cultural memory is surely negotiated as much without the classroom as within: I don't think my perceptions of Shakespeare, say, or Churchill were conditioned solely or even principally at school. Besides, it wasn't only Cicero's speeches that were being read and digested: the correspondence, of course (amply covered here), but all those treatises too. ‘Romans of the first and second centuries ad’, says Keeline, ‘seem to have paid little or no attention to Cicero the philosopher’ (337). The philosophica are rarely cited, it's true. But when Pliny the Elder describes De officiis as ‘books that should be memorized, not just kept in hand every day’, it's surely more than a courtesy nod.Footnote ⁵ And intertextual traces abound, whether it's Valerius Maximus imitating the Tusculans or Pliny the Younger the Cato: as with the oratory, Cicero's afterlife as philosopher extends far beyond citations. But one thing at a time.

Giuseppe La Bua, meanwhile, studies Roman education and the reception of Cicero's speeches.Footnote ⁶ If that sounds strangely familiar, remit and approach differ amply from Keeline's (and neither cites the other). On the one hand, La Bua's vista is wider, reaching back to Cicero's own efforts at self-memorialization, and forward to the fifth century. On the other, his focus is narrower, or at least different: where Keeline dwells mainly with declaimers and (for want of a better term) literary texts, La Bua keeps company with teachers and scholars throughout. Quintilian is joined by Asconius, the Scholia Bobiensia, pseudo-Asconius (late antique) and the Scholia Gronoviana, all liberally quoted and discussed.

The book has two short chapters and two long ones. Chapter 1 covers relatively well-trodden ground: that Cicero wanted to become canonical; and how spoken oratory became published literature. Chapter 2 turns to less familiar and more technical material, charting the fate of the speeches from first publication through to medieval manuscripts. Chapter 3 opens with a brief reception history from Catullus to Tacitus’ Dialogus, along with declamation and the pseudepigrapha, then devotes itself to Cicero's posthumous role as the standard of Latinitas; abundant comment and commentary here on Ciceronian lexis, style, and metre. Finally, Chapter 4 asks how Cicero was taught. Like Keeline in his first chapter, La Bua finds that ancient instructors are interested above all in rhetorical finesse; he develops the point, though, in greater detail and across several speeches, including Pro Milone again, Pro Scauro, Pro Sestio, and the notorious question of irony in Pro Marcello. It's a picaresque tour, running to more than 130 pages, traversing many sub-topics and blending (or blurring) analysis of Cicero with analysis of his commentators; and, like the whole book, it displays much learning. A shame that the copyeditor couldn't eradicate the remaining non-nativisms from La Bua's admirable English.

Third in our Ciceronian triumvirate is Caroline Bishop, with another book of deep erudition, wide range, and intelligent exposition.Footnote ⁷ She too is concerned with Cicero's status as canonical author. But where Keeline and (for the most part) La Bua ask how that status was established and shaped after his death, Bishop investigates how he sought to shape it himself; where they focus on oratory, she covers the whole corpus, privileging the philosophica; and where they seek answers in the schoolroom, she focuses on another cultural-intellectual context, the Greek classicism of Cicero's day.

An introduction sets the scene of Greek culture at Rome, before Chapter 1 takes us to…Aratus: a pleasingly unexpected point of departure, albeit a logical one, if Cicero really did produce his Latin version of the Phaenomena as a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old (42). Bishop takes a broad sweep, giving ample space to Aratus and his Hellenistic reception before coming to Cicero's verses themselves. If the framing question (why did Cicero produce the Aratea?) leaves room only for speculation, and the answer (in the hope of acquiring prestige) is predictable, they begin to build Bishop's thesis: even these teenage efforts, she argues, were a precocious step towards self-canonization. Then come chapters on Cicero's engagement with Plato (Republic, Laws, the translated Timaeus), Aristotle (De oratore, Topica) and Demosthenes (rhetorica, Philippics), considering in detail, as for Aratus before, the pre-Ciceronian reception of each writer. Chapter 5 speculates about the collection of letters that Cicero planned to publish (that old chestnut); Bishop suggests that it would have crafted a persona, and apologia, along much the same lines as the Philippics. The final chapter traces self-canonization in the late philosophy (especially De natura deorum and De diuinatione), before a brief conclusion, unusually helpful in bringing the argument together. ‘Nothing was foreordained about Cicero's reception as a classic’ (302); on the contrary, it was Cicero's own classicism, Bishop argues, which helped make him one.

Bishop ends by pairing Cicero and Virgil, ‘the “twinned figures” atop the Roman canon’ (309), as two authors who steered their own canonization. I hope it won't seem reactionary, in these times of canons challenged, if I follow her lead. In 1997 Virgil became the first ancient author to be honoured with a ‘Cambridge Companion’. Now he is the first (I think) to get a second edition. Charles Martindale, editor of the original version, has teamed up with Fiochra Mac Góráin to update what was already an excellent book.Footnote ⁸ The first things you notice are its weight – the page count is fifty per cent up (maius opus etc.) – and the cover, an apt blend of continuity and change in both design (overhauled) and image: it comes again from William Morris’ stunning manuscript of the Aeneid, but now features Turnus with Iris, rather than Aeneas with Venus (a ‘relatable’ underdog for Generation Z?). Most of the twenty-eight chapters are carried over from the first edition, with varying degrees of retractatio. At one extreme, James Zetzel leaves ‘Rome and Its Traditions’ firmly untouched; at the other, Joseph Farrell has replaced his (excellent) chapter on Virgilian intertextuality with an (excellent) other; most contributors have opted for relatively light revisions. Interspersed are eight additional pieces, two of them replacing existing ones (a fresh ‘Virgil in Art’ by Luke Houghton; ‘Character in Virgil’ now taken by Helen Lovatt), others wholly new. Three fatten the section on ‘Receptions’: the Appendix Virgiliana finds its place (Scott McGill), not before time; so does ‘Augustine's Virgil’ (Gillian Clark); Sergio Casali and Fabio Stok revise Don Fowler's chapter on Servius and add one on ‘Post-Classical Commentary’ (Philargyrius, Pomponius Laetus, de la Cerda). Co-editor Mac Góráin contributes an essay on ‘Authority’ (partly political, primarily poetical) and a forward-looking envoi (‘Virgil: The Future?’). And if ‘Virgil as a Poet’ sounds bland, the chapter so titled is a highlight: reading extracts with English poetic translators by her side, Victoria Moul explores Virgilian diction, sound, metre, and imagery in an exemplary discussion, sensitive and powerful.

David Quint has also returned to Virgil, a quarter of a century on from his celebrated Epic and Empire.Footnote ⁹Virgil's Double Cross is a compact, elegant, and avowedly dark reading of the Aeneid as a poem which ‘performs its own immanent critique’ (ix).Footnote ¹⁰ Chiasmus, Quint argues, is the ‘master-trope’ (xiv) of the poem, serving persistently to problematize apparently straightforward binaries (hence the punning ‘double cross’ of the title). His ‘chiasmus’ has a fairly distant relationship to the ‘abba’ we all know and love, nor does it much resemble what Quintilian is talking about in the passage on antimetabole (Inst. Or. 9.3.85) with which Quint (piously?) opens Chapter 1. It seems to cover, rather, variations on ‘repetition as reversal’ (to remember Epic and Empire again) on the one hand, smudged correspondences on the other. To exemplify ‘smudged’ (my gloss): Neptune calming the winds is famously assimilated to an orator calming a mob (Aen. 1.148–53); but the analogy is disturbed by the adjective saeuus (‘savage’), applied not to both winds and mob, but to both Neptune (well, his trident) and mob (18–21). As for the repetitions, this involves not least the popular (and rewarding) game of tracing intratexts, as when Pyrrhus’ murder by Orestes echoes Pyrrhus’ own killing of Priam (Aen. 2.663, 3.332) in a precisely formalized encoding of revenge. Many such echoes are well known, of course, and Quint's own master-plot about binaries which unravel (or at least challenge) themselves is not new either (xii). But there is no lack of novelty here: rarely a page goes by without neat insights, lucidly and wittily expressed.

The seven chapters blend thematic and sequential arrangement, leading us gradually through the poem; every book gets a look-in at some point. Several chapters are revised from articles published between 2001 and 2015, two of them in Materiali e Discussioni (curious that Quint mentions their publication as part of a debt of gratitude to Gian Biagio Conte, editor of that journal [xxi]: not quite in the spirit of ‘international peer review’?). Chapter 1, ‘Virgil's Double Cross: Chiasmus and the Aeneid (Books 1 and 12)’, supplies both title and ‘big idea’ for the book; others address Aeneas and Pyrrhus (revealed to be disturbing doubles of each other), Dido, the theology of the Underworld, the founding narratives of Book 8, and intertextual emplotment in Book 10. Several big themes recur – Virgil's interweaving of myth and later Roman history; intertextuality with the Iliad and (more speculatively) with the Aethiopis; the politics of Augustanism – alongside the promised focus on patterning and design. For his own structure, Quint plumps for ring-composition of a purer sort: Chapter 1 catapults us into Aeneas’ and Turnus’ double aristeia, whose symmetries ‘reveal underlying identity’ (9; the scales are surely tipped a little by the severed heads hanging from Turnus’ chariot, Aen. 12.511–12); Chapter 12 concludes that, in the final lines of the poem, ‘Aeneas kills a double of himself’ (190). Not a cheery conclusion – but a dark reading is what we were promised.

Carthage in Virgil's Aeneid is another book to linger over.Footnote ¹¹ Elena Giusti has already proved her mettle in a series of learned articles; now she establishes on a larger scale her credentials as a leading Virgilian of her generation. Simply put, the book studies how the Aeneid portrays Carthage and the Punic Wars. More precisely (since not much about this book is simple), it

‘Tragic-historical’ encapsulates Giusti's two leitmotifs: tragedy, not just as a crucial ingredient in Virgil's distillery, but as a ‘proprietary genre’ of the Punic Wars, as imagined in Augustan Rome (7, 20); and the far-reaching ‘historical revisionism’ (149–50) that she descries in the same period. This is an Augustan age which lingers in the trauma of civil war, its outlook defined, not to say scarred, by it; Giusti's position on the old ‘European/Harvard’ scale tends accordingly, like Quint's, towards pessimism – albeit a pessimism no less congenial, in her typically nuanced model, to Augustan ideology than optimism would be (11).

Close readings of Aeneid 1 and 4 make up a surprisingly small part of the page count: this book takes a wide sweep into, and back out of, its focus text to pose some big questions – and offer some big answers – about literature, culture, and memory in Augustan Rome. Chapter 1 goes back to the mid-Republic (and Plautus’ Poenulus in particular) to ask how Carthaginians were cast in the Roman imaginary back then; Giusti finds them being created in the image of the Persians, that notorious ‘other’ of classical Athens (Edith Hall duly looms large).Footnote ¹² After this ‘analeptic digression' (89), Chapter 2 comes back to Virgil's own Carthaginians, orientalized ‘other’ and yet dangerously similar – Romans in the mirror. It also plumbs the ‘tragic Dido’ theme, positing significant engagement with Aeschylus’ Persae and Ennius’ Medea Exul, among others. Chapter 3 turns from tragedy to history, specifically the relationship of Virgil and Livy, arguing at times for targeted response (both Virgil to Livy and vice versa), elsewhere in terms rather of ‘dialogue’ and ‘joint reflection’ (167). As with the Persae, it's not clear how far specific intertexts can be pressed, nor is Giusti much concerned to ‘prove’ them in formal terms; but she develops a stimulating and far-reaching argument around them, that Virgil and Livy are both busy problematizing any distinction of history and myth. Finally, Chapter 4 asks why the Punic Wars so rarely surface in the Aeneid, and produces a striking answer: all three wars are there, ‘superimposed’ (203) in sequence onto Aeneid 1–4, with the games of Aeneid 5 as a triumphal re-enactment. Livy features here again, as Giusti puts his Hannibal in dialogue with Virgil's Dido; Naevius and Ennius too, in some complex and inevitably speculative chains of reconstruction; finally, large questions are broached about history and cyclicality. A bittersweet Conclusion brings us back to the trauma of Roman memory, the tragic wound of civil war – the real ‘tears of things’, lacrimae rerum (so Giusti's last words, 285). This is a complex book, compelling and challenging in equal measure (hard not to think at times of Philip Hardie, who supervised the PhD from which it has grown): a triumph of tragic reading.

Editors Bobby Xinyue and Nicholas Freer have harnessed a varied team for their Reflections and New Perspectives on Virgil's Georgics,Footnote ¹³ old hands alongside young blood. Their introduction is a useful mise à jour, nicely surveying recent work up to 2018, and the thirteen papers cover a broad interpretative range, political, philosophical, intertextual, metapoetical, and of course reception-al. I'll tuck in here three books where Virgil plays a smaller part – Peter Heslin's Propertius, Greek Myth, and Virgil, which inter alia re-dates Propertius’ first book and reassesses agonistics with Virgil accordingly;Footnote ¹⁴ Nandini Pandey on responses to iconography in Horace, Ovid, Propertius, Virgil & Co.;Footnote ¹⁵ and (late in) Lauren Curtis’ Imagining the Chorus in Augustan Poetry Footnote ¹⁶ – before rounding off Virgil and Cicero with a brace of commentaries. They're the latest in a remarkable series from my colleague Ingo Gildenhard, who for several years now has been producing substantial commentaries on A-level set texts. Some are solo, some collaborative; all are excellent; and they're free to download. In 2018 it was the turn of Cicero's Second PhilippicFootnote ¹⁷ and (with John Henderson as co-author) Pallas and Camilla in Aeneid 11.Footnote ¹⁸ Only selections of each text feature, as the exam board bittily prescribes, but the two commentaries still run to more than a thousand pages between them. The format is tailored to the classroom: each paragraph of Cicero, or short passage of Virgil, gets its own chapter, comprising lively title (‘Caesar: Dead Duck or Deified Dictator?’; ‘The Aesthetics of Death-Floration’ – some of them very lively: ‘They F*** You Up, Your Mum and Dad…’ for Aeneid 11.539–406), Latin text, running vocabulary, and ‘study questions’ ranging from linguistic nuts and bolts to interpretative challenges; then comes a commentary in classic style, addressing both students and teachers. The notes are fully engaged with the scholarship, and go well beyond reporting it: this is a genial combination of ‘right-on’ and rigour, supporting and stretching students of all abilities – and by no means infra dig for those who have left school behind.

Two ‘Green and Yellows’ appeared within a few weeks of each other in mid-2019. Catharine Edwards offers a varied sampler of Seneca's Epistulae Morales,Footnote ¹⁹ including favourites on old age (12), slaves (47), and prose style (114), along with (among others) one of the villa letters (86) and that bout of sea-sickness (53). Anthologies aren't universally in fashion these days, obscuring as they do the role of the book as a maker of meaning; but they have their advantages, and Edwards seeks a best of both worlds, regularly adverting to sequence and taking care to situate each letter within its book.

The title is an interesting choice, shunning ‘Epistles’ and, for that matter, Seneca's own title, Ethical Epistles,Footnote ²⁰ in favour of plain ‘Letters’. If it invites comparison with Shackleton Bailey's ‘Green and Yellow’ Cicero,Footnote ²¹ the contrast is strong: Shack's austere notes are as far removed from Edwards’ affable guidance as Seneca's epistolary philosophy is from Cicero's correspondence. If the comparison is rather with Summer's venerable commentary,Footnote ²² well, the overlap in content is substantial (over half of Edwards’ sixteen letters), but the manner is again very different: language and style get lighter coverage, literary and philosophical interpretation – and the meaning of epistolary form – much more. (Gone too the talk of ‘Silver Latin’.)

Students will appreciate the substantial Introduction, including a beginner's guide to Stoic philosophy, nice comments on Seneca's style (‘a choppiness and unpredictability inimical to complacent reading’, 24), and an introduction to prose rhythm. The page on intertextuality is welcome, if curiously limited in its brief (‘Seneca and Earlier Latin Poetic Authors’, 22–3: Seneca imitates plenty of prose too, as Edwards’ own notes regularly remind us); the reception section (29–32) skips the early years (Quintilian, Pliny, Tacitus…) in favour of a helpful tour through early modernity and beyond. It's perhaps fitting that Nero gets no dedicated treatment in the introduction, but crops up more than once in the notes: his dark presence is one which this volume, like the Epistulae Morales, prefers to adumbrate.

Seneca's nephew, meanwhile, gets his second ‘Green and Yellow’ (he had to wait for it), in Paul Roche's commentary on Bellum Ciuile 7.Footnote ²³ A climax of the poem, and conveniently self-contained in its narrative (the Battle of Pharsalus), Book 7 makes an obvious choice for a first dip into Lucan's dark waters, or a second: from Pompey's fateful dream to Caesar's corpse-side dining, there's plenty for readers old and new to feast on. Roche serves as a sympathetic maître d’, offering abundant help with the Latin, situating the text within both epic and historiographical traditions, and putting the burgeoning scholarship on the Bellum Ciuile to thorough use – as you know to expect from his fine commentary on Book 1 (but the move to Cambridge makes this one affordable).Footnote ²⁴ The casual reader might easily miss the fact, tucked away in ‘Abbreviations’ (vii), that Book 7 got long and learned treatment from Nicola Lanzarone only three years ago.Footnote ²⁵ True, many users of ‘Green and Yellows’ may be reluctant to venture beyond English. Still, the coyness is surprising, and surely not called for, given Lanzarone's different remit and approach. Perhaps Roche felt that he had said enough elsewhere;Footnote ²⁶ and I shan't do much better in only mentioning another heavy Italian commentary which thudded onto my desk as I was signing off, Andrea Cucchiarelli on Horace, Epistles 1.Footnote ²⁷

Comedy corner now, and an attractive pair of books on Terence's Andria. It's four decades since the ‘Aris & Phillips Classical Texts’ were brought into this world by John Aris, together with his daughter and son-in-law, Adrian and Lucinda Phillips. Recent years have seen welcome cosmetic makeovers (farewell to the clunky typeface and covers), a new general editor, Alan Sommerstein (whose Acharnians launched the series), a takeover by Liverpool University Press, and a continuing stream of additions. Peter Brown's The Girl from Andros completes the run of Terence's six plays, and offers itself as an excellent way into Roman comedy.Footnote ²⁸ The scene is set with over fifty pages of introduction, including synoptic interpretation, frank engagement with recent work, and a thorough crash course in metre. Text and facing translation are robust if not perhaps to the taste of all (metrical beats marked in the Latin; the translation modern, but a touch crib-like). The commentary itself is wide in range and notably attentive to Terence's language. The notes in this series have always been cued to the English text, skirting the original with varying degrees of embarrassment; Brown takes full advantage of A&P's new liberality, giving lemmata variously in Latin and English (to less irritating effect than you might expect), and commenting in detail on lexis and syntax. Very sadly, he didn't live to see the finished book; happily for him and his readers, Beppe Pezzini, a rising star of the comedy scene, steered it through production with evident care.

It's mildly paradoxical that the Andria, Terence's debut, is his last play to join the Aris & Phillips troupe; conversely, it makes an apt subject for Bloomsbury's inaugural ‘Ancient Comedy Companion’.Footnote ²⁹ And a congenial companion it is, thanks to Sander Goldberg, who marries the expertise of a Terentian doyen with an unusually smooth pen, omnia dulcia dicens.Footnote ³⁰ The five semiautonomous chapters first introduce Roman comedy and Terence; then come an interpretation of the Andria itself, a long chapter on its ancient and modern reception (cameos for Oxyrhynchus, Hrotsvit, and Abildgaard), and an essay on the history and challenges of translating it (Machiavelli to Penguin, and beyond). The mode is welcoming, the content well judged as an impulse to engagement. Forty-odd pages of back matter, including precise endnotes and a sympathetic guide to further reading, are billed as ‘the semblance of a scholarly apparatus’ and ‘entirely optional’ (xi): charming, and too modest.

Plautus’ Casina gets analogous treatment from David Christenson in the second book of the same series – or is it the first?Footnote ³¹ Goldberg's cover blurb has him ‘launching a much-needed new series’; Christenson's ‘launches a much-needed new series of books’. A touch of sibling rivalry there, or overzealous marketing: let's call them twins, then – no, make that triplets, since the same claim is staked for their Greek counterpart, Ian Storey on Aristophanes’ Peace. Meanwhile Helen Slaney's companion on Seneca's Medea adds to the darker side of the family (‘Bloomsbury Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy’):Footnote ³² again accessible and readable, and interesting in its approach to reception, weaving it into a reading of the play rather than appending it.

Goldberg dedicates his Andria to Eleanor Winsor Leach, who passed away in 2018 after a publishing career of more than half a century. A collection of essays in her honour was already in press, and saw the light later the same year, as an issue of the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. Themed issues are now the default for that journal; on the Latin side they have so far included a conference volume on Varro, edited by Valentina Arena and Fiachra Mac Góráin,Footnote ³³ and this memorial Festschrift for Leach.Footnote ³⁴ Epistolography is the theme; editors Teresa Ramsby and Ann Vasaly lead an all-female line-up, or nearly (a chapter from Peter White), ranging across Cicero, Ovid, Seneca (Ad Helviam, counted a letter), Pliny, Fronto, Symmachus, and Petrarch.

It's nearly time to sign off on this bumper crop, but let me first pay a brief call on the Loeb Classical Library, whose latest entrants include a revised edition of John Fitch's superb Seneca tragicus (real and pseudo-), incorporating new bibliography, modifying the text ‘at a few points’ (ix), and touching up the translation.Footnote ³⁵ The series Fragmentary Republican Latin, meanwhile, continues its rapid growth with three fat volumes on oratory from Gesine Manuwald.Footnote ³⁶ Towards 200 men from Appius Claudius Caecus to Messalla Corvinus – and one woman (Hortensia, addressing the triumvirs in 42) – make a full enough tally of republican orators on any reasonable count (Cicero is omitted, of course; so is Cato the Elder, held in reserve for a new Loeb of his own). The base text is Malcovati's Oratorum Romanorum Fragmenta;Footnote ³⁷ mercifully her numbering has been retained, with minor and transparent modifications. Material is split into testimonia (on life and oratory) and fragments, copious in both cases (‘this edition errs on the side of providing more rather than less’, xxix); but don't get your hopes up: most of the ‘fragments’, including all three of Hortensia's, are not verbatim quotations but third-party reports of a given speech. That fact, together with the full introduction, the potted sketch of each personage, and generous bibliography, makes this edition, even more than the new Ennius,Footnote ³⁸ as much a handbook as it is a text – and so a very useful route into one of the less accessible corners of the canon.

A contrasting pair to finish. If love's your thing, try Katherine Wasdin's Eros at Dusk, which puts Graeco-Latin wedding poems and love poetry between the same covers (Sappho and Catullus lead the dance).Footnote ³⁹ More for war? James O'Donnell has turned De bello Gallico into lucid, convincing, contemporary English.Footnote ⁴⁰ It's a masterclass in translation, and a dangerously appealing introduction to ‘the best bad man's book ever written’ (viii).