The excitement of the new critical and theoretical approaches applied to Virgil in the last thirty years should not make the reader forget the importance of a close attention to the linguistic and metrical detail of the text for a full appreciation of what Virgil is about. Virgilian ambition manifests itself not just in the extensiveness of the poems’ conceptual and allusive scope, but also in a microscopic attention to detail and to the relation of the detail to the wider context. The classic status that his poems immediately achieved was due, as much as to anything, to his perfection of the stylistic and metrical experiments of the previous two centuries of Latin poetry in order to forge a flexible and varied poetic manner, the master and not the slave of both Greek and Latin poetic traditions, responsive to context, and integral to the wider meanings and functions of the poems. For example, in a recent discussion of Virgil’s style, O’Hara draws attention to the fact that the ambiguity that has become so central to modern critics’ treatments of the meaning and ideology of the poem is generated partly by small-scale indeterminacies of syntax; and I have suggested that stylistic figures such as oxymoron and hypallage contribute to larger structures of paradox in the areas of poetics and ideology. Virgil’s liking for stylistic ambiguity and paradox also reminds us that his style is not ‘classic’ in the sense of a uniformly limpid and serenely balanced manner; his use of language can be difficult and unexpected, often straining at the limits of Latinity. While no later Latin poet can escape the influence of Virgil, it was left to Ovid to perfect ‘a poetic koine, a stylistic instrument which was freely manageable by writers of lesser genius. The Ovidian manner, as generations of clever English schoolboys have discovered, is imitable; Virgil’s is not.’