This volume is a miscellany of papers delivered at a conference, ‘Greek into Latin’, held at the Warburg on 18–19 November 2005. The volume took seven years to find its way into print. The contributors are P. Botley (Warwick); P. De Leemans (Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven); G. (Tel-Aviv University and University of Crete); D. Nikitas (Aristotelian University, Saloniki); M. Pade (Aarhus/Danish Institute of Rome); P. Petitmengin (Ecole normale supérieure, Paris); H. Rosén (Hebrew University, Jerusalem); A. Siebengartner (Princeton); P. Tóth (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest/Warburg Institute), N. Zagagi (Tel-Aviv University).

The volume is anecdotal, dealing with the minutiae of translation practice on the ground, rather than with now-popular ‘translation theory’. Much is interesting; some is marginalia. Although its papers are not mutually cohesive, and probably do not intend to be so, an extended introduction drawing out major themes and findings would be beneficial. Some readers may find it a nit-picking criticism that gender inclusive terminology is never used in the volume when referring to its putative readers, for instance on p. xiii: ‘The educated reader will be able, in most cases, to follow the main lines of the arguments, learn some of the background facts as he goes, and skip what he finds too technical’. However, this is worth pointing out, since unconscious sexism still exists (and should not). One also occasionally feels that somewhat outdated notions obtain (e.g. ‘golden age of the classical language’ p. 7; golden and silver are not distinctions now in wide use, and this is not just a matter of terminology). Siebengartner's apology for ‘giving Cicero the poet this sort of extended attention’ (p. 111) is outdated, given that Cicero as a poet is now heavily rehabilitated; see for instance my own treatment, and bibliography, in The Cambridge Companion to Cicero (ed. C. Steel [2013], pp. 88–106).

The ambit of the volume runs from early Latin (Zagagi) through Classical Latin (Rosén, G., Siebengartner,), late antiquity (Tóth, Nikitas) and humanism (Pade, Botley), to Petitmengin's fascinating comments on the early twentieth-century genesis of the Loeb Classical Library which conclude the volume. The papers range from narrowly technical (Rosén) to broad-brush contextual interpretation (Siebengartner, Pade). For this reader the most useful parts of the volume are the appendices where the raw data is gathered (G., Appendices A and B, pp. 58–96; Botley, Appendix, pp. 204–5). These appendices are valuable resources for further study in the fields covered by their respective papers. G. in particular presents data which is both significant and comprehensive. Much of G.'s argument draws selectively on this material to show how it works ‘on the ground’ (p. 41). My only small criticism of this excellent paper is that it does not treat Cicero's poetry, only the Aratea, and then incidentally as part of the Stoic argument of DND 2, and not comprehensively (only two named references pp. 49 and 80, plus one where the Aratea is not named, p. 80). The Aratea is the first of Cicero's works in which he essays various techniques of translation from Greek to Latin, and merits a section on its own.

This brings me to the most ‘interpretative’ article, Siebengartner's ‘Stoically Seeing and Being Seen in Cicero's Aratea’. Siebengartner characterises Cicero's didactic voice in the Aratea as an uncharacteristic hint of modesty (p. 115): Cicero is only a conduit from a bigger message from the sky. This is an attractive idea and well argued, although the difference between his reading of the Aratea as a Stoicising work, and my earlier work, is, I think, overstated (see nn. 56 and 62). One can come from the angle of seeing the poem as appropriated in the Stoic argument of the DND, or as being itself an early document of Cicero's Stoicising, influenced by (say) Boethus of Sidon: these two routes lead to the same place: that the poem is in a significant sense a Stoic document.

Much of the interest of the volume lies in the fact that Latin continued to be considered, right up until the nineteenth century, to be a better medium than the vernacular for the ‘faithful’ rendition of Greek: viz. the comments made by Ambroise Firmin-Didot in 1837 (p. 211): ‘En effet, la langue latine, par son analogie avec la langue grec, peut suivre presque tous les mouvements de chaque phrase, en offrir un commentaire perpétuel du texte grec, tout en le traduisant en quelque sorte mot pour mot’ (contrast the techniques of the Renaissance translators, brought out in Pade's paper). Latin came to be considered more stable than the vernacular, which was seen as fluctuating according to its time; Latin was therefore viewed as more apt for conveying what were perceived as the perennial values of the Greeks. Idealisation, of course: but it explains the persistence of Latin as a medium of translation with an educated readership which lasted much longer than one might have imagined it would.