The title of M.'s book, based on his 2015 Berlin Habilitationsschrift, neatly combines the two areas that he intends to focus on from a receptional perspective: Roman (i.e. Augustan) classicism and Greek lyric poetry. As M. points out (p. 16), Horace's Odes is the central Roman text, although he takes a few looks at elegy as well; surprisingly not only Roman elegy (mainly Ovid), but Greek elegy (mainly Theognis and Solon), too.
In the introduction M. formulates the central aim of his study: the function(s) of Greek lyric for Augustan poets (p. 17). He is well aware of the enormous amount of scholarship devoted to the reception of Greek lyric poetry from an intertextual point of view and, therefore, (taking recent papyrus discoveries into account) wants to go a step further. For him this means looking beyond the scope of individual texts in order to uncover larger contexts of reception (‘functions’ in M.'s terminology) while still taking individual poems as a starting point (p. 21). Methodologically, he bases his research on the concepts of ‘transformation’ and ‘allopoiesis’, which means that reception works both ways and influences the view of the older text, too. For this reason, he includes several side glances into the early modern reception of antiquity in order to assess the influence of the Roman texts on the understanding of Greek lyric poetry (see pp. 63–5, 82–4, 153–5, 174–9, 203–5). This introduction is joined by two introductory chapters (pp. 25–38/39–62) that are named after Horace's famous bon mot ‘Graecia capta I’ and ‘II’ and concerned with an overview of intertextual research and Roman precursors in the transformational processes from Greek to Roman literature respectively (Lucilius; Catullus; Cicero and Caesar).
The main body of the book is organised as follows: three tripartite chapters (a structural feature M. points out, p. 23) represent three larger contexts that M. intends to study: prominent themes (‘Leitthemen’: metapoetics, wine/symposium, love), prominent poets (‘Leitfiguren’: Archilochus, Sappho, Pindar) and relationships between poets and the princeps (addressing the princeps in literature, civil wars/Actium, exile). The last chapter sums up the six functions that M. identifies during the course of his analyses: creating distance (in poetics and politics), creating proximity (approaching the realm of politics via the symposium), the supply of role models (for the poet and his audience), providing universal symbols and signs (e.g. wine), delivering a blueprint for the combination of individuality and authority (i.e. in establishing oneself as the first in something) and, finally, providing the means of (self-)canonisation and controlling one's own reception.
In general, M. has to be commended for undertaking such a study that aims at giving a coherent picture of the reception of Greek lyric in Augustan poetry (mostly Horace). By concentrating on three main themes, images of three central poets and three modes of dealing with the emerging principate, he succeeds in showing that there are universal strategies and modes (M.'s ‘functions’) at work that apply to more than just a single text and that these references to Greek lyrical texts reveal their particular meaning when regarded not primarily in terms of aesthetics, but especially in relation to their socio-political contexts. Of course, this corresponds well with a genre that has someone saying ‘I’ in specific situations as one of its basic structural elements or, as M. Lowrie put it with wonderful succinctness: ‘The zero degree of lyric discourse is utterance, a dramatic speaking out grounded in occasion’ (Horace's Narrative Odes [1997], p. 19; a book listed in M.'s bibliography).
Speaking of genre, it is odd, though, that M. nowhere defines how he or the ancient authors he is dealing with understand the term ‘lyric’, which would have been interesting especially for the ‘wine and symposium’ section of the ‘Leitthemen’ chapter (M. only briefly mentions and rightly dismisses the obsolete Greek/grounded in occasion vs Roman/metapoetical dichotomy, p. 22). This is even more inexplicable since he shows a special awareness of conceptual issues when he professes an interest in whether the Roman authors understood the Archaic period as an epoch distinct from the Hellenistic era, for instance (pp. 16, 241). Does the inclusion of Greek and Roman elegy within the scope of this book nod towards the modern triad of epic/lyric/drama? But that is never stated explicitly. At least as far as Roman elegy is concerned, M. remarks that it is included as a means of contextualisation (p. 17) and that epic and didactic poetry are referred to only selectively in order to clarify a certain point (p. 22). Although the subtitle advertises ‘Transformations of the Archaic period’ this last-mentioned exclusion of epic is a wise choice because this would merit a separate investigation of its own, one that could indeed be done following in M.'s footsteps. Greek elegy, though, does not come in before page 22 of the introduction, where it suddenly appears paired with ‘lyric’, although prior to this point only ‘Greek lyric’ has been mentioned.
Furthermore, with regard to the special focus on Horace's Odes, a section on Alcaeus as a ‘Leitfigur’ would have been a welcome addition (though he gets special attention in the section on ‘Exile’ in Chapter 6). Certainly, this would have interfered with the tripartite structure of the three main chapters, but this parallel subdivision may seem a little forced anyway (for example, Chapter 6.1 treats the important issue of panegyrics merely in four and a half pages).
This being said, M.'s study has many merits that recommend it to the reader. I will highlight just a few of them: throughout M. demonstrates a very sober approach to intertextual readings. He exploits all the possibilities of subtle links and echoes, but is well aware of the limits. One important result of his analyses is the demonstration that a Roman author is often more interested in invoking previous literature by referring to a poet's name or tone than to a specific text. He can corroborate this reasoning from an unexpected angle: by drawing on early modern literature, M. is able to show how the image of Sappho transferred (and generated) by Roman texts instigated a (Greek!) reception of Sappho that seems to contain intertextual links to a fragment of Sappho still unknown at the time when the modern text was written (pp. 177–9). So, the Roman reception (or ‘transformation’ as M. would put it) captured the essence of Sappho so well that it can appear to refer to the Greek original even without knowing it.
M.'s idea of measuring the success of the Roman transformation by looking at early modern reception yields very convincing results (sometimes expected ones as in the case of Horace's image of Pindar, sometimes surprising ones as in the case of Sappho mentioned above). In addition, I find M.'s view of the relation between single poem and collection very persuasive. He does not have to resort to the extreme ideas of Horace rewriting existing texts or planning the collection in advance, rather M. states that individual odes are interrelated sufficiently through their choice of words and motives even if they were not composed at the same time or with their position in a future collection in mind (pp. 140–1). Besides these general issues, there are many illuminating insights scattered throughout the book, for example the discussion of the notoriously difficult Horatian epistle 1.19 on pp. 75–9, the symbolic interpretation of the barbitos in Odes 1.32 on p. 87 or Horace's way of reading Greek lyric in contrast to a (modern) philological reading on pp. 114–15.
M.'s book offers a sound approach to the Horatian reception/transformation of Greek lyric poetry (and a little bit of elegy), supplemented by parallels and contrasts from Augustan (mostly Ovidian) elegy. It convincingly presents a comprehensive perspective in order to reveal the purposes behind the notable Augustan interest in Archaic Greek lyric and elegy. Last but not least, the book recommends itself to the reader by its elegant style, often displaying humour and wit.
