In this prodigious two-volume commentary, F., D. and C. provide what are, in effect, substantial essays – albeit lemmatised – on each of the elegies of Propertius' fourth book. This follows the trajectory of F.’s earlier commentaries on books of Propertius, which have increased in density to a considerable degree since his 1965 commentary on Book 4. The lion's share of the work is F.’s, with D. commenting on poems 3, 5 and 7, and C. on 2 and 10; F. is also responsible for the approximately 70-page introduction. There is a substantial bibliography; a table of variations from Heyworth's 2007 OCT; and five thorough and useful indexes (‘Parole notevoli’; ‘Nomi e cose notevoli’; ‘Lingua, stile, poetica’; ‘Topoi’; ‘Passi citati’). It would have been helpful to have a list of variations from F.’s own 1984 Teubner edition of the text too; there are a considerable number of these ranging from minor alterations such as reading primus for the text of most of the MSS (primae) at 4.10.5, to the transposition of couplets (e.g. 4.3.37–8 post 35) and the addition of lacunae (e.g. after Iuppiter in 4.1.80).

In terms of the (im)practicalities of using the commentary, there are a couple of aspects of style and format that seem worthy of note. Each poem is printed before discussion of it without any sort of apparatus criticus. For a text that is in such a fraught state, this is a decision which is likely to encourage less aware users of the commentary to think that the text is (considerably) more stable than it in fact is. (Even G.P. Goold's 1999² Loeb edition and G. Hutchinson's 2006 ‘green-and-yellow’ – two series which are usually sparing with apparatus critici – provide them for Propertius.) That being said, there is, as is entirely appropriate, considerable discussion of textual variants in the commentary, with frequent references to manuscripts or groups of manuscripts by sigla. What is unhelpful, however, is that there is no discussion of the relationship of the manuscripts at any point, nor even a list of what the various sigla used by the commentators mean. The sigla apparently correspond to those used by Heyworth in his 2007 OCT, but this is not mentioned at any point and left to the user to divine from the fact that the text printed is tabulated against Heyworth's edition. Even this is not consistent, however, as sometimes manuscripts are listed individually, and at other times using a catch-all for a common source: for example, FLP are used for a shared reading on p. 181, but the catch-all, Π, is used at p. 176; Heyworth uses Π on both occasions in his apparatus. All this rather limits the readership of these discussions to those already familiar with the issues surrounding the complex transmission of the text, and to those who have a couple of editions sitting open around them.

The commentary sections begin with a considerable discussion of the content of the elegy in question, and an overview of scholarly approaches. These then segue into the lemmata that constitute the commentary itself. Each lemma is not at all clearly marked, and given the excessively large font size, individual sections of commentary often run to several pages making it difficult to find the relevant entry quickly. (The font size also contributes to the considerable size of the volumes, which might not be deemed entirely apt for a poet who aspired to be a Callimachus Romanus.)

In the light of the fact that three scholars contribute to the commentary, a recurring feature is its uneven treatment of some aspects of interpretation across different poems; this not infrequently results in a sense of incoherence. The occasional lack of engagement with possible metapoetic readings of the elegies that constitute Book 4 may serve as an example. Whilst F. provides a detailed account of the metapoetic aspects of 4.6, C.’s discussion of 4.2 is almost entirely void of such considerations. In the more than 100 pages that constitute the introductory material to this poem and the lemmata themselves, it is striking that mention of the possible interpretation of Vertumnus as a metapoetic figure representing the protean corpus of Propertian elegy is made fleetingly on two occasions (pp. 409–10 ad 4.2.1 and 502 ad 4.2.64). No mention is made of the metapoetic aspects of 4.2.21–4, though they are discussed by the same source that is inaccurately cited on p. 410 (J.B. DeBrohun, Roman Propertius and the Reinvention of Elegy [2003], pp. 169–75),Footnote ¹ and little is made of the potential for metapoetic readings of the epigram at the close of the poem, though relevant literature is cited in the bibliography specific to the poem (for example, C. Shea, ‘The Vertumnus Elegy and Propertius Book IV’, ICS 13 [1988], 63–71; omitted from both the full and the poem-specific bibliographies – though not an article concerned with metapoetics per se – is E.C. Marquis, ‘Vertumnus in Propertius 4, 2’, Hermes 102 [1974], 491–500).

F.’s introduction to the commentary provides a historical overview of the scholarly approaches to the structure of the book, and concludes by comparing it to the arrangement of Horace, Carm. 4 around a central poem (pp. 72–3; on possible ways of approaching the structure of Horace's final book of odes, see R.F. Thomas' 2011 commentary, pp. 7–10). In arguing thus, F. maintains that 4.1 is a single poem that sets out the two types of elegy – aetiological and amatory – that constitute the rest of the book, and that the other poems fall into one of these two categories. Whether one chooses to read Propertius 4.1 as one or two poems, it is clear that its two parts are meant to function as a diptych setting up a tension that is to be played out through the rest of the book, but it strikes me as unhelpful, in approaching the architecture of Book 4 (if there is such a thing), to fixate on a pattern of aetiological vs non-aetiological or amatory elegy. The majority of the poems in the fourth book display characteristics of both, even if one argues that each is predominantly one or the other. Little attention is paid to the ways in which consecutive poems respond to one another outside of this framework of aetiological-or-not; this is exacerbated later in the commentary by dint of the fact that there are several commentators at work, and little has been done to ensure that the relationships between the poems under consideration and those that precede and follow them are explored.

F. also reasserts his view that Propertius is not an opponent to the Augustan regime, and suggests that in exploring the ‘orizzonti nuovi’ of the elegiac genre by celebrating the ‘attività di Augusto in campo militare e civile’ through aetiological poetry (p. 68), Propertius distances himself from the anti-establishment aspects of the elegiac modus vivendi portrayed in his earlier work. In the light of the generic experimentation found in many poems of Book 3, however, it seems to me that the distance between Books 3 and 4 is considerably smaller than F. makes out (in spite of the apparent number of intervening years), and that attempts to tie the poet's testing of the boundaries of the elegiac genre to pro- or anti-Augustan readings of the text is rather infelicitous.

This commentary is a significant resource of material on Propertius 4, but it is one which is not particularly reader-friendly, and one's ability to benefit from it is, in many ways, predicated on a considerable knowledge of the issues surrounding the text and its interpretation. F., D. and C. are somewhat staid in their hermeneutic approaches and add little to our understanding of the elegies at hand, especially when set against the bulk of the volumes.