No apology or explanation is needed to justify this volume. These have been anni mirabiles for Propertian studies, in part thanks to the signal efforts of Professor Heyworth. A commentary on the third book makes for a natural fit with the current state of scholarship; the first has received a fair amount of attention, so also the fourth, while the second (itself possibly, if not probably, two books) is an especially knotty problem. Not that Book 3 does not have ample difficulties of its own, which the present volume seeks to survey and for which, in many cases, a triage is offered, if not definitive solutions.

This commentary had its genesis in a discussion about student aids (and so OLD, not TLL, is the rule, and the reader is cautioned that Norden is in German), and its origins are reflected in the (very useful) glossary of literary and others terms, the maps, and the especially detailed overview of metrics and the mechanics of scansion. The editors err on the side of generosity to the student; both ‘golden line’ and ‘antonym’ are defined. All Latin and Greek are translated, including lemmata and even most stray words (vita = ‘life’); this practice adds to the bulk of the book. An appendix contains a useful collection of passages from Classical literature relevant to a reading of Propertius 3. The text, is, of course, H.'s, with the apparatus placed after the main body of poems, one imagines, so as not to daunt the Propertian neophyte; one fears this practice may lead some students to minimize the importance of textual problems. The bibliography is supplemented by further reading on each elegy after the relevant notes. A brief postlude to the entire commentary discusses the beginning of Book 4.

The heart of this book is the notes, a rich treasure for students that will likely render Camps obsolete (a pity, given many of his notes exhibit a pithy wisdom that provides a good counterbalance to the discursive commentary found here). Those who dispute H.'s readings will, of course, be as unhappy with the present volume as they would be with his Oxford text and Cynthia (2007), though the notes are scrupulous in pointing out textual cruxes and exhibit an admirable restraint from dogmatism, even if occasionally a declarative statement in judgement of a particular reading might have benefited from a ‘perhaps’ or ‘likely’ (useful words in Propertian criticism).

The introductions to individual elegies are especially rich, and given H.'s recent major work on the poet, more advanced scholars will find items of interest in the notes that expand on the reasoning behind editorial choices from the Oxford text, often in literary directions that were outside the scope of Cynthia. The introduction is student-accessible, though a clearer discussion of the poet's date and testimonia would have been desirable given the target audience. The lengthy section on the historical context is helpfully thorough and sound until the very end, where there is a brief discussion of darker relations between poets and princeps (Gallus, Ovid). This section is too short for the weighty issues it introduces, and the discussion of different schools of thought on the Aeneid is rather out of date, especially given that it is difficult to speak of a ‘current standard reading’ of the epic. The invitation of the editors for users of the volume to ‘propose alternative readings’ may be a fond hope, but student users of this book will learn much about the science of text criticism as they work through the notes. Toward this end, more help on the practice of reading a critical apparatus would have been welcome.

A particular strong point of the commentary is its introduction of Hellenistic poetry and the epigrammatic tradition to a student audience. Rhetorical devices and tropes, conventions of elegiac poetry and the many grammatical peculiarities of Propertian Latin are presented in consistently clear form. The notes would have profited from more introduction to Fedeli's major commentary on Book 3 (1985), which otherwise would be inaccessible to the present volume's primary audience.

H. has provided the classics world with remarkable treasures in his textual work on Propertius. The present, co-edited volume fulfils the expectation of an early title of his thesis, ‘A commentary on Propertius 3’. We can be hopeful that the happy collaboration with Morwood will be repeated for another book of elegies.