This is a fascinating and thought-provoking book – and a quite controversial one too. There is nothing standard about L.'s main contention: she not only wants to defend and endorse Plato's conception of poetry (and art), but also to show that Plato's conception should help us rediscover what a true aesthetic experience should look like – beyond most modern conceptions of art. Taking Plato's phrase ‘hunger for tears’ (τὸ … πεπεινηκὸς τοῦ δακρῦσαι, Rep. 606a) as a sort of catchword, L. insists that the pleasure we get from poetry is indeed linked to our appetites and that we should take literally the idea that we crave tragedy – that is, we have a physical appetite for grieving and lamenting.

Unlike most scholarly works on Plato that very much tend to read the critiques of poetry in Rep. 2–3 and 10 in isolation, L. proposes that Plato actually took over how archaic poets, especially Homer and Pindar, reflected on their own work. This rather physical view on artistic pleasures is not Plato's invention or idiosyncratic proposal, but what we find through the poets themselves, who repeatedly speak of the gustatory pleasure the ‘honeyed’ muse provides, and regularly evoke sexual pleasure as a genuine analogy to aesthetic pleasure – as L. reminds her readers (pp. 43–4; 62), both analogies are parodied by Aristophanes in the famous passage at the beginning of Frogs (vv. 53–67), where Dionysius is trying to explain what his desire for Euripides amounts to. What typically characterises aesthetic appetite though is that, contrary to desire for food or sex, it can never be satisfied – hence its ‘addictive nature’, as L. labels it. To be sure, poetry is often depicted by the poets themselves as a sort of medicine that helps audiences forget their troubles for a moment, but, being raptured in our pleasure on hearing the Muses’ ‘sweet’ voice, we also ‘run the risk of forgetting ourselves completely, and losing sight of our need and interests when caught up in the consuming pleasure of poetry’, the Homeric Sirens being ‘the mythic expression of this anxiety’ (pp. 55–6).

In a nutshell, that anxiety is at the core of Plato's banishment of poetry from his ideal city. Of course, banishment is not what L. would recommend. What she recommends instead is that we read Plato's descriptions in a positive way: since ‘mimetic poetry … satisfies both the desire to experience a wide range of emotions and the desire for complete freedom in exploring them’ (p. 155) in the most intense way, it must be condemned by a philosopher who, as L. says (perhaps in a quite exaggerated way), aims at ‘apathy’ (p. 180). But for us, as L. advocates, following C. Altieri's important book on Aesthetics (The Particulars of Rapture: an Aesthetics of the Affects [2003]), this exactly describes what poetry and art more generally should help us achieve. Since poetry essentially deals with strong emotional experiences, poetry is the most forceful ‘self-alienation’ (p. 156) in Plato's eyes. For us, these experiences amount to what Altieri calls ‘plasticity’, i.e. the ‘infinite capaciousness of subjectivity itself’ (p. 115). L.'s book is not only extremely rich in her suggestive, detailed analysis of how Plato and archaic poetry conceived of poetry; it is also a stimulating manifesto for another conception of poetry and art – a conception, she emphasises, that has been largely forgotten since the rather more intellectualist conception of art we find throughout history from Aristotle onwards.

Even a sympathetic reader cannot but feel a certain unease on at least three key points. L. begins by claiming that the core of her project consists in dealing with what has been commonly labelled the ‘paradox of tragic pleasure’, namely the question of why we take pleasure in painful emotional experiences, like lamenting someone's terrible fate. Instead of dealing with the paradox itself, L. suggests that pain is at the core of any and every aesthetic experience and that therefore this paradox should rather mean that our aesthetic pleasure, in a way, amounts to nothing else than the pleasurable experience of pain. But we may fairly doubt that this view exactly responds to what is usually meant by the so-called paradox of tragic pleasure. And we may doubt whether Plato himself would have agreed. True, craving or longing, or what Plato generally calls a ‘lack’, is painful: see especially Gorgias 496d–e, where Socrates ends up saying that quenching one's thirst amounts to experiencing pleasure and pain simultaneously (λυπούμενον χαίρειν λέγεις ἅμα, ὅταν διψῶντα πίνειν λέγῃς). In the passage of the Philebus where he deals with comedy and laughter, Socrates has Protrarchus similarly recognise that tragedy is both and at the same time pleasurable and painful (48a: τάς γε τραγικὰς θεωρήσεις, ὅταν ἅμα χαίροντες κλάωσι), but the pain at stake here is not that coming from any sort of lack; it is obviously the pain due to the emotion of pity or fear for the hero in a tragic situation. When L. repeatedly insists on the importance of pain, I suppose she wants to refer to pain in the sense of a lack, not in the latter sense of a painful emotional experience. But this is hardly what modern readers understand under the paradox at stake in tragedy, which the Philebus passage explicitly states.

I guess, L. might reply that her claim is precisely that the pain involved in all our aesthetic experiences is of the first type, not the second (and indeed, she never analyses or even mentions the passage from the Philebus). It is because our desire for such experiences is never really fulfilled that pain is always at the core of it. Or rather, as L. brilliantly writes, ‘the threat of poetic satiety (Pindar's koros) obliges the poet to sustain our interest by eluding our satisfaction, perpetuating a painful state of arousal that is, like erôs, dangerously incorporated into the experience of pleasure itself’ (p. 76). But, one wonders, if this might reflect Plato's warning against poetry, which (he alleges) holds us in a perpetual state of pain and disarray, would this really apply to Pindar or Homer or art more generally? We cannot but agree with L. that ‘Poikilia is an aesthetic tactic that guards against the potential transformation of the object of pleasure into an object of disgust’ (p. 66), or pain: but should that not imply that Pindar's (or whatever lyric poet's) aim is to provide pure pleasure without any pain being involved? Also, if one thinks of the episode of the Sirens (which L. refers to several times), what sort of pain might be Odysseus’? Surely, he might experience death if his mêtis did not prevent him from staying and listening to the Sirens’ song forever, but in Homer's text there is no sign, as far as I can see, that he also experiences pain all the time he is listening to them. Following Plato (who makes Homer the ‘urfather’ of tragedy: Ὅμηρον ποιητικώτατον εἶναι καὶ πρῶτοντῶν τραγῳδοποιῶν, Rep. 607a), L. takes tragedy to be the paradigm of poetry and art. But should we follow suit?

Finally, L. repeatedly says that there should be no gap whatsoever between an emotion felt in real life and an emotion induced in the theatre, and that we should not draw a firm distinction between real life and mimesis, which has been often seen as providing a solution to the paradox of tragic pleasure. It seems to be the case that Plato himself draws no such firm distinction – he who insists that indulging strong emotions in the theatre will tend to augment our propensity to have those emotions in real life (see esp. Rep. 606d). But perhaps Plato is simply wrong in denying what Aristotle will take for granted? I do see that L.'s point is to defend the outlines of a theory of art that definitely refuses Kant's crucial claim of ‘disinterestedness’ (a defence we also, and similarly, find in A. Peponi's groundbreaking book: Frontiers of Pleasure: Models of Aesthetic Response in Archaic and Classical Greek Thought [2012]), and, again, this is a very attractive model that deserves serious consideration. But in the case of tragedy no reader could help but wonder how such a claim could square with the obvious fact that no passionate admirer of Shakespeare's Hamlet would crave to meet a person who was in her own life trapped in a Hamletian sort of story and feel sorry for her.

I am not sure that L.'s new and fresh approach to the paradox of tragic pleasure will convince all of her readers. But I certainly think that anyone interested in Plato's views on poetry, and more generally in ancient (and contemporary) aesthetics, must read this highly rich, interesting and challenging book.