Petrarch's Virgil features a frontispiece by Simone Martini depicting the poet reclining while Servius opens a curtain to reveal him. If C.'s Teubner edition corresponds to the reclining Virgil, his Parerga, which follows upon his Prolegomena of 2016, might well encapsulate Servius pulling back the curtain.

C.'s first chapter opens with una storia, i.e. a historical account of Nicolaus Heinsius qua Virgilian (and Ovidian) editor. Heinsius’ ambassadorial service allowed him to become a modern-day Petrarch, with exploratory forays into scattered European libraries. C. also considers Heinsius’ editorial work. At Aen. 1.2, for example, for Lavinaque venit Heinsius follows Servius and the Carolingians, as among the capital manuscripts only R lacks the synizesis. Thus, the capital manuscripts’ authority leads R.A.B. Mynors, M. Geymonat, R. Sabbadini and A. Castiglioni to adopt Laviniaque. C.'s consideration of ancient testimonia, however, firmly convinces him that Heinsius was right (p. 12). Further, Heinsius’ evaluation of Virgilian hypermetrism also provokes C. to reconsider his Teubnerian reading at Aen. 10.883 (p. 6).

The second chapter examines the contribution of Christian Gottlob Heyne. C. regards Heyne's gentle Altertumskunde as more than merely a prolegomenon to Wolf's rather contentious Altertumswissenschaft (pp. 16–17), noting that, in contrast to ‘the larger landscape of textual studies at the time, Heyne's rejection of textual polemics [is] … exceptional’ (p. 20). Even G.P. Wagner, Heyne's editor, would mention that age's vitriol (istius aetatis … labes).

C. compares Heyne's contribution to the critical text of Virgil with that of Otto Ribbeck, who was a pupil of Lachmann, Heyne's own student. On the one hand Ribbeck's edition is ‘an imposing monument of learning’ (p. 22), but on the other hand it ‘spills into a cerebralism that causes him to carry out arbitrary changes’ (p. 21). C. considers G. 2.68–71, comparing Heyne's sensible reading with Ribbeck's willingness to accept a corrupted edition (p. 22). Some might see C.'s firmness (e.g. ‘Ribbeck followed [Wagner's] mistake’ [p. 23] or ‘Wagner's revision of Henye's text is wrong’ [p. 24]) as overstated. Yet such judgements are necessarily within the purview of the textual critic, and to deny the editor the right to determine what presents itself as the true text would render editorial judgement effete. To return to Heyne's contribution, C. offers, inter alia, an interesting explanation of Heyne's choice of pernox over pernix at G. 3.230, where Heyne relied on the indirect tradition to unmask grammarians’ proposition of a pseudo-etymology based on an entirely reconstructed verb (p. 26).

In the third chapter C. reviews Sabbadini and Ribbeck as Virgilian editors, citing G. Pasquali's assessment of Sabbadini's edition as ‘neither the most beautiful nor the most useful effort by this outstanding scholar’ (p. 33 n. 2). C. notes, too, Sabbadini's penchant of placing too much value on the capital manuscripts, particularly the Palatine (P); Ribbeck also over-trusted P. Yet Ribbeck's greater editorial error was imagining Virgil to have made a second edition of the Georgics (p. 38). Ultimately, Ribbeck ‘becomes a victim of himself’, i.e. of his own distrust of textual evidence: for example, Ribbeck transposes the address to Maecenas (G. 2.40–1) to follow the invocation to Bacchus in the book's second line (p. 40). Sabbadini, by contrast, was a ‘radically conservative critic’ (p. 41).

The next chapter argues for the recentiores to be regarded more seriously. C. confesses his former hesitancy to do so, albeit Pasquali viewed these late manuscripts as non deteriores. Having explained the value of the antiquiores, playfully dubbed the ‘magnificent seven’, C. concisely expounds upon the Virgilian manuscript tradition (p. 48). The importance of manuscripts from the Carolingian and later ages lies in the possibility that they may preserve readings from now lost antiquiores. At Aen. 4.215–17, for example, the recentiores preserve subnexus, not the subnixus of the antiquiores and Parisinus lat. 7906 (p). This is no ‘orthographical trifle’, as there is a difference in meaning and grammatical construction; cf. also numen vs nomen at line 94 of the same book (p. 54).

C. opens the next chapter with a brief encomium of the great Norwegian scholar Egil Kraggerud, though C. will reject some of Kraggerud's proposed emendations. C. responds to Kraggerud's criticism of his own work, for example at 10.366, where Kraggerud rejects C.'s notion of quando qua causal conjunction (p. 63). In the next chapter, C. considers the value of stylistic analysis, beginning with asyndeton and coordination: ‘Virgil deconstructs the architecture of hypotactically conceived sentences only to recompose it … in no hierarchical order … to underline moments of high narrative tension’ (p. 71). C. compares a simile from Aen. 9.57–64 with the ‘almost unrecognizable’ Homeric model (Il. 17.657–65) (p. 73). This chapter encompasses further similar analyses of Virgilian paratactic style – a rich read here, for C. explains how important style is for establishing Virgil's text.

The seventh chapter opens with an amusing anecdote that calls for civility among Virgilian critics, a fitting preamble to the aporia of line Aen. 4.436, ‘the most difficult of the whole poem’ (p. 82). According to Servius, Varius and Tucca had read dederis. Such ancient authority must be met with sensible counter-arguments for dederit, whose subject would be Aeneas, not Anna, though she is addressed by Dido. C. runs through all the possibilities here – what kind of ablative morte would have to be, what the meaning of veniam must be – to explain his hesitant adoption of dederit. ‘Rather than a suicide threat, her words would then refer to the prospect of dying with a broken heart’ (p. 85).

C. next considers the Gates of Sleep (Aen. 6.893–8), an editorial issue of emendation vs deletion vs transposition or some variation of these. Much of the issue here revolves around the phrase his dictis and to what words the narrator refers. Is Anchises speaking directly in lines 893–6? If so, his dictis refers to these lines specifically, which is the position C. adopts, using the Homeric model for guidance, while looking back to Heyne for the simplest explanation of horn vs ivory.

C. closes with an ‘Addendum’, which despite its title is the book's most significant chapter. Here, one of the greatest textual critics and interpreters of Virgil lays bare his editorial principles – a must-read for all students of classical philology – using H. Kantorowicz’s metaphor of a legal case. No small part of this addendum's value lies in the way in which C. tells the story of textual criticism's origins in Lorenzo Valla's judgement upon the Donatio Constantini.

This chapter ends with a tour de force: C. addresses head-on the position of R. Tarrant (Texts, Editors and Readers [2016]), which argues that textual criticism is a form of persuasive rhetoric. C.'s tone is respectful but firm: ‘The vocabulary of textual criticism includes two terms [evidence and witnesses] tinged with no rhetorical colour and inspired by no metaphor’ (p. 93). ‘Data are the sovereign remedy to the gimmicks of persuasion, which covers its dearth of substantial arguments with appealing artifices’ (p. 94). C. exposes the fallaciousness of Tarrant's rhetoric-driven approach (p. 98), returning to Kantorowicz’s metaphor of the textual critic as a trial judge: the editor ‘must resort to internal criteria, and it is precisely in these cases that the textual critic attains a level of refinement unknown to the judge’ (p. 102).

C. closes by raising the alarm that someone with Tarrant's professional clout might encourage ‘a critical relativisation, as if the truth was just a matter of opinion’ (p. 105). ‘In marked opposition …, I believe truth cannot be relativised’, ‘Trusting evidence and testimonies is the only path that leads to truth’ (p. 105). What a refreshing thing to read, especially from the scholar who, after C. Segal's English publication of The Rhetoric of Imitation (1986), more than any other critic shaped the way in which we approach Virgil's text interpretively. Who believes in truth any more? Apparently at least C. does, and perhaps this slender tome will challenge others to do the same.