The truism that the ancient world is not a time-free zone can wobble a bit when one is confronted with texts of unknown or doubtful authors which have been variously dated to points a few centuries apart, or indeed with collections such as the Anacreontea, where six centuries seem to make little difference to style or matter. G.'s intriguing and challenging book is, at its broadest point, a plea that we jettison our obsession with historical context and contextualising: anonymity is not just a scholarly puzzle to be solved by assigning the text an author and a time, it can also be used as a strategy.

G.'s title leads us to expect that his subject will be texts whose author is unknown. Though his book does address works circulating sine auctore (Latin for ‘anonymous’, as he notes), the elasticity of his use of ‘anonymity’ is clear from the first text he discusses, the Res Gestae of the supreme auctor, Augustus. Here, and in the other two texts discussed in the first section of this wide-ranging book (Ovid's Ibis and the Pseudo-Senecan Octavia), we are concerned with anonymity in a text rather than of it. The Res Gestae funnels its author's previous incarnations into the climactic event of his official naming as Augustus, but it also seeks to anonymise him. Where Augustus boasts that he rebuilt the theatre of Pompey without inscribing his own name (RG 20), for instance, he insinuates that everything else might come from him. G. remarks wryly that modern scholarship on ‘the Augustan regime’ seems to have swallowed this gambit. When it comes to his enemies, Augustus erases the name of Antony, who often appears in the RG through antonomasia (a pun G. resists!). Ovid's Ibis is even more conspicuous in its refusal to name the target of its curse, which is particularly noticeable given that a defixio works by naming. Ovid takes away from his enemy the name that is his own and substitutes a form of periphrastic reference that is always in the poet's power. The pile-up of mythical names in the poem only taunts Ibis with what he will continue to lack, and it is the names of the victors, G. remarks, that feature, not those of the victims. Is it awkward that Byblis, Canace, Thyestes, Myrrha and others are named? No, says G., these were characters who harmed themselves (an example of how tightly G. argues his theses). The Pseudo-Senecan Octavia becomes, in G.'s reading, an effective piece of elite propaganda by convincing us that it could have been written by anyone; it seeks to install itself as cultural memory. The unspeakableness of the imperial family is matched by the antonomasias that indicate its members by relationship and function rather than by name. This is particularly the case for the play's eponymous heroine: ‘Just as the unnamed Octavia is constantly reformatted into her precedents and doubles, and vice versa, so the play is set free to occupy multiple contexts, multiple temporalities’ (p. 114).

Section 2 deals with texts for which we have little or no information about their authors: Phaedrus’ Fables, the Laus Pisonis and Calpurnius Siculus’ Eclogues. G. suspects that what Phaedrus tells us about himself (which is all we know about him) is fabricated, and he reads a self-ironising story of failure and decline into the fables of this poet who will only be known by his pseudonym. When it comes to the Laus Pisonis, the text's generic praise is not a poetic failing but a deliberate attempt to write a panegyric that fits all times, in which Piso's versatility and adaptability reflect the poem's. This move allows G. to subject the poem to a rich close reading. Calpurnius Siculus exploits the pastoral motif that the characters are out of the loop and ‘have no idea how to paint the political structures they see in the far-off distance’ (p. 191). This blankness is a way of ‘future-proofing’ the work in an unpredictable climate where emperors and dynasties are expiring all the time. It is a strategy for a context, but a context that keeps repeating itself: ‘For no matter where you stand, it is always an Augustan liberation from civil war, a foundation and rescue, a golden age permanently renewed’ (p. 197).

Part 3 deals with two pairs of prose texts in two chapters: first Seneca's Apocolocyntosis and Petronius’ [?] Satyrica and then Tacitus’ Dialogus and [Longinus’] On the Sublime. The first and last of these texts have in common a copious use of quotation. In the case of the Apocolocyntosis these quotations-become-formulas serve the text's main strategy, the proverbialisation of Claudius. It is one of G.'s recurring points that anonymisation can serve the purpose of turning what is said by no one into what is said by everyone. In the Apocolocyntosis quotations from well-known authors become tags and so withdraw themselves from the grasp of intertextuality (one of G.'s targets is ‘our neurotic intertextualist fetish in Latin studies’, p. 209). The Satyrica is treated to an illuminating analysis revolving around Trimalchio's obsession with tituli and branding. The final chapter is given to two texts that address the issue of historical context quite explicitly. Is the decline of letters a political or a moral issue? The two texts move in opposite directions on this question. Tacitus’ Dialogus, which starts with a specific event (the launch of Curiatius Maternus’ tragedy) is constantly framing the words and behaviour of its dramatis personae as customary and habitual; it is ‘a text that repeatedly shuns the one-off for the over-again’ (p. 253). Here, as throughout, G. stresses the ‘compulsively rerun traumas and public discourse of the imperial period’ (p. 254). On the Sublime is quite upfront in its ambition to speak for all time, which is the mark of sublimity itself. [Longinus’] promiscuous quoting ‘renders all the passages he quotes radically timeless and authorless’ (p. 263).

Perhaps ‘anonymity’ in G.'s subtitle is the wrong word. This is a study of the power of anonymising, and G. gives us a penetrating analysis of two of its strategies: anonymising as an exercise of the poet's power to give or withhold, confirm or remove identities and anonymising as the aspiration to a literary timelessness or proverbialised voice of the people. In G.'s previous monograph, Juvenal and the Poetics of Anonymity (2017), he introduced us to a satirist who sees all but (unlike Horace) keeps himself out of the line of vision. Documenting the dangers of being conspicuous, this satirist disappears into a crowd from which his voice can emerge as something like a choral voice. G. has thought long and hard about literary anonymity and the challenge it presents to our scholarly practices, and his new book will repay the same thought on the part of its readers. The readings are close, illuminating and often brilliant, and the scholarship is scrupulous. The insistent colloquialism of G.'s style, engaging or annoying depending on your taste and mood, is anything but anonymous.