This Critical Guide to Latin Literature occupies a new nook, sliding between Companions and Handbooks. The volume editors position it vis-à-vis the Cambridge History of Latin Literature (1982), the Blackwell Companion to Latin Literature (2005) and the CUP series Roman Literature and its Contexts (1990–2016), sharing aspects with each but like none. Just as appropriate a comparandum might be J. Sandys’s Companion to Latin Studies (1910), an encyclopaedic treatment of material (law, geography, art, epigraphy etc.) ‘as would be most useful to the student of Latin literature’. But the Guide aims not for a gathering of data, but at ‘ideas-driven’ chapters with a programmatic subjectivity, ‘as we try to critique or at least reflect on the ideological underlay of what we do, as well as doing it’. The contributors, who were ‘encouraged to be opinionated’ (p. 3), cut across authors and genres, constructing a set of road maps to methodological and theoretical paths through a broadly conceived Latin literature (‘a term of convenience and intended inclusively’, p. 4). There are discussions of scholarly tools (editing), familiar topics needing to be made strange again (authorial identity, intertextuality), reports from neighbouring disciplines with their own historiography and methodology (linguistics, medieval Latin) and an urgent demand that more than just ‘literature’ – however we define that – be brought into the conversation. Above all, these maps demand that we pay attention to how we are travelling and that we both learn something about and show respect to the varied and variegated terrain.

One enters this atlas through a cover featuring an image of headless, winged female antiquity, steered by the phallogocentric joystick of modernity. Mercifully, this is not a metaphor for the volume. The dedication to John Henderson reminds us exactly how influential Cambridge Latin has been in the last 40 years. The editors have taken real care to enlist experts from different traditions and backgrounds to cover the (primarily Anglophone) field. There is a range of stylistic approaches, from the list format (J. Stover on ‘Medieval Latin’) to a nearly aphoristic style (M. Lowrie on ‘Political Thought’). The bibliographies – wisely in this case appended to individual chapters – are a rich delight (the preface notes that the chapters were in final form by late 2019). These scholars regard their perspectives and approaches as necessary to the interpretation of Latin literature: they aim not to provide information for consultation, but to offer ways of seeing that will change our views of the material. The best chapters are insistent both on our conversion and on the possibility of more than one valid approach to a text.

This will be of necessity an overview/evaluation of the Guide, not a review of individual parts – this is all the more necessary in that fully three-quarters of the contributors are my friends, some of them also past or present students, teachers and colleagues. The chapters proceed from what might traditionally be viewed as core to periphery. The first, I. Peirano Garrison’s thoughtful piece on ‘Canons’, leads off four pieces on big basic topics; those following broaden to Medieval and ‘Neo-Latin’ (Y. Haskell), ‘Reception’ (J. Uden) and ‘National Traditions’ (T. Fuhrer); the volume finishes up with six chapters on topics traditionally seen as more adjacent than central, from ‘Latin literature and Linguistics’ (a nicely acerbic J. Clackson) to ‘Latin Literature and Greek’ (S. Goldhill). The one chapter that feels out of place, and in another such guide might come next to, for example, ‘Periodicity’, G. Kelly’s wide-ranging exposition of the many ways in which we organise the times we study, is the eminently clear and helpful piece on ‘Editing’, by R.A. Kaster and S.J. Huskey, which in this volume sits between ‘Reception’ and ‘Linguistics’. The point may be to remind us that textual criticism, both printed and digital, is as much an approach as each of the other topics: as Kaster rightly says, following C. Damon, ‘every edition represents a unique theory’ (p. 516).

What did I learn? A great deal. From every chapter, I gained a lot of specifics and an overall sense of the topic; the ample footnotes could in many instances provide topics for doctoral dissertations. I also gained a clear sense of where the contributors sit and how they divide and understand the issues facing us as a field. Where topics do not receive their own treatment, the general index (e.g. to ‘gender’, ‘enslaved persons’, ‘diversity’, ‘colonialism’, ‘law’) allows readers to trace their own themes. From ‘Author and Identity’ (A. Sharrock) and ‘Intertextuality’ (D. O’Rourke and A. Pelttari) to ‘Material Culture’ (M. Squire and J. Elsner) and ‘Philosophy’ (K. Volk) there is a great deal here that I plan to assign in future postgraduate seminars.

I also learned that despite decades of attempts to make one subfield of classical studies (‘Literature’) inter- and multi-disciplinary, scholars of ‘related fields’ still feel unheard, especially but not exclusively the writers on linguistics, political thought, imperial Greek and historians. In concluding, I will linger briefly on the last, exempli gratia, since it hit the closest to home. Readers of M. Lavan on ‘Latin literature and Roman History’ will learn that historians do not pay much attention to literary scholars – and that this could be remedied by literary scholars changing their work so that it does not alienate historians (p. 817, strongly on p. 841, ‘Latinists often seem to go out of their way to alienate historians’). But one might take a moment to reflect on the fact that the field of Latin literature as we knew it when I began my career in 1981 (the year I went to graduate school) no longer exists. This is in large part due (in my probably blinkered view) to its ceding so much ground to ‘history’ that Latin ‘literary’ study is no longer recognisable as such. Partly this results from the flight from philology of the 1970s and 1980s – but where Greek studies got Derrida and Lévi-Strauss, Segal and Zeitlin, Latin studies were essentially taken over by the new historicism, a kind of intertextuality tethered to a genealogical model and without the Kristeva cool (with apologies to G.B. Conte) and Sir Ronald Syme. Lavan ignores that general change in the field of Latin studies, which remain overwhelmingly historical. L. Edmunds asked in 2005, of this turn towards ‘something like a poetics of culture for ancient Rome’, not ‘how far will it go?’ but ‘How far can it go?’ (TAPA 135 [2005], 3). His wry optimism that such a turn might come to terms with the great truth, as promoted by many philosophers of history and articulated for Classics by D. Kennedy (among others), that ‘if historicism achieved its aim of understanding a culture of the past “in its own terms”, the result would be totally unintelligible except to … that culture and moment … History must act … as a translator, an interpreter’ (The Arts of Love [1993], p. 8), seems 20 years on to be positively Quixotic. Despite Gibson and Whitton’s editorial optimism (p. 34), things are not looking particularly rosy for the texty among us. Students on the Roman side of the ‘classical philology’ track in my department, at any rate, are committed to studying slavery, race, law, medicine, ecology, identity – all sometimes ‘and/in Latin literature’, be that of the classical, medieval or early modern period.

This is not a bad thing. Fields change, and change is vital. But the continued expression of literature from Literature + X must stop. Any ancient text can accommodate a plurality of approaches. Alienation has no place in our endeavour. A scholar does not have to become a historian, or a literary expert (e.g.), to benefit from learning about different readings and understandings, which in turn help us rethink the problems we tackle. In the words of the immortal George Harrison, ‘try some’ – you do not have to buy some to enjoy the benefits of the big tent that Classics is and should be. This Guide, at its best, offers paths into the intersecting landscapes that open views from, and into, that tent. It will be interesting to see what ‘Latin literature’ looks like in its wake.