This slim volume, an English version of S.’s 2010 Rome master's thesis, promises a systematic study of the relationship between the third-century b.c.e. literary epigrammatist Leonidas of Tarentum and ancient Cynicism. More precisely, though, the topic of the book is the apparent tension in Leonidas between humble subject matter and elaborate poetic style. Scholars have long found Leonidas’ sympathetic epigrams on the lives of simple folk, his depiction of his own principled poverty and the ethical exhortations he addresses to his reader redolent of Cynicism (cf. p. 4 n. 7). Despite early suggestions to the contrary (pp. 4–5) S. too ultimately allows that Leonidas was influenced by Cynicism to some significant degree (p. 75). Nevertheless, he insists that a single-minded critical focus on apparently Cynic elements has hindered an appreciation of the remarkable stylistic features of Leonidas’ poetry. Packed with uncommon, often elaborately-confected, words, this style seems to jar with the poet's lowly subject matter and ethics. While earlier critics deplored the style as gratuitous ornamentation (‘tedious’ per A.S.F. Gow, ‘Leonidas of Tarentum’, CQ 8 [1958], 1), more recent studies (e.g. K.J. Gutzwiller, Poetic Garlands [1998], p. 90) have read the disjunction between style and content as a deliberate strategy, saying, in nuce, Leonidas imparts a stylistic grandeur to humble subjects to exalt them and/or to create humorous irony. S. claims that Leonidas’ style, especially the minute technical names for tools and the elaborate adjectives describing them, is placed in the service of a distinctly un-Cynic agenda, being calculated to bring to life – in S.’s words to ‘animate’ – not just the world of the poor, but specifically of productive labour.

The work consists of a brief introduction, two chapters, two brief appendices on philosophical topics, plus bibliography and indexes. Each chapter contrasts the treatment of a theme in Leonidas, poverty and work respectively, with Cynic texts (treated here, regrettably, more as a grab bag of motifs, anecdotes and ethical slogans than as literary works in their own right). In the first chapter, S. examines in turn Leonidas’ depiction of his own life and outlook, his epigrams on rich and poor figures, negative portrayals of inter alia the Cynic Sochares (AP 6.298), and finally a pair of epigrams (AP 7.648, 7.440) on a certain Aristocrates. According to S., this final pair of epigrams celebrates Aristocrates’ ‘constructive social role’, a successful, socially-engaged, and thus un-Cynic, lifestyle of a kind denied to the poet himself (because of his exile, mentioned in AP 7.715). This section is representative of problems that mar the work as a whole. S. proposes a significant revision of the usual view of Leonidas’ ethics. Previous studies have located an enunciation or crystallisation of the over-arching ethical themes of the corpus (be they Cynic or not) particularly in the diatribistic (e.g. AP 7.472) and ‘autobiographical’ epigrams (i.e. epigrams delivered by the poet propria persona, e.g. AP 6.300). This is the basic approach taken, for example, in the seminal studies of M. Gigante, L'Edera di Leonida (1971, pp. 45–55) and K.J. Gutzwiller, Poetic Garlands (1998, pp. 102–12). S., by contrast, reads the autobiographical epigrams negatively, as expressions of an un-Cynic aversion to poverty (‘a dreadful condition from which one has to escape’, p. 13). This negative reading comes at the price of disregarding the apparent valorisation of (a certain kind of) poverty in AP 6.302, in which Leonidas addresses a group of mice invading his hut. Despite the language of the poem, which smacks of a kind of pop-philosophical ethics (αὐτάρκης, 3; ταύτην ᾐνέσαμεν βιοτήν, 4; λιτἄ, 7, is not just ‘a common adjective’ [p. 19] but practically an ethical buzzword by the third century), S. insists that the encounter with the mice is instead ironic and un-Cynic, and – as if either of these propositions prevented it from expressing an ethic – ‘depleted of any moral content’ (p. 17). For a positive ethic, S. looks instead to the two epigrams on Aristocrates (AP 7.648 and 7.440), ‘a figure with whom [Leonidas] particularly agrees’ (p. 37), as S. asserts. This shift of focus appears arbitrary. Leaving aside the question of whether the two epigrams are even about the same individual, it is questionable whether the assessments they give of their subject are as uniformly positive or significant as S. makes out. The sincerity of 7.440, whose subject is commemorated as a kind of renaissance man, seems unalloyed; of 7.648, which features a belaboured metaphor comparing children to pillars of a house and ends with a misogynistic sting-in-the-tail (γυναικῶν … ἀλιτοϕροσύνην, 9–10), less so. In any case the sentiments are not particularly strongly authorised elsewhere by Leonidas himself, and it seems quite an overstatement to claim, as S. does, ‘[t]hroughout this text [AP 7.648] the poet sums up all the important motifs of his work’ (p. 37).

The second chapter, on work, focuses on Leonidas’ use of specialised banausic terminology and his ‘animated’ descriptions of labourers’ tools in dedicatory epigrams. These features of Leonidas’ poetry, S. argues, once again put him at odds with the Cynics. The Cynics attributed a positive moral value to poverty itself and practised a kind of ‘productive idleness’ devoted solely to the cultivation of the Cynic tropos biou. Leonidas, meanwhile, depicts poverty (his own and others’) negatively, but valorises humble figures content with the bare essentials obtained through diligent labour, represented by the tools dedicated at the end of a lifetime of activity. Through close word-by-word study of these dedications (see esp. pp. 44–57) S. effectively shows how Leonidas’ descriptions dramatise the productive power of the tools even as they sit at rest. Even so, the argument remains underdeveloped and narrowly formulated. For instance, apart from a few inchoate pages (pp. 62–4) on the ideology of labour in Hesiod's Works and Days, S. provides little in the way of literary perspective for the ideas he finds in Leonidas. How, for instance, might Leonidas’ description of low-class labourers and their tools compare with Posidippus’ roughly contemporary descriptions of elaborate, high-class objets d'art and their often famous creators? Such questions go unanswered because of the work's narrow focus on refuting Cynic influence.

In a total of only 93 pages there is still material that could have been cut as extraneous. More than once this reviewer felt the sensation of reading half-digested notes rather than a polished argument. To cite just one instance, a long paragraph at the top of p. 55 digresses from the argument only to come to no definite conclusions of its own. There are occasional mistakes in the Greek. The phrase σκότιοι μύες (‘furtive mice’) in AP 6.302 is printed twice (pp. 15 and 16) as a single word with two accents (σκότιοιμύες) and called an ‘irreverent adjective’. Since works as recent as 2012 appear in the bibliography, the omission of a germane article by N. Piacenza, ‘Callimaco, Leonida di Taranto e la poetica dell’ὀλίγος: spunti per un confronto e per una rilettura di AP 6,300 e 302’, ARF 12 (2010), 79–92, was surprising.

S.’s negative claim, that Leonidas, though influenced by Cynicism, is no Cynic, is well-enough taken. Yet it is by no means new and somewhat underwhelming in the absence of clearer and more convincingly argued positive claims. Rather than being published in their present form, the ideas here, especially some stimulating stylistic observations in Chapter 2, ought to have been allowed to mature and develop.