Recent years have seen a growing trend among Classicists: new studies fail to accord some of the relevant scholarship due consideration. Occasionally, of course, just cause can be pleaded: the sheer volume of work on, say, Virgil might seem to warrant a degree of exclusion. But when the ancient text in hand remains to date comparatively little explored, as is the case with Ciris, then the latest book on it can reasonably be expected to include a critical discussion of all noteworthy investigations that preceded. Whereas that was indeed what G. Bretzigheimer offered in her groundbreaking essay of 2005 (in N. Holzberg [ed.], Die Appendix Vergiliana, pp. 142–224), she herself would be passed over in complete silence by I. Peirano (The Rhetoric of the Roman Fake [2012], pp. 173–204). B. Kayachev (Allusion and Allegory: Studies in the Ciris [2016]) at least referenced both predecessors, but no more than that, and now W., who knows Bretzigheimer – she, like Peirano, determines the late first century ad as the earliest possible date for Ciris – confines himself to a brief mention of her name. His focus lying solely on pinpointing a date for the epyllion and ascribing it to a specific author, W. is somehow trapped in thrall to German-language Quellenforschung and the biographical approach of bygone times. The conclusions drawn back then are the only findings he discusses, and of the 150 titles listed in his bibliography, a mere 11 date from the twenty-first century (6 of them bear his name) and 17 from the 1990s, with commentaries and handbooks representing over one-third of those 28. The seminal theories that inform modern literary criticism and that, some 30 years ago, first made their presence and validity felt in Classics, when prominent scholars such as A. Barchiesi, D. Fowler, P. Hardie, and S. Hinds applied them to Augustan poetry, have not influenced W. at all in his analysis of Ciris’ position within the context of that same poetry.

Consequently, both the method he follows and the findings he presents function much like a time machine, taking readers back at least 50 years. His old-school approach to literature is even matched by his diction: peremptory claims and a reprimanding tone reserved for naughty scholars at variance with Teacher's ideas. W. begins with an attempt to prove that Ovid was an imitator who drew on an anonymous poet's Ciris not only for his version of the myth (Met. 8.6–151), but also, from the Amores on, for numerous passages in his other works. Turning to Virgil, W. finds that he initially provided pre-texts for the epyllion – the Bucolica and Georgica – but that, when writing the Aeneid, he switched roles and became an imitator as well. These interdependencies, W. deduces, point to the year 26 bc as the publication date for Ciris. The anonymous author, whom W. also has writing Catalepton 9 around the same time, must therefore have been Asinius Pollio, and corroborating evidence is found in Horace, who addresses that very individual in Carm. 2.1, thus dedicating the entire second liber of his Odes to him. That, in W.’s view, has to be a tribute to the man as author of Ciris, especially since the book's final poem opens with an ‘allusion’ to the work itself: Carm. 2.20.1–2, non usitata nec tenui ferar / pinna biformis per liquidum aethera allude to Ciris 50, tenui condescendens aethera penna. Wholly consistent with all that, again to W.’s mind, is the relationship between Ciris and the poems of Propertius: on the one hand, ‘direkte Abhängigkeit’ (p. 223) that has the epyllion's author borrowing straight from the elegist's mouth, on the other, visible ‘imitative Benützung’ (p. 233), which results from Propertius’ own borrowing from the borrower. Tibullus is only an imitator in his first liber, and his carmine purpurea est Nisi coma (1.4.63) can be taken as ‘versteckter Hinweis auf ein jüngst verfaßtes Gedicht’ (p. 236).

How can we ‘prove’ – a stock verb in W.’s analyses – that, for example, a poet of Ovid's stature chose to imitate a colleague whose work, in W.’s own words, contains ‘einfach zu viel Unbeholfenes, ja geradezu Mißlungenes’ (p. 210) and is thus ‘gewiß kein Meisterwerk’ (p. 216)? In the examination of passages from Ovid and Virgil for which W. believes there is a pre-text, he establishes at the outset several criteria for the identification of such imitation, and his indicators include repetition, once or several times, of a given word. He illustrates what he means by citing (p. 30) Ars 3.65, utendum est aetate, cito pede labitur aetas as an ‘imitation’ of Tib. 1.8.47–8, at tu, dum primi floret tibi temporis aetas / utere. But Ovid would surely have been capable of articulating this commonplace without recourse to imitation, quite apart from the fact that the two lines can hardly be deemed strikingly similar. W.’s principle is a purely mechanical one: he seeks out signs of agreement in words and phrases. Nowhere does he show signs of taking into account the lesson he could have learnt from modern intertextuality studies: when a poeta doctus such as Ovid summons up another's words, it is because the lector doctus is supposed to recognise those and appreciate the arte allusiva at play. And the keen-eyed commentator doctus, R. Gibson, finds nothing of the sort in Ars 3.65: his only ad loc. reference is to dies 1 in Otto, Sprichwörter. The textual ‘correspondences’ listed by W. as proof that Augustan poets imitated the author of Ciris are based on his own use of indices, commentaries that offer so-called parallels and the ThLL, but not on any effort to uncover the poetic intention behind verbal allusions before considering whether verse B could possibly have been influenced by verse A.

W. is very obviously intent on declaring Ciris a pre-text for the Augustan poets, and in order to make of those its receptive readers, he has to come up with a known literary author of that day. In his convenient attribution then of yet another pseudo-Virgilian text, Catalepton 9, to the man of his choice, W. forgets one thing, however: that particular poem belongs to the kind typically anchored fast within the context of a liber. In this particular case, furthermore, scholars have now plausibly argued that the liber was designed as the literary lusus of a Virgil impersonator. Why, W. did not think to ask when ‘identifying’ the author of Ciris, does his man's famous name never appear in the manuscripts, with even the alleged imitatores never mentioning Ciris and Asinius Pollio? Had W. read the latest research on pseudepigrapha, it would have acquainted him with one crucial aspect: it seems evident that the authors deliberately remain anonymous because that allows them to mask themselves as long familiar writers and thereby set the scene for the intended lusus. Readers are supposed to detect and savour the skill with which impersonators slip into character and wield the intertextual tools that create allusions not only to the classic works of the great authors impersonated, but also to those of more recent writers. Ciris and other such texts need to be interpreted with that lusus and all its implications in mind: W.’s uncritical reviving of historicising approaches will simply not do. It is also high time that Classicists recognised this epyllion as a work of poetry and produced, for example, incisive analyses of the way in which its author handles the material. Bretzigheimer has already taken the first steps and demonstrated how masterfully the anonymous author retells the myth by applying canny structuring and psychology. That is the road that ought to be travelled and not the one that turns into a sort of cross-author hunt for the elusive Mr X. W.’s book has shown where that can end.