Tam Graece quam Latine – pro nefas! – disertissimum (p. 155). Serious Latinists will turn to this store of scholarly know-how multi-variably to polytropically for years to come. The H. trademark specialities are all here. In a comparison H. would not make (not even a reference occurs), this is what Gordon Williams' late-1960's vintage version (in Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry) of the ‘Greek :: Latin’ Question can look like in this generation; above all, an expanded field for stocking ‘Latin’, with prose backing up the still core treasures from Parnassus, but the limits for the Latin language and Roman ways of managing ‘Greek’ vastly engrossed and thickened, to approach the comprehensiveness practised in contemporary classical linguistics (indeed ‘an abundance of evidence’, p. 55; accessed in superb indexes, where ‘Passages Discussed’ for once means it). GtoL makes a handsome volume, with half the pages of T&O (though the font is a squeeze, and today's shrunk footnotes verge on the asthenopic). Material is introduced accessibly and ‘further reading’ precisely specified. If this does not stay the chef d’œuvre, it will take a monster of a follow-up.

H. finesses the ‘Origins’ Question, starting up with the ‘generation’ of Varro (the other book-end is ≤ ‘Tacitus’). He targets what writers in Latin tell us about their relation to Greek writings. How writers worked with categories, affiliations, branding, including ways that textuality was archived, packaged, commodified, within the heavy pressure for comparison and its concomitant, the rich potentialities for displacement. Then he works out his own trunk-version of all this without straining after concurrence or masking where he branches off into bricolage. The book quarters its agenda under the heads ‘Time’, ‘Space’ (context) and ‘Words’, ‘Genre’ (text): (1) Greek literature was ranged as an evolving sequence under revision; manufacturing the Latin counterpart was thought of as ‘war’. (2) Particular cultural settings set Greek literature before Romans. Personalities and institutions bossed reception; events staged and modelled performance, audience, critique; customised venues differentiated ambience, along tourist trails. (3) The Greek language was calibrated against Latin according to a raft of apprehensions, and Romans exploited the two languages differentially. (4) Classificatory architectonics developed Greek counterparts to structure broad domains and conjure up strategies for expropriation, hybridisation, subversion: the prose ‘supergenres’ [sic] of philosophy, history, oratory, and in verse, that of hexameter poetry.

(1) reports the accounts and paraded presumptions of Latin writers for the history of Greek and of Latin in prose and poetry, assessing the metaphorics brought into play for parallels and heteronormities. How could Greek cope with having to follow Homer and Latin with not having Homer to follow? How invariant was binary thinking about literature? What ‘first’ was not ‘new(-to-Latin)’? Did Latin authors image-build corpora after their own physique? The emphasis is on what they say, so differentials in authority are bound to flatten. (H.’s players tend not to cheat, err, bungle, misrepresent.)

(2) packs in material evidence for literary culture to ground the books' versions of their base in live sociality as Romans tasted versions of ‘Greece’. The SatNav routes from Greeks sold, magnetised, sucked to Rome and environs, the villa lifestyle they played into, the unfurling panoply of state theatre, urban education, book trade, entertainment and egghead. A vast cast of individuals make their way ever farther afield. Through the expat Greece simulacrum in South Italy and multi-cultural Sicily, to reach Hellas, Athenian image-repertoire fixated for good. Thence crossing over to an inflatable Rhodes absurdity, traipsing through the ports, provinces and Greek-mixed worlds of Asia (Minor). A time-out to Hellas gone west at Marseilles. Finally to the Alexandrian world's end of late Ptolemaic, then shocking ^?Roman^?, Egypt. Moving from centre to periphery must straightforwardly load the survey one way (‘to Greece’), before these Romans bring themselves back, wised up, imbued, sparked – variously Hellenised to pitch elite sensibilities – by Being There.

(3) pitches into Roman authors, including those who wrote in Greek and/or included Greek in their Latin writings, and the prevailing exclusion zone otherwise produced in Roman texts by intense self-abnegation. How to deal with Greek as reference language, its distinct/ive names, lexicon, phonetics, the evocations and feel? What does follow for whom and for what if Latin is the heavier, harsher, straighter language? If words transliterate and naturalise, or won't and don't? Then there is the business of intertext focussed as interculture. In particular, what techniques governed triangulation with superimposed antecedents in playing a Latin model off against a, or especially its, Greek model, as intensifies in imperial Latin, which does not sever ties to Greek? (Showcased: Polyb. 3.47–55~Liv. 21.29–47~Sil. 3.477–643; Ap. Rhod. 1.721–898, 3.1069–1264~Virg. Aen. 4.219–329~Val. Fl. 1.561–2.424; Theocr. 11 etc.~Virg. Ecl. 2 etc.~Calp. Sic. 2 etc.; Eur. Med. 1–8~Enn. Med. frr. 208–20 Jocelyn~Sen. Med. passim; Plat. Tim. esp. 32c–33b~Cic. Tim. esp. 16–17; Ar. Hist. An. 6.576a~Varr. RR 2.7~Colum. 6.29~Plin. HN 11.168 9; Arat. Phaen. 79–87~Cic. ND 2.109~Germ. Phaen. 79–84~Manil. 1.331–6; Thuc. 2.51.5~Lucr. 6.1138–1286~Ov Met. 7.283–660 [pp. 166–219]. Unexcerptable Manilius is the one clunker, where 331–6 revolve back on a ringing progression from 145, via esp. 305–7, besides snapping respicit’s acrostichal 334–40.) So to the development of rhetorically pointed Latin staccato, exploiting pointers in Greek but ratcheting up the effect to fuel a distinctively ‘Romanised’ medium that saturated re-elaborated Greek classics with the loud difference of Latin melodrama, estrangement, sublimation. Finally, can we pinpoint changing strategies for translating ‘Greek’ – data, metrics, language-specific effects, figures, jeux?

(4) delivers GtoL’s (strictly ‘Literary’) Answer. ‘Greek to Latin’ provides one obtrusive grid through which Latin writers characterised their works as against other sorts and individualised them within their locales. Plotting differences between and within a language's whole library requires considerable flattening (esp. in authors said to say their characters' lines etc.), but H. hits on particularly supportable schemata within which to contain his correct view of literature as self-promoting contestation. Prose includes more and other than philosophy, oratory, history, even with their interhybridised crossovers thrown in. But these are the self-proclaimed and arguably ‘in possession’ heavyweights in triopolising prestige, the power of orthodoxy. Prose rhythm learned ‘in Asia’ provides a livery for Latin texts to place themselves spectrally between in and against, adapted and set aside (the latter in historiography). They were calculated to inflect ‘Greece’ and preferred/proferred modems generating ‘Romes’. H. hits on the concept of generic ‘grounding’ to catch the strategies that stabilise the self-positioning proposed by each text for where it belongs on the prose planet. The staking of the claim tends towards automatic concession, but the idea builds from blunt obviousness such as our ‘literal’ whereabouts from explicit to connotational, off to the idiomatic nuancing of particular socio-cultural niches intimated by forms of address, audience-postulation, communicational channels. (This is where lead boots criticism – not H. – notoriously stints imaginary worlds by supplementing information-meagre texts as if outlining quasi-real settings-cum-situations.)

In poetry the very differently projected ‘supergenre’ is (provocatively) nominated, again calling in all manner of ancient witnesses, as hexametric verse. A vast alliance of dactylic legions take their positions: narrative-didactic-pastoral-satiric-occasional-epigraphic brothers-in-arms. These variously deploy the positionings dubbed onto their Greek antecedents and opponents, they evolve shifting (always loaded) suggestions about their own relationships and, the argument runs, they pitch in and club together, demonstrably hybridising away ever more intricately, but always promoting their ensemble by webbing mutual intra-activity into proceedings rather than admit intertextual business with lesser regiments to the fold (or arena). Hard to prove and credit: satire's there to disregard epic along with the rest? Elegy its own fan-club. Iambic attacks anything in uniform, not excluding its own suicide vest mission. Etc., etc. There are good Roman reasons why dactylic verse should rule (in a word, ‘Virgil’, and the reflex, ‘Ovid’), but there are other things to do with that than manoeuvring Greek-bounced propositions to suit (‘Horace’ keeps both ends burning, hexametrics/lyrics, melding into the literary paradigm of self-melding).

GtoL sets about The Task with cultural identity, political spin, ideology-building trained in the sights. The Impossible Task, for me, of deriving Warship from Ocean. Greeks (and many more un-, not-that-, more-than-Greek Greeks) spoke Greek, but they were never an ancient state, even of mind, not until the Romans dubbed Hellenes ‘Greeks’ (the ethnic slur/^!banter^! never adopted by one) and for a myriad purposes embraced the fantasy that those others might play as a (seductive) entity, rather as, conversely, the Hellene cosmos farcically minimised polyglot normality all around, including not least their own. But me no buts, what all ‘but’ had me shut the book, though, was not enabling distortion of the blankly asymptotic face-off between the world-city's imperial Latin and the superduper lingua franca they had worked with/against since forever, but every time GtoL fell into proposing relations between ‘the two nations’.