Given current interest in imperial Greek literature, Aelian has been due for a book. Thanks to Steven Smith, he now has a provocative, engaging monograph that should appeal to scholars of the Second Sophistic, but also of literary and philosophical culture in the High Empire, political dissent in Rome and, naturally, ancient conceptions of humanity's animal other. Aelian is an Italian-born miscellanist writing in Greek in the first decades of the third century, best known for his Varia historia (VH). S.’s main focus, however, is on Aelian's longest and perhaps least-read work, the De natura animalium (NA), a collection of two hundred-odd short anecdotes and observations about creatures of the land, sea and air.

S.’s study is primarily a cultural-historical one, exploring Aelian's meaning in his contemporary moment rather than his source material or formal and linguistic characteristics. In particular, S. has a strong sense of Aelian as an alienated figure (5: ‘generally disenchanted with human society, Aelian is a personality at odds with Severan Rome’), close to, but cut off from, the glamour of sophistic star culture and the power and luxury of the emperors’ court. Thus he writes about animals rather than people and approaches easy moral and scientific certainties with questions and ambiguities. He further embraces an aesthetic of poikilia (‘variety’) that markedly rejects unity of form or of voice. The result, in S.’s view, is a probing social and cultural critique disarmingly embodied in a mass of diverting and eclectic data about semi-anthropomorphized animals, all written in elegant Attic prose.

S. approaches Aelian's text from a variety of angles in many short chapters: after an introduction and initial biographical characterization (ch. 1: ‘The Independent Intellectual’), S. briefly considers the relationship of human to animal in Aelian's Rustic Letters (ch. 2) before considering the NA in terms of aesthetics and poikilia (ch. 3); Hellenic and Roman identity (ch. 4); Stoicism (ch. 5); mythology and the divine (ch. 6); Egyptian and Indian exoticism (ch. 7); sexuality (ch. 8); and kingship (ch. 9). S. then concludes (ch. 10) with extended readings of two long episodes from the VH dealing with female virtue (Aspasia and Atalante) and an appendix on Aelian's lost invective against the emperor Elagabalus.

As befits his subject, S.’s specific contentions are too many and varied to be conveniently summarized. They are all supported by a series of usually two-to-three-page close readings of particular episodes, which often rely on intertexuality or historical context. These are the interpretive core of the book and range from how a hunting dog's possible use of syllogisms problematizes Stoic ideas about logos (114–17) to the cultural implications of the bon vivant Hortensius’ being the first person to eat a peacock (79). These readings are highly original and virtuosic and work their material for all it is worth, perhaps on occasion more. Different readers will buy — or not buy — different parts of S.’s argument. Highlights for me included S.’s political interpretation of geese putting stones in their beaks to impose silence and avoid the attention of eagles (241–2), and his take on the paideia displayed by elephants that were exhibited in Rome as variously dancing or writing letters with their trunks (80–6). I am less convinced that Aelian's brief assessment (NA 15.19) of a senatorial author named Demostratus gives us grounds to suppose that Aelian lamented the lack of meritocracy in Roman administrative practice (77).

S. is a sympathetic and imaginative reader who makes one want to seek out the texts he is writing about, and combines sophistication and charm with clear exposition. He also displays appropriate attention to points of textual and linguistic detail; philologists will find little to quarrel with. Literary scholars may have more concerns, in that S. does not spend much time on the formal niceties of authorial and narrative persona, nor on the nature and response of Aelian's readers. In particular, many of his readings depend heavily on biographical data that we know only from Philostratus, or in some cases from the Suda. The former, at any rate, is likely to be largely accurate, but that does not necessarily mean that one can legitimately take (for instance) Philostratus’ observation that Aelian was a lifelong bachelor as interpretively relevant to the latter's supposed critique of élite Roman marriage (88). At times S. tends toward a straightforwardly biographical study, while at others he uses a deconstructive technique that leaves little room for a historical author.

However, one does not need to accept all (or even most) of S.’s interpretations to enjoy or profit from his book. Nor is it necessary to be intimately familiar with Aelian's text, though it does help if one finds odd anecdotes about animals intrinsically amusing. S.’s work rings truest as an imaginative essay on how an erudite and creative but eccentric author might have expressed his discontent within the constraints of a sophisticated but self-satisfied literary orthodoxy and an authoritarian, increasingly violent political régime. The book gave me much to ponder in preparing a seminar on Lucian, even though that author figures little in S.’s argument. S.’s concern for placing Aelian in a specifically Severan context is most welcome given the lack of such emphasis in much work on the Second Sophistic. It goes without saying that the study of Aelian is hugely enriched by this volume, but S. goes well beyond this and adds welcome depth to our understanding of the Severan milieu and the scope for cultural dissidence in Imperial Rome.