The main aim of P.'s study is to show that receptions and reflections of Old Comedy in Imperial period Greek prose writing are more varied and more creative than is normally supposed and interact more subtly and revealingly with the receiving authors’ larger projects. We are not offered a comprehensive survey, but the route taken, through Plutarch and Aelius Aristides as well as Lucian, with briefer treatments of Alciphron and Libanius and a quick forward glance at Thomas More, convincingly documents P.'s main contention that the form's hospitality to exercises in literary polemic, stylistic commentary and pugnacious authorial self-definition, which has been so interesting to modern criticism, did not pass unnoticed by Imperial period authors either. Drawing out this strand does indeed enrich our understanding of the long history of comedy, the horizons of Imperial period Greek paideia, and the aims and artistry of the individual authors, even if not all the examples P. offers are equally compelling.

The star turn, inevitably, is Lucian, who duly has the book's two most substantial chapters devoted to him: Chapter 3 ably examines the use in Piscator and Bis accusatus of Old Comic plot forms to set up Lucian's mock-defensive self-advertisement as the inventor of a new kind of philosophical satire, itself based in part on Old Comic models; and Chapter 4 hunts Aristophanic elements, again mainly to do with literary self-characterisation, in selected prolaliai (Prometheus es, Zeuxis, Hercules). The case is clearest and richest in Piscator. Here the central character's very name, Parrhesiades, echoes what was perceived as a key characteristic of Old Comedy; in the action of the dialogue, he reprises the role of the Dicaeopolis of Acharnians, like him becoming to some degree a figure for his creator, while at the same time being confronted with a situation (great individuals from the past come back to life to set the modern world to rights) that is borrowed from Eupolis’ Demes (compare Aristides, Or. 3). The resulting text both exemplifies and defends the form (philosophical satire in prose dialogue) that Lucian/Parrhesiades is responsible for, yet also – once more in Aristophanic vein – keeps a sense of the slipperiness of the central character and the possible precariousness of his identification with the author. All this is well brought out in P.'s discussion, though she might have underlined still more firmly the Aristophanic pedigree of the whole plot-line of Lucian's dialogue, with its passage from physical violence to debate and from the talking round of one of the two parties to exploration of the effects of the decision reached between them.

Of Bis accusatus P. acutely observes how alertness to Old Comedy as an intermittently, and playfully, autobiographical form allows Lucian not only to dramatise himself and to talk about his literary personality, but also to insert himself as the last item in a sequence of philosophical court-cases that has been conjured out of the collision of Plato's Apology with philosophical biography. The Apology, together with one or two other remembered episodes, grounds the conceit of putting multiple philosophers on trial for key moments in their careers, but it is the precedent of Cratinus in Pytine, depicting himself prosecuted for desertion by Comedy, that allows Lucian to show his (Parrhesiades-like) surrogate ‘the Syrian’ indicted successively by Rhetoric and Dialogue and so once more to talk about his own originality as a literary innovator. The Old Comic input is undeniably striking and consistent with what goes on in Piscator, but I wonder whether P. in her discussion may not exaggerate its influence on the whole composition. The Pytine cannot claim to be the sole available model either for a life- and character-revealing trial or for the trope of a character being contested over by an allegorical personification or personifications (think of the Choice of Hercules and the associated tradition of philosophical allegory, which Lucian also exploits in Somnium). The case seems to me to be much more one of a convergence of strands, ingeniously made compatible by Lucian, than of Old Comedy necessarily providing the crucial master-thread.

In the same vein I also wonder whether, when she turns to Lucian's prolaliai, P. may similarly be pushing her thesis of Old Comic influence too hard. These short, curtain-raising prologue speeches do dwell repeatedly, like a comic parabasis, on their author's quality and originality as a writer, in tones that affect to fear scepticism, or insensitivity, on the part of their audience; this feature of the parabasis was indeed well appreciated at the time (as witnessed in Aristides, Or. 28, discussed in Chapter 2, but also Or. 4.11, which goes unmentioned); and one (but only one) of the three examples discussed (Prometheus es) does evoke Old Comedy directly, though for its political satire, not its authorial self-reference. But to say that the prolaliai therefore come across as strongly Old Comic in tone or that they could not have come out this way without Old Comic precedent seems rash. On the one hand, P. herself relies heavily on a general parallelism and falls back increasingly on phrases like ‘we can see [sic] resonances of’ and ‘we can hear echoes of’; on the other, she pays scant attention to the obviously relevant oratorical background. Prolaliai are detached, self-standing oratorical proimia, and the prooimion is canonically the (or at any rate a) place in an oratorical performance for talking about yourself and creating a relationship with the audience.

In the build-up to Lucian P. has good things to say about Plutarch (Chapter 1) and Aristides (Chapter 2), both of whom have a mixed view of Old Comedy, deprecating its scurrilous, abusive side, but also finding it useful in other respects. She shows neatly how for Plutarch in the Lives the historical information provided by comic abuse of fifth-century politicians can help him with the moral as well as the factual side of his project, but still more interestingly how variously stimulating Aristides found his engagement with the comic poets. While in Or. 29 he can use them as a point of contrast to highlight the purity of his own attitude to oratory and religion, in Orr. 3 and 28 he taps into their polemical energy, for the purposes both of attack (on Plato) and self-defining apologetic (channelling the comic parabasis to defend his own self-praise).

The presence of Libanius (Chapter 5) and Thomas More (Epilogue) further enlivens P.'s study, but again raises worries about a line of analysis being stretched too thin. Libanius qualifies because of the episode in his Autobiography in which as a student he is struck by lightning while reading Aristophanes’ Acharnians. But does this really mean that Libanius has appreciated and is making purposeful reference to the autobiographical, self-defining (Dicaeopolis = Aristophanes) strand in the play? More's Lucianic Utopia does indeed have its central speaker Hythlodaeus claim to have introduced the Utopians to ‘Aristophanes, Homer and Euripides’, but does this indicate any special engagement with the comic poet (directly or mediated via Lucian) when these three are simply the core verse authors of the Byzantine school curriculum to which humanist scholars were introduced by their émigré Greek mentors?

There are some rough edges in the presentation. Gregory Sifakis is incorrectly identified by his middle name on p. 65 (unconscious cross-fertilisation with Michael Silk?); textual critical issues are shakily handled (p. 126 with n. 35: square brackets indicate a deletion, not a supplement; and what is a ‘supposition’ – a supplement? a conjecture?); and there are more wobbles in straightforward translation than one would ideally like to see (including a strange mistranslation taken over from a senior scholar on p. 48). The Press and its readers and copy-editors should have done better by their author in this respect.