‘Statius’ Thebaid’, someone donnishly quipped, ‘has no sufficient reason to exist.’Footnote ¹ Kyle Gervais might beg to differ. Like the Thebaid itself, his commentary on Book 2 has grown over many years, and deserves to be taken very seriously.Footnote ² The crisp introduction sets the tone and clearly signals priorities in its four sections, a rising tetracolon for author, problems of editing, intratexts, and intertexts; not a word on style and prosody, and reception is excluded on the ground that Statius’ own imitatio is quite enough to be getting on with. The text is newly constituted, with ample apparatus and text-critical discussion: Gervais joins Barrie Hall's rebellion against the bifid stemma, but fairly questions his view that the Thebaid should be easy reading; he accordingly diverges from his edition nearly a hundred times, and offers a translation which, if less old-falutin’ than Shack's Loeb, does an equally good job of disabusing anyone who thought it would be quicker to read Statius in English.Footnote ³ The notes are full and rich: words aren't wasted, but both philological graft and literary interpretation amply attest to fine scholarship, good sense, and long thought.

Like most of the Statian nouvelle vague, Gervais finds much of the wit and meaning in the imitation, and he abundantly shows why others should too. From the complex brew bringing Laertes and his dripping eyes up from Hades, through the fine tracery of Harmonia's necklace, to tyrannical Eteocles as Dido writ new (love for Aeneas turned to lust for power) and the epic blow-up of Tydeus’ monomachy, he patiently and interestingly teases apart Statius’ dense weave. We could perhaps take a bit more interpretatio Romana: Gervais doesn't want to get bogged down in ‘pro-’ and ‘anti-Domitian’, reasonably enough, but it's hard not to hear imperial cant when Eteocles affirms that the patres would not permit his resignation, even if he wanted it (Theb. 2.450–1); hard too not to hear the note of cynicism equally familiar from Silius and Valerius Flaccus. But that is a quibble: this is an edition to endure and earn due honours.

Two disembodied alabaster hands holding stylus and plectrum: an eerie cover for Stanley Lombardo's new translation of the Odes and Carmen Saeculare.Footnote ⁴ It turns out to be the ‘Hands of Horace’ by the sculptor Sarah Danays in 2017, a suitably modern image for a stylishly modern translation. Lombardo has already tested his mettle on Homer, Virgil, and more, and his Horace (this time with facing Latin) is equally readable; Anthony Corbeill adds a brief introduction and thirty pages of skeletal notes. The Translator's Preface regrets all those dully rhyming quatrains of iambic pentameters that used to be trotted out (xvi), and promises a better impression of Horace's varying rhythms and stanzas, which Lombardo certainly delivers. Odd, though, to find no mention of David West, who did something similar both in his three volumes of Odes (likewise text and translation, but with interpretative essays too) and in his English-only Odes and Epodes.Footnote ⁵ Odder still the absence of Guy Lee, whose much admired volume of twenty years ago is an exact competitor: Odes and Carmen Saeculare translated in varying metres, with facing Latin, brief introduction and skeletal notes.Footnote ⁶

Lombardo goes for shorter lines and freer adaptation than West, and has the advantage of being both bilingual and cheap; I suppose the peculiar choice of Shorey and Laing for the text of the Odes (we're not told where the Carmen Saeculare comes from) won't bother too many of the ‘students of classical civilization’ targeted on the cover.Footnote ⁷ With Lee the comparison is closer. Take the first stanza of Nunc est bibendum (Odes 1.37):

Or of Parcius iunctas (Odes 1.25):

It must be serendipity that produced so much similarity among difference, but the syncrisis also points up Lombardo's slimmer, updated style (and Lee didn't call Lydia's moechi ‘fuckers’). He is up to the minute on Ligurinus’ grooming too, following Richard Thomas in taking the pluma of Odes 4.10.2 as pubic hair (if a shade less delicate than Horace in spelling it out). Alas for the translation of mox as ‘soon’ (Odes 4.4.9), but that's a stubborn weed, so do spread the good news (‘subsequently, thereafter’, etc.).Footnote ⁸ Production is very good.

Two slender tomes on Tacitus now, starting with Lee Fratantuono's commentary on Annals 16.Footnote ⁹ The idea of elucidating this corner of the Tacitean canon was a nice one, and we can thank Bloomsbury for bringing it to fruition. We might be more grateful if the book didn't tell students that Tacitus wrote the Annals before the Histories (7, 33), that the perfect of abrumpere is abrumpsi (155), or that suffect consuls in the Principate were created when an ordinarius ‘for whatever reason had not finished his tenure’ (97). Some help with Tacitus’ tricky syntax would be nice (there are long notes on basic points), as would a halfway-accurate Latin text and – well, you get the idea. It would be trivial to point out that every lone ‘i’ has been auto-capitalized (‘locus, -I, m.’ etc.), if it didn't show such breath-taking disregard for copy-editing. I'm sorry to fulminate, because Fratantuono conveys great enthusiasm for his text, and – as you might expect, given all his work on epic poetry – catches some nice Virgilian notes. But it's hard not to be frustrated when an imprint calls itself ‘Academic’ and hawks wares like this to unsuspecting buyers: dear Bloomsbury, please take some responsibility for what you print and how you print it.

Victoria Emma Pagán meanwhile offers a new beginner's guide to Tacitus.Footnote ¹⁰ The structure is part thematic, part by work, and skirts scrupulously clear of predictability: a first chapter is themed around imperial prosopography; the second deals with speeches and deeds (with a tour of favourite anecdotes); then come a chapter each on Germania, Dialogus, and afterlife. Pagán works hard to keep the style fresh (even the Teletubbies pop up, surely a first in Tacitean scholarship), and makes the Germania her unorthodox key (‘arguably the most important work for understanding Tacitus’, 78). Of course the ‘Introductions to Tacitus’ shelf is a well-stocked one, and this volume finds a close comparandum in Rhiannon Ash's student guide:Footnote ¹¹ they share laconic title, length (but Pagán has endnotes), lively manner, a substantial reception chapter, and the climactic claim on the back cover that ‘the wit and wisdom of Tacitus remain all too relevant to our contemporary world’ (Ash)/‘the work of Tacitus remains eternal’ (Pagán). But these are two quite different books: where Ash introduces the five works in their traditional order, Pagán gives the deck her unusual shuffle, and the points of emphasis are various and varied. The work of enthusing new readers continues apace.

Ovid's Homer: now there's a title to catch the eye.Footnote ¹² The fertile terrain of Virgil's Homer has been ploughed for many a year, Ovid's Virgil too. Now Barbara Weiden Boyd cuts out the middle man to ask how Ovid reads the Iliad and Odyssey themselves. The question has been asked before, of course, but she offers this as a first dedicated monograph, and one which dwells at least as much in the elegiac corpus as in the Metamorphoses. The introduction sets out a Bloomian stall, and paternity looms large throughout: how does Ovid treat his poetic ‘father’? Rather fondly, it emerges: there is more filial piety (and genial winking) than parricide between these covers. Boyd shows similar benevolence herself, writing with clear affection for both her authors, and abundant positive critical energy.

The preliminaries over, we start with a potted history of Latin Homer from Livius Andronicus to Propertius. Boyd's plan of ‘dispelling the large Virgilian shadow’ over Ovid (4) is reflected straight away in Virgil's remarkable omission from this account (no Horace either); so is the temptation of teleology, as we whisk through Homer's Roman reception to its ‘mature manifestation in Ovid’ (23). Three short Ovidian readings then whet our appetite, as do interesting remarks on his use of the commentary tradition, before Chapter 2 launches the first major enquiry, ‘Ovid's Diomedes’. It is a nice choice to open with: a ‘secondary’ hero for the ‘secondary’ Ovid (41), but a primary hero too, given his star role in the early fighting of the Iliad. Not all may agree that he is notable as ‘an exemplar of rhetorical excellence in the Iliad’ (66) or be described as ‘much like the Ovidian narrator’ in his αἰδώς (shame and/or respect) towards Agamemnon (52), but the connections drawn are intriguing. Four chapters then explore the paternity theme with the help of such father-figures as Nestor, Daedalus, and (a stretch, this) Agamemnon qua ‘prospective father-in-law to Achilles’ (107). Direct syncrisis is scarce here; the idea is rather that, if we think of Ovid as Homer's poetic son, all fathers and children can be read as metatextual comment on that relationship. Then comes a chapter on repeating yourself (aptly recycled from a conference volumeFootnote ¹³), with Ares and Aphrodite as its theme: when Ovid retells Demodocus’ lay in Ars am. 2 and again in Met. 4, Boyd argues, he performs an act of Homeric repetition. I wasn't sure exactly how the studious variation in Met. 4 relates to formulaic orality, or what makes this example stand out among so many Ovidian self-imitations, but the readings are sensitive as ever, and ‘repeatedly, incessantly and repetitiously’ (219) is one of many nice touches of wit. Two further chapters on heroines and ‘Homer's Gods in Rome’ bring the total to a Pierian nine.

One striking thing about this study is the rarity of close intertextual work. To be sure, Homer gets his due and more, with long plot summaries-cum-analysis (a full eighteen pages on Iliad 4–5) offered throughout. Specific intertexts are proposed from time to time, some of them worked hard, and several scenes and episodes are read together in broad terms; but this is certainly not – to take three very various paragons – an Ovidian Knauer, Nelis, or Barchiesi.Footnote ¹⁴ A deliberate choice, no doubt, and reflected in the wide berth given to the ‘Little Iliad’ of Metamorphoses 12–13, mentioned briefly once, and Papaïoannou's big book about it, not mentioned at all.Footnote ¹⁵ Likewise presumably the exclusion of the Homeric hymns (think only of Pentheus in Met. 3). Still, Boyd's manifesto for thinking more about Homer when reading Ovid comes across most effectively in the closer comparisons – and would only gain from adding Virgil (we glimpse just one ‘window reference’, 70–1). Some more Aeneid might also help with suggestions about paternity, given how powerfully the dynamics of epic succession are inscribed by Virgil and described by Philip Hardie.Footnote ¹⁶ But Boyd has made her choices, and followed them through with style: her Ovid's Homer, after all, is above all an elegiac one – and the oblique gaze fits.

Bartolo Natoli, meanwhile, has been studying ‘the poetics of speech in Ovid’.Footnote ¹⁷ Having considered some voices silenced in the Metamorphoses, he settles on the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, where he finds Ovid artfully and artificially fashioning his own ‘silencing’. There is plenty of familiar material here, and the Latin texts and translations needed another check, but Natoli works hard to fashion a clear argument, and to ground it theoretically: he invokes ‘schemata’ and ‘cultural memory’, and criticizes psychologizing readings of the exile poetry, which he prefers to read through the lens of persona-theory.

Miryana Dimitrova's book Julius Caesar's Self-Created Image and Its Dramatic Afterlife Footnote ¹⁸ does just what it says on the tin, dividing its attention between Caesar's commentaries (with some Lucan) and Caesar on the English stage; Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto, and Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra are the protagonists. Originating in a dissertation written at King's College London, it is a careful, clear discussion with light scholarly apparatus, arranged around three themes: Caesarian celeritas, his ‘illeism’ (all those third-person verbs), and, most interestingly, his ‘relationship with temporality’, described as ‘quasi-divinity’ (22). The plays in question show scant sign of direct influence from the commentarii and only some of Lucan, but Dimitrova gives carefully considered reasons for reading them together, and shuttles gamely between her ancient and modern texts. I won't pursue my Bloomsbury-bashing except to suggest that they employ a copy-editor to iron out such wrinkles as ‘Sallustus’ and ‘Assinius Pollio’, and to ask whether it's good taste to feature dust-jacket puff (‘A pioneering study…’) from the author's own doctoral supervisor.

Plant of a Strange Vine by Robert John Sklenář is an entertainingly idiosyncratic reading of Seneca's Oedipus.Footnote ¹⁹ The idiosyncrasies start with the quotation in the title (Jeremiah, on the sins of Israel) and the prefatory request that we read Sklenář’s earlier book on Lucan first: I didn't get round to that, I'm afraid, but would have gladly read a page or two summarizing it. They continue with a brief reading of Epistulae morales 114, whose attack on corrupt style Sklenář makes his interpretative key for Seneca's own tragedies; the bulk of the short book is a read-through of the Oedipus itself, oscillating between very close comment on language and very large claims about philosophy and cosmology. Given the premise that ‘Seneca is a decadent poet’ (5) and a tendency to take hyperbole literally (words such as ‘false’ and ‘distorted’ abound), it's perhaps not surprising that Sklenář finds the Oedipus – which stands in his view for all the tragedies – scarred by precisely the oratio corrupta excoriated in the letter-treatise. Not to mention differences between poetry and prose, doubts might fairly be raised about syllogisms along the lines of ‘Ep. 114 censures undue abruptness; I find this passage of Oedipus unduly abrupt; ergo Seneca is hoist by his own petard’. Sklenář also finds the letter itself flawed by a ‘fatal contradiction’ – a little unfairly, given that he mistranslates the sentence in question (12). Karlheinz Töchterle can rejoice to find his commentary cited in perhaps 80 per cent of the footnotes; why Tony Boyle's isn't cited at all we are left to guess.Footnote ²⁰ For all that, the prose is gutsy and Sklenář knows his mind: a pleasingly knotty vine under which to pass an hour or two.

A scenic book to finish, Prudentius and the Landscapes of Late Antiquity.Footnote ²¹ Cillian O'Hogan has revised his Toronto dissertation into a picaresque tour of Prudentius, in particular the Cathemerinon and Peristephanon. Keeping his eyes peeled for allusions to classical poetry, he offers a string of sensitive small-scale readings marked by careful attention to the model texts. Thematic unity comes from ‘landscape’, liberally interpreted (journeys, urban space, pastoral, architecture), unity of argument from the opening claim that ‘Prudentius’ poetry consistently…retreats into descriptions of the world that owe more to biblical and classical precedents than they do to lived experience’ (2; how many ancient poets would have agreed that life and literary imitation are so separable?). To pick out one of many interesting details, I confess to leaving Chapter 5 unconvinced that Prudentius subtly expresses reservations about the marvels of modern buildings, but the argument raises a question about intertextual methodology. Prudentius enthuses over a basilica in Emerita with its laquearibus aureolis (Peristephanon 2.197), echoing Virgil's laquearibus aureis (Aen. 1.726). O'Hogan is curiously reluctant to accept this ‘putative imitation’ (in fact one of the clearest liaisons he considers), then suggests that it expresses ‘ambivalence’ and ‘uneasiness’ about Carthaginian luxury in church (156). But that depends on agreeing, first, that Prudentius also found Dido's palace problematic and, second, that we can stabilize exactly which connotations are imported when a given phrase is imitated. (What does Sklenář mean with his title?) In any case, as Statius’ Siluae show, Horatian moralizing discourse isn't the only way to turn rich architecture into verse. Still, food for thought, and – like all O'Hogan's arguments – served with care and ingenuity. Many other nice morsels are offered along the way, and images too, as of poor St Cassian, ‘martyred by being stabbed to death by his stylus-wielding pupils’ (52): a lesson to remember.