Good times for forgers. The death of the author, decreed by R. Barthes over half a century ago, has produced several consequences in recent decades, including unprecedented critical attention towards texts that have come down to us as anonymous or associated with well-known poets but of spurious or uncertain attribution. The implicit assumption is that these texts deserve to be the subject of scholarly research per se, even without being credited with the name of an author, and regardless of the intentions of those who composed them. Hence the numerous works that have flourished in recent years on Latin pseudo-epigraphic poetry (e.g. T.E. Franklinos, L. Fulkerson [edd.], Constructing Authors and Readers in the Appendices Vergiliana, Tibulliana, and Ouidiana [2020], and previously I. Peirano, The Rhetoric of the Roman Fake: Latin Pseudepigrapha in Context [2012]), which understandably focused their attention on the Appendix Vergiliana. K. is not only one of the scholars who share this interest, but has made it the subject of his own project: after editing the multi-authored volume Poems without poets. Approaches to anonymous ancient poetry (2021) and a commentary on the Ciris (2020), he has now published the volume under review on the Lydia, i.e. the second part (ll. 104–83) of the diptych that the poem constitutes together with the Dirae (ll. 1–103) according to many scholars and K. himself. On the Dirae (2024) he recently published another commentary.

This work on the Lydia has the merit of providing a thorough and well-documented analysis of all relevant aspects of the poem, thus becoming the main reference study on it. The long introduction, which includes an extensive essay on the poem and its literary context, is followed by the Latin text with a critical apparatus, an English translation, a commentary and, lastly, bibliography and indexes.

One of the most substantial novelties of K.'s work lies in the constitution of the Latin text. Compared to earlier editions (such as E.J. Kenney's 1966 OCT), he introduces about 20 changes (including conjectures, amendments, transpositions etc.), and above all he is so confident as to eliminate the numerous cruces within the few dozen verses of the composition. Not all his interventions are persuasive (e.g. modo for mea at 109, where he downplays the parallel of Prop. 2.33.38), but in general they are well argued and worthy of attention.

Now that the debate between adiudicantes and abiudicantes on the Virgilian authorship of the Appendix (or at least of a part of it) has subsided after a century or so, scholarly attention has shifted to the nature and quality of the compositions in the sylloge, the intentions of their authors, the cultural and literary context in which they originated and circulated, and thus also their dating.

One of K.'s most relevant, though not entirely new, proposals concerning the Lydia is its rather high dating. K. bases his hypothesis on a significant stylistic fact, namely the concentration, in the space of 80 verses, of three spondaic hexameters, all with quadrisyllabic verb forms (136 uestigare, 150 uoluebantur, 170 accumbebat). This trait would not be ascribable to the Hellenising virtuosity of a poeta doctus, but to an archaising simplicity that would suggest a link to the style of Lucretius (rather than the refinement of Catullus and the neoteroi, pp. 9–10; 39). Consequently, K. proposes ‘the early-to-mid 40s bc as a plausible chronological setting’ (p. 10), namely before Virgil's Eclogues and all the great Augustan poetry. As regards the possible author, K. favourably reconsiders the hypothesis of attributing the poem to Valerius Cato (whom we know to be the author of a Lydia from a fragment of Ticida). K. does not, however, go so far as to support firmly this attribution, but nevertheless believes that ‘a more profitable approach will consist in exploring the poem in the context of the poetry of the first century bc as if it were written by Valerius Cato’ (p. 14).

This dating would overturn the terms of the relationship between the poem and Augustan poetry. Instead of being a ‘response’ to Virgil (Ecl. 1 and 9) on the tragedy of exile from the confiscated land according to the prevailing view, the Lydia would conversely be referred to in various ways by Virgil and other great poets of the Augustan age, including Horace (especially Epod. 2) and the elegiac authors (especially Tib. 2.3 and Ov. Am. 3.7 – it is, however, difficult to believe that the ‘comparison of Ovid's flaccid penis to a wilted rose [3.7.65–6] may allude to the erotically charged image of Venus crushing flowers [170]’ in the Lydia, p. 37). K. thus endows the Lydia with the autonomy of a poetic project and a prominent position in the history of Latin poetry. Indeed, he intends to ‘explore the Lydia's engagement with the Greek bucolic’ (pp. 14–32), particularly with Theocritus’ Idyll 1, Bion's Lament for Adonis and the anonymous Lament for Bion. K. seeks to trace the supposed analogies and relationships between the Lydia and these texts, by providing many accurate and stimulating observations, but the ‘smoking gun’ that demonstrates a direct and convincing relationship that excludes the mediation of Virgil and Latin poetry is never provided. K. acknowledges that, just as it is ‘insufficient to prove its [i.e. Lydia's] chronological priority over Virgil's Eclogues, … there is no binding reason to assume a priori that the Lydia is post-Virgilian either’ (p. 32), but this ‘declaration of equidistance’, so to speak, is belied by the one-sided analysis of the individual passages from the poem and their relations with the intertexts of Augustan poetry, which are regularly considered as ‘possible early reactions to the Lydia’ (p. 15). The priority of the Lydia thus remains, albeit with the cautions enunciated by K. but repeatedly dismissed, a petitio principii, which entails a unilateral view of the poetic framework in which the poem is set.

On the basis of this assumption, K. tends to understate or hastily evaluate the intertexts (cf. e.g. 153 uirum uirgo and Ov. Her. 6.133 and 21.116) and analogies especially with elegiac poetry, which are numerous and characteristic of the Lydia, from vocabulary (e.g. querelas, 121) to typical character roles (docta puella, 128) to situations (e.g. erotic-intellectual exchanges between the puella and the poet-lover, as in Prop. 2.13.11–12). Also striking is the use of domina (127) to refer to the beloved, i.e. a key term for the notion of seruitium amoris, which was introduced by Gallus, as K. acknowledges (p. 86), and which recurs here with the traditional value it has in elegiac poetry. If the author of the Lydia preceded Gallus and contributed so significantly to the creation of Latin erotic language and elegiac imagery, it is difficult to imagine that, when reconstructing the genesis of their literary genre (cf. e.g. the Ovidian list of erotic authors in Am. 1.15 or Trist. 2), the Latin elegiac poets do not recognise the pioneering role of their predecessor with due emphasis.

The spondaic hexameters, of the particular type K. emphasises, as a clue in support of the high dating of the poem also constitute an interesting argument, but it does not seem to me to be decisive. If, as K. argues (pp. 12; 40), the author of the Lydia is so sophisticated as to be able to produce the effect of a studied rustic naivety, appropriate for a bucolic singer, namely for the speaking character of the poem, why should he not be equally credited with the ability to give his hexameters a flavour of archaic simplicity through this stylistic trait?

In conclusion, it is difficult to share K.'s confidence in the validity of his own arguments, and readers will remain sceptical about his more innovative proposals on the dating of the Lydia and the role it plays in the literary context to which it belongs. On the other hand, readers will appreciate the many qualities of K.'s work, a clearly written book, full of excellent individual observations on language and style, which is destined to become an important tool for the study of Latin poetry and its pseudepigrapha.