The scope of this thought-provoking book is indicated by its subtitle, and involves a period of literature (430–323) which L.V. rightly sees as insufficiently studied and inappropriately denigrated. (The period contains poems of [p. 1] ‘daunting diversity’, hence [cf. p. 330] the book's main title.) The denigration, begun in antiquity itself (pp. 6–7), was exacerbated by more recent oversimplifications about the decline or decadence of lyric after Pindar. These have their counterpart, as L.V. is aware (p. 3), in generalisations about the visual arts of ancient Greece. More might have been made of this: see for example A. Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (1994), pp. 27–8 and 50–4 on the alleged pattern of rise and decline. They recall even more, of course, the once prevalent antithesis between ‘classic’ and ‘Hellenistic’ literature. L.V. indeed observes (p. 4) that there are features in her authors that anticipate the latter (p. 175 identifies Philoxenus as ‘an Alexandrian avant la lettre’). She determines, none the less, to study the relevant works in their own right, rather than as merely a ‘missing link’.

This last complication might be avoided altogether by K.J. Dover's suggestion (Theocritus [1971], p. lxxi) ‘that Hellenistic poetry began … with the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles’. However, L.V.'s determination typifies the balance and also the tolerance of complexities (‘problematisation’: blessed word!) that characterise the book as a whole. In fact, her treatment recalls Dover (pp. lxv–lxvi) on the inadequacy of many traditional criteria for identifying Hellenistic poetic features. Thus she finds (p. 172) accumulated epithets no infallible index of dithyrambic style, since they are anticipated in archaic cletic contexts. (This approach could have been taken further: for instance, Licymnius fr. 769's ‘blurring’ [p. 174] of ‘the boundaries between … physical qualities [of Hygieia] … in anthropomorphic terms and … features that describe her in technical and quasi-scientific terms’ has ample precedent in earlier lyric). Similarly she remarks that ‘not all dithyrambs have a Dionysiac narrative content and not all paeans have an Apollonian theme, nor are pieces with Dionysiac or Apollonian contents necessarily dithyrambs or paeans’ (p. 61). Of another term, the ‘New Music’ (the title, significantly, of volume 5 of Campbell's new Loeb edition of the lyrics), she well observes (pp. 71–2), in a chapter headed by quotations from the hostile reception initially meted out to Chopin and Prokofiev, that ‘newness is … in the ears of the critic’ and that ‘every era has its [own] new music’. Later (pp. 88–90) we are reminded that the contrast between poetic Old and New goes back to the Odyssey and Pindar and can legitimately be placed under the rubric ‘strategies of self-representation’.

L.V. often thus casts a refreshingly (though unmaliciously) sceptical eye over several received opinions. What of her own positive contributions? As transition to these I select her denial of the ‘Mixing of Genres’. Since this remains a keystone of my own approach, I may be biased; but I find pp. 66–7 too brief and superficial a treatment, and the claim that ‘the basis of’ the notion is Plato Laws 700a–701a misleading. To say ‘the idea of contamination implies a view of genre … much too rigid and, at the same time, unstable’ is to substitute paradox for argument. The crucial text (and test) here is Aristotle's poem on Hermias (PMG 842) to which L.V. devotes pp. 268–77. Her pronouncement that it ‘attests to (sic) the fluidity of the movement between performance settings and between social contexts, and to a rich process of exchange and cross-pollination among symposium, festival and theatre’ (p. 277) is perfectly consistent with acceptance of its mixing of genres, and her reluctance to detect generic mixing depends, I feel, on her being distracted by the present fascination of A. Ford and others with Performance and Reperformance (a trend originating in the last quarter of the previous century), as well as on her programmatically avowed belief in ‘the interaction of lyric with contemporary social, cultural, religious, and political contexts’ (p. 3). As cold an eye might as profitably be cast upon the assumptions underlying these opinions as upon those which L.V. objectively dissects.

It is interesting to trace how L.V.'s assumptions have guided her findings. The long-vexed issue of whether there was one Philoxenus or more receives an ingenious solution (pp. 117–18): one, the dithyrambist from Cythera. The contradictory testimony of Plato Comicus fr. 189 KA is circumvented by supposing it a comic parody of Philoxenus which transposes his dactylo-epitrites into Plato's own hexameters; the poet's origin in Leucas is a joke appropriate in a play entitled Phaon, a joke taken too seriously by Athenaeus 146 F = PMG 836 (b), our only explicit source for a Philoxenus from Leucas. This attractive hypothesis allows L.V. later to argue for a ‘dithyrambic performance’ of Philoxenus' Deipnon (p. 263). It does, indeed, have several dithyrambic features.

One of the more interesting chapters is 3, on biographical traditions concerning the poets, especially the aforementioned Philoxenus. After Fairweather, Lefkowitz and others, most scholars would now accept that these traditions are all too often uncritically spun out of the authors' own works simplistically interpreted as autobiographical declarations. L.V. none the less argues (pp. 114–24; cf. p. 7, etc.) that, while not historically true, these traditions can be illuminating, since they ‘are a form of early reception’ – that burgeoning research area! – ‘of the poet's production’. In general this seems reasonable: when both biographical tradition and extant works can be juxtaposed, the results are often enlightening. But when biographical traditions concern poets whose work has so largely perished, it becomes very difficult to identify, let alone interpret, motifs originating in the lost work, as witness the numerous, widely diverging, interpretations advanced for the anecdote about Philoxenus enshrined in Clearchus fr. 57 Wehrli.

In matters of detail one must keep a watchful eye on the author. Setting aside the misreporting of J. Strauss Clay's gender (p. 308), I give but one instance of why. The reading of Phaenias' anecdote (fr. 13 Wehrli = PMG 816) about Dionysius, Philoxenus and two red mullets is based upon the anachronistic assumption (p. 130) that the poet's act in taking up (ἀναλαβών) the fish in his hands violates ‘proper table manners’. On the contrary, in ancient Greece ‘cutlery was not used at table, for … fingers were more agile than knives and forks’ (B.A. Sparkes, JHS 82 [1962], 132). Further, given the wide range of meanings for ἀναλαμβάνω collected s.v. by LSJ, why should we privilege the translation ‘grab’, as ‘indicat[ing] violence, including the violence of unwilling sex’? (‘Take into one's hands’, as at Hdt. 1.111.1, of lifting a baby, the first entry in LSJ s.v. (I 1 a), is less steamy but more likely.) Nor, pace L.V., is Philoxenus' subsequent witticism ‘an animal fable, an ainos’, though the entire anecdote is an ainos in a divergent sense, confirmed by noting, unlike L.V., how the idiomatic verb of seeing (εἶδεν) motivates, as often in for example Machon, the witty remark. L.V. is conscientiousness itself in signposting the dangers of distortion for her poets (‘filtering’ she calls it: pp. 48–59) from their sources – for example Athenaeus, with his interest in food and drink. We need to be equally alert against ‘filtering’ derived from twenty-first century preoccupations.

The book contains interesting analysis of portions of Timotheus' Persians. Chapter 7, on ‘inscribed cultic songs … until recently ignored in the study of late classical lyric poetry’ (p. 328), is sometimes verbose and unproductive, sometimes illuminating. L.V.'s grasp of recent bibliography is commendable, extending for example to relevant portions of Dithyramb in Context (2013), edd. B. Kowalzig and P. Wilson, which was ‘forthcoming’ when she wrote. One is reminded thereby how much work has recently been devoted to adjacent topics. This is not to belittle L.V.'s own achievement: the poems in question ‘have never been analysed as a whole’ (p. 1). We now need a full commentary on them, such as your reviewer happens to have just completed. Meanwhile this beautifully produced volume, with its extensive Greek passages followed by translations, usually by L.V., needs to be used with caution, but is very timely.