Having worked its way through the roster of classical authors (Oppian and Grattius have yet to receive the honour, but it is surely only a matter of time), the Brill Companions series has moved on to their reception. Despite the editor's efforts to cast the chapters assembled here as instances of ‘synecdoche’ (2), it is not immediately clear what distinguishes this volume as a ‘companion’ from any other collection of essays (an issue that is not new to this publisher: see JRS 103 (2013), 331–2), but perhaps the terminology should not be pressed too hard.

What the reader approaching this volume for the first time is likely to find more surprising is the arrangement of its constituent parts. In view of the fact that receptions of classical authors necessarily build on and are informed by earlier receptions, there is a prima facie case for structuring a companion to the reception of a particular author according to chronological principles; but it is evident that this is precisely what the editor of this volume has sought to avoid. The reason he gives for this is that ‘an ordering of this kind would give the misleading impression that the aim here is completeness, which it is not’ (11; I suspect that only the most uncharitable reader would make this assumption). Instead ‘the contributions dealing with the negative aspects of Cicero's reception are placed in the middle’, following the most positive moment with which the collection begins. The last essay then returns to the Renaissance its later form, now with the added twist that ‘even a negative assessment of Cicero somehow implicates or presupposes a far more positive one’ (11–12). It is salutary to be reminded that ‘Cicero's reception inextricably involves the influence of his enemies no less than his friends’ (10), that although there exists an organization with the name Société Internationale des Amis de Cicéron, a Société Internationale des Ennemis de Cicéron would historically have been able to recruit an at least equally numerous and dedicated membership. But if this principle was sufficiently important to determine the overall structure of the volume, it was surely also important enough to be reflected in the titles of the sections into which the volume is divided, which as they stand offer the reader little orientation (‘Two French Receptions’ seems particularly arbitrary, given that essays on Montaigne and Voltaire appear elsewhere in the collection).

Within this eccentric structure, the merits of individual chapters will depend to some extent on the taste and interests of the reader. Martin McLaughlin and John O. Ward are predictably good on Petrarch and the Middle Ages respectively, while Caroline Bishop (on Asconius and Macrobius) and Gábor Kendeffy (on Lactantius) contribute valuable studies of the reception of Cicero in the scholarship of later antiquity, and the eighteenth century is well represented in the chapters by Carl J. Richard (on the American Founding Fathers), Robert G. Ingram (on Conyers Middleton, the prolific theological polemicist and biographer of Cicero) and Matthew Sharpe (on Voltaire and the philosophes of the French Enlightenment). B. L. Ullman called Cicero the ‘grandfather of humanism’: in addition to McLaughlin on Petrarch, the present volume features an exploration of Montaigne's use of the literary technique known as acclamatio, which Kathy Eden sees as a Ciceronian device, and JoAnn DellaNeva offers a lucid summary of the heated debates surrounding Ciceronianism in Latin prose writing during the Italian Renaissance (curiously DellaNeva's essay contains only three footnotes, a striking contrast to the 134 of the immediately preceding chapter by Sharpe and the 217 of Elisabeth Begemann's study of the fortunes of De natura deorum, De divinatione and De fato among German scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). In a piece previously published in French elsewhere, the distinguished historian of philosophy Carlos Lévy links Jérôme Carcopino's attitude to Cicero with the French scholar's involvement with the Vichy régime, while the editor's own contribution (on the ancient historians Erich S. Gruen, Sir Ronald Syme and Hermann Strasburger) represents an extended exercise in polemical historiographical doxography; the reader who reaches the end of this chapter may have some sympathy with Altman's conclusion (echoing Bruno Weil) that ‘it is high time for a return to Cicero’ (246). Alex Dressler's analysis of Cicero's place in formulations of literary ‘modernity’ in Tacitus’ Dialogus de oratoribus and Horace's Epistles 2.1 is rather too subtle for the pedestrian intellect of the reviewer, as are Paul Allen Miller's observations on Derrida, though Miller has some interesting things to say on De amicitia.

On the level of detail, the standard of editing is mediocre at best. Names fare particularly badly: the editor of Cicero's correspondence is first referred to as ‘H. R. Shackleton Bailey’ (7), which in a footnote on the same page then becomes ‘D. R. Shackelton Bailey’, and in an essay on twentieth-century historical scholarship, it is surprising to find a reference to ‘Arnaldo Momigiliani’ (222 n. 30). Peter Garnsey is repeatedly ‘Gramsey’ (58 n. 11, 59 nn. 16 and 19; but see 70 nn. 83 and 84), and Emanuele Narducci becomes ‘Emmanuelle’ (146; correct in index). The editorial sections of the book refer consistently to Ad Herrenium (8, 380, 395) while individual chapters have Ad Herennium; ch. 7 reveals hitherto unknown forms of the verb arbitror (‘abritramur’, 192; ‘abitror’, 194). Consultation of even the most comprehensive dictionary of sects is unlikely to offer enlightenment on ‘a sola scripuralist Protestant’ (98), who may or may not be ‘Christlologically (sic) heterodox’ (102 n. 24). Different chapters follow different styles of presenting bibliography, a female author is referred to as ‘idem’ (116 n. 84), and there are some disappointing misplaced and missing apostrophes (‘next two project's’, x; ‘Lactantius’ intends’, 58; ‘critics sceptical responses’, 340). This list is far from comprehensive, and the profusion of avoidable errors does not inspire confidence; the demise of copy-editing at Brill is much to be regretted.

In short, this collection struggles to be more than the sum of its parts, although some of those parts are very good indeed. As Altman acknowledges (he invites the reader to read Zieliński's Cicero im Wandel der Jahrhunderte (5th edn, 1967) before embarking on the book in hand), the volume should not be used as an exclusive or even a primary point of entry to its vast and variegated subject; rather, it should be read in conjunction with the relevant chapters of the Cambridge Companion to Cicero (2013), a recent volume from Brill entitled Cicero Refused to Die (2013), and a forthcoming BICS supplement, The Afterlife of Cicero. Only then — and perhaps not even then — will the full range and variety of the remarkable afterlife enjoyed by this remarkable figure become truly apparent.