H.'s new book focuses on the reception of Virgil in late antiquity. A short introduction is followed by eight detailed chapters. The first chapter offers a reading of the verse correspondence of Ausonius and his former student Paulinus, who had recently converted to a life of asceticism. The next three chapters develop themes found in Virgil's poetry: public ideologies / private journeys, cosmic struggles and concordia discors. Chapters 5–7 treat the topics of novelty, paradox and allegory. As a kind of conclusion, the last chapter, ‘Mosaics and Intertextuality’, addresses one aspect of the recent scholarly reception of late antique Latin poetry. As expected, the published version of H.'s Sather Lectures are chock-full of his characteristically wide-ranging and perceptive explorations of Latin intertextuality; unfortunately, his revisionist positions on late antiquity are less than convincing.

The two big questions at the heart of H.'s book are to what extent poetry on Christian and non-Christian subjects respond differently to the poetic tradition and whether ‘late antique poets rework the tradition through what is an identifiably “late antique” poetics and aesthetic’ (p. 2). On the first question H. concludes that both kinds of texts respond to previous Latin poetry in roughly similar ways, and for the second that the continuities are more important than the differences between ‘classical’ and ‘late antique’ literature. Because of the interventions of scholars like J. Fontaine and M. Roberts, it is no longer controversial to say that poets like Paulinus and Prudentius shared a literary culture and methods with Claudian and Rutilius. But H.'s analysis is limited by the fact that he does not engage with scriptural epic as such, much less with the poetry of Damasus or Ambrose or Commodian, nor does he bother with previous scholarship on Christian poetry: for example, K. Pollmann is not even included in the bibliography, and there is no indication that Fontaine (1977) had two complementary objectives, to describe a late antique aesthetics and to show that Christian and pagan authors of the later fourth century shared a certain mutual outlook. Fontaine wrote voluminously on Isidore and on early Christian literature; although his approach is somewhat dated now, it should be acknowledged that he consistently broke down the dividing lines between secular and religious literature.

The question of a late antique aesthetics involves methodological questions and grand historical narratives. As for methodology, H. proposes to read late antique Latin poetry in Virgilian terms:

Of course, no one would argue that interesting results can be had in this way, and it is certainly true that reading ‘is a matter of perspective’ (p. 249). But this is no way to determine whether late antique poets differed from their predecessors, much less to do justice to Ausonius, Claudian, Paulinus or Prudentius as creative and talented poets. H. cites E. Gibbon's praise of Claudian, that he ‘soared above the heads of his feeble contemporaries, and placed himself, after an interval of three hundred years, among the poets of ancient Rome’ (p. 51), as though Claudian had found himself a time machine to erase the distance between himself and his ancient forebears. In point of fact, Claudian incorporated the genius of numerous intermediaries including Statius, Silius Italicus and Ausonius, not to mention the Neoplatonic philosophers. No one has ever denied the importance of Virgil for understanding the Latin poetry of the fourth century, which makes it seem all the more strange that H. should choose this line. Indeed, the marginalisation of late antiquity has everything to do with such perspectives, because they deny Claudian and his contemporaries their own place and time; in this regard, it appears not at all gratuitous that S. Hinds entitled a recent chapter ‘Claudianism in the De raptu Proserpinae’ (2013). Whatever legitimate criticisms might be levelled at The Jeweled Style, it is odd too that H. did not take precautions against Roberts's just criticism of previous scholarship in this field: ‘Only in literary studies does an unexamined classicism still often provide the criteria of evaluation for the products of late antique culture’ (M. Roberts, The Jeweled Style [1989], p. 5). As a study in the reception of classical Latin poetry, H.'s book is brilliant; but when one's goal is to evaluate the relevance of a specifically late antique aesthetics it is unconvincing to dispense with the viewpoints of Claudian or Prudentius.

Ever since the Renaissance late antiquity has been regarded as the swan song of the classical world, a last gasp before the silence of the Dark Ages. Grand narratives that construe Western culture as something essentially continuous elide late antiquity by focusing in on some essential quality or practice, as for example rhetoric in E.R. Curtius's monumental work Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948). In contrast, the transformationalists led by P. Brown in the second half of the twentieth century privileged a plurality of factors at work in the rise of new centres of power and new ways of living during the period between the rise of Christianity and the rise of Islam. The reactions of P. Heather (2005) and B. Ward-Perkins (2005) against the sunny optimism of those who seemed to deny that anything had declined anywhere in late antiquity were a necessary corrective; likewise, in a more scholarly and entirely remarkable book on the most important late antique Latin historian, G. Kelly offered an excellent and extended discussion of intertextuality that included numerous insightful criticisms of the Fontaine–Roberts thesis of a distinctly late antique aesthetics (Ammianus Marcellinus [2008], pp. 161–221). Then, in The Space That Remains (2014) I sought to produce a more rigorous explanation of a few specific differences visible in the remains of late antique Latin literature. Against this larger context, H.'s indiscriminate rejection of periodisation stands out:

If only we could pay more attention to other questions! These other subfields have been able to move on because – to take extreme cases – Tacitus is no longer read as a failed Ciceronian and no one mistakes Apollonius for an oral poet. Literary periods are disciplinary constructs invented and discussed as a way to formalise which points of view matter, and so Classicists settled on Alexandrian and then Hellenistic as terms of art to describe a certain set of texts united in one or more ways and worthy of attention for their own sake, and not merely because they reflect Homer's profound influence. In the same way scholars who attend to the differences of late antique Latin poetry allow for something more than a merely Virgilian reading of their texts. The transformations (and declines) of late antiquity will remain a touchstone for as long as Greek and Roman literature retains a place of honour in Western, and now global, culture. In short, while H. views discussion of late antique poetics as ‘a sign of the relative youth of studies of late antique Latin poetry’ (p. 3), a return to Antike und Christentum would take us back to its modern beginnings.