This book aims ‘to provide readers with a convenient and accessible edition of all six of Callimachus’ hymns … accompanied by notes sufficient for ease of reading’ (p. vii). In view of both the other available editions and commentaries, and the developments in Callimachean studies over the past 30 years or so, its arrival is timely. Those beginning their journeys into the beguiling but often perplexing world of Callimachus’ Hymns are not especially well served for introductions: the notes in A.W. Mair's Loeb offer only minimal exegesis, whereas commentaries on individual hymns, such as A.W. Bulloch on the Athena or N. Hopkinson on the Demeter (to say nothing of R. Pfeiffer's monumental edition), are aimed primarily at more experienced readers. The scholarly landscape has also changed considerably since these commentaries were published, in particular with regard to how the issue of performance is approached, and to conceptualisation of the poems’ socio-political contexts. As a scholar who has played an important role in these trends, S. is well placed to summarise and reflect on recent debate. In doing so, and in providing readers with elegantly presented texts, accurate and readable translations, useful notes and introductions to the individual poems, S. achieves her goals admirably. Her book deserves warm praise and is a volume that all students of ancient Greek literature, not just devotees of Callimachus, ought to own.

The book's strengths are perhaps most clearly on show in the general introduction, which contains helpful overviews of Callimachus’ life and output (pp. 3–7), his relations with his literary contemporaries (pp. 7–8) and his place in the hymnic tradition (pp. 9–12). Slightly more space is given over to a discussion of the language and style of the Hymns (pp. 22–9), a complex topic deftly handled. By focusing on a few well-chosen examples (e.g. the discussion on p. 25 of the relationship between ἀμφήριστον at H. 1.5 and its uses at Il. 23.382 and 527), S. gives readers telling snapshots of the effects and interpretative conundrums created by Callimachus’ allusive practices. The sections that deal with the poems’ Ptolemaic connections (pp. 14–16), the dating of the Hymns (pp. 16–22), metre (pp. 29–36) and manuscript tradition and papyri (pp. 38–46) are particularly notable for combining admirable breadth of treatment with clarity of presentation. S. also makes a strong case for seeing the Hymns as a unified poetry book by laying out structural and thematic correspondences between the three pairs of hymns (pp. 12–14), although she sensibly does not commit to claiming that Callimachus himself was responsible for the order of the poems as we now have them.

The introductions to the individual hymns each contain an overview of the poem and sections on relevant cults, sources and intertexts, and connections with the Ptolemaic regime. Although all the introductions do readers a considerable service in equipping them with the information necessary to contextualise the hymns, they are also the areas in which the limitations imposed by the scale of the volume are most obviously felt. When dealing with poems of such obliqueness, which have given rise to such variant approaches in modern scholarship, the commentator faces considerable doxographical challenges, and S. is commendably judicious in her treatment of traditionally problematic issues such as performance and dating, while her approach to the hymns’ possible political dimensions is similarly even-handed. Her general comments on the poems are always informative, but on occasion fall short of providing incisive synoptic interpretations. Her account of the Artemis, for instance, gives a thorough account of the hymn's structure and offers valuable comments on its relationship with the Apollo (pp. 100–2), but more could be said about the overall picture of the goddess that the poem's details add up to.

The introduction to the Athena might also have benefited from further discussion of whether Athena's punishment of Tiresias is justifiable (or indeed whether it can even be adequately conceived in such terms), and whether readers’ responses are meant to be shaped more by the unsettling display of the goddess’ power or by her recompense for the suffering she inflicts. Equally, the connection between Tiresias’ mistaken voyeurism and the playful erotic colouring with which Athena's appearance and her part in the Judgement of Paris is rendered (H. 5.13–32) might have been treated in a little more detail. S. is well aware of these issues and touches on them in various insightful notes. Remarking on Κρόνιοι δ’ ὧδε λέγοντι νόμοι (100), for instance, she suggests that ‘[t]he label [sc. Κρόνιοι] may be ironically applied here, where the punishment does not fit the circumstances’. Her note on 101–2 observes that the lines ‘echo the language of law codes’, leading to the suggestion that ‘Athena, by “quoting” Cronus’ law code, displaces her responsibility for the act’. These comments suggest a reading of Athena's action that would at least complicate the basic monitory function of the myth as ‘a mythological exemplum of the consequences for young men who would ignore the narrator's exhortation to avert their eyes from the statue [sc. during the ritual]’ (p. 234), but it is left to readers to ponder their consequences.

A similar issue arises in the treatment of the Demeter, where S. puts particular emphasis on the comic antecedents of the Erysichthon story (p. 264), which she interprets as ‘a humorous inversion of the serious cult frame’ that produces ‘a potent criticism of aristocratic excess’. This is plausible and certainly helps to make sense of the poet's focus on the social consequences of Erysichthon's plight (72–86), but numerous features, such as the consequences of his behaviour for his mother, sisters and slave women (94–5), Triopas’ lament to Poseidon (98–110) and the final picture of Erysichthon at the crossroads begging for scraps from strangers (114–15), complicate the poem's emotional tone. S. is too attentive a reader to treat these nuances reductively: in her note on 96–110, she comments that ‘the tragic tone of the speech is undercut by the bathos of the conclusion’, while also detecting ‘elements of comedy’ in 94–5. But we might wonder whether the passage creates less a relation between separate registers (bathos, tragedy) in which one predominates, than an indeterminate commingling that leaves readers unsure how they are meant to react. At stake here is a distinction between an ironically distanced mode of reading which mirrors that of a knowing narrator, and a mode of reading more open to reflection on the relationship between the poem's subject and the adequacy of the critical resources brought to bear on it. Nor of course is this distinction absolute: individual readers might well find themselves responding to the hymn in both ways.

Yet while such passages might be felt to demand more elaborated interpretations than S. provides, this criticism is offset by the limitations imposed by the book's form, and the usefulness of the commentary as a starting point for further engagement. The Hymns will doubtless continue to provide fruitful ground for critical debate, and S.’s keen observations and lucid arguments will be a valuable tool for the participants.