The title of Luke Roman's book lays out a formidable rubric. This is a comprehensive study of the rhetoric (and realities) of literary autonomy in Latin poetry, traced through the oeuvres of some of the most significant poets of the Roman literary canon over the course of three centuries. A monumental work of literary history — and a proportionately vast achievement, since R. has undoubtedly succeeded in telling the story he set out to write. If the very scope of the project contains certain pitfalls, these are hazards which R. himself cheerfully embraces as the price of his chosen genre of literary criticism. Whether or not all readers will agree with him about this, most will agree that the few drawbacks of R.'s approach do not detract from the many new and valuable insights he has to offer into the work of every Roman author he discusses, nor from his ability to make us re-read some of Latin literature's most familiar and well-worn tropes.

R.'s study defines poetic autonomy as the sequestration of a realm of literary activity from the pressures — material, political, ideological — of the outside world, and seeks to mesh its analysis of the rhetorical gestures through which poets claim or disavow their autonomy with the material realities underpinning these claims. This commitment to both the internal and extrinsic narratives of literary history that run through and around R.'s choice of texts is a brave remit, and foregrounds a dichotomy that R. knows to be open to deconstruction. And so it is: R.'s account of the historical conditions under which Roman poets wrote about their autonomy (or lack thereof) is offered at times without footnotes or sources, such that the historical picture he paints seems to be drawn out of the very poems for which he is providing the historical background; when the biographical tradition is invoked, its value as evidence is not questioned. This is old historicism at its most untroubled, and R. makes no bones about the generalizing nature of his aims. ‘Is it possible to revive the lost art of generalization?’ (24), he asks, apparently without irony, in the introduction.

Yet R.'s partial account of the historical context is only really glue and filler for the central narrative of this book, which relates how the rhetoric of literary autonomy gets passed down from poet to poet and refashioned in response to the literary tradition. Starting with Lucilius and ending with Juvenal, this narrative writes history from the inside out, and has as much to tell us about Roman cultural and political developments as it does about Latin literature. R.'s reading of Catullus provides a brilliant early example of this: he begins with an analysis of the idea of literary value that emerges from the Catullan corpus when we focus on the contrasting concepts of time that attach to the various literary works mentioned in the polymetric poems. He then proceeds to read Catullus against Cicero, and demonstrates through a close reading of passages from the Pro Sestio and In Pisonem how far the terms of cultural value circulating between all genres and media in this period are invested with direct political currency. Equally impressive for its combination of historical and literary insight was the chapter on early Augustan poetry, where R. picks out a number of ingenious common threads between Horace's Satires, Virgil's Eclogues and Propertius' first book of poetry, and weaves these into a narrative about the new meanings of libertas and servitium that emerge in the literature of the early Augustan period. R. finds convincing ways of connecting such diverse factors as Horace's social and Propertius' sexual status, and plots these considerations into his account of how ideas of freedom and slavery are recalibrated in this period.

Another invaluable outcome of R.'s approach is its filiation of new genealogical lines between texts of different, even ostensibly alien, genres. In his treatment of space, for example, R. shows how a number of quite diverse Roman poets use landscape and cityscape to figure a rhetoric of social withdrawal and immersion respectively. Horace is an obvious focus for this idea, but some of R.'s most intriguing insights on this theme pertain to Juvenal, and range beyond the legacy of satire, as R. persuasively connects Juvenal's version of the city/country dichotomy to Virgil's Eclogues. This is a good example of how productive ‘poetic autonomy’ proves to be as an umbrella concept for the range of texts scrutinized in this study. Satire, elegy, pastoral and epigram all get a look-in, as do Catullus' polymetric poems, which are presented as foundational for the collocation of other genres that follow. R. traces his story not just within each genre but from one genre to another, and this provides a surprisingly fertile basis for his study.

I will admit to having harboured initial doubts as to whether poetic autonomy would provide a fruitful theme for a work of contemporary literary criticism. I was wrong. While a greater engagement with theory (which seems to be a bugbear for R.) would certainly have made this book more intellectually exciting, it is nevertheless a major achievement, which no student or scholar of Latin literature of virtually any period can afford to ignore.