In this excellent book G. edits, translates and discusses 35 fragments which are attributed, with varying degrees of certainty, to Julius Caesar's work on grammatical analogy (written, according to Suetonius Iul. 56.5 [Test. 2], in transitu Alpium – a journey dated by G. to the spring of 54 b.c.). G. also does much more than this: the edition, translation and commentary take up only about half of the book, which begins with six chapters of fine-grained analysis detailing the linguistic, rhetorical, philosophical and political contexts out of which De analogia emerged. Here G. combines a profound knowledge of the Roman grammatical tradition and its contemporary scholarship with a sensible and sensitive approach to the historical analysis of elite cultures. The result ought to be read by anyone with a serious interest in the development of linguistic science at Rome or in the relations which held between grammatical scholarship and other forms of elite cultural activity during the last years of the Republic. The following points of discussion are of the type which naturally emerge from interaction with such a novel and thought-provoking work. They should not be understood as detracting from G.'s superb achievement.

In Chapter 1, G. discusses potential political resonances of Caesar's programme of linguistic normalisation, a popular subject for hypothesis in recent years. In one version of this argument we are told that Caesar's drive towards linguistic standardisation emerged from his personal politics (pp. 4–7); in a slightly different version we are told that it was a response to his encounters with members of local elites in Gaul struggling to adopt a language whose morphology was full of optional variants (pp. 4, 7–8). Such political interpretations suffer from a lack of evidence: no ancient source, including Cicero and Gellius, connects Caesar's politics to his grammatical stance. What is more, one may question whether or not claims like this are consistent with what we know to have been the subject matter of De analogia. To take one example, it seems unlikely that local elites in Gaul, frustrated by the absence of a standardised morphology in the Roman legal and administrative language which they regularly encountered, would have known or cared about a debate concerning the correct accusative singular form of Calypso (fr. 27). In such cases we should be willing to call out these debates for what they surely were: the rarefied, hyper-educated noodlings of a relatively small Roman cultural elite.

In Chapter 3, in one of the most intriguing arguments of the book, G. claims that Caesar's question num tu … harum rerum natura accidere arbitraris? (fr. 11B), combined with the fact that in the surviving fragments we find no appeal to the external world of res ‘for the purpose of distinction’, should lead us to conclude that, for Caesar, linguistic systems enjoy ‘autonomy … from extra-linguistic reality’ (p. 41). This is reiterated in G.'s commentary on the fragment in question: ‘The linguistic habits of a community bear no relation to the rerum natura and the ratio that governs the language is independent of extra-linguistic reality’ (p. 191). These claims, if true, would mark a major development in our understanding of Caesar's semantic theory, especially as it relates to the analogist position described by Varro in De lingua latina 9 (pp. 194–5). The evidence, however, is thin and G. stretches it too far. Caesar's question pertains to pluralia and singularia tantum and, according to G.'s interpretation, which is surely right, rejects the idea that the range of grammatical forms which a designation may take is constrained, in the case of grammatical number, by the nature of the referent itself. It tells us nothing about what Caesar's attitudes may have been to the relations which hold between words and objects in other linguistic contexts and, as such, cannot support the claim that, for Caesar, linguistic systems in general were causally insulated from the external world. What is more, Caesar's supposed linguistic Epicureanism (as discussed in Chapter 6) would seem to militate against such a claim, given that Epicureans were clearly committed to a theory according to which the origins of language lie in nature itself (cf. p. 118, where I would have appreciated a reference to Epicurus, Hdt. 75).

Chapter 4 contains an extended discussion of elegantia, a term regularly applied to Caesar's own eloquence. The heart of the chapter (pp. 53–75) is a 42-item list populated by around 30 individuals said in the Brutus to possess one or more of the qualities which are elsewhere (in Rhetorica ad Herennium and De oratore) associated with elegantia. Here G. reads the historical accounts offered in Brutus in the light of the rhetorical precepts expressed by Crassus in De oratore 3, with the aim of identifying Cicero's own attitude to the type of eloquence practised by the elegantes. His conclusion is that the praise offered to such individuals by Cicero is ‘more or less accidental’ and that Cicero ‘harbours significant doubts’ about the value of elegantia as a form of eloquence (p. 53). Such an approach veers dangerously close to positivism, assuming as it does a remarkable degree of systematicity between views expressed in different Ciceronian works, as well as a very close correspondence between Cicero's own views and those of the interlocutors in his rhetorical dialogues. The same approach resurfaces at pp. 109–10, where G. uses a precept of Crassus from De oratore 3 in order to identify ‘hostility’ underlying the praise of Caesar found at Brut. 261, again leaning rather too heavily on some very subtle Ciceronian intertexts.

Turning to the text and commentary, G. has produced a clear set of texts together with detailed yet judiciously-selected apparatus critici. Translations are mostly very accurate, although the English terminology employed can seem over-technical: fr. 7, where Pompeius' tredecim litteris is rendered as ‘thirteen phonic-graphic units’ is an extreme example. G.'s linguistic expertise, close familiarity with the Roman grammatical tradition and profound bibliographical knowledge make him an ideal scholar for the explication of these complex and difficult texts, and the rather prosy commentary he has produced will surely remain standard for years. The commentary format enables G. to give the less familiar fragments of De analogia the space they deserve, producing what feels like a balanced account of the fragments as a whole. Any reader wanting to know the details of Roman linguistic debates in the first century b.c., especially regarding allomorphy, will find much of interest here. Occasionally it feels like G.'s focus on the linguistic nitty-gritty of each text led him to miss an opportunity to discuss how the different fragments may relate to one another. Two examples: first, G. argues that fr. 12, where Charisius reports Caesar's approval of the nominative form lacer over an alternative lacerus (laceris in codd.), may suggest that Caesar, like Varro, assigned a ‘paradigmatic role’ to the ablative case (pp. 200–1). G. gives no indication, however, of how we should understand the scope of such a paradigmatic role given the contents of frr. 13–17, which show Caesar debating the correct ablative singular forms for I-stems and consonant stems. Second, in his discussion of the famous fr. 2, according to which tamquam scopulum, sic fugias inauditum atque insolens uerbum, G. states, ‘[t]he main problem this passage poses is in knowing how to interpret inauditum atque insolens’ (p. 84). This may be true, and the following discussion is intelligent and convincing, but I would have welcomed some discussion of the scope of uerbum here (a word without its own entry in the rather sparse index verborum), and of how this fragment as a whole may be squared with Caesar's apparent ‘approval’ of the novel participle ens at fr. 31 and of genitive singulars in -iii at fr. 4. Perhaps uerbum here means something like ‘lexeme’, and so Caesar's rule may not include unusual morphological variants like ens, Pompeiii but, if so, the case for such a reading needs to be made.

Despite these few (mostly minor) points, this book deserves a wide readership among both intellectual historians and literary scholars. There is still much work to be done, for example, on the connections which exist between developments in Roman linguistic science and forms of literary expression (in both prose and verse) in the late Republic. G.'s book will surely become a standard and essential reference work for anyone interested in such issues.