This book presents us with an Argonautica that is fresh and different from the poem other critics have described, and it opens up new and promising ways of thinking about this complex work. Although his approach is in many respects formalist, P. goes beyond past formalist studies, and he discusses temporality in a distinctive way that departs from recent historicising readings, to reveal the many ways in which the Argonautica is productively ‘untimely’. The poem, that is, incorporates a number of temporalities that are in friction with each other, from the primeval to the Argonauts’ own era and (through uses of Homer) the Trojan War still to come. Not only are readers enabled to expand their imaginative sympathies to include other ways of being, but the inconcinnities between these temporalities enable them to reflect on their own selfhood and way of being in the world (‘reading is an act of self-revelation’, p. 243). They thus become aware of themselves as ‘subjects in and of history’ (p. 1). Encountering other temporalities and listening to internal performances similarly enable the Argonauts, and the author reveals his own selfhood through his epic.

This bare outline cannot reflect the care and detail with which P. elaborates his argument and the way in which the book's organisation allows him to come at his points from different perspectives. It opens, in Chapter 1, with ‘proemial passages’ and relations with other texts; these discussions establish the notion of literary history as encapsulating the poem's temporalities and also the ways in which ‘philological practice [both Hellenistic and, evidently, the modern critic's] has ethical consequences’ (p. 67). P. then turns to internal performances (Chapter 2) and the various ways in which the Argonauts, and the reader, are offered, but then blocked from, access to the past and other orders of being (the section on the Heliades’ song is especially successful). Similar dynamics emerge in the Argonauts’ encounters with remnants from the past, including rituals (Chapter 3). This chapter is uneven because of some questionable argumentation, but the fine concluding discussion of the Hesperides and Herakles stands out. Chapter 4 offers an excellent consideration of the problem of exemplarity: the extent to which specific events do and do not conform to exempla, the limits on the latter's predictive force, and how such uncertainty provokes readerly reflection. The discussion of the scenes represented on Jason's cloak in Book 1 is one of the finest parts of the book. It unsettles the many previous treatments of these scenes that have sought one-to-one correspondences between these scenes and the events of the poem, and it puts our understanding of this ecphrasis on a new footing. P. also suggests new dimensions and greater complexity in Jason's use of the Ariadne exemplum, and Medea's responses to it, at their first meeting in Book 3. The last chapter makes excellent use of an adapted version of ancient ideas of phantasia as a conjunction between ‘the sensory and the conceptual’ (p. 262) to explore the climactic scenes of Jason and the bulls, the Earthborn and the taking of the Fleece.

P. commands an impressive array of modern critical approaches, including a sophisticated version of ‘intertextuality’ and affect studies. He also deftly puts his own discussions into relation with ancient ideas about literature. In many parts of the book it is a pleasure to observe him uncovering successive dimensions of significance in a given passage, often unfolding meanings from a single word or phrase and its echoes of Homer and other earlier poetry, and always tying these findings back to temporality and the reader's active engagement with the text's suggestiveness. Sometimes it is difficult to trace how he gets to his conclusions, and in some places (fortunately in the minority) his arguments seem tendentious or otherwise weak. For example, much of the discussion of the fashioning of the Great Mother's statue at Dindymon relies on translating ἔντροφον ὕλῃ (Arg. 1.1117) as ‘flourishing in the wood’ (p. 177), so that we have a strange synoptic picture of a stump that is ‘mighty’, ‘flourishing’ and ‘utterly withered’, when the phrase means only ‘grown in the wood’. One might also want to ask if there is such a thing as going too far in detecting literary characters’ subjectivity when the text is silent, as when P. suggests that perhaps ‘readers are meant to consider the possibility’ that Orpheus’ song at Thynias is a response to his having seen the picture on Jason's cloak of Apollo killing Tityos, so that he would exemplify ‘a process of reading, understanding, and developing exempla’ (pp. 216–17). P.'s language is suitably tentative, and a more conventional reading might well see a thematic connection planted by Apollonius. It is legitimate to bypass a thematic approach in favour of an affect-centred one, but there is a danger of the text becoming just a libretto for the play of readerly fancy. A final example is the way in which he argues that Orpheus, drowning out the Sirens, ‘creates a disordered din’ (p. 127), on the basis of κανάχησεν, used of his performance at Arg. 4.907. Whereas in Homer the related noun often refers to the noise of battle, Pindar, he says, uses it of the orderly sound of auloi. It seems arbitrary to claim that Apollonius reverses Pindar's reversal of Homeric usage: why is he not following Homer's lead?

That P.'s readings raise such questions along the way is a by-product of how innovative they are. I would like finally to raise a larger question of approach, more in the spirit of clarification than criticism. Early on P. distinguishes his own approach from historicising readings of the Argonautika (my own included, which in several later places he misrepresents), which he lumps together, not wholly accurately, under the heading of ‘New Historicism’. He is quite correct to say that ‘like all critical approaches, they have their blind spots’ (p. 19 n. 84); historicising readings would not, for the most part, uncover what P. has with his method, though they can also enable insights of their own. I would not agree that what he refers to as historicising's blind spots are entailed by that approach, although they are dangers to which it can be susceptible. On the other hand, this book elides history, in important senses of that term. P. speaks often of ‘readers’ without explaining who he thinks they are, and he does not distinguish between ancient and modern readers in particular. But all readers bring to a text their specific social, cultural and historical experiences, and these things influence, without determining, their responses; and the same applies to authors. We write and read within particular historical situations. P. speaks often of readers becoming conscious of themselves as ‘historical subjects’, but he leaves that phrase abstract. In what sense are they historical subjects, and in what concrete ways does the poem promote this understanding about themselves? Were Hellenistic Greeks’ modes of understanding themselves the same as those of modern readers? More specificity here would have enriched the discussions. When he does speak of history, including on the book's last page, P. seems to mean primarily literary history. It might have been well to work with a broader notion of history (and for that matter, of culture). I say these things not to complain of what this book does not do when it does so much, but to make a different point. Rather than positioning Untimely Epic in opposition to historicising ways of reading, we might more fruitfully think of these and other approaches to the Argonautica as complementary, filling in each other's blind spots.

I have learned a great deal from this book, and so, I think, will anyone interested in Apollonius, Greek poetry or poetry in general. In an exemplary way it shows how much we can gain from reading literature in understanding ourselves, others and our world, and it serves Apollonius well.