Nos ausi reserare… (‘We dare unbolt…’): a small but weighty beginning, with the new Loeb Ennius. It's nearly eighty years since E. H. Warmington finished his four-volume Remains of Old Latin (1935–40), combining the fragments of Ennius, Lucilius, Accius, and other pre-Sullan poetry in cheerful farrago with the Twelve Tables and a book of ‘archaic inscriptions’. The dry title notwithstanding, this was a flagship collection from a long-serving general editor of the Loeb Classical Library (1937–74): the scholarship was valiant, despite the slips so fully catalogued by unkinder reviewers, and the product has exerted wide influence as the go-to ‘accessible’ edition of so much important material – even if l'Année Philologique insists on calling its editor ‘Brian’ (his son: talk about tuer le père). Still, eighty years are a long time even in Classics, and an update could fairly be called overdue; happy news, then, that Harvard have commissioned Gesine Manuwald, another London professor, to oversee it. The new title is Fragmentary Republican Latin, more of a mouthful but a touch less downbeat; the remit is extended to include oratory and historiography; and the first instalment is a chunky Ennian diptych (one book for the Annals, one for the rest), jointly curated by Manuwald and Sander M. Goldberg.Footnote ¹

The innovations are substantial, and broadly three. First, the text. Warmington's numbering of the fragments – which is to say, his reconstruction of Ennius’ works – is jettisoned. For the Annals Skutsch becomes the benchmark (as he surely had to):Footnote ² Goldberg and Manuwald keep his numbering, even where they raise doubts, and students and teachers of Ennius can thank them heartily for it. For the Satires they follow Russo;Footnote ³ for the tragedies, Manuwald's own recent edition (unfortunately, if trivially, misidentified as Tragicorum Latinorum Fragmenta, xxxv), which orders the fragments for each play by date of the quoting source, abjuring any attempt at plot reconstruction.Footnote ⁴ That is intellectually admirable (and accompanied by wise introductory remarks on the difficulties of handling fragmentary texts), but perhaps a little purist for the catholic Loeb audience; and a concordance with Jocelyn might have been nice.Footnote ⁵ (They are supplied for Skutsch, Vahlen, and Warmington.) Another major change comes in Ennius’ version of Euhemerus, intrepidly restored as verse by Warmington, firmly back in prose (and denied any appearance of a continuous text) here. Accuracy with the Latin looks good on a spot-check; a shame the first pentameter quoted (2) couldn't be set right.

Second, the translations: for the most part, wholly new. To my taste volume 2 is very successful, volume 1 mixed. The famous line moribus antiquis res stat Romana uirisque (Ann. fr. 156) comes out as ‘on old-time ways the Roman state stands fast and on its men’ (193), at once soulless (‘old-time’) and perverse (in not letting antiquis modify uiris); I vote with Warmington (‘On manners and on men of good old time’). In the augury scene of Book 1 we read, ‘so the people were waiting, visible on each face a concern / for their affairs, to which the victory of supreme rule is given’ (153, for frr. 82–3: sic expectabat populus atque ore timebat | rebus utri magni uictoria sit data regni), where ‘their affairs, to which’ is unhelpful at best; on this point too Warmington is a more faithful guide for the Latinless (‘wondering to which of the two the victory of right royal rule should be given by the event’), however you prefer rebus. Why, in Romulus’ threat to his brother (nam mi calido dabis sanguine poenas, fr. 95), does Remus’ ‘hot blood’ get watered down to ‘your life's blood’ (155), and why, in Ilia's dream, does postilla (fr. 40) become ‘awhile’ (51)? By contrast, back in volume 2, the fishy Hedyphagetica is closely derived from Warmington; amid sea weasels, parrot wrasse, and scaly oysters there is only one substantive change, from ‘sea-perch’ to ‘bass’ (for acarnae): a delicate (and unexplained) touch.

Third, the rest. The bulk of this edition – at just shy of a thousand pages, it's twice as much Loeb as Ennius used to get – is owed in part to larger print and more space around the edges, but primarily to the abundant scholarly apparatus: nearly a hundred pages of introduction and bibliography (all in volume 1, so non-epic Ennians won't get away without buying both volumes), 114 general testimonia (ditto), fuller citation of the context for many fragments than Warmington gave, a smattering of footnotes, and – particularly useful – substantial introductions to individual works and books. If I pick out a couple of oddities (‘cf. Lucretius 1.1–3’ [119] on Ann. fr. 1, presumably culled from Skutsch's commentary but obscure in this abbreviated form; the complaint that Vahlen and Skutsch put Mettius Fufetius [Ann. fr. 120] in Book 2 ‘for no particularly good reason’ [160] – isn't his war with Tullus Hostilius a pretty good one?), they are exceptions to a very good rule. On the one hand, the result is more cluttered even than Warmington, with plenty of leafage to clear away if you want to gaze on the fragments themselves; on the other, it will be a superb resource for students and non-expert scholars, thanks above all to the extensive and up-to-date bibliographical pointers. This is perhaps the closest a Loeb has yet come to a commentary, but with good reason; ‘Ennius perennis’ and the Loeb Library can look forward together to a new lease of life.

Steven Green's new volume on Grattius releases another poet from the cobwebs of an ageing Loeb, this time the Minor Latin Poets.Footnote ⁶ Some years ago John Henderson memorably let the dogs out;Footnote ⁷ now Green co-opts ten scholars to explore the Cynegetica from a nice range of perspectives. It was a good idea to include a text of the poem, with translation and notes; but for the inevitable subtitle, the puns on hounds and hunting are kept on a short leash. Among critical approaches intertextuality figures large: Giulia Fanti studies imitation of Lucretius and Manilius; Monica Gale adds the Georgics and advocates powerfully for Grattius as a poet with allusive muscle; Boris Kayachev well documents interactions with the Aeneid and toys with making Virgil the alluder; Lisa Whitlack argues for direct influence of Theocritus. Elsewhere Donncha O'Rourke addresses author figures, Christina Tsaknaki tries a ‘Callimachean’ reading, and Green himself (following Henderson) scours the poem for the ‘Augustan flavour’ it takes so little trouble to display, tentatively advocating a date towards ad 8. Gregory Hutchinson's chapter tots up Grattius’ references to motion – surprisingly few for a poem on dogs and hunting – and reflects, briefly but richly, on their ethical implications, not without a passing swipe against metapoetic reading (‘tedious or abhorrent as we may now find it (I would go for “abhorrent” myself)’, 138) and a thought-provoking rejoinder to his editor (‘Although we are inclined to see politics as the ultimate source of meaning in Augustan poetry, within the world of the poems the ultimate source of meaning looks much more like religion’, 145–6). Two final chapters (Victoria Moul and Mike Waters) illuminate Grattius’ reception in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Some news in brief now, with due apologies. Sergio Yona's PhD monograph examines Epicurean influence on Horace's Satires, giving special place to Philodemus.Footnote ⁸ Neil Bernstein offers an excellent brief introduction to Seneca's Hercules Furens.Footnote ⁹ Roland Glaesser introduces Lucan's epic to a broader (German-reading) public, with a hundred pages of commented precis and another fifty on selected ‘themes and aspects’.Footnote ¹⁰ I won't write about Tom Geue's exciting study of Juvenal, since I had a trivial part in its evolution,Footnote ¹¹ and I'll balance modesty with fairness to my co-editor and our contributors by only mentioning a volume on literary interactions under Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian.Footnote ¹² Last but very far from least, The Poetics of Late Latin Literature is a heavy and heavyweight collection which poses big questions about literary aesthetics in later Latin, and offers some stimulating answers.Footnote ¹³

Marden Nichols’ study of Vitruvius joins the wave of scholarship working to bring ‘technical’ literature back from the margins.Footnote ¹⁴ Authorial persona and self-fashioning are one axis of interest, cultural context the other. The book ranges widely in Latin (and some Greek) literature, setting De Architectura in conversation with authors from Demosthenes to the Elder Philostratus; there is a special place for Horace, whose literary persona Nichols parallels with that of Vitruvius, and Plautus’ Mostellaria, for its take on the adage, la domus, c'est l'homme même. Vitruvius’ own text is selectively mined, with proportions, pozzolana, and pumps kept at arm's length; primary points of focus are the autobiographical prefaces and occasional short passages taken as starting points for cultural enquiry.

The two governing claims are that Vitruvius is invested in establishing an authoritative persona, and that he lived in a Roman culture that was also deeply and self-consciously Greek; a third is that his text is more complicated than you might think, another unsurprising move but justified by some of the scholarship. On the tricky business of identity and dates Nichols treads carefully, preferring for the most part to report other scholars’ theories – and some of them are pretty hare-brained – without coming down for or against. But this project is concerned less with ‘hard’ facts and more with cultural and literary history; and it doubles as a welcome call for the literature brigade to pull Vitruvius down from the shelf more often.

‘Horace and Seneca’ was an interesting idea for a conference held at Heidelberg in 2015, and the resulting volume, edited by Martin Stöckinger, Kathrin Winter, and Andreas Zanker, brings together fourteen attempts at putting these two philosopher-littérateurs in conversation.Footnote ¹⁵ As contributors note several times, Seneca only quotes Horace four times, far less often than he does Virgil or Ovid; but it would be a poor reader who stopped the enquiry there, and not only because Seneca's tragic choruses are obviously dripping with the Odes. The chapters range widely in mode and quality: several pursue specific intertexts, some more persuasive than others; others try broader or looser syncrisis, on ethics, politics, style, or indeed metrical practice (two chapters). I'll risk invidia by singling out one highlight, Alexander Kirichenko's ‘Constructing Oneself in Horace and Seneca’, a rich and ambitious comparative study of personal ethics, high politics, and studia in the two oeuvres. The editors offer, besides an attractive introduction, a ‘bidirectional list of correspondences’ between the two authors, running to nearly thirty pages. It's a crude tool, of course, more a representative index of modern work (their sources begin with A. Zingerle in 1873) than an exhaustive guide to intertexts, however defined; and the stated goal of providing a starting point for future research would have been helped had they specified who identified each correspondence and where. Still, it's a generous endeavour, which, like the volume as a whole, should serve its enthusing purpose.

There was a time when Caesar's Bellum Gallicum was force-fed to all ‘boys in the lower forms’. By the late twentieth century you could graduate in Classics without reading a word of it, never mind the Bellum Ciuile: for all the pedagogical purity of his Latin, the endless battles and perceived lack of literary depth – and a general antipathy to prose – knocked Caesar out of the canon for many. In the last couple of decades the pendulum has swung back, as the Bella have been grazed by the ‘historiographical turn’. Some would say that we're finally starting to read Caesar's penmanship properly; however you feel about that, there's no longer any excuse to call it boring. Cue a new Cambridge Companion to the Writings of Julius Caesar, neatly curated and impeccably timed by two young bloods of Caesariana, Luca Grillo and Christopher Krebs.Footnote ¹⁶ Like the Companion to Julius Caesar edited by the late Miriam Griffin for Blackwell,Footnote ¹⁷ it has a distinguished international cast; the tighter remit (accounting for less than an eighth of Griffin's book) amply justifies its place alongside it on the shelf.

Highlights for me include Andrew Riggsby on geography and space, Krebs on prose style, and a volley of contributions opening up the terra incognitior of the fragmentary works: oratory, poetry, the Anticato, Caesar's linguistic treatise De analogia, and the six extant letters. But almost every chapter fires, and original contributions are many. Ancient and modern reception is well covered; textual criticism stays out, as the unwritten Rule of Companions generally dictates. The absence of chapters devoted to each of Bellum Gallicum and Bellum Ciuile, and thus of a systematic treatment of each, also fits that modern profile, while at the same time reacting, I suspect, to their presence in the Griffin companion. By contrast, the ‘continuators’ (that is, the Bella Alexandrinum, Africum, and Hispaniense) get dedicated treatment, as they did there, and fare much better for it: where Ronald Cluett merrily hammered the ‘pseudo-Caesars’ (‘great Latin prose that sure ain't’),Footnote ¹⁸ Jan Felix Gaertner gives a nuanced account of each work and abundant pointers to scholarship (monoglot Anglophones need not apply) – including the view, also his own, that part of B Alex. goes back to Caesar himself. All the chapters end with reading recommendations and open questions about research to come; this sense of a volume looking forward with all eyes open is strong and invigorating: here is a corpus with plenty of life in it yet.

Commentaries have been landing thick and fast, starting with a contrasting pair on Aeneid 8. James O'Hara's contribution to the Focus Vergil Aeneid,Footnote ¹⁹ like the series as a whole, is on the one hand explicitly tralaticious, not to say antiquarian: the notes are based on Page's commentary of 1900, the vocabulary adapted from another of 1893, and the text, mirabile dictu, taken from Hirtzel's long-defunct OCT.Footnote ²⁰ On the other, it is fresh and stimulating, thanks to the extensive revisions and additions, and rich in its brevity; as Gransden's ‘Green and Yellow’ fades,Footnote ²¹ this makes an excellent point of departure on Book 8 for undergraduates and others. Meanwhile Lee M. Fratantuono and R. Alden Smith break new bounds with a commentary running to more than eight hundred pages.Footnote ²² The introduction is perfunctory, leaving ample space for long notes on pretty much every word, as well as a bulky apparatus replete with such variants as omnis/omnes and affatur/adfatur (8.26, 8.126). If Nicholas Horsfall's Virgil commentaries took concision and acerbity to an extreme rarely seen these days, Fratantuono and Alden Smith again offer a polar opposite.Footnote ²³ The tone is affable and nothing if not leisurely; where Horsfall amassed learning with brutal brevity, they cite in extenso, verging on the manner (and at times the discrimination) of a seventeenth-century variorum. So mihi is explained as ‘dativus dynamicus vel energicus’ at 8.163, ‘dativus acquisitionis’ at 8.508, because F. Antoine said so in 1882: will that enlighten many? Their own comments are extensive too, which is not to say we aren't left wanting more in multo: so, for instance, the note on Euphrates (8.726) duly reports the celebrated structural allusion to Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo, cites the scholarship (missing the scepticism of JenkynsFootnote ²⁴), and paraphrases Callimachus at length, but doesn't do much by way of interpreting it. Or suppose you want to know more about the name ‘Cacus’: no note on his first appearance (8.194); the introduction does report that ‘it evokes the Greek word kakos’ (17, not indexed) – but surely there was room between these expansive covers at least to acknowledge the differing quantity. Then again, selection is not of course a science, and those students lucky enough to have access to the best-funded libraries will find plenty here to provoke and stimulate.

Rex Stem's revival of another faded commentary, this time a school edition of Caesar's Gallic War (selections),Footnote ²⁵ offers itself as a rigorous but more forward-looking classroom tool for intermediate Latin students.Footnote ²⁶ Jan Robinson Telg genannt Kortmann devotes, in fine and thorough doctoral dissertation-style, more than four hundred pages to Silius Italicus, Punica 12.507–752.Footnote ²⁷ At the other end of the scale, William Barton's slim edition of the Peruigilium Veneris offers a critical text of this short spring poem with translation and commentary.Footnote ²⁸ The introduction (nearly half the book) offers ingenuous reportage of the long debate on date and authorship, before reviving the claim for Annius Tiberianus in the early fourth century, or at least his milieu. Then come the ninety-three verses themselves, with thick critical apparatus and smooth translation, and a commentary tuned heavily to textual criticism, but attentive to other things too; alas for ‘Seneca's Octavia’ (133). The Bloomsbury Latin Texts series, marketed as ‘student editions of key works of Latin literature’Footnote ²⁹ and catering especially for British school students, is a strange home for this specialist study; strange too the wide spacing, which stretches perhaps 100 pages to fill 150, giving a peculiar ‘storytime’ feel. And the price…?

We end back with Gesine Manuwald, and Cicero. If his speeches constitute a core of the prose canon, the chances of finding a decent modern commentary on any given one are still surprisingly low. They have just increased, however, thanks again to Manuwald's unceasing industry, which bears new fruit in a major Oxford edition of De lege agraria.Footnote ³⁰ Agrarian bills don't set everyone's pulses racing, and it's little wonder that these orations struggle to compete with the Catilinarians as prime examples of Cicero's consular oratory. Still, as speeches from his first weeks in office they certainly merit the wider readership which Manuwald canvasses, and her solid intervention, the ‘first full-scale commentary’ in English (v), leaves no excuse not to give them a try.

The introduction is devoted primarily to historical and procedural context and to reconstructing Rullus’ proposals, no easy job given their typically obfuscatory presentation by Cicero. The economic politics of land distribution are not at everyone's fingertips, and non-expert eyes risk glazing over at the ‘vicious circle of usury in the provinces’ (xi), ‘viritane assignments of ager publicus’ (xv), and so on: these quaint tones will leave some wishing for a little more explanation. Cicero's self-styling as nouus homo and a ‘truly popularis consul’ (Leg. agr. 1.23) gets brief coverage, questions of structure, revision, and rhetorical strategies rather more, textual criticism the conventional last word.

Next come testimonia, then the three surviving speeches, to Senate (fragmentary) and people (one long, one short). Manuwald gives her own text, based on Marek's Teubner of 1983, but re-punctuated (Germanic commas come and go, unpredictably and not always helpfully) and with the apparatus presented as footnotes (a habit apparently bedding in at OUP). If the idea is to make more readers notice textual problems, it works: it is hard to read a line like ‘nihil numero et suffragiis ³⁸⁰ depravari ³⁸¹, nihil vi et ³⁸² manu perfingi posset’ (Leg. agr. 2.98) without being provoked into checking the foot of the page. But the effect is irritating enough to confirm the merits of the usual conventions, as I hope the Press will come to agree. The more substantive problems are also discussed in the commentary; Manuwald tends to the conservative, even when the transmitted text is hard to parallel (e.g. on 2.70: ‘verbo has to be supplied, but does not have to be added to the text’); the inconsistency on ‘Alexas’ in 1.1 and 2.41 presumably reflects a change of mind. The parallel translation is firmly in the school of ‘clarify the Latin’, which it duly does, at some expense to English style and idiom but with reliable accuracy, saving some tenses in conditionals and elsewhere (1.24, 2.6, 2.88, 2.90) and a major collision with sentence structure in Cicero's grand preface (2.2, also confused in the note, 191).

The prime virtue of the commentary, as of the introduction, lies in wide and intense coverage of the scholarship, along with generous notes on procedure and the technicalities with which these speeches bristle. Lexical help is cued to the OLD, often quoted at length, syntactical comment to Kühner–Stegmann; several notes simply precis the text and/or (some may say) state the obvious. Ancient texts and inscriptions are cited at length, whether or not they have a bearing on Cicero's usage; there is an argument for trimming some of this, but the encyclopaedic presentation will save a few people time looking up references. Rhetoric and style are thoroughly covered; one exception is sexual invective, which is overlooked or avoided: Rullus’ pretty-boy surveyors (2.53, formosis finitoribus) get prudish comment (‘this description insinuates that their company is desirable’, 309), and the similar implication in 2.59, Iuba…bene capillatus, is lost amid a long note on hair and beards (317–18). Metre gets curious treatment, variously wordy-technical (‘This point is concluded with a clausula consisting of a version of the catalectic dicretic (first paeon and trochee)’, 240, on the familiar esse uideatur rhythm), vague (‘a fairly frequent type of clausula’, 120), arbitrary (rhythms are identified at modern paragraph ends, but not always and not only), and surprisingly often wrong (1.6, 1.15, 2.1, 2.4, 2.25, 2.60, 2.65); harder but interesting questions about the effect of, say, a string of cretics in 2.1 or the dispondees in 2.4 and 2.10 are not broached. More broadly, it would be interesting to see these speeches set in the context of Cicero's oratory as a whole: how has his style developed since the Verrines, and what will change between this and the Philippics?

But these are small matters in a big and serious book. With it Manuwald puts Cicero's first consular speeches firmly back on the map, and (dare I say?) tills rich land for his readers to come.