‘No one should complain that there is nothing left to do.’ So runs R. Hunter's litotic epigram capping Poems without Poets. This volume gives us more to do and less to complain about. When it comes to editing anonymous ancient texts, it is not that nothing has been done; it is more that we have a lot to complain about in the doing. One of this volume's most interesting insights is in exposing how the philological tradition – hardly replete with shrinking violets – has felt particularly entitled to perpetrate excesses of text-critical zeal on these defenceless, authorless creatures. This excess has bulged between full-on textual meddling on the one hand and abandoning a poem to death by a thousand obelisks on the other. This book advocates a much more careful and appreciative handling of texts made by poets and editors, who are no less worthy of these titles for having no names.

Ancient anonymous literature is very much in the thick of its overdue ‘rehabilitatory’ phase, with more and more appreciative contributions flooding forth since the paradigm shift of I. Peirano (The Rhetoric of the Roman Fake: Latin Pseudepigrapha in Context [2012]). Kayachev's crisp introduction (pp. 2–3) duly distinguishes this volume from recent work: while my book Author Unknown: the Power of Anonymity in Ancient Rome (2019), for example, treats anonymity as an intrinsic feature of a text (although I am careful to define this as a misallocated relationship with the reader), Poems without Poets treats it as a historical force materially affecting a text's treatment by scholars over time. But I would see all of this work as united by the common interest of rehabilitation and the common problem of how anonymity inflects reader reception – be that inflection positive or negative, that reader historical or imagined.

The twelve chapters fall into three sections of decreasing size: five chapters in Part 1's ‘Collections’, four in Part 2's ‘Fragments’ and three in Part 3's ‘Texts’. Nominally, this clusters the chapters of Part 1 under the rubric of anonymous poetry collections and the role of the compiler, those of Part 2 under the common problems of contextless fragments, and those of Part 3 under a redemptive advocacy for anonymous texts as ‘integral artistic wholes’ (p. 3). In practice, the chapters easily cut across these divisions, because the vast majority are concerned with the fascinating problems anonymous poetry throws up for editors. I found myself wondering why this animating spirit of specifically editorial problems was downplayed in the volume's title and introduction, in favour of a more catholic/anodyne ‘approaches’ to anonymous poetry, especially given the original conference's subtitle (‘editing anonymous poetry’). Perhaps a missed opportunity here. Rather than taking refuge under the standardised edited-volume-speak of ‘diversity’ and ‘complexity’ among contributions (p. 7), Kayachev could perhaps have owned the importance of editing and textual criticism as prompts for the riveting theoretical issues contained herein. The case for making these dustier parts of the discipline interesting has never been more urgent. The volume does the job so well, it is a shame it does not show off about it more.

To the ‘approaches’, then. A. Hall starts strong with a clear-headed analysis of the complex early tradition of the Homeric Hymns – like many such collections from antiquity, a case of accretion over time. Hall's formalist reading of the Hymns’ patterns of repetition in initial and closural formulae uses these clues to reconstruct not just architecture, but how the collection evolved: in his view the original collection contained 24 poems, 1–26 minus 6 and 8. Hall tracks the separate Homeric and Hesiodic colours of the various organisational units of the collection to reach his convincing conclusions, to which might be added a superficial numerological point: 24 is the magic Homeric number. From a complex case of pseudepigraphic longue-durée accretion in the hymns, J. Lightfoot gives a magisterial introduction to the corpus of astrological poetry under the pseudepigraphic name of ‘Manetho’. These six books totalling 3,000 hexameters contain material ranging from about 80 ce to the fifth century. Lightfoot's brief is not to disentangle the original from the later accumulations, but to show the dizzying dynamics of pseudepigraphy ‘folding back on itself’ (p. 37), i.e. harking back to another Greek (likely pseudepigraphic) piece of astrological literature, the corpus of Nechepso(s) and Petosiris. Lightfoot then discusses the circulation of this material in Roman and late antique Egypt, where multiple crossings of content between poetry and prose show the everyday forces of reception generating endless parallel versions – and where, nevertheless, the hand of an individual poet (‘Pseudo-Manetho’) can be felt.

Sticking with the theme of the collection, we now pivot to the Latin side. R. Maltby has a hard crack arguing single authorship behind Tibullus Book 3, contra multiple authorship consensus. For Maltby, the strong thematic ties across the book push for a series of Heroides-like experiments with different elegiac voices penned by the same author, flagged also by certain metapoetic red flags (e.g. a recurrence of the changeable Vertumnus). Maltby is all too aware of the high political stakes of positing a male ghostwriter behind the Sulpicia cycle. He is careful to entertain the idea that the overseer poet could have been a woman too, though a slip to the default male pronoun (p. 57) makes us suspect the force of his conviction. T.E. Franklinos's excellent fourth chapter considers another pseudepigraphic collection in the Catalepton, but provides a challenge to its very status as a Virgil fake. Franklinos quietly yet radically unhitches the collection from the constraints of Virgilian biography, reading it more as a literary experiment retrospectively toying with the cultural milieu of the mid first century bce. In that context, the Octavius (and?) Musa of Catalepton 4 and 11 do not necessarily need a distinct historical referent. Franklinos argues nicely that the Catalepton's prosopographical apparatus is supplied precisely by late republican texts (e.g. the Octavius of Horace, Sat. 1.10.82); what would Franklinos make, I wonder, of the eponymous addressee of the Culex? Rounding out Part 1, we go back to Greek, but stay in the imperial period. M.A. Tueller gives a wonderful account of the Metrodorus cycle in Book 14 of the Greek Anthology. Metrodorus, the supposed editor of a cycle of epigrams around mathematical problems, is both a collator and a commentator approaching authorial status: his scholia are substantial prose ‘solutions’ appended to the epigrams. This raises important questions about where text ends and marginalia begin. In perhaps the most theoretically informed chapter on the topic of authorship, Tueller makes us think twice before lopping certain scholia from ‘the text’.

From the warmth of huddled poetic groups, Part 2 puts us out in the cold of isolated fragments. H. Čulík-Baird presents a fascinating run through Cicero's practice of verse citation in the De oratore and the Letters, many cases of which are unattributed – but which are not necessarily for that reason ‘anonymous’. Quite the opposite: markers such as nosti, ‘you know’, show that, even if these fragments of wisdom seem unattributable now, they needed no footnote then. While this leaves the intellectual snobbery of such framing generously unaccounted for (‘of course you know’ as status marker and put-down), the general approach leads to some real insights on late republican intellectual practice as well as opens another window onto how anonymity can foreclose scholarly interpretation (e.g. the frequently quoted quo me nunc vertam, pp. 111–12). P.J. Finglass gets back to editing with a nice chapter ‘towards’ a hypothetical volume of anonymous Greek tragedy, more indulgent to the creative act of interpolation policed out of a ‘classic’ edition. His suggestions for how to display such ‘fragments’ in the context of this putative collection (p. 128) are genuinely energising in their upending of the usual hierarchies of a standard critical edition: highlighting, rather than shamefacedly bracketing or outright deleting, the elegant pseudepigraphic art of interpolation. Back to Rome, M. Shumilin makes an original case for considering the vexed Helen episode of Aeneid 2.567–88 as an act of such creative interpolation writ large – and attributes it to Varius, posthumous editor of the Aeneid, who may have plied some big finishing touches. S.J. Heyworth finishes off Part 2 by inventing a couple – namely, the last two poems of Tibullus Book 3 (19 and 20). Unlike Maltby, who pushes a unitarian line to Book 3, Heyworth argues that 3.19 and 20 are plausibly, genuinely Tibullian – possibly fragments displaced from Book 2. Deploying various metrical, linguistic, but mostly intertextual arguments, Heyworth mercilessly shoots down most of the evidence for inauthenticity. [Tibullus] might need to shed some of his brackets.

Without a let-down so far, the volume saves some of its best jewels for last. M. Hosty pens an outstanding chapter on editorial practice around the pseudo-Homeric Batrachomyomachia. The poem's unique status as both inside and outside the protection of an authoritative father figure – an ousted orphan haunting the feast, both Homer's and not Homer's – emboldened its various editors, from Byzantine times to the late nineteenth century, to make serious textual interventions. The 1896 editor Arthur Ludwich even added nine lines of his own making. Hosty compares the Batrachomyomachia's in-between condition to that of an orphan via Iliad 22.489–98, but he need not have done that all himself (the language of paternity for authorship is well-established in antiquity). Kayachev follows on Hosty's heels to track the opposite problem in the textual history of the Moretum: while the Batrachomyomachia's orphan status invited hard interventionism, low assessments of the Appendix poets have left many kinks in the texts that can, with care, be ironed out. Kayachev starts the job admirably with his persuasive suggestions for Moretum touch-ups. Finally, R. Hunter shares some new work on inscribed Greek epigram (specifically funerary epitaphs). These poems, partaking in a mostly default condition of anonymity, prove fascinating for the questions they raise about literacy vs non-literacy, literarity vs non-literarity, metre as hard rule or soft guide and about the principles of charity or condescension brought to any critical engagement with a text. Hunter brings the best of his literary sensibility without ever idling into naïve generosity (cf. his model reading of the sudden irruption of a pentameter into the otherwise hexameter pig poem CIGIME I 527, pp. 214–15).

The days of scholarship patronising anonymous literature are long gone. This volume shows us what wonders result when some of the discipline's leading philologists and critics treat these works not as hapless orphans, but as over-18s with full voting rights. It is not just business as usual, as Kayachev might have us believe (cf. p. 200). Anonymity expands our critical and disciplinary practice. These poems, after giving so much, should never go without again.