Wandering Poets is a collection of twelve papers by C., dating from between 1965 and 2015. Two are newly published, but the majority are revised versions of earlier papers. These revisions, in some cases substantial, C. justifies on two grounds, to take account of new discoveries, especially of papyri, and of advances in scholarship and where C. has changed his mind. In his introduction, he strikes an elegiac note, highlighting the consistency of his views, and it is pleasant to picture him in his study gazing at trophies won and other memorials of earlier battles. There is a large banner reading MY NAME IS NOT AL OK?; in the gloom can be spied the bloodied carcasses of long-forgotten victims, many of them continental scholars. Indeed C. takes account of few modern scholars, save A. Kaldellis, L. Miguélez-Cavero, E. Watts and K. Wilkinson; their brilliance is accepted, their conclusions rejected. Two notable areas where much modern research has been ignored are archaeology and numismatics, where recent evidence has suggested that the bedrock assumption of a Roman decline has been overstated. It is a history based on literary sources that, save for the chance discovery of papyri, have been available for hundreds of years. It is, of course, true that no scholar has studied these sources more rigorously or with better understanding than C.

The essays are not united by a single theme but rather by C.’s own interests in the field of Late Antiquity, in particular writers and their motives. In C.’s career two themes have loomed large, Claudian and the decline of paganism, and both are found here, Claudian viewed primarily as the defender of Stilicho, paganism as something dying on the vine. The principal authors covered are Palladas, Cyrus, Nonnus and Hypatia.

‘Wandering Poets: a Literary Movement in Byzantine Egypt’, first published in 1965, has been seminal in its influence. Its premise was startling, that there existed a school in the fourth and fifth centuries of professional, pagan poets, traveling widely in the Empire, many knowing Latin, often engaged in politics, who were from Egypt. Its conclusions have been rarely challenged in the Anglophone world, Miguélez-Cavero the most prominent dissenting voice. The new version is very substantially revised, as C. has come to accept that few poets can be proved to have been pagan, perhaps just Pamprepius, and Nonnus Christian from the beginning (E. Livrea's suggestion of two authors is dismissed [E. Livrea, Prometheus 13 (1987), 97–123]). Now Olympiodorus is the one figure other than Claudian credited with a knowledge of Latin. Political ambition, wanderlust and financial greed remain although only Cyrus and Olympiodorus were successful. The former earned his popularity in Constantinople as a builder of churches rather than for his poetry, and the latter's detailed knowledge of the events in the West before 410 suggest a career as a civil servant. The major problem remains that the group is so motley and diverse, especially in date and circumstance, that it is difficult to justify its characterisation as a school. The earliest, Soterichus, Triphiodorus and Palladas, were born before the accession of Constantine and the latest, Dioscurus, was active in the latter half of the sixth century. Too little is known, in most cases only titles, to construct putative careers with any credibility, in particular the steady output of encomia and epics on current wars, which C. suggests was the stock-in-trade; only four war epics are known other than those of Claudian (three, if we follow the Suda regarding Pamprepius' Isaurica).

The two articles on Claudian illustrate how far scholarship on the poet has advanced, witnesses both to the consistency and the rigidity of C.’s views. His Claudian remains a propagandist, ready to lie on behalf of his patron, comparable only to today's ‘rent-a-hack’ journalists. His poetic skills and his willingness to serve a paymaster confirm his ties to other poets from Egypt, differing only in that he wrote in Latin and that his work has survived, both owed to his patron Stilicho. C. has always been dismissive of De raptu Proserpinae (‘pretty but irrelevant’, p. 132), and he has ignored much recent scholarship that has explored Claudian's careful engagement with his predecessors both Greek and Latin. It is a very unliterary Claudian that we are left with, a borrower from his betters but unable to resist the temptation to improve by amplification. It is the Roman aspect of the poet that is most ignored, both as that inheritor of the Roman epic tradition and as the forerunner of Rutilius and Sidonius and their followers.

‘Palladas: New Poems, New Date?’ is highlighted by the publisher as new and controversial. C. accepts, as we must, that the revised dating of Palladas' poetry to the Alexandrian riots of 391 is no longer tenable following the discovery and publication of the Yale codex (P.CtYBR inv. 4000). He is, however, unwilling to accept Wilkinson's arguments that suggested the poet was writing in Constantinople around the time of its foundation, suggesting that only his first poems need be so early in date. Poems therefore that Wilkinson has tied to Palladas' bitter responses to current events, Constantine's adornment of his new city and his legislation on divorce, his criticisms of his own students and his attacks on women become much less pointed. It is especially difficult not to accept that his reference to his own age is tied directly to the Constantinian reformulation of the weight of the solidus to 72 to the pound. In C.’s hands, the poet has now become playful and witty rather than the pointed and blistering lampoonist that he described in 1965.

‘Paganism in Sixth-Century Byzantium’ is the second new essay in the collection, primarily concerned to refute Kaldellis' suggestion that a thorough-going paganism survived in many writers through the reign of Justinian. It is perhaps ironic that C. is now engaged in battle with the author who is perhaps his truest heir, in particular in his emphasis on both provocation and the failures of earlier scholars; as C. writes, ‘Kaldellis sticks to his guns, ignoring critics' (p. 347). He must, however, be right to argue that we should be hesitant to deduce an author's adherence to paganism from a specific phrase or his choice of subject-matter. Both Rome and Constantinople in the fourth and fifth centuries were societies that consciously looked back to a glorious past just as the Second Sophistic had looked back to its Greek past.

‘The Last Days of the Academy at Athens', described as ‘an entirely new version’ of a paper published in 1969, confirms C.’s continuing interest in late Neoplatonism. He emphasises his contention that the seven philosophers returned home from their brief and unhappy sojourn in 531 at the court of Chosroes, dismissing M. Tardieu's suggestion that Harrân on the Persian Gulf was their new residence. The latter site would form a link in the golden chain of learning linking the Academy of Plutarch, if not of Plato, to Baghdad. C.’s choice of Athens, largely for its libraries, is more prosaic, although Damascius was able to find the time to write a memoir that became Agathias' source. C.’s account of the life and death of Hypatia is similarly unromantic: no feminist or pagan martyr, she was the unlucky victim of Cyril's ungoverned anger.

It should be remarked in conclusion that whilst the publisher has shown an admirable freedom in allowing C. to ‘improve’ his articles, it will lessen the usefulness of the volume. The thesis of ‘Wandering Scholars' is now less forceful, and the new message will have to be evaluated in any account of Claudian's poetry, as scholars debate whether to choose a hard or a soft C.