In addition to works aiming, wholly or partly, to replace Peter's Historicorum Romanorum reliquiae — Chassignet, L'Annalistique romaine in France; Beck–Walter, Die frühen römischen Historiker in Germany; a team, led by Tim Cornell and of which I am a member, Fragments of the Roman Historians (forthcoming) in Britain — there have been, particularly in Italy, a number of studies of individual historians — Forsythe on Piso, Santini on Hemina, Walt on Macer, Perutelli on Sisenna (cf. JRS 97 (2007), 300–2), Laconi, only four years previously, on Quadrigarius. Ambrosetti here presents a full-scale edition of and commentary on the fragments of Quadrigarius, comprising a wide-ranging introduction (9–74), a critical edition, preceded by detailed lists of manuscripts for each citing author (see further below) (77–118), commentary (121–374), bibliography (375–408), and a selective index (409–23).

In the edition A. retains both Peter's numeration of the fragments and his often arbitrary attribution to specific books of fragments for which a book number is not preserved, even though she sometimes argues a contrary case. Thus since frs 70–72 all come from Book 8 and A. believes that fr. 70 refers to the triumph of L. Aemilius Paullus in 167 b.c. and fr. 71 to either L. Valerius Flaccus, censor in 184–3 b.c., or Q. Fulvius Flaccus, censor in 174–3 b.c., and that fr. 72 corresponds to Livy 45.1.2, she assigns fr. 67, concerning the alleged Rhodian embassy of 169 b.c., to Book 8, though in the edition it appears under Book 7 (and frs 70–2 continue to follow frs 68–69, which relate events of 146 b.c.). In fact no fragment has both a certain or probable context in the second century and a book number until fr. 73 (137 b.c.) and the only safe course is to place frs 62–69 under the heading ‘Books 7–9’. Worse, A. includes, with Peter, fr. 12, the account of Valerius Corvinus’ duel with a Gaul, even though she agrees that it is not the work of Quadrigarius (thus, most recently, Oakley and Holford-Strevens) and relegates her commentary on it to an appendix.

Elsewhere A.'s ideas about the context of a fragment do not affect its position. She implausibly thinks that fr. 1 refers not to the battle of the Allia but to the participation of the three Fabii, sent as ambassadors to Clusium, in a battle with the Gauls. And her suggestion that fr. 46 refers to Fabius Verrucosus' campaign in Liguria is clearly wrong: Fabius' colleague M'. Pomponius Matho fought in Sardinia, not Liguria.

A. thinks that the letter of the consuls of 281 b.c. to Pyrrhus (fr. 41) is based on genuine archival material and shows that Quadrigarius made use of documentary sources. The whole story may be unhistorical, but in any case it is much more likely that the letter is Quadrigarius' own invention.

An editor of fragments cannot be expected to master the textual tradition and collate the manuscripts of each citing author (ten in the case of Quadrigarius) and for the most part must rely on existing editions. In three cases, however, A. has gone further. For Aulus Gellius she has collated Par. BNF Lat. 13038 (but not Cambridge, Clare College 26; see Marshall in Texts and Transmission, 177), for Nonius the photographs of the MSS used by Lindsay held at the University of Genoa (she also reports the citations, almost certainly fake, in the Cornucopiae of Niccolò Perotti), for Priscian all the MSS of the eighth and ninth centuries containing the fragments of Quadrigarius. For the rest her lists of MSS are taken, with suitable adaptations, from standard editions. This procedure can have unfortunate results, as is clear from the entry for Livy. For Books 6–10 and 25 she has used the OCT, for 31–40 my Teubner edition. In the sigla for Books 6–10 Walters and Conway cited their MSS just as ‘Mediceus’, ‘Parisiensis’ etc., without shelfmarks, and A. does the same; for the fourth decade, on the other hand, she virtually copies my list of sigla, but interprets my ‘Fragmenta, Vat. Lat. 10696’ and ‘Fragmenta, Bamb. Bibl. Rei Publicae Class. 35a’ as ‘fragmenta codicis … ': the fragments are what remain of MSS of Late Antiquity; A.'s formulation implies that what were once MSS Vat. Lat. 10696 and Bamberg Staatsbibliothek Class. 35a have been reduced to fragments. And I wonder whether she expands some but not others of my abbreviations because she is unable to make anything of the latter.

A. overloads her apparatus in two ways: she includes entries for what are purely matters of orthographic convention and provides what Frank Goodyear used to call ‘voting lists’ (e.g. fr. 9 ‘incolumiores Hosius Marshall Julien … incolomiores Hertz Peter^1–2 Chassignet Beck-Walter Laconi’); the name of a modern scholar should appear in the apparatus only if he or she was the first to propose a reading. (Similarly, the introduction and commentary contain rather too much conscientious reporting of earlier views; I should say that A.'s knowledge of the bibliography is formidable.)

The commentary discusses the context of each fragment, but is largely concerned with matters of language and style and it is this which is A.'s main strength. She makes full use of TLL, Kühner–Stegmann and Hofmann–Szantyr, and provides a mass of information which will provide a firm basis for future work on Quadrigarius' Latin; she draws the material together in the final chapter of the introduction (61–74), but there is more to be done (my remarks in Aspects of the Language of Latin Prose (2005), 66–9 merely scratch the surface).

The criticisms above should not obscure the substantial merits of A.'s work. It is a matter of regret that it was not available when I was preparing the entry on Quadrigarius for Fragments of the Roman Historians; but even if it had been, the difference of scale would have made it impossible to make full use of A.'s material. It is a book of solid and traditional filologia classica and it is hard to think that, in the present age, it could have been produced anywhere other than Italy.