This volume takes up the old but still timely cultural theoretical question: can the subaltern — or the unrepresented and maybe unrepresentable Other of human history — speak? And if not, then how does it happen that, in Latin literature up through Late Antiquity, ‘inferiority is (or can be made to be) empowering (or at least enabling)’ (2)? Answering this question with mostly high-art texts, the volume leans in a literary direction where what Sebastian Matzner in the introduction terms ‘the playful and/or strategic manipulations of discursive hierarchies’ predominate over ‘the dynamics of concrete oppression’ (6). Rather than resorting to the simple and reductive answer that the relationship between elite and non-elite discourses is one of appropriation, Matzner writes that ‘[t]he answer is, unsurprisingly, never straightforward’ (12).

The contributions that discuss successful instances of elite appropriation of non-elite or otherwise ‘inferior’ discourses set the baseline from which other contributions deviate with more or less ‘complexity.’ Discussing Catullus, Cicero and Ovid, William Fitzgerald draws a line through traditional studies of Latin literature from Callimachus’ poetics of small things to Nietzsche's diagnosis of ressentiment (‘I'm good […] because I've been wronged’: 16), as background for close readings of lexically related bits of Catullus and Cicero. These explain the Roman reversion to inferiority as a function of a self-conscious sense of being slighted (Cat. 76.2; Cic., Fam. 5.7.2), which Ovid's Heroides hypostatise into an entire genre. Dunstan Lowe's study of the praeco presents a simpler form of appropriation, Ovid and Horace's incorporation of the low-status crier's role for their praeco-like self-promotion. In contrast with Lowe's model of complete appropriation, Jean-Claude Juhle finds in Martial himself a mixture of appropriation of others and of genuine self-representation: the first of poverty, based on conventional claims of the ‘poor poet’, the second of the periphery (Martial's native Spain) from the centre (Martial's Rome). Starting from Horace's dictum, ‘Greece took captive its brutish conqueror and brought its arts to rustic Latium’ (29), Matzner traces the same type of complexity in Horace himself, a symbolically colonised subject who benefits from real colonisation and explores his complex condition as a kind of post-colonial theorist in Epistulae 2.

Discussing Phaedrus the fabulist and Juvenal's poems’ ‘resistance to being pinned to particular poets’ (92), Tom Geue explains them as ‘figured speech’ or ‘the elite tactics of self-reduction during the Principate’ (106, cp. 94–6) but makes the biggest contribution to the volume when, in passing and evoking Plato's Phaedrus behind Phaedrus’ Aesop, Geue describes ‘the complex inferiority that is writing itself’ (100, cp. 90 n. 3). Victoria Rimell's exciting piece returns to ground first broached in Matzner's contribution, Horace's more prosaic poems, but from a completely different angle: where Matzner read Horace's literary critical Epistle to Augustus as a form of post-colonial theory, Rimell extends the deconstructive turn introduced by Geue to Horace's metapoetics for which ‘censorship [read: criticism] is the condition of possibility not only of “good poetry” but of reading/writing (or agency) in general’ (111–12). The alleged ‘son of a freedman father’ (Hor., Sat. 1.6.6) appears once more a complex compound of active and passive, superior and inferior. Shadi Bartsch evinces a similar dynamic from an author whom we would probably deem inferior, the fifth-century allegorist Fulgentius, by showing how he was able to rescue Vergil from the inferiority to which the Christianisation of Rome threatened to reduce him as so much ‘pagan swill’ (226), offering a ‘bold, if speculative, claim’ (226) that Fulgentius’ was the ‘first [Christian] text to offer a sustained and not piecemeal allegorical interpretation’ of pagan literature (229–30).

With less theoretical felicity than others in the volume, Stephen Harrison reviews Horace's odes for evidence of homoerotic desire. Offering impeccable close readings, Harrison concludes that ‘male-male desire is often […] played down by multiple focalisation’ (182), which seems correct but also assumes that the discussion of female desire for males cannot but be evidence, in the context of Horace's poetry, of male desire for males. This is probably plausible but produces problems for a feminist reading, which a more queer-theoretical approach would avoid by emphasising the fungibility, not only of the desired, but also of the desirer in erotic discourse. Ranging from the Odyssey and Anacreon to Catullus and Ovid, Gregory Hutchinson compares different attitudes to unequal manifestations of physical beauty in mostly first-person poems. Introducing symbolic logic to set the parameters, Hutchinson charts intersecting hierarchies of ugliness in terms of age and status, as well as ‘attractiveness, devotion, desire, and power of choice’ (204).

One of the first contributions to explore the failure of elite discourse to capture subalternity, Amy Richlin's invocation of blackface revitalises the old question of the use of masks in Roman comedy, demonstrating the uncanny relevance of Roman palliata (esp. Plautine) to almost every interesting category of modern thought (gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity), and identifying pre-modern representations of race as anti-essentialising and essentially ambivalent: ‘dark’ and ‘broad’ can throw ‘fair’ and ‘demure’ into relief, but when demands for freedom are ‘spoken through a dark mask’ (71), colour surfaces as a marker of difference and identity, including even identity politics. Bringing a welcome feminist perspective, Vassiliki Panoussi also explores the failure of elite discourse fully to appropriate the somewhat subaltern subjectivities of Tacitus’ heroines, Messalina and Agrippina. Returning to the sub-theme outlined in Matzner's introduction, literary play, Panoussi explores the role of topoi in producing such women — that is, their literary construction and construction on account of literary precedent — tracing Tacitus’ background, and maybe the background of the women themselves, to Cicero and Livy's images of women's power. Resembling Richlin in attention to subalternity and Panoussi in attention to historiography, Ellen O'Gorman scans a received text for the voice of the socially subordinate Roman people. Starting with Rancière's appropriation of Livy's account of the secession of the plebs and grounding the discussion in concrete phenomena such as elision, alliteration, internal rhyme and prose rhythm, O'Gorman argues that popular experience emerges through Livy's value-laden deployment of noise (or phonê) rather than speech (or logos) in Roman historiography.

The final contribution of the volume anchors its range more securely in Late Antiquity, with Hardie's interpretation of the angry cowherd who rebukes his patron saint for the loss of his cows as part of the congregation of the fourth/fifth-century populist bishop, Paulinus of Nola, Poems 18 (full disclosure: Hardie shared this paper with me before publication). Mining the sustained speech of this true subaltern for Classical allusions, Hardie explains Paulinus’ prosopopoeia through Auerbach's concept of Late Antique realism (sermo humilis) as related to the commonplace of the poor poet in Classical Latin, which Paulinus’ ascetic assumption of real poverty revitalises. Here, within the confines of Latin literature, we finally encounter the convergence of literary and sociological forms of subalternity — that of the appropriated voice and of the expropriated under-classes.

This convergence of sociological and literary perspectives demonstrates the value of the volume as whole, which, in addition to being equally wide-ranging and conceptually focused, deploys theory in a consistently timely way that promises to open Latin literary studies to intellectual frameworks born of the political imperatives of our time, including intersectionality, postcolonial studies, feminism and (almost) queer theory.