This new Green and Yellow has the merits of brevity and a clear purpose, ‘to provide the student reader with the information that will facilitate the construe of the text’ along with guidance towards ‘an appreciation of Horace's craft’, i.e. ‘his use of language, metre, and the construction of poems’ (p. vii). These things it certainly does. The main points are made in a short, well-organised introduction. Notes to specific lemmata are highly attentive to classical Latin idiom and to the main features of poetic language, both general and specifically Horatian. Nor does M. content himself with labelling these features as standard or non-standard, poetic, modelled on Greek, or otherwise remarkable. He gives clear illustrations and directs the reader to further discussions: the standard reference grammars along with OLD, TLL, Roby and Woodcock are constantly cited, much more often than in most student commentaries. There is also an excellent analytical index that is largely devoted to linguistic matters.

All this is managed in a way that does not impede use of the commentary to facilitate rapid reading of the text. By the same token, however, there are ways in which this commentary works better as a linguistic and stylistic textbook than it does as a guide to Horace's poetry in all its aspects. The prefatory statement of purpose cited above continues: ‘Interpretation of each poem posed a rather more difficult issue, about which something has been said at the end of the Introduction’. And there we learn (in a half-page section entitled ‘Interpretation: a Note’, p. 20) that M. limits his coverage to a survey of ‘available interpretations’ – certainly not all of them, however, since there are so many and some are frankly ‘unrewarding’ (although M. hopes that ‘no important reading has been overlooked’). The student is thereby informed that linguistic interpretation is quite separable from the literary kind and that the latter involves rummaging through existing ideas, discarding most, in search of the right one, rather than imagining that some new insight could possibly illuminate a passage or a poem.

Here I should admit my general agreement that commentaries, especially those meant for students, should make the text in question more accessible, and should generally refrain from promulgating theses or arguments that are more effectively set out in articles or monographs. But literary and philological exegesis are not as separable as M.'s prefatory remarks imply; and when students are the intended audience, a good commentary ought to present philological and linguistic issues in a way that will encourage the reader to become a better Latinist or Hellenist and also point the way to becoming a better literary critic, particularly by showing how linguistic and literary analysis inform one another. M. takes a different view, treating the one kind of exegesis as logically prior and indispensible, the other as entirely posterior and too often misguided.

As a result, M. sometimes draws unnecessary distinctions in a way that misses the larger point. At 1.1.6 he writes that terrarum dominos is ‘best taken as predicative with euehit … rather than with deos; the focus is on the new status of the victor, rather than on the power of the gods’ (p. 53). This is a very familiar conundrum about which commentators have always disagreed. But the potential for uncertainty that Horace creates here (the existence of which is proven by the commentators' disagreement) actually means something: the grammatical ambiguity about raising men to the level of gods, centring on the question of which are the ‘lords of the earth’, hints at the theme of apotheosis. This becomes relevant to Horace's own ambition at the end of the poem, where literary canonisation becomes a similar form of elevation, and then reappears in the political and religious sphere in the next poem (1.2), where Augustus is imagined as Mercury come down to earth but destined to return to the sky. Pretending that there is no uncertainty whether terrarum dominos refers to men or gods, when confusion between these categories is so obviously the point, forestalls literary interpretation in a way that diminishes the experience of reading. In such cases, remaining open to uncertainty can teach a useful lesson about linguistic and literary interpretation that, in my experience, most students find exciting.

Readers will differ to some extent over what constitutes an ‘important reading’. Still, I expect others will be surprised not to find books by Ancona, Armstrong, Bowditch, La Penna, Oliensis, and Woodman and Feeney in the list of cited works. But then others are cited to no real point. J. Miller, in his recent study, Apollo, Augustus, and the Poets (2009), devotes five trenchant pages to ode 1.21 (Dianam tenerae dicite virgines), but M. cites Miller only to note that he and K. Quinn ‘are somewhat casual in observing distinctions’ between this ode and an actual hymn. The complaint must have to do with Miller's very informative comparison between this ode and the Carmen saeculare, which M. barely mentions. This brings out another deficiency of the commentary, which does not seriously deal with Horace's poetic career as a factor in the literary interpretation of Odes 1. Admittedly one can construe ode 1.21 without thinking about the Carmen saeculare; but is there any actual advantage in virtually ignoring the later poem? Nor is it just a matter of Horace's later career: M.'s discussion of ode 1 focuses narrowly on the mechanics of the priamel as a formal device, but ignores the fact that Horace begins his lyrics much as he had his satires (not to mention his career as a poet), by reviewing different walks of life, this time in a more positive key than before. (Santirocco is excellent on this point, as on much else, but he too has somehow gone missing from the bibliography.)

In general, the readings M. finds ‘rewarding’ are the most limited ones, as he tacitly acknowledges in what is essentially his envoi to the reader, the endnote to ode 3.38. Here for once he acknowledges a metapoetic frame of reference: by eschewing Persicos apparatus, he implies, Horace expresses a preference for simplicity in all things, including the interpretation of his poetry. Accordingly, M. surveys the various symbolic meanings that readers have found in the sympotic wreath that Horace requests and finds all of them incompatible with this guiding principle. But here M. accepts a measure of indeterminacy, as well: ‘For the last time we are faced with an interpretational stand-off. Some are content with an uncomplicated “ethical” reading. Others find that insufficient (without denying the ethical element) and look for some sort of allegory, whether aesthetic or erotic. There is no way to reconcile these opposed camps’ (p. 227). The last point may be right; in any case, M. makes it clear to which camp he belongs, and he is usually less generous to his opponents. In his endnote to ode 1.3 (p. 80), he states that there is no ‘need’ to understand the poem allegorically, i.e. as referring to Virgil's work on the Aeneid, and that therefore it should not be read that way. This is a point on which very good readers of Horace can and do honestly disagree, but M., stating mere opinion as if it were fact, insists that those who disagree with him ‘fail to see that H.'s strictures would be “over the top” if directed at poetic composition of any kind’.

The strengths and weaknesses of this commentary are very pronounced, and very much at odds with one another. It would not be fair to say that a scholar who wants a text to mean not as much but as little as possible is the wrong person to comment on a poet like Horace. Anyway, this commentary, by virtue of appearing in this series, is likely to be widely used. Teachers who know Horace well and have sufficient independence of mind may find it useful in helping students to construe Horace while showing them how much more rewarding even a neophyte's ideas about his poetry can sometimes be in comparison with those of certain experts. Those who do not already know Horace well are advised to do their homework and not to rely on the impoverished conception of a remarkable poet that they will find in these pages.