Mapping the Graeco-Roman emotional landscape has attracted growing interest in recent years. C.'s monograph, in the new Emotions of the Past series (edd. R.A. Kaster, D. Konstan), focuses with mixed results on jealousy in Roman elegy, a genre well-suited to the emotion. Not much has been said on the topic, C. notes (p. 4 n. 5). C.'s fundamental and ambitious claim is that ‘[j]ealousy is not merely the subject matter of elegy: it creates and structures elegy's various generic features’ (p. 19), specifically ‘its obsessive detailing of events, anxiety over trust or fides, and interest in role-playing’ (p. ix). An introduction defines jealousy (p. 10: fear of a third party's stealing the beloved) and demonstrates elegy's uniqueness in manipulating jealousy thematically (pp. 15–16). Six well-woven chapters cover the causes, manifestations and effects of jealousy in erotic relations between poet-lover and puella, in love triangles and in social relationships.

Elegy and philosophy's common discourse on love-as-illness occupies Chapter 1, an adaptation of C., CJ (2006), 271–98. While the genres share the basic disease analogy – apparent from C.'s collation of passages on love's repercussions (including jealousy) from Lucretius, Tusculan Disputations and elegy (pp. 22–34) – only elegy presents love as ‘an inescapable part of the human condition and something [elegiac lovers] cannot live without’ (p. 29). Unlike the philosophers, the elegists seek not a cure but increased desire (pp. 34–45).

Describing jealousy through elegiac case studies, Chapter 2 explains what jealousy is like and when male lovers should or should not express it. Propertius 1.3 is paradigmatic: ‘Cynthia manifests her jealousy with anger, while the male lover displays an increase in physical desire’ (p. 50). Narrators gain elegiac authority vis-à-vis their audience (beloved, rival, reader) through displays of jealousy. Revelation of the narrators' unfaithfulness or deception in Propertius 3.15 and Amores 2.7–8 ‘forces readers to participate in a more direct way with evaluating claims and suspicions of fidelity or infidelity’ (p. 62). The chapter's strongest points are that jealous characters use visual cues in determining their beloveds have cheated and that they tell stories (often mythological) when expressing jealousy. C.'s explication of the narrator's jealousy in Propertius 1.3 is unpersuasive, however, and her claims of Cynthia's ‘jealousy’ demand greater nuance. Cynthia's speech is not direct but constructed: what is attributed to her says more about the poet-lover than the puella.

In Chapter 3, C. examines gendered reactions to jealousy. ‘[W]atching or fantasizing about a beloved is not so much a reflection of desire as an indication of suspicion and fear’ of infidelity (p. 78). Women are initially sceptical of the evidence for infidelity but ultimately succumb to jealousy (Heroides 5–6, Propertius 4.3); men are credulous of the slightest suspicion. The gender difference continues into the physical realm in Chapter 4. Women's violence – which lovers masochistically embrace as proof of desire – ‘seems to be the frustrated expression of their [the women's] impotence, at least in view of the male narrator’ (p. 95). By contrast, in C.'s formulation, men react not with violence but with restraint and attack poetry. The lover's violence in Amores 1.7 is simply uariatio, C. argues, not an unveiling of the genre's implicit violence. Is it fair, though, for C. to say that Ovid's speaker ‘did not actually deliver a blow’ (p. 106) when he calls the beloved laesa (1.7.4, 34, 40), calls himself harmful (59), says rage moved him against her (3) and compares his act to assaulting a citizen (29)? This illustrates a deeper flaw in Chapter 4, selection bias: the elision of male violence to fit an imperfect model. C.'s reading disregards, for example, Propertius 2.15.17–20, where the speaker threatens to beat the puella if she refuses to take her clothes off before intercourse. C.'s assertion that the poet-lover's depiction of violence ‘is a calculated affair that he hopes will establish his own depth of emotion and character but that in fact reveals his own compulsive jealousy and narcissism’ (p. 111) is interesting and sound. Yet ultimately the analysis of violence and gender does not solve the interpretive problems of violence or enrich the poetic ambiguities uncovered in the past two decades of work on elegy.

Over the final two chapters C. widens her scope to distrust and social fides. The shift is matched by a narrowed focus on Propertius, who ‘has an interest in the uses of jealousy, both poetic and sociopolitical, that goes beyond what we find in other writers of Roman elegy’ (p. 113). Chapter 5 argues that poetic/generic rivalries are presented in terms of amatory jealousy, and that the reader experiences suspicion about the narrator's plausibility in parallel to the narrator's own suspicions about his beloved's fidelity. Thus for C. the appearance of other poets in Propertius 1.4, 1.5, 2.34 (Bassus, Gallus, Lynceus) and Catullus 50 (Licinius) is about not homosocial bonding but the persistence of erotic jealousy, a ‘competitive and biting’ attitude between males (p. 117), and the poet-lover's ‘anxiety that they will steal his ideas or be competitors for a place in the hierarchy of love poets in Rome’ (p. 128). C.'s line is persuasive on Propertius 2.34, less so on 1.4 and Catullus 50. The argument on Propertius 1.5 – which is about the narrator's empathy, not jealousy, for Gallus – rests upon tendentious interpretation of several keywords (including inuidus, furores and mala).

Chapter 6 claims that ‘elegists think that jealousy is a symptom of a more pervasive problem in Roman society’ (p. 141). The non-erotic sphragis poems of Propertius' monobiblos (1.21–2) share with the earlier erotic poems a thematic concern about the loss of fides and the negative consequences of unreciprocated trust. 2.6 dramatises the contamination by erotic jealousy of other social interactions (pp. 146–51); 3.13 expands outwards from the infidelity of the puella to ‘undermine any notion of trust in human relationships’ (p. 152). C.'s connections between erotic/jealous fides and other kinds of fides are frail. Wall paintings at 2.6.27–34, we are told, may connote a noble house, mention of which in turn ‘points to the larger issues at stake’ (p. 148); mention of Romulus and the Rape of the Sabines at 2.6.15–22 somehow invokes fratricide – as if any reference to Romulus must automatically include the story of the death of Remus. C. rightly draws attention to the juxtaposition of erotic jealousy/infidelity and complaints of a decline in political fides in Propertius 3.13. But proximity does not necessarily prove that sexual jealousy structures the content and bearing of elegy's forays into public discourse. Moreover, C.'s reading unduly conflates the poem's actual complaints about the ‘greedy girl’ with interpolated notions of erotic jealousy.

Running throughout are two main issues. First, after unsubstantiated reference to elegy's ‘adulterous relationships’ (p. 17), C. treats the status of the puella (citizen wife? meretrix?) ambivalently, omitting sufficient engagement with S.L. James, Learned Girls and Male Persuasion (2003). By not taking a stand, C. whitewashes over a crucial interpretative decision – it is important whether the poet-lover's romance is with another citizen's wife or a non-citizen sex-worker. (Statements like ‘jealousy would not exist without the marriage bond in the first place’ [p. 71] seem easily refutable.) Second, C. assumes that elegy ‘provides a continuous tale of the relationship’ (p. 138, cf. 47) and she reads Propertian poems that do not mention Cynthia by name as evidence for the poet-lover's relationship with Cynthia. I am reluctant to impose the twin tyrannies of linearity and unity upon this complicated, richly inconsistent genre (Cynthia appears in the flesh in 4.8, after speaking as a ghost in 4.7 …). Happily, such diachrony is not really required for the bulk of C.'s argument.

Elegy is perhaps the most complex, sophisticated product of Roman literature and is unaccommodating of monolithic aetiology. It is hard to adopt a jealousy-genesis for elegy without excluding Propertius 4, as C. mostly does; two important monographs on Book 4 – M. Janan, The Politics of Desire (2001) and T.S. Welch, The Elegiac Cityscape (2005) – are overlooked altogether. Ovid, Amores 3 does not appear and Ars Amatoria gets short shrift, though both have much to say explicitly about jealousy. C.'s discussions of Tibullus, who is less central than Propertius to the monograph's agenda, are more effective. But the individual components of that agenda tend each to rest on analysis of a few poems scattered across the corpus, decoupled from their poetic fabric. This book is commendable for investigating under-studied aspects of elegy, but its claim that jealousy is the key that unlocks the genre reaches too far and fails to convince.