With this volume Claudius Aelianus’ opuscule the Rustic Epistles (20 letters occupying a scant 17 Teubner pages) at last receives its first full commentary in any language. Recent decades have seen its neglect in considerations of Aelian's literary and rhetorical career somewhat corrected, in large part thanks to a great resurgence of attention to ancient epistolary literature – but in the case of Aelian's letters specifically, in very large part thanks to the efforts of D., whose numerous articles and chapters on them, both on textual matters and interpretation, culminate in accomplished manner in this commentary. The book consists of an introduction (35 pages), Greek text and Italian translation, c. 140 pages of commentary, a comprehensive bibliography and three indexes (thematic, Greek and Latin terms, and passages discussed).

The text is based on that of P.L.M. Leone (Claudii Aeliani Epistulae rusticae [1974]), but D. makes some well-reasoned changes to Leone's text in several places, discussed in the commentary and based on personal inspection of the necessary manuscripts. Though D.'s work is not a critical edition, the text printed here is an improvement to any previously published, including that of Leone, taking account of the intervening four decades of discoveries and scholarship on the text, including the material in her own previous contributions.

The introduction discusses, in turn: Aelian's life and career, quite succinctly. The attribution and manuscript tradition of the Rustic Epistles, as fully as need be: the letters’ attribution to Aelian is secure, and the evidence is summarised here; the manuscript tradition is not a voluminous one, the corpus reaching us via two codices; some readers might want a little more than the few lines devoted to the MSS’ title for the work, ἐκ τῶν Αἰλιανοῦ ἀγροικικῶν ἐπιστολῶν (‘From the Rustic Epistles of Aelian’), which implies that we have only a selection of a larger work, but in truth we will never know any more about this possibility unless further letters emerge, and fuller discussions of the matter are signposted here. Finally, in great detail, the question of the Epistles’ intertextual relationships (introduction §3, ‘Allusività e forme di memoria letteraria’ [‘Allusivity and forms of literary memory’], pp. 19–43). The text's recasting of episodes from Menandrian plots in a different genre, borrowing substantially from their sources’ vocabulary, has been the main reason for any scholarly attention it has received until recently; the closeness of these borrowings to known Menandrian fragments even led T. Kock (Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta, Vol. 3 [1888]) to invent further comic fragments from other phrases in the Epistles, changing their wording slightly to give the requisite metre. This New Comedy background to many of the letters’ scenes and phrases is one reason why a substantial section of the introduction is devoted to intertextuality and indeed would require much space in any commentary on this work. But it is not the only one: recent scholarship (not least that of D.) on the Epistles has found a more nuanced intertextuality than the merely ‘copy-and-paste’ borrowing that Kock's practices assumed, both in alluding to more than just New Comedy (Old Comedy and pastoral poetry provide the greatest numbers of hypotexts after New Comedy, but there are others) – and having qualitatively different intertextual relationships with sources of different genres – and in their rewriting of dramatic scenarios taking into account how the conversations and interactions between characters would differ if they were conducted through written correspondence, so that the quite different potentials and conventions of the epistolary genre are exploited. Moreover, D.'s extensive and fine-grained work on the four Greek epistolary collections most similar to Aelian's (those of Alciphron, Philostratus, Aristaenetus and Theophylact Simocatta) mean that she is ideally placed to explain how each epistolographer, all of them to varying extents alluding to New and (less so) Old Comedy and a varying range of other genres, has their own distinct allusive strategies and set of intertextual practices, and to elucidate Aelian's practice in particular. In all these matters, this substantial section of the introduction guides readers expertly, while the commentary illustrates these points fully for each particular case. If one theme might have warranted a little more space in the introduction, it would be the contextualising of the Rustic Epistles in the wider literary and rhetorical culture of the time (beyond the epistolary genre): Lucian garners many mentions, the Greek novels some, starting in the introduction and accumulating as the commentary proceeds; likewise, there are a few mentions of ethopoiia and other rhetorical exercises to which the text has often been compared; but a synoptic view in the introduction of the Epistles’ place in its milieux, Greek and Roman (Aelian was from Praeneste and claimed never to have left Italy, but his works are exclusively in Greek), ‘sophistic’ or otherwise, considering questions such as its relationship to such rhetorical exercises, what kind of contribution it would make to the career of Aelian, or how and by whom it might have been read it its time, would be welcome. This is not to criticise the overall approach, entirely justified by its own results and by the last two decades of scholarship, of avoiding earlier scholars’ (frequently reductive and superficial) comparisons with rhetorical exercises, categorisations of each letter against schemas from rhetorical and epistolary handbooks etc., and instead treating the Rustic Epistles as a literary text worthy of commentating as such.

The commentary is all that one could hope for and indeed would expect from the author of the excellent commentary on Aristaenetus’ Erotic Letters (Aristeneto. Lettere d'amore. Introduzione, testo, traduzione e commento [2007]). The approach to and coverage of themes within each individual letter, and thus to the whole work, is sympathetic, nuanced, full of detail and refreshingly even-handed. That is to say, there are still some letters that receive more commentary per line of Greek than others, inevitably, because of factors such as the relative density of their allusions to extant texts; nonetheless, the fate of so many individual letters in the hundreds of under-researched letter collections of antiquity is to be almost completely overlooked until a commentary on the whole book comes along, and now that moment has arrived for the Rustic Epistles that are not, for instance, a reimagining of Menander's Dyskolos (Epp. 13–16) or do not have a metaliterary authorial sphragis (the end of the book's closural Ep. 20). They may be slight, but each of the letters is a well-crafted miniature with its own appeal, and D.'s attention succeeds in bringing something new to light in the reading of all 20 Rustic Epistles, both the relatively more known and the less so. This book will thus serve, like the Aristaenetus commentary before it, as the standard point of access to Aelian's letters for experts and newcomers alike for some time to come.