The volume under review originated, for the most part, from an international symposium organised in 2013 at the University of Reading by Currie and Rutherford, under the auspices of the Network for the Study of Archaic and Classical Greek Song (https://sites.rutgers.edu/greeksong). This is the fifth volume collecting the proceedings of conferences promoted by this Network. The book includes a substantial introduction and 21 chapters devoted to various aspects of the main topic. An index of passages and an index of subjects close the book. Each contribution ends with a list of references; there is no general bibliography, which would have helped to unify the volume.

The introduction by Currie and Rutherford sets out clearly the issues, the original corpus and the outline of the inquiry. ‘Greek lyric poetry’ includes melic, iambic and elegiac poetry of the seventh to fifth centuries bce. Reception is considered only within Greek and Roman antiquity; it may help us to understand better the lyric poems; it includes both transmission (through the creation of ‘canons’ in particular) and impact on further literature and culture. Transmission is of particular importance in the case of lyric poetry, since it involves the transformation of an original performance of song and dance into written texts (without musical or choreographic notations). Furthermore, a significant part of these poems came down to us as excerpts quoted by later authors, who often modified the texts, mistakenly, by lack of memory, or deliberately, to serve their purpose: taking into account the context and the motivation of the quotes is therefore essential. The introduction distinguishes six stages in the historical process of transmission: (1) ‘The Seventh and Sixth Centuries bce’ (selection and Panhellenization, oral and written transmission, control of the tradition and creation of first ‘canons’ of poets and texts); (2) ‘Fifth-Century Athens’ (comedy, Herodotus, Plato, Xenophon; Panathenaia festival as institutional venue, symposium and sympotic anthologies; literary critical discourse by Aristophanes or the sophists); (3) ‘The Fourth Century bce’ (first known papyri and inscribed texts of melic poets: Timotheus’ Persai and Paean to Dionysos by Philodamus of Scarpheia; interest of Chamaeleon and other Peripatetics in the biographies of lyric poets); (4) ‘The Hellenistic Period’ (standard editions of the poets with commentaries; ‘canon’ of nine melic poets; poetic anthologies; lyric poems and iambics by Callimachus, ‘Anacrontea’; cult of poets); (5) ‘The Roman Period’ (scholia within the manuscripts of poems; imitations by Roman poets; simplification and stereotypes; Second Sophistic, Plutarch, Athenaeus, Pausanias, Menander Rhetor); (6) ‘Late Antiquity and Byzantium’ (Himerius, Emperor Julian, Nonnus, Stobaeus, but general decline).

The volume is divided into seven sections: ‘Transmission’; ‘Canons’; ‘Lyric and the Peripatetics’; ‘Early Reception’; ‘Reception in Roman Poetry’; ‘Second Sophistic Contexts’ and ‘Scholarship’. Some sections are thematic, while others are chronological. Three sections contain only two papers, and many of them overlap. This rather heterogeneous division does not seem perfectly convincing, but this does not prejudice the coherence of the whole.

The first two chapters (Part 1) address the question of textual variants and ‘new philology’. This methodology emerged among medievalists, and is not so much interested in trying to discover the ‘original’ or ‘canonical’ texts, as it is in examining various versions of the texts in antiquity. A. Lardinois gives several interesting examples among poems by Solon, Theognis, Tyrtaeus, Alcaeus and Sappho, whereas E. van Hilten-Rutten focuses on Tyrtaeus, fragment 4 West, quoted differently by Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus for different reasons.

The following three chapters deal with the creation of canons (Part 2): G. Nagy is interested in the shaping of the Lyric Canon of nine poets, which first occurred in Athens in the classical period: he argues that the songs of ‘the Lyric Nine’ were reperformed during the Panathenaia (as citharodic or aulodic performances) and that this context played an important role in the emergence of the canon. According to Nagy, ‘the festival of the Panathenaia in Athens was the primary venue for the traditions of performing both Homer and the Lyric Nine … [T]he performances of these songs at private symposia would be only a secondary “locus of diffusion”’ (p. 99). C. Calame studies the reception of lyric poetry in Old Comedy, which tends to reduce the composition of the lyric poets mentioned to a few characteristic features (as homoerotic love poetry in the case of Ibycus, Anacreon and Alcaeus). Aristophanes’ comedies show that the symposium was an important venue for the reperformance of lyric and tragic poetry. They do not only allude to traditional lyric poetry, but they also parody them in different contexts and compose such songs for fictional ritual occasions. Calame concludes by stating that there is no canon of nine lyric poets in late fifth-century Athens nor a fixed list of poetic genres (dithyramb being the most frequently referred to and mocked in comedy). Nagy's and Calame's papers are thus interestingly opposed in many aspects. K. Bartol's chapter is concerned with elegy and its reception: she considers how elegy differs from melos, the naming of elegy, and the various meanings of the terms ἔλεγος, ἐλεγεῖον and ἐλεγεία. She finally argues that the ‘notion of elegiac genre must have been fixed quite early’ (p. 139), as evidenced by the creation of elegiac collections (maybe as early as the end of the sixth century), and that the ‘elegiac genre’ was probably defined both by sympotic context and by educational or gnomic content – which may explain that larger narrative poems tended to be excluded from these collections.

Part 3 concentrates on the transmission of lyric by the Peripatetics. T.A. Hadjimichael's and E. Bouchard's contributions are interesting in that their demonstrations take different (sometimes opposite) directions: Hadjimichael argues that the Peripatetics ‘were actively involved in the transmission and canonization of lyric poetry’ (p. 152), as intermediaries between Plato and Aristophanes on one side and the Hellenistic grammarians on the other. She shows that the scholarly activity of the Peripatetic philosophers (which she refers to as the ‘Peripatetic project’) being interested in Greek social and cultural history, and concentrating on the life of melic poets rather than on melic poetry in general, is complementary to each other and conservative, following Platonic or Aristophanian views on music and poetry (excluding New Music, for instance). She also highlights both the survival of performance culture in the time of the Peripatos and the fact that the Peripatetics, who did not make editions, were probably working with texts. She views this ‘move towards textuality’ as a step leading to literary study and to Alexandria. Bouchard underlines the fact that ancient readers did not acknowledge literary personae in poetic works and took the poetic ‘I’ as genuinely representing the poet. She highlights a common Peripatetic method (called ‘Chamaeleon's method’ by modern scholars) that consists of extracting biographical data from poetic works, and the opposite practice according to which links tended to be drawn between poetic genres and biographical details pertaining to their authors. Emphasising the Peripatetics’ antiquarian interest in ancient culture, she explains the conservatism of the corpus of authors the Peripatetics were interested in by this special curiosity. This section could probably have been placed after the next one (‘Early Reception’). It is also surprising that reception of lyric poetry in Aristotle is not covered in the volume.

In the next section (Part 4), three chapters focus on the early reception of lyric. Focusing on Timotheus’ Persae, D. Fearn highlights Bacchylidean intertextuality in the poem and sophistic influence, especially of Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen. He also points to the central position of Timotheus’ Persae between archaic lyric and Hellenistic literature, emphasising the continuity within lyric literary history. A. Capra argues that, in the Phaedrus, Plato plays with Stesichorus’ Helen, not only as a text, but also as a performance. M. Kazanskaya's contribution is concerned with three points in the biographical tradition of Sappho concerning her brother Charaxus’ love for a courtesan from Naucratis: the name of the woman, the tone of Sappho's poem and its target (whether the brother or the courtesan).

Part 5, ‘Reception in Roman Poetry’, includes two chapters. E. Bowie convincingly argues that Catullus’ poem 11 does not only evoke Sappho, but Alcaeus too, and that Horace, by including in the same book two poems (Odes 1.14 and 1.32) interpreting Alcaeus’ ship poem, one allegorically and the other literally, displays his knowledge of Hellenistic scholarship on Alcaeus. G. Bitto studies the reception of Pindar's architectural metaphors and of Pindaric philology in Rome, surveying several Latin poets (Horace, Propertius, Ovid, Statius and Virgil). Both these contributions could probably have been included in the ‘Scholarship’ section (Part 7).

Part 6 explores the reception of Greek lyric poetry in the context of the Second Sophistic. The first two chapters concentrate on the influence of Athenaeus on Sappho's reception: as a sympotic author (S. Caciagli) or as a ‘sophisticated hetaira’ (R. Schlesier). The next two contributions by J. Romney and J. Klooster focus on the influence of the biographical tradition, and especially of Plutarch's Life of Solon (subject to the author's own moral concerns), on modern interpretation of Solon's poetry and politics. F. Modini considers the figures of Terpander and Alcaeus as inspiring Aelius Aristides’ To the Rhodians: Concerning Concord (Or. 24).

Part 7, ‘Scholarship’, includes four chapters. T. Phillips's dense paper concentrates on how historical notes in the scholia of Pindar's Epinicia might have stimulated the readers’ reflection on the cultural past. E.E. Prodi's learned and valuable chapter is the longest one in the volume (55 pages): surveying all the attested poem-titles of Simonides, Pindar and Bacchylides, he tackles the issues of their origin, date and value. J. Breuer, exploring the way in which the ancient grammatici of the third century ce, and especially Pomponius Porphyrio, commented on the reception of Greek lyric poetry in Horace, concludes that their knowledge of this poetry was probably not very accurate. Finally, A. Neumann-Hartmann's clear chapter focuses on the Byzantine period: studying Eustathius’ approach to Pindar both in the Introduction to his commentary of the poet and in his other works, she shows that the Byzantine scholar was interested in Pindar's dialect, style and myths, but had direct knowledge mainly of the victory odes, and that his commentary dealt with excerpts from the four books of epinicia.

As a whole, the book is a stimulating and compelling collection of papers enriching our understanding both of the reception of Greek lyric poetry in later literature and scholarship, and of Greek lyric itself. It will be of the greatest use for all students and researchers of ancient Greek and Latin literature and history, and more generally for anyone interested in antiquity.