Roman writers referred to Greek literature frequently and explicitly. But did the Greeks read and use Roman literature? Their silence about Roman models and the lack of explicit markers have led many scholars to deny Greek reception of Latin texts, at least until the third century a.d. Over the past decades, however, more and more work suggesting potential Latin influences has emerged. Daniel Jolowicz adds to this discussion with his detailed study of Latin poetry in the Greek novels. In fact he deals with Chariton, Achilles Tatius and Longus. He does not find enough evidence in the ‘paraliterary’ Xenophon of Ephesus, and Heliodorus falls outside the chronological scope of the investigation, i.e. the first two centuries a.d. The somewhat skewed comparison of Latin poetry and Greek prose is justified on the one hand by the scarce transmission of Greek poetry from that period, on the other by pragmatic restriction of the source corpus and by the fact that poetry is more suitable for revealing a genuinely literary interest beyond the mining of texts for mere information.

The Introduction (1–34) is largely devoted to developing a general cultural backdrop, based on ‘a deliberately cumulative and maximal view of the spread and depth of Greek appreciation for Latin literature, which will thus offer a counterweight to the traditionally pessimistic approach’ (14). With this goal in mind, J. reviews what we know e.g. about Greek–Latin bilingualism, Latin literary papyri in the context of education, and the role of Latin in festivals and libraries. The final section on ‘allusion and intertextuality’ defines intertextuality as intentional allusion and as part of the authorial agenda (which is traditional and fair; I am not sure why this needs to be associated with ‘positivism’, 28–9). Of central importance for J.'s approach is the claim that there was a fundamental difference in modes of referring to Greek and to Latin texts: while Greek references to Greek authors (I think one would have to specify: canonical Greek authors) tend to be open and explicit, Greek references to Latin authors tend to be hidden. Like earlier scholars, J. speaks also of ‘covert’, ‘disguised’ and ‘masked’ citation. Framed in a model of postcolonial anxiety and self-assertion, this way of alluding is seen as a strategy of ‘suppressing’ and ‘silencing’ the Latin models in the very moment one resorts to them.

The following chapters focus on Roman elegy (in Chariton and Achilles Tatius) and on Virgil (Aeneid in Chariton, Achilles Tatius and Longus; Eclogues and Georgics in Longus), with some additional observations on the representation of bodily violence in ‘silver’ and Neronian authors (Ovid, Lucan, Seneca in Achilles Tatius). The results are mixed, and I think the study is here too (as avowedly in the picture of the general cultural background painted in the Introduction) best understood as a deliberately ‘maximal view’ that pushes the underlying hypothesis to its extremes. Most of the passages adduced prove little in terms of close reading of the text but suggest more general parallels in genre conventions, motifs, small plot lines, and what could be called a general sentiment or outlook — for instance, when J. detects adaptations of the elegiac servitium amoris in a number of novels (with the remarkable observation that the recurrent erotic use of Greek δέσποινα in a way similar to Latin domina does not have close parallels in earlier Greek literature: 154–5). These resemblances still have to be explained, but they need not necessarily betray the intimate knowledge of Latin texts that J. supposes. He certainly makes a number of plausible and important suggestions, but it is not always an easy task to spot them among much that seems (at least to this reviewer) pressed too hard. In chapter 2 on Chariton and Ovidian Letters and Exile, for instance, the Ovidian (but also more generally elegiac) motif of smudging one's love letters with tears is said to serve as a model for Chaereas’ writing to Callirhoe in which he ‘pours a libation of tears’ on his letter (Chariton 4.4.8: κατασπένδω τούτων μου τῶν γραμμάτων δάκρυα) — but precisely the smudging characteristic of Ovid is absent. Also hardly credible is the claim that Dionysius’ simple act of rereading Callirhoe's letter in 8.5.14 responds to Ovid's advice (Rem. am. 717–8) not to reread love letters because of potentially damaging effects. By contrast, Callirhoe's lament in her Babylonic exile, ‘I am separated from my homeland by a whole world’ (τῆς πατρίδος ὅλῳ διορίζομαι κόσμῳ, 5.1.5) is strikingly reminiscent of Ovidian phrases such as Pont. 2.2.12 ‘patria toto sumus orbe remoti’, and given there is no Greek parallel for Chariton's language here (as J. claims), this is definitely noteworthy.

J. is to be praised for collecting and considerably expanding on what has been researched on his question before, but he needs judicious readers. His argument that Latin intertexts are ‘suppressed’ will not necessarily sound more convincing than the alternative hypothesis, on which he casts methodological doubt, that that there were other Greek intertexts, now lost, that were the common source of Roman poets and Greek novelists. However that may be, J.'s comprehensive study is a serious and timely piece of scholarship that will make a difference in the study of the Greek novel and the reception of Latin authors in the Greek world.