We used to tell a simple story: Roman literature began in 240 b.c.e., when a Greek freedman named Livius Andronicus produced Latin plays based on Greek models for the ludi Romani. Then we complicated the story by acknowledging the inherent difficulty in defining ‘Roman’ and ‘literature’ and ‘began’ since verbal art and public entertainment had a long, if shadowy history in Latium well before 240 and Hellenism was no sudden import. Denis Feeney now returns us to the ludi Romani of 240, but the story he tells is no longer simple. Though duly respectful of Roman culture's persistent habit of reinventing itself through interaction with other cultures, he nevertheless sees in Andronicus' plays ‘a decisive reorientation in a new direction’ (152) that set the creative writing of Latin poetry and prose on its now familiar course. That reorientation was brought about by what F. calls ‘the Roman translation project’ as authors in the century from 240–146 b.c.e. gradually transformed and redefined ‘what Latin is and what Latin can do’ (80–1) by taking Greek literary forms as prototypes for new and distinctly Roman ones.

The core ideas here, as F. acknowledges, are not new. Friedrich Leo was laying the foundations for this argument over a century ago, while the sheer oddity of the Romans' literary trajectory and the complexity of their negotiations with Greek culture have been recurrent themes in scholarship since the 1990s. We remain in lively, productive debate about the nature of literary history, the relative primacy of oral and written modes of literary communication and the aristocracy's rôle in the support and eventually the creation of literary texts. What is new is the breadth and depth of F.’s exploration as he sets these issues in a broadly Mediterranean, not narrowly Greco-Roman context and draws both upon a wealth of empirical evidence and contemporary insights into the nature of translation and cultural transference. The result is a richer, more nuanced account than ever before of the Roman literary achievement in all its improbable splendour.

What was it these early Roman authors took up in Greek and made their own in Latin? F. pays close attention to the social and political forces that shaped the reception of Greek literature in the West as piecemeal accommodation to an emerging Roman imperium by the communities of Magna Graecia broke down the Hellenistic koinē and their acceptance of Latin as the language of power weakened Greek cultural hegemony. He also acknowledges that what the early Roman dramatists adapted was not Athenian plays as we commonly understand them from fifth- and fourth-century sources but Athenian plays as reshaped by the Hellenistic performance tradition and the scholarly apparatus that had begun to form around them. He is equally astute about the emergence of prose genres, which here claim their rightful place in the story: the adaptation of Greek language and historiographic traditions by historians from Fabius Pictor to Postumius Albinus is especially well treated and takes us far beyond the never satisfactory explanation that they wrote in Greek to address a Greek readership. And through it all, the importance of writing in the Roman experience of literature is rightly stressed without either denying or belittling the rôle of oral performance.

In an investigation of this scope, even when so much is clearly right, a few points might inevitably be questioned. Is ‘translation project’ the best way to characterize the literary development that began with Andronicus? F. explores with great acumen the complexities of ‘translation’ in both theory and practice, but ‘project’ receives no comparable interrogation. What exactly is a ‘project’? To write as he does of ‘the intense self-consciousness Roman poetry displays from the start’ (157) flattens the contours of highly variable terrain. Plautus, Ennius and Accius were indeed highly self-conscious writers, but not in the same way, with the same intent or with the same result. Would the idea of ‘project’ be differently defined if the focus lay not on what poets intended but on what aristocrats like Livius Salinator or Fulvius Nobilior or Gaius Laelius intended by supporting their efforts? The literary development traced here reveals itself clearly enough in retrospect, but ‘project’ suggests a common plan from its inception and threatens to revive the teleological impulse that Roman literary historians today work assiduously to transcend.

Was the Romans' literature as important to them as it is to us? It is reasonable to suppose that Romans of the later third century ‘needed to know what the Greeks were like’, but it seems a bit of a stretch to assume (the point is not argued) that ‘the new spectacles were the crucial venue for working this out’ (140). A venue, surely. And perhaps even a crucial one — but the crucial venue? Did Romans need to learn what Greeks were like by watching Plautus, or was Plautus funny because they already thought they knew what Greeks were like? And, for that matter, how important to these Roman spectacles were the plays we value so highly? The funeral of Aemilius Paullus became famous for its entertainments, but not one of our four historical sources mentions plays on the programme, though we know almost by chance that there were at least two.

There is also and inevitably the problem of building coherent critical structures from fragmentary evidence. We know little of many important works, even less about their reception, and what we do know can be difficult to interpret. Inscriptional evidence that the Sicilians of second-century Tauromenium took an interest in Fabius Pictor's history is qualitatively different from Ennius' claim to an appeal ‘latos <per> populos’. We work with what we have, but must not forget what we have lost. A modern Latinist may well see in the fragments of Ennius' Annales ‘a Homeric epic written in a language that was not Homer's’ (247): nearly a quarter of its (meagre) remains survive precisely because of their Homeric echoes. A Roman immersed in the complete poem, however, would surely have been most aware of all that is not Homeric, viz. the story, the structure, the historical sense, perhaps even the lack of tragic sensibility. Ennius no doubt gave Romans something important, but one could argue that the first poet to give them a truly Homeric epic in Latin hailed not from Rudiae, but from Mantua.

Final points. This is a very elegantly prepared book, beautifully designed and edited, effectively indexed and priced well within reach of the many readers it deserves. Two quirks are worth mentioning, if only to show that someone noticed. The complex argument builds on itself in a style that some will call ring composition, others repetition. It could surely have been shorter. There is also a curious rhetoric to its annotation: scholarly debts are detailed with scrupulous honesty in eighty pages of fine-print end notes and nearly fifty more of references, but only a small subset of these debts, and not always the important ones, receive mention in the text. Skipping the notes distorts the argument and its foundation. But these are quibbles. This is an important inquiry into an important subject. That it raises questions and doubts is not a fault but only one more measure of its success.