S. approaches the terzo gran lume of Rome (after Cicero and Caesar in Petrarch's memorable phrase, reused as the title of F. Della Corte's 1954 study) as a major political intellectual. Varro's massive and only partially extant work on the Latin language is here celebrated and plumbed for its myriad associations. S. teases out Varro's associative thinking in case studies and follows at times meandering larger structural patterns (or returns) so as to reveal underlying ideas about Romanness, not simply how the Romans understood Jupiter or cult activity or patria potestas, but how the collective arises from, without altogether rationalising or homogenising, the details. She thus extends a method originating with six pages in E. Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953) (‘Etymology as a Category of Thought’) and recently considerably explored, see, for example, M. Amsler, Etymology and Grammatical Discourse in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (1989) and the comprehensive and insightful chapter by I. Sluiter, who reviews the history of etymological investigations and characterises ancient etymology as an ‘anchoring practice’ – not simply a form of thought or discourse, but a cultural practice of asserting identity via an authorising past (Chapter 4 in Brill's Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship [2015]). That etymology connects ‘now’ and ‘then’, indeed explains ‘now’ as a changed version of ‘then’, is clear. Whether it creates or fosters identity seems another question (what identity meant, and for whom, and how it might have differed from modern identity S. does not consider).

More positively and originally, S. offers what she calls a ‘through reading’ of Varro's work. She responds to the insistent, recurrent flittiness of the De lingua Latina (now this, now that, and that reminds me of something else) by considering how an ideal reader would read later passages in view of earlier passages. Such a reading strategy can homogenise texts – I think of older readers of Plato who would cite snippets from various dialogues to build conclusions about what Plato really wanted to say or many readers of scripture who bring together what a historical critical scholar would insist should stay apart. But S. does not homogenise. She constructs imaginative recreations of what reading Varro might have been like in the aftermath of Caesar's assassination. An imaginative, associative recuperation of an ideal reader's (Cicero's in particular) experience is here buttressed by considerable learning (up-to-date bibliography on the Roman calendar, religion more generally, prosopography, political history, legal issues is bundled into the readings). The examination at various points of the intellectual relations of Caesar, Cicero and Varro is particularly useful (pp. 22–41 re-examine all of Varro's life and work).

At the heart of S.'s mission is to reveal ‘Romespeak’ or ‘Latin as a world-forming toolkit’. Her thesis is ‘De Lingua Latina led Varro's audience on a journey of discourse enrichment’ (p. 42) towards the end of being citizens not of a real community but of a consensual ideal with due regard for consuetudo even though this might not always be right (anomalia therefore is tolerated, and various sources of authority as mediated through Varro are allowed). S. does establish that for Varro the people are the governing linguistic body. Certainly, S. succeeds in communicating the manner of Varro and his recurring interests in agriculture and the political and public discourse. Her steady return to the issues of why and how Varro is investigating Latin lends needed coherence. But here perhaps slips in a bit of circularity. S. chooses for explication essential terms for Romanness: the city of Rome, place names, divine names, kinship terms, magistracies. Would Varro's peers or subordinates have recognised place, state, religion and kin as the categories of identity? Are these not displacing other modes of association (the aristocratic families, clubs, army, local cult, professions, status)? Varro, Cicero and scholars may think we need a book for culture, but identities are messy and fluctuating and not so easily constituted. Aside from these broad theoretical caveats, it is very useful to have Varro's treatments brought together with scholarly issues flagged and relevant bibliography discussed. Chapter 5 on the city of Rome is an important chapter bringing together much of S.'s earlier work. The Rome of Varro's pages emerges as ‘a city of symbolic and emblematic sites’ (p. 130). I found the final chapters on kinship terms and the calendar less coherent and convincing (still it was a good idea to consider the year's festivals in chronological and book sequence).

One piece of advice for the reader: read the introduction and then the conclusion for a full picture of the ambition of this book. Some of the chapters replay, perhaps deliberately, the meandering quality of the original. Some readers will be put off by the decision to mirror Varro's itinerary (itineraries) and by the use of neologisms and vernacularisms. For example, S. describes a phase in Varro's career (p. 22): ‘This successful hookup with Pompey continued’ – we are a long way from D.C. Earl, The Moral and Political Tradition of Rome (1967). S. does not hesitate to deflate. Often I felt an effort to mimic the linguistic openness of her subject, although the use of slang seems to be reproducing a different venue altogether – a chat outside the lecture hall skewering the old arch-classicists droning on inside? Following the sequence of Varro's topics allows S. to riff. Pp. 54–9 are a bold, bravura solo on the figure of Camilla. I am not persuaded, but S. is inviting the reader to consider, what if one took all these references and reuses from Callimachus to Virgil as a resonant whole, ‘an allusive network’? It is easy to complain that this gives far too much power and purpose to the author, but S. is trying to take the culture and the traditions as a resonant whole. What would the most learned Romans of the day, Varro, Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, have made of one character, one name? The danger is, of course, that the imposition of coherence is as arbitrary as putting words to things. S. knows what she is doing with the reader. She acknowledges, for example (p. 82), that in the course of Book 7 ‘a meandering drift’ moves away from etymologising, leaving the work to the reader, then (consequently?) S. moves on to ‘terminology of walking impediments’. At times it feels that we are in a running commentary, associative, provocative. And so I stumble here. How is S. going to evade the charge that she is reproducing Varro's meandering method? She apparently does not want to. No one will accuse her of under-reading a passage.

There are in any ten pages more ideas and interesting connections than in many a journal article (see e.g. pp. 82–3 on an etymology for a comic expression for old women, which veers to caterpillars, an allusion to Cicero, metapoetic language, finally arguing that Varro is ‘leaving the reader comprehensively wrong-footed’). The forward force of Varro's ramble – perhaps the aesthetics of S.'s through reading – does not develop each of these. A commentary on Varro's De lingua Latina is a Borgesian task: from a fragmentary text, from the state of our linguistic loss and alienation, write the narrative encyclopedia of Rome. S. invites us to consider what this encyclopedia might look like.