Isolated remarks about the symbolism underlying Latin poets' use of metre can be found in many commentaries in almost every modern language; they also occur with particular frequency in some general books, such as Wilkinson's Golden Latin Artistry, and aspects of the related ‘métrique verbale’ were investigated by French scholars of the last century, notably Hellegouarc'h and Soubiran. But M.'s book is the first ever English-language exploration of the connotations different metres bear, asserting that ‘Roman poetry as a whole embodies an attentiveness to metrical form, to metre as metre, self-standing and separable from its verbal content, that goes beyond what we see in equivalent poetry in Greek’ (p. 27). No general book of comparable size exists on the topic for Greek, so it is difficult to confirm or refute M.'s argument. But I think if it did, it would confirm that the phenomenon M. observes is incompatible with the performance-based literary scenarios of Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic Greece. The contexts of specific performances (Archaic/Classical), or at least the fiction of specific performances (Hellenistic), seem to have been influential enough to operate as a filter that shaped both a poem's contents and its metre(s) into rather predictable combinations. To separate metre from verbal contents, or to subvert existing assumptions about likely combinations (S. Hind's ‘dynamic impurity’) in the manner M. correctly observes in Roman versification, was still uncommon even in Hellenistic literature.

‘Metre-symbolism’ and ‘métrique verbale’ can be slippery objects of study. They investigate impressionistic connotations, not codified denotations. M. refrains from pointing to the allegedly inherent êthê of individual metres which were often posited by ancient scholars of metrics – for example Aristotle's claim that iambs are inherently appropriate to everyday speech, while dactyls diverge from the colloquial register. While M. carefully considers the observations made by ancient scholars of metrics, he refrains from ‘resting a confident reading of the metre of a poem by, say, Horace on the evidence of an unsupported statement from, say, Terentianus Maurus’ (p. 33). By following methodologically more solid examples of modern scholars like Maas or Barchiesi, he adopts as his main touchstone the literary tradition, which constitutes a reservoir of familiar combinations of different metres with different subject matters (and stylistic levels). On first encountering a poem, readers or listeners apply the interpretative ‘code’ supplied by literary tradition, which allows them to perceive any such combination as an allusive re-use of familiar forms: iamb is then considered colloquial because it is the main metre of theatrical dialogue, or abusive because Archilochus and Hipponax had used it before theatre; hexameter is less colloquial because it is mainly connected to the sublime contents of narrative epic. Of course, the poets can choose to confirm readers' expectations or foil them to creative effect.

The introduction maps out the book, and gets the reader to share in its interests by presenting examples of the two metres whose associations are perhaps the clearest and the easiest for ancient authors to exploit: priapean (e.g. Catull. 17) and sotadean (e.g. Martial, see in particular 2.86.2 and 3.29). The four chapters consist of detailed analyses of poems that demonstrate the ‘semantic’ changes individual metres underwent as authors employed them either in tune or contrast with the background noise of previous poems in the same metre: phalaecean hendecasyllable (1), iambs (2), Sapphic stanza (3) and dactylic hexameter (4).

Chapter 1 reveals how cautiously M. uses the literary tradition to define the ‘connotations’ attributable to different metres. It also exemplifies the style that characterises his analyses and the way he has them interlace within his lengthy chapters. For example, after observing that Catullus' use of the phalaecean made the metre ‘redolent of freedom and release’, M. discusses two instances in which Statius ‘re-uses’ this metre, i.e. Silvae 4.3 and 4.9. Both are contained in a book in which the dactylic hexameter is by far the most common metre. Silv. 4.3 praises Domitian's construction of a ‘highway’, but it does not – as one would expect on this occasion – celebrate the achievement in hexameters. The brevity of the phalaecean lines that Statius adopts instead may give the poem's written incarnation on the page the shape of a road, almost as a carmen figuratum – a road that, as M. follows Coleman in pointing out, ‘facilitates fast travel [and] is perfectly complemented by a fast-moving metre’ (p. 60). In this context, the river Volturnus, happily regimented by Domitian's engineers, expresses satisfaction with its new dimension as a smaller, more ‘Callimachean’ river compared with the uncontainable Assyrian rivers of anti-Callimachean memory. In keeping with these ‘neoteric’ connotations, the Sibyl's rejection of old-fashioned solemnitas presents her as very different from the Sibyl of Virg. Aen. 6.71–7. Statius' Sibyl appears to be very Catullan, in tune with the impulse to remove constraints and overthrow limitations that characterised the Catullan phalaeceans. This nuance contained in the phalaeceans of Silv. 4.3 triggers M. to investigate the ancient theory of a connection between phalaeceans and ionic metre, Catullus' rejection of the effeminate deviancy implied by this ionic connection, and Martial's interpretation of this iambic metre as a shortened alternative to the hexameter.

In Chapter 2 M. discusses choliambics (pp. 114–30) before and in Catullus (in particular poem 31). Pp. 130–58 turn to Catullus' iambs; particularly in poem 4 this metre serves to express fastness and freedom of speech, and the same is true for its parody in [Virg.] Catal. 10. Pp. 158–67 focus on Horace's Epodes and their forerunners, Archilochus and Callimachus' Iambi; Epod. 11, a ‘Third Archilochian’ system, openly exploits the ‘elegiac tinge’ deriving from its second epodic line, an elegiambus. Pp. 167–76 cover Horace Carm. 1.4, where the movement from dactylic to iambo-trochaic metres may ‘mark a release … from the “static” heroic measure to “active” iambo-trochaics’, and thus symbolise the transition from the immobility of icy winter to the joyful mobility of spring; M. finds the same contrast between stately hexameters and iambic swiftness at play in Epod. 16 (pp. 176–80).

In Chapter 3 M. points out the strong Sapphic/erotic atmosphere of Stat. Silv. 4.7 and contemplates the aggressive character of the strophic stanzas of Catull. 11. When read in combination with Catull. 51, a poem brimming with proper Sapphic eroticism, Catull. 11 employs its metre not only to connect the end of the poet's love to its beginning, but also to deliver ‘a violation of metrical propriety harsh enough to express his girlfriend's betrayal of the love evoked so exquisitely in poem 51’ (p. 208). M. then investigates what other themes or poetics inform Catullus' and Horace's Sapphic strophes, such as an opposition to Pindar (Carm. 4.2 and 1.12), a dichotomy between the private and the public (Carm. 3.14), and the pursuit of otium (Catull. 51b). M. next focusses on the Alcaic strophes of Stat. Silv. 4.5 (compared with 4.7). But perhaps these analyses have more to say about Horace's ‘Callimachism’ than about the Sapphic strophe per se.

Chapter 4 opens with an admirable description of the battles the Greek hexameter had to wage in the second century b.c., when it replaced the native Italian Saturnian as the sublime metre of celebration and solemnity. M. focusses on Accian Saturnians celebrating Brutus Callaecus on the walls of a temple that reflected the state of the art in Hellenising architecture, as well as on the surfacing of elegiacs in one of the elogia of the Scipios, which are otherwise composed in Saturnians. The chapter then tells the story of the hexameter's continued development in two opposite directions: on the one hand, it came to be used to portray everyday life in the Satires of Lucilius or Horace; on the other, it was ‘eroticised’ (in its pentametric ‘abbreviation’) in Latin elegiac poetry.

In this last chapter I would have expected to read about the somewhat parallel evolution of the Greek hexameter, which after a rather monolithic epic phase (it is difficult to consider the Margites an archaic poem) was adopted in the fourth century as the metre of gastronomic poetry by the parodic poets. I would also have expected to find greater attention paid to how rule violations in the use of caesural division of hexameters or iambs in cola express specific connotations (see, however, pp. 230, 330). But this mimetic device in Greek and Latin versification could easily be the topic of another short book; and M.'s brilliant book may pave the way to a new outburst of interest in Anglo-American philology for the ‘semantics of versification’.