T.’s text and commentary on Catullus c. 64 makes a magisterial contribution to scholarship. Scholars of this poem and Catullus more broadly will want to consult it regularly, to engage with T.’s learned, thoughtful and convincing analysis, to use her excellent edition of the text and to draw on the wealth of resources she provides on the text and its interpretation: manuscripts, editions, scholia, commentaries, ancient sources both extant and fragmentary, and scholarship spanning many centuries and several languages. Although commentaries on Catullus have proliferated over the last 500 years, this book – in the Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentary series – is sui generis in both scope and achievement. Commentaries on Catullus generally deal with the whole corpus in one volume, making them selective and compressed by nature (e.g. R. Ellis, D.H. Garrison, W. Kroll, K. Quinn, H.A.J. Munro and D.F.S. Thomson). A few commentaries cover smaller portions of the collection, such as J. Godwin’s series (very helpful as teaching texts) and G. Nuzzo’s well-received Italian text and commentary on c. 64. However, as an 890-page excursus on every element of Catullus’ longest, most complex poem, where virtually each page presents fresh insights combined with extensive research, T.’s work stands in a class of its own.

The book includes an introduction, Latin text with critical apparatus, commentary, epilogue, bibliography and indexes. Each element is well designed, successfully executed and constructed to work as part of a whole. The introduction, intended as a genuine introduction but laden with learning, will now be the main overview on this complex poem, covering everything from the poem’s social and literary contexts, mythic background and role in Catullus’ collection, to its diction, style, poetic aspects, metre and its reception via the manuscript tradition and scholarship.

I find T.’s version of c. 64 readable and plausible; this will likely become the text. In Section 4 of the introduction she shows her workings, explicating the manuscript tradition, how she has accessed and approached the manuscripts, scholia and other editions, and her methods in constructing both text and apparatus (pp. 94–109). She also explains how she has used digital tools, such as the PHI and Catullus Online. This transparency about her process usefully demystifies an opaque, often inaccessible field within professional Classics.

In the commentary (just shy of 600 pages long) T. explains her textual choices. She is judicious, learned, scholarly and creative – never dogmatic. She painstakingly works through passages marked by cruces, presenting alternate variants and interpretations so that, while she makes her own decisions clear, readers have ample room to reach different conclusions. Her scholarly, incisive and transparent approach to constructing a readable version of the text that Catullus was ‘most likely to have written’ (p. 102) permeates the book. Illustrative examples include the treatment of lines 215–18 (pp. 407–15), where T. explains why she follows Baehrens’s transposition of lines 216–17, and the discussion of a possible lacuna in the Song of the Fates (p. 638). In the commentary T. justifies her textual choices via technical aspects such as grammar, syntax and metre, but also through more literary aspects such as characterisation, theme and devices. This means that, for example, her transposition of lines 216–17 in the text (p. 124) turns out in the commentary to reflect her understanding of Aegeus’ characterisation and psychology throughout his whole speech, as much as the syntax of reddite (pp. 410–14). The consistent interweaving of technical, linguistic and literary material is one of her biggest achievements; T. makes textual criticism literary and exciting.

Intertextuality dominates c. 64 and thus this book too. T. nimbly adopts different approaches to and frameworks of intertextuality, allusion and reception theory. She variously portrays Catullus as an active alluder, lets the text stand as an intertextual artefact, reads intertextuality bidirectionally and draws on reader response theory. For example, on line 11 when discussing illa, we find an active Catullus, who ‘varied his Argonautic predecessor’ (p. 152). In the notes to lines 12–18 the text is an intertextual artefact that ‘invites’ readers (p. 155). T.’s willingness to approach intertextuality as a bidirectional phenomenon leads to convincing new readings of Catullus via sources such as Virgil, Ovid, Seneca and Statius. T.’s introduction to the Song of the Fates illustrates this (pp. 578–93), inviting us to view it not just through the obvious lenses of the Epic Cycle, Iliad and Iphigeneia at Aulis, but also Virgil’s temple ecphrasis in the Aeneid. In terms of reception T. regularly shows that what a given reader takes from the intertextuality depends on what they bring (and when they bring it). Her explanation of how readers can resist the narrator who remains stuck in his poem while we see beyond the frame (pp. 682–3) illustrates her sensitive use of reader response. T.’s work models how we can successfully deploy diverse frameworks of intertextuality within a single work.

T. makes a particularly important contribution to the understanding of the poem’s levels of focalisation, a topic on which she has published, for example in her volume on Metalepsis, co-edited with S. Matzner (2020). She explicates how levels of narration intersect with and complicate (and are complicated by) the horizontal planes on which Catullus puts pictures (of narratives) side by side. She investigates how levels of focalisation relate to Catullus’ experiments with form and narrative structure, genre and how they activate the senses, which in turn affects our perceptions of the text, our embodied experiences while reading it and therefore our interpretation of its meanings. T. is not the first to investigate this cluster of interrelated themes, but her sustained attention to it brings out how vital the theme of perception is for the poem. She continually makes us consider how we – along with various internal audiences, viewers and listeners within the poem – perceive the events not just cognitively but at a sensory, embodied level. Again, her exploration of these themes underpins her whole approach. I direct interested readers to the notes on lines 43ff. (pp. 194–212), the transition from Ariadne to Bacchus’ arrival (pp. 453–62) or the note on euhoe at line 255 (pp. 467–8), each of which exemplifies T.’s approach to the key questions: ‘who speaks?’ and ‘who sees?’.

After guiding us through the kaleidoscopic complexity of c. 64 in commentary format – which necessarily fragments the text and our experience of it – T. zooms out. In her 29-page epilogue she helps us see the poem in toto. From this eusynoptic perspective T. provides excellent insights via a reading of how poetic form, place, space, time and storytelling intersect to shape our experiences of and moral perspective on the poem. The epilogue allows us to process what we experienced when deep within the commentary – and inside this ever-disorienting poem.

T. draws on an immense array of sources. This would be overwhelming, but she has divided the bibliography into distinct sections, separating editions and commentaries on Catullus, other sources of conjectures used for the apparatus, editions of and commentaries on non-Catullan texts and other scholarship. This structure makes it an eminently useful resource for everyone from the freshest reader of Catullus to seasoned experts. The indexes too display how T. has crafted the volume to work for its readers, being divided into four distinct types: Latin words in Catullus’ text, Greek terms, subjects and passages. Smart choices on how to structure the material make this huge book navigable.

I recommend this book to all Classicists. This work is a magnum opus on c. 64; even more, T. addresses fundamental questions of how texts work in themselves and on readers. Her treatment of intertextuality, narrative, genre, space, time and subjectivity has implications that stretch far beyond Catullus’ text.