This volume is at its heart a book about the work a metaphor can do. The time period under investigation is, as the title suggests, the latter portion of the first century bce. The authors under consideration are a familiar cast of characters – Propertius, Horace and Virgil. The metaphor in question: choreia, defined (if we defer to Plato's Laws) as ‘the totality of dance and song’ (p. 217). Though C.’s monograph conceptually situates itself within the intertextual methodology that has predominated in modern Latin literary studies, in practice, C. counters arguments against the potential insularity of intertextuality by revisiting familiar poems by familiar poets with particular attention to the language of performance. C. seeks ‘to understand how Augustan poetry assimilates, interprets, and reimagines the idea of the Greek chorus’ (p. 2) by ‘uncovering the multiplicity of significances that can be created out of a single image and set of poetic vocabulary’ (p. 29).

The considerable appeal of the volume is in its uncovering of this ‘how’. After a first chapter devoted to the way the Hellenistic chorus shaped Augustan poetry, C. uses Propertian elegy in Chapters 2 and 3 to show ‘how Augustan poetry maps choreia onto the body of a desired and beautiful figure as a metaphor for poetic creation’ (p. 130). Chapter 4 then turns to the Horatian corpus to unpack how ‘the chorus shows that the collectives of community and canon are intimately related to each other’ (p. 131), before Chapters 5 and 6 attend to ritual and what C. calls ‘foundational choreography’ in the Aeneid. The book's form is itself a clever mirror of its content, where, like the texts the book considers, C.’s readings enter into a chorus of sorts, as the predominant strands of Latin literary scholarship become the voices to which C. adds her choreia-centred readings.

Put another way, the individual case studies show how the concept of choreia can complicate (or more often reaffirm) familiar trends in Latin literature (e.g. established tropes of poetic primacy, literary tradition and metapoetic manoeuvring). At times, this means that the book's conclusions do not seem unique to the metaphor of the chorus; it is not, for example, the only ‘space that can express Greco-Roman cultural blending’ (p. 18) nor the sole way that Virgil ‘marks out a more complex metamorphosis of Greek mythological and literary traditions’ (p. 190) that connect to the Aeneid’s themes. But C.’s broadest argument, solidified at the book's conclusion, is compelling: unlike other images and metaphors, the chorus – as a unified group made up of individuals – was a natural way for poets to think about their relationship with other texts, ‘allowing a writer to reach back diachronically to many layers of literary tradition while also synchronically responding to the community of poets striving to articulate their own distinctive voice in a fertile and innovative contemporary literary landscape’ (p. 238).

This diachronic commitment, however, is to a Greek chorus, where ‘Greek’ is somewhat monolithically defined. C. frames her project as a response to T. Habinek's The World of Roman Song (2005), which she suggests ‘comes at the expense of ignoring these poets’ debt … to Greece’ (p. 28). But if Habinek is too focused on ‘an authentic past of Roman song culture’, C.’s response goes perhaps too far in the opposite direction. The book assumes early on that ‘native’ Latin carmen traditions were ‘imagined to be fundamentally different’ (though likely similar in practice) from the Greek chorus because the vocabulary of Greek choreia ‘does not tend to be used by the surviving Latin authors of performances considered to be part of a longstanding tradition of Roman religion’ (p. 11).

The cost of such an assumption is the considerable nuance offered by, for example, Livius Andronicus’ transformation of Musae into Camenae, a move that demonstrates that a ‘Greek’ phenomenon or concept need not necessarily be translated by a Greek loanword. I by no means suggest that C.’s project of studying Greek choral influence is unfounded, but rather that there is a very rich world in the middle where pre-Augustan poetry was already confronting these very same issues. D. Feeney's Beyond Greek (2016) was published too late to be considered by C., but now serves as a powerful model: to look back solely to ‘original’ Greek poetry reifies concepts like ‘Greek’, ‘religion’ and ‘choral’ by excluding earlier Latin carmina (e.g. Cato, Agr. 141, or Livius Andronicus again with his 207 hymn to Juno) simply for not using a Greek word to describe their familiarity of engagement with Greek traditions.

The book's chronology and scope is thus driven by this focus on the Greek chorus via Greece itself. No reader would expect a book on Augustan poetry to be exhaustive, so C.’s decision to omit Ovid (pp. 20–1) is entirely understandable. Her decision to likewise relegate the corpus Tibullianum (‘A Hellenistic Poet at Rome’!) to footnotes, however, could use more explanation, given the extent to which something like the first poem of Sulpicia's garland would seem to offer much to the discussion of gender and chorality in Chapters 2 and 3. Another temporal curiosity is that C. begins her Latin case studies with Catullus 63, a choice justified by its status as ‘a transitional text’ that ‘for the first time that we know of’ demonstrates what it might look like to engage with Hellenistic concerns about self-consciousness and embedded choral poetics in Latin (p. 30). There is no doubt that the poem is attractive to C.’s project, but another Catullan poem – 34, a hymn to Diana – is cast aside, even though (as C. later suggests) it appears to be an important model for Horace's Carmen saeculare. Not only does it align its narrative voice with puellae et pueri integri (34.2), but in the context of C.’s choral project, 34 is also fascinating for its interest in Roman figures (Lucina, Trivia, Romulus) set among the Callimachean hymnic tradition (the birth of Diana on Delos). The poem's exclusion is mysteriously attributed to the fact that it may not have actually been performed by a chorus (p. 60 n. 87), a criterion maintained nowhere else in the book.

To move towards a conclusion, I return to the beginning, where the book's prevailing question of how suggests to this reader the companion question of why. As C. astutely argues, both elegy and lyric are deeply imbued with questions of physical presence, and readers can see how the development of these genres around the turn of the millennium may explain the fascination with the corporal realities of the chorus. But beyond a brief reference to Augustus’ interest in performance (pp. 22–4), we are never given a sense of why this corporality might become (as opposed to anything else) a ‘primary metaphor’ (p. 130) in the work of Augustan poets specifically.

Though readers may be left with questions about some of the book's organising principles, C.’s overall inclination towards the ‘performative turn’ is most welcome in this monograph. This book excels in its detailed readings that explore the individual texts’ relationships with Hellenistic authors and their own contemporaries. These are the moments where, instead of achieving broader harmony, C. uncovers ‘something of the multiplicity, the complexity, and the unique sound of the individual voices in the chorus of Augustan poets’ (p. 24). In one sense, then, the volume suggests that the work of a metaphor is to ask us to re-evaluate where we stand in relation to familiar traditions – a perennially worthwhile undertaking.