This is a remarkable book. H., who has published on both Latin poetry and the topography of Augustan Rome, now takes an audacious interdisciplinary leap, not only arguing for the complementarity of literary and archaeological types of evidence but making a case for the influence of the visual upon the verbal arts of antiquity, rather than the reverse. This is a dense book, and I find the logic and reasoning that guide readers through H.'s arguments to be more persuasive in the first four chapters than in the last two; I also find the rhetorical polarisation of object scholars and text scholars (‘intertextual apartheid’, p. 10) to be overdrawn and unnecessarily polemical. More important, however, is the execution of the book itself: H. deserves praise for the abundant evidence throughout of painstaking research, ingenious (if not always fully convincing) conclusions and sheer scholarly enthusiasm.

The introduction contains a discussion of Lessing's influential juxtaposition of the verbal and visual arts. This juxtaposition, a guiding principle in H.'s project, also dovetails with H.'s focus on the now-lost Portico of Philippus in Rome, since Lessing sees in the famous painting of Helen by Zeuxis that was displayed there a challenge to Homer and the power of the written word (Laocoön Chapter 22). Inspired by the juxtaposition in the lost portico of Zeuxis’ Helen with a series of Trojan War paintings mentioned by Pliny (N.H. 35.144), H. sets out to reconstruct the building; but to do so, he needs more help than the very sparse evidence provided by the ancient sources and Renaissance topographers can offer, and so turns to a second portico, which, though known to us only in seriously compromised physical condition, can provide – H. believes – an analogy.

This second and hypothetically parallel portico is in Pompeii; when excavated in 1817, its remains, surrounding the temple of Apollo, were found to contain a series of wall-paintings depicting scenes from the Trojan War. It is highly plausible to imagine that the decorative scheme found there was influenced by the art on display in the capital; but establishing this connection is a major challenge since, although varied secondary evidence can give us a general idea of the decorative scheme, much of the primary evidence was lost within 20 years of the first excavations at the site. Only those paintings that were removed to Naples have been reasonably well preserved; most of them, left to the harshness of the elements, were effectively lost shortly after their rediscovery. The first four chapters, therefore, are devoted to a detailed investigation of what we can learn from the secondary sources – drawings done soon after the excavation of the portico, illustrated books published for a European public hungry for anything to do with Pompeii and a cork model made by Domenico Padiglione in the mid-1820s – itself not extant, but the archetype of a smaller-scale replica made by his son Felice Padiglione some 40 years later and currently housed in the archaeological museum in Naples (il plastico di Pompeii). At this point, readers may think that I am describing an elaborate house of cards, constructed of virtual images of things – or even images of images of things – that no longer exist and so can never be subjected to critical scrutiny. And indeed I am – or rather, H. is; but he does so with such determination, conviction and passion that at least this reader found herself rooting for him, finding the argument, albeit primarily circumstantial, to be at its core a reasonable one. The result is a prominent portico displaying a series of paintings concerning the Trojan War, the loss of which must be lamented anew after one reads H.'s reconstruction.

In Chapter 5, H. escorts his readers back to Rome, to the Circus Flaminius and the temples that lined it. His purpose is to reconstruct the Portico of Philippus that surrounded the Temple of Hercules Musarum; but the evidence for this building is so limited, particularly regarding the decoration, that this chapter is something of a disappointment. H. wants to make a case for the Trojan War paintings that Pliny mentions to be understood as models for the Pompeiian series; and this is neither a surprising nor a radical inference. But the absence of almost any mention of the Portico of Philippus in the Augustan writers, aside from several allusions conflating it with the temple of Apollo on the Palatine (pp. 234–6), creates an immovable obstacle to the third component of H.'s argument, set forth in the final chapter, viz., that when the Augustan poets write about building metaphorical temples for Augustus or describe real ones, they are responding to the decoration they find in the portico surrounding Hercules Musarum. And not only that: H. argues, in another polarising flourish, that the Trojan war series was intended by Augustus to suggest a new poetic theme that would inspire the poets he patronised to make Ennius’ Annales obsolete, in both aesthetics and ideology (I paraphrase from p. 244; see also p. 258).

The result, especially in the final two chapters, is less than the sum of its parts, as the argument loses some of its subtlety, conviction and persuasiveness. In the course of an otherwise plausible but convoluted argument that the collegium scribarum poetarum moved its seat from the temple of Minerva to that of Hercules Musarum (pp. 230–7), H. denigrates the evidence found in Festus (likely derived from Verrius Flaccus) that the word scriba in the (apparent) name of the collegium refers to creative writers, not simply clerks. H. argues that in creating this collegium as an apparent honour to Livius Andronicus, the Senate used this word as ‘a carefully calibrated snub’ (p. 232) to keep its members in their place. But Verrius Flaccus – if he is in fact the source of the suggestion that scriba can mean ‘poet’ here – is not so easily dismissed; meanwhile, H. simply rejects the possibility that scriba might well have been used to describe Livius, who was of humble origins and whose translation of the Odyssey might well have been designated the work of a scriba, i.e. ‘clerk’: thus perhaps the early name of the collegium. A second, more general concern involves H.'s references to ‘Homer’ and the ‘Trojan War theme’ as being more or less identical. While it is generally agreed that Roman boys of a certain social standing started their primary education with the Iliad and (selections from?) the Odyssey, can we be confident that their understanding of the characters and events of the Trojan War also embraced extra-Homeric texts, like the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (see pp. 128–33)? In other words, is Homer the main point, or is Virgil's brilliant post-Homeric epic really the focus? H. could have strengthened his argument if he had focused from the outset on the striking prominence of Aeneas in at least some of the paintings he discusses, rather than emphasising the paintings’ supposed Homericity; but the organisation of his argument makes H. appear to change course rather late in the day, as the focus shifts from an apparently close reading of Iliad Book 1 to a more broadly ‘Homeric’ canvas.

The production values of the book are generally very high (though deciphering H.'s photos of the plastico requires, as he acknowledges, a certain leap of faith). I noted a few editorial lapses: the last sentence of the Italian passage quoted on p. 37 is not included in the following translation; the reference on p. 71 to number 8 on the plan of the Temple of Apollo (fig. 10) should read number 18; and the bodies of several footnotes in the last chapter have disappeared (22 and 70), to be replaced by the repetition of an earlier footnote (12).

This book is not perfect; but my lack of complete satisfaction with the book's conclusion is not meant to detract from the praise it deserves. Indeed, it merits a wide readership among philologically trained classicists, art historians and archaeologists, all of whom are bound to find something inspiring in H.'s pursuit of the lost classical past.