K.’s monograph constitutes a slightly revised version of his Ph.D. thesis written at the University of Leeds. It is divided into an introduction followed by six chapters: ‘The Proem (Lines 1–100)’, ‘Beginning from the Beginning (Lines 101–205)’, ‘The Night Episode (Lines 206–348)’, ‘Heroic Deeds (Lines 349–85)’, ‘An Epic Voyage (Lines 386–477)’, ‘The Metamorphosis (Lines 478–541)’, and ends with a conclusion, which constitutes a ‘discursive’ commentary on the pseudo-Virgilian Ciris.
The introduction begins with the Cirisfrage, which K. argues cannot be solved through comparative analysis of parallels (p. 6), since they do not provide reliable conclusions about the relative chronology of the Ciris and Virgil. Thus, he accepts a ‘pre-Virgilian dating ex hypothesi’ focusing on ‘a holistic interpretation of the poem’ through the concepts of allusion and allegory. K. continues by providing a brief outline (although some would expect a more extensive one especially for a monograph whose central subject is allusion) of the studies that provide theoretical discussions on intertextuality (at this point J. Farrell, ‘Intention and Intertext’, Phoenix 59 [2005], 98–111, who in part responds to D. Nelis, Vergil's Aeneid and the Argonautica of Apollomius Rhodius [2001], and D. O'Rourke, ‘Maxima Roma in Propertius, Virgil and Gallus’, CQ 60 [2010], 470–85, and ‘Paratext and Intertext in the Propertian Poetry Book’, in L. Jansen [ed.], The Roman Paratext [2014], pp. 156–75, could also have been mentioned), thoroughly explaining his methodology, which is partly anticipated by F. Cairns (Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry [1972]). He suggests that the three central aspects of oral poetry (i.e. its composition by subject, its intertextual character and the mechanics of its composition and reception that are closely related) ‘can be extrapolated … to the literary poetic tradition of classical antiquity’ (pp. 11–12). Therefore, the poet can be seen as an imaginative reader of the story turning into a poem who ‘does not so much “invent” allusions as “find” them already potentially present in the plot’. In other words, allusion is ‘intrinsically inherent to poetry’ and in that sense has close parallels with allegory which, however, is disproportionately discussed by K. in comparison to allusion solely in a page of the introduction (pp. 16–17) and in the fifth and sixth chapters of the book.
The first chapter examines the verses 1–11, 14–17, 21–6, 27–8, 35, 36–9, 42–6, 42–50, 54–7 and 100–3, focusing on the technique of the window reference used by the author of Ciris and identifying various literary sources that can provide evidence that the Ciris poet ‘asserts rather than denies a certain compatibility between (mythological) poetry and philosophy’ (p. 48). The second chapter discusses the lines 101–5, 105–9, 110–15, 120–5, 129–32, 137–9, 142–3, 149–55, 163, 164, 165–8, 171, 180, 181–4, 225–6 and 237–8, putting emphasis on the circumstances that caused the events that are associated with the plot of the poem and thereby anticipating its end and its aetiological dimension (‘teleological raison d’être’, p. 56). The sources identified in these verses are once again numerous, ranging from Homer to Nicander and from Ennius to Catullus, although occasionally the literary goal for which the poet recalls some source(s) is emphatically undermined by (an)other source(s), as K. rightly observes (p. 79). The third chapter examines ‘the most significant and original part of the poem’ that is presented ‘in an un-epic manner’ (pp. 92–3), focusing on the verses 206–19, 231–6, 242–3, 259–64, 268–72, 273–7, 278–82, 284–9, 301–5, 310–14, 316–19 and 487–9. K. concentrates on the narrative technique used by the Ciris poet, who ‘extracts general patterns of action from his models’, thereby recalling the composition by theme (i.e. ‘thematic principle of composition’), which here is not displayed in oral, but in written poetry (pp. 98–9). The fourth chapter concentrates on the verses 362–3, 365–8, 371–3, 376–7, 386–90 and 520–7, exploring the most archetypical epic subject that is ‘the hero killing the monster’. Nonetheless, the subversive and implicit way in which this traditional epic theme is employed presents the Ciris as an ‘anti-epic’ (p. 128), something that is most emphatically confirmed by Scylla's cutting of Nisus’ hair, which constitutes a variation on this subject (p. 144). The fifth chapter begins with Scylla's journey behind Minos’ ship, which K. claims recalls the ‘metaphor of the sea voyage of song’ through the Apollonian Argo and the Callimachean Delos. K. continues that this ‘poetological dimension’ is also evident through Scylla's monologue, which can be interpreted as a poetic performance as well as displaying the heroine as a poet figure (pp. 157–8), something that is demonstrated by lines 405–6, 408–11, 414–20, 423–4, 428–32, 433–7, 448–50, 471–5 and 514–19, which are the focus of this chapter. The last chapter discusses Scylla's metamorphosis, which K. claims is ‘the aetiological objective’ of the Ciris, suggesting that the heroine's metamorphosis can be viewed as ‘a form of metempsychosis’ (p. 182) and can be ‘closely associated with metaphor and other poetological tropes’ (p. 184). More than that, he argues that the metamorphosis (metempsychosis) is ‘a metaphor for allusion’ (p. 202), given that ‘the meaning of the model is reincarnated into the imitation’ (p. 208), something that is confirmed by the sources that K. identifies in lines 478–80, 484–8, 487–9, 490–2, 493–5, 496–8, 505–7, 514–16, 527–9 and 538–41.
K.’s work is full of excellent points and suggestive hypotheses (although sometimes difficult to prove). The book summarises the critical insights of modern scholarship and sheds new light on the interpretation of the Ciris through its relation to the literary tradition, examining thoroughly various sources in terms of subject, structure, language and metre. Nonetheless, given that the identity of the Ciris poet is still a matter of dispute, it seems very difficult to be sure about which literary sources are deliberately used by the author in order to serve his goal(s) and which constitute common and parallel points between original and imitation. Therefore, sometimes ‘some of the proposed connections can only be posited tentatively’ as K. prudently admits in the introduction (pp. 17–18).
The book is carefully produced and almost free of typos (I noticed only one on p. 22 for ‘the second lines have’ read ‘the second line has’, and there are also some missing commas), and I learned a great deal from it. Furthermore, none of the criticisms noted above should distract readers from its value, which is twofold: this monograph is a systematic study of the sources identified in the Ciris as well as its first literary commentary, and, therefore, it is very welcome for students and scholars interested in intertextuality and the study of a neglected and (unfortunately) unfamiliar Latin poem. There is still work to be done in less mainstream literary compositions of Latin literature written by authors whom we pejoratively (and of course wrongly) tend to call ‘minor poets’.
