This volume brings together thirteen papers from the equivalently titled conference held at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in September 2014. The conference format that yielded this rich and diverse range of perspectives included both the pre-circulation of papers and assigned respondents. A glance at the list of contributors shows a veritable who's who of scholars; as such, one can expect individual work of proportional excellence.

The premise of need for such a collection is undeniable – the theme is of significant depth and interest, and one that has suffered without the attention of sustained treatment. A coterie of formidable scholars has come together here to identify, trace and analyse the consequences of the deliberate assumption and manipulation of voices of weakness and inferiority within the tradition of Latin literature. As can be imagined from the initial statement of the volume's motivating premise, the angles of approach are widely variant due to the enormous range of active, participating matrices (polarities, hierarchies) of understanding: cultural, social, political, gendered, generic and spatial, to name only the obvious. The rationale, objectives and tone for the contents and structure of the compilation, as well as the epitomising of each chapter, is laid out by Matzner in the introduction. He carefully grounds from the outset the importance of intersectionality to the collection across all levels, from the material's conception to dissemination, and also establishes through this theoretical framework one of the persistent strands of continuity exhibited by the collection: the integration and application of theory, a different set of voices harnessed to stand alongside the authorial voices in ways that are collaborative, challenging and occasionally bordering on the competitive. The introduction to the theme itself is left to the opening contribution by W. Fitzgerald, who does most of the heavy lifting of positioning the chosen theme within the literary tradition. In this orientation to the primary thematic veins of expression, he notes particularly the paradoxical mechanics of authorial privileging via debasement, situated amidst the concerns of genre, coping with decline, and negotiating a sense of Roman identity, sensitively parsing these acts of strategic balancing and poised deferral or demurral. Fitzgerald's survey intermingles verse and prose sources, helpfully grounding attentiveness to the fact that, although the title refers to the ‘poetics’ of the weaker voice, the scale is inclusive of both verse and prose.

In terms of prose, there are two offerings on historiographical texts. E. O'Gorman (Chapter 7) focuses on the bodily constructed clamor in Livy, untangling how noise is accommodated within a hierarchy of voice. Her highly theoretical approach is balanced by V. Panoussi (Chapter 11) on the literarily-staged Tacitean dismantling of wifedom and motherhood in the cases of Messalina and Agrippina, respectively. They are both valuable contributions from the perspectives of social and gender hierarchy on the interplay between controlling and marginalised identities. The additional work focusing on prose is S. Bartsch's chapter on Fulgentius (Chapter 12). Beginning her discussion with the awareness of allegorical interpretation's games of competitive disenfranchisement, she compellingly explores how Virgil is marshalled into mediating and mitigating the contents of his own Aeneid in dialogue with Fulgentius’ authorial persona, eclipsing the epic's problematic paganism. It is a view that brings a new Virgil to life, but one that would be happily accompanied by further stabilising discussions of epic's role as a predominant generic voice. Beyond the brief notation of epic's existence as a genre of defined opposition, an exception can be carved out by the way that P. Hardie touches upon the intertext of Virgilian epic in his careful exposition of Paulinus’ Carmen 18 (Chapter 13), but, given the topic at hand, one might expect at least a nod to R.O.A.M. Lyne's seminal Further Voices in Vergil's Aeneid (1987).

The broadness of approach, across both verse and prose, is balanced by the fact that three of the thirteen chapters focus exclusively on Horace, with a further two contributions also prominently featuring this same poet. Horace is indeed the volume poster boy, and as such is first the subject of Matzner (Chapter 2), who examines how the development of Latin literature can be productively mapped out against paradigms of post-colonial literature. He applies post-colonial criticism to the Letter to Augustus as a test case for understanding Roman philhellenism, a cultural and cultured response to the (flexing) phantom limb of the Greek imperialist agenda. The Horatian-inflected sense of philhellenism is given a new spotlight by Matzner's learned application of critical theory, in continuity with his introduction. The baton of Matzner's theoretical approach to Horace is passed to V. Rimell (Chapter 6), who, in one of the more deliberately flaunted stylistic voices of the volume, assesses the multifaceted balancing act wrought by Horace in the Ars poetica. She strikingly dissects the text's sly proclamation of ‘both ways is the only way I want it’ along various cross-sections, particularly bodily structures and the social scaffolding of identity posed by ability, politics and manners. In her reading, the process by which Horace crafts a reader, a critic, a poet is the recognition of the poet's inferiority simultaneous with awareness of its staginess, a layered act that causes both parties (poet, addressee) to pass through the revolving doors that link deferential outsider with superior insider. The internal dynamism of the Horatian balancing act is especially productive when considered alongside the construct of Bartsch's Virgilian-mediated Virgil. The final chapter solely focusing on Horace is Harrison's (Chapter 9), who seeks to rectify the denial or disadvantaging of homoerotic desire in the Odes. With straightforward yet nuanced textual analysis, he draws out a number of occasions where the Odes are perspectivally imbued with the male desire of the poet, recontextualising the multidirectionally expressed erotics of the authorial gaze. On a related note, Horace also constitutes a generous proportion of G.O. Hutchinson's discussion of beauty (Chapter 10), framed by symbolic logic and pursuant to the question of passion's ability to distort understandings of beauty. His use of logic to investigate this premise adds a third language to the familiar Hutchinson style of cross-referential work between Greek and Latin spheres, another reflex of the awareness of the trope of authorial self-fashioning on an internal and external level. His ending point, on the ugliness of the comic mask, particularly resonates with the earlier contribution of A. Richlin (Chapter 2) on the possible index of visible humour afforded by the fabula palliata, a specific reading of the Poenulus likewise motivated by questions of visual impact.

And so, not all roads lead to Horace, but D. Lowe's discussion of elegy (Chapter 8) does end with the influence of Horatian satire. Elegy is a genre especially relevant to the concept of a weaker voice, and Lowe reorients critical views of (especially Ovidian) elegy by identifying a vein of influence in contradistinction to the orator, the usual relational voice of elegy: the praeco. Drawing on a publicly mercantile voice to shape the poetic persona of the elegist certainly adds a new facet to understanding not only the elegiac persona, but also the constructed relationship between poet and inspiratory puella; however, in the case of Ovid there is an especial opportunity to integrate pointed awareness of the scholarship that views the Ovidian puella as the embodiment of elegiac poetry, thereby even more humorously short-circuiting the acts of vending or self-promotion propagated by the assumption of this voice. Despite the question asked in the introduction about the roles played by humour and irony within this investigation, the formative potential for (and indeed, existence of) playfulness in these assumptions of voice does not constitute a strong thread of discussion. A swift glance at the index reveals a quite short entry for humour, none for irony; the archness of the title might suggest that playfulness would indeed be a point of shared attention and reference, but the outlet for humour here is rather the employ of learned, stylistic wit on the contributors’ part in externally framing the material. In terms of broader trends, one might also note that Lowe's brief dalliance with pseudepigraphic material (the Copa) is not out alone in the cold, given Hardie's discussion of the Moretum as he contextualises the rustic texture of Paulinus’ poem; but, collectively, the use of this material as a supporting act cannot help but slightly beg the question of why pseudepigrapha is not directly reckoned with as an entire literary phenomenon that emblematises many expressions of the volume's thematic preoccupation.

Despite the centrality of Horace to the collection, prolonged discussion of satire finds its form in the contributions of J.-C. Julhe (Chapter 4) on Martial and T. Geue on Juvenal, here twinned with the fabulist Phaedrus (Chapter 5). Julhe lucidly discusses the identifying traits and biographical information that comprise Martial's ‘inferiority complex’ and allow him to compose poetic rejoinders that positively counter reactions to such self-identification. It is one of the most direct, literal products of the volume's interrogatively posed lines of interest. The positive constructions of Martial are put to effective organisational juxtaposition with Geue's discussion, who outlines how Juvenal and Phaedrus, in contrasting notions of self-fashioning, retreat from setting out a coherent identifying presence, instead practising authorial self-erasure. The name as specific marker of identity is the zone of primary investigation for Geue, who, with especial stylistic flair, outlines the mechanics of Juvenal's anonymity and Phaedrus’ pseudonymity, acts that could be eminently filed under ‘if the phone don't ring, it's me’.

The strength of individual chapters is not something under contestation, nor, indeed, the collective urgency of explicating all the attendant complexities of the ‘weaker voice’. The sense of targeted readership, is, however, slightly muddled by the visible disconnect between its promotional material and the zones of focus that its chapters learnedly present. The jacket summary positions it as a resource for coming to grips with a foundational understanding of how Roman authors adopt and fashion their authorial personae, a view corroborated by the lengthy index entry for ‘self’, but, ultimately, a positioning that the volume far outpaces in its ambitiousness. One element that does stake a qualifying claim of attention within this sphere that could have provided a satisfactory anchoring point is the ultimate expression of the weaker voice: voicelessness, which finds expression across any number of Latin texts. Altogether, the cumulative illumination of these ‘complex inferiorities’ has provided a new, sharp critical perspective with which to consider Latin literature. Personally, it made me reach immediately for Propertius 4.7: if, as voiced in oratorical treatises, ‘blood’ is the stylistic component to the ‘bones’ of rhetoric, is Cynthia's haranguing speech, so redolent of the Ciceronian Pro Caelio, rendered humorously harmless by her literal ‘bloodlessness’? Her bodily inferiority (also literal, belonging to the world below) and feminine identity, seeking to break out from the controlling pen of the poet, makes this poem an especial work that crystallises the preoccupying thematics of the volume, and provides just one such case for its immediate, thought-provoking impact.