Tom Hawkins aims to demonstrate that iambic poetics did not die with Horace's Epodes but continued to be a live literary option into Late Antiquity. This thesis requires some initial justification, since nothing after the first century b.c. looks like archaic iambos. Once it is shorn of the generic expectations created by metre, what is left of iambos? How does one recognize it? For H., the most important indicator is programmatic engagement with the story and poetry of Archilochus (and less prominently Hipponax). However legendary, the story — Lycambes’ rejection of Archilochus and the latter's ferocious verbal assault that drives the Lycambids to suicide, plus the similar tale about Hipponax — looms large in the ancient reception of archaic iambos. By invoking this story, later writers were able to activate a nexus of social issues: the breach of an unprovoked insult, the weak position of the aggrieved vis-à-vis the aggressor, the righteous indignation that seeks to restore proper boundaries and the power of words to effect this. To flesh out his position, H. selects six authors or texts from the first to fourth centuries as the basis for six chapters. Each chapter concludes with a short ‘interlude’ that sketches an iambic approach to another author or issue.

Ovid claims for his Ibis that it is iambic in neither metre nor character, indeed that in a future poem he will unleash iambs dipped in Lycambes’ blood (lines 45–54). In ch. 1, H. takes this to be a praeteritio that encourages the reader to keep Archilochus in mind while reading these elegiacs, even as Ovid ostensibly postpones his appearance. The violent abuse of ‘Ibis’ in subsequent lines seems to confirm this. Is this a deliberate reversal of Horace's Epodes, which begin with ibis (‘you will go’) and push the iambic form in the direction of elegiac content? Moreover, might this reversal reflect a changed perspective on the Augustan régime, from Horatian optimism to Ovidian pessimism from his perch in Tomis? Perhaps.

Ch. 2, devoted to Babrius, is perhaps the least successful. Babrius writes in choliambs (with ‘unsharpened teeth’) and recounts fables. H. explores other features that might suggest an engagement with iambic poetics, but this reader was not convinced that Babrius owes much more to the archaic iambographers than his Hipponactean scazons.

Bishop Gregory of Nazianzus was perhaps the most learned man of the fourth century, with a fondness for allusion and a sharp tongue. In ch. 3, H. subjects Gregory's autobiographical poetry (composed in trimeter) to fruitful investigation. Despite his explicit disavowal of Archilochean invective (much like Ovid and Babrius), and his opposition to an unnamed ametros iambopoios, it is Gregory who emerges in these verses as a classic iambopoios — an identity that he uses to castigate his episcopal opponents and justify his own self-fashioning as an ascetic holy man.

In ch. 4, H. shifts his focus to prose, beginning with Dio's First Tarsian (Or. 33). Dio explicitly adopts the persona of Archilochus to criticize the Tarsian ‘snort’ and their fondness for depilation, highlighting an iambic element that is never far from the surface: the contest of masculinity, in which ‘effeminate’ and ‘non-Greek’ become inextricably linked.

In ch. 5, H. reads Lucian's Pseudologista as an entirely fictitious appropriation of the iambic mode. Most have identified the narrator of this text with Lucian himself, who adopts Archilochean invective to rail against a critic who had objected to his use of the word apophras (‘unpropitious’). But H. argues (plausibly, I think) that the ideal reader is encouraged to be unsympathetic to the narrator, whose iambic bluster turns out to be lacking in substance. Lucian, therefore, is the joking puppet-master who has staged an iambic contest between two pedants.

Ch. 6 is devoted to Julian's Misopogon, in which the emperor reverses his usual disdain for iambos by adopting an Archilochean persona. His justification is the topsy-turvy world of the January Kalends (a theme that H. also tracks in Ovid and Lucian). It was in the context of this season that the citizens of Antioch had ridiculed their emperor's cultivation of a philosopher's beard. Julian responded with an excoriating attack in which the Antiochenes are smooth-skinned and effeminate slaves to luxury (echoes of Dio) whose abandonment of Hellenism had been exposed even by the barbarians of the Rhineland. As H. notes, Archilochus fr. 114W (preference for a short, uncouth general over one who is tall and elegant) probably lurks in the background. In addition to the fact that the Antiochenes had mocked Julian's beard and compared him to the Cercopes, H. might have also noted Julian's impending campaign (calamitous, as it would turn out) against the Persians.

H.'s search for iambic engagement in imperial literature occasionally flirts with banality — someone mentions Archilochus, someone else is hostile — but he is almost always sufficiently careful (and skilful) to avoid dead-ends. The book's greatest weakness, however, is its uneven engagement with relevant scholarship. We have long since passed the point when failure to cite an article was a legitimate complaint, especially when so much ground is being covered, but in a book over which Callimachus casts such a large shadow, it is curious that neither Peter Bing nor Alan Cameron figures in the discussion. The claim that Gregory's poetry has been largely ignored (142) seems unfair to the many scholars who have been working on precisely this topic in English, Italian, French and German, most of whom are not to be found in H.'s bibliography. Such lacunae are perhaps inevitable in a project that is this ambitious in temporal scope. H.'s real strength is in his bold and creative (and often persuasive) readings, held together in an elegant structure. For this alone, the book is worthwhile, and we are indebted to him for illuminating some of the many ways in which iambic poetics remained a live literary option in the imperial period.