How did the Romans do philology? Think in terms of the Latin language, and Varro's De lingua Latina, Caesar's De analogia, or Quintilian's chapters on grammar might come to mind. Think of commentary on texts, and names like Servius, Asconius, and Porphyrio won't be far away. But few of us, it's probably fair to say, could claim a deep acquaintance with all of those, and still fewer have acquired much sense of the broader picture – and it is broad – of ancient scholarship in and on Latin. Cue James Zetzel's Critics, Compilers, and Commentators, a massive and remarkable study of Roman philology from antiquity into the early Middle Ages.Footnote ¹

‘Philology’ for his purposes is ‘the set of disciplines and interests involved in preserving and explaining texts’ (3), divided three ways into grammar (from basic textbooks to specialist treatises on tropes or metrics), commentaries, and lexica. I wouldn't care to specify how many examples of each class Zetzel has surveyed: suffice to say, an astonishing number, many of them with complex traditions – which makes it all the more remarkable that the results are presented so palatably. The longer first half of the book constructs a history of Latin philology from the early second century bc up to around ad 800. The rest is a ‘bibliographical guide’ in handbook form, with a hundred-odd entries where you can look up philologists by name, or the commentary traditions on Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Germanicus, Persius, Lucan, Statius, and Juvenal; each entry gives a potted account of the material and associated problems, and directs you to current editions, commentaries, and bibliography.

Smooth prose and the easy confidence of a seasoned scholar make the book a pleasure to read, and (though I'm hardly qualified to quibble) convincing, both over innumerable zetemata and on the story as a whole. It begins not, as Suetonius would have it, with Crates' sojourn in Rome in 167 bc (a classic tale of culture being imported from the Greek world), but with the commented edition of the Twelve Tables by Aelius Catus Paetus (consul in 198 bc). Grammatica originated, that is, in legal exegesis, more concerned to determine meaning than to emend: hence the more conservative approach to textual criticism at Rome than in Alexandria. Other stand-out cast members include Q. Remmius Palaemon (mid-first century ad), whose lost Ars grammatica was ‘probably the single most influential work of its kind ever written in Rome’ (75) and who bequeathed us, more or less, the system of noun declensions and verb conjugations still in use; Jerome's teacher Aelius Donatus, best known today for his excerpted commentaries on Terence and Virgil, but author of two canonical grammars; and Priscian, whose ‘huge Ars’ (5), written in Constantinople in the early sixth century, stands as ‘the last (and perhaps most original) great treatment of Latin grammar written within a Roman empire’ (10).

Zetzel is sensitive to proportion: these and other big names (Servius not least) are treated with compact efficiency, leaving plenty of room for the lesser creatures, and some nice curiosities from the cabinet: Fulgentius’ citation of a Liber facetiarum by Tacitus, whether for laughs (‘clearly a joke on the gloomy historian’, 100) or not (a compilation of mordant epigrams?); tips on declining honorificabilitudinitas from Charlemagne's teacher, Peter of Pisa; and the two weeks spent by Terrentius and Galbungus investigating whether ego has a vocative – if you believe Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, ‘the oddest (and most interesting) of all grammarians’ (354).

The title recalls Edward Gibbon on the second century ad: ‘A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.’Footnote ² It's an ironic appropriation, of course, not only because this book triumphantly vindicates the place of ancient scholars in our understanding of Latin, of its literature, and of Roman intellectual culture, but also because it's a model of compilation, commentary, and criticism in itself. Compliments to OUP for making it affordable from the off.

Back to modern philology, and an innovative foray into the world of Augustan declamation. Bart Huelsenbeck's Figures in the Shadows sets out to profile in detail the styles (‘speech-identities’) of two declaimers, Arellius Fuscus and Papirius Fabianus.Footnote ³ They were significant men: Fuscus taught Ovid, and Seneca the Elder (Con. 10.pr.13) reckoned him among the very best declaimers; as a stylist, says Seneca the Younger (Ep. 100.9), Fabianus was second only to Cicero, Asinius Pollio, and Livy. But most of what we know about them, and all their extant Latin, comes by way of the Elder Seneca's Controuersiae and Suasoriae, which Huelsenbeck calls his ‘home base’ (1). They're more than that, and Seneca's name really should have been on the cover, at least for the sake of librarians and Googlers. But Huelsenbeck has his reasons, resisting a common tendency to lump together Seneca's hundred-plus declaimers as if they represented one more or less uniform voice: his goal is to liberate two of them, at least, from their ‘cookie-cutter bodies’ (6).

He's not the first to try such differentiation, as readers of Janet Fairweather for one will recall,Footnote ⁴ and he shares with her the attractive benevolence towards Roman declamation which has been coming into fashion. But Huelsenbeck's enterprise is distinctive, partly in the sheer scale of minute interpretation, partly in drilling down hard into the technical side of prose style. Sentence architecture, word order, and prose rhythm feature heavily, with a vigorous dose of discourse pragmatics; section titles like ‘Sententiae Are Non-Sequential’, ‘Presentational Sentences, Theticity’, and ‘An Observation on Participles’ offer fair warning of both content and mode. The investigations are painstaking, precise on the Latin, and undergirded by remarkable diligence with the scholarship (a footnote on the ‘ab urbe condita construction’ cites three handbooks, three monographs, and four articles); they are accompanied, not unjustifiably, by frequent text-critical interventions. How far they take us, I'm less sure: it's well and good to find that Fabianus favours ‘phonetic iteration’ (alliteration and assonance), ‘binary cola’, ‘guttatim style’ (i.e. an additive, non-periodic style), and parataxis (147), but how distinctive is that in Early Imperial Latin? Prose rhythm, says Huelsenbeck, ‘should be expanded to include…syntax, sound, meter, information structuring’ (168) – something akin, by the sound of it, to compositio as anciently understood; but I didn't see quite what followed in practice. And his determination to search for epigrammatic point exclusively in the last word (197–218) seems misguided: yes, the fulmen in clausula often does strike there, but sententious word order is surely not so predictably mechanical.

Another, rather different, angle is interactivity, both among declaimers and with other authors. Here the key idea is the ‘shared locus’, a version of topos or commonplace, but also defined by specific verbal expressions, as when Cestius Pius and Albucius Silus, declaiming on Parrhasius, each start a line with Producitur nobilis senex (‘A noble old man is presented’, Con. 10.5.4, 11). For Huelsenbeck it is literally a key, unlocking Seneca's principles of organization (Chapter 1) and taking us to the heart of how declamation worked: minute crafting and recrafting of set-piece ideas (not a revelation, but surely right). In the main, he avoids speaking of allusion or imitation, but much of what he says could be expressed in those terms, both in reading declaimers against each other and especially when, in Chapter 4, Fuscus is set in dialogue with the likes of Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Manilius, and Seneca the Younger. Either way, this last chapter does good service in countering a common (and patently absurd – think only of Ovid) notion that declamation and ‘literature’ in the early Empire were poles apart.

A brief conclusion declines to recapitulate what does define the styles of Fabianus and Fuscus (I'd better do the same) and gamely confesses that, ‘Once we are immersed in it, study of the Elder Seneca's collection [so it was that!]…steers its own course. Problems are defiantly their own…and their solutions may resist easy and dramatic presentation’ (328). True enough: this is an unusual book, not easy to read, or to digest; but there is plenty of food for thought.

From prose technicalities to poetry for all: I. B. Tauris (now an imprint of Bloomsbury) continue their ‘Understanding Classics’ series with Paul Allen Miller's Horace.Footnote ⁵ Aimed at ‘a wide audience of appreciative modern readers’ (so the website), this short book takes on the unenviable task of digesting Horace's poetry for the novice and the Latinless. Miller's extensive publishing career makes him an authoritative choice, and the conservative structure keeps things accessible: four chapters, each longer than the last, focus in turn on Satires, Epodes, Odes 1–3, and Epistles 1; there follows a brief epilogue on reception. The Ars poetica is used for the introduction; the other works are relegated to passing mention, Odes 4 as being an inferior sequel to Books 1–3 (8, 129), Carmen saeculare and the long letters to Augustus and Florus for no explicit reason (2, 9).

Three well-justified leitmotifs run through Miller's account. One is Horatian ethics. Another is irony, more specifically that Horace is a ‘Roman Socrates’;Footnote ⁶ we're promised clear Socratic precedents and Platonic intertexts (13), but I noticed only one of the former (135), and none of the latter. The third, hardest to get across to a non-Latinate readership, is the fine grain of Horace's language. In his introduction, Miller cites Nietzsche's famous comparison of the Odes to a mosaic ‘in which each word is a tile, whose placement produces the sought-for effect’ (10), then illustrates with a passage from the Ars poetica – printed with a word missing from its first line. Venial, perhaps; less so the slips in the accompanying translation, with plenty more to follow: so, for instance, hoc quidam non belle is given as ‘this indeed is not well done’ (27), the cineri doloso of Odes 2.1 as ‘painful ash’ (112), and Tibullus’ diuitias alius – his incipit! – as ‘riches of another man’ (31); even Horace's self-styling as Latinus…fidicen gets mangled (150, 153). Mistake-spotting is invidious, I know; and it's human to err, as Horace would be first to say. But there are limits, and I fear Flaccus would not miss the irony (‘these…poems ask us to pay close attention to their words and structures…’, 176); there must be a lesson here somewhere.

Edited volumes have been rolling in thick and fast, starting with a spirited collection on The Ancient Lives of Virgil, edited by Anton Powell and Philip Hardie.Footnote ⁷ Primary focus is the Life now known variously and clumsily as the Vita Suetoniana-Donatiana, Vita Suetonii uulgo Donatii, or Vita Suetonii Donatiana (VSD), which is to say, Aelius Donatus’ biography of Virgil, derived or even copied from Suetonius’ entry in his De viris illustribus. Most conveniently found in the Suetonius Loeb, it's the source of such famous anecdotes as Octavia's swoon at Tu Marcellus eris (‘You will be Marcellus’, Aen. 6.883) and Virgil's parting wish that his unfinished poem be burned. But are those stories fact or fable? Nicholas Horsfall was typically forthright: VSD ‘is a work of attractive romance…a mere congeries of inventions, fictions and embroideries’.Footnote ⁸ It's a provocation that Powell and others could not resist, and this volume devotes substantial energy to challenging it.

The book opens with Irene Peirano-Garrison and Andrew Laird, who martial recent work on ancient lives to put pressure on ‘fictionality’ as a valid or relevant term: biography and criticism were so closely intertwined in antiquity that we would do better to approach a work like VSD as a creative response to Virgil's texts (Peirano-Garrison), even a form of exegesis (Laird). A rather different line of assault is taken in the last two chapters, where Hans Smolenaars and Anton Powell attack Horsfall on his own terms, arguing at length that VSD gives accurate information. Were Horsfall alive to reply, I suspect he would have firm words, not least on the references to ‘the Life of Virgil by Probus’ (180–5): if Powell really thinks the Vita Probiana was written by Probus (i.e. before Suetonius), and not (as most believe) several centuries later, he might fairly be expected, in a book of this title, to say why.

Ahuvia Kahane, meanwhile, devotes herself to Virgil's reported epitaph, and two contributions address Virgil's only metrical life, 107 hexameters penned by Phocas in the late fourth century or so. Stephen Harrison offers text and translation along with an intertextual apparatus and commentary; counting any and every verbal parallel a ‘citation’, he affirms the quality of this ‘highly allusive poetic text’ (73). Scott McGill complements that with a chapter on Phocas’ use of VSD, and his departures from it. Two more chapters pursue the later reception of VSD: Fabio Stok on manuscripts, Nora Goldschmidt on Ben Jonson's Poetaster and the ‘Paris accessus’, a medieval romance involving Ovid climbing up a ladder to Livia's bedchamber and Virgil naughtily removing the rungs. (Ovid breaks his leg, which is why, of course, he was so tight-lipped in writing Vergilium tantum uidi [sic], ‘Virgil I only saw’.)

If Virgil's lives are the topic of this book, his death occasions the two most vivid claims. According to Andrew Laird, Ovid's avowal that he tried to burn his Metamorphoses does not recall Virgil's analogous instruction about the Aeneid, but itself sparked the Virgilian myth. More titillating still, Anton Powell wonders whether Virgil's death was not so natural after all: did Augustus, eager to see a ‘politically invaluable’ poem published (192), lose patience at all those revisions and finish the poet off? It's not surprising that Hardie discreetly distances himself from both theories (xi–xii); let's see how they get on.

Virgil's afterlife gets extensive coverage of a different sort in Virgil and His Translators.Footnote ⁹ Editors Susanna Braund and Zara Martirosova Torlone gather twenty-eight chapters ranging from humanism to the twenty-first century. Translations into English are well represented, from Dryden to Seamus Heaney by way of Wordsworth and post-Vietnam America, and ending with Josephine Balmer de se ipsa. But the volume's cosmopolitan outlook takes in French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, Slovenian, and Spanish, with forays too into Brazil, China, and Turkey. Even Esperanto makes the cut (‘Sed la reĝino, delonge lezita de am’ serioza…’), as does the curious case of Eugenios Voulgaris, who put the Aeneid into Homeric Greek in the 1790s – with whatever degree of success (Τεύχε᾽ ἀείδω ἄνδρα τε…). The introduction promises a mix of ‘top-down’ theorizing and ‘bottom-up’ case studies (4); in fact the latter approach dominates, with practical reading of extracts outweighing disquisition on metaphrase and the like, and with more interest in assessing the place of Classics in country/century X than in making a ‘hard’ reception case (what do we learn from this about Virgil?). Still, it's an eye-opening tour, which gives reason to look forward to Susanna Braund's ‘major study’ in progress (3), A Cultural History of Translations of Virgil: From the Twelfth Century to the Present.

A clutch of edited volumes from De Gruyter is headed by a heavy book on Intratextuality and Latin Literature, twenty-seven chapters across 500 pages.Footnote ¹⁰ Originating in a conference held at Thessaloniki in 2017, it is on the one hand a kind of Sharrock and Morales two decades on,Footnote ¹¹ on the other a cheerful miscellany of papers on Latin literature. Certainly the editorial touch is light, whether in standardizing format, creating dialogue, or establishing a theoretical framework: the introduction opens with one paragraph of questions à la ‘what is intratextuality?’, before the editors throw up their hands and declare open season (‘Meanwhile, the present volume…’, 1). The result is a pretty broad church. A few contributors take intratextuality to mean intertextuality within a text: so, for instance, Christine Perkell on Aeneid 12, Tristan Franklinos on Ex Ponto 4, or Ulrike Egelhaaf-Gaiser on the Attic Nights. Several expand that to intertextuality within an author's oeuvre, others again to a catholic range of approaches to structure, theme, and unity.

That prompts reflection on the headword of the volume, and an increasingly common term of our trade (if not yet – unlike ‘puggle’ and ‘Latin@’ – admitted to the Oxford English Dictionary). For some, ‘intratextuality’ is ugly theorese, idly labelling the sort of things Classicists have always studied (so Rainer Friedrich, in lively invective).Footnote ¹² For others, including me, it is a convenient shorthand for the sort of thing discussed by Perkell and others in this volume: when Virgil has Dido pallida morte futura (‘pale at coming death’, Aen. 4.644) and Cleopatra pallentem morte futura (‘paling at coming death’, Aen. 8.709), I call it an intratext, and doubt it came about by accident. Alison Sharrock has offered various, more capacious definitions: ‘negotiating one's way around the textual system’;Footnote ¹³ more specifically, ‘the phenomenon and the study of the relationship between elements within texts’ (15), extending even to the absence of such relationships. Andrew Laird has proposed that ‘intratextuality’ is to ‘design’ what ‘intertextuality’ (as used by purists) is to ‘allusion’: a set of relationships determined wholly by readers.Footnote ¹⁴ And David Konstan, in the most theoretically engaged chapter of this collection, insists that intratextual criticism should not seek unity and coherence; thus, in his case study, if we approach Lucan in intratextual terms, ‘we may read the laudation of Nero [at BC 1.33–66] as a separable set piece…detachable and at all events isolable’ (348). That's an empowering, or at least convenient, theoretical base for the particular problem of Lucan – and more or less the opposite of intratextuality as more commonly understood. Little wonder the foreword was so aporetic; the conversation will no doubt continue.

Life, Love and Death in Latin Poetry is a rich collection of essays offered in honour of Theodore Papanghelis, Professor of Latin at Thessaloniki.Footnote ¹⁵ De Gruyter do not officially ‘do’ Festschrifts any more; or rather, they do, but won't say so on the cover; the conspiratorial feel is rather touching. So too with They Keep It All Hid,Footnote ¹⁶ which on closer inspection reveals itself as a volume for the distinguished Harvardian Richard Thomas. A dozen papers by friends and former students reflect their differing areas of expertise, and to some extent that of the honorand: Augustan poetry dominates, with a little Greek, some reception, and plenty of intertextuality; Bob Dylan, subject of Thomas’ most recent book, is restricted to the titular allusion. Meanwhile, a huge collection of papers on ‘models of narrative and interpretation’ marks (again discreetly) the retirement of Christiane Reitz, Professor of Latin at Rostock since 1999; it ranges suitably across Roman poetry and some prose, with articles in English, French, German, and Italian.Footnote ¹⁷

Away from De Gruyter, arrivals include Reading Republican Oratory, a first output from the major research project ‘Fragments of the Roman Republican Orators’ run by Catherine Steel at Glasgow,Footnote ¹⁸ and a conference volume on the equally tricky fragments of Lucilius.Footnote ¹⁹ Texts and Violence in the Roman World, edited by David Scourfield and Monica Gale, was an interesting idea for a collection, and the results are strong.Footnote ²⁰ The book's eleven contributors take us from Roman comedy to Prudentius by way of Lucretius, Horace, the elegists, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Seneca's Phaedra, and Lucan, with time for some muscular prose too (John Henderson on the Elder Seneca's ‘audionasties’, Bruce Gibson on Tacitean uis, and William Fitzgerald on cruelty in Apuleius). Another nice set of papers, edited by Fitzgerald together with Efrossini Spentzou, is The Production of Space in Latin Literature.Footnote ²¹ The ‘spatial turn’ is well embedded by now, but space is still money – witness Topoi, an ‘excellence cluster’ which has brought millions of euros into the Berlin universities since 2007 – and also, as this volume demonstrates, a productive topic. The heaviest theoretical lifting is done by Spentzou on Propertius and in the introduction, and by Therese Fuhrer on ‘lieux de passage’ in Augustine. The last is a highlight of the book (another is Victoria Rimell's typically high-octane tour of water in Early Imperial poetry), but there are interesting reflections too on Catullus, Horace, Varro, Seneca the Younger, Tacitus (twice), and even ‘the space of vehiculation’.

Four commentaries to finish, starting with Laurel Fulkerson on the Appendix Tibulliana, a.k.a. ‘Tibullus 3’ – or rather, two-thirds of it (the hexameter Panegyric to Messalla stays out).Footnote ²² I suspect that the remarkable modesty on the cover blurb (‘Though admittedly somewhat obscure, this volume argues…’) is as unintentional as it is misplaced, given the expansive scale and the inaugural role of this volume in a series of Oxford commentaries on ‘pseudepigrapha Latina’. The Appendix is a fiddly book, throwing up notorious conundrums of authorship and dating: does Lygdamus (poet of 3.1–6) imitate Ovid, or vice versa? Who wrote ‘Sulpicia's garland’ (3.8–12) and when? How do those poems relate to the brief elegies in Sulpicia's own voice that follow (3.13–18)? Are 3.19–20 by a different poet again (or two)? And that vexed question of our times: was there ever a female poet Sulpicia? On chronology, Fulkerson is agnostic, holding to an Augustan-ish dating (this despite an ‘emerging consensus’, as Robert Maltby reports it, that Lygdamus belongs in the late first century adFootnote ²³), but not concerned to argue the point, to settle the Ovidian Prioritätsfrage, or indeed to rule out Tibullan authorship of all the poems. As for Sulpicia, Fulkerson takes the reasonable position that, absent decisive arguments, it is more interesting to read her ‘as an authentically recovered female voice’ (53) than not.

The commentary is billed as ‘literary’, perhaps for a modern ring, perhaps to profile it against the heavier philology of Navarro Antolín, whose massive commentary on the Lygdamus poems is the nearest English-language competitor.Footnote ²⁴ So, for instance, on 3.1.1, Martis Romani festae uenere Kalendae (‘the festive Kalends of Roman Mars are come’), the form uenere in 3.1.1 gets a full page from Navarro Antolín, with statistics on -ere vs -erunt in Tibullus and elsewhere, and a battery of bibliography; Fulkerson settles for the brief (and inaccurate) note ‘alternative (poetic) form of the third person plural, present indicative active’, but adds a nice suggestion about uenere/Venere, given Martis nearby (she might have signalled the two differing quantities). She also leaves out Hor. Sat. 1.3.87, cum tristes misero uenere Kalendae (‘when the grim Kalends are come for the poor man’, well adduced by Navarro Antolín), and, for that matter, [Tib.] 3.8.21, Hanc uos, Pierides, festis cantate Kalendis (‘Hymn this girl, Pierians, on the festive Kalends’; note, with Tränkle, 3.1.5 dicite, Pierides…);Footnote ²⁵ it's not quite time, then, to throw your old commentaries away. But perhaps that was an unlucky sample: other notes abound in parallels, interpretation, and above all reportage of the ever-burgeoning scholarship. Handling her poet(s) aimiably, her readers gently, Fulkerson offers an attractive route into this corner of Latin elegy – and will no doubt help coax it further back in from the margins.

Luis Rivero García's large volume on Metamorphoses 13 advertises itself as a tool primarily for future editors of Ovid, not perhaps the best way to shift copies, but a fair and (if you suspect shades of Housman's editorum in usum) unpretentious representation of its contents.Footnote ²⁶ Those editors will find plenty to ponder, but the rest of us can eavesdrop with profit too, both to weigh new conjectures (as Met. 13.8 hac hac classe) and on numerous points of language and usage.

2018 was an annus mirabilis for Tacitus, with major Cambridge commentaries on the Annals from two leading authorities in the field. A. J. (Tony) Woodman's new ‘Orange’ edition of Book 4 completes, nearly half a century on, the series on Annals 1–6 begun by F. R. D. (Frank) Goodyear in 1972.Footnote ²⁷ Goodyear had hoped to get it done in four volumes and a decade; in the event, he managed only Annals 1–2 before his untimely death in 1987. A weighty sequel on Annals 3 followed in 1996, written jointly by Woodman and R. H. (Ronald) Martin (austere initials are still de rigueur in the orangerie); now Woodman has finished the set with Books 5–6 (2017) and 4.Footnote ²⁸ He was the obvious man for the job: the acknowledged world expert on Tacitus, an ‘Orange’ commentator of long standing, and a sometime research student of Goodyear's; the result is a product which ‘literary’ and ‘historical’ readers alike will take very seriously.

This last instalment is novel in doubling up another Cambridge commentary, the ‘Green and Yellow’ Annals 4 produced by Martin and Woodman in 1989.Footnote ²⁹ I don't think I am alone in counting that volume one of the very best in its series, a brilliant and brilliantly timed book which captures so much in so little space, and did so much to bring the ‘literary turn’ in Roman historiography to a wide audience of students and scholars. Whether the ‘Orange’ is intended to supersede or sit alongside its predecessor is a question Woodman does not directly address in his preface; the answer is perhaps both. The volume is offered as ‘more or less entirely new’ (x), and collation confirms as much, albeit with interesting opportunities to trace self-imitation from time to time (sample the old and new notes on Ann. 4.1.1, cum repente…). It is also longer, more detailed, more interested in textual criticism, and less concerned with ushering in novices: witness the introduction, a powerful ten-page essay devoted almost wholly to Sejanus and Sallust, and (in good ‘Orange’ style) making no attempt to cover the range of bases normal in most commentary series. On the other hand, and like Annals 5–6, this is more streamlined than the earlier Tacitus volumes, with a modern look, briefer notes, and a less forbidding (not to say acidic) manner than Goodyear's. Still, Martin and Woodman will surely remain in heavy demand as an affordable and accessible commentary for students, and not only them: I for one will be keeping both books to hand.

Rhiannon Ash, meanwhile, ushers the Neronian Annals into the Cambridge fold with a ‘Green and Yellow’ on Annals 15.Footnote ³⁰ The hundredth in the series (there was a cake), it's a weighty tome – longer, in fact, than Woodman's new Annals 4 – and another important addition to the shelf. The Pisonian conspiracy, the fire of Rome, and the death of Seneca are just some of the reasons why Annals 15 features heavily on syllabuses – as it once did for a schoolgirl called Rhiannon (vii) – and why this book will be a very welcome replacement for Norma Miller's student commentary of 1973.Footnote ³¹ A substantial introduction sets the scene, including a lively read-through of Annals 15 and five dense and energizing pages on Tacitean style; the commentary is full, detailed, and shot through with an infectious enthusiasm. Future commentators on the Annals have a lot to live up to.