Since Zetzel's landmark article of 1980 (‘Horace's Liber Sermonum: the structure of ambiguity’, Arethusa 13), some of the biggest transformations in the way we think about what happens in a book of Latin poetry have emerged from studies of Horace's first book of Sermones. Despite the intense critical attention that these poems have received, commentaries of a matching high calibre have failed to materialize, and the best of the old ones (Bentley, Lejay, Orelli, Heinze et al.) are by now very old, and have long since ceased to tell us what scholars are actually saying. Emily Gowers’ new Green and Yellow commentary does far more than bring things up to date. It innovates, and opens pathways for fresh interrogation. By combining the best of the solid philological and historical gains made by the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentaries in French, German and Italian, with the best of recent cultural and literary-critical scholarship (primarily in English), G. has managed to produce something that the field has not, in fact, ever seen: an impressively full and thought-provoking commentary in English on the first book of Horace's Sermones (Bentley's brilliant commentary of 1712 was in Latin).

Commentators have to be choosy in selecting what to emphasize and what to let readers pick up on for themselves. G.’s points of emphasis are well chosen and well balanced, with the main point of focus centering on the process of the poet's self-fashioning in the course of the book, and the relation of the self that we are made to notionalize and keep track of in the many shifting historical, cultural and stylistic contexts that we are made to consider. What G. seems to ‘get’ in all of this that no other commentator seems to have gotten nearly as well is how ideas tumble forward in Horace's hexameter poems from things (logically) unsaid, but (metaphorically and tangentially) implied. Playing with the ways of off-hand talk, Horace's ‘Conversations’ trip along from thought to thought, often landing us far from where we began, and having taken many unexpected turns along the way. And yet underneath their affable meandering is a web of implication (the traces of a loaded metaphor's being gradually unpacked, or of it secretly implying, then giving way to, the next metaphor down the line) that connects not just one thought to the next, but first to last and all thoughts in-between.

A particular highlight in teasing out how this works in the actual ‘talking’ of the poems is to be found in the way that G. tracks the flow of ideas from line to line in S. 1.4, showing how the poem's opening discussion about Old Comic freedom gives way to a quasi Old Comical/censorial scolding of Lucilius’ over-free style (‘an “Aristophanic” synkrisis between himself and his Roman satirical “father” Lucilius’, 149), and from there to the question of whether satire, given its stylistic proximity to New Comedy and everyday speech, belongs in the lofty (senatorial?) company of high Ennian poetry (‘numerus means both “group” and “metrical line” in this poem’, 150–1). Then, from New Comic fathers scolding their sons we transition to the topic of Horace's own brand of scolding humour which, he says, he has adapted from the lessons he learned from his New Comic father (‘the salient comic precedent is the severe father Demea in Terence Adelphoe’, 176) who has a good deal of the Old Comic Lucilius about him (‘the father's finger-pointing lessons are the ethical equivalent of Greek comedy's branding of criminals … notabant’, 176). Every step of this discussion, G. shows, finds Horace giving a polyvalent figure a slightly different turn.

G.’s note on ‘numerus’, quoted above, is itself worth the price of the book, and to it I have added a ‘senatorial’ question mark of my own in parenthesis, as if to show how new possibilities tend to pop into view by way of G.’s insightful line-by-line analyses: is Horace perhaps playing upon (and mocking the very idea of) his wielding the censor's nota by pretending in these lines to exclude certain un-worthies (such as himself) from the lofty company of ‘the poets’, i.e. the way a censor would sort out and specify who belongs in the senate, and who does not? I might say the same thing about the G.’s note on illudo chartis in line 139, where the invitation to savour the metaphor produced by illudo (‘I gamble/fritter away on’) provokes me to think that perhaps Horace is here, at the end of the poem, still playing with the idea of his being a New Comic (thus ‘gambling’ playboy) son of an admonishing Terentian father, i.e. still ‘frittering away’ his wherewithal on silly things (such as satire). And thus the entire poem seems fitted together in intricate ways that I had never managed to see before.

I could go on with further examples. Suffice it to say that the commentary does not solve every grammatical and syntactical problem that I have ever had in reading these poems: in fact there are many places where it could have stood to be more teacherly and explicit. Nor has it dispelled my every meaning-filled doubt about some of the poems’ darker turns. And yet it is much to her credit that G. has not tried to try to do this. Whatever else this outstanding book does, it has the decency never to tell me what Horace ‘clearly’ means in poems that, as Persius (stealing Horace's own metaphor) once observed, he designed to keep us dangling (‘excusso populum suspendere naso’, Pers. 1.118).