In this thoughtful and interesting study, a revision of a 2007 thèse d'habilitation, Alessandro Garcea has added considerably to our understanding of both Caesar and his grammatical and rhetorical theories, and of the textual and political culture of the mid-first century b.c.e. as a whole. The De analogia, a work in two books written after Caesar's publication of his Comentarii de Bello Gallico, which was dedicated to Cicero prior to the publication of Brutus in 46 b.c.e. (in which work it is praised: ‘de ratione Latini loquendi accuratissume scripserit’, Brut. 253), may well have served as a response to Cicero's own grammatical theories as set out in his De oratore, of 54 b.c.e. The work survives only in a small number of fragments (if a somewhat larger number of testimonia), but was one that must have participated actively in the vibrant intellectual and textual culture of some of the Republic's most chaotic years. G.’s work — to construct a work of considerable importance through a paucity of evidence — is therefore, of necessity, a challenging one; the end result, although hardly perfect, is certainly a welcome and worthwhile one.

After a brief preface, the work is divided into three parts, each part further subdivided into smaller parts, moving more or less from the general (matters of introduction and context) to the specific (the fragments and testimonia themselves). Part I (‘Introduction’) provides both background and context to the De analogia as a whole: a section entitled ‘Inter tela uolantia’ (I.1) presents the backgrounds of Caesarian and linguistic politics, as well as matters of eclecticism, polemics and analogy. The next subsection (I.2) turns to the writing of De analogia as a whole, from Caesar's intellectual education to the title of the treatise. The final section of Part I (I.3) presents G.’s understanding of Caesar's grammatical positioning, from questions of orthography to derivation and inflection, to analogy and conventionalism. This section concludes with an Appendix on Cicero's Orator. G. handles the material with an ease that inspires confidence in his reader (and indeed, he has established himself as a competent wrangler of this work), but a slightly more transparent presentation of argument and endpoint at the start of this section would have been helpful. Nowhere in this work are we given a concise and straightforward summary of the most basic details of De analogia: its likely date, its dedicatee, its rôle in the textual politics of the late Republic (that is to say: why it is important) and the state of the fragments.

Part II of the work (‘Cicero, Caesar, and the Oratores Elegantes: Recreating a Debate at a Distance’) is similarly split into three subsections, which endeavour — as the title suggests — to engage in the difficult task of attempting to recreate, through often less-than-helpful sources, an ancient rhetorical debate from a distance of some two millennia. The first subsection (II.4) examines the rhetorical doctrine of elegantia as reconstructed from both theory (of the uirtutes orationis) and, then, literary texts (Cicero's De oratore and Brutus). The next subsection (II.5) is where G. first turns to the relationship between Cicero's many rhetorical works and the De analogia, following then with somewhat more general discussions on the command of linguistic change, the Alexandrian tradition, and Caesar as a prose writer. Finally (II.6), G. turns to the influence of Roman Epicureanism on first-century rhetoric and grammar, with discussions of Philodemus’ concern for purity and clarity and, finally, Caesar's (‘supposed’) Neo-Atticism. As with Part I of this work, I found all of the information presented in Part II both interesting and highly valuable; again, however, I found myself occasionally at a loss as to how G. imagined this all to be coming together in terms of his overall work. There are connections to all of this, to be sure, but they could have been made far more explicit — especially for the reader who is not an expert in the prose culture of this time. There is too much here of importance, I think, to risk discouraging the non-specialist.

Part III of the work (‘Texts, Translations, and Commentary’) is both the longest (at close to 130 pages) and most important and, in a sense, the most frustrating upon which to offer comment. These twenty-three sections are exhaustively researched and painstakingly presented; and for that, G. deserves only high praise. However, where this reader would have liked some kind of clear presentation of what the De analogia might have looked like as a whole, at the moment it had been handed from Caesar (and how awkward would this have been?) to Cicero, I found a somewhat dizzying array of testimonia presented thematically —‘I as Consonans duplex (F4)’; ‘The Mutae at the End of a World (F7)’; ‘Case and the Paradigmatic Role of the Ablative (F120)’ — rather than with care to the original order, or, as it were, literary sense, of the text as a whole.

In sum, this impressive work would have benefited throughout from a clearer presentation of its content — and importance — to the non-specialist, and, perhaps, a clearer explanation of the logic of presentation and, in particular, the rationale behind the presentation of the fragments and testimonia. Nevertheless, this is a very fine and important new study, one that bears the marks of painstaking scholarship, and one that will be exceptionally valuable to the specialist in late Republican prose and intellectual culture.