In this tightly argued and nuanced study of Augustan poetry, Lauren Curtis has made a valuable contribution to the study of choral poetics. Bringing close readings of both Greek and Roman poetry (predominantly the latter) into dialogue with one another, C. demonstrates how a particular attention to choral imagery, that is, references to the chorus as ‘both cultural and literary phenomenon’ (2), both explicit and allusive, enriches our understanding of Augustan literary culture.

Poets of every age can rely on the image of a chorus to explore themes pertinent to the individual and their place in a community, to divine worship and mortal ritual, to identity, authority and performance. The poetry of the twenties and teens b.c.e., too, is shown to engage amply with these choral associations. More interestingly, even as poets seek to incorporate that Hellenic cultural landscape into their often competitive poetics, C. identifies a particular resistance to and reshaping of Hellenic models of chorality during this time ‘of transition and definition, poetic innovation and dense textual allusions’ (21). Due attention is also given to the ways that choreia is shaped by the Augustan poets’ self-consciously literary and lettered, rather than performed, choral creations, a shift in focus that C. highlights in her brief survey of some choral imagery in Alexandrian poetry in ch. 1.

In the subsequent five substantial chapters, we are shown how individual poets take various approaches in their different works to imagining the chorus. For Propertius in his elegies (the focus of ch. 2), the chorus allows associations of the erotic female bacchant to combine with his private vision of Cynthia, unlocking new ways to understand both his admiration and his jealousy. In ch. 3, Horace, specifically in his Odes, uses choral imagery to emulate and vie with lyric poetry as a whole, while attempting to reinvent the genre for new Roman audiences. Ch. 4 brings out more acutely how this imagery can be read as a means for poets, and Horace most of all, to place themselves in dialogue with their civic, Augustan community and with ‘poetic tradition’ simultaneously. In the two final chapters, both focusing on the choral poetics of the Aeneid, we are led through the Hellenic and Roman ritual and poetic landscapes summoned by choral and chorus-like movement. Here choral imagery is cast as culturally formative as well as illustrative of subterranean tensions in Virgil's vision of Rome's (re)-foundation under Augustus.

The reader is led in an intricate dance around C.'s vision of the Augustan literary imagination, and her elucidation of all these approaches goes far beyond this rather blunt summary in both richness and variety. It will be wise to leave literary Latinists to assess the implications for the field of Latin poetry. From the perspective of choral studies, however, C. has set out an accomplished exposition of the multiple ways in which attention to choral imagery can reward readers. C.'s analysis of the lusus Troiae in Book 5 of the Aeneid is particularly satisfying, showing how the pyrrhic antecedent to the military manoeuvres of the Trojan youths brings multiple mythical geographies (Trojan, Cretan and Greek) to bear on one foundational moment for the future city of Rome, while simultaneously reaching forward to the Augustan world's familiarity with Roman military spectacle. The ghosts of past choral performances summoned in the lusus Troiae are then shown to haunt both the choral landscape depicted in the underworld in Book 6 and the cosmic choreia found on the shield of Aeneas in Book 8.

C.'s study also opens the door for further work on the rich, although sometimes elusive, choral imaginary in Roman literature. For example, I wondered what role Cicero's works, freighted as they are with Plato's idiosyncratic conception of good and bad choral practice, might be shown to have had on these Augustan poets. The idea of a ‘developing closeness between literary judgement and civic participation’ (131), described by C. as ‘one of the distinctive features of Augustan poetry’, sounds as though it could be inflected by Plato's choral theories and his ruminations on the theatocracy (e.g. Pl. Leg. 700d–701a) that he allegedly witnessed in Sicily.

One aspect of this study that may give some pause is the range of images which might be included under the sign of choreia. C. always takes the reader through the rationale for reading all the selected passages ‘chorally’, but the net is sometimes cast uncomfortably wide. Discussions of poets, nominally the leaders of their chorus(es), or of ‘the lyric genre’, gain something from being contextualised within the landscape of choral imagery in ch. 4, but ultimately the chorus itself recedes far into the background. Putting to one side any smaller quibbles — e.g. just how choral are the circling manoeuvres of Turnus and Aeneas on the battlefield (227–34)? — there is value in pushing scholars to think hard about what ‘counts’ as choral, and C. has provided a multitude of examples and test-cases. While some subtler allusions may not convince every reader, this book is stimulating for its rigour and provocations concerning what the image of a chorus can do in poetry.