In his Introduction, Dinter distinguishes himself from previous scholars who have ‘exclusively addressed’ issues of politics and ideology, source criticism and the influence on the poet of ‘contemporary rhetorical education and practice’ (1). D., by contrast, will ‘take Lucan more on his own terms as a poet’ and will address various features of his technique that create ‘a unique poetic form and vision’ (2). Some scholars of Lucan will not recognize their own work in this rather sweeping Forschungsbericht, but the real problem lies in the want of any clear definition of D.'s own project.
The first and longest chapter of the study concerns ‘Lucan's Epic Body’. As early as the proem to the Bellum Civile Lucan identifies his subject as the fatherland turned against its own guts with a victorious right hand. Students of Lucan will scarcely need reminding that the ensuing ten books repeatedly draw out this image as well as depicting innumerable instances of dismemberment and bodily disintegration. D.'s contribution is to gather together a large amount of such material, to arrange it under specific headings and then to subject it to the bare minimum of useful analysis. There are some nice observations but no coherent thesis.
The remaining chapters are tied to the first by a series of bodily metaphors, some ancient, some D.'s own, but few readers will regard them as contributing to a unified thesis (for these metaphors, see, for example, 4, 9, 15). Fama, epitaphic motifs, sententiae, various forms of repetition, medieval argumenta and sundry Renaissance and early modern continuations of Lucan are thrown together to create a study of Lucan's ‘epic body’ that itself has all the bodily unity of an Arcimboldo grotesque. On occasion, this approach has more basis than on others. The section on sententiae, in which D. does his most effective and original work, draws well on Quintilian's view of these as the ‘eyes’, that is to say, the places of greatest beauty, within the body of the speech, but the threefold assertion (92–4) of their capacity for excerptability and integration into ‘new textual bodies’ or ‘new literary bodies’ smacks of an author trying too hard to hold his own text together. In other instances, the connections are distinctly more tenuous, even evanescent.
D.'s second chapter on Fama presents Lucan's poem as a ‘textualized struggle for fame’ (62). As in the first chapter, he demonstrates his ability to bring together a good deal of material relevant to the general theme, but a striking inability to do much with what he has amassed. The one strong claim regards the relationship of Lucan's Erictho to Fama as presented in Ovid, Metamorphoses 12. The arguments adduced in support of this view are somewhat forced.
The account of sententiae sits uneasily with D.'s initial claim to break with modern concern for the influence on Lucan of the rhetorical culture in which he was raised. Yet it does draw an important distinction between context-specific pointed expressions and sententiae that ‘display universal gnomic force’ (91). There are also good remarks on the highly sententious speech of Pothinus (110–11) and a useful account of ‘antiproverbs’ and their place in Lucan (111–14). D.'s experimental filleting of Lucan in the manner of the excerptor of Publilius Syrus would have benefited from greater application of the distinction between the context-specific and the universalizing. He might also have asked in what sense phrases such as Luc. 7.55 pacemque timeret qualify as any sort of sententia (102 n. 73, 109 n. 126).
The final chapter presents a strange congeries of material. It begins with some hackneyed observations on the poetics of iteration in Seneca and Lucan, gestures briefly at internal verbal repetition and then collapses into wholly irrelevant paratextual material from the argumenta and the continuators. The central section treats the Vulteius episode as a ‘case study’ in Lucan's ‘poetics of repetition’ (122), but it offers little that is new and is vitiated by internal contradiction (127 implies that Livy's account of the Opitergini is no more than a hypothetical reconstruction while 137 indicates knowledge of its actual contents).
It was sensible of D. to avail himself of Susanna Morton Braund's translation of Lucan, and the reader is repeatedly made aware of its quality and precision. Where D. does not do so, the results can be somewhat eccentric (at 135, praebebunt testes is rendered as ‘we have been seen’). The text is not free of errors though most of these are relatively trivial. In sum, D. is an energetic but somewhat undiscerning collector of ideas and material. Much of what finds its way into this study could profitably be removed. Much else could be subjected to more acute and effective analysis. D. is an enthusiastic anatomist, but I would not trust him as a surgeon.
