Everyone who teaches Horace, whether at undergraduate or graduate level, has been looking forward to the long-awaited appearance of an accessible but scholarly English commentary on the enigmatic and (traditionally) unpopular fourth book of Odes. The current provision is unsatisfactory: an excellent recent commentary exists, but in scholarly Italian (Paolo Fedeli and Irma Ciccarelli, Q. Horatii Flacci Carmina: Liber IV (2008)); Michael Putnam offers illuminating discussions in his 1986 work, Artifices of Eternity. Horace's Fourth Book of Odes (1986) but the book is not arranged as a conventional commentary; compelling readings of individual odes can be found in major works of Horatian criticism from Fraenkel to Lowrie, but none offer a line-by-line guide of the sort appropriate for a reading class; and finally, several school commentaries, such as those by Page and Quinn, remain useful, but they are dated and unsuitable for more advanced study. The situation has surely compounded the work's unpopularity: poems that are harder to teach are less often taught and, as a result, less often the object of scholarly study.

Richard Thomas' new edition of Odes IV and the Carmen Saeculare for the Cambridge ‘Green and Yellow’ series is therefore welcome and it is in many respects a model of the genre: clear, thorough and judicious, packing a great deal of information into a volume of manageable length, while also offering the reader a coherent interpretation of the work as a whole. All those teaching Horace will want a copy, and will find it of great use in navigating these remarkable poems and the existing scholarship upon them. The inclusion of the Carmen Saeculare — which too often slips through the cracks in studies of the Odes — is a particular strength of T.'s book, as is the nuanced and extended treatment of the poem, which is well discussed in both introduction and commentary. Three useful appendices gather together key sources on the Secular Games of 17 b.c., doing much to contextualize not only the Carmen Saeculare but the public orientation of Odes IV as a whole.

Many other features of the commentary commend it, especially for use with advanced undergraduates or graduate students with a strong grounding in both Latin and Greek. The links made between Odes IV and Horace's earlier lyric are thorough and judicious; as — more unusually — are those between this late lyric work and the full range of Horatian hexameter. The erotic dream of the close of Odes 4.1, for instance, is compared to the comic, sordid and self-deprecating version of a similar motif at Satires 1.5.82–5: not a very romantic connection, but one that prompts plenty of thoughts about the varieties of Horatian self-presentation. Among the wider literary contexts, the discussion of Hellenistic Greek parallels is particularly illuminating, with plenty of illustrative quotation. (All quotations from Greek are also translated.) T.'s feel for the force of individual words is acute, and the commentary offers extended discussion of the possible associations of certain key terms and names. Further strengths include the generous and largely balanced citation of other critics, especially on contested lines or interpretations, with frequent useful pointers to longer discussions or summaries of the evidence (for instance, on the identity of the ‘Vergilius’ address in 4.12). The structure of these discussions generally makes T.'s own opinion plain, though on occasion students may be hard-put to grasp the implied conclusion: the commentary on Odes 4.5, for instance, offers a careful analysis of the unprecedented ‘jingle’ of –um and –o endings in lines 3–4 and the unusually rigid pattern of single-line sentences in lines 17–24. In the note on 17–24, T. suggests that the poet's own ‘point of view’ may emerge only in the first-person voice of the final stanzas. A subsequent note specifically on the repetition of rura in lines 17–18 concludes: ‘Finally, the repetition may be both incompetent and deliberate (cf. 17–24n.).’ That pithy formula ‘incompetent and deliberate’ is a provocative assessment of the style of the passage, but it is not found in the summary discussion of the poem as a whole, or even of a particular subsection. Readers sometimes have to work quite hard to add up the pieces of the commentary in this way, and to follow up their implications (not least, in this case, for our sense of the poem's sincerity).

Overall, it seems that T. does not particularly admire, and perhaps even actively dislikes, the most notorious of these odes: the outright panegyric of 4.4, 4.5, 4.14 and 4.15 in particular. He hints as much in his introduction, which quotes with approval Llewelyn Morgan's description of the Carmen Saeculare as a ‘wholehearted endorsement of an autocrat's exercise in mass manipulation’ (TLS 18 October 2002, p. 27). Of course T. is not alone in feeling alienated by the panegyric of Horace's late lyric. The danger is that, as well as conveying his own unease, he does not offer us a clear sense of why others have disagreed — those who appreciate this poetry are too often represented chiefly by quotations from Fraenkel, set up in such a way as to discourage us from taking them very seriously.

The moving coda to Putnam's Artifices of Eternity compares Horace's last lyric book to the late work of Yeats and Eliot — not in order to suggest any direct influence, but as a kind of biographical analogy for the thoughtful public poet. This kind of comparative literary imagination has much to offer Odes IV which has been, in the past, much better liked, used and (arguably) understood than it is today. Several of the most signficant political odes of the English seventeenth century, for instance, arise from Odes IV — Marvell's ‘First Anniversary of the Government under Oliver Cromwell’ borrows elements of its structure and unusual use of focalization from Odes 4.4 — and countless authors have turned to Horace's major panegyric odes when faced with the dilemma of making resonant art out of the duty of public praise. For all the strengths of his rich and discerning commentary, T. could perhaps have offered the first-time reader of Odes IV a fuller sense of why the most difficult of these poems have not always seemed so hard to admire.