This is a book about the relationship between imperial ideology and poetic discourse in the age of Augustus; it uses Apollo, the special patron of both poets and the princeps, as a test case. All too often, discussions of this general topic seem to be the product of fixed notions of how great poetry must respond to absolute power and so end up forcing an improbable unanimity of opinion, whether pro or con, upon a group of poets who were remarkably diverse in most other ways. It is the chief merit of Miller's book that he has no such axe to grind. He is willing to ascribe a range of different views to different poets, to different poems by the same poet, and even to different parts of the same poem. This makes it a difficult book to summarize, for there is no overarching thesis to which its many different themes are subordinated. The compensating benefit is that a series of very well-known and often bitterly contentious passages are discussed with a degree of sensitivity, humility and good sense that the intervention of politics often banishes. No reader will agree with all of M.'s readings, but his even-handed treatment will probably annoy extremists of every stripe in equal measure. These sophisticated and satisfying discussions never stoop to making a straw man of rejected arguments and M. does admirable justice to acknowledging the wide variety of plausible critical opinion, though its vast size and often polemical nature means that he cannot engage with all of it in equal detail.

Most of the chapters are focused on particular themes, which are arranged in a rough chronology. We start in the period of rivalry with Antony, when Octavian first claimed Apollo as his patron; the highlight of this chapter is a superb interpretation of an anonymous lampoon preserved by Suetonius. The next chapter moves on to narratives of Actium, and it too foregrounds non-canonical poetic material, in this case a couple of Greek epigrams. These work well as comparative material but their intrinsic interest is not quite as high (and the press has made a mess of the Greek typography). Other narratives are extracted from widely varying generic and chronological contexts, such as Virgil's description of the shield of Aeneas and Propertius 4.6, but this is done with a sensitivity to the original setting. The extraordinarily long third chapter on Apollo in the Aeneid is really a book within a book and is the only place where the reader's interest may flag. It seems at times motivated more by a grim determination to cover every place where Apollo appears in Augustan literature than by relevance to the larger comparative project. It is not that the quality of the close readings is any lower, just that this chapter seems to be struggling to formulate a general interpretation of the Aeneid which its limited remit will not permit.

Returning to the thematic approach, the next chapter is an excellent discussion of the temple of Palatine Apollo. M. accepts the standard interpretation of the scanty material evidence, but the real focus is on literary accounts of the temple and their reflection of its ideology. The following chapter is on Apollo as a symbol of a new age, and it is mostly concerned with the Secular Games. M. argues convincingly that Augustus' major innovations were designed to insert Apolline elements. The next chapter collects programmatic passages where M. detects a tension between Apollo's ability to embody either a Callimachean or an Augustan poetics. Unsurprisingly, given the more general theme, these discussions are more oddly assorted and the comparisons are not as sharply drawn. It is also the place where the reader is most likely to feel that M.'s ascription or not of a political element to Apollo may be somewhat arbitrary. The final chapter concentrates once more on a single work, Ovid's Metamorphoses, but it is successful where the Aeneid chapter was problematic. M. eschews passages in the epic where the presence of Apollo is of marginal interest to his political and comparative argument and focuses exclusively on its intensely Augustan beginning and end. Ovid is so clearly responding to his predecessors here that the approach is naturally comparative and the chapter draws together many of the themes of the book.

It may seem an unsurprising conclusion that the Augustan poets invoked Apollo, god of both the lyre and the terrible bow, with a wide range of significations, from the purely aesthetic to the purely political, with many kinds of hybrid in between. The real strength of the book, however, is the quality of the individual readings, many of which benefit greatly from the comparative framework. M. is able, for example, to contrast effectively the very different approaches of Virgil and Propertius to the battle of Actium without reducing either of them to stereotypes. At the same time, his range of critical sympathy is wide enough to do justice to the solemnity of the carmen saeculare and the humour of the pursuit of Daphne in the Metamorphoses. For its comprehensive breadth, its even-handedness and its many striking and insightful interpretations, this book will be the first place to stop for anyone interested in the rôle played by Apollo in Augustan poetry.