This book marks an excellent contribution to scholarship on the Silvae from a leading scholar in the field. van Dam's 1984 fine large-scale commentary on Silvae 2, to which Newlands is indebted, is by no means made redundant. However, N.'s work is more accessible, as well as more up to date. Her presentation of the Silvae as the innovative and fun poems they are should help sell their charms to a wider audience of students and scholars than they currently attract.
The introduction is divided into ten main sections. After a brief discussion of Statius' life, N. turns to the character of the Silvae, laying stress on their experimental and paradoxical nature: ‘They are playful and earnest, intimate and elevated, improvisational and learned; they challenge generic distinctions … In the stylistic extremes of haste and elevation they are profoundly anti-Callimachean; but in their learning and their interest in “minor” themes and characters they are closely tied to Hellenistic poetic traditions’ (3). The question of the Silvae's political leanings, which reappears periodically throughout, particularly in the discussion of 2.2 (e.g. 121 and 134), is here first raised: N. argues (5; cf. 8–9) that Book 2's emphasis on friendship and withdrawal from public life reveals the impact of the political turmoil of Domitian's last years. After an examination of the term Silvae and a discussion of the difficulty in knowing whether M's tituli were Statius' own, N. moves on to the book's themes: the destructiveness of death and the power of art to tame nature and confer immortality. A brief but rich discussion of structure brings out the importance of Book 2 as a thematically rich unit and places it in context as the middle book of the first published collection. Sections then follow on patrons and patronage, Martial and Statius, style, and text and reception.
N. takes advantage of new developments in scholarship, for instance, concerning the cultural milieu of Domitianic Rome. She takes a fairly conservative textual approach, basing her text on Courtney's OCT (1990, rev. 1992) and incorporating several emendations made by Shackleton Bailey in his 2003 Loeb edition. Her decisions seem sensible, although lack of space sometimes prevents her from doing justice to the problems. For example, in the vexed issue of what to do with M's Lyceo at Silv. 2.2.35, N. reads Inoo … Lechaeo (a reference to the port which received Ino), instead of Inoo … Lyaeo favoured by van Dam and Courtney (i.e. ‘the sanctuary of Dionysus which/who is connected with Ino’). Both readings are problematic, as N. admits: there does not seem to have been a covered way from the harbour to the Acrocorinth nor is there any sign of a famous temple to Dionysus (although there is evidence of the god's worship in Corinth). Statius may well be making a loose reference to the road leading from Lechaeum to Corinth which had both porticos and shrines. However, the evidence on the other side is stronger than N. suggests: Inoo … Lyaeo would tie in with the recurring motif of foster-parentage (cf., e.g. 2.1.97–8) and allow a pun on Baccheidos.
N. knows her way around the secondary criticism and provides a full bibliography. Books which have been published too recently for N. to take into account include C. Laes, Children in the Roman Empire: Outsiders Within (2011, a translation of his 2006 Dutch work), which differs from N. in arguing for a sexual relationship between Glaucias and Melior, Morgan's 2010 work Musa Pedestris: Metre and Meaning in Roman Verse, which gives further consideration to Statius' use of hendecasyllabes in 2.7, and Volume 3 of Anderson's The Manuscripts of Statius (revised edn 2009), which supplements N.'s section on the reception of the Silvae. Consideration of the question of the book's generic experimentation may have benefited from reference to Morgan's arguments about children figuring as ‘non-epic’ material in the Metamorphoses (JRS 93 (2003), 66–91) and Connors' view (CJ 88 (1992–3), 1–17), in a discussion of various texts including Silv. 2.6.17–20, that the death of a pet could be seen as unepic.
Amongst the numerous fine individual entries, there are some notes which are less convincing. So, for instance, N. argues that in metrical patterning and the idea of strolling by a river the description of Blaesus at 2.1.194 evokes Vergil's (very different) picture of Gallus at Ecl. 6.64 and then goes on to suggest a point of comparison in political disgrace. N. also rejects the idea that 2.7.124–5 refers to a tradition that Laodamia worshipped a Bacchic statue of Protesilaus in a Maenadic frenzy on the grounds that the evidence is slight. See, however, Bettini's A Portrait of the Lover (trans. Gibbs, 1999), Reeson (2001) on Ov., Her. 13.33–4 and Apul., Met. 8.7 with Hijmans, Mnemosyne 39 (1986), 351, 358. Additionally, the book is hampered by constraints of space. Frequently I was left wishing for longer entries, more cross-references to other poems in the collection, and a fuller picture (particularly in the case of the intertexts). Occasionally, N. could have done more with her material: for example, she does not bring out the significance of the verbal echoes of the Thebaid's Opheltes episode, where the slave Hypsipyle laments a high-born child, in Statius' consolation for Melior who is mourning the death of the low-born Glaucias.
The book is well-produced, with only a few mistakes (e.g. p. 31 the reading of Courtney is qualis not quales; the lemma at 2.3.24–25 prints rapinae instead of rapinis).
