This provocatively old-fashioned book certainly makes a change from the usual run of companions (including G. Davis, Companion to Horace (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) and Stephen Harrison, Cambridge Companion to Horace (CUP, 2007)). As Hans-Christian Günther remarks in the opening page of the volume under review, those prior works left him ‘much more at ease with my decision to opt for the rather unusual form of this companion, a kind of paraphrastic interpretation of Horace's works’. There is indeed a good deal of paraphrase here, much more than most Anglophone scholars of Latin literature will be used to: although each chapter is organized at least to some degree around thematic groupings of the poems under consideration (such as ‘Personal Religion in the Odes’, section 3.2 of the chapter on Carmina I–III), the great bulk of the book is taken up with careful analyses of a single poem at a time. The weaker examples slip too easily into narrative or summary — the sort of thing better served by the opening comments in a commentary — but the best are sensitive and compelling, offering a host of telling observations. A very full Index Locorum, with the main discussion in each case helpfully indicated by bold type, makes locating observations on a given poem or passage straightforward.

G. has not written the entire volume, but he has contributed most of it: a substantial opening chapter on ‘Horace's Life and Work’, as well as the chapters on the Epodes, Odes I–III (by a considerable margin the longest of the book), the Carmen Saeculare and Epistles II, in addition to a brief preface. His collaborators Edward Courtney and Elaine Fantham contribute two chapters each (Courtney on Satires I and II, discussed in a single long chapter, and a short final piece on the transmission of the text; Fantham on Epistles I and Odes IV). A judicious chapter on the Ars Poetica is contributed by Tobias Reinhardt, and Peter E. Knox covers ‘Language, Style and Meter in Horace’. As such, the volume is an odd hybrid: in large part, one man's interpretation of Horace — and as one would expect, G.’s various chapters relate fairly closely to one another, and share emphases — plus a handful of other voices, that nevertheless do not add up to the kind of varied perspectives on a given author that we find, for instance, in Davis's Blackwell companion.

G.’s written style — and to a lesser extent that of the volume as a whole — is straightforward and expansive, and he is not afraid to repeat himself or to reiterate key ideas, such as his strong emphasis upon the interpretive significance of Horace's poetic autobiography and ‘self-interpretation’ of his own work, or his rather sweeping disdain for ‘modern theory’ tout court. This makes for a clear sense of the volume's central aims and ideas, but it is a shame that the English prose is so workmanlike, prone to local repetition and awkward phrases, with a handful of outright errors and many overlong sentences. This otherwise handsome (and extremely expensive) volume is also marred by a surprisingly large number of typographical and formatting errors.

I found the target audience of the book hard to determine. It claims to be ‘aimed at students and scholars of classical and modern literature who seek comprehensive orientation on all aspects of Horace's work’. It also claims that ‘all quotations from Latin and Greek are translated’ but in fact this is not the case — I found several Latin quotations in footnotes without a translation, and this tendency sometimes creeps into the main text as well. In Knox's discussion of style in the Satires (533), for instance, none of the list of obscenities are translated (although several are fairly unusual words), and further down a list of brief quotations from Satires 1.2 also have no translation. Much more problematic is that the frequent quotation of German is never translated, even in the case of quite long and argumentatively significant passages, such as Gottfried Benn's poem Der Dunkle (482), and two substantial quotations from Schopenhauer (324–5). In an English work apparently intended to offer an accessible overview of Horace to students and scholars who are not necessarily specialists in Latin literature, it is a mystifying decision not to translate substantial quotations from German.

Although G.’s range of cultural reference is attractively broad and engagingly presented, the volume pays no formal attention to Horatian reception. This is in contrast to the great majority of recent companions (including the editor's own Brill's Companion to Propertius (2006)). This lack of engagement with an increasingly prominent area of classical scholarship reflects G.’s forceful — even aggressive — repudiation of what he terms ‘modern theory’: ‘Suffice it to say that modern theory is nothing but a misapplication of half-understood philosophies (or sometimes pseudophilosophies) to literary criticism, a misapplication that substitutes the texts as objects of research by theory itself; that the advance in knowledge or understanding gained by such a procedure is virtually nil, is no wonder’ (x). In fact, the book rejects not just theory but, apparently, any criticism considered tainted by theoretical concerns, and almost any suggestion of metapoetic interpretation (not a single mention, in text or bibliography, of Lowrie's Horace's Narrative Odes or even of Michael Putnam's Artifices of Eternity, to cite just two particularly egregious instances among very many possible examples). The well-informed specialist will appreciate and may even (depending on their sympathies) enjoy the pointed disregard — an almost audible silence — that surrounds a very large number of recent commentators on Horace, but this decision effectively disables the book as a useful introduction. For all G.’s earnest — and plainly sincere — admiration for Horatian versatility and range, the ‘Horace’ that emerges from the volume is accordingly flattened and reduced.