Gareth Williams’ engaging new study of Seneca's Natural Questions is called The Cosmic Viewpoint, a pleasing title that evokes his central thesis: Seneca's study of meteorological phenomena is a work where science and ethics are combined, designed to raise the reader up towards a cosmic perspective far beyond mortal woes, the better to combat adversity in Stoic style.Footnote ¹ Chapter 1, ‘Interiority and Cosmic Consciousness in the Natural Questions’, introduces the idea of Seneca's worldview, contrasting it in particular with the approaches of Cicero and of Pliny. In contrast to Cicero, Seneca's emphasis is on interiorization, and his ‘cosmic consciousness’ takes his perspective far above the Imperial consciousness of Pliny's Encyclopaedia, which for all its all-encompassing scope still takes a terrestrial Roman perspective. In Chapter 2, Williams addresses the question of how Seneca's moralizing interludes are to be understood in relation to the technical discussion of meteorology; this is a key issue for Williams, since his overall thesis is that Seneca's work has an integrated ‘physico-ethical agenda’ (73). From now on the chapters reflect this integration between the moral and the scientific. Chapter 3 focuses on Seneca's discussion of the flooding of the Nile in Book 4a and its integration with the theme of the vice of flattery. In a nice discussion of ‘The Rhetoric of Science’, Chapter 4 argues that Seneca's presentation in Book 4b of his investigation into the question of how hail and snow are produced is such as to invite critical reflection on the scientific procedures involved (these procedures are: reliance on influential authority, argument by analogy, argument by bold inference, competing arguments, and superstition in contention with reason), but that the aim is not to reject the possibility of attaining scientific truth, but rather to suggest that to attain it one must rise above these petty arguments to find the cosmic perspective, and that to do this is in itself morally improving regardless of any knowledge gained. Chapter 5 discusses Seneca's treatment of the winds in Book 5 and his implicit contrast of the natural phenomena with the transgressive actions of human beings who plunder the earth's resources and wage war on one another. Chapter 6 examines the ‘therapeutic program’ (256) of Seneca's treatment of earthquakes in Book 6. Chapter 7 explores how Seneca's treatment of ancient theories about comets reflects the ascension of the mind to the celestial plane that is the ultimate aim of his scientific enquiry. In Chapter 8, Williams discusses the significance of Seneca's excursus on divination within his treatment of thunder and lightning. Finally, a brief epilogue explains the way that the progression of ideas across traditional book order (where the final books are Books 1 and 2) can be understood to serve Seneca's moral programme. This is a rich and compelling study of Seneca's Natural Questions that establishes it as a work of considerable literary and philosophical qualities. Williams’ final, gentle suggestion is that we moderns, too, might find some peace and liberation in Seneca's cosmic viewpoint, far above the troubles of our everyday lives.

Ruth Morello and Roy Gibson's excellent co-authored introduction to the letters of Pliny the YoungerFootnote ² is the latest in a series of collaborations from the pair, who only last year published an edited volume on uncle Pliny the Elder, and already have a 2003 special edition of Arethusa on this younger Pliny under their belt. Now they have written a whole book together; the collegiality of this venture and the benefits of such collegiality are especially evident in the volume's crisp methodological self-awareness and in its open-mindedness about interpretative strategies. The authors also demonstrate thoughtful consideration for their readers, who, no matter how they approach, will need careful guidance in navigating ‘Pliny's kaleidoscope’ (1), a work that has no linearity of argument, narrative, or chronology and indeed no organizational principles that are immediately evident, and that offers something different every time you take a shake. Gibson and Morello's volume is designed accordingly to facilitate multiple points and modes of access to the work, to familiarize us with multiple methodological approaches, and to offer us a number of tools to help us get to grips with the vast complexities of the letter collection. In eight chapters, the authors showcase a whole variety of different strategies for reading the letters: as autobiography, as isolated letters, as individual books units, as thematic cycles, and as a whole collection, or through focus on particular themes such as otium or villas, or the collection's engagement with its epistolary models Cicero and Seneca or its treatment of contemporaries. Four substantial appendices provide assistance (and the introduction offers guidance about the various ways that these too may be utilized): Appendix 1 provides a timeline, Appendix 2 a catalogue of contents and addressees for Books 1–9, Appendix 3 a guide to bibliographical resources for thirty-one of the most popular topics covered by scholarship on the letters, from Christianity to Latinity, Vesuvius to villas, and Appendix 4 a list of the main characters who appear in the letters. Gibson and Morello skilfully meet the challenge of providing a useful introduction to a text as broad and various as Pliny's letters. Their clearly expressed appreciation for the benefits and limitations of a whole range of different methodological approaches to the work will be of great benefit to students and more experienced scholars alike.

The term ‘plagiarism’ derives from a poem by Martial (Ep. 1.52) in which he describes a poetic rival as a ‘kidnapper’ (plagiarius) of his own poetry. At the start of his new study of plagiarism in Latin literature, Scott McGill defines it as the theft of someone else's literary output in order to pass it off as one's own and thereby win credit for oneself.Footnote ³ McGill's study is of the rhetoric of plagiarism in ancient literature, and explores several key questions about literary practice and especially the establishment of literary value and the attribution of credit in antiquity. How did ancient authors establish ownership and theft of literature in the absence of any ancient legal definition of intellectual property? How did the ancients distinguish between the culpable theft of another's work and imitatio, the creative imitation of great predecessors that was at the heart of Roman literature and education? Above all, McGill shows that it was crucial for ancient writers to establish a rhetorical distinction between plagiarism and imitatio, and that doing so might serve a variety of rhetorical purposes. The works of Seneca the Elder (discussed by McGill in Chapters 2 and 5) crystallize the issues neatly; the whole premise of Seneca's Controversiae is that one learns rhetorical excellence by emulation of the greats who have gone before, and that one must memorize and redeploy their techniques and even their sententiae – the snappy one-liners that were designed to be re-used by other authors in new contexts. When it comes to the re-use of material from other writers, the line between proper and improper behaviour is imprecise, and needs vigorous policing. McGill analyses the treatment of plagiarism by a wide range of ancient Latin authors: an initial chapter on the rhetoric of plagiarism in the prefaces to technical (research-based) works by Vitruvius, Pliny the Elder, Manilius, and Seneca the Elder is followed by chapters devoted to individual authors: Martial, Terence, Seneca the Elder again, and then Virgil. This is a juicy and timely topic (the volume makes a useful contribution to current scholarship on the circulation and consumption of literature), the scholarship is solid, and the arguments are nicely written, with delicate elaboration of the issues through close reading of a wide selection of ancient texts; it only lacks a little spark of mischief to enliven it.

The appreciative study of Early Christian literature is gathering momentum. In my last review I welcomed Andrew Dykes's study of Prudentius’ Hamartigenia, which synthesized theological and literary readings of this challenging fourth-century Christian hexameter poem. Martha Malamud's new translation is an excellent companion to Dykes's monograph and together they have really opened up the Hamartigenia to new study.Footnote ⁴ Though her volume is billed as a translation, Malamud in fact offers us far more; the translation itself takes up less than fifty pages, though it is underpinned by substantial explanatory footnotes, often highlighting issues of translation and discussing the nuances of the Latin original. The rest of the volume consists of eight elegantly entitled interpretive essays (‘Writing in Chains’, ‘Figuring It Out’, ‘Seeking Hidden Truth’, ‘Falling into Language’, ‘Under Assault’, ‘Generation of Vipers’, ‘Signs of Woe’, and ‘In Aegnimate’) that provide a concise overview of historical and literary context before taking us through key aspects of the poem. Malamud writes with clarity and vigour, and her approach is sophisticated yet accessible; the volume leaves one keen to take one's reading of Prudentius further.

A new multi-disciplinary volume about the writings known as The Passion of Perpetua – recounting the martyrdom of a young Christian woman in Carthage in 203 ad – offers an exciting blueprint for taking forward the literary study of ancient Christian texts.Footnote ⁵ The book opens with a new edition of the text and a new translation, both by Latinists Joseph Farrell and Craig Williams, and concludes with an epilogue from Marina Warner reflecting on her own Catholic childhood. In between come eighteen further contributions from an international cast of scholars, exploring literary, religious, cultural, and psychological aspects of the text. One of the experimental elements of this collection is that by and large these essays are by scholars who had not previously worked on the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis but rather were experts in other fields whom the editors invited to bring their fresh perspectives and methodologies to bear. The result is a highly stimulating collection that approaches the text from a great variety of new angles and should fulfil the aims of the editors to encourage literary appreciation of the work in conjunction with historical studies.

Isabella Salvadore's new edition and commentary of Commodianus’ poem aims to provide a new reading of another challenging Christian text.Footnote ⁶ The key to this reading is the thesis that this is a work of didactic rather than apologetic poetry, hence her adoption of the title Carmen de duobus populis rather than the alternative Carmen apologeticum. The ‘Two Peoples’ of Commodianus’ apocalyptic and proselytizing poem are the saved and the damned of Judgment Day; he urges immediate conversion to Christianity before the imminent end of the world that is described in lurid detail in the final section of the poem – the apparent depiction of Nero as the Antichrist is one of its most notorious features. Salvadore describes this as one of the most mysterious poems of this period – whatever its period and context might have been, since one of the key mysteries is whether it was written in the third or the fifth century. She sensibly relegates the debates surrounding this dating issue to an appendix, so that it can be tackled independently from the issues of literary merit and theological message that are her primary concerns. Her approach is characteristic of thorough and systematic Italian scholarship; she begins by outlining the troubled editorial history of the text, with its unhelpful amendments and misinterpretations, proceeds through close philological analysis of the poem (metrics, lexicon, syntax, morphology – which are in themselves interesting as evidence of the development of later Latin into the Romance languages), and then turns to theological context and doctrinal issues, before finally addressing the issues of classical models and literary genre. A nice point is made about Commodianus giving new Christian significance to a line from Manilius (which his opening echoes) so that it becomes an expression of the unknowability of God (although not all of the classical parallels that she identifies are entirely convincing). Much of the detailed analysis comes in the substantial running commentary, which provides a helpful aid to reading and interpretation. This commentary is the latest in flourishing series of slim volumes designed to support the teaching of Latin literature at university (Testi e manuali per l'insegnamento universitario del latino). As well as offering introductions to familiar Latin works, many of these, like Salvadore's, are invaluable in bringing more obscure and lesser-known works into the hands of younger scholars.

This batch of books to review included a substantial representation from Italian scholarship on Latin literature, including two edited collections that testify to a lively environment for scholarly exchange in Italy involving scholars at all stages of their careers; in both cases, the volumes emerged from colloquia held in Italy and there seems to have been only light editing of the conference papers for publication so that something of the original atmosphere of the colloquium is preserved. In both volumes, as in Salvadore's commentary, diligence and detailed scholarship is the key – there is emphasis on dating issues, on the transmission of texts, on philological issues, and on textual parallels. Sometimes (though by no means always) this systematic scholarship comes somewhat at the expense of a deep literary engagement with the text and especially with its broader cultural significance.

In Le parole della passione (Words of Passion),Footnote ⁷ the subject is the expression of passion in Roman literature, primarily the amorous passions but also those of grief and anger, with a focus on terminology. An exciting topic, and there is no reason why the lexical lens should not afford us new insights into the ancient Roman articulation and formulation of passions. However, the editors acknowledge that, while the subject may be ancient passion, the philological passions of the scholars are to the fore in this collection. There are eleven papers in all, covering a diverse range of subjects. In Part 1 we have: a study of amor and furor in the Aeneid (Laura Bocciolini Palagi); an analysis of the use of legal language to describe love in Propertius, which also links this juridification of love to the concept of servitium amoris (Giulia Danesi Marioni); a tantalizing study of erotic language in the ‘Senecan’ epigrams, which spends a great deal of time on background and only gets to the poems themselves towards the very end (Rita Degl'Innocenti Pierini); and an interesting look at an inversion of a familiar topos in Ausonius Epig. 115 about a man with scabies, where thwarted love is used as a metaphor for illness (Silvia Mattiacci). In Part 2 we have a survey of the term admirari and its cognates by the Latin love poets from Catullus to Ovid (Francesco Citti); a study of animal eros in Virgil and its intertextuality with Lucretius (Bruna Pieri), followed by a detailed reading of Georgics 3.229–34 (the bull in love) placing it in a broad mythological and literary context (Paolo Mantovanelli); two brief linguistic notes on Sen. Oed. 371–80 (Francesca Romana Berno); and a survey of the journey taken by the word unanimus from pre-Virgilian literature to the first century ad (Roberta Strati). Finally, in Part 3, we have a study of dolor in Lucan (Lisa Sannicandro) and then of anger and revenge in Silius Italicus Punica (Stefano Giazzon). Many of the individual contributions are valuable and interesting in themselves, but there tends to be more in the way of lists (of places where a term appears and of parallels in other classical texts) and less in the way of analysis of these lines or of a sense of what this admirable philological work might tell us about the meaning of the poetry or more broadly about the way in which passions were understood and described by the ancients. All in all, I don't think that the volume quite adds up to a ‘contribution to the examination of the cultural roots, at the basis of our civilization, of a fundamental dimension of the human soul’ (as the blurb on the back cover grandly claims).

Meanwhile, the volume Il Romanzo Latino is a collection of papers on the Latin novel, with particular focus on issues of genre and literary models.Footnote ⁸ The papers are somewhat uneven in what they offer: Paolo Fedeli's opening contribution, for instance, is more or less a bibliographical survey of work on the Satyricon, while Giulio Vannini's work of textual criticism and close philology usefully proposes a new reading of a rather difficult passage, Agamemnon's poem in Satyricon 5. A highlight of the volume is Luca Graverini's comparison of hunting scenes in Achilles Tatius and Apuleius, which establishes significant parallels between the two authors, in the way that they use a contrast between dangerous and harmless hunting to make generic play between epic and elegy; the conclusion is that the profound similarities between the treatment of these ideas by the two authors should be enough to scotch the notion that the Greek and Latin novels are generically unrelated. Stelios Panayotakis’ ‘A Fisherman's Cloak and the Literary Texture of the Story of Apollonius, King of Tyre’ (the only contribution written in English) discusses the possible literary models for the episode of Apollonius’ encounter with the kind fisherman who shares his cloak with him, and especially the significance of its relationship with Sulpicius Severus’ biography of Martin of Tours.

Roland Mayer's new commentary on Horace Odes 1 for the Cambridge Green and Yellows is erudite and polished and a pleasure to read.Footnote ⁹ The introduction is a model of its kind, managing to convey all the basic technical information about such matters as historical context, genre, and metre within an engaging narrative about Horace's role in transforming Greek lyric poetry for his own Roman ends. The commentary is beautifully packaged to convey a great deal as concisely as possible, and to awaken a student's appetite for further reading among the centuries of great scholarship on these poems; it evokes a sense of the lively and rich history of interpretation of Horace's poetry. It is certainly conservative in its own approach to interpretation – Mayer is explicit about this, and he takes Horace himself as his authority for the idea that in antiquity poetry's aim was to entertain and soothe, providing release from the toils of everyday life, and not to challenge and change perceptions as in the modernist conception of art. Not everyone will agree, but the position is lucidly and fairly articulated; as in the case of Gibson and Morello on Pliny, the very clear articulation and situation of approach cannot fail to be of great benefit to students. However, I can't resist citing part of a note on Odes 1.5 that seems self-satirizing in its over-pronounced ‘fuddy-duddy’ stance; as part of Mayer's elucidation of the word flavam, he feels that he must explain to his young readers that ‘Before the twentieth century women kept their hair long and it was generally bound up into more or less elaborate coiffures’ (87).

Alessandro Garcea's new edition will be indispensable to anyone working on Julius Caesar's intriguing work of linguistic scholarship, De analogia.Footnote ¹⁰ Garcea has compiled the extant fragments of the text and presents a new edition accompanied by an English translation. The substantial commentary fully contextualizes and explains each fragment, with a view to political and cultural as well as linguistic significance; these are also outlined in the introduction.

Finally, two recently published books aim to provide guides to the study of Tacitus: a volume in the Oxford Readings series put together by Rhiannon Ash,Footnote ¹¹ and a Blackwell Companion edited by Victoria Pagán.Footnote ¹² The aim of the first series is to reprint and repackage a selection of important previously published scholarship, while the second series commissions new pieces, so they are not necessarily in direct competition but rather are complementary to one another. Ash's introductory essay to her selection of articles is especially valuable. Her initial section, ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’, gives stimulating account of the development on scholarship on Tacitus from the sixteenth century to the present day, complete with colourful detail, memorable landmarks, and lucid explanations of key shifts in approach, placing the important work of Syme, Wiseman, and Woodman in a broader context that further illuminates the significance of their contributions. The brief section ‘Current Themes’ is concise yet wide-ranging, but the discussion of the selected articles that takes up most of the introduction is especially good; here she brings out clearly the particular contributions of each piece to Tacitean scholarship, yet the articles are seen not as milestones along the linear road of scholarship but as contributions to a living debate about Tacitus’ works in which we must all continue to engage. The fact that the articles are not arranged chronologically according to original publication facilitates this, but it is brought out very nicely in this introductory chapter where Ash highlights the dialogue between the papers included in her volume and also their dialogue with other important scholarship on Tacitus. Thanks to Ash's careful selection and presentation, this book exhibits the virtue of methodological self-awareness that has been a recurrent feature of this review, and for which we should all strive.