[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]
Literary theory has foregrounded the dynamicity and intricate richness of poetic language by arguing that each text is an intersection of other texts.[1] While Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva based their analyses on prose novels, nonetheless their understanding of each literary text as a mosaic of other texts has long resonated within Classical scholarship and has shaped our interpretations of textual interactions. Latin poetry has been a particularly fertile field: from Giorgio Pasquali’s ‘arte allusiva’, to Gian Biagio Conte’s theorisation of poetic memory and Stephen Hinds’ redefinition of the terms of reference;[2] in Latin studies intertextuality has been a key methodology, often critiqued, but never abandoned.[3] In this collection of sixteen chapters, Stephen Harrison, drawing on his own pivotal work on intertextual and inter-generic relations (Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace, Oxford 2007) presents us with intertextual and intergeneric close readings of Latin poetry, showcasing the kaleidoscopic richness of Latin poetic texts, across time, genres and authors.[4]
Together with Horatian Readings: Poetic and Literary Texture (2025, Berlin), this book captures Harrison’s passion and expertise in Latin poetry and gathers the findings of the last 25 years of his research, while also adding to his more recent work on the reception of Latin poetry and on Neo-Latin poetry.[5] (A full list of the original publications is provided at the beginning of the book.) Arranged chronologically and divided into two sections—‘Late Republican Poetry’ and ‘Augustan Poetry’—the collection plays within the remits of metapoetics, intertextuality, cross-generic interaction, and narratology. Despite the chronological and thematic breadth of the essays, the volume achieves a strong sense of coherence through its shared methodological frameworks and by creating a sustained dialogue between the Latin authors and periods considered throughout the book.
The collection starts off by foregrounding Lucretius’ debt to Ennius’ epic and tragic style. By examining passages from the first book of the De Rerum Natura, Harrison argues that Lucretius evokes his predecessor to legitimise his poetic authority and to underscore the cultural and literary importance of his own didactic and Epicureanism-centred poem. The next chapters, 2–5, shift their generic focus to elegy and, specifically, to Catullus’ production, but maintain intertextuality as a framework for textual analysis. The second chapter combines two originally separate papers. In the first section, by revisiting the scholarly discussion on the unity of Catullus 2 and 2b, Harrison unlocks an intriguing interpretation of the whole poem that compares Catullus to Atalanta and, at the same time, to Hippomenes, both referred in the poem’s mythological digression. In a nod to the intersection between gender studies and Roman elegy, Harrison foregrounds the gender-fluidity of Catullus’ poetic persona. The second part of the chapter, while arguing for the inclusion of the last stanza in poem 51, also turns the poem’s famous love triangle between Catullus, Lesbia and the other man, into the reception of the mythological love triangle between Paris, Helen and Menelaus, by reading the poem with Catullus 68 and Horace Odes 1.17. The third chapter returns to gender identity in Catullus, by analysing the representation of Attis in poem 63. The interaction of different literary genres shapes the identity of this figure: not only Attis’ own name and story symbolises the complex cultural negotiations between East and West, as dramatised in Euripides Bacchae, but Catullus’ use of Greek and Roman tragedy and of Hellenistic hymns as models for this poem, further enhances the fluid and complex identity of Attis and of Catullus’ own poetry.
Chapters 4 and 5 conclude the section on Late Republican poetry, by concentrating on how Catullus presents his poetic persona and programme. In Chapter 4 Harrison proposes an anthropomorphic reading of Catullus 1, by exploring the identification of Catullus’ little book with a boy on the cusp of manhood. The poem is seen as anticipating Ovid and Horace’s own similar gestures later on in Tristia 1 and 3 and Epistles 1 respectively. The boy, still young but about to come of age and ready to be mentored by a greater writer embodies Catullus’ own poetic programme, slender but ambitious. Chapter 5 keeps the focus on Catullus’ programmatic poetics in poem 4. Harrison argues that, through the intertextual connection with Hellenistic poetry, Catullus’ phaselus (‘light vessel’) is a miniature version of Apollonius Rhodius’ epic ship, the Argo, while also looking back to Greek epigrams. On the one hand, the miniaturisation may refer to a real miniature ship commemorating the poet’s own travels outside Rome, while, on the other, the focus on the act of miniaturising embodies Catullus’ own poetic programme.
The sixth chapter opens the section on Augustan poetry, while, at the same time, offering a thematic continuity on the metapoetics of sea-voyage metaphors. In this rich chapter, Harrison maps sea-voyage imagery across Callimachean and Catullan poetry and argues that the Hellenistic use of the ocean as a metaphor for the complex task of writing epic is adapted by Catullus to poem 64, the first attested Roman epyllion. This metapoetic use of sea-voyage imagery and its connection to the epic genre is supported by later instances and modifications of this motif as found in Virgil Georgics and Aeneid and in Horace’s Odes. Chapter 7 narrows the focus on Virgil’s production and examines Eclogue 4. Harrison here provides a new candidate for the mysterious puer of the poem. The chapter compellingly argues that Sextus Pompeius’ potential offspring should be considered along with the traditional candidates, i.e. the future sons of either Augustus or Antony. By concentrating on the contemporary readers’ expectations, Harrison emphasises the text’s ambiguity as a Virgilian strategy to come to terms with the uncertainty of the historical context. Chapter 8 examines the stylistic and metrical features that can be associated with Sibylline oracles in the prophetic passages found in Virgil’s Aeneid. Repetition of metrical and sound patterns at the end of consecutive lines shape the incantatory rhythm associated to oracular pronouncements.
The next triad of chapters proposes narratological analyses of passages from Virgil’s Aeneid. In chapter 9, the analysis of Homeric-inspired similes within battle narratives in Aeneid 10 foregrounds multiple focalisations and embeds the perspectives of different kinds of readers in the text. Chapter 10 expands this analysis of battle-narrative similes to Aeneid 9–12, by highlighting the range of meanings available to a reader able to situate Virgil as the culmination of a game of window allusions in between Homer, Apollonius and Ennius. The generic texture of these similes is enriched by a final section on erotic lyric models for Aeneid 9.433–937. In chapter 11, Aeneas’ narrative to Dido in Aeneid 2 and 3 is compared to the speeches of tragic messengers in Greek tragedy. The focus on extradiegetic and intradiegetic narrators and narratees enhances the emotional quality of each episode, while strengthening the connection between the mythological story and its historical context. Chapter 12 returns to metapoetics, as Harrison examines episodes from the katabasis of Aeneid 6 and evaluates Homeric, Hesiodic, Ennian, Lucretian intertexts. Aeneid 6 becomes a ‘repository of allusions to the history of epic from Homer to Virgil’s own day’ (152). Chapter 13 brings to a close this thematic subsection on Virgil’s Aeneid by examining colloquialisms in divine speeches in the Aeneid, using the features delineated by Anna Chahoud in E. Dickey and A. Chahoud 2010. Colloquial and Literary Latin (Cambridge).
The concluding triad of chapters 14, 15 and 16 examines poems by Propertius and Ovid. In a nod to the recent scholarly interest in the historical and political significance of itineraries in poetry, Chapter 14 argues that the itinerary of Hercules in Propertius 4.9 refers closely to that of the ceremonial return of Augustus in Rome in 19 BCE. [6] By reading the poem with Callimachus’ panegyrical poetry, Harrison shows that the figure of Hercules joins comedy and praise, allowing for both in Propertius’ poem. Chapter 15 stays on book 4 of Propertius’ elegies and examines the interaction between Propertius’ longer elegies and short Hellenistic epigrams. Harrison argues that Propertius evokes shorter epigrams at the beginning and end of longer elegies, in a gesture which not only enhances the multi-layered and rich texture of Propertius’ poetry, but also homages the epigrammatic and Greek origin of the genre. Chapter 16 concludes the book by re-working the chronology of Ovid’s works as proposed by Ronald Syme in 1978.[7] Harrison updates it by considering most recent arguments and developments of scholarship, while also advancing a few hypotheses, through the examination of literary evidence and comparisons with other authors.
This rich collection of essays offers readers a clear sense of the development and consistency of the author’s scholarship over the past two decades. The prose throughout is characteristically lucid, the arguments carefully structured and persuasive, making the volume not only a valuable resource for specialists but also an ideal and accessible read for undergraduate students encountering Latin literary criticism for the first time. While some of the reflections and methodological approaches may appear traditional—understandably so, given that the pieces were originally published over a twenty-year span—the thematic arrangement of the essays and the editor’s selection gesture towards contemporary directions in Latin scholarship. The volume maintains a strong focus on poetics and intergeneric relationships through close readings of a wide array of Latin poetry from Ennius to Ovid, enriched by analyses of Greek poetry, ranging from Homer to Hellenistic authors. This volume is not merely a testament to the rich and compelling readings that have defined modern approaches to Latin poetry, but a pivotal contribution that ensures the continued centrality of intertextual methodologies in shaping the field’s future.
The author was the external examiner at my PhD viva voce examination. I had no relationship to him prior to this.
Table of Contents
Part A: Late Republican Poetry
- Ennius and the Prologue to Lucretius De Rerum Natura 1 (1.1-148).
- Issues of Unity in Catullus 2 and 51.
- Altering Attis: Ethnicity, Gender and Genre in Catullus 63.
- Catullus 1: Book and Boy?
- Catullus 4: Greek Epigram ad Miniaturised Greek Epic.
Part B: Augustan Poetry
- The Primal Voyage and the Ocean of Epos: Two Aspects of Metapoetic Imagery in Catullus, Vergil and Horace.
- Prophetic, Poetic and Political ambiguity in Vergil, Eclogue
- Vergil and the Sibylline Prophecy: Generic Multiplicity in the Aeneid.
- Force, Frequency and Focalisation: the Function of Similes in the Battle-Narrative of Vergil, Aeneid
- Serial Similes in the Battle-Narrative of Virgil’s Aeneid.
- Dramatic Narrative in Epic: Aeneas’ Eyewitness Account of the Fall of Troy in Vergil, Aeneid
- Vergil’s Metapoetic Katabasis: the Underworld of Aeneid 6 and the History of Epic.
- Sermones deorum: Divine Discourse in Vergil’s Aeneid.
- Hercules and Augustus in Propertius 4.9.
- Framing Epigrams and Elegy in Propertius Book 4.
- The Chronology of Ovid’s Poetic Career.
Notes
[1] Kristeva, J. 1980. Desire in Language: a semiotic approach to literature and art, T. Gora, A. Jardine and L.S. Roudiez (trans.), L.S. Roudiez (ed.) (New York); and Kristeva, J. 1986. The Kristeva Reader, T. Moi (ed.) (Oxford).
[2] Pasquali, G. 1920. Orazio Lirico (Firenze); Conte, G.B. 1986. The Rhetoric of Imitation. Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets (Ithaca/London); Hinds, S. 1998. Allusion and Intertexts. Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry, Cambridge.
[3] Giusti, E. 2023. ‘Virgilian Criticism and the Intertextual Aeneid’. Mnemosyne, 76: 871-895; Gunderson, E. 2021. ‘Introduction’, in The Art of Complicity in Martial and Statius: Martial’s Epigrams, Statius’ Silvae, and Domitianic Rome (Oxford) 1–28. For a most recent examination of the status quo, see Pelttari, A. and O’Rourke, D. 2024. ‘Intertextuality’, in R. Gibson and C. Whitton (eds.) The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature (Cambridge) 208–71.
[4] A further contribution on intergeneric relationships is Papanghelis, T.P. Harrison, S.J., Frangoulidis, S. 2013 Generic Interfaces in Latin literature: Encounters, Interactions and Transformations (Berlin).
[5] Harrison, S.J., Xinyue, B. Barton, W.M., and Gesine, M. 2024. An Anthology of Neo-Latin Poetry by Classical Scholars (London). Harrison, S.J. 2024. The Neo-Latin Verse of Urban VIII, Alexander VII and Leo XIII (London). Harrison, S.J. and May R. 2024. Apuleius in European Literature. Cupid and Psyche since 1650 (Oxford).
[6] The chapter was originally published in 2005 and reflects the interest in analyses of poetic spaces that characterised the decade 2005-2015. There is a current resurgence of spatial theory applied to Classics, see Young Myers, M. and Zimmermann Damer, E. 2022. Travel, Geography and Empire in Latin Poetry (London).
[7] Syme, R. 1978. History in Ovid (Oxford).