[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
In this volume celebrating the career of Stephen Harrison, his students recall his instruction “that one should only accept the review offer if one wanted to read the book anyway” (13)—a principle that, combined with his extraordinary breadth of research interests, has led him to review (they note) over a hundred books. Although I did not know it, I was living by this advice when I volunteered to review Latin Lineages. I am happy to add that I was not disappointed. Latin Lineages is a collection that will delight the reader who dips into any individual contribution and still further rewards a reading cover to cover.
In their introduction, the editors (Catherine Conybeare and Regine May) indicate the thrust of the volume: it “follows the lineages of intertextuality and reception from Latin poets of the first century BC to prose authors of the second century BC, and their later reception in English literature” (1), with most contributions involving at least one ofthe authors central in Harrison’s body of work: Catullus, Vergil, Horace, and Apuleius. This relatively wide scope takes in texts from the lost oratory of L. Manlius Torquatus to the pseudo-Vergilian Culex to neo-Latin Fascist verse to contemporary queer renditions of Catullus, with an accompanying diversity of methodologies. While rejecting the oversimplification of a “merely chronological arrangement” (11), the editors divide the volume into a first grouping of essays that interweave Catullus and Apuleius, and a second grouping of essays that draw on Vergil and his contemporaries. Within these two groupings, almost every contribution hands off gracefully to the next, connected by author, theme, or method. The volume’s central idea is intertextuality: an essential concept partly due to the honorand’s decades of work. The contributors weave intertextuality together with concepts of reception and generic enrichment (Harrison’s own coinage), that is, the cross-pollination of texts from one genre by their interactions with another. The contributions demonstrate that this nexus of concepts remains a powerful lens to bring to texts and their relationships, especially to lesser-known texts in relationship with the “big names.”
This observation brings me to the difficult task of singling out individual contributions to discuss within the scope of this review. This reviewer was particularly struck by a selection of articles that do a lot with texts that are in some sense surprising. Gail Trimble, for instance, makes the case that the relationship of The Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope’s eighteenth-century “glittering, irritating, unforgettable mock-epic” (281), with Vergil’s Aeneid goes beyond mere passing parody to form a dense and purposeful network of allusions between characters. Similarly, Abigail Buglass takes the pseudo-Vergilian Culex—another mock-epic often underestimated precisely because of its humor, brevity, and conflation of the heroic with the nugatory—and shows that its author, like its tiny hero, is a learned and attentive reader of Vergil and of Vergil’s reading of Lucretius. An even more unexpected text is that presented by Bettina Reitz-Joosse: the Amba Alagia, a Fascist-era poem in neo-Latin hexameters celebrating Italy’s colonial wars in Ethiopia. Reitz-Joosse considers not only what the poem’s responses to Vergil tell us about the time and place of its production, but also how our own scholarly interpretations should be challenged by the uncomfortable existence of such disturbing acts of reception. In an article confined to a single, canonical Latin author, Thea Selliaas Thorsen, following Harrison’s lead, makes the case for the coherence and value of an underappreciated Horatian ode, 3.27. Daniel Jolowicz and Ian Repath, in their contributions, both participate in a similar revaluation of the Greek novels. All these articles not only make novel arguments about the texts they consider, but also draw the reader’s attention to texts to which they might never have given much thought. On a foundation of Latin literature,this volume builds structures that reach far.
Yet some subjects are introduced without quite enough exploration of what makes this topic, in particular, worth discussing. Henry Stead, for instance, offers a thought-provoking exploration on two contemporary queer translations/versions of Catullus—but the article’s limitation of its scope to the years 2016-2023 in Britain (which turns out to include only Roz Kaveney’s Catullus and Isobel Williams’ Switch) reads as an attempt to recast an interesting comparative study of two versions as a complete history of an oddly narrow period. Similarly, Darcy Krasne could have made a stronger push for the literary and interpretive value—not just the existence—of Valerius Flaccus’ reception of earlier wind similes; her relatively brief discussion of the implications of the wind imagery near the end of the article could well have been expanded into the whole article. I read Donncha O’Rourke’s otherwise fascinating account of akrasia in Vergil but was disappointed not to learn what exactly the phrase “hermeneutic of access,” used in the abstract (168), referred to. These are, however, minor quibbles, not intended to downplay the value of the essays in question. The volume is, indeed, remarkable in that every contribution is intriguing and at least mostly convincing on its own terms, and every contribution—if not always in the same way—has something to say to the broader conversation: the conversation between and among ancient (and modern) literary works that we call intertextuality and reception, and the conversation that extends to include their contemporary readers and interpreters. Indeed, many of this volume’s contributions remind us that acts of ancient reception, early modern imitation, and contemporary translation are all also acts of reading and interpretation, not that far from the work these essays are themselves doing.
The book is well presented, with accessible referencing and useful indices.
While many of this volume’s chapters will be read in isolation by those interested in particular texts or periods, the whole is greater than the parts. Many of these essays draw on Harrison’s concept of “generic enrichment” (or “philosophical enrichment” as O’Rourke particularizes it in his essay), and in a similar sense one might say that the essays brought together in this volume “enrich” each other. While each pursues its own strand of inquiry, including many very different texts and approaches, reading them together brings out unexpected nuances and satisfying connections. Anyone who has the opportunity to peruse the book as a whole will appreciate not only the extent of Stephen Harrison’s influence but the richness of the conversations his work and teaching continue to prompt, as this volume puts on display.
Authors and titles
Introduction (Catherine Conybeare and Regine May)
Stephen Harrison’s Major Publications (June 2025)
- Manlius Torquatus’ In Sullam (Catherine Steel)
- Catullus in the Ancient Greek Novels (with a Focus on Chariton) (Daniel Jolowicz)
- A Queer Catullus for the 2010s and 2020s? (Henry Stead)
- Swearing like a Philosopher on Trial: Catullus, Epicurus, and Beards in Apuleius’ Apologia (Regine May)
- Apuleius and the Greek Novel: Generic Infringement (Ian Repath)
- Philosophical Enrichment: Akrasia in Vergil (Donncha O’Rourke)
- Pallas, Son of Hercules (Llewelyn Morgan)
- Vergil in Ethiopia? Nello Martinelli’s Amba Alagia (Bettina Reitz-Joosse)
- How the Winds Blow: Inherited Anemologies in Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica (Darcy Krasne)
- The Gnat’s Descent: Intertextuality and Poetic Memory in the Pseudo-Vergilian Culex (Abigail Buglass)
- Vergilian Roleplay in The Rape of the Lock (Gail Trimble)
- Back to the Future: (Spatio)temporal Enrichment in Horace’s Odes3 and 3.27 (Thea Selliaas Thorsen)