The identification of the quarrel between Cupid and Apollo at Met. 1. 452–73 as a Callimachean recusatio has become a noted feature of scholarly discussion on this passage. Cupid and Apollo's encounter stands as a favoured starting point for the ongoing analysis of generic interplay within Ovid's sprawling work; this is hardly surprising, given its consideration as a programmatic, exemplary triumph of elegy over epic. Although genre studies on the Metamorphoses have represented an enduring presence in Ovidian discourse since Heinze's pioneering work, genre's evolution into what some deem a pet scholarly obsession within studies of the poet has garnered both admiration and revilement. Given the multiplicity of discussions prominently featuring this very episode, it would not seem unfair to deem any addition superfluous. However, adding to the surfeit of analyses is exactly my intention here, with the view that there are yet a few elements that have gone unremarked or underexplored, and that such elements can illuminate further the complex interplay between epic and elegy here on display. Namely, I will suggest that the dynamic created by the difference in accounts of the Python's slaying (Ov. Met. 1.441–4 versus 1.456–60) has not been appreciated fully for its role in the debasement of epic poetry that leads into and consequently informs the programmatic myth sequence of Apollo and Daphne, and that this dynamic finds an overarching explanation by supplying reference to a passage from Nicander's Theriaca. Using Nicander as a literary source, coupled with recognition of both the fictive touches and the weighted literary critical language that Apollo retrospectively applies to his deed, allows us to reinterpret this passage and provides a further example of Ovid's careful strategies of narrative and tone.

In 59 bc, in the second half of Caesar's tumultuous year as consul, a certain Decimus Laelius brought a charge of extortion against the former praetor and ally of Cicero – L. Valerius Flaccus. Flaccus had proven instrumental in the suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy four years earlier. From the beginning of his speech pro Flacco, the orator frames the case in terms of contemporary politics. Though ostensibly about the defendant's alleged misconduct as Governor of Asia, Cicero makes the contest a ‘trial of character’ and argues that the impetus for the prosecution was actually Flaccus’ role in foiling the Catilinarian plot. In contrast with his own heroism as consul and that of his client in preserving the Republic, Cicero portrays the prosecution and its backers as in league with the remnants of Catiline's ill-fated putsch.

The fourth Eclogue presents itself explicitly as a political poem, a loftier intervention in the humble world of pastoral poetry (4.1–3). This grander type of pastoral, moreover, is singled out as possessing a specifically Roman political significance: these ‘woods’ are to be ‘worthy of a consul’ (silvae sint consule dignae, 3), and the coming Golden Age is set within a precisely identifiable political context, the consulship of C. Asinius Pollio in 40 bc (te consule, 4.11). Beyond that, however, the details of the relationship between the miraculous child, whose growth to maturity will be accompanied by the fabulous portents of the new era, and the contemporary political setting at Rome are left tantalizingly, perhaps prudently, vague. It was no doubt with a view to promoting his own political interests that Pollio's son, ‘the rash and ambitious Asinius Gallus’, claimed to have been the original puer of Virgil's poem. If so, he was very far from being the last public figure to appropriate the resounding cadences of the fourth Eclogue to endorse his own position: it was not long before (in Harry Levin's words) ‘The Pollio eclogue had virtually created a minor genre, a means for the court poet to flatter his sovereign, as well as a device for balancing the moderns against the ancients.’ But even before the opportunistic assertions of Pollio's son, the poem's prophecies of a new age had already been re-appropriated to tie down the oracular generalities of the eclogue to a particular individual and a definite set of political circumstances, in a move that was to have significant repercussions for the later fortunes of Virgil's essay in pastoral panegyric.

Elite, Athenian, male – all three adjectives usually apply to our sources on the ancient world, and the study of ancient ethics (including even so-called ‘popular morality’) is no different in this respect. There are, however, a few exceptional sources that provide a window into a more diverse population and their hopes, desires, values, and insecurities. In the following, I wish to highlight one of these – the corpus of oracular lamellae from Dodona – and demonstrate how this body of evidence can shed new light on an old question. Specifically, I will consider what we can learn about techne (art, craft, profession) from these tablets; but in addition I hope readers with an interest in ancient ethics will see how promising this source is for further study on other topics. As I will show, alongside the better known peri technes literature – a group of texts from the fifth and fourth centuries bce that discuss medicine and other crafts from a theoretical standpoint – there is a small corpus of texts from Dodona that uses this same phrase and discusses the crafts from a far more practical perspective. The object of this article will be to show how these two corpora are mutually enlightening.

In the second poem of Propertius’ fourth book, the form-shifting deity Vertumnus claims that he is suited to any role that he is associated with because he can appear convincingly as a girl or a man: indue me Cois: fiam non dura puella; / meque uirum sumpta quis neget esse toga? (‘dress me in Coan silk, I shall be a gentle maiden: and who would say that I am not a man when I don the toga?’, 4.2.23–4). Later in Propertius 4.9, another gender ambiguous character, Hercules, while trying to gain entry into the shrine of the Bona Dea, boasts that he had woven and performed a handmaiden's service (4.9.47–50):

idem ego Sidonia feci seruilia palla
officia et Lydo pensa diurna colo;
mollis et hirsutum cinxit mihi fascia pectus,
et manibus duris apta puella fui.

I have also done the tasks of a slave-girl in a Sidonian gown
and worked at the daily burden of the Lydian distaff.
A soft breastband has surrounded my shaggy chest,
and with my hard hands I was a fitting girl.

ἄνδρά μοι ἔννεπε…: Are you shocked to find a misprint at the very beginning of Martin West's Teubner Odyssey? Then you've not been reading the poem in the editions of La Roche (1867–8) or Ludwich (1889–91), and you have not been reading the Iliad in West's edition (1998). You will need to consult the latter if you want to gain enlightenment on this and other orthographic niceties: the introduction to West's Odyssey is, inconveniently, not a stand-alone resource. Sampling his text alongside Allen's routinely derided OCT rarely revealed differences more substantive than, for example, ἐνὶ vs ἐπὶ in 1.211. But confidence in my collation may be undermined when I confess that I almost missed μηδὲ vs μέγα δέ in 13.158: West's decision to set aside the entire ancient textual tradition in favour of Aristophanes of Byzantium's conjecture strikes me as reckless. Strongly attested lines have no immunity to West's suspicions (e.g. 1.171–3). Suspect lines are variously queried in the apparatus, or bracketed in the text, or moved from text to apparatus. The last of these options is disruptive to the reading experience, and such a sharply polarized layout can hardly avoid being arbitrary: doubtfulness is a continuum. I, at any rate, was unable to extract a consistent set of criteria underlying West's choices among the three options. But his handling of these difficult decisions is more restrained than I had expected. The apparatus, once its conventions have become familiar, is clear and informative; an unprecedented range of papyri is cited; the testimonia, too, are given in unprecedented abundance. Allen, of course, but also von der Mühll (1946) and Thiel (1991) are put in the shade by West's final scholarly tour de force.

‘Statius’ Thebaid’, someone donnishly quipped, ‘has no sufficient reason to exist.’ Kyle Gervais might beg to differ. Like the Thebaid itself, his commentary on Book 2 has grown over many years, and deserves to be taken very seriously. The crisp introduction sets the tone and clearly signals priorities in its four sections, a rising tetracolon for author, problems of editing, intratexts, and intertexts; not a word on style and prosody, and reception is excluded on the ground that Statius’ own imitatio is quite enough to be getting on with. The text is newly constituted, with ample apparatus and text-critical discussion: Gervais joins Barrie Hall's rebellion against the bifid stemma, but fairly questions his view that the Thebaid should be easy reading; he accordingly diverges from his edition nearly a hundred times, and offers a translation which, if less old-falutin’ than Shack's Loeb, does an equally good job of disabusing anyone who thought it would be quicker to read Statius in English. The notes are full and rich: words aren't wasted, but both philological graft and literary interpretation amply attest to fine scholarship, good sense, and long thought.

This is a particularly rich crop of books on Greek history. I commence with two important volumes on citizenship in archaic and classical Greece. Traditional narratives of Greek citizenship are based on three assumptions: that citizenship is a legal status primarily linked to political rights; that there was a trajectory from the primitive forms of archaic citizenship to the developed and institutionalized classical citizenship; and that the history of citizenship is closely linked to a wider Whig narrative of movement from the aristocratic politics of archaic Greece to classical Athenian democracy.

Identity studies live. This latest batch of publications explores what made not just the Romans but the Italians, Christians, and Etruscans who they were. We begin with both age and beauty, the fruits of a special exhibition at the Badischen Landesmuseum Karlsruhe in the first half of 2018 into the most famous of Roman predecessors, the Etruscans. Most of the exhibits on display come from Italian museums, but the interpretative essays that break up the catalogue – which are also richly illustrated – are by both Italian and German scholars. These are split between five overarching sections covering introductory affairs, the ages of the princes and of the city-states, the Etruscans’ relationship with Rome, and modern reception. The first contains essays treating Etruscan origins, history, identity, and settlement area. The second begins with the early Iron Age Villanova site, before turning to early Etruscan aristocratic culture, including banqueting, burials, language, writing, and seafaring. The third and longest section considers the heyday of Etruscan civilization and covers engineering and infrastructure, crafts and production, munitions, women's roles, daily life, dance, sport, funerary culture, wall painting, religious culture, and art. The fourth section treats both the confrontation between Etruscan and Roman culture and the persistence of the former after ‘conquest’ by the latter. The fifth section contains one essay on the modern inheritance of the Etruscan ‘myth’ and one on the history of scholarship on the Etruscans. Three aspects to this volume deserve particular praise. First, it includes not only a huge range of material artefacts but also individual essays on Etruscan production in gold, ceramic, ivory, terracotta, and bronze. Second, there is a recurring interest in the interconnections between the Etruscans and other cultures, not just Romans but Greeks, Iberians, Celts, Carthaginians, and other Italian peoples. Third, it includes the history of the reception of Etruscan culture. Amid the just-shy-of-200 objects included (almost every one with description and high-quality colour image), the reader can find everything from a mid-seventh-century pitcher made from an Egyptian ostrich egg painted with birds, flowers, and dancers (147), through the well-known third- or second-century bcTabula Cortonensis – a lengthy and only partially deciphered Etruscan inscription that documents either a legal transaction or a funerary ceremony (311) – to the 2017 kit of the Etruschi Livorno American Football team (364). Since we have no extant Etruscan literature, a volume such as this is all the more valuable in trying to get a sense of these people and their culture, and the exceptionally high production value provides quality exposure to material otherwise scattered throughout Italy.

Passion. Nowadays everything must be done with passion. No ‘personal statement’ for university admission is complete without some sentiment of passionate motivation; you purchase a sandwich and learn that it has been ‘made lovingly’. So is there anything wrong with studying classical archaeology passionately – with the engagement of emotions, or ‘intensity of feeling’ (OED)? The question arises from the very title of a festal volume devoted to a (some would say, the) historical pioneer of the discipline, J. J. Winckelmann: Die Kunst der Griechen mit der Seele suchend. Since it is conventional to translate die Seele as ‘the soul’, immediately we encounter the problem of mind–body dualism, and the question of where passions are to be located in human biology. But let us accept the sense of the phrase as it is being used here. It is, as Goethe recognized in Winckelmann's work, and celebrated accordingly, an ‘awareness’ (Gewahrwerden) of Greek art that was at once intuitive and reasoned; spontaneous, yet developed by patient study (conducted with ‘true German seriousness’ – so deutsch Ernst). Pious remembrance of Winckelmann has been maintained in his homeland virtually ever since his premature death (a ‘thunderbolt’ of awful news, as Goethe described it) in 1768. This year is the 250th since that loss, and will be widely marked. Meanwhile the recent anniversary of Winckelmann's birth – 1717, as a cobbler's son, in Brandenburg – occasions fresh hagiography, and attendant exhibitions, perhaps most notably a show at the Capitoline Museums, documenting an important part of Winckelmann's intense and eventually glorious activity in Rome.

Three recent volumes indicate a growing appreciation of the significance and complexity of Plato's account of mousikē in the Laws. Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi's edited work, Performance and Culture in Plato's Laws, collects fifteen diverse chapters by prominent scholars in Greek literature, philosophy, and culture to produce an immensely rewarding and original range of perspectives on Plato's treatment of performance and poetics in the Laws. As Peponi notes in her brief introduction, the complexity of the cultural background that Plato manipulates and appropriates in the Laws, as well as the intricacy of the Platonic appropriation itself, combine to present a very real challenge to any scholar seeking to understand them. In addition, it is hard to see that any robust treatment of the Laws’ political theory can avoid getting to grips with the fundamental connections between politics and performance established within the dialogue. Any reader with an interest in either Plato's political philosophy or his poetics will be well rewarded by time spent with this volume. The chapters are divided into four sections, which focus in turn on issues of cultural identity (‘Geopolitics of Performance’), the role of the choruses in Magnesia (‘Conceptualising Chorality’), the Laws’ treatment of genre (‘Redefining Genre’), and the later reception of the Laws’ poetics (‘Poetry and Music in the Afterlife of the Laws’). In the second of the volume's two chapters on cultural identity, Ian Rutherford considers the Laws’ representation of Egypt as a culture that successfully resists political and moral decline via a commitment to stability in mousikē. Setting Plato's account against the external evidence, Rutherford suggests that the Laws offers a partial fiction of stable Egyptian mousikē, useful not least for the implications of its possible critical connection to Dorian culture. In the last of five chapters on the Laws’ interest in the civic apparatus of choral performance, Peponi demonstrates the singularity of choral performance in the work. Whereas the Laws treats most types of performance as producing pleasure in the spectator, in the case of choruses, the emphasis is on the pleasure and experience of the performers. Peponi argues that this shift in focus represents a Platonic attempt to ‘de-aestheticize’ the chorus. In this way, Plato seeks to rehabilitate mousikē by divesting it of the psychological and aesthetic flaws identified in the Republic’s extended critique. However, as Peponi notes in conclusion, the Laws is not altogether comfortable with this sort of performative pleasure. In the first of five chapters on genre, Andrea Nightingale discusses the Laws’ manipulation of generic diversity in service of the unified truth represented by the law code at its heart. Nightingale presents a fascinating and original analysis of the law code as a written text rather different in character from that criticized in the Phaedrus as a pharmakon that destroys our memory of truth. Rather, it serves to encourage the internalization of truths by obliterating the citizens’ memories of previous unwanted cultural norms. In the volume's final chapter, Andrew Barker turns to Aristoxenus for help in making sense of Plato's suggestion that music can be assessed as ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’, or as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Contrasting the Platonic focus on mimesis and ethical correctness with Aristoxenus’ assessment of music ‘by the standard of its own intrinsic values’ (413), Barker suggests that, of the two treatments, Plato's is the furthest removed from general Greek opinion. These varied and illuminating chapters are representative of the scope and quality of the volume, which not only serves to open up new directions for research on the Laws but also makes plain that the Laws is at least as important as the Republic for a thorough understanding of Plato's views on art and culture, and their relation to politics.

The cinematic and televisual reception of the ancient world remains one of the most active strands of classical reception study, so a new addition to the Wiley-Blackwell Companions series focusing on Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen is sure to be of use to students and scholars alike (especially given how often ‘Classics and Film’ courses are offered as a reception component of an undergraduate Classical Studies programme). The editor, Arthur Pomeroy, himself a respected and prolific ‘early adopter’ of this branch of scholarship, has assembled many of the leading names in cinematic reception studies (including Maria Wyke, Pantelis Michelakis, Alastair Blanshard, and Monica Cyrino), alongside a good number of more junior colleagues, resulting in a varied and rewarding compendium that will provide a useful accompaniment to more detailed explorations of this field. (Some, though not all, chapters offer further reading suggestions, and most are pitched at an accessible level.) The twenty-three contributions span the ‘canonical’ and already widely treated aspects of screen reception, from 1950s Hollywood epics to adaptations of Greek tragedy, as well as ranging across material which has only more recently began to attract the attention it deserves, such as TV documentary, or adaptations for younger audiences. The volume is not as easily navigable as it might be, with the four-part division of the chapters sometimes seeming a little arbitrary. (So, for example, a chapter which discusses ‘The Return of the Genre’ in films like Gladiator appears under the heading ‘Comedy, Drama, and Adaptation’, when it might have been better placed in the first section, on ‘The Development of the Depiction of Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen’.) But rich discussions are not hard to find, especially in those chapters which show how cinematic receptions are indicators of more widely felt concerns relating to our reception of the past, as in Blanshard's assessment of ‘High Art and Low Art Expectations: Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture’. Michelakis’ chapter on the early days of cinema is also a valuable distillation of some of his recent work on silent film, crisply and concisely setting out the plurality of approaches that must inform our understanding of the cinematic medium (for example, spectatorship, colour, and relationships to other media). More broadly, the collection makes a solid and welcome attempt to put this pluralism into practice, with Pomeroy stressing ‘the complexity of understanding film’ early in his introduction (3). Chapters focusing on music, and costumes, for example, allow us to see productions ‘in the round’, a panoptical perspective which is still too readily avoided by much classical reception scholarship. (It is also good to see at least one chapter which ranges beyond screen media in the West.) Other vital areas of film and TV studies could arguably have received more attention. Some contributors touch on the importance of assessing audience receptions of these films, or the impact of marketing and other industrial considerations (such as screening practices), but more chapters dedicated to these approaches might have been a more sustained reminder to readers of just how widely screen scholarship can (and often needs to) range. To that end, a particularly significant chapter in the book – one of only 3 by non-Classicists – is Harriet Margolis’ account of how film historians might evaluate ancient world film. Newcomers to this field should pay particular attention to this, and to Pomeroy's introductory comments on how we should regard film as much more than a quasi-literary medium.

I was very excited to get my hands on what was promising to be a magnificent and extremely helpful Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, and my expectations were matched – and exceeded! This handbook contains no less than sixty contributions written by eminent experts and is divided into six parts. Each section opens with a brief orientation essay, tracing the development of rhetoric in a specific period, and is followed by individual chapters which are organized thematically. Part I contains eleven chapters on ‘Greek Rhetoric’, and the areas covered are law, politics, historiography, pedagogy, poetics, tragedy, Old Comedy, Plato, Aristotle, and closing with the Sophists. Part II contains thirteen chapters on ‘Ancient Roman Rhetoric’, which similarly covers law, politics, historiography, pedagogy, and the Second Sophistic, and adds Stoic philosophy, epic, lyric address, declamation, fiction, music and the arts, and Augustine to the list of topics. Part III, on ‘Medieval Rhetoric’, covers politics, literary criticism, poetics, and comedy; Part IV, on the Renaissance contains chapters on politics, law, pedagogy, science, poetics, theatre, and the visual arts. Part V consists of seven essays on the early modern and Enlightenment periods and is decidedly Britano-centric: politics, gender in British literature, architecture, origins of British Enlightenment rhetoric, philosophy (mostly British, too), science, and the elocutionary movement in Britain. With Chapter 45 we arrive at the modern age section (Part VI), with two chapters on feminism, one on race, and three on the standard topics (law, political theory, science), grouped together with those on presidential politics, New Testament studies, argumentation, semiotics, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, social epistemology, and environment, and closing with digital media. The volume also contains a glossary of Greek and Latin rhetorical terms. As the editor states in his Introduction, the aim of the volume is not only to provide a comprehensive history of rhetoric, but also to enable those interested in the role of rhetoric in specific disciplines or genres, such as law or theatre and performance, to easily find those sections in respective parts of the book and thus explore the intersection of rhetoric with one specific field in a chronological sequence.