This is a review of Emily Gowers's commentary on Horace's first book of Satires for the Cambridge green and yellow series. This collection of ten Latin poems in dactylic hexameter represents the first of two books of Satires that the Roman poet Horace composed. A number of these poems are among the most well-known and characteristic of the genre of Roman Satire, including several moralizing "diatribes" (I.1, I.2, and I.3), Horace's portrait of his freedman father (I.4), his picaresque "Journey to Brundisium" (I.5), the fantastical monologue of the wooden effigy of the god Priapus (I.8), and Horace's encounter with an officious "boor" who pesters him for an introduction to Maecenas (I.9). These brief summaries do not of course do justice to the density of themes and the many abrupt turns of thought that typify these poems. Within many of these poems, which range in length from 35 to 143 lines each, Horace manages to create vivid reflections - sometimes distorted, sometimes not, and it is always difficult to tell which it is - of Roman society as it was in the 30's BC, in all its kaleidoscopic complexity and discombobulated diversity. For readers who are only familiar with the orderliness and polished finish of Horace's Odes and Epistles, the effusiveness and superabundance of material in the Satires will display a very different side of this remarkably versatile poet.

This edition includes 27 pages of Latin text, a 28 page introduction and just about 280 pages of commentary in a dense layout and fairly small print, a thoroughly comprehensive bibliography of 23 pages current through about 2009, two indexes (one general, one of Latin words), and a map of Horace's possible routes to Brundisium. The notes in the commentary are equal parts grammatical help for the student-reader to construe the meaning of Horace's often difficult and allusive Latin and scholarly analysis and bibliographical synthesis for the more professional academic reader. The notes are incredibly helpful with grammar and vocabulary. Many of the most difficult sentences/phrases are translated very literally into English, hard-to-recognize case usages are occasionally parsed, obscure diction and idioms are explained, and in general the commentator does an excellent job anticipating where a reader with a few years of Latin-reading experience will run into trouble and foregrounding the grammatical/lexical help in a very dense layout of notes so that it is usually easy to find.

The more interpretive notes and the notes geared towards more professional readers are also consistently helpful. Verbal and thematic parallels within the Satires and with other Latin texts are noted and discussed, allusions to contemporary historical realities and Roman cultural practices/institutions are explained, and the introduction contains informative sections on Horace's life and times, the history of Roman satire and Horace's place in it, the "plot" of Satires I as a poetry book, the wide range of philosophical and literary influences (both Greek and Roman) on Horace's Satires, the literary afterlife of the Satires, and the transmission of the text. One thing that seemed to me to be missing in both the introduction and notes was any extended discussion of the connections, thematic and otherwise, that exist between the Satires and Horace's other poetry books. For example, the character of Canidia (I.8) is a key figure in several of the Epodes and in two Satires of the second book, and it is curious, given that so much other interpretive evidence is brought to bear on Satires I, that there is not really any sustained movement anywhere in the commentary to read Canidia thematically through the lens of the Epodes or Satires II. There is of course some value in reading the first book of Satires in a kind of vacuum, given that it is Horace's earliest published poetry, appears to enact a very different poetic program than his other works do, and has rarely received individualized attention from scholars, but a reader looking to discover how Satires I fits into Horace's broader oeurvre will not find too much help in this edition.

The chief feature of this commentary, however, is the amount of space it devotes (both in long essays introducing the commentary to each poem and in the notes themselves) to the literary interpretation of each of the poems and the exposition of all the major scholarly approaches - historicist, sociolinguistic, feminist, and more - that have been applied to each of the poems, along with the commentator's own interpretations. These features set this edition apart from most other entries in this commentary series and make it as much an argumentative scholarly monograph as it is a commentary. This is potentially a great asset or a great defect, depending on what one wants to use this commentary for. On the one hand, this edition constitutes a very useful compendium of what contemporary scholarship has said about Satires I, but in showing how Satires I can be put into a wide array of interpretive boxes, the commentator ultimately presents these poems to the reader very neatly packaged. Very little room is left for the reader to draw his/her own conclusions about the Satires given the sheer thoroughness of the exposition of other scholars' readings of the poems, and the commentator's own analyses sometimes take on an authoritative tone that has the effect of making the comments into prescriptions for interpretation rather than prompts. For example, on page 298, the commentator writes of Aristius Fuscus, a character in I.9, that "His function here is to give Horace a dose of his own medicine and demonstrate how the ideal satirist might behave, extracting wry humour at other people's expense while extricating himself with perfect civility". Such an interpretation might certainly be valid, but it is presented in a way that might lead one to think it is "the" correct interpretation of Fuscus's role. This kind of authoritative literary criticism is quite conventional in scholarly articles and monographs, but it is unusual to find it so pervasively in a commentary geared towards students. The number and intensity of scholarly voices in this edition could well do more to close down the Satires to such readers' own interpretations than open them up.

Overall, however, this commentary has far far more to recommend it than not. The grammatical/lexical help is first-rate, there is a wealth of interpretive material here that no serious reader of Horace and/or Satires I can afford to overlook, and the poems themselves are definitely one of the high points of Latin Literature.

No one can be that presumptuous! All one can review is the translator, who is a little bit loose. I prefer translators that are more literal. But then, as Robert Frost said, poetry is that thing that gets lost in translation, if you know enough Latin, the original text can be appreciated in full. And Horace is one who gives you plenty of quotations, if you wish to impress your friends. In just the few pages of Ars Poetica, you have in medias res, laudatur temporis acti, quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus... Thanks to the translator for telling us that morbus regius was jaundice and that it was considered contagious, like scabies. Can you imagine? It took another 2,000 years to figure out that jaundice is caused by a (contagious) hepatatis virus.

Horace's Satires are challenging but well worth the effort of steady study.

Though this is not necessarily a book for the idle poetry reader, I loved this completely. If you enjoy reading the work of the ancient poets and writers, this is perfect. Since it has the original Latin text on the facing page to the translation, it is possible to see how the syntax and lines fit together to make the beautiful, if a bit idiosyncratic, poetry of Horace.