A Literary Commentary on the Elegies of the Appendix Tibulliana by Laurel Fulkerson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2017. Pp. x, 384.

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172 PHOENIX Alejandro Amenábar’s film Ágora (2009), which showed Hypatia’s Alexandria through the lens of post-9/11 discourse on extremism—he also offers fresh and exciting insights. Especially intriguing is Watts’s discussion of a diptych of two writings from eighteenthcentury France—the “Dissertation sur Hypacie” by the male writer “M.G.” together with the response of “Mademoiselle B.,” who had commissioned it—which reflects the ideological tensions in Hypatian reception and encapsulates the dynamics of continuation, re-shaping, and suppression that Hypatia’s story has undergone through the ages. The afterword takes its cue from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in order to reflect on the point where “the legend becomes fact” (149). Watts ends with an impassioned plea to push back and resist the temptation to just “print the legend,” and he largely succeeds in doing so himself. Inevitably, there are slips into a more hagiographical tone, but on the whole Watts’s book demonstrates how to “appreciate Hypatia for the person that she was, not the literary character that she became” (155). UniversitÈ at Basel / CÂ edric Scheidegger LÈ ammle University of Cambridge A Literary Commentary on the Elegies of the APPENDIX TIBULLIANA. By Laurel Fulkerson. Oxford : Oxford University Press. 2017. Pp. x, 384. The APPENDIX TIBULLIANA (AT) has been transmitted as the third (sometimes third and fourth) book of Tibullus’ poetry. The collection is traditionally broken up into four or five authors: Lygdamus ([Tib.] 3.1–6), [Tibullus] (7), the friend of Sulpicia (8–12), Sulpicia (13–18), [Tibullus] (19), and an anonymous poet (20). Its poems situate themselves in the literary world of Augustan Rome. With the exception of 3.7, they are written in the meter and style of erotic elegy. Their chronology and authorship, however, is much debated. Many argue that some or all of the poems are pseudonymous and should be dated to a later period. Most heatedly debated is the authorship of the Sulpicia poems (3.8–18). Commentaries on the book have been piecemeal and infrequent. K. F. Smith prints the entire corpus with a brief discussion of the poems in the Appendix, but only offers line-by-line notes for the Sulpicia cycle (4.2–14 [= 3.8–20]).1 H. Tränkle is the only one to cover the entire Appendix.2 E. Navarro Antolı́n provides commentary on Lygdamus’ poems (3.1–6); R. O. A. M. Lyne writes on the poems most commonly attributed to Sulpicia (3.13–18); and W. W. Batstone has published notes on all the poems by and about Sulpicia (3.8–18).3 While commentaries on the AT are well supplemented by a great deal of scholarship, Fulkerson’s new volume treating the whole is a welcome addition. Fulkerson approaches the AT as a complete book. In contrast to modern critics who have dismissed its poets as second-rate or amateur imitators, Fulkerson treats the 1 K. F. Smith (ed.), The Elegies of Albius Tibullus (New York 1913). 2 H. Tränkle (ed.), Appendix Tibulliana (Berlin and New York 1990). 3 E. Navarro Antolı́n (ed.), Corpus Tibullianum 111.1–6: Lygdami Elegiarum Liber (Leiden 1996); R. O. A. M. Lyne, Collected Papers on Latin Poetry (Oxford 2007) 341–367; W. W. Batstone, “Sulpicia,” in D. J. Rayor and W. W. Batstone (eds.), Latin Lyric and Elegiac Poetry: An Anthology of New Translations (New York 1995; second ed., London 2018) 261–265. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 173 writers of the AT as “competent, even good, poets” working within the traditional rules of Roman erotic elegy alongside the canonical three: Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid (vi). She demonstrates in her introduction that the inclusion of these authors in our assessment of the genre expands and redefines what we know as Roman erotic elegy. To maintain her focus on elegy, she has omitted discussion of [Tib.] 3.7, an anonymous hexameter panegyric to Messalla. Her reason for doing so is clear and sensible (37–39). The absence of the panegyric, however, somewhat disrupts the process she advocates—to read the collection as if the poems “belong together” (37). The volume opens with an introduction, followed by the text...