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Because Thomas' work concentrates so much on particulars, it is difficult to discuss his book in broad, general terms. Instead, I shall review a selection of papers from the volume and then offer some general observations. Thomas' first chapter, 'Preparing the Way: Catullan Intertextuality' (pp. 12-67), contains a discussion of the opening lines of Catullus 64 which is, in many ways, programmatic for the book that follows. Thomas shows well how these lines are shot through with references to Euripides, Apollonius, Ennius and others. Catullus' references, Thomas argues, are not merely inert allusions; through them the New Poet does things: he 'rejects, corrects, or pays homage to his antecedents, and . . . presents his own as the superior version' (p. 32). Throughout the book Thomas views these as the main purposes of intertextual reference in Catullus and his Augustan successors.
A major piece, chapter 2, 'Callimachus, the Victoria Berenices, and Roman Poetry' (pp. 68-100),' argues that not Pindar but Callimachus-specifically the opening of Aetia 3 with its epinician for Berenice-should be seen as the primary model for the extraordinary proem of Vergil, Georgics 3. Many of Thomas' detailed points are suggestive and thought-provoking, but in my view he produces no evidence firm enough to make his case persuasive. Part of the problem is that the Callimachean material is simply too fragmentary to bear the burden of proof he places on it.
For me the chapter that shows Thomas at his best is chapter 5, 'Prose into Poetry: Tradition and Meaning in Virgil's Georgics' (pp. 142-172),2 where the author shows how Vergil has transformed into poetry material from technical prose treatises on agriculture. Through a series of detailed, sensitive analyses, Thomas illuminates the way in which Vergil edits, refines, suppresses, even sometimes falsifies material from Theophrastus, Cato and Varro.
Like many contemporary critics Thomas is sympathetic (too sympathetic for my taste) to the notion that, whatever a poem may be 'about', it is very often also-or mainly-'about' poetry itself. This idea informs his chapter 6, 'The Old Man Revisited: Memory, Reference, and Genre in Virgil Georgics 4.116-48' (pp. 173205),3 which interprets Vergil's old Corycian (the old man of Tarentum) as 'a conflation of the old man of Philitas, of...