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Christina S. Kraus, John Marincola, and Christopher Pelling (eds.). Ancient His- toriography and its Contexts: Studies in Honour of A. J. Woodman. Oxford: Ox- ford University Press, 2010. Pp. xiii, 449. $135.00. ISBN 978-0-19-955868-1.
It is difficult to overestimate the influence that A. J. Woodman has had on the study of ancient historiography over the last forty years. Appropriately, papers on historians from Thucydides to Ammianus, but particularly on Tacitus, pre- dominate among the twenty-one contributions to this Festschrift that will appeal to scholars and advanced students alike. Woodman's extensive engagement with Latin poetry is also represented with discussions of Catullus and Horace (Fee- ney), Vergil (D. Nelis; J. Marincola), Ovid (D. West), and Juvenal (J. Powell). Other writers are discussed with insight along the way, and navigating the sea of authors is made easier by an index locorum and a general index.
The editors have grouped contributions into sections that take their titles from Woodman's books: author and audience, quality and pleasure, poetry and politics, and Tacitus reviewed. Woodman's methodology of reading texts pro- vides another unity that crosses section boundaries. The editors devote the first part of their introduction to summarizing that methodology, and...