Professor Quinn’s study is intended mainly as a textbook for students (including in particular students of English literature) who have to deal with Latin literature in translation. It is clearly and often stimulatingly written, with plenty of illustrative extracts, and should fulfil its useful purpose. My impression is that students of English will find some parts of it – I am thinking of the more general excursions into literary theory – a shade over-explanatory and unsophisticated. But what it does do extremely well is to place the Roman writers in their historical and cultural setting, both in relation to their contemporary audiences and their expectations and in relation to Greek and Alexandrian tradition. The material is divided into four categories: poet as storyteller, poet as teacher, poet as himself, and the development of literary prose. There are useful incidental discussions of originality; of oral versus written; of the lacunae of survival; of the importance of tone in Ovid and Catullus; of a recurring moral concern characteristic of Roman literature. Much has to be covered in 250 pages, and it inay be regretted that relatively little space is devoted to Virgil’s Aeneid (eight pages) and Lucretius’s On the Universe (seven pages);