[1] Editor of the volume under review, Herzog is well-known for his work on e.g. Latin epic renderings of the Bible and for a series of important literary essays coming far closer to an integration of theory and practical criticism than is common in this area; I particularly admire his "Non in sua voce: Augustins Gespräch mit Gott in den Confessiones", in Stierle/Warning edd., Das Gespräch (Munich 1984), 213-50.
[2] Schanz was frank and explicit in his title, Geschichte der römischen Literatur bis zum Gesetzsgebungswerk des Kaisers Justinian; in practice he confined himself to Latin. The French translation here bills itself less circumspectly as the fifth volume of "Nouvelle histoire de la littérature latine".
[3] I synthesize the titles in English from the lists provided, with very slight variants, in the French and German editions. In particular, I observe that only the French edition specifies dates for volume 4, hence calls attention to a gap from 254-284: I will return to the significance of that gap below.
[4] Learned consultants have not helped me resolve decisively the choice of 15 BC; our best hypothesis is that it represents the end of the literary career of Propertius, but that would be more accurately expressed "c. 15 BC".
[5] Translation is credited to the direction of Gerald Nauroy on the title page, but nine other hands are credited in a detailed listing of credits a few pages further on.
[6] I hesitate to quote from the French when the German more certainly reflects Herzog's sentiments, and I do indeed find the German edition more lucid and direct, but it must be admitted that the French will find a wider audience among American users.
[7] It cannot be overemphasized that the political and social upheavals of the mid-third century were dramatic, but from Greek literature, we have at least Dexippus, Plotinus, and Porphyry (though note that the two of them were writing for a very narrow circle far from their natural linguistic home). As Herzog points out (61), the substructures of literary culture were also shaken when during the 25 years 260-285, the civil service "avait presque cessé de fonctionner". Histories of education blithely assume that schools continued without serious interruption through this period, but that is far from clear.
[8] That knowledge of Greek declines in Latin late antiquity is no novelty, and if Pierre Courcelle had ever written the promised prequel to his Les lettres grecques dans l'occident de Macrobe à Cassiodore (1948) we would see the story more clearly. I do not see that our common knowledge on this point is backed by any clear sense of the mechanism. That the young Augustine already disdains Greek for Latin cannot be taken as a sign of a Christian influence yet, and indeed in objective terms it is among Christian writers that we find a more lively and vigorous contact with Greek thought in this period than among the "classically" trained.
[9] Note that by the time the traditionalist, not to say "pagan", Macrobius in the early fifth century can canonize this generation, his own "Greek" learning needs to be heavily pilfered from other sources, notably Aulus Gellius.
[10] Take the works of Victorinus, bishop of Ptuj in Slovenia (pp. 466-71), probably born there, died as a martyr under Diocletian. In that remote customs outpost between Noricum and Pannonia, where the Orontes flowed into the Drava as eastern slaves of the customs office brought their language with them, he wrote the earliest surviving Latin scholia on the book of Revelation, which circulated later with huge success in its original form and in several recensions. Ptuj is not the sort of place from which the classicizing elites expected to receive influential new books.
[11] Note also that pp. 17-18, in a note on the evolution of the Latin language, Herzog takes a very conservative position representing only one (to my eye minority) view among linguistic scholars, insisting on continuity and accepting H. Lüdtke's notion of diglossia. It is reassuring to believe that "Latin" and "proto-Romance" existed side by side, with the learned classes moving effortlessly between them, until a relatively swift and abrupt transition in the seventh century or so: but Roger Wright's Late Latin and Early Romance (Liverpool 1982) has brought a healthy gust of skepticism into such ideas. There is at present a small backlash among particular traditionalist French scholars shoring up the pedigree of their twin linguistic bases of Latin and French. But linguistic development seems to have been far smoother and at the same time more radical than the belief in a swift transition allows, and the conservative thing about late antiquity is its adherence to a writing system that was increasingly out of touch with the lived language. Wright's great contribution is in showing how Alcuin, venerating and seeking to revive "Latin", achieved the virtual creation of "medieval Latin" by destroying the cultural pretensions of the majority of subjects of Charlemagne's empire.
[12] See my "The Demise of Paganism", Traditio 35(1979) 45-88, for reservations about the traditional myth that is still important: see most recently P. Chuvin, Chronicle of the Last Pagans (Cambridge MA 1990), with my review at BMCR 1.1.3 and the contrary view of L.T. Pearcy at BMCR 1.1.2.
[13] The reader of this review in search of a
balanced view of this important book should consult M. Vessey,
"Patristics and Literary History," Journal of Literature and
Theology 5(1991) 341-54.