Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2008.06.21Sounds excellent.
J.L. Lightfoot, The Sibylline Oracles: With Introduction, Translation, and Commentary on the First and Second Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xxiii, 613. ISBN 978-0-19-921546-1. $220.00.
Reviewed by Aaron Kachuck, University of Cambridge (ak555@cam.ac.uk)
Word count: 2383 words
It is hard to do justice in the course of a review to any of Jane Lightfoot's monumental contributions to classical scholarship, but this is particularly the case with her new text, commentary, and discussion of the first two books of the Sibylline Oracles, Judaeo-Christian texts that adopt the narrator, form, and language of Greek hexameter poetry and oracles. In the essay portion of this book, L. has built on the work of scholars such as R. Buitenwerf, J.J. Collins and H.W. Parke to produce new and incisive formulations of the problemata confronted by the scholar of Sibylline Oracles Books I-III, and answers to those questions that she believes can be reasonably deduced from the evidence. Lightfoot does not shy away from withholding a definitive conclusion when none seems to suggest itself from the extant material, leading her to sensibly conclude many of her deeply researched questions not with artificially confident answers, but with the questions to which her and others' research has not been, and may never be, able to respond (see, for example, p. 219). L. exercises a healthy skepticism towards overly creative, and not sufficiently evidence-based, answers to textual problems. And problems in the Sibylline Oracles are inevitably textual problems because of the extreme scarcity (sometimes total dearth) of external evidence relevant to the discussion, and it is because of the textual nature of these questions that L.'s utilization of methods derived from classical philology yields such solid results. L.'s work represents the first comprehensive commentary in English on the first two books, such that all future study of the text will benefit from L.'s editing of the text and apparatus criticus for the first two books.
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(Via the Agade list.)
