12/09/2008

A new book on the Sibylline Oracles

My review of J. L. Lightfoot's The Sibylline Oracles: with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary on the First and Second Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) is set to appear in The Classical Review (2009) 59.1: 101-3. At xxiv + 613 pages, Lightfoot's is the biggest book on the subject since Alexandre's 1856 Excursus ad Sibyllina (which weighed in at 624 pages of 19th-century scholarly Latin!) and, in addition to bringing the discussion up-to-date (and in English!), will prove (I predict) to be every bit as indispensible as Alexandre's (out-dated and un-Englished though it be) still is.