monograph will hold a very important place among publications of coins found in excavations in Anatolia. Zeynep Çizmeli Ög ˘ ün Ankara University zeynepogun1@gmail.com doi:10.1017/S0075435820000374 II. LITERATURE AND RESPONSE GIUSEPPE PEZZINI and BARNABY TAYLOR (EDS), LANGUAGE AND NATURE IN THE CLASSICAL ROMAN WORLD. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xii + 240. ISBN 9781108480666. £75.00. What is linguistic naturalism? Some readers will think of the etymologies in Plato’s Cratylus and the discussion of whether they reveal the true natures of the things denoted by the words. For other readers the phrase will evoke Lucretius’ description of early humans creating language out of natural cries. But neither Lucretius nor the Cratylus make much of an appearance in this work, which focuses primarily on Varro and also on Cicero, Lucilius, Nigidius Figulus, Posidonius and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Of course, the views of ‘nature’ in these different writers were not the same; often multiple views can be found even within a single text. But the volume embraces this diversity and uses a maximally inclusive denition of ‘nature’ in order to explore the phenomenon to the full. Does it succeed? That would depend on one’s denition of ‘success’. Wolfgang De Melo (‘Naturalism in morphology: Varro on derivation and inection’, 103–20) offers a detailed study of Varro’s use of the word natura in linguistic contexts, providing a persuasive explanation of the term’s different meanings and uses, and of Varro’s understanding of morphology. David Blank (‘What’s Hecuba to him? Varro on the natural kinship of things and of words’, 121–52) argues that Varro’s treatment of nature as a linguistic force reveals his debt to the Stoics and their ideas of oikeiosis (accommodation and appropriation). But then in the last chapter James Zetzel (‘Natural law and natural language in the rst century B.C.E.’, 191–211) offers a completely different perspective: ‘Varro does not make coherent sense …“Nature” is not a term with a single meaning, and therefore claims to rely on nature are necessarily inconsistent and incoherent; naturalism approaches meaninglessness …“Nature” is what we invoke in order to explain what we do not understand and therefore cannot explain’ (194). This statement challenges the basic premise on which De Melo’s and Blank’s chapters were based, namely that ancient texts do make sense. If you do not start from that premise, then neither their arguments nor any of the other chapters are convincing. But is that premise as weak as Zetzel claims? Does polysemy really render a word useless? Perusal of the Oxford Latin Dictionary suggests that most Latin words have multiple meanings: are all such words meaningless? Readers would be in a better position to engage properly with this challenge if the authors and editors of this book had prioritised clarity more highly: condence that one has fully grasped all the arguments earlier in the book and understands the evidence on which they are based is a pre-requisite for tackling Zetzel’s chapter, and few readers are likely to reach it with that condence. This unclarity has multiple causes. Sometimes it is not made clear what the basis for an argument is, as when we are told that an ‘extreme naturalistic doctrine’ of spelling long i with ei in forms used for senses that are naturally fuller ‘underlies Lucilius’ guideline (358–61 M.; 364–6 M.) for the choice between ei and i both in the body of a word (mille, meilia) and in the case endings (e.g. gen. sing. pueri, dat. sing. puerei)’ (58). But when the relevant passages of Lucilius were quoted (51–2), a normal reader would have thought that Lucilius was advocating the ei spelling in both mille and milia (‘mille hominum, duo milia’ item: huc ‘e’ utroque opus: ‘meille’) and that puerei was a nominative plural (iam ‘puerei uenere’‘e’ postremum facito atque ‘i’, ut ‘puerei’ plures ant). How exactly did the author get from those quotations to that interpretation? Other sources of unclarity include terminology that will be unfamiliar to many readers (e.g. ‘morpholexical’, 97), distinctions that could have done with more explanation (e.g. ‘he goes beyond our concept of naturalness and reaches the higher concept of naturalism’, 119), expressions that do not seem to make any sense (e.g. ‘φιλήτης <*ὑφειλέτης, with the rst letter “taken away”, ὑφεῖλον FOR steals the < ὑφείλω’, 59), and expressions that do make sense, but II. LITERATURE AND RESPONSE 272