Anthologie bilingue de la poésie latine. Avec la collaboration d'André Daviault, Sylvain Durand, Yves Hersant, René Martin et Étienne Wolff. (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade 652.) Pp. lx + 1847. Paris: Gallimard, 2020. Cased, €69. ISBN 978-2-07-274331-3

Whereas, say, H.W. Garrod's pre-First World War Oxford Book of Latin Verse stopped with the grammarian Phocas at the threshold of the sixth century, and M. Grant's generically broader survey Latin Literature: an Anthology of 1979 drew the line even earlier, after St Augustine, this bilingual compendium ranges well beyond Rome to include works written across Europe over more than 2,000 years. Here, in a single volume, in a parallel text layout running to 1,500 pages – supported by 400 pages of editorial apparatus (in French) –, are 155 named authors dating from the third century bc to the present day, beginning with the shreds of Livius Andronicus and ending with the no less fragmentary ‘Inter Aerias Fagos’ by still-living French writer Pascal Quignard. If this one-volume overview of Latin's whole ‘extraordinary adventure’ is, as the editor H. suggests, a first of its kind, it is nonetheless clear that questions of choice – what is in, what is out and why – are as fundamental here as to any more tightly focused collection, and the simple fact that a major generalist publisher should have chosen to invest so handsomely in such a project in the first place, each new Pléiade celebrated as much for its years-long gestation as for its leather binding, silky paper and pin-sharp typography, is worth noting in itself.