These have been good years for Ennius perennis. A couple of years on from his Loeb renewal, two superb books keep the lifeblood pulsing. Ennius’ Annals. Poetry and History, edited by Cynthia Damon and Joseph Farrell, is a masterclass of a conference volume. The lucid introduction, a sort of ‘Whither Ennius?’, powerfully situates it in the receding wake of Otto Skutsch's monumental edition and the fresher waves of Ennius and the Architecture of the Annals, Jackie Elliott's powerful challenge to ‘Virgiliocentric’ reconstructions of this fragmentary text. As those studies made plain enough in their different ways, reception and interpretation of the Annals are interlocked to a special degree, and the fourteen chapters in this book (plus afterword by Mary Jaeger) roam nicely around and between both.

These days Flavian epic and intertextuality go together like toast and butter, or a persistent cough and fever, depending on your taste. Either way, Intertextuality in Flavian Epic. Contemporary Approaches is not perhaps the most startling of titles. But the book within is an impressive collection, its four editors (Neil Coffee, Chris Forstall, Lavinia Galli Milić, and Damien Nelis) leading a star cast of Flavians in a wide-ranging and stimulating set of chapters.

First up, a brace of major Teubner editions. Marcus Deufert's De rerum natura marks a significant moment in Lucretian studies. I suspect that most people, at least in the Anglosphere, are still using Cyril Bailey's venerable Oxford Classical Text (revised in 1922) for everyday reading, if not the equally antique Loeb (W. D. Rouse, 1924). In broadest outline, text-critical views haven't changed much since: a ‘closed’ tradition, in which two Carolingian manuscripts rejoicing in the workaday names Oblongus and Quadratus are prime witnesses, but often problematic ones; a mass of manuscripts from Renaissance Italy, which editors consult primarily for conjectures. But the last century has seen plenty of important work, and Deufert can report more precisely on the various corrections made in O and Q; affirm that all Italian manuscripts descend from O, and give them a stemma; pan many more humanist conjectures; wade in the muddy river (xxi) of modern interventions; and offer his own solutions to, or non liquet on, textual problems small and large. The result is a text with plenty of novelties (and many questions left open), and an edition with a very different look.

Cicero has a unique place in the history of Latin. A political and intellectual figure elevated to iconic status both by his own efforts and by posterity; author of more extant prose – dozens of speeches, the treatises philosophical and rhetorical, and nearly a thousand letters – than any other pagan Roman; model of good style and set-text author par excellence, from antiquity to modernity. So far, so uncontroversial. But when and how did he acquire this place atop the canon? It's a question that Caroline Bishop, Thomas Keeline, and Giuseppe La Bua have each asked, and one to which they offer some interestingly different answers.

Reflecting on present unease about structural biases in the discipline, and aiming to offer a data-rich response to some recent criticisms of this Journal, the Editorial Board has undertaken a study of the representation of female scholars in the Journal of Roman Studies. To that end, we have gathered data on publications, submissions and JRS Editorial Board membership for the past fifteen years, from Volume 95 (2005) through to the present volume, Volume 109 (2019). The data are set out in the final section (VII), following a brief review of the main results. Our goal here is neither to present a definitive analysis, nor to offer a commentary on the underlying causes of the patterns revealed (on which we expect much fruitful discussion elsewhere). Rather, the JRS Editorial Board aims to make key data available both to inform a much wider debate within the profession as a whole and, importantly, to inform this Journal’s policies, procedures and active outreach. The Board is also acutely aware that any analysis of gender bias needs to be framed carefully — both by an awareness that there are other under-represented groups in the discipline (on which our data in their current form would regrettably only offer a most imperfect picture), and by a sensitivity to the limitations of a conception of gender as a simple binary.

How did the Romans do philology? Think in terms of the Latin language, and Varro's De lingua Latina, Caesar's De analogia, or Quintilian's chapters on grammar might come to mind. Think of commentary on texts, and names like Servius, Asconius, and Porphyrio won't be far away. But few of us, it's probably fair to say, could claim a deep acquaintance with all of those, and still fewer have acquired much sense of the broader picture – and it is broad – of ancient scholarship in and on Latin. Cue James Zetzel's Critics, Compilers, and Commentators, a massive and remarkable study of Roman philology from antiquity into the early Middle Ages.