¹ For a recent sharp and relevant attack on the ‘biographical fallacy’, cf. de Vries, J. G., Mnemosyne 36 (1983), 249 Google Scholar: ‘These tendencies’ 〈i.e. to treat literature as autobiography〉 ‘are objectionable when they appear in the explanation of individual passages or works; they become perverse, when dominating in a history of literature, which then (at best!) will degenerate into a series of biographies.’

² It is perhaps even more worrying in a ‘critical survey’ to find the author advancing without citation of source an excellent interpretation by someone else: cf. p. 58 n. 20 ad fin., where the credit should have been given to Lee (1975) on Tib. 1.3.77.