This book – which is free to access through the publishers’ website as an open access title – is appropriately small but (like many small things) punches well above its diminutive weight in terms of sharpness of focus and its panoramic range of reference.

The first chapter (‘The Good of Small Things’) outlines the topic, offering both general statements – what seems trivial may be highly significant, and so on – and abundant examples of the ways in which literature and art make use of the small realia of life to evoke authenticity and also pathos. This is a device as old as Homer – whose homely similes can reduce the god Hermes down to the size of a familiar seabird (Odyssey 5.51-4) – but it is not confined to literature. Pliny the Elder’s wonderful catalogue of random deaths (HN 7.180-185) proves that the most significant moment in one’s life may well occur when something mindlessly unimportant is going on, such as putting on shoes or taking a bath. Similarly, Aristophanes’ hiccups in Plato’s Symposium and that hunting scar in Homer’s Odyssey are both unimportant in themselves but accumulate significance and threaten to overturn the whole text with a ‘domino effect’ (p. 32). A pinprick can be the moment in time in which your whole world changes if (say) it is the insect bite which (allegedly) caused the death of the composer Scriabin. Ignore the small at your peril – as anyone who has spent the night with a mosquito can attest (p. 73).

Chapter two looks at ‘Sallust’s salient snails’ – ‘marginal yet blatant’ creatures who change everything. In the Jugurthine War, it is snails which lead the hungry Ligurian scout – who is out looking for water but who has a penchant for escargots – to find the twisted tree which leads to the fortress. Gowers brilliantly uses this serendipitous incident (‘what happens when gastronome meets gastropod’, p. 41) as a peg on which to hang some very revealing readings of Sallust, of snails, ancient life, and history in general. The following chapter (‘Brief Lives – the Case of Crispus’) looks at a man who was a ‘spectator of events, not a maker of them’ (p. 56) and who (despite being named Crispus) made few waves on the water of the historical record. This is surprising. He was hugely wealthy and a good orator: he was diplomatic to the testy Tiberius, and he foiled the ‘informal fallacy’ (‘have you had sex with your sister, as the emperor did with his?’) with a cleverly non-committal ‘not yet’ (nondum). The anecdotal quip says a lot in a brief compass, rather like the thumbnail sketches which evoke lives while describing deaths in epic (e.g. Homer Iliad 5. 541–553, 20.381–91, Virgil Aeneid 10.562–4). Crispus had the misfortune to marry Agrippina, who was Nero’s mother and Calilgula’s sister as well as being his former sister-in-law, in a family tree which Gowers admits is ‘exhausting to disentangle’ (p. 62) but which makes for entertaining reading into that nondum. Crispus generates other anecdotes: of dendrophilia (Pliny NH 16.242), of a half-opened door as an image of how to approach flattery, of a family lawsuit between his wealthy wife and brother-in-law over money neither of them needed. When Caligula was attending Tiberius on Capri, Crispus said there was never a better slave or a worse master, but he became the attendant to Caligula, who became the worse master to Rome. In Gowers’ excellent handling, nondum is the story of his life; ‘not yet or not quite…a shadow and a stooge’ (p. 70).

Chapter four looks at ‘Tiny Irritants’: those thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to which make life absurdly painful, like thorns in the flesh in Theocritus (4.55). Small things can really hurt our bodies – Seneca knows how torture works (Epistles 24.14) – and wreck our relationships with the ‘pinching shoe’ of annoying spousal habits. They can also be funny: so when the Musca brothers are brushed away like flies (muscas: Cicero De Oratore 2.247), we have an ancient precedent for Michael Heseltine telling us that Ed Balls was talking balls. People who are objectionable are described as tiny irritants but given a ‘heavy’ soubriquet: so, the girl who gets the better of the poet in Catullus 10 is molesta (from moles (‘heavy weight’ or ‘mass’)) as is Horace’s pest in Satires 1.9. Minor health concerns can (and do) wreck our lives, and Gowers splendidly dissects the use of eye troubles as both a symptom and a metaphor (p.88). Cicero’s letters deal with the political molestiae but home in on his chronic lippitudo which irritates (and irrigates) his eyes and so which ‘might mimic (or cover up) the signs of true emotion’. The chapter ends with the stone in the shoe – that pinching marital shoe again – but concludes wisely that Cicero (like other politicians then and now) was ‘perhaps never entirely comfortable in his own skin’ (p. 95).

The final chapter looks at the diminutive in language, literature and life, drawing together some of the themes in this wide-ranging book: ‘minor feelings and discomforts; small things as portable extensions of the human body; not-yetness and not-quiteness; precise calibration; and striving towards points’ (p. 96). ‘Useless-seeming’ diminutive forms of nouns, names, and adjectives turn out to have many uses which Gowers expertly unpacks. They are used both for sentimental reasons – think of Cicero’s Tulliola mea for his daughter Tullia – and also to show withering contempt for people who deserve it. Cicero used them as put-downs (pp. 115–9) when belittling philosophical opponents such as the ‘tough little man’ (forticulus) Epicurus who talks about ‘little bodies’ (corpuscula) when he means atoms, or when mocking his political rivals as in the case of Pulchellus noster Clodius. Virgil showed in his use of language that small pests such as weevils can be big problems for the farmer: Cicero affects to do the reverse, with variable results.

The book is small but (almost) perfectly formed: I noticed a few tiny irritant errors but none which spoiled the argument or the interest. There are 24 images (both monochrome and colour), 13 pages of bibliography, and a general index. All Latin and Greek is translated into clear English, and the book is written in Gowers’ characteristically engaging and witty style which makes reading it a pleasure as well as an education. I would envisage it being available in sixth-form libraries as perfect extension material for students of Classics, and the link to this open access title could well be sent to them for download.