When I sent my editor the first draft of my manuscript for Not All Dead White Men, she responded the next day telling me that it wasn't quite ready to send to readers for peer review. She asked me to first go through, do a search for the word ‘toxic’, and then replace at least half of its instances. Or, alternatively, she suggested that I could dedicate some space to interrogating how I was using the word and what a heavily loaded term like ‘toxic masculinity’ meant to me in the context of the manosphere – or Ovid, for that matter. What were the stakes of viewing classical antiquity and its reception in male-dominated spaces through the lens of such a fraught concept, one that is so often debated, dismissed and misrepresented? The exploration of what toxic masculinity meant in the context of the study and reception of ancient Greece and Rome seemed too complex for a paragraph or a footnote – it deserved its own, in-depth study. It seemed easier to think of a handful of synonyms and go with the find-and-replace option instead.

The essays in this volume take the time to explore the topic with the nuance it deserves. When I was studying the manosphere, I saw how flawed and oversimplified their conceptualisation of ancient masculinity was: Sparta and Rome, in particular, are seen by far-right online communities as a time when men were ‘really’ men, not the beta cuck white knights they are now. The scholars who have contributed to this volume have done us a great service in exploring the edge cases that show how difficult it was for men in antiquity to stay within the rigid confines of normative, hegemonic masculinity. Often, men risked going too far or not far enough in their gender performance and being seen as brutes or weaklings.

Unfortunately, fact-checking and scholarship won't have much of an impact in the communities where toxic masculinity thrives and is valorised. Even the term ‘toxic masculinity’ itself is derided there and misunderstood as an argument that all men, always, are toxic.