‘Classics, is, to me, the unicycle of education. It isn't especially practical or useful… It won't get you a well-paid job in a fancy office, and it won't necessarily make you attractive to the opposite sex… But none of that is important compared with the simple fact that studying Classics is brilliant’ (253). So says comedian (and former Cambridge classicist) Natalie Haynes on her own one-wheeled whistle-stop tour of the classical world: The Ancient Guide to Modern Life.Footnote ¹ Haynes is an intelligent guide with a real passion for the Classics and a great sense of humour. The index gives a good indication of what to expect: The Office can be found next to Xenophon's Oeconomicus, Dead Poets Society next to Tertullian's De Spectaculis, and Barbra Streisand sandwiched between Stoicism and Suetonius. Chapter titles are inevitably playful: from ‘Thinking Allowed’ to ‘Frankly, Medea I Don't Give a Damn’ and the inevitable ‘There's No Place Like Rome’. But this is not just a book played for laughs: Haynes's discussion of Aristophanes (199–209) is keen to emphasize that entertainment and education, comedy and Classics are not mutually exclusive categories: as she shows, is it possible both to amuse and advise.

To judge by its Monty-Pythonesque subtitle (‘What Have the Greeks and Romans Done for Us?’), The Long Shadow of Antiquity by G. and A. Aldrete would seem to belong to the same genre of ‘Class-com’ as Hayne's Ancient Guide.Footnote ² What is more, the introduction promises ‘an entertaining journey through the institutions, artifacts, rituals, and structures that make up our modern culture’ (x). Certainly this book contains much interesting information (discussion of Founding Fathers, quarters, and Republicans and Democrats gives a hint at the target audience) but the balance between didacticism and entertainment is not always well maintained. The introduction concludes on a somewhat earnest note: ‘In this book, let us consider some of the ways in which our Greek and Roman “parents” gave birth to the world we live in today’ (xi). The book is divided into seven chapters, focusing variously on ‘Food and Shelter’ (1–42), ‘The Family and the Journey of Life’ (43–88), and ‘Language, Law, Philosophy, and Literature’ (267–320). Pictures help to leaven the dough but, all too often, the quality of the images is disappointing: the erotic scene on a drinking vessel is (doubly) murky (fig. 2.5), while the stadium at Olympia looks more like a lake than a running track (fig. 3.4).

Homeric Greek. A Book for Beginners, first published nearly a century ago, is now in its fourth revised edition.Footnote ³ It is a book written and revised with the North American market in view, and is unlikely to generate much interest with teachers and students on this side of the Atlantic because, as mentioned in earlier reviews, the American system for displaying declensions of nouns and adjectives (Nom., Gen., Dat., Acc.) conflicts with the ‘British’ system (Nom., Acc., Gen., Dat.). Notwithstanding this observation, Homeric Greek does offer a rigorous and clearly presented introduction to the Iliad. Over the course of seventy-seven lessons, the student is taken through the first book of the Iliad (with additional exercises in translation both from Homeric Greek into English and – for the more adventurous – English into Homeric Greek). Detailed grammatical help and vocabulary lists are supplemented by brief but insightful notes on the narrative, with a strong linguistic focus. For example, at Iliad 1.193 ff. we read that ‘The imperfects in the first two verses make the description strikingly vivid, while the abrupt action of the two following aorists are well adapted to introduce Athena suddenly and dramatically’ (198).

Released at the same time, and clearly intended as a companion volume to Homeric Greek, is an expanded edition of R. J. Cunliffe's A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect (first published in 1924).Footnote ⁴ It is similar in form and feel to Autenrieth's Homeric Dictionary first published in 1877, but, although it lacks the illustrations of looms and spears that are such a feature of the Autenrieth, it provides more comprehensive coverage of the use of specific words. The main advantage of Autenrieth was that names and places were integrated into the Dictionary, whereas Cunliffe's Lexicon did not include them. The recent expansion has now remedied this shortfall: a forty-two-page supplement of proper names and place names, written by the original author but excluded from the first edition on grounds of cost, can now be found at the end of the volume. This is a useful addition. What is most remarkable is that in this age of iPads and smart phones there is still clearly a market for books that were first published almost a century ago.

For Writing. Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization by B. B. Powell, Greek is not a starting point but an end point: the penultimate chapter is entitled ‘The Greek Alphabet: A Writing that Changed the World’ (227–44).Footnote ⁵ It begins with a trenchant and absorbing discussion about the difficulties in writing about the theory and history of writing (‘Introduction: A Difficult Topic, Little Studied, Poorly Understood’, 1–10). Its eighteen chapters take one on an extraordinary journey from protocuneiform to the Greek alphabet via Egyptian hieroglyphs, the West Semitic Revolution, and lexigraphic writing from Mesoamerica. This is a well-illustrated book, with a helpful glossary of terms and an excellent guide to further reading, but reader beware, this is no coffee-table read. Consider the following: ‘In sum, the ambiguous correspondence of language and speech afflicts all such studies as this one, because speech, sometimes called “spoken language,” certainly is a language, but not all language is speech’ (8). Though this may seem off-putting to some, the journey is well worth the effort. As Powell stirringly relates: ‘Writing is magical, mysterious, aggressive, dangerous, not to be trifled with. Although it takes many forms, it is always a technology of explosive force, a cultural artifact based not in nature (whose rules we did not create) but sprung from the human mind’ (11).

Ancient Historians. A Student Handbook by Susan Sorek gives us exactly what it says on the tin.Footnote ⁶ This is not an intellectually ambitious book (the bibliography is particularly thin), but it offers an accessible starting point for anyone interested in learning about Greek and Roman historiography – of particular interest, perhaps, to sixth-formers and first-year undergraduates. The importance of history as a discipline is brought out in the Introduction, which discusses the relevance of ancient history and the difference between ancient and modern historiography. Readers will find brief but clear introductions to the historical contributions of all the usual suspects. At the same time, some space is given to some less familiar names both from early Greek history and from the Later Roman Empire. All quotations are in translation, making the book particularly useful to those without Latin and Greek.

Anyone who ever has ever picked up an old Loeb Catullus, or had recourse to Fordyce's Oxford commentary, may well have noticed the curious gaps in both text and translation – an act of editorial ‘discretion’ designed to remove the ‘rude bits’ from Catullus’ poems, which in fact saw generations of schoolboys clamouring all the more enthusiastically to discover what they were missing. Expurgating the Classics. Editing Out in Greek and Latin, edited by Stephen Harrison and Christopher Stray (with contributions by Ewen Bowie, David Butterfield, Gail Trimble, Ian Ruffell, James Morwood and Deborah Roberts),Footnote ⁷ gives us a welcome and fascinating window onto the dilemmas and strategies of earlier generations of editors and translators from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries when faced with ‘obscenity’. As this book reveals, Catullus was not the only source of editorial embarrassment – Horace suffered in a similar way, along with Aristophanes and a significant number of poems from the Greek Anthology. In addition to covering individual authors, the volume also focuses on strategies of translation in both the Penguin Classics and the Loeb series (including a table summarizing the contents of ten poems from the Greek Anthology in commendably robust terms).

Exploring Greek Myth by Matthew Clark sets out to fill a gap in the student market between general introductory textbooks and more advanced scholarly publications.Footnote ⁸ It does not seek to advance a unified ‘theory’ about mythology but gives readers the chance to consider the meanings of myth from a number of different perspectives. Each of the chapters is based around a particular theme or question and is illustrated with detailed discussions of specific myths or parts of myths. For example, Chapter 5 (‘Ikaros’ Wings, Aktaion's Dogs: Myth and Meaning’, 54–67) uses the tragic stories of Actaion and Icarus to illustrate the way in which myth is not limited to a single interpretation but has the ‘potential to take on various meanings, depending on the purposes of the teller and the telling’ (54). Shakespeare gives a perfect example of the malleability of myth: Richard, Duke of York, uses the story of Icarus in order to attack Henry VI for encouraging his son's foolish ambition; but Henry VI turns the mythical tables on Richard and presents Richard as King Minos – the villain of the piece. Unlike Icarus, Clark manages to steer a good middle course, between the watery depths of general introductions and the blazing heights of scholarship – though (a small point) he sometimes gets his wings wet with the ‘further exploration’ boxes (‘pick a character from Greek myth and write an essay’, 66).

Since the pioneering work of Walter Burkert, J.-P. Vernant, and Marcel Detienne in the 1970s, it has become almost axiomatic to talk about the centrality of animal sacrifice to Greek and Roman religion. Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice, edited by Christopher. A. Faraone and F. S. Naiden, presents a collection of essays that seeks to challenge this prevalent view through a reconsideration of the positions set out by Burkert (in his Homo Necans of 1972) and Vernant and Detienne (in their La cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec of 1979).Footnote ⁹ As described in the Introduction, the difference between these two positions can be characterized as follows: ‘For Burkert, animal sacrifice was a tragic deception; for the two French scholars, it was a comedy of errors. Where Burkert saw violence, they saw the minimization of violence’ (2). In a rare discussion between Vernant and Burkert, Vernant declared: ‘Sacrificer, c'est fondamentalement tuer pour manger. Mais, dans cette formule, vous mettez l'accent plutôt sur tuer; moi, sur manger’ (‘The act of sacrifice is in essence killing in order to eat. But in this formulation, you put the emphasis more on the killing; I on the eating’; 32–3). This stimulating collection reconsiders the theoretical foundation for these positions and re-examines the historical, visual, and literary evidence. The theoretical position of Vernant and Detienne (who acknowledged from the start the difficulties inherent in the notion of ‘sacrifice’) fares better than that of Burkert, but, as the Afterword describes, ‘the great theories of sacrifice advanced a generation ago’ no longer ‘retain cogency in themselves’ and, at least for the scholars in this volume, it is no longer agreed ‘that the ritual killing of animals is the central act of Greek and Roman religious life’ (195).