The first title in this issue's batch of classical reception publications sees Lucy Pollard take us on an engaging and colourful tour of early modern travellers' experiences in Greece and the Levant.Footnote ¹ This area of scholarship is well trodden, and many readers will be familiar with David Constantine's Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal (1984); but Pollard brings new material to bear by her extensive use of the unpublished diaries of John Covel, the Cambridge scholar and minister who served as chaplain to the Levant Company in Constantinople in the 1670s. These are supplemented with accounts of other seventeenth-century travellers such as George Wheler and Paul Rycaut. Successive chapters cover the logistics of travel, scholarly and archaeological approaches, and perceptions of Greeks and Turks. Pollard tends to let her sources speak for themselves; her arguments about the emergence of a ‘proto-archaeological’ approach to antiquities in the last third of the century, about the importance of perceived religious affinities between Anglican travellers and Orthodox Greeks, and about admiration of the Ottomans as a model for empire are interesting, but made with a light touch. Above all, this provides us with a richly detailed survey of the experiences, challenges, and preoccupations of early modern Englishmen travelling east.

Equally meticulous, and equally successful in bringing a fresh approach to familiar territory, is Damian Valdez's study of German philhellenism in the ages of Winckelmann, Herder, Schiller, and Goethe.Footnote ² German philhellenism is often analysed within a teleological framework, as an outgrowth of romantic irrationalism with catastrophic consequences for twentieth-century history. Valdez's approach is different: by returning to the mid-eighteenth century and concentrating on ‘juxtapositions that allow us to understand the intellectual contexts and problems within which philhellenic ideals were articulated’ (1), he manages to defamiliarize the story of philhellenism's origins, while also making greater sense of some of the priorities and preoccupations of its founder figures. His approach is textualist, but he brings into the discussion a wide range of better and less well-known writers, and his close attention to questions of genre and interlocutor pays dividends. One example: his point that, in the absence of established conventions of social history writing, eighteenth-century accounts of Greek mores were conceived and received as Sittengeschichte, a form of history which encompasses ‘the intimate connection between private customs and political history, between social life and the character and development of the state’ (59), helps elucidate why debates over the causes of the greatness or the decadence of Romans or Greeks appeared so urgent and important, with antiquity held up as a mirror to the contemporary world. Even those classicists without a particular interest in the history of philhellenism may find interest in Valdez's archaeologies of debates over the position of Athenian women and the nature of Greek male friendship. There are a few typographical errors and some inconsistencies in the transliteration of Greek names, but these should not be allowed to detract from a serious contribution to the intellectual history of classical scholarship which repays careful reading.

Another synthetic treatment of a sweep of reception history is Gideon Nisbet's Greek Epigram in Reception.Footnote ³ Despite its title, this work does not offer an overall account of the Greek Anthology's reception from the early seventeenth-century ‘discovery’ of the Palatine exemplar (though such a discussion is very much needed). Its focus falls squarely on Anglophone receptions and, within those on translations, from Bland and Merivale's ‘Miscellanies’ of 1806 to the selections of Walter Leaf, Shane Leslie, and others in the 1920s. Nisbet tells this story in order to illustrate a larger thesis about the dynamics of classical canon formation and the social and political factors behind the policing of the boundaries of the classical in the long nineteenth century. While the sheer size and unwieldiness of the Anthology lent itself to further anthologizing, the competition of its varying versions and authors (Cephalas versus Planudes, Meleager versus Straton) for authority, and the presence of pederastic material which might be viewed with enthusiasm or horror, depending on the reader's inclinations, made it a significant theatre of operations within the contest between those who wished to maintain Hellas as a place of purity and light, the Victorians' ancestral home, and decadent voices such as J. A. Symonds and Oscar Wilde. Nisbet offers a series of close readings of selection, translation, and publication strategies which show, in lengthy (sometimes vertiginous) detail, how the Anthology served both dissident and counter-revolutionary readings of classical Greece. The discussion is often knotty and entangled, and many footnotes could have been trimmed. But for those willing to stay the course it offers a thought-provoking case study of the role of classical material in the cultural tensions of the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

We come next to two studies of (and, in one case, by) poets. Amanda Wrigley and Stephen Harrison have edited a collection of Louis MacNeice's classical radio scripts from his two decades as a writer and producer in the BBC Features Department.Footnote ⁴ Eleven scripts are included, ranging from the propagandist ‘March of the 10,000’ and ‘The Glory that is Greece’ of 1941 to lighter-hearted treatments from Apuleius and the Aristophanic Enemy of Cant. Full archival references, information on the original transmissions, and (where available) evidence from listener-response surveys are given in the brief introduction to each. The editors also include brief explanatory notes aimed at non-classical readers, Wrigley's general introduction places their selection within an overall account of MacNeice's activity during the 1940s and 1950s, and the Appendix gives a full list of extant scripts and recordings of MacNeice's BBC work. In the case of a collection such as this one always wonders what principles have governed the selection: Wrigley suggests that the plays included give ‘a representative range of MacNeice's various creative engagements with the history and literature of Greece and Rome and his use of classical antiquity to comment on the contemporary international situation during the Second World War’ (1). But the volume also makes a case for the radio play as a significant literary genre within its own right, for MacNeice's importance in developing that genre, and for the quality of MacNeice's radio writing by comparison with his better-known, published poetic work. One could wish that Wrigley and Harrison had included more scripts in their volume, in particular more of the wartime efforts that Wrigley mentions in her introduction. A selection cannot, of course, be comprehensive, and this volume will fulfil its aim of providing a useful starting point for those wishing to research MacNeice's radio oeuvre further.

Josephine Balmer's Piecing Together the Fragments is a treat.Footnote ⁵ Balmer is a scholar-poet who will be known to classicists through her translations of Sappho, ‘classical women poets’, and Catullus, as well as for the more recent collections inspired by ancient verse (Chasing Catullus [2004] and The Word for Sorrow [2009]). This book, which is based on a PhD thesis in creative writing, comprises a brief history of classical literary translation from antiquity to the present, followed by chapters offering reflective accounts of Balmer's practice in composing her previously published collections. It is these that are the most interesting, giving us a peek inside the workshop of a distinguished literary practitioner of our time. But they contain much more besides: Balmer's discussion offers, inter alia, a succinct account of the development of feminist approaches within Classics since the 1970s and an extended argument for considering translation a mode of scholarship which exists in a two-way, interactive relationship with other forms of scholarly and linguistic interpretation, not as the second-best that it is often held to be by translators and classicists alike. Ever attentive to the personal voice as well as to the state of the discipline, Balmer reflects on the balance between fidelity and fluidity as they affect the translator's work. This book has relevance beyond translation studies and classical reception studies; classicists in general will benefit from reading her analysis and perhaps applying similar self-reflection to their own work.

From contemporary poetry to contemporary novels, Tessa Roynon's lucid and beautifully written account of Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition Footnote ⁶ offers a fresh perspective on a celebrated author whose engagement with classical material is perhaps not widely known. One of the joys of classical reception studies lies in its potential to illuminate the unexpected connections between past and present in such a way that our understanding of both is enriched, and Roynon's analysis certainly achieves this. The central chapters each address a key moment in American history, from the founding of the nation through to the civil rights movement, exploring how Morrison's novels of each era use the classical tradition to assess and reconfigure those moments. To take just one illustrative example, Beloved, Morrison's widely acclaimed novel about slavery, is shown to engage with the paradigms of tragedy on multiple levels, particularly in its depiction of Sethe, whose infanticide recalls that of Niobe and Medea. Roynon argues that Morrison's intention is to redirect our focus on the Old South's reliance on the classical tradition (and the subsequent mythologization of the Civil War) in order to show that ‘the tragedy and tragic heroism in Southern history belongs not to the Confederacy but to African American culture’ (24). In the process, this book makes a valuable contribution to various strands of discourse within reception study. It speaks to the classical tradition's potential for protest, its slipperiness and ambiguity (for, as Roynon acknowledges from the outset, Morrison herself is not given to declaring her debt to classical material openly), and to the flourishing debates over ‘black classicism’.

Studies of cinematic depictions of antiquity have always been prominent within classical reception publications, ever since Maria Wyke's landmark 1997 publication, Projecting the Past. Ancient Rome, Cinema and History. While it seemed as though Rome was hogging the limelight for a long time, thanks to its dominance of the silver screen in the mid-twentieth century, more recent productions and publications have considerably redressed the balance. Not only has Greece regularly caught the eye of twenty-first-century filmmakers (with Troy, 300, and Clash of the Titans, for example), but scholars too have given cinematic Greece the attention that it deserves. Pantelis Michelakis is well established as an authority on cinematic depictions of Greek tragedy, through a number of articles, and his monograph on Greek Tragedy on Screen now provides a welcome opportunity to explore this complex and intriguing body of films at length.Footnote ⁷ Michelakis subjects a range of films, from early silents to the work of Cacoyannis, from Pasolini to Woody Allen, to close and careful analysis, under a succession of thematic headings, including ‘adaptation’, ‘media’, ‘genre’, and ‘time’. This gives some indication of the book's approach. Although it is certainly interested in the question of the changing receptions of Greek tragedy in the modern world, it is also deeply engaged in exploring how Greek tragedy can be used by filmmakers, viewers, and critics in order to think about cinema's own practices. Or, as Michelakis puts it, Greek tragedy on screen ‘deserve[s] close scrutiny because [it reveals] assumptions about the form, content, and status of both Greek tragedy and cinema as art forms’ (8). His close-reading methodologies therefore give as much space to the visual dimensions of these adaptations as to their narrative characteristics, and make as much use of the language and theories of film criticism as they do of classical literary criticism. This is as it should be. Studies of cinematic classical reception have often been guilty of insufficient engagement with the approaches of the ‘partner’ discipline, but this charge cannot be levelled at Michelakis. Consequently, this book can be dense in its argument and not always easy to follow for the film studies novice – but it will certainly repay the reader's effort in demonstrating just how important the combined study of Classics and cinema remains.

Also turning its attention to the depiction of ancient Greece on screen is the edited collection Ancient Greek Women in Film.Footnote ⁸ There is some overlap with Michelakis' book, with a few chapters on tragic women such as Medea (in both Pasolini and von Trier, as well as in the 1963 Jason and the Argonauts) and Cacoyannis' Iphigeneia, but it also gives space to other mythological characters, particularly Helen and Penelope (with two chapters on each), and some of the historical women who have populated more recent films, including Alexander's Olympias and 300's Gorgo. In terms of its content, the collection is a coherent one, although a diversity of approaches to this content is in evidence. The introduction outlines how the collection situates itself within classical reception studies more broadly, but, on this score, it is fairly predictable in its ambitions (noting, for example, the adaptability of the depiction of these women, according to different parameters and contexts). More striking is its alignment with debates in gender studies, and it is the chapters which most explicitly engage with those debates that make the most impact, and ensure that parts of this collection will be useful to a broader range of readers. It is fairly easy to account for the mutability of these Greek women in the modern world, but it is much more interesting to address the ways in which many of these films have made a project of marginalizing these women, especially when their ancient narratives would seem to tell a very different story. Two notable essays in this regard are Kirk Ormand's account of the laughably passive portrayal of Medea in the 1963 Jason, which (almost) entirely suppresses her ‘deadly potential’ (76), and Edith Hall's entertainingly indignant survey of recent ‘Odyssean’ films which fail to give Penelope the prominence (or indeed agency) that she is granted in Homer.

A much more diverse array of essays is collected in Seduction and Power. Antiquity in the Visual and Performing Arts,Footnote ⁹ the second major publication from the Imagines classical reception project (www.imagines-project.org). By taking ‘power and seduction’ (and particularly the ways in which seduction can be understood as an instrument of power) as a unifying theme, it shares some concerns with Ancient Greek Women in Film, although there is little actual overlap. In addition to some predictable coverage of figures such as Cleopatra and Helen, the volume ranges widely, covering topics as varied as the reception of Agrippina the Younger, nineteenth-century depictions of hermaphrodites, and T. S. Eliot's play The Cocktail Party. This diversity is the main strength of the volume. The reader will almost certainly delight in at least one or two unexpected and intriguing discussions among its contents, and the editors are to be commended for giving space to aspects of the visual and performing arts which are still sometimes at the margins of classical reception studies. In Nicoletta Momigliano's ‘Modern Dance and the Seduction of Minoan Crete’, for example, it is refreshing to find discussion not only of dance, an art form which is only just beginning to receive the attention it deserves in classical reception circles, but also of the particular appeal of a civilization outside the ‘classical’ mainstream. Filippo Carlà's chapter on Theodora is a welcome excursion into the reception of late antiquity, while the prevalence of case studies on subjects from continental Europe (provided by the international line-up of scholars that populate the Imagines project) is also to be applauded. This diversity inevitably weakens the intellectual coherence of the volume, however. ‘Seduction and power’ allows enough room for each contributor to take rather different paths, and while Silke Knippschild attempts to draw the threads together in a closing chapter, she has to labour rather hard to do so. This chapter also suggests something of a missed opportunity, for, although Knippschild briefly discusses the idea that places and cultures can be as seductive as people or abstract concepts such as beauty, she does not confront the idea that surely lurks beneath her argument, which is that ‘seduction and power’ must also be a trope of the process of reception itself. But while this collection stops just short of being more than the sum of its parts, it will nevertheless exert its own kind of seduction on the reader.