The cinematic and televisual reception of the ancient world remains one of the most active strands of classical reception study, so a new addition to the Wiley-Blackwell Companions series focusing on Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen Footnote ¹ is sure to be of use to students and scholars alike (especially given how often ‘Classics and Film’ courses are offered as a reception component of an undergraduate Classical Studies programme). The editor, Arthur Pomeroy, himself a respected and prolific ‘early adopter’ of this branch of scholarship, has assembled many of the leading names in cinematic reception studies (including Maria Wyke, Pantelis Michelakis, Alastair Blanshard, and Monica Cyrino), alongside a good number of more junior colleagues, resulting in a varied and rewarding compendium that will provide a useful accompaniment to more detailed explorations of this field. (Some, though not all, chapters offer further reading suggestions, and most are pitched at an accessible level.) The twenty-three contributions span the ‘canonical’ and already widely treated aspects of screen reception, from 1950s Hollywood epics to adaptations of Greek tragedy, as well as ranging across material which has only more recently began to attract the attention it deserves, such as TV documentary, or adaptations for younger audiences. The volume is not as easily navigable as it might be, with the four-part division of the chapters sometimes seeming a little arbitrary. (So, for example, a chapter which discusses ‘The Return of the Genre’ in films like Gladiator appears under the heading ‘Comedy, Drama, and Adaptation’, when it might have been better placed in the first section, on ‘The Development of the Depiction of Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen’.) But rich discussions are not hard to find, especially in those chapters which show how cinematic receptions are indicators of more widely felt concerns relating to our reception of the past, as in Blanshard's assessment of ‘High Art and Low Art Expectations: Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture’. Michelakis’ chapter on the early days of cinema is also a valuable distillation of some of his recent work on silent film, crisply and concisely setting out the plurality of approaches that must inform our understanding of the cinematic medium (for example, spectatorship, colour, and relationships to other media). More broadly, the collection makes a solid and welcome attempt to put this pluralism into practice, with Pomeroy stressing ‘the complexity of understanding film’ early in his introduction (3). Chapters focusing on music, and costumes, for example, allow us to see productions ‘in the round’, a panoptical perspective which is still too readily avoided by much classical reception scholarship. (It is also good to see at least one chapter which ranges beyond screen media in the West.) Other vital areas of film and TV studies could arguably have received more attention. Some contributors touch on the importance of assessing audience receptions of these films, or the impact of marketing and other industrial considerations (such as screening practices), but more chapters dedicated to these approaches might have been a more sustained reminder to readers of just how widely screen scholarship can (and often needs to) range. To that end, a particularly significant chapter in the book – one of only 3 by non-Classicists – is Harriet Margolis’ account of how film historians might evaluate ancient world film. Newcomers to this field should pay particular attention to this, and to Pomeroy's introductory comments on how we should regard film as much more than a quasi-literary medium.

Elsewhere in the world of ‘companions’, Brill's wide-ranging series of Companions to Classical Reception continues to grow, with recent and forthcoming edited volumes examining the reception of key authors (Plato, Plutarch, Aeschylus), genres (ancient epic), historical figures, and themes (Alexander the Great and Athenian democracy). Helen Roche and Kyriakos N. Demetriou's contribution to the series focuses on classical receptions under the twentieth-century fascist regimes of Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany.Footnote ² The study offers an insight into the wealth of possible approaches to reception which are used by Classicists, ranging across classicizing architecture and visual imagery, political rhetoric, public spectacle, and cinematic reworkings of ancient ideas, as well as discussions of classical pedagogy and scholarship. As Helen Roche explains in her introductory chapter, bringing together an examination of Italian Fascism's manipulation of ancient sources and ideas with a consideration of National Socialist appropriation of the classical past offers an opportunity to compare and contrast these two distinct yet contemporaneous and ideologically similar regimes; the case studies highlight the many interconnected ways in which Nazi and Fascist propaganda deployed Greek and Roman themes to (re)create national identity and legitimize political power. After Roche's introductory chapter the book is divided into three sections: ‘People’, which combines chapters looking at wider notions of national identity and its perceived relationship to Greek and Roman predecessors (this reader appreciated in particular Felix Wiedemann's careful exposition of the ways in which classical philology and historiography during this period bolstered the ‘Aryan myth’) with those focusing on individuals’ contributions to, and reactions against, fascist ideology (Dino Piovan's chapter ‘Ancient Historians and Fascism’ reminds us that scholarship itself is a form of reception which can both respond to, and shape, contemporary politics); ‘Ideas’, with contributions examining cultural, political, and pedagogical appropriations of antiquity (including, among others, two chapters considering receptions of Plato, along with Arthur J. Pomeroy's enlightening discussion of mass communication through cinema and Joshua Arthurs’ piece on the 1937–8 celebrations in Rome of the bimillenary of Augustus’ birth); and ‘Places’, in which contributors consider the manipulation of civic space, classicizing architecture, and the re-appropriation of classical archaeology. In this final section, Flavia Marcello's two complementary chapters, one examining civic architecture across Italy and the other focusing closely on the built environment of Rome under Mussolini, particularly stand out. While some chapters consider Italian and German examples side by side (as, for example, in James J. Fortuna's piece, which takes as its starting point Hitler's 1938 visit to Rome under Mussolini), elsewhere the reader is left to discern the parallels and points of contrast for herself; despite the recurring presence of particular themes and sources, few individual authors take the opportunity to highlight the connections between their work and those of others in the volume. Nonetheless, this collection offers an excellent series of insights into the manifold ways in which these two regimes interacted with and recast the classical past. At a time when, in some circles, problematic readings of the ancient world are once again being used to support hateful politics and racist ideologies,Footnote ³ this volume feels particularly timely.

With David A. Lupher's Greeks, Romans and Pilgrims,Footnote ⁴ we are transported to a very different geographical setting and chronological era. This volume examines the ways in which, during the seventeenth century, the earliest British settlers in New England made use of classical models. While the scholarly literature on this period and its key individuals is, as the author acknowledges, substantial, this is the first treatment which specifically focuses on the reception of ancient Greek and Roman history and literature at the time. Lupher's project is the result of painstaking research and looks in detail at a body of evidence which ranges from archival material (including personal letters and notebook jottings) to pamphlets, essays, and poetry written by the settlers. The author seeks in particular to examine the hitherto underexplored humanistic interests of the Puritan Separatists who founded Plymouth Plantation (with attention given especially to the writings of its governor, William Bradford); he challenges along the way the scathing assertions of their detractor Thomas Morton, founder of Ma-re Mount (Merrymount), that the inhabitants of Plymouth Plantation were ignorant and uneducated. Populated with a cast of colourful characters, the book is as intriguing for the insight which it offers into the social and political lives of the early settlers as it is for its examination of the uses to which they put classical models. Beginning with an examination of the ways in which classical ideas were used to inspire colonial settlement, it moves into consideration of the settlers’ self-fashioning through the use of allusions to ancient authors (focusing particularly on Morton, whose three-book New English Canaan – a detailed autobiographical account of the settlement of New England – is given close attention, and the autodidact Bradford, as seen in his Of Plimmouth Plantation and other writings). While much of this work relies on identifying and analysing specific written references to ancient themes, Lupher's approach also involves a fascinating discussion of the contents of the personal libraries of the settlers. Using the astonishingly detailed evidence of their probate papers he is able to identify with extraordinary precision some of the books from which they derived their ideas, and to trace the paths of influence by which classical allusions – sometimes confused, misremembered, or deliberately distorted – found their way into their published works. It becomes clear that often these men were working not with ancient primary texts but with the various types of secondary material to which they had access – works in translation and popular publications. What emerges here is a unique case study in the transmission of texts and ideas which illustrates some of the ways in which classical motifs percolate over time into reception texts, mediated by the versions and translations to which individuals have access at a given cultural and political moment.

The subject of the next volume might seem to occupy a position at the opposite end of a moral and cultural spectrum, as we move from Puritan settlers to the provocative wit and wisdom of Oscar Wilde, whom the editors of this volume of essays on Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity describe as thoroughly immersed in the ancient world.Footnote ⁵ The eighteen contributors to the collection (which originated in a colloquium at Oxford's Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama), a roughly even mix of Classicists and English literature scholars, offer us a fascinating range of insights into Wilde's ‘classicism’, taking care to distinguish between ways in which it was simply typical of the time (for a well-educated elite author), and ways in which it was distinctive. As well as a series of chapters which explore Wilde's classical education in depth, and examinations of an array of classical themes in his own works, a number of essays offer an insight into how classical antiquity unsurprisingly became a constitutive part of Wilde's own conceptions of himself as artist and critic, and his performance of his public image. So, for example, Kathleen Riley analyses his De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol – his ‘ultimate narrative[s]’ (175) – as homages to Euripides, in which he constructs his own tragic turning points and narratives. Turning in another direction, we see, in Shushma Malik's essay, how the misdemeanours of certain Roman emperors were just one component of Wilde's historical sense, and how Nero and Elagabalus became recurrent figures in helping Wilde to examine and explain his own crimes. Wilde is always a fascinating figure, and an assessment of his work and legacy through the lens of classical antiquity does nothing to lessen his interest: as the volume itself points out, classical reception scholarship which provides ‘full studies of individual modern authors’ (11) is relatively thin on the ground – but this comprehensive approach to Wilde certainly pays off.

Finally, a piece of scholarship that should be required reading for all serious students and scholars of classical reception is now published in paperback (after its first publication in 2014): The Classical Tradition. Art, Literature, Thought, jointly written by Michael Silk, Ingo Gildenhard, and the very much missed Rosemary Barrow, who sadly died while the paperback edition was in preparation.Footnote ⁶ This unashamedly ambitious and elegantly written work is hard to sum up in a few hundred words. As its authors explain in their Prologue, it aims to offer a rereading of the classical tradition, advancing ‘fresh appraisals’ (ix) of how works relate to one another, and confronting head-on the notion of ‘the grand sweep or the big picture’ (x) as a valid – and valuable – way of assessing the ongoing, and changing, significance of classical material. Ambitious, but not comprehensive: this is no encyclopaedic assessment of the classical tradition in the vein of Grafton, Most, and Settis’ The Classical Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 2013) but rather a rich and engaged examination of the notions of value and continuity that underpin the classical tradition, focusing primarily on the cultural traditions of Italy, France, Germany, and the Anglophone world; and on art, literature, and thought, but also encompassing language, translation, notions of high and low culture, value and aesthetics, education, and the history of scholarship. A brief example of the kind of analysis on offer here must suffice. In the section on ‘Archetypes’, short chapters on the architectural feature of the dome, and then on the hero, take us through a dizzying yet compelling journey of a succession of ‘instantiations’ of these archetypes over the centuries – from the Pantheon to the Florence Duomo to London's Millennium Dome, and from Hercules to the Charge of the Light Brigade to 9/11. These varying presences of ancient archetypes ‘all have origins in classical antiquity and complex histories thereafter’ and ‘survive today…without, usually, any direct reference to, or direct dependence on, their ancient forms’ (251). As such, ‘it may well make more sense to discuss given examples under some other rubric than “reception”’ (251), a proposition which is central to this book's thesis. ‘Classical reception’ may have taken precedence as the preferred label for this kind of study in recent decades, edging out the apparently elitist, value-laden, and moribund associations of ‘a classical tradition’ – but Silk, Gildenhard, and Barrow make a good case for not allowing reception to replace tradition as a hermeneutic tool. Showing that issues of value and continuity ought not to be dodged, their model of the classical tradition also allows for meaningful discussion of a whole range of ‘reflexes of, uses of, reconstitutions of, or responses to, the ancient world’ (4), without getting tangled up in whether something really and explicitly counts as ‘a reception’ or not. To be sure, this ‘traditional turn’ is not certain to find favour with all proponents of ‘classical reception studies’ – but the ambitious provocations of the book demand our engagement and consideration.