Sometime between ad 89 and 91 Mettius Rufus, Prefect of Egypt, had a Greek elegiac couplet-and-a-half chiselled on the left foot of the seated Memnon colossus at Thebes (no. 11):

With these verses Mettius broke with a half-century tradition of inscribing bland testimonies, in prose, that commemorated personal encounters with the colossus. He introduced poetry into the graffiti rash that continued to grow for another 100+ years over the feet and legs of the massive statue (nearly 60 feet high), which guarded, together with its twin to the south, the entrance to the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III. The two colossi were erected around 1400 bc during the pharaoh's own lifetime, but only the northern one drew any documented attention. The reason for its fame was the fact that it emitted a sound at dawn when the sun warmed its base. This ‘ability’, if we can call it that, resulted from damage the statue endured in an earthquake in c. 27 bc, and the matutinal sound was said to be the voice of the Ethiopian hero Memnon, who was thought to greet his mother Eos at dawn each day. In order to experience the phenomenon first-hand, politicians and soldiers, men and women, believers and sceptics (Strabo being a prominent example of the latter, pp. 10–11) travelled to Thebes. Some of them even documented the encounter with an inscription, a practice that peaked under Hadrian (ad 117–138), the emperor himself visiting with his wife Sabina in 130; the last text was likely carved in the early third century.

R.’s book is a well-executed and engaging treatment of the monument's 107 inscriptions (61 Greek, 45 Latin and 1 bilingual; 39 are in verse). For many who visited the site, the colossus served as a direct line to an idealised Hellenic past, and the monument's surface became a display piece of the personalities who chose to memorialise both the statue and themselves. The inscribed texts, which range from laconic expressions of adoration to a nine-couplet elegy in the Aeolic dialect (no. 29), tell an intriguing story of educated Romans appropriating an Egyptian monument and making it speak to their Hellenic cultural tastes.

Over six chapters R. deftly explicates the multi-layered story the monument embodies. In Chapter 1, ‘Reading the Colossus’, she describes the European rediscovery of it in the first half of the eighteenth century by Richard Pococke, who risked the hostility of local Arabs to record details of the monument (pp. 1ff.). From discussion of European explorers, R. turns to a general description of the colossus and the ancient authors who mention it, including Strabo, Pliny, Tacitus, Pausanias etc. (pp. 9ff.). When it became associated with the Homeric hero, no one actually knows. Pliny is the first author to identify it as Memnon, but already in ad 20, when the first inscription was incised (no. 1), Memnon was named. R. thus rightly supposes that Germanicus could have known of this association when he visited Thebes a year earlier, in ad 19 (p. 16).

Chapter 2, ‘Worshipping the Colossus’, takes up the topic of tourism. The first two centuries of Roman rule in Egypt witnessed increased ‘sacred tourism’. Motivated by both intellectual curiosity and religion, pilgrims sought to experience the monuments of a land that had appealed to the Greek imagination since the time of Herodotus. In the case of the Memnon colossus, they wanted to connect with the uniquely Hellenic past they believed it embodied. In other words, they went to Thebes seeking an ideal that was of their own making. Drawing on J. Elsner, R. sums this up nicely when she states that ‘the autoptic experience [was] not primarily to discover or explore the unfamiliar, but rather to see for oneself what one already knows’ (p. 75).

With Chapter 3, ‘Talking with the Colossus’, R. turns from sightseeing to sight-conversing, that is, to ways in which visitors conversed with the Memnon statue. Here she investigates the two principal rhetorical devices, apostrophe and prosopopoeia, that permitted conversation between the living listeners and the inanimate object. Through apostrophe people engaged Memnon directly in much the same way in which a passer-by animated a deceased relative in a grave inscription. Prosopopoeia, in turn, served as the statue's means of responding to the human visitor. This speech act comprised not only the mysterious sound Memnon emitted at dawn, but also his highly personalised messages to his visitors. R. unpacks this theme through a masterful reading of the verse inscriptions (nos 92–4) commissioned by a woman named Caecilia Trebulla, who visited in the time of Hadrian (pp. 97–100). Over the course of three inscriptions Trebulla goes from generic passer-by to close acquaintance of Memnon, to trusted confidant and Sibyl-like character through whom the colossus reveals past violence that had been done to it.

In Chapter 4, ‘Homeric Memnon’, R. teases out the different strains of Homeric influence in the inscriptions. Memnon was a Homeric hero, and, not surprisingly, many texts draw on epic language. Members of the educated class who visited Thebes engaged with the Homeric tradition in different ways. Some sprinkled their inscriptions with Homeric allusions (pp. 119ff.). Others not only alluded to Homer but also sustained ‘the fiction of the larger epic context’ (p. 124). One poet, the self-styled Ὁμηρικὸς ποιητής Arius, went so far as to create a four-line cento (no. 37) out of different lines from Homer (pp. 134ff.). Through his poetic arrangement, Arius resurrected Homer and let him acknowledge in his own words one of his now colossally-shaped heroes (p. 140).

From Homer R. moves in Chapter 5 to Sappho or, more precisely, to the poet Julia Balbilla, who accompanied Emperor Hadrian and his wife Sabina on their tour of Egypt in the year ad 130. Balbilla, a member of an established family from Syrian Commagene who was possibly raised in Athens (pp. 142–3), left over 50 lines of lyric poetry on the colossus in an archaising Aeolic dialect. R.’s sympathetic handling of this poetry reveals a clever and playful poet who, for example, flirtatiously suggests that Memnon withheld his voice the first time Sabina visited him in order to ensure that she come back (no. 30). Playful lyric of this sort stands in contrast to the loftier tones that the Homeric language conveys. In the end, R. sees Balbilla appropriating Sappho as a claim to her own personal fame and to the glory of the imperial household, rather than out of any erotic feelings for Sabina (p. 164).

The final chapter, ‘Modern Memnon’, returns to the topic of the modern reception of the colossus. From William Wordsworth to Lord Byron, to John Keates and many others, R. charts Memnon's Nachleben in the works of western writers. What she reveals are continued acts of cultural appropriation not much different from those observed in the Roman period. While the Memnon colossus might have lost its voice already in the third century, it continued to serve as a mirror to those who paid it homage well into the nineteenth century.

The book is well written and produced; there is little to fault in it. Nevertheless, and this is less a complaint than a reflection of this reader's laziness, it would have been nice to have the date of each inscription (however uncertain it is in many cases) next to the respective text and translation in Appendix 2 (perhaps this could be added in a future paperback edition). Otherwise, a few typos were noticed. In Chapter 1, fn. 26, read ἄξια, not ἄζια. Chapter 2, fn. 34, the reference to Wilcken should be to no. 413, not no. 412. Chapter 2, last line of p. 67, gives the wrong era: read 5 September 122 ce. Appendix 2, no. 30, line 8, change κατἐχες to κατέχες.