A Little Greek Reader by James Morwood and Stephen Anderson forms a companion volume to A Little Latin Reader by Mary English and Georgia Irby (though one might be seduced into thinking from the cover illustration and italic title print that this is a volume from the JACT Reading Greek stable).Footnote ¹ The twenty-plus chapters focus on different points of Greek grammar (for example, ‘Indirect Statement’ [64–74] and ‘Result Clauses’ [99–106]), prefaced with brief grammatical introductions and then illustrated with a selection of unadapted passages in prose and verse. Each passage is supported by linguistic and contextual notes, and an extensive vocabulary is supplied at the back of the book. Although billed as ‘an ideal supplement for undergraduate courses in beginning and intermediate Greek’ (back cover blurb) it should also be of use to sixth-form teachers for revision and extension work (it was, in fact, trialled at the JACT Greek Summer School in 2013). Appendices supply short biographical notes and offer help on meter and dialect. There is also a useful guide to literary terms – though the definition of ‘hyperbaton’ – ‘the dislocation of normal word order, by way of displacing one part of one clause into another’ (213; our emphasis) – seems unnecessarily proscriptive.

Hellenistic and Biblical Greek. A Graduated Reader by B. H. McLean offers seventy graded passages of Greek taking the reader from ‘Basic Level: Early Christian Texts’ (13–67) through to ‘Advanced-Level Hellenistic Greek: Atticizing and Literary Greek’ (385–421).Footnote ² Each passage is furnished with grammatical notes and a vocabulary list and is supported by a ‘Summary of Verbal Paradigms’ (423–46) and a detailed glossary (447–509). What sets this apart from other ‘Biblical Readers’ is the refreshing range of material covered – with a whole section devoted to inscriptions, including ‘Sacred Laws of a Silver Miners’ Association Dedicated to the Lunar God (IG² 1366)’ (309–12) and ‘The Delphic Oracle Commands the Importation of Maenads (IMagn-Mai 215)’ (375–80). McLean himself offers a very interesting – and wholly convincing – explanation for his decision to include such a broad range of ‘extra-canonical’ texts in the volume:

There is now a very long back-catalogue from Oxford University Press of ‘Very Short Introductions’, running to over four hundred titles. Byzantium by Peter Sarris clocks in at number 437, just ahead of Psychoanalysis and The American Revolution.Footnote ³ It is divided into seven chapters (in honour, one would like to think, of the seven hills of Constantine's ‘New Rome’). After an introductory chapter (‘What was Byzantium’ [1–18]), we are taken on a whirlwind historical tour of this most complex of cities, from the foundation of Constantinople (19–40) through to the ‘End of Empire’ (1453 and All That – and beyond [114–28]). The material is well explained and set out, though perhaps as a series the ‘Very Short Introductions’ have started to lose some of the energy and creativity that characterized earlier volumes. Arguably the most interesting chapter is ‘Text, Image, Space, and Spirit’, which by its nature is least bound to the necessary task of driving forward the historical narrative of the city. Sarris describes how, notwithstanding the loss in 476 of 120,000 papyrus rolls in a devastating fire at the public library of Constantinople, Byzantine schoolmasters and copyists established a conservative canon of favoured ‘Attic’ texts which were studied and imitated. However, although we might lament the limited literary view which this process of selection produced, ‘Without this backward-glancing dimension to Byzantine literary culture, the works of Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles would all have been lost’ (96). Byzantine readers may have glanced backwards at the literature of Greece and Rome, but in the transition from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, as Sarris explains, the understanding of classical culture underwent a profound change. Within visual culture, for example, ‘images of sphinxes, gryphons, and other hybrid characters derived from the world of classical mythology’ ceased to be considered as literary or ‘antiquarian’ figures but began to take on new meaning, with ‘a magical or talismanic quality’ (103).

Since The Raw and the Cooked, the mental chewing over of food and drink has never lost its appeal, partly as an ongoing contribution to the broader shift towards social history, and partly because we cannot fail to be interested in the nitty-gritty of other people's food. Food and Drink in Antiquity. Readings from the Graeco-Roman World. A Sourcebook by John F. Donahue is self-consciously (5) set within the former, and as part of the ‘Bloomsbury Sources in Ancient History’ series sets out with the premise that food and drink may be a focus of ancient literature in itself, with the conventions deployed in ancient literature reflecting ‘contemporary practice’ (7).Footnote ⁴ Chapter 2 acts as a sort of amuse gueule to the breadth of sources the book includes: a survey of ancient literature, by genre, with a taste from a representative author for each genre (epic: Homer, Virgil; tragedy: Euripides, Seneca; etc.). The sources are bridged by very brief discussions. The remaining chapters follow a similar format (text, bridge, text), though they are organized more thematically: Chapter 3 on the food itself (grain, gapes, olives and beans, figs, honey, etc.); Chapter 4 on food and religion; Chapter 5 on dining; Chapter 6 on the military; Chapter 7 on medicine. The book is aimed primarily at undergraduates and this no doubt accounts for its style and content. For example: ‘the following passages confirm the popularity of wheat’ (57). Despite the claim to be a work of (social) history, there is little or no attempt to identify any changes or differences in time or place in an ‘ancient world’ that stretches from Homer to Ammianus Marcellinus. More tellingly, one of the few attempts to acknowledge such differences, the section ‘From Greece to Rome: The Feasts of Roman Dynasts’ (167) is preceded by two sections of Athenaeus (‘early third-century ce writer from Naucratis (Egypt)’; 275) and Alciphron (‘c. 200 ce’; 273). Questions about authors writing in a province of the Roman empire using Greek are not even hinted at. Similarly, although the book, as is the custom of introductions, repeatedly refutes claims of comprehensivity (‘The purpose of this volume is to present a reasonably representative selection’ [1]; ‘A work of this nature can never be truly comprehensive’ [1]; ‘any survey of literature must be arbitrary’ [6]), one would, nevertheless, expect to see some discussion of archaeological material beyond the text-based. Surely a book which claims to be interested in the social history of past food and drink should at least mention the countless images on vases, dining paraphernalia, mosaics, wall-paintings, the few architectural remains of dining areas, and the floral and faunal remains found on classical sites. The fifteen images are purely there to illustrate in passing. Figures are not discussed in the text (for example, grain mills are discussed in general [64–5], though not with reference to figure 3 itself). Furthermore, images suffer from the same lack of chronological and contextual specificity as the texts: for the illustration of Hippocrates and Galen (233, fig. 15) the caption reads ‘Hippocrates, b. 460 bce, Greek physician, and Galen b. 129 ce, Roman physician and philosopher. Fresco, thirteenth century. Anagni Cathedral, Italy’. Omitting discussion of archaeological material perpetuates an archaic division between different projects of study, and, more importantly, denies the archaeological nature (that is, context of production, preservation, and discovery) of all cultural artefacts from the ancient world, including more obviously epigraphic ones, but literary texts as well. Careful editing would have removed vagueness in the referencing of the text – for example, p. 6 refers to Braund, while there are two different works by Braund included in the ‘Suggestions for Further Reading’ (sic) and there is no Haubold or Boys-Stones (referenced on p. 6) in the list at all.

From Abortion to Pederasty, edited by Nancy Rabinowitz and Fiona McHardy, tackles the problems and pitfalls of discussing and teaching ‘difficult topics’ within Classics.Footnote ⁵ Such topics include death (Chapters 1 and 2), disability (Chapter 3), abortion (Chapter 4), domestic and sexual violence (Chapters 5 and 8), religious sensitivity (Chapters 6 and 7), race and slavery (Chapters 11 and 12), and sexuality (Chapters 13–15). The introduction sets out the intellectual background to the inclusion of these subjects in the Classics curriculum, and to the political context of learning in UK and US universities. In this, the editors raise fundamental questions about the future and nature of higher education in these countries, and as such these questions should be taken seriously by us all. They also raise the interesting pedagogic question about whether education should disturb ideas that are key to students’ identities, and whether this should be acceptable or not. The introductory chapters provide case studies, drawn from the personal experiences of the authors on issues that have arisen while teaching such subjects, and the pedagogic strategies that have resulted. As a result the book is rich in anecdotes – often hilarious – such as a student informing her lecturer that an uncle was having ‘one of his livers’ removed (72). We are often reminded of the breadth of discomfort that it is possible to provoke unwittingly. Many practical solutions are discussed, such as warnings in course descriptions about sexually-explicit material or the suitability of courses on mortuary theory for those recently bereaved. However, although each chapter is interesting, humbling, and often funny at the same time, it has proved difficult for the authors to move beyond their individual examples, and beyond personal responses to their own teaching situations. The only overarching lesson, if any, is that ‘empathetic’ (72) teachers will be sensitive to both their material and their students. Sadly, the interesting dilemmas raised in the introduction remain largely there. The conflict between broadening minds and exposing them to discomfort is tackled in depth only occasionally (DuBois, Lively), and the inherent conflict between the importance of personal experience (in this context bereavement, rape, etc.) in learning and the creation of knowledge and academic detachment remain unexplored.

Foundation myths hold a perpetual fascination for Classicists. They have become bound up in debates on cultural supremacy as well as the origins of a state, group, or city. They have largely been treated as historiography and when, inevitably, conflicting stories arise, battles are frequently fought over the relative age and authenticity of myths, and they are compared with other evidence (often archaeological) in order to test their validity. More recently, the historical and literary construction of these myths has been emphasized, often resulting in acts of retrospective justification for contemporary superiority. Foundation Myths in Ancient Societies. Dialogues and Discourses, edited by N. Mac Sweeney, sidesteps these conflicting approaches and suggests that instead of concentrating on the veracity, or applicability, of a particular myth, we should be concentrating on foundation discourses, ‘the sum total of several different myths together and the various relationships between the stories and variants’ (2).Footnote ⁶ As a result, apparently contradictory myths can be acknowledged as simultaneously meaningful. In order to illustrate this position, the volume considers examples from across the Mediterranean world, both ‘core’ (Athens – Tanner; Rome – Squire) and ‘peripheral’ (Bactria; Phoenicia). The first chapter (Malkia) takes a comparative approach, examining mythic variations between Greek and Hebrew foundation myths. Chapters routinely deal with multiple sources of evidence, such as Chapter 2 (Donnellan)'s expert handling and integration of literary texts, cult practices, and iconography. All the essays emphasize the openness of the myths to variable, often subversive (e.g. Squire) interpretations, dependent on audience, context, and so forth, and, importantly, the interplay of apparently conflicting yet simultaneous myths.