Ancient cities feel very familiar to us both because we are so familiar with cities in the modern world and because so much evidence from the ancient world was produced by cities. However, ancient cities were much smaller than modern ones and their modes of transport, communication, government and economy were very different. In short, we still do not fully understand how people lived in ancient cities, nor how they thought about them. This twin problem, as set out by K. in the introduction, is what the nineteen papers collected in this book are intended to address. The volume began life at a conference in Edmonton in 2011 and just over half the papers are by scholars based in Canada. There is a fairly even balance between contributions by senior and junior academics and it is to the credit of the latter that it is hard to distinguish between the two in terms of level of insight or quality of scholarship. Many of the articles are excellent but the book as a whole is unfocused and, as a result, falls short of the promise of K.'s introduction.

In the introduction K. states that the volume was intended to cover ‘the broadest possible spectrum of questions about cities in antiquity from the most concrete to the most figurative or conceptual’ (p. 3). The contributions are indeed an eclectic mix, some heavily archaeological, others more historical or philological and ranging widely in geographic and chronological focus. The majority look at Greek and Roman culture but there are also articles on ancient Jewish, early Christian, Etruscan, Oscan and even Indian culture. This diversity could have allowed fruitful comparison, yet there is little attempt in any of the articles to engage directly with the more general problems that K. sketches in the introduction, and little sense of dialogue between the contributions. On the contrary most of the papers have a rather narrow focus and deal with highly specialised problems. The result is a hotchpotch of articles to do with ancient cities, each of which could just as easily have been published elsewhere or could have been replaced by any other article on ancient urbanism. What sounds like a valid approach at the outset soon begins to feel like justification for a lack of cohesion.

That this is a missed chance to arrive at new ways of thinking about ancient cities is perhaps best illustrated by A. Parasher-Sen's chapter on the archaeology of the site of Kondapur in the Deccan Plateau. Looking at this second century b.c.–third century a.d. site in Central India alongside the cities of the Mediterranean could have been a profitable way of arriving at a fresh perspective for viewing both. The chapter is an interesting discussion of whether the evidence from the site justifies speaking of it as a city, a methodological problem that clearly has broader implications. However, the scholars of Greek and Roman culture who are most likely to pick up this book will find the argument hard to judge because the chapter does not include a single map, photograph or drawing of either the site or the finds material. This seriously diminishes the value of the chapter to the book's project and makes it of most use to those already familiar with the region and period. The rest of the book is better provided with illustrations but almost all the other contributions seem to be targeted at similarly narrow audiences.

For instance, M. Maher's article on the late Classical fortifications of Stymphalos and Alea makes a compelling case that these defensive works should be associated with the reorganisation of Arcadia that accompanied the founding of Megalopolis in 371 b.c. The more general ramifications of what it meant for a city to be fortified or how fortifications were experienced are issues that could have been explored in order to connect the article to K.'s more general themes. But they are not and, as such, the article will likely be of most interest to scholars working on either fourth-century Peloponnesian history or on the technology and design of Greek fortifications. Similarly E. Varto's discussion of the work of Henry Sumner Maine, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges and Lewis Henry Morgan on the development of ancient states from kinship societies will be of most relevance to scholars working on nineteenth-century historiography. If it had assessed the extent to which the ideas of these scholars still influence the ways in which we view ancient cities today it might have done more to challenge modern preconceptions relating to ancient urbanism so as to arrive at new questions and interpretations.

For so diverse a book there is no space here to consider all the articles on their individual merits but it is worth pointing out just a few highlights. S. Hijmans's chapter essentially addresses the thorny problem of why the reliefs on Trajan's column included so much detail when much of it would have been impossible to see. Hijmans challenges the very assumption that visibility was the driving motive behind much of what we think of as ancient art and suggests that giving permanence to the ephemeral may have been even more important. C. Bruun's close reading of dedicatory inscriptions at Ostia makes a compelling case for taking note of the significance of the timing of dedications in relation to local religious festivals in order to assess their meaning. The fortuitous pairing of E. Kondratieff and D. Philips's chapters on the representation of urban landscapes in the Aeneid demonstrates how contemporary urban realties filtered into Virgil's work. Kondratieff shows that key passages of Books 6–8, most notably the famous Heldenschau, played upon Virgil's audience's knowledge of the topography of buildings and monuments of Augustan Rome. Philips convincingly reads the description of the construction of Carthage in Book 1 as an echo of the large-scale construction works taking place in the earliest years of the Principate.

Some of the chapters are more problematic. T. Henderson's attempt to draw significance from the so-called Eítuns inscriptions at Pompeii rather stretches the evidence. These Oscan texts clearly do contain topographical information about where troops in the city were supposed to muster, probably at the time of the Social War, but the extreme brevity of the texts makes it less straightforward than Henderson suggests to use them to reconstruct the meaning of the urban landscape at this time. R. Korner's examination of the significance of the word ekklesia in the Book of Revelation depends on a rather one-sided reading of the ongoing debate about political life in the Roman period polis and draws a rather too sharp, and not altogether appropriate, distinction between the concepts of demos and ekklesia in contemporary Greek thought. Finally, I was unconvinced by the value of L. Wandsnider's attempt to use the anthropological theory of ‘social signaling’ to interpret Hellenistic euergetism. The chapter does more to demonstrate that the phenomenon fits the theory than to show how the theory has something new to tell us about the phenomenon. It is none the less an engaging discussion of one of the defining characteristics of civic life in this period.

This is a book that can be profitably dipped into but will probably rarely be read from cover to cover. There is a danger that some of the individual contributions might not reach their target audience, which would be a pity because, individually, they make important contributions to their respective fields.