I was born in the Andes at about 2,640 m a.s.l., and I spent the first quarter-century of my life mostly at that altitude or higher. When people in the flat north-eastern or midwestern United States – where I now live – ask me whether there is anything I miss from my birthplace, I say: ‘mountains’. I first missed mountains when I spent months on end away from them. Unlike the proverbial fish who does not know what water is, my late realisation was not because I had been oblivious to their existence. Rather, I thought mountains were inevitable. I am not sure my mountain-youth gives me any insight into ancient Greek and Roman mountains, but it does make me aware that any generalisation into people’s understanding of landscapes is hazardous. What the plainspeople may think of mountains (or of plains for that matter) is not fully available to me, precluded at least partly by experience.

K. is aware of such biases and reflects on the matter explicitly in an epilogue (e.g. pp. 218–19 and 303–12). He is also convinced of the viability and relevance of his ambitious project, which ranges across the Greek and Latin literary canon to probe what mountains meant in antiquity. The texts he scrutinises span from the Iron Age to late antiquity. If we were to take nearly a millennium and a half of writings and work backwards from the present to inquire about the meaning of mountains in Greek literature, we would have to begin with Elytis or Cavafy and use Theodoret of Cyrrus – one of the latest ancient texts K. treats at length – as our end point. The enterprise is formidable. Yet mountains lend themselves naturally – one should probably say culturally – to this sort of diachronic exploration. It is not only that through their sheer thereness mountains have struck many as inveterate, indeed pre-human, but also that most mountains are storehouses of human activity.

The map(s) at the beginning of the book give a good sense of its geographic scope. K. deals with mountains in the Mediterranean and neighbouring regions, but primarily with those in mainland Greece. The enterprise is based on ‘patchy’ evidence. K. employs that adjective to describe the archaeological record and how it may be used to interpret the experiences of ancient people on mountain pilgrimages (p. 4). But if archaeological evidence is incomplete and fragmentary, deficiencies are arguably much more extreme in the case of literature. Few of the people who interacted with mountains in antiquity wrote, fewer still wrote the sorts of literary texts in which K. is interested.

The book is divided into four main parts. Their subjects seem almost arbitrary: ‘Mountains and the Divine’, ‘Mountain Vision’, ‘Mountain Conquest’ and ‘Living in the Mountains’. Each of these parts is further subdivided into short essays, many of which are devoted to single authors or literary works. K. does not aim to be encyclopaedic. What he provides is literary analysis of how various understandings of mountains fit into a long history of mountain representations and changing attitudes to landscapes. Throughout the book K. insists that to comprehend how individual ancient authors treat mountains one should read their works in their entirety (e.g. pp. 50, 178, 219 etc.). Not every reader will go through The Folds of Olympus from cover to cover; yet, even those who skim it will find sound treatment of relevant literary texts. If you are interested in mountains in ancient literature, this book is a rewarding read. Readers will be encouraged to make connections between the texts K. treats and the sorts of evidence and mountains with which they are personally familiar. For scholars of antiquity not primarily interested in literature the enterprise might appear odd and lopsided. Epigraphy and archaeology do not simply expand or complement, but trouble and even contradict the literary picture. Ethnography, another obvious avenue of research barely touched on in the book, would hugely expand and enable interpretation – even that of ancient texts.

Rather than attempting to summarise the book, I will call attention to some recurrent issues and to the sorts of connections that reading it prompted me to make. Mountains are protean, not so much because they are places inherently characterised by ambivalence or contradiction, but rather because the meaning of mountains depends on who is writing about them, when and why. An author can extol them as proof of military or political domination precisely because they can serve also as sites of resistance (pp. 186–91). Since they are liminal spaces where mortals and gods come into contact, they can be characterised as locations where old religion clings to an obsolete past, even as new religion coopts and transforms traditional practices. K. calls attention to this last point while discussing Saint Simeon Stylites the Elder (pp. 297–300). It is also patently clear in the case of Saint Simeon Stylites the Younger: the base and lower shaft of the column in the Younger’s monastic complex, located on Samandağı on the outskirts of Antioch, were carved out of the living rock of that mountain. Those who carved that column tapped into ancestral local traditions according to which mountains were divine and sometimes fully personified – very much against common Greek concepts of landscapes. In Anatolia such ontological porosity between humans and mountains can be traced back to the Bronze Age (on Anatolian mountain-people see F. Rojas, The Pasts of Roman Anatolia [2019], especially pp. 93–102 and 137–40).

K. is also interested in points of contact between ancient texts and scholarship on the environmental humanities (p. xxiii). Quarrying and mining are not often his concern because most ancient texts do not dwell much on the matter. But anybody who has read Pliny the Elder’s account of Roman extractive endeavours at the site now called Las Médulas in north-western Spain (NH 33.66) will know that Pliny was aware of the devastating effects of imperial gold-mining operations. He tellingly called one of the techniques of extraction ruina montium (NH 33.66). Las Médulas were ancient mountains. They no longer exist as they had existed before the Romans (cf. K.’s claim about the continued presence of ancient mountains on p. xxvi). Is Pliny being eco-critical avant la lettre? Quite apart from texts, archaeological evidence for the impact of imperial extractive operations is unmistakable and full of insight that texts alone cannot provide (on mining in Iberia see L. Gosner, ‘Mining, Movement, and Migration in the Industrial Landscapes of Roman Iberia’, in L.R. Gosner and J. Hayne [edd.], Local Experiences of Connectivity and Mobility in the Ancient West-Central Mediterranean [2024], pp. 86–112). The many cities of the Roman east could only be covered in marble by the rapid transformation of entire mountain landscapes, many of which had had their own meanings before the Romans turned those mountains into quarries. Christian saints in the east combined Christian holiness with Anatolian mountainness: Saint Ariadne of Prymnessos became a mountain, literally, to escape her Roman persecutors. Her biography fuses resistance to Roman imperial quarrying endeavours with ancestral Anatolian traditions of mountains-who-are-people.

K.’s topic is vast. No single scholar could offer an exhaustive treatment of the representation of mountains in Greek and Roman literature, much less one of how people in antiquity more generally interacted with mountains. Local variations are more varied and more significant than the always partial and prejudiced literary record could ever document. Even so, in K.’s book mountains are kaleidoscopic, both in the sense that they shapeshift into new patterns depending on who is writing about them, but also in the much more interesting sense that mountains can act as instruments of mediation (as kaleidoscopes) through which to ponder questions about, for instance, the nature/culture divide and its permeability, the questionable virtues and inevitable violence of colonialism, the materiality of memory and identity, and ultimately what it means to be human. The crystals in K.’s kaleidoscope are alphabetic letters.