Books on ancient Alexandria appear to grow like Topsy. This latest contribution is predicated upon the idea that the city was what Jan Rüggenmeier in his introduction calls a multidimensional hub. Like Rome, Antioch or Ephesus Alexandria ‘was characterized by a high density of exchange, a frequency of social encounters, and a plurality of philosophical and religious views and practices’. The volume presents these encounters in the main by focusing on the interaction of different identities within the city, whether Greek, Egyptian, Jewish or Christian. By and large it focuses on the Roman imperial period, though a number of essays concern themselves with the Ptolemaic period.

The volume consists of twenty-five essays and divides itself into four sections: The City; Egyptian and Hellenistic Identities; Jewish Alexandria; and the longest section focusing on the period from the New Testament to early Christianities. Studies vary from the very particular (Michael Sommer on the Apocalypse of Zephaniah and the tombs of the Egyptian Chora) to much more general pieces such as Christoph Riedweg's contribution on Alexandria in the new outline of Roman philosophy in the Roman imperial period and in late antiquity.

As with many collective volumes it is not easy to summarise what conclusions in broad terms emerge from the volume. Individual essays are certainly illuminating (one thinks especially of contributions in the first section of the volume on the cityscape and the way that the layout of the city contributed to the way different groups interacted) as well as a range of essays which open up again well-known subjects such as the question of the Greek identity of the city, the issue of cultural rivalry, the implications of Aristeas's account of the translation as well as the character and origins of what some term, possibly incorrectly, the Jewish pogrom of 38 ce. The section on Christianity, which is probably of greatest interest to readers of this Journal, returns to some old chestnuts. An essay by Samuel Vollenweider dismisses Apollos, mentioned in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians and in Acts, as any kind of a key to understanding the origins of Christianity in Alexandria. Jörg Frey goes over well-known territory on the potential Alexandrian provenance of a number of New Testament texts, rejecting, for instance, an Alexandrian provenance for John but endorsing one for 2 Peter. Benjamin Schliesser has some useful things to say about the Jewish origins of early Alexandrian Christianity. Wolfgang Grunstäudl revisits the shadowy figure of Pantaenus in the context of a discussion of the sources of Clement of Alexandria's Eclogai propheticai and Hypotyposeis. Thomas A. Kraus presents a learned piece on the complex nature of Clement's interaction with Greek culture as seen through his critique of religious statues in the Protrepticus and Tobias Nicklas has some interesting remarks on the little-studied (he gives us the first published translation of the work) Greek text The martyrdom of Mark, which he seeks to contextualise in late fourth-century Alexandria, emphasising in particular the text's severe engagement with pagan practices. These are to mention just a few of the essays, the majority of which make plain the lacunae in our knowledge as well as the complex character of the relatively minimal evidence remaining.

The scholarly world still needs a properly systematic volume on ancient Alexandria along the broad lines set out in the introduction to this volume. Such a work would highlight the complex questions relating to the identity of Alexandria over about eight hundred years, raising questions, inter alia, about continuity and discontinuity, the effect of Christianisation, and the persistence of paganism and Judaism. This volume has the virtue of showing, through its diverse studies, why this might be the case, even if its medley of stimulating studies can only hint at what such a volume would look like. Against this background it is a pity that the editors did not round the volume off with a conclusion in which interconnected themes emerging from the volume were highlighted and future prospects for study laid out.