Not surprisingly, given the difficulties inherent in offering a satisfactory definition for the ‘genre’ of consolation, consensus of any kind is rare in this collection, beyond a consensus of scepticism about making valid generalisations when one is dealing with ancient consolatory writing. J.H.D. Scourfield offers a sensible, deliberately provisional, approach in his contribution, ‘Towards a Genre of Consolation’, which proposes to divide texts about grief (meta-consolations, more or less theoretical treatises on grief and its remediation) from those texts that have an avowed practical aim of consoling. Yet Scourfield also emphasises the common ‘philosophical and rhetorical underpinnings’ (p. 11) that unite many of the texts we tend to identify as consolatory, and he notes that we can also speak of ‘a more strictly literary underpinning’ (p. 15). Scourfield counsels scholars to be flexible and reasonable in granting membership in the genre to texts that exhibit some traits of consolation but not others, and he makes the important point that ‘we should go beyond [a] purely textual notion of a genre’ in our evaluations of texts, because ‘consolation is, after all, a social practice’ (p. 15). No definition will satisfy every scholar, of course, and not everyone will be convinced of the need for one. Representing the generic malcontents in this collection is M. Wilson, who observes, in a characteristically pugnacious and engaging re-evaluation of Seneca's so-called consolations, that ‘[t]heir author would, I think, have been surprised to learn that they could be treated as if a single coherent body of writing, unified under a single generic banner’ (p. 94). None the less, I have already given Scourfield's essay to a colleague in English, an Emerson specialist for whom the fact that ancient consolation exists at all was revelatory, and I will undoubtedly recommend it to others. This first chapter serves to illustrate both the difficulties in constructing even a provisional definition and the desirability of doing so, and so nicely sets the stage for the chapters that follow, which deal with texts ranging from Euripidean tragedy to Augustine's Confessions to the Arabic philosopher-physician Al-Razi's Spiritual Medicine.

The book consists of a preface and brief introduction by its editor B. and eight chapters by individual contributors, including one chapter by the editor. There is no aim at comprehensive or even representative coverage of consolatory authors or texts. Boethius, for instance, as B. notes in the introduction, is missing altogether, although Late Antiquity is represented by J. Lössl's chapter ‘Continuity and Transformation of Ancient Consolation in Augustine of Hippo’, which indicates how the new ideological framework of Christianity rewrote generic expectations and norms. P. Adamson's chapter on ancient consolation in medieval Arabic thought offers an intriguing glimpse into the reception of classical thought from an unusual vantage point for classicists, and may invite readers to consider what further gains might be won in taking a more capacious and longer view of receptions of ancient consolation. Why not include an essay, for example, on Montaigne? Or on a text originating within the usual chronological boundaries of Classics, but more influential for intervening ages than for our own, such as Galen's On Freedom from Grief, whose first critical edition (cited by Scourfield) appeared in 2007, the same year as the conference from which this volume springs. Scourfield mentions Galen briefly (p. 14), but his importance for Adamson's medieval Arabic authors suggests that a sustained treatment of the Peri Alupias might be salutary for classical scholars, too. A detailed look at Galen could prove a mutually illuminating complement to D. Konstan's ‘The Grieving Self: Reflections on Lucian's On Mourning’. In this piece, Konstan invites us to consider whether Lucian's ‘burlesque of the consolatory tradition’, particularly its harsher Epicurean strains, may not have been intended to sting his readers into indignant affirmation of the legitimacy and even the value of grief, not for the insensible dead, but for those who go on living, and whose experience of loss ‘is a response to a dissolution of … joint identity … the extinction of a common existence … a sense of privation that extends to every aspect of our daily life’ (pp. 144–5).

For the most part, when complementarity happens in this volume, it seems merely serendipitous, as in the link between J.H.K.O. Chong-Gossard's ‘Mourning and Consolation in Greek Tragedy’, and M. Wilson's observation on Senecan tragedy; to wit, ‘If the soothing of passions could be made reliably to work, there would not be much in the way of tragic consequences in drama’ (p. 98). On the other hand, there is a strong current of Platonism running through several of the papers, anchored by G. Boys-Stones's contribution on the pseudo-Plutarchan Consolatio ad Apollonium. The familiar notion of a Hellenistic origin for ancient consolation, with Crantor's Peri Penthous holding pride of place, is challenged in Boys-Stones's paper by the attractive substitution of Plato as the philosophical originator of the genre, and his Phaedo as its Ur-text.

In the introduction, B. too stresses the social character of consolation, and also its relation to the psychology of grief, an interconnection that his own contribution, on Cicero's Consolatio ad se, explores further. His examination of that work's character and purpose shows how aptly a contemporary turn of phrase, ‘grief work’, describes Cicero's project, and I think he is right to see ‘the memorial in words’ (p. 76) of Tullia that Cicero accomplished to have been as effective a consolation as the physical shrine he intended to build. B. expresses the hope that the present volume will contribute to recent lively interest in classical studies, among other fields, in studying the emotions. On this score, the collection's success is mostly indirect. Although Konstan's essay is a notable exception, these papers focus most fruitfully on what ancient consolatory texts reveal about ancient concepts of the soul's constitution and, based on this constitution, what its proper therapy should be, rather than on direct attempts to characterise the way that parents, friends and spouses in classical antiquity actually experienced grief or its alleviation. Wilson's discussion of Seneca, however, suggests some reasons why a traditional ‘philosophical approach’ (p. 110) that privileges the identification and genealogy of philosophical tropes will miss much of what is interesting about these texts. In the case of Seneca, that may be his recognition that, as Wilson writes, ‘It is more important to contend with grief than to be free of it’ (p. 109).

As is fitting, and perhaps inevitable, given the variety of texts and approaches to them represented here, the strength of the volume lies in its diversity rather than any strong convergence of views. None the less, diversity is lacking from this collection in one respect that, as a reader, I found so distracting as to detract from my appreciation of its strengths, namely, the absence of even one contribution by a female scholar. This lack cannot be explained by a dearth of women working on this topic, nor can it be explained satisfactorily by the volume's method of assembly, since in addition to papers presented at the initiating conference, the editor states in his preface that he solicited additional contributions. It is disappointing that this volume on a topic of universal human interest and experience, in antiquity as now, should have been allowed to appear with such a partial representation of those equipped to contribute to its exploration.