In 1903, shortly before the publication of the first volume of Antike Schlachtfelder, Johannes Kromayer published an essay on Chaeroneia, in which he outlined the methods central to the study of ancient battlefields. The underlying principle is found in a simple declaration: ‘Dem Gelände werden an Ort und Stelle die Fragen vorgelegt, auf die es antworten soll’. Literary studies, with their emphasis on narration, focalisation, metaphor, tropes and other tools of literary analysis, may seem hard to reconcile with such a positivistic approach, but actual battlefields and their imagined counterparts may not be so very far apart. Already in 1832 C. von Clausewitz (in Vom Kriege) had introduced uncertainty as a condition of warfare and a challenge for the historian, commenting, ‘drei Vierteile derjenigen Dinge, worauf das Handeln im Kriege gebaut wird, liegen im Nebel einer mehr oder weniger großen Ungewißheit’. In the volume under review the fog of war is not just a metaphor of uncertainty, but is an atmospheric phenomenon that, like mist, rain and storms, is also an active agent in narratives of war. In V. Fabrizi's chapter on Livy, for example, terrain and weather contribute to the outcome of battle. They manifest the strengths and weaknesses of the protagonists, and they permit the author to bring the audience into the story. This focalising of the reader's attention is one of the recurring themes of the volume. In L. Zientek's reading of Lucan this is accomplished by co-opting agricultural language to create in the ravaged battlefields a negative evocation of the productive landscape. This is a trope she traces back to Virgil and Ovid, but in Lucan the result is even more pessimistic: there is no prospect of recovery. A somewhat similar approach informs Makins's treatment of Propertius, whom she reads as a poet representing landscape in fantastical ways to highlight the effects of war on marginal groups. Like Zientek, she finds the post-war landscape (in this case the Perusine war) transformed into a funereal landscape, marked by a macabre fertility. Propertius’ own family was deeply impacted by Rome's growth to power, and Roman Italy was a patchwork of landscapes of war that affected Propertius personally. Makins is particularly alert to ambiguities of diction: does vestris ossibus, for example, refer to the bones of Perusia's men or Perusia itself? Verbs connoting touching, such as contingere, do double duty to suggest borders and pollution. Through a series of test cases involving Veii, Umbria and Actium she makes the point that Roman peace and prosperity have always been built on bloody and violent war, a tradition with which Propertius was deeply familiar.

Lucan, not unexpectedly, looms over the volume and is the subject of at least three papers. In addition to Zientek, E. Meijer concentrates on Lucan's description of Caesar crossing the Rubicon and argues that Caesar is presented as if resorting to fetial ritual to justify his crossing of the boundary. In the apparition of Patria and the swelling of the river, the Italian landscape has challenged him, but cannot stop him. Instead, invoking Rome's ancient gods, Lucan's Caesar presents himself as ‘Patria's miles’. Ultimately, victory, not lawfulness, will decide who is right. Like Meijer, K. Laporte uses a specific episode to illustrate the literary techniques of her chosen author, Herodian. Her subject is Herodian's treatment of the war between Pescennius Niger and Septimius Severus in 193 ce. She identifies the landscape as backdrop, obstacle, helper and even actor in the narrative. The harsh conditions at Mt Taurus serve to mark the uncontrollable forces shaping events. A notable strength of the essay is her attention to Herodian's habit of compressing or expanding the narration to establish correspondences between landscapes and key protagonists.

The third essay on Lucan is J. Weiner's study of mutable monuments and memories. Weiner uses the many monuments erected in Tito's Yugoslavia (called Spomeniks) and their recent descent into decrepitude as a lens through which to examine the erasure of memory. Lucan's anachronistic treatment of the Palatine Temple of Apollo (built by Caesar's heir) can delegitimise the principate just as effectively as the Augustan building programme sought to give it a veneer of legitimacy. Because of the explicit comparison with Tito's decaying monuments, Weiner is alert to the value of mnemotopes, those places and monuments that serve as anchors for memory. Aside from Weiner, the concept is best put to use by J.Z. van Rookhuijzen in his treatment of Herodotus on Salamis. Starting from the observation that Herodotus does not give us much in the way of grand strategy, preferring to concentrate the narrative on specific sites, such as Psyttaleia and Kynosoura, van Rookhuijzen speculates that small islands frequently served as mnemotopes because seascapes are essentially featureless. Monuments, memorials, trophies and even the supposed throne of Xerxes help produce a spatial narrative in which land features as an anchor for the battle narrative. This is neatly argued, although there is a tendency in the essay to go one step too far. Arguing for the literary importance of Psyttaleia, where Xerxes is supposed to have stationed men to kill Greek stragglers, van Rookhuijzen asks ‘But would a Persian general really station his troops on a small island without any water, in order to kill any Greeks that might wash up there?’ (p. 217). The story may be a literary embellishment but challenging the historicity of the episode with a rhetorical question weakens the case, since it begs the curmudgeonly answer, ‘Yes, he very well might’. Similarly, van Rookhuijzen persuasively suggests that since the ‘surface of the water’ will not bring us closer to the battle Herodotus has turned his attention to the mountain above it, searching for a mnemotope to fix the narrative. Fine, but this is somewhat undone by the claim that, rather than being authentic, the scene ‘may just as well have existed only in the minds of later Greeks, desiring to somehow anchor the sea battle in the land’ (p. 224). Are historical authenticity and outright invention the only options for understanding historical narration?

At Salamis, Herodotus only had to report one recent battle, but many landscapes of war exist in a very different relationship with the author's and audience's time. These differences are explored in E. Minchin's treatment of the Trojan landscape, far away in place and time, Reitz-Joosse's discussion of Roman Parthia, distant and unfamiliar, and Mackie's essay on the Dardanelles, a perennial landscape of war in the Mediterranean. Minchin's essay on Homer's landscape of war is especially rich. She offers a detailed reading of the poet's use of landscape and suggests that he creates a mental model to bring his audience into the poem. Especially persuasive is the counterpoint she notes between the descriptions evoking violence and horror and similes in which the audience glimpses what the plain around Troy was and could be like: pleasant and productive. The audience is thus offered an immersive experience. (The paper begins with a meditation on another kind of immersion: the museum dioramas showing, among others, the Gallipoli battlefield; these visual representations of battlefields provide an illuminating counterpoint to Homer's skilful evocation of the Trojan landscape through language.) In her discussion of Parthia as a landscape of defeat, Reitz-Joosse reflects on the paucity of accurate knowledge on the part of the Romans in relation to the geography and ethnography of Parthia. For Roman authors (here taken to include Plutarch) this became a diagnostic, marking the defeat of Roman arms. The failure to exert control over the land is matched by a void in Rome's geographic knowledge. Propertius’ Arethusa (4.3.35ff.) exposes Roman ignorance of Bactria, while Plutarch and Lucan also draw on ethnographic clichés to paint a picture of Parthia as an alter orbis. This distances it from Rome both figuratively and literally, and it explains how it eluded Roman control. Quite the opposite conditions pertain in the case of the Dardanelles.

Unlike the unfamiliar topsy-turvy world of Parthia, the entire region that encompasses Troy and Gallipoli emerges in Mackie's essay as a landscape of war, although the layering of which Mackie speaks emerges as perhaps better understood as episodic. As he notes, it is not clear that most of the combatants in WWI saw themselves as Achilles reincarnated, even if their officers carried Homer in their pockets. This raises a question regarding mnemotopes that needs to be addressed directly. If an audience is unaware of a stratum in a battlefield's cultural stratigraphy, how should we understand its operation? If pre-Homeric Troy was sacked by Hercules, did it make any difference to the Athenians fighting nearby in 411 bce or the Anzacs in 1915 ce? If Hecuba was prophesied as being buried at Cynossema, what does this add in terms of the active deployment or construction of memory? Mackie claims that ‘a myth of the queen of Troy helps to identify a later landscape and (seascape) of war’. But what has been added to the layering of cultural memories? Does attaching Hecuba to Cynossema amount to more than knowing that nearby Çanakkale means Pot-Castle? Or that Byron nearly drowned trying to swim the straights here in 1810 or that he was recreating Leander's accomplishment? In a sense, the Dardanelles are not just the quintessential landscape of war, they are the quintessential landscape of myth.

As in any volume of conference papers, some essays are more striking than others. The outstanding paper is A. Feldherr's contribution on Enargeia, which despite its reference in the title to the Battle of Lake Trasimene has equally cogent remarks on Herodotus (Gyges and Candaules) and Thucydides’ Syracusan narrative. Feldherr offers subtle readings of these episodes in which there is often a dramatic tension between spectators within these accounts, who often see only a selection of confusing details and the audience, who share the synoptic view of the historian. The final paper that merits attention is W. Brockliss's essay on Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. Brockliss reads the First Stasimon as an ode to Attica and suggests that the depredations caused by the Spartans, garrisoned at Deceleia, had prompted an idealisation of the Athenian homeland, now transformed into a landscape of war. The idea is attractive but hard to endorse. Deceleia is not close to Colonus, which lies only one mile outside the Dipylon Gate, and Lysias 7 says the depredations caused by the Spartans occurred ‘far away’. The prominence of Colonus in the OC is more likely due to the fact that it was Sophocles’ birth-place, home to the Academy and a gymnasium known, according to Herakleides Kritikos (BNJ 369A), for its lush greenery. The battlefields in this volume exemplify von Clausewitz's uncertainties, as much on the page as in the landscape.