This interesting volume collects papers from a symposium on ancient music and dance held in Brest in 2006. The contributions seem to fall into two main groups.

The first concentrates on theoretical and philosophical (especially Platonic and Neoplatonic) responses to music and dance. P. Otaola in a useful survey presents the theories of rhythm put forward by Aristoxenus and Aristides Quintilianus, before discussing ancient notions about the interface between rhythm and ethos. One of the most exciting ancient treatises on the social and political function of song and dance is Plato's Laws, represented here in a discussion by A.-G. Wersinger of a difficult passage involving choral education, matrimony and aidos (6.771e5–72a4). As exegesis, the essay (which culminates in a close reading of the prose rhythm of the passage) is unconvincing and involves some apparent mistranslations; but it does contain much that is of value about Plato's view of choruses. In another difficult and somewhat inconclusive piece, I. Tsimbidaros compares the pseudo-Plutarchan De musica with the work of Aristides Quintilianus, showing that these texts (the first strongly Aristoxenian and historical in approach; the second showing the influence of Neoplatonic thought) share a view of the development of music rooted in Plato's response to Classical traditions of song. B. Sabattini discusses Polybius' famous digression (4.20–1) on musical education in Arcadia, arguing that theories of ethos inspired by Plato and his predecessors directly influenced political education and the choices of leading statesmen. As for literary theory, E. Salm provides a useful survey of Dionysius of Halicarnassus' use of musical terminology for verbal analysis in De compositione uerborum. Finally, in theology, B. Lançon discusses attitudes to music and liturgical song in the early Christian East and West, arguing that unaccompanied song functioned for the early Church as a weapon in the struggle of ideologies.

Other papers focus on determining what can be gained from reconstructing actual ancient sounds, rhythms and choreographies. A. Bélis, the epigrapher and noted exponent (through her Ensemble Kérylos) of historically accurate performance of surviving ancient music, gives us a useful treatment of the frame of a solo performance in the Classical period: how the performer approached the podium, how he stood, how he held his instrument, gestured while playing and finished his recital. M. Steinrück returns to the old but still vexing problem of whether in Classical Greek song the melody of the antistrophe followed that of the strophe, thus largely or totally neglecting the accentual contours of the phrases, or rather privileged accent over metre, creating a new melody fitted to the accents for each strophic unit. Steinrück argues against the current consensus that the latter was the case, with melodic repetition only at certain emphatic points in the antistrophe, but the evidence could have been presented more clearly and at greater length (one problem with all studies in this area is the very small size of the data sets involved). J. Päll shows how an attempt to determine whether the monostrophic epinicians of Pindar were danced through simple statistical analysis of the diction leads to inconclusive results – the methodological point is important. E. Lascoux, in what is perhaps the most thought-provoking and frustrating piece in the collection, presents what he calls a ‘théorie du phrasé’ for reading Homer. He attempts to bring metre, rhythm and accentual melody into a synthesis or tonotopie through the close analysis of a passage in Iliad 15, emphasising what he calls the ‘bi-directionality’ (double direction) of melody and rhythm in the hexameter. Since much of his terminology (unique and rather difficult) is never explained, and the outline of the argument is exceptionally hard to follow, I was unable to replicate his results for myself. But Lascoux's insistence on metre as something living and bound up with the spoken or recited language is stimulating, and one looks forward to a better and more discursive presentation of his ideas. N.-P. Youtsios uses pictorial evidence from vase painting and the Attic Nymphenreliefs to discuss a traditional style of women's ritual circle-dance in honour of the nymphs and Pan. D.-R. speculatively reconstructs the choreography of vv. 209–19 of Aristophanes' Frogs; while A. Lazou discusses a contemporary Greek project to combine poetic text with music and dance in performance.

Finally, there are one or two pieces that present a whole body of evidence. F.G. Naerebout makes an impassioned if somewhat scattergun plea for the importance of epigraphic sources to ancient music studies (something no one now would really think of denying, thanks partly to Naerebout's own work in the field). A. Le Coz describes the evidence for dancers in fifth- and sixth-century a.d. Constantinople, and their involvement in political and faction struggles. S. Emerit describes the pictorial and philological evidence for ancient Egyptian categories of musical performer.

The book's production is quite poor, with frequent problems in the Greek, spelling mistakes even in transliterated words, and other visual flaws that could have been caught by more careful proofreading. It would have been better to revise the English-language abstracts; the indexes, however, are useful. As often with collected volumes, this one is interesting particularly for the range of topics covered and the diversity of approaches used. The book as a whole demonstrates the strength of contemporary ancient music studies, and exemplifies certain basic divergences of method in the field. One can see a very clear fault line here between those who believe that particular performances, melodies, rhythms and even choreographies can be speculatively reconstructed, along with their sensuous impact, from the literary and pictorial sources, and those who wish to concentrate on illustrating the ancient literary tradition's responses to the phenomena of song and dance, or (more generally) its role and institutions in Greco-Roman society and culture.