As the editors of Once and Future Antiquities Footnote ¹ point out in their preface, ‘science fiction, fantasy, and the classics have in common the effect of inviting us to reconsider (by speculating, by imagining, by contextualizing) our own world anew’ (xi). The fourteen wide-ranging chapters in this volume eloquently illustrate this point. Contributors explore the multiple ways in which the genres of science fiction and fantasy (SF&F) engage with, respond to, and cast new light on cultural artefacts, story patterns, and characters from the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, reflecting too on how these receptions respond to contemporary preoccupations. Appropriately for a volume on classical receptions, the contributions are all linked by the unifying theme of ‘displacements’ – a concept which refers here both to the movement of ideas, texts, and themes across time and space, and to the disruption of perceived genre boundaries or preconceived ideas about the relationship between receiving and source texts or cultures.

The editors’ introduction outlining the shape of the volume is complemented by Tony Keen's valuable contribution reflecting on the history of classical reception scholars’ engagement with SF&F; much of this scholarship was stimulated by a blogpost written by Keen himself in 2006, and here – alert as always to the methodological challenges of working in this field – he revisits and critiques the schema which he proposed there. The piece is one which reminds us, too, of the influence of scholarship published in places deemed less conventional or seen as informal by the still-dominant narrative of the academy, in which ‘serious’ scholarship is too often perceived as only that which appears in scholarly journals or weighty books.

The ensuing contributions to the volume range across a variety of contemporary genres and media, including: novels (featuring some widely read works such as Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, as well as those which have received less scholarly attention, including Wilhelm Jensen's 1903 Gradiva. A Pompeian Fantasy), short stories, film (including animated movies, with a chapter by Suzanne Lye on Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away), television (Claire Kenward's chapter on time travel in receptions of the Iliad is an articulate and original contribution to the scholarly conversation around classical reception and Doctor Who), and table-top role-playing games (the discussion of Dungeons & Dragons by C. W. Marshall provides a fascinating new insight into the protean nature of receptions where individual players influence the narrative).

Some contributors take as their focus a single reception text or ancient source (perhaps unsurprisingly, epic poetry resurfaces frequently here); others focus on a particular character (Jennifer C. Ranck finds a Cassandra-figure in the time-travelling police officer of Simon Barry's television series Continuum, and Stephen B. Moses and Brett M. Rogers illuminate engagingly the reception of Atlas from antiquity, via the muscleman Charles Atlas, to the Rocky Horror Picture Show) or on a motif or theme (nostoi are a recurring preoccupation, as are underworlds).

Since the founding of the journal Practitioners’ Voices in Classical Reception Studies by Lorna Hardwick in 2007,Footnote ² dialogue between creative practitioners and scholars has increasingly been recognized as having an important place in reception studies; the book's epilogue – an essay by the bestselling speculative fiction author Catherynne M. Valente – is a welcome addition to this conversation. The author's reflections here on her personal engagement with the ancient world, and its influence on her work, offer a fitting conclusion to a rich volume in which the fluidity of movement between worlds, times, and genres is central to audiences’ experience of and engagement with the material under discussion.

Biographical works seldom land on the desk of this reviewing team; Artemis Leontis’ book on Eva Palmer Sikelianos (1874–1952) is a welcome and enthralling exception.Footnote ³ Best known for her revival of the Delphic festivals, Palmer Sikelianos – who was born in New York but spent much of her life in Greece – is revealed here, in the first biography devoted to her, as a figure whose influence and engagement with the ancient world was much broader than this alone. As the author writes, ‘Life was the dominant medium of Eva Palmer Sikelianos's work’ (xxv); the book's subject emerges from this study as a unique example of a living embodiment of classical reception. From her insistence on wearing only handmade Greek clothing and footwear, ‘a quotidian production that turned her body into a manifestation of Greek culture and its relevance’ (42), and her determination to learn how to spin and weave using ancient methods in order to produce her own cloth, to her role in producing, directing, and acting in Greek plays, Palmer Sikelianos immersed herself in the Greek world in the way she lived and worked.

This is an engaging biography which is likely to appeal to researchers and non-specialist readers alike; there is much here that will interest scholars concerned with practice-based research and embodied knowledge, as well as with the reception of the ancient world in modern times. Themed chapters focus on key aspects of Palmer Sikelianos’ interaction with the classical world: her engagement with Sappho; her weaving practice; her patronage of music (in particular Byzantine music); her role in producing, directing, and acting in theatrical performances (including in the festivals at Delphi); and her writing (focusing on her autobiography, Upward Panic, as well as her correspondence, including hundreds of letters concerning the occupation of Greece during the Second World War). Leontis uses textual and material artefacts to chart the story of a life, weaving a compelling study which excavates Palmer Sikelianos’ interactions with the ancient world alongside her personal relationships, her education and cultural activities, and her political activism. This involves examining a wealth of archival material – letters, photographs, newspaper articles, and the texts of lectures she gave – but also items of Palmer Sikelianos’ clothing and possessions, including her loom. The author's close attention to the photographs of her subject, and her accompanying analysis of the classicizing images which these project, is especially enlightening.

At a time when considerable efforts are being made to shed more light on the often invisible women who have shaped Classics and the engagement of wider societies with the ancient world,Footnote ⁴ this book makes a significant and timely contribution to the discipline, not only in charting the life of one extraordinary figure but also in providing a model of biographical scholarship for others to follow.

Based on her E. H. Gombrich lectures delivered at the Warburg Institute in 2014, Marjorie Curry Woods's Weeping for Dido. The Classics in the Medieval Classroom Footnote ⁵ explores the interaction of emotion, gender, and performance in the reception of Latin texts in the medieval period. Focusing on the medieval classroom practice of boys’ performance of emotional speeches in women's voices from classical texts (a practice recalled by Augustine in his Confessions, where he remembers ‘weeping for Dido’ as a schoolboy), this study uses as evidence Latin manuscripts and their interlinear glosses – additional annotations made to explain points of grammar and vocabulary, or to aid comprehension. A short introduction sets out the methodology, whereby the author provides photographic images of the manuscript pages alongside English translations of both the texts and their glosses, drawing comparisons between different versions. Two core chapters then examine extracts from Latin poetic texts and their manuscript traditions: Virgil's Aeneid, and texts focusing on the Trojan War (Statius’ unfinished Achilleid, and the Ilias Latina). Woods not only elucidates and contextualizes for her readers the relevant scenes from the texts she discusses, but also offers thought-provoking insights on why particular passages may have been selected for adolescent boys to study and perform. Along the way she considers the representation of masculinity in these texts and their commentaries, as well as examining the connections between emotion, memory, and understanding, reflecting on how this may aid with language learning.

A third and final chapter opens by focusing on a thirty-line medieval Latin lyric poem by Marbod of Rennes, in which a boy narrator laments over a weeping woman cradling the head of a dead warrior (the scene has been identified by some as depicting Andromache and Hector); the poem, Woods explains, is remarkable for the way in which its central section uses no gender-specific words to identify its singer and subjects. Her ensuing discussion then explores in greater depth the implications of performances by boys in the medieval classroom for our understanding of education during this period, for our study of the reception of classical texts and themes, and for the potential of such texts to generate emotional responses. This concise and eloquent volume is both a valuable addition to recent scholarly forays into the history of classical pedagogy and an illuminating insight into the engagement of readers, educators, and students with classical texts.

The Classics in Modernist Translation, edited by Miranda Hickman and Lynn Kozak, pulls into sharp focus a relatively under-represented area of classical reception studies, namely Modernist literature.Footnote ⁶ Several of its contributors offer reasons why Modernist classicisms have not attracted the same attention as, say, post-colonial and contemporary classicisms. These range from the subject's inherent complexity to a perceived ideological aversion to both Modernism and Classics, both of which are frequently associated with atavistic Eurocentrism. Modernist writers’ innovative, irreverent, allusive, and often mercurial engagements with classical literature also test the boundaries of translation for specialists and legibility for non-specialists.

As Hickman notes, a classical training is now relatively rare among scholars and students of Modernism. But, as this volume proves, classical reception was crucial to the development of Modernism itself. It was a feature of its founding parents and chief exponents, including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D., Richard Aldington, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Laura Riding, all of whom are discussed in the impressive and impressively diverse chapters of this volume. The book is tangibly exploratory and interdisciplinary, offering a range of scholarly approaches to the material. It signals considerable work to be done, and each section's ‘respondent essays’ work to amplify such invitations to further research. Elizabeth Vandiver opens the book with a case study of Aldington and H.D.’s ‘Poets’ Translation Series’, which – occurring as it does on the ‘cusp of modernism’ (16) – represents something of a power grab by a new literary elite from the philological guardians of the classical tradition. Part I is then given wholly to Ezra Pound and translation, containing close philological exegeses of Pound's interestingly mediated Hellenism in Cantos and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Part II focuses on H.D.’s translations of Euripides, which, as Eileen Gregory notes, reveal themselves as ‘acts of interpretation, showing awareness of lexical resonances, metricality and imagistic qualities’ (124).

Part III, entitled ‘Modernist Translation and Political Attunements’, explores the theme with reference to Riding, Eliot, Joyce, and Yeats. ‘Politics’, as Nancy Worman rightly points out in her respondent essay, is interpreted broadly here. Leah Flack's discussion of the presence of the song of the Sirens in Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land, stands out, giving a healthy shake to the pedestal of erudition on which their authors’ texts have come to rest. It is reassuring to see how crude the creation of complexity can be, and interesting to see the role of classical texts in that creation. The volume's plural and pluralizing approach to the intimidating monolith of classical Modernism seems set to achieve its goal of opening up classical modernisms to a wider constituency of scholars.

Gesine Mauwald in her Reviving Cicero in Drama Footnote ⁷ admits that ‘exploring a group of dramas whose only common feature is that they all present “Cicero” as a character in the dramatic action may appear rather arbitrary at first glance and might seem not to lead directly to specific insights’ (242). She also advises that most of the plays under investigation are now forgotten largely because of their poetic quality, or lack of it. After the first glance has worn off, it is clear that Manuwald has valiantly assembled a survey of dramas that feature ‘Cicero’ in post-Renaissance Europe (including plays in Latin, English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and Czech), from Robert Garnier's Cornélie (1574) to Robert Harris and Mike Poulton's Imperium (2017). She has identified sixty-five plays and each entry has a page or two of information about the playwright and their work. There is then a short section for ‘bibliographical information’, pointing to how the reader can access the script, often helpfully with a link to a digital edition. After a list of the play's characters, Manuwald provides a ‘comment’, concentrating mainly on Cicero's role in the play, his portrayal in relation to the historical record, and a discussion of possible sources, both ancient and modern. This data is necessarily descriptive.

The survey is complemented by introductory chapters explaining the aim (‘to make a contribution to exploring the rich and varied reception of Cicero’; viii) and providing details of Cicero's life and works. Chapter 3 (‘Context: ‘Cicero’ as a Character in Literature and Art’) is where an essay on the pan-European reception of Cicero, building on existing reception scholarship and helping the reader navigate the complex social, cultural, and political contexts of the plays surveyed, would have been welcome. For a chapter surveying the character of Cicero ‘in literature and art’ there are some notable omissions, such as Jack Lindsay's Roman novels of the 1930s–1950s, and representations of Cicero in (visual) art.

In the conclusion, Manuwald suggests that the emergence of Cicero on the stage correlates with the increasing popularity in the sixteenth century of historical drama, and that his relative prominence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ‘may be connected with the development of historical drama’ (244). No surprises here. Whole dissertations could – and we hope will – be written about each survey entry. Detailed discussion is perhaps made all but impossible by the enormous temporal and geographical scope of the project. But Manuwald nevertheless identifies a shift from generally negative characterizations of the Catilinarian Conspiracy, where ‘Catiline is the arch-villain’ (244), to Catiline as revolutionary (in turn, switching Cicero from hero to reactionary). This is an important insight, which has parallels in twentieth-century leftist historical fiction in the wake of Edward Spencer Beesly's landmark scholarly examples of reading history against the grain in the 1860s and ’70s. Manuwald's book presents numerous opportunities for students and scholars of classical reception to investigate many obscure and several well-known plays starring Cicero.

In 1998 Christopher Stray published his book Classics Transformed (1998). It quickly became a key source of information and inspiration underpinning all sociologically informed approaches to studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British Classics. Classics in Britain Footnote ⁸ constitutes another clear and bright beam through the often opaque history of British Classics as a scholarly discipline. As we have come to expect, Stray focuses particularly on evidence gathered from and about school and university curricula, scholars, and their teaching practice and materials. But he also shows, for example, how nineteenth-century classical publishing practices and institutions such as the Hellenic Society and the Classical Association helped to change the position of Classics in British society.

The book is a revised compilation of Stray's extensive work in the field, beginning with five chapters exploring the presence of Classics within scholarly institutions, especially the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The second part consists of seven chapters focusing on the transformative role of publishing and printing practices; and the third part addresses the key schoolbooks, grammars, and journals. In his preface, Stray reflects on how much of the work produced under the umbrella of classical reception is still dominated by literary and visual arts studies. His book reminds us of the essential role played by scholarship and teaching in the transmission of classical culture, and goes a long way (as its author hopes) towards redressing the balance. In Constanze Güthenke's introduction to the volume, which contextualizes Stray's contribution to the history of scholarship and classical reception studies, she argues that ‘Stray's findings, portraits, exempla, “micro-environments”…feed into a new awareness that Classics as a discipline…is in fact inseparable from questions of reception’ (7). But perhaps the most precious feature of Stray's magisterial tome is his finely tuned ear to the periods’ witty or ridiculous turns of phrase, his keen eye for enriching but not overburdening detail, and the occasional oddball fact, all of which make his writing about – let's face it – often austere, sometimes dry, subject matter both impressively learned and amusingly human.