Historians of ideas have increasingly eschewed the time-honoured method of tracing the ‘influence’ of one author or text on (an)other(s) across time, if only on the quite reasonable grounds that, since later thought is inevitably shaped by such a large raft of sources – environmental as well intellectual –, judgements concerning impact are inescapably arbitrary. There are simply no hard-and-fast criteria on the basis of which one may discern the extent to which x ‘influenced’ y in a way that z did not (or did so to a lesser or greater degree). Seeking to do this demands insupportable guesswork at best and is a fool’s errand at worst. Consequently, scholars have instead begun to speak instead of ‘receptions’ of the past by the future. This is not a distinction without a difference. Every earlier text is read and adapted somewhat differently by each of its readers. The process of transmission is simultaneously a matter of (re)creation, that is, of reception. The avant-garde of this approach may be found among Classicists who advocate what has come to be termed ‘classical reception studies’. The intuition behind this insight may be summarised as: ideas travel, but they do not travel in the same directions.

I highlight this development, with which many among the primary audience of The Classical Review are doubtless familiar, because the message has not, for the most part, yet filtered through to numerous scholars among whom may be counted the potential readers of the present volume, namely, historians of political thought. As the editors (two Classicists and a historian) make clear in the introduction, ‘classical reception theory’ unifies the book’s otherwise quite diverse chapters. Both its methodological unity and its focus on how subsequent authors appropriated the work of their predecessors sets this Companion apart from comparable collections (such as those recently published by Cambridge and Blackwell) that focus primarily on the original sources and only tangentially deal with later readings. The book spins off from the activities of the ‘Classical Reception Studies Network’, founded in 2004, and of a more recently established group devoted specifically to ‘The Legacy of Greek Political Thought’. Contributors are affiliated with both European and North American institutions and are drawn from diverse disciplines, including political theory, philosophy and history as well as Classics.

The volume is organised thematically rather than in strict chronology. The first section, ‘The Reproduction of Greek Political Thought’, features chapters on Hesiod, Thucydides and Platonism. The second, and by far the longest, part, ‘Greek Thought in New Environments’, covers the period from the Roman Republic until the eighteenth century. The third, ‘Variation and Adaptation’, and the fourth, ‘Greek Thought and the Potential for Dissent’, sections primarily concern how ideas pioneered in ancient Greece continue to be salient in recent and contemporary theoretical debates. This arrangement derives from a novel metaphor for reception theory, proposed in the introduction, of applying to it the evolutionary categories of reproduction, variation, adaptation and selection, each of which plays a vital role in conceptualising the process by which texts are received (pp. 4–5). The editors insist emphatically that the Companion should not be regarded as either comprehensive or definitive. Rather, they say, the contents should be treated as a series of ‘case-studies’ that offer a ‘snapshot’ of the current state of play on the topic, as well as ‘an opportunity to begin consideration of how to theorise this disparate and contentious field’ (pp. 15–16). In undertaking such a first step, the book may be judged a success.

When reviewing such a wide-ranging collection, it is always challenging to single out chapters for particular praise. But I especially commend two, very different, contributions. V. Syros’s essay on the dispersal of Greek political ideas in the Islamic world between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries demonstrates mastery of a broad set of literatures from both antiquity and the medieval period. Syros concentrates on the twin themes of the origins of human sociability and the basis of political authority that enjoyed wide diffusion among ancient Greek thinkers. Numerous sages of the day proposed that society arose as a result of the natural frailties to which human beings are subject; survival of the race depended on its members banding together. Yet, communal associations were not assured to be harmonious, thus necessitating the formation of systems of political justice along with mechanisms of enforcement. Once transmitted into the world of Islam, authors were compelled to reconcile such naturalism with Koranic teachings about rulership as a reflection of divinity, charged by Allah with disseminating and maintaining the faith. Squaring these two factors posed a considerable dilemma for Islamic theorists. Syros performs the notable feat of surveying within a relatively brief compass a quite extensive array of efforts to resolve this obvious tension between natural and supernatural dimensions of socio-political order.

Sawyer’s chapter affords a fascinating examination of the comparative fortunes of the Greek classics (including political thought) in US and British universities during the first three quarters of the twentieth century. She demonstrates that a schism opened up between c. 1900 and c. 1970 (although she often alludes to later developments as well) concerning the status of Classics generally and of Greek political thought in particular. Sawyer characterises this divergence as driven largely by the acceptance or rejection of the ‘relevance’ of ancient ideas in contemporary contexts. British scholars upheld the purity of their studies, for instance, insisting on the requirement to master classical languages, whereas in the United States translations became the norm with emphasis placed on the ‘great conversation’ of Western civilisation. As a result, one observes the popularisation of the Classics curriculum in the United States, even beyond the classroom. Many a bookshelf in respectable middle-class homes displayed volumes of The Great Books of the Western World, a compendium composed of 54 books of translated texts which foregrounded Greek philosophy and literature. By contrast, resistance in the United Kingdom to a perceived diminution of academic standards meant that the study of classical political thought withered in institutions of higher learning, with students turning to curricula that they deemed to be of greater pertinence. Sawyer contends that this chasm remains in evidence even today: the spirit of ‘relevance’ may be found, for example, in the Straussian approach to historical philosophy so widespread in US academia; and British ‘snobbery’ (her word) is reflected in the scholarship of Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School. (She fails to mention that those who subscribe to the latter methodology seldom direct their attention to the ancient world, preferring instead the safer confines of medieval and modern Europe.) Her conclusion suggests that precious little has changed on either side of the Atlantic in the opening decades of the twenty-first century.

As previously remarked, the editors of the volume make no claims to be comprehensive. Still, there are notable lacunae. Except for Syros’s chapter, the period of well more than a millennium stretching from later Roman antiquity until the sixteenth century is untouched. Yet the diffusion of Greek political writings in the Western Empire continued unabated even beyond its collapse. Cassiodorus, for example, read and promoted knowledge of the Greek language and of classical texts. Following a lull, the Renaissance of the twelfth century and the emergence of scholasticism paralleled the profuse circulation of writings (initially in Latin translations) by philosophers and historians of ancient Greece from whom lessons about political theory were culled. The culmination of this process of dissemination was the Renaissance. The latter era is absent from the Companion other than in R. Kingston’s informative chapter on Plutarch in early sixteenth-century France. (I applaud Kingston for drawing attention to Jean [aka Janus, aka John] Lascaris, a woefully understudied Greek émigré to Europe, who was responsible for the transmission of countless ancient texts to the West.) Once again with the exception of Syros’s chapter, none of the contributions moves outside of the Occidental context, and only a single chapter (by T. Mróz on Poland) concerns authors and texts hailing from elsewhere than Western Europe and North America. One would have thought that Byzantium might have been offered a seat at the table. Likewise, highly robust modern schools of political philosophy, such as those found in Latin America and Asia, are invisible. One hopes that future classical reception investigations of Greek political thought will cast a wider chronological and cultural net.

All-in-all, the volume accomplishes admirably the goal it sets itself, of illustrating how classical reception studies may be brought fruitfully to bear on the myriad sources from ancient Greece that were appropriated and adapted in highly varied fashion by their inheritors. I have already noted the insistence by the editors that the volume represents not an end but a beginning. Clearly, much remains to be done.