C.'s volume offers a large-scale comparative reading of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer's Iliad, with a focus on the respective protagonists’ journeys from violence to wisdom: ‘Gilgamesh and Achilles begin from the compulsion to exalt oneself above smaller and weaker men, to achieve an everlasting name and avoid disgrace above all things; but they are led, and they lead us who contemplate them, towards the truth that the heroic ideal slips away in face of the instabilities of mortal life’ (p. 337). C.'s writing conveys a sense of deep engagement with the epics and the enduring (yet rarely explicit) wisdom that they invite us to ponder. This book is not only the fullest and most ambitious comparison between the two epics attempted so far, amid continuing academic research on the relationships between early Greek and ancient Near Eastern literature; it is also a personal appreciation of the beauty and profundity of each poem.

An important feature of C.'s interpretation is his attention to the wider literary contexts of Gilgamesh and the Iliad, and to the constitution of the texts. It emerges clearly from his detailed analysis that Gilgamesh, though the best-known work of ancient Mesopotamian literature, is still a fragmentary text, and C. is aware that A.R. George's standard edition of 2003 is to be supplemented by many significant new discoveries. This is not the place to engage with philological details: in case readers feel stimulated by C.'s work to explore the non-Greek material independently, it is worth noting in brief that George has recently published a second edition of his English translation that takes account of the latest Sumerian and Akkadian evidence (The Epic of Gilgamesh [2020]) and that G. Beckman's treatment of the Hittite sources is now available (The Hittite Gilgamesh [2019]), with further, not yet fully published texts on the horizon (see Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 83 [2020], 325–7). On the Sumerian sources, C. draws especially on the widely used Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature and on publications relating to it (p. xii): specialists appreciate the ETCSL mainly because of its excellent search function, while its textual reconstructions are increasingly out of date, and its elegant English translations tend to skim over philological problems. K. Volk (ed.), Erzählungen aus dem Land Sumer (2015), is a more recent and reliable anthology.

On the basis of independent readings of Gilgamesh (Chapters 2–4) and the Iliad (Chapters 6–16), both of which are amply contextualised within their respective traditions, C. identifies a series of parallels that concentrate on the protagonist (Gilgamesh/Achilles) and his companion (Enkidu/Patroclus) in particular: the nature of the male relationship, including its possible sexualisation in at least some versions; the companion as a substitute for the protagonist; the death of the companion; the protagonist's quest in reaction to this death; the coming of the companion as a phantom; and various attendant similarities of detail (see the schema on p. 328). Having noted some inherent problems in the universalist notion of ‘heroic literature’ (pp. 8–13), C. repeatedly finds that the evidence disagrees with traditional expectations of what an epic should be: the shift ‘from the outward world of action and the pursuit of prestige to an inner world of reflection, questioning and preoccupation with the universality of death’ emerges as the most remarkable feature of each poem and as the most important similarity between them (p. 226).

At the same time this tendency to scepticism and introversion, which seems more palpable to me in the case of Gilgamesh than of Achilles, is not wholly unique: C. refers to his own forthcoming work on the early medieval Ulster Cycle (p. 13), and mention could be made of a comparative reading of Gilgamesh and Beowulf along similar lines (R. North and M. Worthington, KASKAL 9 [2012], 177–217). C. follows many (p. 34 n. 116) in taking the view that Gilgamesh must have been known to Homer. I confess that I remain to be convinced of this: even after reading C.'s uniquely sensitive and detailed interpretations, I feel that even fuller contextualisation within the respective traditions, and beyond them, would be required in order to make a historical link seem plausible. The nature of that supposed link is quite unclear (C. offers some speculation, p. 334), and even on the purely literary level a great deal of spadework remains to be done: see now the exemplary study of B. Ballesteros (CQ 71 [2021], 1–21), whose detailed exploration of Ishtar's ascent to heaven and Aphrodite's ascent to Olympus has thoroughly dismantled the common argument for direct influence from Gilgamesh on Homer that is accepted as a prime example by C., among many others (pp. 193–5, 330–1). Similarly, I wonder whether a more wide-ranging study of the ‘companion’-theme in Greek (and other) epic, adumbrated by C. (p. 213) but not resumed in his concluding speculations on Enkidu and Patroclus (p. 331), could lead to alternative interpretations: M.L. West concluded that Heracles’ Ioalos was the intermediary between Enkidu and Patroclus (‘Gilgāmeš and Homer: The Missing Link?’, in: B. Dignas and L. Audley-Miller [edd.], Wandering Myths [2018], pp. 265–80), M. Schofield once extended the chain of analogies by adding Roland and Oliver (CQ 36 [1986], 18), and there may be other ways still of explaining the similarity, beyond literary dependence. The strength of C.'s book is that it does not rely on the assumption that Homer knew Gilgamesh: the wisdom-oriented interpretation that it advances can be appreciated independently of the historical claim.