For a genre fathered by a blind oral poet, classical epic takes a remarkably vivid interest in modes of seeing and being seen. Between views of and from Olympus and the Underworld, scenes of teichoscopy and ecphrasis, epic asks its audience and its actors to visualise the grand and the fantastical, to make mere words realisable through imagination. This deep and varied engagement with one particular sensory perception and stimulus – the most important alongside hearing and sound – has not escaped critics, who have often written on individual epics’ fascination with sight. Here, for the first time, L. has provided a panoramic account of the genre's preoccupation with seeing of all kinds: divine and prophetic, female and male, philosophical and artistic. Sensitive in interpretation and formidable in scope – the authors discussed range from Homer to Nonnus – the book represents a major critical intervention by a scholar who has spent many years familiarising herself with a vast range of both primary and secondary sources (the bibliography runs close to 700 items). Indeed, the smooth and substantial integration of Quintus and Nonnus, in particular, provides an exemplary model for all critics of the Graeco-Roman epic tradition who typically stop at the Flavians or perhaps make an exception for Claudian (who is oddly the only major epic poet excluded from this study).

The theme of vision is capacious enough to furnish numerous passages for analysis as L. advances a coherent account of larger developments in the epic tradition. ‘Developments’ should not be taken to imply an overly teleological view, however, for the book is organised not as a literary history but rather as a series of engagements with the different kinds of viewing important to the genre (of gods, of prophets, of art, etc.). By eschewing the standard chronological ordering of material, L. is able to foreground the various visual contexts that constitute looking and being looked at in epic. Each chapter thus adds to an ever more complex sense of how we should read any single moment of vision in a poem, and how these moments relate to each other. So, for instance, we learn not only how epic narrative is shaped by the perspective of the gods (Chapter 2), but also how various mortal heroes (Chapter 3) aspire to and fall short of, and prophets (Chapter 4) indirectly draw on, that divine perspective.

The systematic breakdown of vision into coherent yet related categories makes sense of the book's subtitle – ‘vision, gender and narrative’ – which might otherwise seem like a random assortment of topics in the study of epic. L. is primarily and consistently interested in how vision is constructed by gender (and related aspects of sexuality and power) and how that construction itself influences the epic narrative. Motivating these questions is a larger enquiry about power: what circumstances determine a character's or the audience's view, and how does one particular view come to be dominant over others? Open-minded almost to a fault, L. is very good at showing how literary episodes offer a range of responses to cultural values and question standard assumptions about epic's habits of representation: gods can be impotent, heroes feminised, women dominant and ugliness a crucial component of a genre ostensibly fascinated with perfection. The resulting picture of the genre reveals not only elements that work against various theological, political and social norms, but also the process and price of constructing and maintaining those norms.

The main accomplishment of the way L. structures the book is in inducing a far greater alertness to the effects and contexts of the gaze. Medea, for instance, receives substantial discussion at several points in the second half the book, but with clearly distinct interpretations depending on whether she is the subject or object of the gaze, whether the generic signals appear more epic or tragic, or whether the fictional context is a dream or teichoscopy or display of magic, and so on. This refraction can occasionally create problems for the reader, since one can miss crucial information about a passage or pertinent discussions, for instance about Mercury at Ov. Met. 2.714ff. (treated on both p. 66 and 332, the latter of which has a bearing on the former). Consulting the indexes, therefore, especially the index locorum, is a must, and indeed, for all the benefit of digesting the entire book, it is realistic that many readers will approach it from the back rather than the front. The sheer quantity of passages discussed, as well as the attentiveness of the readings, means that references to L.'s book will become a familiar feature of footnotes for some years to come.

Although the field of sensory studies is currently moving in other directions, sight remains a popular subject and has received a good deal of attention across a range of visual phenomena, including epiphany and topographical sightlines (L. has contributed to some of this work herself). In this context, then, it is perhaps surprising to find a book that, on the one hand, signals in the introduction the author's deep immersion in the theoretical and historical bibliography yet, on the other hand, practises an almost exclusively literary approach to the topic. Moreover, explicit discussions of theory (from Lacan and Kristeva to film studies) tend to be confined to self-contained passages, often at the end of sections or chapters (e.g. p. 121 or 139), and with limited implications for how one understands L.'s close readings, which almost always rely much more heavily on the poetic text itself. The compromise must have been a difficult one, but it would have been more compelling either to explicate the role of contemporary theory more fully or to dispense with it more cursorily. The absence of any discussion of non-literary contexts, on the other hand, has a different effect, which is to make some of the readings more one-dimensional than they might have been, especially given recent scholarship in this area (e.g. Barchiesi on Ovid's Phaethon, or Feldherr on the Metamorphoses as a whole). Some variation in method and context, at the expense of the discussion of a few passages (which in any case begin to offer diminishing returns), would have made for a more powerful whole. Chapter 8 on the assaultive gaze, which makes fuller use of contemporary film theory and cultural studies alongside ancient visual terminology, provides a skilful example of what L. can do when ranging beyond the limits she sets herself elsewhere.

But if it is relatively easy to appreciate how the book will be both used and useful, it is not always the easiest of reads. Because of its breadth, the individual discussions are necessarily very compact, with a heavy burden placed on the reader either to know the works and the secondary scholarship in some detail or to have them to hand: this book cannot function as an introduction to the epic tradition, nor was it designed to. This concision entails a number of short-hands, from a penchant for the rhetorical question to a habit of condensing discussions of secondary scholarship into short bursts, as if introducing the reader to the book's behind-the-scenes construction.

These minor queries and differences of opinion do not detract from the great strengths of the book, namely that L. is fully committed to teasing out the myriad implications of viewing and she provides the reader with a much-enhanced analytical toolkit for doing so. Indeed, it is the sustained scrutiny of the theme from every possible literary angle that makes this study an invaluable resource for all scholars of epic, narrative, gender and the senses.