The vivid visual description of key scenes is a hallmark of Greek historical writing, and across his disparate works Xenophon demonstrated particular skill both in presenting set-piece narratives and in placing his readers in the position of spectating at events alongside their protagonists. H. argues in her monograph that in doing so Xenophon traces a ‘politics of viewing’ in which spectacular display can manipulate, or be blunted by sceptical analysis, and in which ideas about identity are materialised through the presentation of self and community. Xenophon's command of descriptive writing, of the enargeia beloved of ancient literary critics, has been recognised since antiquity, and H. has the space in which to explore how he puts this facility to work in his three longer narrative works, the Hellenica, the Anabasis and the Cyropaedia. Her careful analyses tease out details which confirm that readers are wise to keep an eye not just on Xenophon's narrative manipulation of spectacle but also on his characters’ actions in looking and arranging themselves for viewing.

H. begins with a brief introduction in which she identifies the set-piece description as a site of ideological conflict and intellectual struggle, of ‘clashing perspectives’ on power. She adds further complexity through alluding to Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon in suggesting that in some cases the disempowered object of the gaze may be complicit in their subjection. At other times displays can be assertions of power; so some acts of seeing can be ‘disempowering’, not the ‘act of empowerment’ identified in feminist theories of the male gaze. Two main themes emerge: what it means for Greeks to look at each other and what it means for them to look at non-Greeks. Xenophon has no stable perspective on either theme, but the tensions they reveal, H. suggests, illuminate our understanding of his subjects’ politics.

Xenophon is clearly responding to the emerging traditions of Greek historical writing, as H. shows in her first chapter, tracing the role of the visual in the work of previous historians Herodotus and Thucydides, and also in the use and discussion of the visual in Xenophon's other works, notably the exploration of the visual experience of tyranny in the Hiero. Here emerges one slight disappointment with the presentation of the book's material; H. relegates much of her discussion of other scholarship to the endnotes. Some of these notes are extensive, such as that on S. Goldhill's interpretation of Xenophon's most theorised account of looking, Socrates’ encounter with the hetaira Theodote (Mem. 3.11) (S.D. Goldhill, ‘The Seductions of the Gaze: Socrates and his Girlfriends’, in: P. Cartledge, P. Millett and S. von Reden [edd.], Kosmos: Essays in Order, Conflict and Community in Classical Athens [1998], pp. 105–24). This was one place where the discussion might have been promoted into the main text; a reader who did not turn to the note would miss valuable discussion that enriches an otherwise descriptive retelling of the scene.

The Hellenica, the topic of the third chapter, offers a good first case to explore. H. highlights three themes: contested viewing, such as Alcibiades’ return to Athens, viewing Greek hegemony, with a focus on a specifically confident Spartan gaze that notably declines after the rise of Epaminondas’ Thebes, and looking at non-Greeks, where Xenophon deploys his skill to describe the encounters between Agesilaus’ Spartans and the Persians. Drawing these together, H. points to a wealth of examples, but it is hard to pin Xenophon down to a single perspective or practice across these diverse themes. In some cases H.'s focus on viewing seems to resolve to a narratological reading of episodes, with the Hellenica's account of the battle of Mantineia (Hell. 7.5.15–27) a good example. H. does tease out some insights, showing how Xenophon's use of indirect discourse makes it harder for readers to identify with Epaminondas even as his skilled control of the visual field is analysed. In the final section of the chapter, exploring Spartans looking at non-Greeks, H. shows how Spartan interactions often involve the staging of spectacle, to greater or lesser effect. The general Dercylidas presents a parade of Greek unity, which readers, unlike the Persian viewers, will know is a charade, while the Spartan king Agesilaus presents the non-Greeks as a spectacle to his troops, presenting them as weaker than they will prove to be. Agesilaus and the Persian satrap Pharnabazus meanwhile function as competing displays of elite self-presentation, but H. worries about how much the reader, presumed to be Greek, will buy into Xenophon's construction.

The next chapter addresses Xenophon's use of the visual in the Anabasis, another text in which Greek encounter with non-Greek is staged to great effect, and also the location of famously vivid scenes such as the Greek forces’ sighting of the Black Sea on their return journey. Again, H. sets out a framework of visual encounters – Greek and non-Greek, Greek and other Greek, Xenophon and others – while showing through close readings of key scenes how Xenophon destabilises some preconceptions, such as the idea that there is a clear divide between Greeks and others, while perhaps establishing others, such as the gap between elite and masses. Here too Xenophon shows the power of visual imagery in the rhetoric of the speeches he presents as having given. On the other hand, his narration of the sighting of the sea relies on sound as much as vision, on the responses to sight as much as the seeing itself. H. is right to conclude that the work is ‘highly revealing for the history of Greek self-consciousness’ (p. 116).

The final substantive chapter addresses the Cyropaedia, another work in which Xenophon includes many vivid scenes of action, in court and camp as well as on the battlefield. H.'s interest is in the ‘complex and contradictory’ presentation of Greek attitudes to Persia, in a text in which the protagonist is both the supreme viewer, ultimately ‘a law that looks at men’ (p. 127, translating Cyr. 8.1.22), and a spectacle of ‘elite masculine endeavour’ (p. 129) and of power itself. H. deconstructs the erotics of viewing through a contrast of Cyrus and Panthea as objects of the desiring gaze, showing how Cyrus maintains a control not available to the beautiful Asian queen, and arguing that they offer an analogy with Greek conceptualisations of possible relationships with Asia and the destabilising consequences of excessive desire. One might disagree about the extent to which Panthea has lost control of her own self-presentation, and while H. draws on and points to some of the extensive classical scholarship on these scenes, it would have been useful to include a more explicit engagement with E. Saïd's theory of orientalism and its impact on the interpretation of classical texts (E.W. Said, Orientalism [1978]; and now P. Vasunia, ‘Edward Said's Orientalism: A Reappraisal’, in: K. Blouin and B. Akrigg [edd.], The Routledge Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory [2024], pp. 43–61).

H.'s work is at its strongest when engaging in close reading, and in teasing out parallels and connections from work by Xenophon and others. It is therefore regrettable that the book contains no index locorum. The main (though rather selective) index lists Xenophon's characters by their names, and a few of the modern scholars discussed; Foucault is included, for example, but none of the Xenophon scholars discussed in the text and endnotes, and whose work is listed in the rich and thorough bibliography. These frustrating omissions make it harder to trace H.'s engagement with both scholarship and a rich selection of ancient texts across the course of the book.