This is an updated re-edition (C. calls it a ‘redaction’, p. 19) of Poétique des mythes dans la Grèce antique (2000), published in English as Greek Mythology: Poetics, Pragmatics and Fiction (2009). The new publication preserves the chapters in the same order as the original (with titles slightly changed) and has three more chapters, devoted to Theseus, Heracles and Prometheus. These three studies effectively complete C.'s survey of Greek mythology, allow him to demonstrate yet again the validity of his approach with further examples, and offer a deeper engagement with the iconography of the myths.

This is a hefty volume. Its 732 pages, in a small font, are characteristically dense. The updated bibliography runs to 61 pages and the notes, which occupy 125 pages, contain a wealth of information (followed by a general index). The ‘table de matières’ offers synopses of each chapter's contents and can serve as a guide for readers. After an ‘avant-propos’ explaining the origins and design of the volume, come eleven chapters: ‘Mythe et Mytho-logiques’; ‘Creátions narratives et poétiques’; ‘Bellérophon, le passage à l’âge adulte et la pragmatique du récit homérique’; ‘Clytemnestre, Oreste et la célébration poétique d'une victorie aux Jeux pythiques’; ‘Iô, les Danaïdes, l’étranger et l'autochtone: l'inflexion tragique’; ‘Hélène, la guerre de Troie et les desseins de l'historiographie’; ‘Thésée l'Athénien en héros iconographique: légitimation d'une politique d'expansion maritime’; ‘Héraclès, héros tragique et victime sacrificielle: entre drame et culte’; ‘Prométhée et la justice civique dans le dialogue philosophique’; ‘Le devin Tirésias, la déesse Athéna et le poète savant d'Alexandrie’; ‘Artémis, Hippolyte et l'espace cultuel de Trézène raconté par un géographe’. A short ‘Conclusion. Réalités virtuelles et fictions référentielles’ rounds out the volume.

In the first chapter C. restates once again his position concerning the concepts of ‘myth’ and ‘mythology’ as modern (not indigenous) categories (p. 17). He examines the ancient uses of the terms mythos and logos, and warns against the opposition mythos/logos which, he affirms, is a creation of the eighteenth century, whereas in the fifth century b.c. the terms were practically synonymous.

This provides C. with the occasion for a historical survey of ‘myth’ interpretation and hermeneutics in the West. C. reminds us of the need to reflect on our methodology, especially since this has, according to C., become increasingly difficult of late, due to the constraints that neoliberal ideology, dominant since the eighties, has imposed on freedom of thought in the humanities (pp. 17–18).

In his methodological critique, C. is reacting specifically to what he feels have been abuses of structuralism at the hands of some scholars, who take it to very high levels of abstraction and, by excessive concentration on what is common to all versions, end up neglecting the specificities of the stories that we call ‘myths’. Those stories, as the ancients understood them, cannot be torn from the texts that embody them and which belong to a certain time, genre, historical and social situation, and cultic and performance context (they are characterised by intra-and extra-discursive elements, in C.'s terminology).

The rest of the book consists of analyses of well-chosen narratives in various Greek texts that survey Greek literature from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the story of Bellerophon in Iliad 6 to Pindaric lyric, tragedy, Herodotus, Hellenistic poetry and Pausanias.

The ancients, C. states, were always sensitive to the pragmatic functions of the texts that appear to us to contain ‘myths’. Since it is impossible to do justice to all C.'s analyses in a short review, I have selected a few illustrative cases. The first text analysed, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, is closely connected to the ritual of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which the hymn both institutes and, at the same time, performs or enacts. Again, in C.'s interpretation of Pythian 11, Pindar's treatment of Orestes’ story (his matricide is glossed over and the stress is put on the double murder of Agamemnon and Cassandra by Clytemnestra, p. 173) is motivated by the performance of the poem in honour of a Theban victor, Thrasydaeus, to whose ritual heroisation the ode, as an ‘acte de parole chanté et ritual’ (p. 161), is a contribution. C. includes here some excellent reflections on the ‘I’ of the lyric poet, who delegates his voice to the chorus in the ode's performance but still retains the authority to approve the figures of both Orestes and Agamemnon as successful men with excellent reputations and to present Clytemnestra's crime as the worst possible offence. The gnomic component of the ode exhibits a parallel contrast between praise and criticism:

And yet, the process of heroisation is only fully achieved at the end of the ode, with the mention (and implicit connection to Thrasydaeus) of the Theban hero Iolaus, Heracles’ nephew, and the Dioscuri, all of whom received a cult. It is only here that the boy Thrasydaeus, fully assimilated to these heroic figures, attains within the performative space of the poem his own heroic status. Unlike the immortality granted by epic, which is acquired through death, Pindar offers his victors a living glory. Pindar's proclamation of Thrasydaeus’ success is the more powerful and effective in that it takes place as part of a ritual celebration.

The myth of Argive Io, as treated by Aeschylus in two tragedies (Suppliant Women and Prometheus), can only be understood, according to C., in the Athenian context, the set of social values shared by the poet and his audience that the tragedies both reveal and ‘perform’. The Suppliant Women transforms the story of the Danaids (descendants of Io who, fleeing their marriage to the sons of Aegyptus, arrive in Argos) and their blood wedding to their cousins into a civic myth, which allows the Athenians to rethink and reaffirm their autochthony in the aftermath, so C. proposes, of their abandonment of their city on the eve of the battle of Salamis. It also provides the city with a ritual space (the theatre) in which to reconsider the values associated with foreignness, the regions outside Greece. This contrast, however, between what is felt as properly Greek and what is perceived as pertaining to Greece's periphery, is ‘une opposition souvent trop schématiquement exploitée entre nature et culture ou sauvage et civilisé’ (p. 227) – here is the kernel of C.'s quarrel with a rigid type of structuralism. The recent encounter with the Persians had revealed to the Greeks their ethnic and cultural unity, but the foreigner and opponent in this case was far from uncivilised or savage. It is rather an excess of riches and their tyrannical system that drive the Persians to hybris, and to trespass the limits, moral and also territorial, assigned to mortals. The dramatisation of the wanderings of Io and her descendants, the Danaids, offered the Athenians, by way of an identification with the rule of Pelasgus, king of Argos, a meditation on their own legendary history, as well as a narrative and poetic representation of the origins of their political and matrimonial institutions.

There is much more in this book to provoke further thoughts and reactions. It is not an easy read and it requires time and concentration fully to appreciate and assimilate the wealth of information, variety of themes and subtlety of the many interpretations of specific passages. But there is a coherence and power to the method overall, and it amply repays the reader's efforts.