‘Someone should write a book about Egypt in the ancient novels.’ This is a thought that crossed my mind some years ago when reading the Greek romances and recalling the novelistic narrative in miniature that is Matthew 2:13–14: Mary and Joseph’s flight into Egypt. The virginal wife and the vulnerable couple. The menace of a jealous king. Dreams and divine promises of salvation in Egypt, however temporary and enigmatic. Now, with C.’s monograph, Classicists will benefit from what will be the decisive study on this important topic. C. charts new lines of inquiry beyond the familiar questions of the novels’ (possible) generic origins in Egypt and (unlikely) status as Isiac mystery texts (pp. 11–15). He instead explores the literary-cultural figuration of Egypt and Ethiopia in the ‘big five’ novels, toggling between the interpretative frameworks of ‘representation’ and ‘resistance’. The romance representation of Egypt and Ethiopia, on the one hand, extends and reconfigures the ethnographic fascination with the peoples, practices and ecology of these perceived peripheries, which had gripped the Greek imagination since the time of Herodotus. But C. also sees Egypt and Ethiopia as ‘sites of resistance, revolt, and rebellion’ (p. 3) against instantiations of imperial power, which manifest differently in different novels – as a Persian king (pp. 29–30), an Egyptian prefect (pp. 139–40) and even a triumphal procession through the heart of Meroë (pp. 212–16). Roman imperium is, of course, the spectral presence never spoken aloud in the Greek romances. And it is precisely this ‘productive ambiguity of Roman presence’, C. argues, that invites readers of novels to imagine ‘what resistance to empire could and would look like’ (p. 8) through the reverberating hypotheticals of prose fiction.

Following an introduction, the book unfolds over six main chapters, which are organised in a chronological arc from Chariton to Heliodorus, but also coalesce around thematic nuclei. This structure works, for the most part. Chapter 1 gets off on an awkward foot; C., reasonably, wants to start at the beginning of the novelistic tradition, with Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus, and the latter in comparison with Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. The challenge, as he acknowledges, is that the Egyptian elements in these novels are mostly found out of Egypt: Egyptian soldiers with Chaereas in Tyre (p. 30), Habrocomes meeting the mummified Thelxinoe in Sicily (p. 37) and Lucius becoming an Isiac initiate in Rome (p. 54). While his arguments about the pan-Mediterranean reach of Isis are persuasive, it is disorienting to start with such centrifugal readings of Egypt before first navigating the Nile proper. In Chapter 2 we zoom in from this empire-wide lens to the microscopic details of ekphrasis in Achilles Tatius, who brings environmental determinism to bear on an Egyptian ‘menagerie’. C. ends with close readings of the hippopotamus and phoenix descriptions in Books 3–4. While I found the ‘resistance’ readings of the hippo somewhat strained – does spectating a hippopotamus captus always an Aegypto capta make? (pp. 74–9) –, C.’s analysis of the phoenix as both an analogue for Clitophon the Phoenician (pp. 85–6) and as a sophist trapped in an ‘ekphrastic loop’ (p. 88) are riveting new readings of some of the novel’s most elusive passages.

The chapters that follow find firmer footing. Chapter 3 is a masterpiece on the boukoloi (‘cowherds’) in Achilles Tatius, illustrating how their paradoxical liminality between land, water and labyrinths makes them avatars for ‘the novels’ creative dynamism and innovative plotting’ (p. 110). This chapter showcases what is perhaps C.’s most valuable contribution to the study of these novels: a remarkable command of both Egyptian narrative traditions and papyrological sources, literary and documentary. This enables him to draw into the story of Achilles’ boukoloi the account of boukoloi attacks in P. Thmouis 1 and the thirteen bandits in the Demotic Contest for the Benefice of Amun. These interdisciplinary analyses, often including inscriptions and visual media, enrich the entire book. But they work especially well in parts, like Chapter 3, that help us theorise how ‘novelistic narratives would be understood differently by Greek and Egyptian interpretive communities’ (p. 119).

Chapter 4 paints a triptych of Alexandria in the ancient novels, comparing the depopulated cityscape in Achilles Tatius (‘art rather than life’, p. 138), the hostile administrative centre in Xenophon and finally the apocalyptic ‘unfounding’ of Alexandria in Heliodorus. C. reveals Alexandria to be a site that all three novelists must reckon with historically and aesthetically, even if what they really want to do is drown it in or deprive it of the Nile (pp. 140, 146). While illuminating the importance of Alexandria between the novels and Egyptian apocalyptic texts, this chapter also lays the groundwork for the remaining chapters by accentuating the representation of time as another canvas of creativity. Egyptian pasts, presents and futures are all in play as C. transitions from Heliodorus’ erasure of Alexandria (an ‘apocalyptic beginning’, p. 148) to the itinerary through Upper Egypt and Ethiopia in the latter books of the novel. Chapter 5 explores the phenomena of geographical and temporal ‘displacement’ in Heliodorus. C. applies the idea of ‘displacement’ to so many facets of Heliodorus that I am not convinced they are all instances of the same effect. But each atomised example is striking in its own right: human sacrifices have been phased out of boukoloi society and displaced to Ethiopia (p. 163). The divinity of Isis has displaced Ptah and the Apis bulls in Memphis (p. 175). Calasiris embodies the displacement of the Greek ethnographic habit to an Egyptian narrator (p. 179). The puzzle pieces of the novelistic storyworld (or ‘theatrical set’, in C.’s words) are all being rearranged.

Chapter 6, appropriately, concludes with ‘the ends of Ethiopia’ in Heliodorus. C. does due diligence in explaining Ptolemaic and Roman attempts to invade and eventually demarcate the borders of Nubia, which highlights the significance of the heroes’ departure from Syene and the Nile as an unprecedented expedition beyond the geographical and textual limits of the preceding Greek novels (pp. 200–1). But some parts of Heliodorus’ Meroë, when at last we arrive, will be very familiar to readers in the Roman world. The adventus rituals for King Hydaspes, Charicleia’s identity performance and the virtuoso display of Theagenes’ gymnastic paideia affirm that even here at the ‘ends of the earth’ Ethiopia is transitioning from its ritual-laden past to a hybridised end (telos). C. is eager in this chapter, as he was in Chapters 4 and 5, to take every anachronism as proof of Heliodorus’ revisionist temporalities. He proposes that the novelist wants to ‘turn back the clock on Meroë’ (p. 199) by making it an ally, not a subject, of Aksum. Heliodorus also foreshadows, in the bright new future of Meroë, its inevitable imperial end (p. 230). The kaleidoscopic chronologies that C. sees in Heliodorus are compelling but also left me wanting more information – even speculation – about what sources of historical periodisation inform the novelists’ understanding of Egyptian/Ethiopian time. Would the ancient novelists share our understanding of what is ‘anachronistic’ in these fictionalised topographies?

C. tends to be cautious about asserting what the Greek novelists knew or read directly from the Egyptian texts and traditions that feature so prominently in the book. And that is probably wise, given how little we know about these authors or their first-hand experience of the lands they bring to life. But as the elegant epilogue on early modern receptions of the Greek novel reiterates, the romance portraits of Egypt and Ethiopia are made of more than the imaginary. The wide-ranging readings in this book deftly illustrate that many channels of inspiration – Roman conquest, Isiac salvation and apocalyptic fantasy, among others – fed the fertile terrain of Imperial prose fiction.