B.’s book is a thought-provoking account of the role of the sea in Greek mythical narrative. At the heart of the book is the claim that the sea was a space associated with in-betweenness and transition in Greek thought, especially transition between life and death, and between human and divine. That claim is the key to B.’s close readings, which shed fresh light on a series of much-studied texts and familiar stories, although sometimes in a way that emphasises the similarities and common patterns between different texts without extensive attention to the differences.

An introduction sets out the argument in outline. Chapter 1 then deals with the image of the sea as a path. The sterile salt water of the sea occupied an intermediary position between the fresh water of the land and the fresh water of the stream of Ocean which was thought to flow round its edge. The further reaches of the sea, especially in the western sea beyond the Pillars of Heracles, were thought to be places of access to the underworld, and the location for islands linked with immortality and the afterlife. Crossing the sea in the Greek mythical imagination therefore led one from life to death, from mortal to immortal experience, most famously in Odysseus’ visit to Hades in the Odyssey, which is analysed at length here as one of several example texts. Chapter 2 deals with the way in which journeying over the sea is often linked with the transition to manhood, for example for Perseus and Jason in Pindar (Pythian 10 and 4 respectively) or for Theseus in Bacchylides 17. Chapter 3 deals with three different stories of mythical women set adrift in chests: Danae, Auge and Rhoeo. The sea in these stories, B. suggests, is an appropriate frame for the indeterminate status of women who stand apart from the normal experience of marriage and household. Chapter 4 offers a fascinating account of the significance of dolphins in Greek myth. Dolphins, for B., share the mediating function of the sea itself: in paintings they are usually shown suspended in mid-leap between sea and air; they also mediate between human and divine, for example in the many foundation myths where their involvement acts as a guarantee of divine approval; and they are linked again with the transition from life to death, and from mortality to immortality, in the assistance they give to figures like Hesiod and Melicertes, whose bodies are recovered by dolphins. Chapter 5 examines the way in which stories of leaping or diving into the sea represent the transition into other states of consciousness – ‘dreaming, madness, drunkenness, or love’ (p. 148) – or again transition to death. Women who leap into the sea, usually to avoid male violence, are often transformed into seabirds (for example Ino-Leucothea is transformed into a shearwater), creatures who are in a constant state of transition between water and air. Finally Chapter 6 looks closely at Dionysus, and the way in which he too stands on the border between death and life, between mortal and immortal (for example as the only god with a mortal and an immortal parent). His famous encounter with the pirates has funerary connotations, and B. suggests that their transformation into dolphins is particularly appropriate to the transitional characteristics of Dionysus himself. The chapter ends with an elegant discussion of the role of dolphins in sympotic art, as figures for the inebriated symposiasts who allow themselves to be transformed by contact with Dionysus within the transitional context of the symposium, which is described by B. as ‘a bridge between daily and divine life’ (p. 183). That final section, like the book as a whole, is beautifully illustrated, and combines discussion of text and image carefully and convincingly.

One obvious question to ask is how those mythical ways of understanding the sea intersected with real human experience, and B. offers some engaging answers to that question. She includes at the end of Chapter 5 some discussion of ancient ritual, for example the initiatory immersion in the sea in the Mysteries at Eleusis, which clearly represented on some level a transition towards contact with the divine. There are also some good passages on metaphor: she argues that the idea of sea-crossing as a transitional experience made it particularly fitting as an image for various kinds of psychological adjustment, or for political transformation, especially for ‘the attainment of a new status or a new order within the community’ (p. 88). Those sections are far from exhaustive, however, and some readers might wish for more sustained discussion of what we know about real coastal communities in the ancient world and their interactions with the sea they lived close to.

There are other ways too in which one might construct a broader picture than the one B. offers. It is striking that the book is quite restricted in generic terms, since B. confines herself mainly to mythical narrative: the title is misleading in that respect. It is also restricted chronologically: later authors like Plutarch are included every so often, but B.'s discussion of them is not for the most part framed within a set of wider questions about change over time (although there are some exceptions, for example in Chapter 5, which takes a diachronic approach, particularly in relation to the development of stories about unrequited love and leaping into the sea in the Hellenistic period). Perhaps most obviously, it would be fruitful to extend B.’s discussion of the way in which the association of the sea with death and the gods is often in tension with a rather different kind of narrative, especially in historiographical and geographical texts, which repeatedly celebrate human control over the marine environment through naval power or through the knowledge gained by exploration. One obvious place to look is Book 1 of Strabo's Geography (Strabo is not in the index, although he makes it into the footnotes every so often), which offers a rationalising account of the sea and its geography, although not in a way that discards completely the features B. discusses: the sea's marginal and transitional status is reinvented and redescribed by Strabo within a more scientific, post-mythological idiom. Within the Classical period, which is B.’s main focus, one might look at a text like Herodotus’ Histories, where the sea is a place of empire and conquest – although of course that characterisation goes hand in hand with an awareness of the difficulty of exercising control and a continuing awareness of the sea as a place of divine protection, not least in the series of scenes where Persian attempts to control the natural environment are thwarted. Texts like those might help us to move towards an even more complex picture, where the dominant views of the sea that B. discusses are in tension with and disrupted by alternative conceptions. And it seems likely, as B. acknowledges very briefly in her introduction (pp. 10–11), that the texts of the Roman Empire would be a particularly fruitful place to look for the evolution of a more tangled story along those lines. The project of understanding ancient responses to the sea in all their variety is bound to need contributions from many different scholars. B.’s book is a valuable starting point.