When I unwrapped this large volume, I found a rather apologetic cover letter explaining that reviewing, despite being a time-consuming and burdensome process, remains a core part of professional academic life. In actuality, the process of reading and reviewing this work, whilst it has been a time-consuming process, has been tremendously enjoyable, edifying and beneficial.

The Oxford Handbook series is well known for producing excellent, state-of-the-art and useful surveys of current and emerging scholarship on a wide range of topics. This volume represents another fine contribution to the series. It is a weighty volume (758 pages), offering a truly impressive diversity of scholarly perspectives on the Second Sophistic period. ‘Second Sophistic’ is an elaborate and somewhat problematic term that is used to refer to the revival of Greek rhetoric and the flourishing of Greek culture in the eastern Roman Empire in the late first to early third centuries ce.

In response to a growing momentum of scholarly interest in this period, the editors have adopted a wide-ranging approach, grouping 40 contributions from eminent scholars under the broad headings of ‘Language and Identity’, ‘Paideia and Performance’, ‘Rhetoric and Rhetoricians’, ‘Literature and Culture’, ‘Philosophy and Philosophers’ and ‘Religion and Religious Literature’. For anyone seeking an overview of the major characteristics of the period, this volume will be a crucial starting point and a vital and important resource.

This volume marks an exciting starting point for a new generation of studies of the Second Sophistic. From the outset, the editors challenge the ‘long-held and still influential view that “classical” Latin and Greek literature effectively ends with Pliny, Tacitus and Plutarch’ (p. 7). They also overturn the notion that Second Sophistic literature is derivative and inferior compared with the ‘superior’ and ‘purer’ writings of the ‘original’ sophists (p. 8). Taken as a whole, the volume convincingly demonstrates that the Second Sophistic period produced a wealth of literary material that is both fascinating and of high quality. The literature of this period covered an astonishingly broad range of topics and genres, and it deserves to be more widely read, from the letters of Fronto, to the Sympotic Questions of Plutarch, the Apologia of Apuleius, the Ephesiaka of Xenophon of Ephesus and the epistolary novels and miscellanies, to name just a few works.

By situating Second Sophistic texts within their broader social and cultural context, this volume enables a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the key preoccupations of this period, particularly its idealisation of the classical past, its emphasis on sophistic performance, paideia and erudition, and its concern with questions of self-definition and identity. To this end, T. Whitmarsh's point in Chapter 2 is a simple and valid one that hardly requires the overly emphatic analogy with quantum physics. The point is that Second Sophistic interest in ‘Greek culture’ and ‘Greek identity’ was not limited to a strictly defined place and period of time but was in fact part of a much larger wave that began ‘at least in the Hellenistic era’ (p. 15) and had a deep and longstanding impact on a number of ancient societies across the eastern Mediterranean (p. 20).

Although each contribution is of a similar length (10–12 pages), there is great variety in approach and emphasis. The initial contributions tend to deal with broader questions, such as whether there was a Latin Second Sophistic (Chapter 3), how Second Sophistic intellectuals utilised a cosmopolitan outlook (Chapter 6) and the different ways in which ethnicity, culture and identity were articulated by Second Sophistic authors (Chapter 7). Other chapters are more technical in their approach, but no less fascinating, such as Chapter 4 on ‘Attic’ versus ‘Asianic’ styles. The large number of chapters devoted to particular intellectual figures tend to follow a broadly consistent format: first, situating the particular author within the interests that characterised the Second Sophistic period, second, providing relevant biographical details and summaries of significant works, and third, discussing particular issues or themes. The chapters on Dio Chrysostom, Aelius Aristides, Plutarch, Apuleius and the novelists are particularly noteworthy in this regard.

This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars because it emphasises a number of important and recent developments in scholarship on Second Sophistic literature, including the ‘new vibrancy’ in Philostratean studies (p. 273), the ‘recent renaissance in Pausanias studies’ (p. 367), fascinating questions of ‘cultural and ethnic hybridity’ in the writings of Lucian of Samosata (p. 327) and recent developments in the study of mythography (Chapter 29) and the ancient novels (Chapter 26). To this end, several ancient authors and works are rigorously defended while others are cast in a new and more appreciative light. W. Hutton, for example, stridently defends the merits of Pausanias’ Periegesis Hellados by emphasising its uniqueness and its distinctively Second Sophistic focus on the distant glory of Greece; Richter rightly defends Lucian against early twentieth-century criticisms of him as a ‘degraded’ Oriental; F. Zeitlin opposes the marginalisation of the ancient novels as ‘unworthy heirs to the classical tradition’ (p. 416); K. Oikonomopoulou recasts the miscellanies as fascinating examples of literary experimentation, diversity and polymathy; and A.P. Johnson argues against the unfair exclusion of several important Christian intellectuals from studies of the Second Sophistic.

This volume points to a number of exciting and fruitful pathways for future scholarship. Clearly, there are opportunities for interesting research to be done in the ‘under-researched’ and ‘undervalued’ genre of imperial Greek epistolography (p. 509) as well as the study of miscellanies as a genre (p. 458), along with Second Sophistic Greek historiography (p. 487) and the poetry and poets of this period (Chapter 31). The volume also introduces new interests in the ‘Jewish interaction with Greek literature in the age of the Roman Empire’ (p. 649) and the desirability of reading Second Sophistic literature alongside Christian apocrypha (Chapter 43). The current and detailed bibliographies that appear at the end of each chapter provide a wonderfully helpful starting point for this future research.

Given that many readers will ‘dip into’ relevant chapters rather than reading this monumental work from cover to cover, it seems worthwhile pointing out some real gems that should not be overlooked. In my view, all of the contributions in Part 3 are well worth reading because each one provides a different and fascinating contextual window on rhetoric as a ‘performance art’ in the Second Sophistic period. Similarly, Chapter 30 provides an excellent survey of historiography in the period; Chapter 35 offers a fascinating account of the seemingly self-effacing Pyrrhonist movement; Chapter 38 gives new insights into the role played by sophists in the cultic and religious life of cities in the eastern provinces; and Chapter 39 provides a lucid survey of the phenomenon of, and reasons for, pilgrimage during this period.

At the risk of revealing my own ignorance, it may also be worthwhile pointing out some of the real surprises for me in this volume. Chapter 8, for example, gives a heady (and sometimes disturbing) survey of the seemingly infinite variety of sexual behaviour in the Second Sophistic; Chapter 12 presents the sophists not only as accomplished public performers but also as financiers of ‘extraordinary building projects’ (p. 188); Chapter 24 describes Galen's extraordinary (and public) demonstrations of his superior understanding of anatomy; Chapter 31 introduced me for the first time to the satirical or scoptic epigram; Chapter 41 outlines a surprising number of common features between the Jewish story Joseph and Aseneth and the Greek novels of the period; and last but by no means least, Chapter 34 gives an account of the fascinating monumental inscription in Oenoanda, which serves as a ‘handbook on Epicureanism’ (p. 542).

I found only half a dozen or so editorial errors (‘instance’ should read ‘insistence’ on p. 239; ‘t’ should read ‘it’ on p. 481; ‘Rhetymnon’ should read ‘Rethymnon’ on p. 313; there is a repeated phrase in the quote on p. 409; superfluous words have been struck through but left in the text on pp. 407, 414 and 416; and there is a full stop missing on p. 458), which is remarkable given the length and complexity of the work, the large number of quotes and the variety of ancient languages it contains.

If I had to choose a single chapter that sums up the overall ‘flavour’ of the volume, it would be C.R. Jackson's discussion of Dio Chrysostom and his place within the Second Sophistic (Chapter 14). Dio's manipulation of his self-image for the purposes of rhetorical role play, his positioning between Greek culture and Roman power, and the complexity, originality and fluidity of his approach to myth and literature seems to sum up a great deal of what Second Sophistic authors were about. By way of conclusion, it is worth quoting the following from Jackson's chapter as a neat summary of the volume as a whole: