Simon Goldhill’s collection of essays is a cry for classicists to embrace the personal. So, I start with some self-reflection. I am, in many ways, different from Goldhill. I am not Jewish; I am at the beginning of my academic career. Reviewing Goldhill’s essays has been daunting, because I cannot hope to understand every aspect of disciplinary politics he writes about; but they are an important call to arms for all classicists to think about the future of our discipline. The great strength of Goldhill’s work is its vulnerability; he makes no self-assured claim to the perfect answer. His prose is self-consciously erudite, full of allusions to high literature and smatterings of Greek. In a work about inclusion, such a tone would normally undermine the mission; in Goldhill’s case, it simply reflects his individual voice. The essays are fragmentary and mercurial; intentionally so, and to their credit.

Goldhill’s first essay champions the personal voice in academic discourse. He sees this as a corrective to institutional exclusion, while acknowledging the complex layers of privilege from which ‘a professor from one of the grandest—most privileged universities’ (17) can speak. This is not a new argument, as he acknowledges (53); but Goldhill’s contribution is valuable. Goldhill’s chosen term is ‘situatedness’. The position from which a scholar responds to a text affects their response, but also, he argues, creates a demand for ‘responsibility’ (47): the response should be conscious of the responder’s own position in relation to the politics involved. In particular, Goldhill draws out classics’ refusal to interrogate and condemn the oppression of ancient Jews, especially by early Christians, a lacuna all the more remarkable given the growing interest in race in the ancient world. As a corrective, he sets out his own readings of religious texts, demonstrating how his personal self helps to orientate that response. Goldhill is too dismissive of labels of identity, which he describes as ‘naïve identity politics’ with ‘instrumental power … for destructiveness, divisiveness and oppression’ (46). Labels are meant to be simplistic as an aid to direct discourse. Ultimately, though, his argument for the personal voice is a triumph.

Goldhill’s second essay explores what situatedness brings to one’s scholarship, particularly when one is Jewish. The central question is ‘why, for whom, when and how does this “identity” of “Jewish classicist” matter …? If it is not to matter, why not?’ (65). He convincingly sets out the tensions surrounding Jewish identity and how it is claimed or suppressed, then tells the story of four Jewish classicists, each directly affected by the Second World War, whose relationship to their Jewishness as scholars differed: Eduard Fraenkel, Moses Finley, Arnaldo Momigliano and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. None of them, Goldhill argues, ‘is simply at home in their Jewishness’ (75). Goldhill also ‘interviewed over thirty scholars’ in search of an answer to his central question (55), and the second half of the essay navigates us through his conversations, littered with anecdotes ranging from the hilarious to the tragic (often both at once). Yet what it means to be a Jewish classicist remains ‘opaque’ (89), and the essay ends without an answer: undoubtedly the point, for if Goldhill’s question were an easy one to answer, it would not merit being asked.

The final essay begins by positioning translation at the centre of the classicist’s practice, as a transformative process which acts on both the text and the translator. Goldhill’s aim is to trace why translation into and from Latin and Greek became so central to our discipline. His starting point is Matthew Arnold, who famously contrasted Hellenism and Hebraism (though ‘he has little interest in real Jews’ (96)), and declared that he practised his Greek translation skills daily. Goldhill then explores how verse composition into Latin and Greek was used by Victorian gentlemen academics ‘in the formation of a cultured self’ (122). He declares himself the product of a Victorian-style education: ‘translating Racine from French into Greek iambics seemed … the beating heart of cultured achievement’ (136). Yet, Goldhill triumphantly demonstrates, classics has also always inspired radical self-reflection: from Karl Marx and Percy Shelley to Dan-el Padilla Peralta. It has always sought its own translation. Goldhill’s essays end on the personal reflection that it is his imperfect sense of belonging in the discipline which has driven his desire for change.

Goldhill’s essays are searingly personal and filled with anecdote and vulnerability; they are both an advocate for the personal voice and an exemplar. The questions he poses are thoughtful and challenging. While he offers few answers, this merely demonstrates the sophistication of his discourse. The essays are anything but safe, and readers may find any number of points to disagree with him on. But the issues Goldhill raises go to the very heart of what our discipline stands for. Every classicist should read this book.