Most of the essays in this collection derive from a Eugesta conference entitled ‘Motherhood in Antiquity’, held at the University of Manchester in April 2014. The editors open with a helpful review of ancient views of motherhood, followed by contemporary theoretical approaches from Beauvoir and Kristeva through more recent work such as that of Marder and Parker. The majority of chapters discuss Roman literature, and poetry receives greater attention than prose. Mairéad McAuley's introductory survey of maternal representation in Roman literature devotes substantial sections to Virgil's Aeneid and Horace's Carmen Saeculare. Keith's classic discussion of the ‘ground of representation’ informs McAuley's discussion of the ‘Brutus effect’, namely the effacement of the experience of real maternity by metaphors that compare land conquered by men to a mother's body.

Volumes such as these are traditionally organised by language, period or region. The editors have chosen instead to arrange the papers according to the different stages of motherhood. Section 1 concerns ‘Mothers and Young Children’, opening with chapters by Florence Ghercanoc and Florence Klein (writing in French) on conception, pregnancy and delivery. Federica Bessone's study of Statius’ Achilleid examines Thetis, a character described as ‘too much a mother’ thanks to her efforts to exclude her son Achilles from participating in the Trojan war. Through the figure of the anxious mother, the Flavian poet incorporates themes from a wide variety of ‘lesser’ poetic genres in his epic, including lyric and elegy. This discussion of how Statius simultaneously ironises and sympathises with his subject is one of the subtlest and wittiest in the volume. Judith Hallett then compares Virgil's representation of maternal Venus to Augustus’ sister Octavia, examining both as mothers of blended families. The Aeneid shows us indirect interactions between Aeneas and Cupid, both sons of Venus, while Octavia nurtured both her children by Antony as well as the children of his former wife Fulvia. Hallett concludes that Virgil may honour Octavia with his portrayal of Venus as a versatile and adaptable mother, ‘by transforming an amoral erotic divinity into a domestically amorous goddess.’ It is hard for this reader, however, to imagine Octavia desiring to be associated with the Venus who callously destroys Dido, or to see domestic amorousness in the goddess's manipulation of Vulcan.

The second section is devoted to ‘Mothers and their Children's Marriages’. Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer discusses epithalamia by Catullus, Statius and Claudian. Claudian includes epithalamic elements in his epic poetry, faulting Ceres for her lack of engagement in her daughter's wedding in De Raptu Proserpinae. Alison Sharrock mines both prose and poetry to discuss Roman authors’ representation of mothers-in-law. They subjected these women to typical ageist and misogynist insults, but do not seem to have made them targets of special abuse — in contrast, notably, to the feared and reviled stepmother. As suggested by its title, Terence's Hecyra appears to be an outlier, as most testimonia show in-laws working together.

In Section 3 (‘Mothers and Adult Children’), Jacqueline Fabre-Serris (writing in French) examines another similarly extreme representation of the maternal relationship, Seneca's Oedipus, in the contexts of literary precedent and biographical tradition. In contrast to Sophocles, Seneca lays greater emphasis on Oedipus's fear of incest rather than parricide. In Ad Helviam, the philosopher consoles his mother by arguing that their earlier separations have habituated her to his exile, while Tacitus makes his Seneca argue that the soldiers will not accept Nero's ‘incestuous’ love for his mother. A Stoic interpretation unites these seemingly disparate elements: reliance on mothers diminishes the autonomy prized by the Stoics, and so can be rejected as symbolically incestuous. Giulia Sissa discusses Euripides’ Jocasta and Aethra, who rebuke their royal children and whose advice should be respected as political wisdom that conforms to traditional morality and philosophical teaching. Readers since Hegel have appealed to these characters’ subject position, confining them to ‘household’ values, and/or religious ritual. Sissa counters that these ‘Mighty Mothers’, ‘mother-philosophers’, are characters in a ‘fictional possible world’, where queens have a far greater likelihood of being heard than the silenced women of the Athenian democracy. Augustine's mother Mon(n)ica has been a saint of the Catholic Church for nearly a millennium, and his views on sexual morality have been blamed on his relationship with her. Therese Fuhrer correctly rejects biographical or psychologising interpretations in her discussion of the Cassiciacum dialogues and the Confessions and focuses instead on how Augustine deploys mothers as philosophical or theological allegories.

The volume's concluding section discusses maternal bereavement, a far more frequent experience in the ancient world than in the modern. Alison Keith examines mourning Virgilian mothers, and Valerie Hope Octavia's mourning for her son Marcellus. Olympia Bobou concludes the volume with a study of mothers who dedicated large-scale objects in classical and Hellenistic Greece. These women were the outliers; far more women dedicated small objects to female deities, without necessarily identifying themselves as mothers.

This is a strong collection of papers, though some discussions are more adventurous than others. Word limits could have been imposed more forcibly on some excessively lengthy discussions. The organisation by life course inevitably produces a homogenising effect, which may obscure some of the essential differences between cultures and periods. Readers rarely expect, however, to consume edited volumes in linear fashion. Furthermore, some of the juxtapositions are extremely productive, such as the two consecutive studies of tragedy, or the progression from Keith's study of Virgil's bereaved mothers to Hope's study of one particular bereaved mother whom tradition remembered as expressing her grief at a performance of the Aeneid.