If the Pontius Pilate of John's gospel was too impatient (like many an administrator) to wait for an answer to his own question ‘what is truth?’, what might he have done with the much harder (as well as more interesting) question ‘what is beauty?’ Well, if he had been able to, he would have benefited from reading K.'s pithy and probing book on the subject. The search for an understanding of beauty is ancient but also highly modern. In philosophical terms, it tends to pull thinkers between the poles of nominalism (taking ‘beauty’ to be no more than a word) and realism (taking it as a genuine entity). More broadly, arguments over beauty raise in an acute form the problems of subjectivism and relativism, as summed up by the formula ‘in the eye of the beholder’ (which is anticipated in Sappho fr. 16).

K. sets the scene, in his introductory chapter, by sketching some of the complexities and uncertainties in modern ideas about beauty, especially in relation to aesthetics. He uses the work of Roger Scruton to illustrate an alleged distinction between erotic and artistic/spiritual beauty, the latter supposedly an object not of desire but of ‘disinterested contemplation’ (a notion first developed in eighteenth-century aesthetics). But what about artistic representations of potentially erotic objects? K. rightly suggests that it is not always easy to make a neat distinction between the beauty of an artwork and the beauty of what it depicts. He also stresses that it has become a modern controversy whether art needs to be ‘beautiful’ at all: the philosopher Arthur Danto is among those who jettison that requirement. Here and elsewhere deep divisions exist: while Scruton wants to isolate aesthetic beauty from desire, Alexander Nehamas believes that is a mistake; and both of them, tellingly, appeal to Plato in support of their views.

In the hope of shedding some light on the conundrums of the subject, K. turns to the Greeks. His response to the challenge of making sense of their approach to beauty is fundamentally lexical. He undertakes a deft analysis of hundreds of passages (from Homer to Christianity, with one or two glimpses ahead to Byzantium) where the vocabulary of kalos, kallos and cognates is found, patiently clearing a track through the linguistic thickets towards an illuminating general thesis. Rejecting the despair of those who conclude from the promiscuous use of kalos that the Greeks had no concept of beauty at all, K. insists on separating the semantics of the adjective from those of the noun. From Homer onwards, kallos is applied mostly to alluring human bodies, while the adjective kalos has a much wider range, picking out excellence in many sorts of things. In the course of the archaic period kallos starts sometimes to be explicitly contrasted with virtue, while kalos becomes available to qualify the latter (among much else). In conclusion to Chapter 2, ‘Beauty in Greek’, which surveys usage in (above all) Homer, archaic poetry, Herodotus (who tends to associate a certain kind of physical beauty with non-Greeks), Euripides, Aristophanes and the orators, K. proposes that kallos can always be rendered as ‘beauty’, even if it does not correspond to all modern uses of the noun, while the adjective kalos needs to be translated much more flexibly.

In Chapter 3, ‘The Nature of Beauty’, K. develops what he sees as the especially close link between Greek kallos and erotic desire. Drawing on a whole array of texts, including the novels, he shows that such beauty is typically predicated of women and young males (it is much rarer of older males and extremely rare of young children); it therefore often approximates to ‘sexual appeal’ (p. 80) and in some cases, for example those of Paris and Alcibiades, carries hints of effeminacy. Among K.'s other contentions in this chapter are that there was no generally perceived Greek link between bodily beauty and aristocratic breeding, and that an attribution of kallos was readily associated with the ‘passive’ erotic objectification of young males but with suggestions of licentiousness on the part of women (respectable citizen women were admired for ‘refined comportment’, p. 89, not beauty). All in all, kallos ‘bears … a tense and equivocal relation to virtue and to social class' (p. 95).

In Chapter 4, ‘Beauty Transfigured’, K. addresses the fact that kallos can sometimes be ascribed to inanimate objects and even to invisible things, including the psuchê and language. But here too, he maintains, there is usually a (tacit) analogy with, or overtones of, visual attractiveness and quasi-erotic appeal. Moreover, K. is keen to deny that the Greeks ever really identified beauty as an object of ‘pure’ aesthetic contemplation or pleasure. He rejects, for instance, the plausible-looking supposition that this is what Aristotle is doing at Eudemian Ethics 3.2, when making ta kala (including statues, horses and songs, as well as human bodies) the object of pleasurable contemplation for their own sake; and he is inclined to believe that Polyclitus' Canon tied the beauty of summetria (a common Greek conception in subsequent periods) to the human body itself rather than the artwork which depicts it. Most Greek references to artworks as kalos, according to K., signify the excellence of technical skill (mostly in terms of mimetic fidelity to appearances), not artistic ‘beauty’ in its own right. And in the crucial case of Plato, K. argues with much plausibility that in Symposium, Phaedrus and Republic the immensely influential idea of ‘transcendent’ beauty never altogether breaks free from an analogy with visual desirability.

In Chapter 5, ‘Beauty Across Cultures: Israel and Rome’, K. seeks to cement his main theses by triangulating Greek with the vocabularies of Hebrew and Latin (including comparative observations on translations of the Hebrew bible into Greek and Latin). He claims that Hebrew manifests the same linkage as Greek between beauty and desirability, while his survey of Latin terminology (including pulcher, formosus, bellus, speciosus, decor) is particularly aimed at reinforcing the denial of a clear-cut ancient notion of artistic or aesthetic beauty. K. does, however, detect subtle glimmers of the latter in some of Cicero's applications of pulcher to the artworks pillaged by Verres, and he also draws attention to the importance of Augustine's platonising idea of beauty as that which is attractive in itself.

The concluding chapter, ‘Greek Beauty Today’, offers a synopsis of the dominant values of ancient aesthetics (pleasure, emotion, awe and moral reactions) designed to underline the view that beauty became central to aesthetic experience only in the Renaissance, and still more so in the eighteenth century. But with Romanticism beauty was challenged by sublimity; later on, modernism questioned its status, on grounds of both sentimentality and politics, as the overriding goal of art. Despite some recent ‘recuperation’ of beauty in aesthetics, K. would resist a return to an eighteenth-century perspective. His ultimate conviction is that understanding Greek ideas can help us at least try to resolve some of our own dilemmas over the lexicon and experience of beauty.

Only a scholar of K.'s superb range and sureness of touch could have packed so much material into a relatively short space without any loss of lucidity. This is a fine, though I had better not say ‘beautiful’, achievement, full of perceptive and penetrating readings (as well as a rich set of endnotes). If there remains room for further debate over many details (it is hard to determine when one should and should not translate kalos as ‘beautiful’ without the risk of begging the question one way or the other), that is only as it should be: the mystery of beauty haunts the intellect as well as the senses. I noticed only a handful of misprints. Lucian, Zeuxis 7 is oddly translated on p. 109. And there is an unexplained discrepancy between two very different hypothetical dates for Demetrius, De elocutione, on pp. 100 and 175.