‘It is without shame’, writes O. in his introduction, ‘that I offer a world overburdened with books [of which he himself, it is fair to point out, is already responsible for a good round dozen] the following substantial study of the Graeco-Roman reflex of the dragon, the drakōn or draco’. Substantial is the word: Drakōn is a match for Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy or Frazer's Golden Bough when it comes to the hoovering-up of raw material and its attendant bibliography. ‘The collocation of evidence’, he writes on p. 2, ‘is scholarship's first and highest goal’. Thus for Cerberus (who qualifies as a suitable case for treatment, like e.g. Typhon, the Giants, Medusa or the Chimaera, under the heading ‘Drakontes Composite’, as opposed to ‘Drakontes Pure’), a footnote lists under ‘principal texts’ over 30 authors, including Nonnus Abbas and Pediasimus, and about 67 individual passages. Forty-five authors or texts are cited for the Asclepius myth, culminating in S. Ignatii martyrium Romanum; and Coluccio Salutati's De laboribus Herculis, written in 1406, is the final ‘principal text’ listed for Hesione. So ‘principal’ seems to mean ‘any significant mention I have managed to ferret out’, and the result resembles not so much referencing as massive carpet-bombing of the target. The bibliography covers 34 pages and contains more than a thousand items.

This overwhelming assemblage of data about dragons and snakes makes careful organisation vitally important; as with the anaconda, the problem is not so much capture and constriction as proper digestion. The book's structure is clear and well organised, moving from past myth to contemporary cult. First come chapters on the straightforward monster-battles (Heracles and the Hydra, Apollo and Python, Cadmus and the Spring-serpent, etc.), other opponents with snaky characteristics (Typhon, Echidna, Medusa, Chimaera) and sea-serpents or kētē (Perseus on the Ethiopian coast, Heracles and Laocoon at Troy). Chapter 4 pulls this mythological material together, with analyses of elements like names, genealogies, physical features and treasure-hoarding. ‘Masters and Mistresses of Drakontes’ and ‘The Symmetrical Battle between Drakōn and Slayer’ continue this process of examination, and by Chapter 7, with the Erinyes, Hecate and ‘anguiform heroes of Attica’ we have made the transition into the world of religion. Two further chapters on ‘Gods of Wealth and Good Luck’ (Zeus Meilichios and the Agathos Daimon) and ‘Gods of Healing’ (Asclepius, Hygieia, Amphiaraus, Trophonius, Glycon) are succeeded by one which provides an overview of the cultic evidence, including the accommodation, maintenance and diet (‘honey-cakes and eggs’) of the sacred snake. A final chapter considers ‘The Birth of the Christian Dragon’, with Saints George and Patrick, as well as some Tyrolean tales.

There are good insights throughout (e.g. the reason for the association of Regulus with the basiliskos, p. 217; an interesting discussion of Laocoon and Apollo Thymbraeus, pp. 135ff.; the identification of Lamia on an Attic lekythos, fig. 2.2); but there are also many careless errors. Minor typos are far too prevalent, and the number of verbal and presentational slips seems to indicate hurried composition and lack of revision; just as a sample, ‘implicitly’ for ‘explicitly’ (p. 108), ‘a better’ for ‘an abetter’ (p. 216), the mistaken ascription to Callimachus of a name in Apollonius (p. 154), a note wrongly repeated (p. 222) and two lines of instructions to the printer entertainingly embedded in a footnote (p. 149). There are no blue whales in the Mediterranean (p. 118); the mosaic in Coimbra (not Coimbria) shows Perseus wielding a bill-hook, not a spear (p. 128), and the Laestrygones do not ‘literally fish Odysseus' men from the tops of their crags', they spear them from the rocks as they flounder in the harbour (p. 133). The image of Podalirius ‘carried by his own erection’ and ‘trailing after his erect member, charging ahead with a mind of its own’ (p. 341) may indeed be memorable, but it is O.'s fantasy, not Lucian's. More seriously, the famous bronze chimaera in Florence currently shows ‘the drakōn-tail attacking the goat-head’ (caption to fig. 2.4), but the tail is an eighteenth-century ‘restoration’. And the claim that there was a myth in which ‘Alexander was sired by a signet ring’ (p. 332) rests on a complete misunderstanding of the Ephorus fragment recorded by Tertullian. Indeed O.'s judgements, though confident, often seem questionable; if he can be so cautiously sceptical about the Athenian oikouros ophis (pp. 349–50; cf. Hdt. 8.41), and about the actual presence of cult-snakes generally, why is he still able to believe (p. 382) that at healing sanctuaries like Epidaurus the resident serpents were gathered in baskets at nightfall, ‘and taken to the incubation dormitories, where they would be encouraged to lick or bite the patients' affected parts’? Hardly conducive to a good night's sleep; it would be a jumpy, jittery ward. Surely we are dealing with suggestibility here – ‘Yes, I did dream in the night that a snake …’.

In general, as noted, the dominant mode is one of overkill (more than you ever wanted to know about the Psylli, for instance, at pp. 210–11, esp. n. 96). In another area, on the other hand, there is a serious lack of necessary information. There are not enough proper photographs, and those that are provided are small and grey; the rest of the illustrations are re-drawings by the author and (mostly) his wife. And when it comes to references to art objects, O. is a one-club golfer: LIMC is almost his sole resource, and Beazley's lists or Boardman's and Trendall's handbooks – let alone museum numbers – might never have existed. LIMC-less readers have no way of knowing, for example, that the two ‘black-figure vases' discussed on p. 344 are in fact Laconian cups; or of making any sense of the (by my count) 236 images of the iconographic attributes of the Erinyes listed in the footnotes on p. 236. So if you are planning on browsing through the visual references while reading this book anywhere but in a major research library, forget it.