The author tells us that this project began as her dissertation in 2000. We are the beneficiaries of the decade-plus that has given this project ample time to expand and flourish. The resulting book contains eight chapters, beginning with an introductory survey of the relationship between the ancient literary epic tradition and the cinematic Ancients of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The introduction outlines the study that unfolds in the subsequent five chapters investigating applications and particular examples relating to Homer, the Argonautica, The Fall of the Roman Empire and Gladiator, Spartacus and Ben-Hur. The seventh and eighth chapters address spectatorship and cinematic parodies. Within there are a number of well researched and thoroughly, if overly, nuanced discussions of individual films that fall in one way or the other under the category of epic, whether they are filmisations of ancient epics (e.g. Ulysses, Helen of Troy, Jason and the Argonauts, Troy), films dependent upon ancient historical figures (e.g. Spartacus) or modern novels set in antiquity (e.g. Ben-Hur), or cinematic parodies set in antiquity (e.g. Carry On Cleo, Monty Python's The Life of Brian.) On a smaller scale P. addresses a number of other films ranging from Godard's Le Mépris (Contempt) and Pasolini's Medea to 300 and Percy Jackson and the Olympians: the Lightning Thief. Most of these lesser studies are quite succinct but appropriately tantalising.

Similarly, P. offers very brief allusions to or summaries of such relevant ancient (mostly literary) topics as Aristotle's discussion of the epic genre, the Cyclic Epics, kleos, the historical novel and the concepts underlying Juvenal's ‘bread and circuses’. She inserts a welcome discussion of the plans and draft for a Gladiator sequel. There is even a three-page table comparing the sequence of events in the Argonautica narratives of Apollonius, Valerius Flaccus and the two cinematic versions of Jason and the Argonauts (1963, 2000). It would be unfair to quibble over how much treatment is given to certain films. There are too many likely suspects to fit into a single book, and her readings of the included titles are all worthy of consideration. She eschews the temptation to play the role of the movie critic when evaluating films, and her personal likes or dislikes for individual films only rarely bubble to the surface. Her familiarity with these and many other cinematic texts is impressive. Although far from being a reference work, the book offers information and insights on many Ancients and films that employ ancient themes. On that basis I recommend it highly to all who are studying film and classical antiquity, and it is within that spirit that I hope the reader will incorporate the following criticism.

Way back in the previous century, I placed a telephone call to David Webb Peoples, who was given screen credit for writing Clint Eastwood's Academy Award-winning Unforgiven (1992). It was obvious to me that Peoples had channelled the Iliad in writing the story about a famous fighter who had withdrawn from combat, re-enters the fray when his best friend is killed and left unburied, has to borrow a weapon to fight the well-intentioned champion of the opposition and in the climactic duel against him refuses his opponent's plea for decency. During our private conversation Peoples thoroughly convinced me that he had never read the Iliad and detailed the various other sources he used for inspiration. Conversely, around the same time I corresponded with Ezra Litwak and Marjorie Schwartz, co-writers of The Butcher's Wife (1991), the plot of which revolves around male and female ‘split aparts’ naturally attracted to one another. In response to my questions as to whether they gained their familiarity with Plato's Symposium in college or elsewhere, they confessed to me that their first encounter with the Symposium happened only by accident when they found themselves in the audience of an amateur dramatic adaptation of Plato's relatively popular work at a community theatre in Malibu.

These two encounters with screenwriters, along with a number of subsequent exchanges with other filmmakers, stripped me of any early delusions that classical scholars could make assumptions about filmmakers' source materials even though it seemed quite evident to us that they must have been ancient texts. Carrying out these kinds of investigations turns out to be a complicated process more attuned to journalistic training and psychotherapy. Consequently, in investigating the various sources for a number of the films she discusses in her wide-ranging study, P. too easily assumes that despite their protestations the makers of Gladiator channelled The Fall of the Roman Empire and does not seem to have an answer to the Coen brothers' claim that they probably had not even read the Odyssey before making O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Similarly, there is no credit given to W. Petersen's gymnasium-level knowledge of Homer but she introduces the question as to whether the makers of the several Argonautica films had read Valerius Flaccus, which of course she wants to answer in the negative.

Fortunately P. does not rely too frequently on this kind of sourcing, but it represents the most salient aspect of the frustrating methodology upon which the book depends. It still reads like a dissertation, asking a series of big questions and addressing the first by articulating an idea from a cited scholar, articulating a contrary opinion from another cited scholar and then moving on to the next question. Not all these opinions are valuable for reaching or understanding her own conclusions, which in turn and perhaps as a result tend to be inconclusive. After spending six pages on the Coens' film (pp. 86–91), she concludes that O Brother cannot be labelled an epic film but makes ‘use of some features of the classical epic tradition … playing openly and amusingly with the processes of allusion to that tradition’, and in so doing ‘demonstrates something of the varied and interesting ways in which epic continues to resonate in the modern world’. These kinds of conclusions do not provide classical scholars with a concrete understanding of the processes of adapting or alluding to the ancient epic.

At the end of the book (p. 306) her ultimate conclusions reveal only that ‘epic repeatedly concerns itself with questions of heroism … or employs a sense of the spectacular in order to narrate its stories'. We knew that at the outset, and the thanks we get for ‘reading a variety of films through and against the classical epic tradition (and vice versa)’ is that it ‘leads us towards a richer and more complete appreciation of what epic, in all its forms, means for the modern world’. Addressing a huge and difficult topic like the relationship between ancient epic and contemporary cinema requires more specific parameters, a more expeditious methodology and more assertive conclusions. This book has established a secure beach head in these treacherous territories. Perhaps fitting within the concepts of Oxford's Classical Presences series, P. confesses in her introduction (p. viii) that she does ‘not claim to have reached a definitive answer’ and hopes that as additional Ancients are released, other scholars will challenge and extend her findings. I would encourage her to remain in the arena and be one of them. Along those lines, Oxford University Press should muster up a little more muscle so as to reproduce P.'s seven still photos in black and white rather than in three shades of pale grey.