While this issue's selection of books on classical reception is diverse in subject area and methodology, one theme they all share is a focus on place and space. The Classics in South America by Germán Campos Muñoz and Time and Antiquity in American Empire by Mark Storey are particularly focused on Classics and the spatiality of empire.Footnote ¹ South America's location beyond the extent of the world known to the Roman Empire provided an interesting point of departure for the classically inclined inhabitants of the continent as they considered continuities and disjunctures with the time and space of classical antiquity. Campos Muñoz's second and third case studies discuss an array of material and literary evidence in examining how both colonial and anti-imperial activities were framed with respect to ancient history and epic. We see how a sixteenth-century Spanish nobleman celebrated becoming Viceroy of Peru in a procession through a triumphal arch adorned with Latin hexameter and classical motifs. Similarly, Simón Bolívar, the revolutionary and subject of classical odes celebrating his liberation of South American territories, enjoyed classicizing triumphs and parades (140). These contrasting case studies show the ongoing significance of the Roman Empire to South America, even as its imperial status changed dramatically.

Meanwhile, Mark Storey understands the United States as fundamentally an imperial project that has reflected on its identity through changing responses to Roman Republicanism. The texts under discussion include a variety of genres and media from across the USA's history. In Chapter 4, Storey even examines travel writing from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, where he discusses Americans’ encounters with the ruins of Rome and Pompeii. The writers’ narratives may incorporate the remnants of the Roman Empire within their contemporary travelogues, but they reflect simultaneously the ongoing history of Italy and the USA's involvement with Europe, including through the Marshall Plan after the Second World War. This is not the only conflict to appear in the book: the American Civil War, the Cold War, and the Iraq War starting in 2003 are integral to Storey's picture of a country engaged in imperialist practices both at home and abroad. This is very much scholarship from the discipline of literary studies, and so a portion of the content and theoretical framings are likely to be unfamiliar to Classicists. However, it is very well worth reading.

While both Campos Muñoz and Storey are similarly ambitious in the timespan and range of materials they cover, the former takes a more chronological approach to his topic. This makes it a suitable introduction to novices in the growing field of South and Central American classical reception, for all the in-depth study it contains. On the other hand, Storey's thesis that America's temporal relationship to antiquity is non-linear and has multiple points of contact is underlined by the structure of the book, which is organized thematically, but jumps from point to point.

Another monograph invested in the politics of classical reception and empire is Ross Clare's Ancient Greece and Rome in Videogames.Footnote ² Part of the innovative Imagines series, this study is clearly invested in the value of gaming, while still taking a critical eye to the ideologies that videogames may promote. Starting with a helpful and in-depth explanation of his theoretical approach, which will make the tome accessible even to those who have never played Minesweeper, Clare analyses big-name franchises and little-known, independent games with equal seriousness. Empire is an especially prominent theme in Chapter 3, which examines strategy games. Clare argues that many of these games build on common perceptions of Roman society as inherently ordered. This is reflected both in the aesthetics of the games, such as the grid-like layout of conurbations, and in the way they structure the player's empire-building. However, in a particularly striking moment, Clare argues that the economic assumptions underpinning gameplay are often largely based on modern concepts, such as ‘trickle-down’ economics (90). Clare frames this chapter with reference to postcolonial scholarship and examines the portrayal of barbarians who counter the players operating under Roman avatars. This approach reinforces how the collaborative world-building that these games foster is part of societies’ ongoing attempts to wrestle with colonial history.

So too does Chapter 5 of The Classics in South America analyse the use of Othering in classicizing media. Campos Muñoz reveals the importance of the myth of Orpheus for Latin American culture, particularly in Brazil. In investigating several different twentieth-century receptions of the myth, he explains how the level of control extended to artists in colonized countries can impact on their cultural representation abroad. The international hit film Orfeu Negro (1959) may have profited from the work of Brazilian musicians and writers, but this French production's portrayal of Afro-Brazilian culture and the slums of Rio de Janeiro has proved troubling to many. Ultimately, the author argues, because the balance of power over the film was held in the Old World rather than the New, its Brazilian contributors maintained deeply ambivalent feelings about it despite its critical success. Just as, in Clare's analysis, large videogame and cinematic studios have greater clout in projecting images of antiquity and empire (57–8), so the economic and cultural power of colonizing countries has allowed them to repackage both myth and colonized societies on a global scale.

Imagining Ithaca by Kathleen Riley is also inflected with an awareness of today's social and political issues, particularly as they relate to national identity.Footnote ³ Her introduction situates this cultural history of nostalgia within the context of political movements in the UK and the USA, including Brexit and Donald Trump. Although spanning cinema, literature, the visual arts, and, perhaps most surprisingly, the television series Michael Portillo's ‘Great Railway Journeys’, Riley traces echoes of the archetypal nostos, Odysseus’ return to Penelope, across these various case studies. Storey's monograph is not the only one in this review to be saturated by the legacy of war: the nineteen chapters are vignettes evoking conflicts that have shaken the globe. Both world wars loom large, in addition to South African apartheid and the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, the examination of identity that we see in her chapters on Njabulo Ndebele's The Cry of Winnie Mandela and Jewish ‘Yorkshire lass’ Tamar Yellin's ‘Return to Zion’, among others, are powerfully relevant (99). ‘Place’ is perhaps an elusive concept in this monograph: many of the Ithacas to which Riley's case studies attempt to return exist in the mind only, but the themes of belonging and spatial dislocation are just as pertinent here as they are in Storey and Campos Muñoz.

Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity has its own preoccupations with how outsiders and natives alike interact with an environment.Footnote ⁴ Edited by Dawn Hollis and Jason König, this volume's essays are truly dialogic. Many feature layers of reception, ranging from classical Greece and the Christians of late antiquity to the early modern period and into the twentieth century. Not only are the chapters in effective conversation with one another, but they also account for how individuals have spoken to each other across time through their engagement with mountains. The majestic European peaks that are the inspiration for these discussions incite wonder and fascination for the ascetics, naturalists, and artists who visit them. What emerges overall is a reassessment of existing presuppositions as to the value and importance of mountains at different points in time from antiquity onwards, as well as an instructive example of how to edit a volume that stays focused despite a large chronological scope.

Another common theme that appears among these volumes is epistemology: how can we know the past? And can we use that knowledge to understand the present or even the future? In Chapter 1 of The Classics in South America, early modern writers draw from Virgil, Pliny the Elder, Aristotle, and Ovid in their attempts to make sense of a translatio imperii (transfer of power or empire) to a newly discovered place. According to Campos Muñoz, these South American authors not only drew on the knowledge of their ancient forebears but used them to articulate their own authority as discoverers of new knowledge. This combination of generic syncretism and authority acquired from the ancients can also be seen in several of the chapters in Mountain Dialogues, which explore the intersection between science and art. For example, Dawn Hollis shows how Classics, natural philosophy, and aesthetics are combined in seventeenth-century discussions of mountains. Throughout the work, sacred, literary, affective, rational, and embodied ways of understanding the past and the environment all collide. In Chapter 10, Chloe Bray demonstrates that a sensory, phenomenological approach to the depictions of mountains in Greek tragedy might shed light on the way in which audiences’ prior ritual knowledge and experiences have impacted on their responses to these plays. This has some overlap with Clare's investigation into the contested relationship between videogames and subject knowledge. Utilizing approaches from both classical reception studies and games studies, he shows how transmedia becomes key to a gamer's interpretation of game worlds based on antiquity, as evidenced by their successful completion of challenges. In both books, the authors’ deep investment in the complexities and nuances of comprehension represent the exciting routes that classical reception can take when researchers are brave enough to leave conclusions open.

Although Storey's refusal to provide a disciplined chronology leaves many answers similarly indeterminate (albeit in a stimulating and provocative way), his political perspectives are clearly articulated. In Chapter 2, he engages with Black classicism and the subject positions of Black people within a white supremacist country. His analysis of W. E. B. Du Bois's ‘double consciousness’ is situated within a broader discussion of ancient and modern enslavement (113–15). What the reader is left with is a potent snapshot of where classical learning can inform the interrogation of trauma that is both personal and political. While Riley's monograph does not so much theorize knowing, the importance of lived experience underpins her project. Many of the chapters begin with a brief allusion to the subject's life, while others, such as her chapter on Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, are from their beginning invested in the emotional intensity of relationships at their most difficult. It is, then, perhaps unsurprising for a book that concentrates on the pain of returning home to link so powerfully subjective experience with understanding. Indeed, towards the end, she quotes the famous Aeschylean phrase pathei mathos – learning through suffering (284).

Such high feeling resonates across these publications. Altogether, the works share not only a sophisticated approach to time and place but also a timeliness. Each one in its own way speaks with urgency about modern concerns that reverberate into the past, demonstrating the continued vitality of the field.