S. lays out at the start of her introduction the hope that lies beyond this volume – ‘that we will someday achieve a general view of the history of ancient Greek narrative … – that is, that we will be able to present a meaningful narrative about how the practices of telling stories developed within Greek literature, and that this history will contribute to the understanding of both Greek literature and narrative more generally’ (p. 1). It is an ambitious hope, and it is not to detract from the generally very high standard of the pieces to say that the volume as a whole still leaves the prospect of attaining that hope as distant as ever.

The first section, ‘Defining the Greek Tradition’, starts at the beginning of what we now identify as that tradition, with papers on Homeric narrative, including comparisons with the Ancient Near East (Haubold on Gilgamesh, Kelly on a variety of Ancient Near East battle narratives, S. on the Hebrew Bible) and with oral narrative modes more generally (Cook on structure in the Odyssey). In terms of contributing to the grander ambitions of the volume, Haubold's chapter is particularly useful for its opening discussion of Auerbach's treatment of Homer and the Bible in Mimesis. Haubold's careful reading drives home the political implications of the ways in which oppositions between Greek and other narrative traditions are defined. Given its title, however, the section as a whole could do more to interrogate the term ‘Greek’ itself in relation to Homeric narrative. Whose Greeks are we talking about?

The second section, ‘The Development of the Greek Tradition’, is more of a mixed bag. Eight papers tackle the big question from a variety of perspectives. In the opening paper, C. goes for the longue durée, analysing the way in which the ‘principle of alteration’ is treated in the Iliad and in Plutarch, partly through a conscious use of Homeric intertexts; he also glances in passing at the use of the motif in Gilgamesh and in Japanese poetry. The same focus on later authors looking back on the Greek tradition reappears in one of the most interesting papers in the collection, J. Morgan's ‘Heliodorus the Hellene’. The great interest of the paper lies above all in the fact that Morgan tackles head on the question of ethnicity that lies at the heart of any project of ‘defining Greek narrative’, and does so in a way that is acutely sensitive (like Haubold's chapter) to the question of what is at stake in the volume's grand theme. (It is no accident that S.'s introduction uses Morgan's contribution as a way of defining the theme of the volume itself.) Morgan notes the shifting fortunes of the Aethiopica in modern scholarship, in particular the change from disparagement to validation of the novel's hybridity. While showing the attractions of reading the novel as a reflection on cultural hybridity or a contestation of Hellenism, Morgan presents the novel rather as positioning itself as the final flowering of the classical tradition, as a paradigm of Hellenism itself. Morgan's argument here is particularly concerned with the treatment of cultural identities within the novel; it would evidently be attractive to see whether the argument can be supported by the narrative techniques used within the novel – and fortunately Hunter's treatment here of the (Odyssean) ‘where do I begin?’ topos in Heliodorus and other authors provides a useful supplement to Morgan.

The other essays in the second section cover an attractive range of genres: lyric's partly adversial engagement with epic narrative modes (Purves on Sappho); lyric again, but Greek as well as Roman (Athanassaki on Pindar and Horace); tragedy's compression of space and time (Easterling); historiography's use of stock situations in battle narratives (Hau, with a particularly useful five-page table of stock situations, events and topoi – a sort of primer to the articulation of narrative in the Greek historians). In addition Nünlist offers an overview of ancient critical approaches to narrative structure, complementing his 2009 monograph The Ancient Critic at Work. These pieces are all attractive in themselves, but perhaps more focussed on questions of how Greek authors thought about narrative than on the question of how we may define Greek narrative itself.

The comparative element largely lacking in the second section reappears in full force in the diverse essays that make up the last section, ‘Beyond Greece’. Pausch offers an interesting comparison of Polybius and Livy, stressing the techniques through which Livy engages the reader in the narrative to a greater extent than Polybius; he is at the same time rightly conscious that this single case study may not tell us very much about Greek narrative per se. Morrison makes some interesting broad observations on differences between ancient and modern epistolary fictions; these differences are necessarily specific to the genre in question. Finally de Jong treats a number of ancient and modern examples of a particular ‘narrative meme’, the trope of the anonymous traveller. This chapter is commendable for the way it tackles openly the question of narrative universality and specificity, with some comparative remarks on Chinese poetry (though this one source of comparative material cannot really hope to solve the question that de Jong boldly addresses). One question de Jong does not address is why the modern examples that she cites of the ‘anonymous traveller’ trope seem much richer than the ancient examples; to explore this further, she could perhaps have looked in more detail at the direction of the anonymous traveller's journey – from centre to periphery or vice versa.

As with earlier volumes in the Leventis series, there is much here to interest the student of Greek narrative. As noted above, I am not quite sure that it marks a new step towards S.'s aspiration of ‘a general view of the history of ancient Greek narrative’, whatever we take that to mean. But it is a volume of high quality, and it does highlight some of the challenges inherent in any such attempt: to pick out just three, the importance of self-reflectiveness about our own investments in Greek narrative; the attractions of comparative approaches as well as the inescapable dangers of superficiality in pursuing them in a very extensive way; and the tension between etic and emic approaches to the history of Greek narrative – that is, between writing that history from an external perspective, looking back at the development of story-telling from Homer to Heliodorus (and beyond), and attempting to show how Greek writers themselves grappled with a sense of belonging to a tradition while inevitably doing violence to the earlier narrative artefacts that made up that tradition.