Orientalism is alive and well. It has been since antiquity, and this work shows how processes of othering were embedded in Greek and Roman culture. Looking at the multifaceted aspects of ancient life, this collection of essays demonstrates how stereotypes, geographic imaginaries and religious categories amongst others, were shaped and reshaped to construct the figure of the ‘other’. The authors avoid anachronistic definitions of orientalism and, by extension, push back against the temptation to isolate these dynamics as ancient, textual or dichotomous. Instead, they suggest that modern categories of race, gender, empire and religion are implicated in how the ancient world is studied. The book makes a case that, like their modern counterparts, both stereotypes and identities were never fixed in antiquity but constantly renegotiated through religion, space, material culture, narrative affect and other mediums.
A key concept that the work questions is the modern idea that markers of identity are separate from each other. In other words, rather than treating religion, ethnicity or gender as stand-alone categories, the authors highlight that these aspects of identity were entangled with others and operated both to distinguish Greeks from each other and to mediate interactions with other people. The book is also attentive to the importance of geography and space in the construction of difference. Ancient authors did not merely describe foreign peoples in terms of physical distance, but deployed space as a heuristic for difference itself. As the editors make clear in the introductory chapter, distance, terrain and climate functioned as explanatory and predictive tools for cultural behaviour and character. Reflecting recent turns in the humanities, the authors do not treat space as a neutral backdrop. Rather, it is a filter through which ideas about race, culture and behaviour were processed.
Following the editors’ introductory chapter, J. Skinner revisits the figure of the mercenary in ancient warfare. He critiques a well-worn figure in ancient military history and shows that the modern understanding and portrayal of mercenaries as misfits or disorganised rebels is an ambivalent characterisation. Drawing on material and textual sources, Skinner highlights that ancient mercenaries came from various classes and regions, functioning not as marginal actors but as active participants in the military economies of their time. His attention to the visual realm is particularly valuable, as it challenges the assumption that representation is secondary to action and poses questions about self-representation in antiquity. Skinner provides a framework to reassess categories that have been too easily projected onto the ancient world, in this case, mercenaries.
The following chapter also focuses on visual culture, specifically on iconography from Greek vases. Authored by K. Vlassopoulos, the chapter is one of the more methodologically reflective essays, offering a strong critique of structuralist and meta-narrative approaches that force images into pre-existing interpretative moulds. Vlassopoulos cautions against approaches that over-determine meaning through visual and symbolic analysis, reminding readers of the importance of resisting reductive typologies. This chapter serves as an invitation to adopt new methodological frameworks that can more responsibly and imaginatively account for the messiness and multiplicity of ancient material representation.
The third chapter, dealing with ‘Greek Religion and the Other’, offers an exploration of how religious practice and belief functioned as both unifying and divisive forces. One of the most important questions raised in the chapter is whether religion can truly be treated as a separable marker of identity or whether it is always entangled with other forms of social meaning. T. Harrison’s discussion includes material on ritual and rites, theological concepts and the construction of sacredness. Harrison engages with conceptual distinctions such as those between animals, gods and humans among different ancient societies, particularly in the context of worship. Most importantly, the chapter reverses a common scholarly assumption: instead of focusing on how non-Greeks integrated Gods from the pantheon, it considers how Greeks encountered and incorporated foreign gods. In other words, Harrison’s approach challenges the one-way model that often underpins Orientalist narratives.
It is not lost on the authors that orientalism and gender are inextricably linked. This appears in discussions of femininity and virility throughout the work, but particularly in E. Pyy’s chapter on ‘The Oriental Queen as the Absolute Other’. Pyy shows how femininity and foreignness were jointly used to project both allure and danger. The chapter moves beyond iconography to explore the social psychology behind exotic, sexual, bloodthirsty representations of women. It reveals how the figures of the five queens examined by Pyy were constructed to reinforce both gendered and racial hierarchies internally and externally in Greek and Roman societies.
Moving further east, the sixth chapter is dedicated to India, or more specifically ‘Indians in the Graeco-Roman World’. In this chapter O. Coloru tactfully reminds readers that mobility and migration were common in antiquity: the ancient world was not static. Coloru extracts valuable insights about both orality and visuality from a range of texts and objects. Covering almost a millennium – from Herodotus to post-Eusebius – Coloru looks at ethnicity and racialisation, particularly in relation to skin complexion, but also how language sounds. Moreover, he tackles prominent themes often associated with India even in modern times, namely wisdom and religion.
Closer to Rome, the Galatae are the subject of another chapter by Lampinen. As a distinctive example of mobility and migration, the Galatians allow Lampinen to explore the fluid processes of orientalisation, especially by comparing the latter’s march on Delphi with that of the Persians. Additionally, the chapter shows how ethnicity, geographical origin vs geographical location and proto-nationalist thinking coalesced to create cultural stereotypes. Lampinen argues that the Galatae were not orientalised through a single strategy but through layered discourses that included climatic determinism and varied through time.
In contrast, J. Lukkari’s chapter looks exclusively at the movement and displacement of one person, Antiochus and his sojourn in Rome. Lukkari analyses how the prince is portrayed in the works of Livy and Polybius. She extracts the narrative strategies that each author employed and through which emotions such as fear, pity or disgust were mobilised to create specific images of character and rule. She critiques earlier scholarship that leaned too heavily on notions of Eastern effeminacy, showing instead how the social logic of each text and the representations of Antiochus reflected a deeper, more ambivalent interplay between admiration and moralising disdain.
On the other hand, D. Lenfant’s chapter on Chariton’s Callirhoe offers a philologically rigorous and theoretically astute reading of the Persian seraglio and the question of the oriental harem. She questions modern translations and interpretations that map contemporary Orientalist prejudices onto the ancient texts. By attending carefully to language, she shows that what later readers identified as a ‘harem’ functions quite differently in the Greek original. Lenfant’s work is a model for how philology can be deployed not simply as textual recovery, but as a method of critique.
The final chapter, also by Lampinen, shifts from case studies to broader thematic patterns, tracing how Greeks and Romans developed and recycled stereotypes about foreign peoples. Implicitly, this chapter offers somewhat of a long-view history of representational tropes. It charts how ideas about Eastern governance (as despotic or tyrannical), wealth (as excessive and corrupting), gender (as softness and effeminacy) and wisdom (recast as secrecy and manipulation) were codified through literary and philosophical topoi. The frameworks of astrology, climate theory and inherited ethnography offered classical authors ready-made systems for explaining and naturalising cultural difference. Lampinen shows how these explanations functioned as ideological instruments, continually restabilising Greek and Roman identity.
As a whole, the volume stands as a valuable contribution to the study of ancient representation and its modern legacies. Each chapter includes a brief but helpful overview of the literature on the topic, giving those interested in the questions discussed an entry way to exploring them further. Nonetheless, the volume’s engagement with the modern field of Classics remains uneven. While several chapters critically interrogate scholarly precedents and reveal the orientalist underpinnings of philological and historical discourse, others remain silent on how the discipline reproduces these same patterns, particularly through the extraction of objects and papyri from ancient sites. Given the work’s strong and solid discussions of material objects and geography, engagement with more recent works on Orientalism would have brought the work even closer to current conversations about the future of Classics. S. Ahmed’s work on affect, orientation and embodied movement would have deepened several chapters’ explorations of race and spatial logic. Similarly, scholars such as K. Blouin, who work at the intersection of material culture and postcolonial critique, could have provided frameworks for thinking through the physicality of objects, their provenance, itineraries and their afterlives. Still, Oriental Mirages does not pretend to be exhaustive. Instead, it creates space for a series of timely conversations. By refusing to reify antiquity or scholarship, the contributors collectively argue for a more reflective approach to classical studies. Crucially, the volume reminds its readers that Orientalism shaped not only how ancient peoples viewed the ‘other’, but also how we view antiquity.
