The book under review is the first publication in the new series Brill's Plutarch Studies, the editors of which are L. Roig Lanzillotta and D. Ferreira Leão. To date, the series has published four titles (including the present one), with a fifth one underway. It will undoubtedly serve the large and very active international community of Plutarchists well, alongside the successful series Plutarchea Hypomnemata of Leuven University Press.

The choice of topic for the series’ opening publication is without doubt emblematic, given that its author is one of the most well-known and influential Plutarch scholars, F.E. Brenk. The volume offers an updated and revised edition of two extensive, book-length studies by Brenk, which were first published in the series Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt (ANRW) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, respectively (‘An Imperial Heritage: the Religious Spirit of Plutarch of Chaironeia’, ANRW II.36.1 [1987], 248–349; and ‘Plutarch's Life Markos Antonios: a Literary and Cultural Study’, ANRW II.33.6 [1992], 4347–469). At the time of their first appearance both studies helped to establish new approaches to Plutarchan scholarship, such as comparative religion and narratology. Publishing them together as a diptych (they are arranged as ‘Part 1’ and ‘Part 2’ in the book, with slightly abridged titles) serves to highlight the two parallel, and occasionally intersecting, roads to the study of Plutarch (the Moralia and the Lives) to which each made a significant contribution.

The concise introduction by the series editors Roig Lanzillotta and Ferreira Leão explains the rationale behind the decision to re-publish the two Brenk studies – namely, to make their content more accessible. This is well justified as a choice, not least because the first of the two studies was accompanied by indexes published in a separate volume of ANRW (‘Index’, ANRW II.36.2 [1987], 1300–22). The introduction judiciously opts not to overstress the common threads between the two studies, even though they do exist: the Life of Mark Antony features prominently in Brenk's discussion of Plutarch's treatment of omens and portents as manifestations of divine will in the book's first part (see pp. 96–102); and, in his detailed study of the Life, he draws an intriguing contrast between its relatively straightforward handling of narrative time and the much more complex temporal order of the dialogue De genio Socratis (pp. 200–4). These observations, in turn, neatly complement his extensive discussion of the De genio in his chapter on demonology in the first part (pp. 43–65).

In terms of its content and argument, Brenk's original text has been only lightly revised by the author himself. Where the reader will mostly observe differences from the original versions is in the footnotes, which have been revised in terms of their style and updated by both the author and the editor (see, e.g., nn. 1–3, on pp. 7–9). The editorial interventions (which mostly concern the addition of recent relevant bibliographical titles on key subjects) are carefully marked with ‘EN’ (= ‘Editor's Note’), thus distinguishing the editor's hand from that of the author. The titles that these notes supply helpfully direct the reader towards evaluating individual arguments or topics of Brenk's discussion in the light of recent research. Another important advance is that the book offers a consolidated bibliography and indexes, both of which encourage a comparative reading of the two studies. Looking at the overall result, the editor has done a diligent and respectful job with Brenk's text. Thanks to the new citation style that has been adopted, Brenk's rich footnotes are certainly much easier to consult than before. The book as a whole contains very few typographical errors.

It would be pointless to offer here a detailed review the two Brenk studies in terms of their argument and importance. The breadth and quality of scholarship that they exhibit is impressive, and the numerous citations to their content over the years eloquently speak to their impact. What does deserve comment, however, is the novelty of the approaches that they introduced at the time of their first publication: Brenk's examination of Plutarch's religious thought is particularly successful in shedding light on the terms in which Plutarch converses with a variety of contemporary religious and philosophical systems (see esp. pp. 66–77 and 121–9 on Plutarch's treatment of Egyptian and Roman religion, respectively). His reading of the Life of Mark Antony in its Neronian context is a masterful example of socio-cultural interpretation, backed up by key intertexts. He was also the first to offer a detailed analysis of focalisation and the manipulation of narrative time in the Life, by applying the narratological approaches of Genette and other French theorists. These approaches have since been adopted by many other scholars and have transformed the way in which we evaluate Plutarch's multiculturalism, his relationship to Roman power and his biographical technique.