Structures of Epic Poetry Footnote ¹ is a monumental, four-volume compendium which aims to classify, analyse, and compare epic structures across Greek and Latin epic poems (and beyond) in a systematic and overarching way. While the individual Bauformen (‘structural elements’) have been the focus of the study of epic for decades, a comprehensive analysis providing a systematic overview of all structural elements in the totality of ancient epic is obviously not a one-person job. The editors, Christiane Reitz and Simone Finkmann, gathered an international group of experts for this herculean task. The compendium provides a set of broad cross-sectional papers on the individual epic structural elements, using a consistent terminology. It has to be said that the editors’ understanding of what constitutes an epic structural element is very broad: it includes the ‘type-scenes’, but also the narrative patterns such as catalogue and ecphrasis, and stylistic hallmarks such as similes; in fact, structural elements as understood by the editors come closest to genre markers.

The resulting publication is both admirable and useful, and it helps a great deal that all chapters are clearly structured, opening with an abstract that greatly facilitates a reader's navigation through this gargantuan compendium. The first volume, Foundations, is not restricted to genre markers, but also aims to provide the theoretical discussions of issues related to the architecture of epic and an overview of select modern methodological approaches. In consequence, the chapters in this volume cover a vast range of topics: the ancient and modern theories of epic, the story patterns of classical epic, the epic formula, narratology, rhetoric, the Alexandrian book division of epic and its impact, intrageneric influences, historical vs mythological epic, didactic and epic, epic fragments, epyllia, invocation of the Muse(s), closure and segmentation, ‘almost-episodes’ (the instances of announcing the event which was on the verge of realization, but was ultimately prevented), aetiology and genealogy, catalogues, similes, and ecphrasis. Since the editors have left it to the contributors to decide whether or not to include Ovid's Metamorphoses in their discussions, a separate chapter faces the challenge of placing this ‘naughty boy’ (as the title of a chapter would have it) within the Graeco-Roman epic tradition.

The second part consists of two volumes called Configuration and is dedicated to the detailed diachronic studies of the individual elements of epic plots. Part 1 deals with the battle scenes; its fourteen chapters cover every conceivable aspect of the epic battles, from the arming scene to the funeral games and the burials. Part 2 contains chapters on journeys (four), time (two), space (seven), and communication (eight).

The final volume (Continuity) broadens the scope of the study beyond Greece and Rome: one chapter treats the poetic form and narrative theme in early Greek and Akkadian epic, and the others look into the long traditions of epic poetry subsequent to the classical epic, from late antiquity to the Neo-Latin poems. This volume also contains an overview of Graeco-Roman epyllia and epics from Homer to late antiquity and a core bibliography organized by ancient author. Its final chapter explains the process of creating an electronic index of the discussed passages in order to produce both the traditional index locorum and a digital inventory of all passages cited.Footnote ²

As an illustration of what the work offers, I present a randomly chosen chapter: T. J. Bolt's on the theomachy. Bolt distinguishes between two categories of theomachy: combat among the gods and human-versus-divine theomachy. He then provides a diachronic overview of both types, treating only the more prominent scenes or the reasons for their absence in the Iliad, the Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Lucan's Bellum Civile, Statius’ Thebaid, and Silius’ Punica. (There is no discussion of the awesome theomachy in Hesiod's Theogony 665–719.) A comparative analysis of the prominent themes and related language follows: excess and distinction as embodied in the use of the formula ‘trice…trice…for a fourth time’; the associations of theomachy with impiety; theomachy as an opportunity for literary self-styling, theomachy and fame, theomachy and the aesthetic concept of the sublime, and a conclusion.

Most chapters proceed chronologically, starting with Homer and usually ending with Silius’ Punica or, in some instances, Nonnus’ Dionysiaca or Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica. Ovid's Metamorphoses is often included. This format is understandably abandoned in the final volume (Continuity), where each chapter treats the epic forms and structures in the works of a specific period. So how useful is this compendium? The format is excellent, as it allows quick access to an informed and comprehensive discussion with essential bibliography. I found those parts of the compendium which straightforwardly treat the building blocks of epic most useful. Discussions of the battle scenes (II.1: ‘Configuration’) and part 3 of volume I (‘Foundations: Core Structures’) stand out as the ideal first port of call for a succinct diachronic overview of, say, invocation of the Muse, aetiology, or a catalogue of ancient epic. Advanced undergraduates and graduate students will greatly benefit from clear and well-structured expositions. I also see the advantages of including a set of chapters addressing the major ancient and modern methodological approaches to the study of ancient epic. Where I have more reservations are some sections of the second part of the second volume: time and space are hardly epic-specific. But the inclusion or exclusion of specific sections in a project of this scope are minor qualms – the editors should be heartily congratulated on providing students and scholars with an immensely useful tool for the study of the central genre of Graeco-Roman literature.

Hesiod gets his fair share of discussion in a new edited volume Didactic Poetry of Greece, Rome, and Beyond (‘beyond’ is in this case represented by the ancient Babylonian Poem of the Righteous Sufferer, the wisdom literature of the Kalanga [people inhabiting regions of Zimbabwe and Botswana], and the Neo-Latin poetry of early modern Scotland). Footnote ³ The aim of the volume is to provide a selection of productive approaches to the study of didactic poetry from a diachronic and comparative perspective, focusing on the way it transmits and communicates knowledge, and the power structures and relations it draws on and creates. Knowledge, authority, and power (inevitably?) lead to Michel Foucault, so the first chapter in the volume provides an analysis of a range of didactic epics from Hesiod to Manilius from the perspective of Foucault's thinking about the relationship of knowledge and power. The other theoretical chapter in the volume seeks to present Hesiod as the cognitivist avant la lettre by arguing that the poem provides a cognitive training and that the goal of the Works and Days was, to borrow an expression from contemporary teaching statements, not only to provide a set of instructions for the farmer, but to teach transferrable skills – in this case, the ability to think, avoid cognitive biases, and solve problems. Part II (‘Tracing Tradition’) contains a range of chapters on discrete issues: Homeric bards as teachers, the reasons why a range of Greek and Latin poets put medical knowledge into verse, the didactic strategy of wordplay, and the metapoetic didactic in the Ars amatoria. The third part of the book (‘Comparisons and Continuations’) begins by looking into the didactic strategies of the Sibylline Oracles and their relationship with Homer, Hesiod, and the Hebrew scriptures; the second chapter suggests a new method for a more productive comparative study of the Near Eastern literature; the third explores the use of animal imagery in archaic Greek poetry and the Kalanga wisdom literature; and the fourth discusses the cultural significance of composing poems in Latin in early modern Scotland.

In 1979, a reviewer of E. R. Dodds's autobiography, Missing Persons, characterized his most famous work, The Greeks and the Irrational, as ‘still one of the four or five modern books which an undergraduate absolutely must read before he can carry on a useful conversation’.Footnote ⁴ In the new edited volume which originated in a conference held at Corpus Christi College in Oxford offering an assessment of Dodds's work as a scholar, teacher, and public intellectual, Robert Parker calls Dodds's masterpiece ‘a book that lives, a book that every person seriously interested in ancient Greece must study’ (116).Footnote ⁵ It is hard to overestimate the impact of that book, now classic, published in 1951, or indeed of Dodds's scholarship in general. Considering his interesting life, his public engagement, and his scholarly impact, this edited volume offers something for everyone – and I don't just mean for every Classicist: Dodds's life path starts in the north of Ireland and leads to Belfast, Oxford, Reading, Birmingham, and then back to Oxford, where he became the Regius Professor of Greek – not without controversy. I was fascinated to learn that he was not only a poet himself, but also knew Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Louis MacNeice. A thoroughly gripping chapter tells the story of Dodds's early interest in the German educational system during the Nazi period, which led to his appointment by the Foreign Office to various important committees concerned with charting the future educational path for post-war Germany. David Phillips provides a full picture of this chapter of Dodds's life, marshalling not only facts and figures but also Dodds's vivid and touching descriptions of the life at German universities which he visited in 1947, quoting not only from the official reports, but also from the letters sent to his wife.

As a Northern Irish republican, declared socialist, and atheist, Dodds encountered many obstacles; his early and, at that period, rather eccentric interest in Neoplatonism did not help. Anne Sheppard's chapter on his pioneering work in Neoplatonic studies usefully expounds his enormous impact on what is now a burgeoning field. Two chapters look into the state of research in Greek religion before Dodds's book on the irrational and its intellectual context, while a third provides an assessment of Dodds's participation in the Society for Psychical Research, of which he was an active member for more than sixty years. There are further chapters on his work on Greek tragedy, Plato, and late antiquity, his associations with poets and other intellectuals, and, finally, a set of personal recollections from people who knew him well. Scott Scullion's incisive analysis of Dodds's work on Greek tragedy will be a tremendously useful companion piece for those consulting the 1944 commentary on the Bacchae. Robert Parker's frank assessment of the major influences, the impact, and the shortcomings of The Greeks and the Irrational will be an indispensable corrective to everyone discovering or rediscovering this classic. Those aspects of Dodds's work which secured him a wide readership and popularity are also the ones that do not withstand the test of time: the influence of the Cambridge ritualists, and especially Jane Harrison's work in his commentary on the Bacchae, and his embracing of psychoanalysis in the early work on Euripides, and particularly in The Greeks and the Irrational, where he famously psychologizes the Greeks as a society under the influence of Freud, Kardiner, Ruth Benedict, and Fromm. The methods notwithstanding, Dodds's work renewed a fascination with the traits of Greek religion which are most foreign to us and we struggle to understand the most: purity and pollution (guilty!), divine madness, divination.

Hardly a year passes by without a new book about divination, and 2019 was not an exception. The book presently under review is an edited volume on divination – mostly Greek, some Roman, and, yes, the beyond (in this instance, the ancient Near East and China).Footnote ⁶ The editors wish to go beyond functionalism and use the example of divination in order to explore the religious experiences of individuals:

In the opening chapter, on Near Eastern augury, Scott B. Noegel argues that divination was an enterprise heavily informed by insecurities, and identifies scepticism from others and the pressures experienced by the augur to interpret the signs correctly as the main sources of augur anxiety in Mesopotamian divinatory cultures. Esther Eidinow revisits a much-discussed puzzle from Herodotus, Croesus’ relationship with Apollo, and argues that Croesus’ testing of the oracles is paralleled in states and individuals consulting the same oracle about the same matter several times and, occasionally, posing the same question to different oracles. Stories about multiple questions posed by both Greeks and foreigners provide insight into the perception and experience of oracular practice, which Eidinow sees as one of pervasive uncertainty. This practice could very well be interpreted as testing, as Eidinow suggests. What I found intriguing, however, is that, among the adduced examples, Croesus is the only oracular inquirer who is explicitly testing the oracle because he is the only one who asks the gods a trivial question to which he knows the answer. Hugh Bowden examines the importance of individuals for the Athenian endeavour to establish divine will through divination, using as an example the activity of Euxenippus, who was tasked with consulting the oracle of Amphiaraus in c. 330 bce. Drawing on psychological research about dreams and dream recall, Bowden suggests that the Athenians engaged Euxenippus to consult this oracle because he was an experienced dream-incubator. The fact that his report led to impeachment owing to allegedly misrepresenting the divine command signifies the power and responsibility of such a position in the Athenian state. Jason P. Davies surveys the role of dreams in divination more generally, while Lisa Maurizio relies on a careful study of the textual and archaeological evidence and the current anthropological accounts of divination in order to argue that the Delphic Pythia probably did not use lots, and, even if she did, this was probably not a procedure resulting in a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. Quinton Deeley, a consultant neuropsychiatrist and senior lecturer in social behaviour and neurodevelopment at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, specializing in cognitive neuroscience of religious cognition, experience, and behaviour, seeks to throw more light on the specific nature of Pythia's possession and discusses schizophrenia, hallucinations, Pierre Janet's concept of dissociation, and suggestion in hypnosis as possible analogies and explanatory models. Andrew Stiles considers the role of tree portents in the Roman society during times of crisis and uncertainty as a manifestation of the worldview of those involved in the interpretation of dissemination of these narratives. Federico Santangelo provides a survey and analysis of prodigies during the Early Principate and deftly challenges the accepted view that the change of the political system in Rome introduced a transition ‘from a world full of prodigies, open to genuine political competition, to one full of portents and tightly policed by an autocrat’ (172). Lindsay Driediger-Murphy discusses the procedure regulating unsuccessful animal sacrifice within Roman state divination. The question at stake is whether Romans continued with the sacrifice until divine assent was obtained (which would mean that the gods actually had no freedom to reject the sacrifice), or whether there was a limit to a number of failed attempts. She argues that divine assent was not always easy to obtain by merely continuing the sacrifice and that no universal rule emerges from Livy 41.15, our only source for the crucial phrase usque ad litationem (‘right up until the successful acceptance of a victim by the gods’). This conclusion has major repercussions on the view of Roman human–divine relationships and undermines the assumption that humans had significant control over the divinatory process. Driediger-Murphy ends with a series of provocative and incisive questions worth citing in full:

Michael Flower conceptualizes ancient Greek epiphany as a real presence of the divine by analysing the set of inscriptions that Isyllus set up at Epidaurus in the fourth century bce, the oracular responses from Dodona, and the Athenian divination practices before and during the Sicilian expedition. The volume closes with a chapter comparing Chinese and Greek divination.

As I hope is obvious by now, I enjoyed reading this book very much, and found it richly rewarding. The focus on the individual beliefs underlying divinatory practices and an attempt to elucidate individual agencies and various methods of getting more insight into them are both illuminating and will stimulate further research.

Another edited volume provides an introduction to and a first comprehensive study of repositories of knowledge in the pre-classical world covering the areas of the Near East and Egypt.Footnote ⁷ The reference to the Alexandrian library in the title is to be understood as a challenge which is immediately addressed in the editors’ introduction: the widely dispersed assumption that the Alexandrian library was not only the greatest but also the original and somehow the first great library ought to be discredited. Instead of representing the beginning of a tradition, the Alexandrian library is perceived as its culmination, since the creation of repositories of knowledge can be traced back to the third millenium BC in the Near East. The focus of this volume is on the libraries for which, unlike in the case of Alexandria, we have both archaeological and textual evidence: in several cases, the material remains of the libraries can be studied in their original context and the texts they contained do not have to be reconstructed, but are extant and can be studied in the very form in which they were written and read by their original scribes and audiences.

In the introduction, the editors provide a detailed overview of the general characteristics of the libraries under discussion: all of them fall into one of the three groups: palace, temple, or private collections, the last of which mostly related to the occupation of the owner. There is no evidence for general public access to any of them. In terms of content, libraries of Egypt and the ancient Near East are comparable: they contained religious texts outlining the temple rituals, magic, and compiling priestly knowledge; scientific texts related to divination, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy; lexical lists; wisdom literature; proverbs; school exercises and model texts; and literary genres such as mythological narratives, histories, epic, lamentations, and other genres of poetry. The individual chapters treat the evidence from the entire ancient Near East and ancient Egypt. Each paper opens with a summary of information available about the libraries from a specific area and time and then proceeds to discuss one or several case studies. The book presents the repositories of knowledge from ancient Egypt in three separate chapters (c. 2600–1600 bce, 1600–800 bce, and 800 bce–250 ce). Six are on the Near East: the earliest libraries of western Asia c. 2600–2300 bce, the archives and libraries in the Old Babylonian Period c. 1900–1600 bce, the tablet collections of the Hittite state c. 1650–1080 bce, libraries in Syria and the Levant c. 1450–1100 bce, scholarly tablet collections of Assyria and Babylonia c. 700–200 bce, and an overview of Assurbanipal's library (r. 668–627 bce). This exhaustive, beautifully produced, and richly illustrated volume will be an indispensable first port of call for anyone interested in the history of ancient libraries.

I now turn to the brief mention of three volumes of general interest I received too late for a detailed review. An edited volume on the communicative strategies in ancient epistolography offers eighteen contributions spanning the entirety of Greek and Roman antiquity.Footnote ⁸ At its centre are the constructions of the roles of the sender and the addressee.

Frances Reynolds has published a monumental full edition of all known cuneiform manuscripts of an Akkadian calendar treatise composed in Babylon in the Hellenistic period, probably before 170 bce.Footnote ⁹ The edition features drawings of the cuneiform tablets, a text edition, translation, and commentary. A substantial introduction provides an overview of scholarship and presents the historical and social context of the tablets, as an analysis of their language and orthography.

Finally, a monograph on a fascinating topic: the concept of anachronism. The authors offer a twofold approach to anachronism: on the one hand, they analyse the concept as understood in Greek and Roman antiquity; on the other hand, they approach it as a vehicle for understanding antiquity itself.Footnote ¹⁰ Their big claim is that, ‘contrary to the position taken by many modern philosophers of history, this book argues that classical antiquity had a rich and varied understanding of historical difference which is reflected in sophisticated notions of anachronism’ (back cover). This will be my summer reading – as we are all unable to travel, a book taking me from Homer to Borges via Virgil, and from the Exekias painter to James Barry via Raphael's School of Athens, promises an exciting intellectual journey through time and space.

In moments of health crises, some people, and especially those among us with hypochondriac traits, resort to the internet for a self-diagnosis and try to solicit an opinion from Dr Google. The results of such queries, at least in my experience, while seldom helpful, are often amusingly random – there must be others whose flu symptoms turned out to coincide with the early stages of yellow fever, as WebMD might suggest. Helen King's new book, Hippocrates Now. The ‘Father of Medicine’ in the Internet Age,Footnote ¹ raises the question of what the internet knows about the father of medicine, and looks into the manifold receptions of the Coan doctor, as well as into the creative engagement with the ancient tradition surrounding the author and the corpus of works we've grown accustomed to call ‘Hippocratic’. King focuses on current configurations of Hippocrates to gauge to what extent they are ‘specific to our age and its concerns’ (5). The result of this investigation is a deliciously entertaining and thoroughly enjoyable work comprising seven colourful chapters. In the opening two chapters, King lays out what we know about historical Hippocrates (Chapter 1: two short and sobering sentences), and the development of the Hippocratic corpus (Chapter 2, with a lucid introduction to the main issues and the short history of scholarly misconceptions). The real spectacle starts with Chapter 3, focusing largely on Hippocrates’ Wikipedia entry and its riotous contents, as well as the history of its edits and revisions: this juicy section wonderfully encapsulates the sheer ingenuity of human inventiveness and the boundlessness of unbridled imagination. Thus we learn, among many other things, that Hippocrates supposedly spent twenty years in prison, where he wrote his only surviving masterpiece, The Complicated Body; that he was a sexual deviant with a romantic interest in Dora the Explorer; and that he was a pioneer in the fight against Big Pharma and so, inevitably, was ultimately assassinated by the government. O-kay.

The following two chapters look into the portrayal of Hippocrates in the media, and in particular in press reactions to medical discoveries announced in 2017–18, and at dissected Hippocrates, as it were: that is, at quotes endowed with Hippocrates’ authority, and primarily dispersed as soundbites through social media and websites. ‘Walking is the best medicine’ and ‘Do no harm’ enjoy great popularity as soundbites on Twitter in particular, and I couldn't resist the temptation to investigate to what extent they are present in the Twittersphere during the spring quarantine of 2020. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, ‘Walking is the best medicine’ takes pride of place among Hippocratic quotes posted there – and, interestingly enough, several Twitter users referring to this quote are medical doctors themselves. The final two chapters preceding the conclusion deal with receptions of the Hippocratic diet and the holistic approach to healing. Here, too, the material presented is remarkable and often hilarious: I learned that, in the views of some, Hippocrates was the ‘Father of colonics’, who averred that ‘Death begins in the colon’ (128), while a Greek tourism website describes the Coan Asclepieion as a ‘holistic healing centre…[with] infirmaries, temples, hot springs, hostels, a school for physicians, and much more’ (139). This thoroughly enjoyable and well-written book makes a clear case that Hippocrates matters today, and that he matters a great deal, to many people, for a vast variety of reasons. As King puts it in the final sentence of her book, ‘he is more alive than ever before’ (159).

In King's book, the name of Vivian Nutton, one of the most influential students of Greek medicine and of Galen in particular, comes up with great frequency, as is to be expected. Laurence Totelin and Rebecca Flemming joined forces with former students and colleagues of Nutton to celebrate and honour the achievements of his long and illustrious career.Footnote ² Their volume aims to explore the ways in which ‘medicine and markets went together in the Graeco-Roman world’ (xxv). The focus on medical marketplaces, with their offer of customer choice, and the economic framework of ancient medical practice enabled the editors and the authors to jointly produce a relatively coherent and attractive collection. In the brief and informative introduction, Flemming first sketches the most incisive insights of Nutton's scholarship before laying out the structure of the volume with its two constituent parts.

Part I, ‘Prices and Exchange’, consists of four chapters. In the opening chapter, Véronique Boudon-Millot explores the cost of medical treatments in Imperial Rome and vividly presents the differences in income and status between medical superstars such as Galen or Crinas from Marseille and their less fortunate colleagues. Laurence Totelin looks at the ancient drug trade, and in particular at the epistolographic practices relating to drugs – that is, letters containing recipes, orders, and requests – attested on papyri and ostraca from the late Hellenistic to the late Imperial period in Roman Egypt. John Scarborough builds on the recent work on medical uses of beaver castor to draw attention to Dioscorides’ warnings concerning counterfeit castor sold as the real thing. This piece develops nicely from M. Devecka's article on these issues (JRS 103 [2013], 88–95) which I heard delivered as a talk at a Society for Classical Studies convention ten or so years ago, and still remember vividly. The final paper of this section, co-authored by Antonio Ricciardetto and Danielle Gourevitch, investigates the evidence for remuneration of wet nurses in Roman Egypt. Much of the evidence gathered and ably analysed by the authors pertains to distressing situations in which exposed children (often in piles of rubbish) would be raised by wet nurses for two to (seldom) three years, only to become enslaved thereafter. Part II, ‘Pluralism and Diversity’, contains six chapters, some more explicitly engaging with the focus of the volume than others. The section opens with G. E. R. Lloyd's wide-ranging swoop into pluralism of ancient medical traditions, focusing on similarities and differences between case histories in ancient Chinese medicine, Egyptian papyri, and various strands of ancient Greek medicine. Elizabeth Craik's piece surveys the evidence for malaria, its effects on pregnant women, and the help they sought in certain cults of Artemis. Robert Arnott looks at medical marketplaces of the Bronze Age Mediterranean and mines Hittite ritual texts to draw parallels with Mycenaean healing cults and speculate regarding the exchange of medical knowledge between the two cultures. In two separate chapters Ann Ellis Hanson and David Leith focus on the careers and achievements of four ancient doctors: Hanson on the physician Antistius, who may or may not have been Caesar's doctor, and Leith on Phylonides of Dyrrachium (a pupil of Asclepiades), Marcus Artorius (Octavian's doctor), and an elusive first-century bc/first-century ad doctor named Lusius. The final chapter is penned by Helen King and dedicated, like her book reviewed above, to Hippocrates’ life on the World Wide Web. The volume closes with a bibliography, the bibliography of the honorand, and a useful set of indexes.

From medicine, we now turn to three new books on Greek and Roman religion. I start with the second volume of Jan Bremmer's collected essays, containing papers on Greek religion and mythology (the first volume, published in 2017, consists of essays on early Christianity, apocalyptic literature, and the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas).Footnote ³ Bremmer is, as is well known, one of the most prolific, wide-ranging, and influential scholars of Greek religion, and a scholar of such unique breadth, depth, and insight, both in the field of Greek religion and in the study of early Christianity, that some graduate students reportedly believed there to be two scholars with an identical name, active in two distinct fields.

The World of Greek Religion and Mythology is a sort of ‘best of classical Bremmer’ compilation, comprising thirty articles split over four sections that have in part been substantially updated with both new evidence and relevant new bibliography. In some cases, the author has expanded, reformulated, or trimmed down the material in individual papers, so that even those among us who are familiar with many of the papers from this collection will still have very good reason to acquire and read this volume. The collection opens with a preface that outlines the intellectual history of Bremmer's interest in religion: for me personally, this was one of the highlights of the volume. Here, the author sketches a thrilling story of his burgeoning early engagement with religion as a student of G. J. D. Aalders in Amsterdam, paints vividly the ways in which encounter with Hendrik Wagenvoort's scholarship shaped his own intellectual agenda, and then offers his reader a captivating narrative of the intellectual and historical forces that have exercised influence on his research agendas and interests. There is a kind of ‘very short introduction’ to the major trends in scholarship on Greek religion of the past fifty years right there in that preface, and I am determined to set it as a mandatory reading for my graduate students next time I teach a course on Greek religion.

It is impossible, of course, to sum up here the sheer richness of individual papers: as everyone who has read Bremmer knows, his explorations offer so much food for thought, and gift the reader with such a wealth of insights, that one is very likely to uncover new facets of a paper on every re-reading. The first section, entitled ‘Gods and Heroes’, includes a set of papers on individual divinities (three articles on Poseidon, Hephaistos, and Dionysus respectively, and another one on the divinities known from the gold tablets), on early hero cult, on agency of statues, and on engagement with Greek gods in twentieth-century scholarship. The second section, ‘Aspects of Greek Religion’, tackles some of the presently most debated issues in the study of Greek religion and includes a set of papers on divination, eschatology, religious associations and agents, and magic. Cumulatively, this section raises some of the most pressing questions about the limits of the ‘polis religion’ model and provides an excellent starting point for anyone interested in reflection on methodology. The third section, ‘Animal and Human Sacrifice’, groups together some of Bremmer's best-known and most influential studies of these rituals: six chapters discuss instances of ritual sacrifice, human sacrifice, and literary depictions of sacrifice in tragedy in particular.

With the final eight papers, forming section four, ‘Myth’, we arrive at some of the biggest questions one can raise in the study of Greek religion: from the timeworn question of the relationship between myth and ritual, via investigations of the relationship between myth and history, propaganda, mythography, and literature, to the biggest one there is: what is a Greek myth? The book closes with an appendix (a piece on the relationship between G. van der Leeuw and J. E. Harrison), acknowledgements, and a set of very helpful indexes.

The papers, originally published with nineteen different presses over the period of thirty-five or so years, are now ready to hand in this beautifully produced and carefully curated volume. This makes it easier than ever to delve into Bremmer's often pathbreaking and always deeply impressive and genuinely inspiring scholarship. Every student of Greek religion will want this splendid collection on their shelf.

Bremmer also features in Eva Elm and Nicole Hartmann's excellent edited volume on demons.Footnote ⁴ But first, I must disclose an interest here: in 2015 I took part in a Berlin conference that in part gave rise to this book, and as a Classicist have greatly enjoyed the cross-disciplinary conversations with colleagues working on various strands of Christian theology and church history.

Demons are, of course, terrifically interesting and hard-to-grasp denizens of the divine world, and one of the greatest obstacles in understanding their nature is that it appears to be ever-changing over time, but they are also shape-shifters in their literary manifestations. The editors took upon themselves to investigate the generic configurations of demons and demonic presences: the starting point for all contributions in this volume is therefore the question of the specificities relating to the genre – to what extent do individual genres (especially biography, hymns, hagiography, letters, and romances) influence the representations of demons in late antique Christianity?

The eight chapters are sandwiched between a clear and informative introduction written by Eva Elm, and a synthetic epilogue penned by Jan Bremmer. In the opening chapter, ‘Demons and Disease’, Christoph Markschies begins by taking stock of the representations of demons in Christian magical amulets as opposed to the portrayal of demons in ancient Christian philosophical texts. In the second step, he reveals with great lucidity that ‘in the ancient world, explanations of the causes of diseases were dependent on textual types and literary genres’ (34). The theme of demons, healing, and disease continues in Annette Weissenrieder's contribution, which scans the Vetus Latina versions of Matthew, Mark, and Luke and asks how should we interpret references to daemonia, spiritus immundus, and spiritus mutus in those works: exorcism ritual or disease and healing? The answer provided is that there is no single answer – the only way to gain a fuller understanding of a specific reference is to consider not only the genre and the literary contexts, but also the textual histories of individual works. In the following chapter, Nicole Hartmann zeroes in on early martyrology and reflects on the almost complete absence of demons in pre-Eusebian martyrdom literature. Why? Well, the answer, completely boiled down, is that the early martyrs had it tough enough without demons and demonic involvement, so that early martyrologies place an emphasis on the goriness and violence of the martyrs’ deaths; only with later martyrology do we see the focus shift ‘from the spectacle of martyrdom to the spectacle of the exorcistic powers of the martyrs’ (77). Emmanouela Grypeou focuses on demons as punishers of sinners in the afterlife in late antique Christian eschatologies, and draws attention to the manner in which punishing angels of the early Christian texts came to be replaced by demons in the later texts. The following three contributions, authored by Robert Wiśniewski, Eva Elm, and Nienke Vos respectively, explore demons in hagiographic scripts. Wiśniewski's piece investigates Latin hagiographies of the fourth and fifth centuries ad in order to gauge the main functions of demons there, and argues that a major motivation for the employment of demonic motifs in such narratives is to ‘strengthen the literary image of a saint’ as an exorcist (101). I found this piece fascinating, in particular for its discussion of the materiality of demonic presences in the imagination of hagiographic scripts. Speaking of materiality, equally rewarding is Eva Elm's paper on Jerome's Vita Hilarionis and Life of Anthony, in which the author stresses the differences in conceptualization of the demonic force: the demons’ playground is externalized in the Vita Hilarionis, the demons being envisaged as corporeal and present in the material world, while they are internalized in the Life of Anthony, and haunt the human soul. Vos's piece, the penultimate in the collection, explores narrative and discursive modes in select passages of Sulpicius Severus’ Vita Martini. Here, the author puts into sharp relief the demons’ function as an opaque narrative background that allows the starry brightness of the saint to shine through with an exceptional luminosity. The method of discourse analysis is also employed by Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe's piece, which closes the collection. In this erudite and wide-ranging study, Lunn-Rockliffe analyses the differences in representation of demonic speech in hagiography and liturgical hymns, to point out the configurations of, and the models for, generic constructions of demonic soundscapes in both genres. Finally, Bremmer's epilogue perceptively draws together various strands of the volume and points out remaining pressing problems and possible avenues of research. All in all, this is a very fine collection of essays (my one quibble is the lack of any indexes), and it was encouraging to see that six out of its nine authors were female colleagues.

How did the plurality of religious beliefs, such as the plurality of views on demons that we just considered, fare in the age of increasing religious dogmatization? Maijastina Kahlos’ new book addresses the issue of religious dissent from the mid-fourth to the mid-fifth century ad in order to analyse both the nature of religious dissent and the literary and narrative constructions of dissent in relevant sources.Footnote ⁵ This book builds on the author's previous research on tolerance and intolerance between pagans and Christians, and starts off with an analysis of tensions between imperial and ecclesiastical authority, placing an emphasis on the rhetoric of power in light of the realities of imperial legislation. In the central part of the book, Kahlos turns to the analysis of rhetoric in the relevant sources to explore the ways in which categories of ‘pagans’ and ‘heretics’ were construed by late antique writers. Here, in an act of continuous deconstructive splitting, the author points out that the nominalist labels depended on the standards of each writer and the author's perception of what ‘being Christian’ represented for him. To me, the most interesting part of the book was its final section, which analyses the historical realities of late antique dissent at the local level (including discussions of magic and superstition), and builds in interesting ways on the approaches adopted by Jörg Rüpke and the Erfurt ‘Lived Ancient Religion’ project. As we move in the study of ancient religions ever more towards issues of individual religiosity, practices, and beliefs, this book on the rhetoric and practices of late antique religious dissent represents a welcome new publication that is bound to provoke further discussion.

Finally, a volume of proceedings arising from a conference held in Zurich in 2016, and now published under the title Literacy in Ancient Everyday Life.Footnote ⁶ In the eyes of this reviewer, the topic is wonderful, the line-up of authors is very impressive, and the collection contains many rewarding papers. But a more appropriate title might very well be Everyday Literacy in the Roman Empire with a Set of Forays into Ancient Chinese, Egyptian, Indian, Iranian and Persian Cultures, with Nothing to Say on Archaic and Classical Greece. And what's with the omission of ancient Anatolian cultures?

The volume contains two uneven parts. The first one, consisting of six illuminating papers, provides a global perspective. Li Feng examines early ancient Chinese inscriptions on bronze, as well as oracular inscriptions on bone. In Classics, we thought we had hit a jackpot when more than 4,000 new inscriptions from the oracular sanctuary of Dodona were discovered and published; the Chinese Shang period (mid to end of the second millennium bc) generated more than 130,000 inscribed bone fragments of oracular texts, of which only about 600 have been translated into English, and only recently so. I was amazed by how many thematic overlaps between Shang and Dodona queries can be identified – terrific material. In an impressive contribution, Harry Falk investigates the emergence of a new script under Aśoka (a mix of Greek and Kharoṣṭhī) and the political and economic reasons for its perseverance. Katharina Zinn looks at orality and literacy in Pharaonic Egypt through the prisms of memory, agency, and textual materiality. Josef Wieshöfer studies the uses of Elamite, Old Persian, and Aramaic in Teispid-Achaemenid Iran to gauge the extent of Persian-language policies. Irene Madreiter raises the issues of gendered literacy by investigating the geographical spread of female literacy throughout the empire. Apparently, the evidence for female literacy is robust for the satrapies, but not for the Persis proper, and the author perceptively discloses the cultural forces driving such a split. William V. Harris closes the section on global perspectives with a disjointed paper that consists of a consideration of two specific questions (discussions of the impact of ideology on educational practices, where the Greek tradition actually does merit a few pages, and of the reasons for the decline of literacy in late antiquity), followed by three short and in places irksome book reviews (150–3, 155); and, finally, there are notes on two textual dossiers from Roman Britain (the ‘Bloomberg tablets’ from London and the texts from Uley and Bath, taken together).

The second, significantly larger part of the volume focuses on the Roman Empire and, like the first part, it contains several notable contributions. ‘Social Groups’, the first of the four subheadings, contains four papers: Sabine R. Hübner on women and literacy in Roman Egypt, focusing on two case studies and disclosing gender differences, a very good piece; Michael A. Speidel on the significance of literacy for Roman soldiers in Lower Nubia and elsewhere; Roger Tomlin on literacy in Roman Britain; and Kai Ruffing on what accounts tell us about the nexus of literacy and economy.

Two papers constitute the subsection ‘Religious Practice’. Wolfgang Spickermann writes on the impact of Roman conquest on the (habit of inscribing) names of Celtic and Germanic gods: the time when the gods learned both to understand and to read Latin as well as Celtic and German dialects, as the author persuasively demonstrates. Another remarkable contribution is Amina Kropp's study of defixionum tabellae, which foregrounds the metaphorical function of writing in the magical context: following a meticulous exposition on the functions of script in defixiones, Kropp argues for a kind of a performative write-up, basically a write-act that ‘serves as a metaphor for the attack on the target’ (282).

The subsection ‘Administration’ starts with Antonio Caballos Rufino's investigation of the semantics of legal inscriptions on bronze from Beatica, followed by two papers on Egypt. W. Graham Claytor looks at notarial services in Egypt from the point of view of village societies (especially Karanis and Kellis) to argue for a documentable shift upwards in the concentration of literate men during the second to fourth centuries ad (but with problematic evidence for the third). Paul Schubert raises a big question: what was the purpose of writing in Graeco-Roman Egypt and who needed to be literate? I enjoyed this essay very much, not least because it focused on the materiality of documents, and argued on the basis of the textual layout of the papyri of administrative character. In the last contribution of the subsection, Benjamin Hartmann sketches the longue durée process by which Roman scribae became endowed with a symbolic significance as guardians of public documentation (tabulae publicae).

The final subsection, ‘Education’, opens with one of the volume's highlights: Marietta Horster's study of the levels of historical and historiographical knowledge among the population at large (refreshingly paying attention to the Hellenistic period too). What can papyri or inscriptions tell us about the taste for a particular ancient historian? The final paper, penned by Winfried Schmitz, studies late Roman and early medieval funerary inscriptions from the Rhine and Moselle area to disclose the decline of Latin in rural areas, as opposed to its relative perseverance in urban centres. An index locorum closes the volume.

As I stated at the outset, many papers in this volume are rewarding and meticulous. Some are indeed quite original – even if it was somewhat puzzling to see the editor introducing the first set of essays as being ‘at the bleeding edge of current research’ (3). As a volume of conference proceedings, this publication is certainly welcome, and the standard of editing is generally high. That said, I must confess that I left it with a feeling of disappointment caused by the absence of anything of any substance on Greek material, other than what Harris had to offer in his piece. An opportunity missed, especially in regard to Greek epigraphy – all the more so, since for the past ten years exciting new finds have been in full swing, reinvigorating relevant discussions on orality and literacy.