‘Surprisingly little has been written in a broad sense about the relationship between art and religion in ancient Greece’ (p. 1). Not my sentence, but the first in S.'s major new monograph under review here. She is quite right (even if much of the first chapter then does the necessary nuance on the big claim). The question she does not ask is ‘why?’. My answer would be, ‘because it is very difficult’; and underestimating that basic problem is also the problem with this book. What S. does is to lay out a taxonomy of religion and art in archaic and classical Greece according to categories normal in the existing literature, but insufficiently questioned or contested by it. These are deities (‘Gods and Goddesses’, Chapter 2); liturgy (‘Sanctuary, Festival and Cult’, Chapter 3); votives (‘Devotion, Offerings and Dedications’, Chapter 4); ritual including funerary and burial (‘Life and Afterlife’, Chapter 5). Each of these sections, well-illustrated and richly contextualised, is well worth surveying for an up-to-date summary of where the respective field is at. One may not always agree that all of the materials in a given chapter really have a religious element (for instance, what K.J. Dover called ‘intercrural copulation’ between men, discussed I think somewhat gratuitously under ‘social rituals’ at pp. 242–4, in relation to an explicit black figure pot now in the British Museum). But the coverage is wide-ranging and well-integrated within the classificatory categories S. has inherited and accepted.

We may critique the book on two fronts: sins of commission (that is, problems with what it is trying to do) and sins of omission (problems arising from what it does not do). To a significant extent that is a critique less of this book specifically than of a field – the study of pre-Christian religion – that finds it difficult to generate an empathetic exploration of some of the most fundamental elements of the ancient world, but also those more distant from us than such ancestral issues as democracy or modern genres of thinking as philosophy, history or tragedy. The main trouble with adopting a taxonomic approach, which S does not discuss at any point but is fundamental (and much more generally so than in her book alone), is the denial of historical specificity and complexity, as well as the inability to register or explore historical change. To take an instance chosen at random: in the eight-page section on ‘celebration and competition’ within the ‘Sanctuary, Festival and Cult’ chapter the illustrated subjects of principal discussion veer radically over more than 200 years and across the entire eastern Mediterranean (as far as Italy, if potential findspots count). They are a marble relief from the Athenian Acropolis from between 330 and 320 bce, a red-figure crater made in Athens between 440 and 420 (without known findspot, so conceivably from Italy), a mid-sixth century Chian black-figure fragment from Naukratis, an engraved obsidian gem of about 500 (thought to be from the Cyclades, though we are not told this) and a coin from Kos from between 480 and 450 (we are not told of what metal). Now whatever synthetic story one may try to tell from this range of stuff (in this case, one dependent on the subject matter depicted in the various images), it is obvious that it cannot carry a diachronic narrative, it cannot elucidate local difference, it cannot give proper reference to the political diversity in how the various places of production governed themselves (let alone that of the venues to which these items travelled in antiquity), it cannot account for the range of materials and the functions of very different kinds of objects. The inclusion of pots made in Italy to illustrate the discussion, when it suits the author (e.g. pp. 101 and 318), only makes things more synthetic and less specific or clear. Religion, whatever that means, becomes a hopeless generalisation, separate from history and defined at best by the selection of ‘Greek’ artefacts chosen to illustrate it.

The omissions are still more fundamental. I have just written ‘religion, whatever that means’. Religion is never defined, although a number of approaches in anthropology and archaeology are sketched, nor is it sufficiently distinguished from the term ‘ritual’, nor from the twice italicised (at pp. 11–12) ‘religious ritual’. That vagueness (a fundamental flaw also in the recent multi-volume Thesaurus cultus et rituum antiquorum [2004–6], for example) is what allows the tangentially ritual-related resonances of one interpretation of the imagery of Greek pederasty (an interpretation rejected by K.J. Dover and Michel Foucault and most of the field, it may be said) to find its way into a book ostensibly on religion. Failing to determine what religion should be for the purposes of the discussion in this book and then representing ‘religion’ with a taxonomic classification of items and activities determined by their illustration in archaeological objects, is a recipe for confusion. It is also not a useful response to the book's implicit question, articulated in the title, about ‘religion in art’. There is no attempt to examine how art (and more broadly material culture, including objects without rich iconographic embellishment) may constitute religion – although it is obvious that monuments like altars (potentially themselves aniconic objects of and within cult) construct the space around them as of ritual significance central to religious activity. The insistence on iconography (and hence illustration rather than function) means that the entire culture of Greek aniconism is ignored (M. Gaifman's recent book [2012] on the topic gets no mention), save for a few pages on herms at pp. 105–9, and that of anthropomorphism emphasised, which is potentially a significant distortion. Worst of all is the complete lack of interest in how the ancient Greeks themselves thought with and about religion (we might speak of pre-Christian polytheist theology) and did so specifically in and with objects. This is a topic of significant recent discussion – in some works cited in this book, though not in that context, but also by these recent contributions by major players to which it does not refer: R. Osborne, The History Written on the Classical Greek Body (2011), pp. 185–215; M. Squire, The Art of the Body: Antiquity and its Legacy (2011), pp. 154–201; W. Mack, ‘Vox Populi, Vox Deorum: Athenian Document Reliefs and the Theologies of Public Inscription’, The Annual of the British School at Athens 113 (2018), 365–98.

The idea of a general book on religion and material culture in ancient Greece is a good one. That book must interrogate what we mean when we say religion in the context of antiquity, and it must explore how religion was constructed by the full range of means at its disposal in the Greek world – not only texts and art, but also epigraphy, architecture, topographic and spatial placement, and the engaged or performative practice of these elements together at sites. The challenge is great because the scope is so large and the theoretical difficulties (above all looking behind and beyond the tinted glass of the Christianised heritage of how to understand religion) are not fully surmountable. We are still waiting.