The bibliographical heading to this review is misleading. The book is authored by The Postclassicisms Collective, which consists of the nine eminent scholars listed above, their voices blended. It results from a series of meetings and workshops; the acknowledgements mention almost a hundred people involved in the project. The book is thus something of a manifesto. It presents itself as a critique of ‘classicism’ or rather its transcendence, the title recalling terms like ‘poststructuralism’ and ‘posthumanism’. The motivation is moral: ‘every act as a classicist is also a political and ethical one’ (p. 5). The collective defines itself as ‘progressive’ (p. 79), distancing itself from the racism, sexism and elitism of which Classics as a discipline has been accused (often rightly), although the critique of positivism demands epistemological modesty: hence, the ‘hope to move forward – in whichever direction that may be’ (p. 94). The tone is somewhat hectoring, with its ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ (the collective is ‘acutely aware that such work must go hand in hand with action’, p. xiii), the style sometimes clunky (e.g. ‘the principled ineluctability of partial perspectives’ – one of the nine should have edited that). Its objective is not to persuade the uncommitted but to provide conceptual tools to help loosen the mind-forged manacles sanctioned by Classics as a discipline. The hope is ‘to reclaim ancient texts as rich and unexpectedly generative resources for thinking about not only our own relationship to them but also about time, matter, agency, and other terms that are central to contemporary debates beyond the borders of disciplinary classics’ (p. 7).

The book has two parts. The first, ‘Introduction’, begins with an ‘Introduction to the Introduction’, followed by chapters on three concepts described as integral to the entire project: ‘Value’, ‘Time’ and ‘Responsibility’. Part 2, ‘Concepts’, surveys nine ideas that ‘would take us to sites of maximum contestation in the field while opening up unexpected perspectives on the questions and problems at stake’ (p. x); they are intended to ‘help establish a shared language that is transhistorical without being universalizing’ (p. xi). These chapters bear the headings ‘Agency’, ‘Discipline’, ‘God’, ‘Human’, ‘Knowing’, ‘Materiality’, ‘Situatedness, ‘Untimeliness’ and ‘World’.

Beginning, then, with ‘Value’: ‘It is one thing to ask what the value of classics is and another to ask about the value of that value’ (p. 9). We Classicists have taken the value of our discipline for granted; indeed Classics ‘is premised on a fundamental blindness toward itself’ (p. 12), as we comfortably go about our business. The word ‘classical’ itself risks being imperialistic: ‘Categories such as classical Chinese literature, classical Indian music, and the Classic period of Mayan civilization are all derived from models predicated on suppositions about “the classical world”’; yet even to ‘speak of “classical” Malay literature … is fundamentally to misread that literature’ (p. 13). Well, maybe. But however self-conscious we are about our values, there are some criteria: ‘It would be a perverse set of values that could not distinguish between the worth of Homer and that of a stray pottery scatter in an archaeological survey – both of which have claims on our attention, but surely not equipollent ones’ (p. 15). Yet the collective observes, ‘There was no more staunch critic of Homer or champion of Virgil than Joseph Scaliger’, although later ‘the fortunes of these two authors were reversed’; these ‘mood swings can in hindsight appear anything but rational’ (p. 17).

In ‘Time’ we read that classicism idealises that past; moreover, ‘Such idealization goes hand in hand with desire for restoration, imitation, emulation, inheritance, fulfillment, embodiment’ (p. 20). Karl Marx wrote that the French Revolution was enacted ‘in Roman costume’ (p. 21); the reference is to the Eighteenth Brumaire, notes the ‘Bibliography’ at the end, since footnotes are eschewed. (Marx, however, believed that the proletarian revolution would draw its imagery from the future.) Because the past is remote, reconstructed through fragments and traces, our ‘desire and longing’ for that idealised world ‘make the scholar obsessive, fixated on getting it right’ (p. 23). Postclassicists, however, are conscious that ‘the conceptualization of historical time changes’ (p. 24), acknowledging Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Stephen Hawking and Bob Dylan (‘“the times they are a-changing” is the anthem of modernity’). But ‘Postclassicism [here in the singular] … seeks to provide a narrative of our engagement with the past that can take account of the historical contingency of the subject who knows … and the enfolded, nonlinear temporalities of engagement’ (p. 28). This brings us to ‘Responsibility’. As the discipline of Classics congealed, it increasingly ‘sustained an ideal of objectivity’ (p. 33). Experts distinguish the authentic from the fake, but also (here is the rub) ‘the Greek and Roman from the oriental and the barbarian’. Textual critics who aim to rid texts of faults are subject to the ‘fantasy of the critic as healer … of iatric responsibility to the pathological text’ (p. 35). What then? Should we be irresponsible? Alas, ‘even “irresponsibility” is a form of commitment to a liberal-humanist tradition’ (p. 36). How, then, shall we treat the past? The collective offers the image of the museum curator, who ‘aims to use her material creatively, constructively and (yes) truthfully’, but ‘the primary responsibility of an exhibition curator is to the public’ (p. 37). Thus, ‘“Responsibility”, for the postclassicist, is to declare and to theorize one's own intellectual and moral interventions in the world’ (p. 38).

Now ‘Concepts’, beginning with ‘Agency’. The collective notes that ‘the nonhuman turn has entailed an aggressive redistribution of agency from human beings to nonhuman actors’ (p. 48). The mirage of the disembodied, male, autonomous, rational subject is dissolving, and just as well, since, as poststructuralism has shown, ‘crimes extending from the excesses of colonialism to the ongoing reign of patriarchy … have been undergirded by the notion of the autonomous human subject’ (p. 51). This is not to deprive human beings of agency altogether; rather, with approaches such as the new materialism, nonhuman studies and object-oriented ontology ‘the commitment is to multiplying actors rather than eliminating them’ (p. 53). The ancients have lessons for us in this regard. Greek and Roman texts, ‘rather than presenting a rational and autonomous male subject as a reified figure, are alive with the thorny and persistent problems that attend any attempt to establish a politics and an ethics on a uniquely human capacity to act on reasons and with reason’ (p. 57). Agency is also restored to marginalised groups. The collective cites J. Butler's and B. Honig's readings of Antigone: ‘Butler seems to be motivated by a desire to recognize Antigone's agency’, but Honig ‘goes a step further and reclaims a committed agency for Ismene’ (p. 61). This is not to posit a wider sense of women's freedom in ancient Athens; rather, it is an attempt ‘to highlight our choice in how we understand Ismene’ (p. 62). It is the reader who is the agent (personally, I give Sophocles more credit).

‘Disciplines’ takes epigraphy as a test case: ‘we want to worry – or squeeze [joke for the cognoscenti] – the example of epigraphy and use this case study to wring out wider issues’ involved in discipline formation (p. 69). Broad as epigraphy is, it is marked off from papyrology, philology and codicology by the arbitrary fact that each operates on different materials. But is it arbitrary? The skills are specialised. The example is adduced of Michel Fourmont, who in the eighteenth century forged many inscriptions: ‘Certainly his most significant “discoveries” were all forged’ (p. 74). Do we not depend on the discipline to demonstrate this? Epigraphers enjoy special privileges: they can touch, even ‘bash’, stones that are off limits to the rest of us. Inscriptions, hidden away in museums, are ‘the preserve of an academic elite’ (p. 77); their licence to operate on them is symbolic of ‘the violence of the discipline’. But even if, ‘For many, their relationship with disciplines has become deeply anxious and toxic’ (p. 78), we nevertheless ‘rely on disciplines … and it is hard not to endorse their presence’. So what to do? Think big: ‘there is no reason an epigrapher should not be equally at home critiquing the National September 11 Memorial as a Boeotian casualty list’ (p. 79). And vice versa? ‘Redrawing the boundaries’ of Classics requires that it ‘make itself open to those whose working practices operate differently than (sometimes in flagrant defiance of) accepted disciplinary norms’ (p. 80). An example is M. Bernal's work, the response to which ‘increasingly became one of denunciation and repudiation – the hallmarks of disciplinary boundary policing’ (p. 81). I admired Bernal, but where he was wrong (and this was often), it was the disciplines that showed why.

In ‘God’ we are encouraged to ‘move beyond … monotheistic perspectives’ (p. 96), though ‘without giving up on scholarly procedure’ (p. 97). Happily, ‘Antiquity can demonstrate that religion has no inevitable connection with nationalism, racism, or empire’ (p. 97). In ‘Human’ we learn that Ovid's Metamorphoses shows that ‘to be a human is also to be inhuman’ (p. 111). The interpretation depends in part on ‘Paul Lejay's brilliant emendation of illas’ to illa in Met. 1.2. Discipline? ‘Materiality’ affirms that ‘Homer is … arguably the first materialist in the West’ (p. 130). But he depends on matter: ‘Homer may be a great poet, as poets go … but he would not enjoy the canonical privileges he does if he had not from the first been linked to the place known as Troy’ (p. 135). So he was not better than potshards? The collective aspires to ‘a field of classical studies that contained no subjects and no objects but only changing materializations’ (p. 143). In ‘Untimeliness’ we are told: ‘To engage with classical antiquity is to step into a multiverse that refuses to obey straightforward temporal laws’. Indeed, ‘At stake is the very stability of time itself’ (p. 164); a page later: ‘At stake is nothing less than the identity of modern culture’ (p. 165). Big stakes. Lucretius, seen through the lens of Michel Serres, ‘emerges … as an early philosopher of untimeliness’ (p. 168); Serres ascribes to Lucretius a ‘fluid-state physics’, which generates also ‘a new way of seeing history as liquid’ (p. 174). As an interpretation of Epicurean physics, I fear this is nonsense. The final chapter, ‘World’, recalls the age of Erasmus when letters united scholars across Europe and beyond; but ‘Philology by postage is no longer a possibility’ in our ‘post-age’ (p. 188). Oy! But surely the internet does the job, and more democratically. A perceptive excursus on Derek Walcott's Omeros reassures us that ‘Homer was not in any meaningful sense a white European, and in any case his poetry has enthralled and inspired readers far beyond the continent’ (p. 190) – independently of Troy? In fact, ‘“the classical” evokes now … a complex space, a polymorphous matrix of crossings’ between all kinds of oppositions (p. 191), even if this too projects present concerns onto the past. In sum: ‘A worldly classicism will not ignore geopolitical, cultural and conceptual boundaries (how could it?), but will shine a new spotlight on them’ (p. 200). Who could object?