If you have ever had a premonition, or if ever some inner voice has dissuaded you from a certain action, you might have noticed that this experience involves a different kind of knowledge than that preceded by an inference. We call it a ‘hunch’, an ‘intuition’, or a ‘gut feeling’; in the nineteenth century this particular subvolitional form of thinking was called ‘unconscious cerebration’, and modern cognitive science recognizes it as a specific type of cognition characterized by quick, pre-attentive, and preconscious processing – Daniel Kahneman's famous ‘thinking fast’.Footnote ¹ The most fascinating aspect of Peter Struck's book on divinationFootnote ² is an attempt to distinguish the type of cognition it entailed. The book offers an insightful analysis of Plato's, Aristotle's, the Stoics’, and the Neoplatonists’ views on divination, concluding that they saw divination as ‘surplus insight’, a specific kind of cognition. Since ‘our ability to know exceeds our capacity to understand that ability’, ‘our cognitive selves are to some…degree mysterious to us…The messages that we receive from the world around us add up, sometimes in uncanny ways, to more than the sum of their parts’ (15). Struck argues that, in the ancient world, the process by which we arrive at such surplus knowledge was acculturated as divination. He focuses on the philosophers’ views and does not attempt to provide an analysis of the technical and practical side of divination, which was based on knowledge and skill (though it must have involved intuition to some degree as well), or of the popular views on divination. Nevertheless, his book will be very useful to those interested in the philosophical views on divination and in the cognitive history of intuition. Cognitive science has spurred several important recent studies in Greek religion and is continuing to provide a useful framework for conceptualizing ancient (and modern) religious thinking and behaviour.

Another hot topic in the study of the ancient world is that of the senses. Recent years have witnessed several publications which aim to offer a series of approaches towards understanding and contextualizing senses and the sensory worlds. I will present two recent edited volumes, each part of a new series, but commissioned by different publishers and with a different audience in mind. I proceed like Plutarch in his Parallel Lives, and offer an individual discussion of each volume with a synkrisis at the end. Bloomsbury Publishing has commissioned a six-volume Cultural History of the Senses which aspires to delve into

The editor of the series, Constance Classen, adopts a traditional, chronological approach to the topic, starting with antiquity and ending with the modern era. The volume under consideration here is edited by Jerry Toner and aims to offer a cultural history of the senses in antiquity.Footnote ⁴ In the Introduction, Toner gives a very general (no notes!), broad-brush-stroke type of essay on the various aspects of sensory perception in antiquity, starting with synaesthesia, continuing through senses and social status, the role of senses in religion, games and spectacles, and senses and the Roman emperors, and concluding with Christian attitudes towards the senses. Instead of a methodological rationale or an overview of approaches adopted in the individual chapters, which would benefit a broadly oriented volume such as this one, he concludes the introduction as follows:

A descriptive and theory-light approach to this complex topic runs the risk of ignoring the fissures that separate the ancient conceiving of sensory perceptions from the modern ones. The individual chapters proceed in a similar fashion: they are engaging, interesting, and offer a wealth of detail, but tend to discuss both Greek and Roman worlds as a composite of time and space, and by proceeding in this manner, they necessarily remain very broad and general. For example, the first chapter considers all senses with respect to feasts and funerals, various philosophical theories of perception, ancient evaluations and rankings of individual senses, ideas of ritual pollution and purity, in the entire ancient world, with examples spanning from Homer to late antiquity on twenty-one pages with fourteen endnotes. There are nine individual chapters and most are anthropological in outlook, treating the social life of the senses, urban sensations, marketplace, religion, philosophy and science, medicine, love in the ancient novel, art, and sensory media.

Routledge also commissioned a series on the senses, but this one is on the individual senses and remains firmly focused on the ancient world. After excellent publications on synaesthesia and smell,Footnote ⁵ the third volume in this series addresses sight, the sense regarded as supreme both in antiquity and in the modern age.Footnote ⁶ In the illuminating and succinct, yet thought-provoking introduction, the editor, Michael Squire, announces that the aim of the volume is ‘to explore ancient Greek and Roman ideas about sensory seeing from a range of different disciplinary angles’, as the ‘theme of sight requires us to work not only between divergent sorts of texts, but also between different types of media’ (5). The hallowed interdisciplinarity, the reigning trope of grant proposals and edited volume introductions, is an often misused tagline, but it really does apply to this volume, which succeeds marvellously in striking a balance between broad surveys and meticulous analyses of individual sources, be they vase-image, relief, inscription, philosophical text, poetry, prose, or technical or rhetorical handbook. The volume brings together experts in material culture, philosophy, history of science, history, literary studies, and theology, and almost every paper really does provide a broad orientation as well as open new and exciting avenues of research. I particularly enjoyed Squire's sweeping and eloquent introduction, in which he takes us on a journey from an ancient epigram-riddle, via images of persons looking into their own reflections, and the spectacular mosaics featuring an eye under attack by dwarfs and animals, to more obscure, yet fascinating, items such as the seventh-century bc phallus cup with a pair of eyes (27, well worth seeing), and topics as diverse as the evil eye, camera obscura, Kepler's dissected eye of a cow, ancient optics, the embodied eye, and ancient ideas about the relation of seeing and knowing. Seeing may be a ‘theory-laden activity’ (13), but Squire wears his formidable learning lightly and manages to be in equal measure stimulating, fascinating, and extremely well informed and informative. Almost all contributions are clear, well written, and concise. The range of topics is truly dazzling for a relatively slim and richly illustrated volume. My own highlights are Verity Platt's chapter on epiphany, Andrea Nightingale's on Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle, and Squire and Reviel Netz's overview of ancient optics. Readers with different interests will surely find their own favourites in this richly rewarding book. Save for one unfocused and reductive discussion of funerary rituals, all contributions in this superb volume will greatly enrich readers’ knowledge.

Synkrisis: Squire's collection will be equally fascinating to a more general readership and to the specialist audience. Individual contributions are well informed of both theoretical and more specialized traditional Classicist debates and provide an excellent starting point for research into the ancient perceptions of sight, as well as a bountiful feast for those already expert in the field. In comparison, Toner's volume is geared towards a general audience. Notes are kept to a bare minimum (226 pages of discussion and 7 pages of endnotes). Rewarding and entertaining, it will keep the general reader and the undergraduate student occupied, but for a more profound treatment of the topic, I would recommend one turns to the Routledge series.

Moving from the senses to the issue of Mediterranean cultural interactions (another hot topic!), one notes that a number of recent comparative (viz. cross-cultural) investigations have tended to sound out parallels between various Mediterranean literary and cultural traditions in a discursive fashion, without explicit commitment (or, indeed, ambition) to detect genealogies, to posit encounters, interplays, and interferences, and to explore, to dissect, or, failing that, at the very least to hypothesize the origins of overlaps and mutual borrowings. This is precisely what Ian Rutherford's splendid edited volume, dedicated to Greco-Egyptian interactions, does.Footnote ⁷ Instead of relying on lofty but slippery tropes of ‘conversations’, ‘negotiations’, and ‘convergences’ between literary traditions and cultural products, the contributions in this bold and substantial volume open a number of new and unsuspected vistas while simultaneously bringing back to the table real hermeneutic value. The book has its origin in a conference held about a decade ago, but all papers are up to date and informed by the latest literature and developments. Without exception, the contributors have done a very impressive job of investigating ‘the relationship between Greek literature and the literary and cultural traditions of ancient Egypt’, the proclaimed aim of the editor (2). But even this is, in fact, an understatement – what this volume does is to draw attention to and cast light on modes, channels, and intensity of interactions between Greeks and Egyptians from the period of Greek literary prehistory to well into the Imperial period, even if the book's subtitle modestly limits its scope to 500 bce–300 ce. Literature, translation, and culture are chosen as focal points of the volume's fourteen chapters, nested between a meaty introduction and a well-organized index. The essays on Greco-Egyptian literary interactions are stimulating and clearly focused: in order of appearance, they discuss Plato and previously undetected echoes of Egyptian culture in the Republic (Susan Stephens), Manetho's ideological instrumentalization of internal and external synchronisms employed to claim cultural supremacy of Egyptians over Greeks qua antiquity (John Dillery; ‘to make the Greek past happen as minor footnotes on the pages of the great master narrative that was the Egyptian past’ [132]), Callimachus’ Coma Berenices (Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones and Stephanie Winder, in which the authors argue, following Selden's lead, that Berenice's representation was modelled to a great extent on Hathor). The section closes with insightful pieces on Isidorus’ four hymns from Fayyum (Ian Moyer) and on Greek novel and its Demotic narrative relatives (Steve Vinson). The volume is far from being Hellenocentric, as it seeks to explore influences in the opposite direction as well: Rutherford's own contribution provides an overview of similarities between the Inaros-Narratives and Greek epic and traces them back to the interactions between Greek military forces and Egyptians. Greek mercenaries were employed in Egypt from the late seventh century BCE, but Rutherford especially highlights the brief period in the mid-fifth century, when Greeks and Egyptians were united against the Persians and the ships of the Athenian Empire were sent to lay siege of the Persian forces in Egypt. Richard Jasnow's piece does an excellent job in detecting Greco-Egyptian interactions in the Book of Thoth. A series of papers deals with religious issues: Alexandra von Lieven's piece concerns Greek translations of Egyptian divine names, Ivan A. Ladynin places the Oracle of the Potter in the contexts of Greek and Egyptian prophetic literatures, while Gideon Bohak's essay maps out Greco-Egyptian magical texts found outside Egypt and investigates the media of dissemination. The only piece that is somewhat incongruous, perhaps, in terms of its scope and of the focus of the volume is Nikolaos Lazaridis’ attempt to develop an overarching theory of cultural interactions. For a very long time, one of the major obstacles in accessing Egyptian material from c.600 bc–ad 200 has been the lack of sufficient numbers of trained philologists specializing in Demotic literature. Joachim Quack, represented in this volume with yet another excellent contribution on the papyrological tradition of the Book of the Temple, is one of the colleagues who have been providing Classicists with access to the invaluable late Egyptian material for decades, and with each new edition, translation, and commentary on these texts, we, as Classicists, become ever more enlightened about the sheer intensity of impact of the Egyptian culture on Greco-Roman cultural products. While we wait for more – and, one hopes, for more demotists – Ian Rutherford's collection will do a superb job at keeping us alert.

Finally, I turn to yet another excellent example of interdisciplinary collaboration. Women and War in Antiquity Footnote ⁸ is a handsome, well-produced, and stimulating volume containing the papers from a symposium on women, war, and violence in antiquity held at Lille in 2009 in order to launch the European Network on Gender Studies in Antiquity (EuGeStA), an initiative originally run by six European universities, but already expanded by the time of the book's publication in 2015 to include nine European and two North American universities. The introduction, written by the editors, succinctly introduces one of the aims of the conference and the volume, which was ‘to [develop]…new perspectives on how the categories “masculine” and “feminine” might be redefined in classical antiquity’ (1), by which a praiseworthy move away from masculine-centred frameworks and the corresponding rhetoric of inversions, reversals etc. of male qualities is meant, for the sake of a more nuanced and multifaceted approach. This is a substantive volume, intellectually honest when it comes to depicting methodological challenges, which a dialogue between historians and literary critics entails. The book falls roughly in two parts: the first part (‘From Words to Deeds’) comprises nine essays and deals mostly with literary representations of women and war, with the generic span extending from Homer (Philippe Rousseau, Marella Nappi) to drama (Louise Bruit Zaidman, Jacqueline Fabre-Serris), and on to Roman epics (Federica Bessone and Alison Sharrock) and elegy (Alison Keith), while one essay investigates the motif of teichoskopia (Therese Fuhrer), and another offers an iconographic study (François Lissarrague). The second half is more historically focused, as it investigates women and war in a variety of historical discourses, representations, and stakes. Pierre Ducrey, Stella Georgoudi, and Pascal Payen build a block of essays exploring women and war in the Greek world, Violaine Sebillotte Cuchet turns to Carian queens, and Judith Hallett, Stéphane Benoist, and Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer discuss Roman material. The organization of the volume in two parts appears to be less necessitated by the divide between literary and historical approaches as by the editors’ wish to highlight diversity of possible approaches to gender questions on both sides of the coin. The book ends with three detailed and helpful indices and a general bibliography. In sum, this is a very fine collection which raises important and timely questions of gender, identity, and perspective, and, perhaps even more importantly, showcases clearly some of the potential synergies which may result from European (and further) collaborations.