This book, the product of two conferences on mental disorders organised by H. in 2010, begins with a stimulating introduction by the editor and continues thereafter with 21 essays on different aspects of the topic, from modern considerations of diagnosis and classification to ancient tragic, philosophical, medical and legal perspectives. H.'s excellent introduction sets out some of the ambitions of the volume, which attempts to speak to modern practitioners of mental healthcare as well as to historians of medicine and classicists; H. argues that a deep engagement with texts from antiquity will provide insight into the problem of defining, understanding and coping with mental illness both in the past and in the present day. He not only provides an overview of the papers, but also points to the further questions or challenges that arise in many of them. The first two papers, by B. Simon and J. Hughes, address issues of classification and diagnosis in modern psychiatry, further illustrating H.'s points about both the disjunctures and similarities between modern and ancient attempts to grapple with mental disorders: at the heart of much of the work lies the problem of defining what is ‘normal’, the significance of subjectivity and the idea that to contend with mental illness in humans is always to contend with the value systems of a particular society.

These essays provide useful frameworks for the papers that follow, most of which concentrate on Greek literature, with emphasis on the Hippocratic Corpus, Plato, Aristotle and Galen. The second section, ‘Greek Classifications’, begins with C. Thumiger's paper on the early Greek vocabulary of insanity, which will be essential reading for those interested in the nuances of a host of words found not just in early medical texts but also in contemporary literature. J. Jouanna, V. Nutton, V. Boudon-Millot and B. Holmes deftly address the efforts of various ancient medical writers to classify different mental illnesses and to explain the physiology of madness. Jounna argues for a stable binary understanding of insanity, one depressive and the other hyperactive, that he traces from the Hippocratic medical authors into Galenic times; Nutton discusses Galen's focus on the connections between mental illnesses and other diseases of the body, his ‘psychosomatism’, underscoring Galen's constant interest in treating his whole patient; Boudon-Millot also looks at Galen, examining his broad approach to mental diseases, which for him encompass not only the extremes of mania but also human passions; Holmes explores how Galen integrates his medical and philosophical ideas of body and soul in her discussion of Galenic sympathy, arguing that Galen departs from his philosophical predecessors by developing a triangle of dynamic relationships between soul, brain and gut that remain insistently grounded in the body. K.M. Vogt finishes the section with a discussion of the varieties of madness to be found in Plato's works: the rational madness necessary for the pursuit of the good, the divinely-inspired madness that may bring the blessings of special insight, and finally the destructive madness that leads us astray from self, community and humanity.

The third section focuses on ‘Particular Syndromes’: first, epilepsy in R. LoPresti's essay, which argues that Greek thought on epilepsy challenges the Cartesian division of mind and body and instead reveals the mind as an ‘emergent property of the body’ (p. 222), and thereafter, melancholy, both in P. Pormann's analysis of Miskawayh's engagement with his Greek predecessor, Rufus of Ephesus, and in G. Kazantzidis's discussion of Cicero, not only a welcome contribution on a Latin author given the no doubt understandable predominance of Greek writers in the volume, but also an intriguing discussion of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural understandings of melancholy. The final contribution here is H. King's essay on the peculiar phobias of two men described in the Hippocratic treatise Epidemics 5 (one fears heights, the other, the ‘flute girl’); she discusses not only the context that probably informed ancient understandings of these diseases, but also how different retrospective diagnoses reveal the importance of cultural context in diagnosis more generally.

Part 5, ‘Symptoms, Cures and Therapy’, contains three fascinating papers that address in various ways contests to define mental illness, how to determine if someone is suffering from it, how to decide what (or who) has caused it and how to cure it (or not). H.'s own paper traces a fairly consistent line of thought from the fifth century b.c.e. to the age of Augustine ascribing hallucinations to superhuman forces, while showing at the same time attempts by doctors and philosophers to ground hallucinations in intelligible bodily experiences. In a similarly wide-ranging paper, P. van der Eijk uses evidence from different time frames in the Graeco-Roman world to explore ancient classifications of various conditions, demonstrating the challenges involved in defining mental diseases and determining treatment that persist today; he shows that despite these challenges, the authors he examines are ‘mostly confident’ (p. 338) in their ability to heal what ailed their patients. C. Gill examines the idea of philosophy as a form of preventive medicine, considering how various philosophical schools and thinkers of antiquity prescribed the ‘care of the self’ (as Foucault put it) and asking whether such prescriptions might be of value in confronting medical illnesses today.

In Part 6, ‘From Homer to Attic Tragedy’, the volume shifts away from medical and philosophical texts, first, with S. Saïd's paper on madness in tragedy, which she contrasts with the extreme mental states in Homer that cannot be easily distinguished from ‘stupid or criminal behavior’ (p. 371), and second, with G. Most's paper that focuses on the connection between hallucinations and madness as an essential feature of tragic drama, and indeed, as a feature of drama itself. Most argues that drama, by representing madness, asks the audience to experience and acknowledge its own illusions.

The seventh section, ‘Mental Disorders and Responsibility’, takes up more explicitly a theme touched on in a number of earlier papers, the question of moral choices made under the influence of delusions. M.M. Sassi analyses how Plato, especially in Timaeus, constructs injustice as a disease, but a disease for which the wrong-doer must none the less take responsibility. D. Konstan explores ancient examples of the ‘insanity plea’, beginning with Agamemnon's famous apology in Iliad 19, and shows how various ancient authors deal with the need for accountability in the case of involuntary actions.

In Part 8, ‘A Roman Coda’, P. Toohey continues to explore the question of accountability in his useful discussion of madness in the Digest, where we get to see how members of society outside the circle of medical writers and philosophers dealt with the consequences of misbehaviour by the mentally ill, and also wrestled with issues such as inheritance and control of property in the case of those who were deemed insane. In the final paper of the book, J. Toner examines the reported effects of large-scale disasters on people in the age of Justinian and the kinds of explanations that were offered; as with disasters in modern societies, there was clearly a need to find meaning in terrible events as a way of coping with their aftermath.

This is a substantial book. I fear that, despite the editor's best efforts and the deft analyses of the authors, many of the papers will be of greater interest to specialists in ancient medicine and philosophy than to scholars outside these fields. Furthermore, the book, despite its breadth, resists generalising and admittedly covers some topics, such as gender or certain sects of medical thought (such as Methodism) or socio-economic factors, in less depth than others. But that does not detract from the achievement of the book, which asks and addresses significant questions about its complex subject.