This is really two books, and not merely in terms of length. The book falls into two major sections: a survey that ‘traces the receptions of ancestral fault into the modern period’, and a series of case studies that ‘follows the ancient trajectories of the idea from Homer and Hesiod to Plato’ (p. 20). Each section is ambitious in scope; together they are overwhelming. They are connected by G.'s claim that ‘a journey through the longue durée of cultural memory is a precondition for understanding any aspect of Greek religion’ (p. 20, cf. similar claims at p. 56). This is broadly true, yet if the ‘section on the receptions of Greek ancestral fault is not an end in itself’ (p. 21), the appropriate scale of this background material must be considered. The 25 pages covering three major works of twentieth-century scholarship (pp. 133–58) give excellent and ample context for understanding the problems relevant to the main discussion of the book. The preceding 110 pages, however, contribute little to the argument of the second section.

There is also some divergence in the background knowledge expected for each section. The title of the book, the second section's focal texts (Homer to tragedy) and G.'s own introduction all imply that mainstream classicists are the book's primary audience, yet the initial focus is on material from the first to the eighteenth century c.e. The central text of the whole first section is Plutarch's De sera numinis vindicta. This is not a mainstream work, and G. himself assumes that his average reader is not familiar with it, devoting eight pages (pp. 39–46) to a detailed summary of its 20 Stephanus pages. Yet no summary can adequately prepare a reader to engage fully with the rest of the section, which focuses on the reception of the Plutarchan text.

Nevertheless, this section is a fascinating area of study in its own right, and there is a great deal to learn here. It is particularly successful in demonstrating patterns of foreignising and domesticating interpretations of ancestral fault. The section begins with ancient discussions of the concept (Chapter 1, focusing - in reverse chronological order - on specific texts of Proclus, Plutarch and Cicero) followed by modern (Chapter 2, focusing first on the early modern reception of the Plutarch text, followed by surveys of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship). This structure is clear and logical, but G.'s focus on the big picture does lend itself to loose applications of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’. For example, the starting point in Chapter 1 is Proclus' De decem dubitationibus circa Providentiam, a fifth-century c.e. Neoplatonist text reconstructed entirely through eleventh- and thirteenth-century translations, which G. initially describes as ‘the most systematic expression of ancestral fault produced by Greek antiquity’ (p. 24, my emphasis). More disconcertingly, G. does not consistently distinguish between early modern and modern perspectives, so that when he writes in general terms of, for example, ‘the modern perception of Greek ancestral fault’ or ‘implicit categories and presuppositions of perception and scholarship’ (p. 109) it is unclear whether he is speaking of current scholarship. This is particularly true as the most recent interpretation that he deals with in detail in these chapters is Lloyd-Jones' The Justice of Zeus, first published in 1971 and revised in 1983.

The stated primary aim of G.'s book is to investigate ‘the poetics of ancestral fault, the precise articulations of its pragmatic formulations and adaptations in literature’ (p. 8), and this is the focus of the second section. This contains useful and thought-provoking readings of individual works and passages, particularly for Solon and Theognis, and the Glaucus and Croesus/Solon episodes in Herodotus. Throughout, G. argues convincingly that ancestral fault is not an archaic feature.

Despite the apparently discrete structure of this section, G. makes valuable and convincing connections between different authors and works. The challenge to the coherence of this half of the book stems from G.'s refusal to define what he means by ‘ancestral fault’ –his own coinage (p. 3 and n. 1), based on a phrase used in the fifth century c.e. by Proclus. He explains it early in the introduction as ‘the notion that individuals and communities could be punished for the crimes of their forebears’ (p. 3), but goes on to qualify it repeatedly (e.g. ‘ancestral fault is an umbrella term used to describe comparable expressions that are often related, but rarely equivalent’ [p. 8]). G.'s motivation is excellent: he criticises arbitrary redefinition as an empty response to problems of definition, and states that ‘the challenge of definition can only be answered by going all the way back through the history of its formulations in order to uncover the nature of the forces at play in the narratives of scholarship’ (p. 20). However, at the end of his extensive survey of these narratives, he concludes only that ancestral fault is ‘the situational expression of a traditional idea’ (pp. 156–7). As a result, each discussion in the second section includes slightly different kinds of evidence for the concept of ancestral fault. For example, references to inherited nature are excluded in G.'s discussion of Homeric epic, but are prominent in his discussion of Alcaeus (pp. 215–18).

Both sections contain many valuable close readings and general observations, but there are also many interpretations that are forced. For example, G. gives three examples as evidence for an ‘almost unanimous rejection of the principle of ancestral fault in the later modern readings of the De sera numinis vindicta’ (p. 124): the introduction to Vernière's 1974 Budé edition, a 1993 article by T.J. Saunders published in Studi Economico-Giuridici (a journal to be found, according to Worldcat, in no more than ten libraries) and ‘an edition of the De sera numinis vindicta published [in 1995]’, which is in fact a mass market paperback printing of a sixteenth-century translation. Of this edition, G. writes: ‘in the twenty pages of his introduction … Gauthier does not have one single word to write about such an unmodern sight as the principle of ancestral fault. Again, the treatise of Plutarch is praised as a useful and relevant text, but its discussion of ancestral fault is completely dissociated from the rest of the work and framed as a bizarre and foreign excrescence. In the discussion of Gauthier, it is so unacceptable that it becomes in fact invisible’ (pp. 123–4). This idiosyncratic reading of an omission in an introduction to a mass market translation reflects poorly on both the selection and the interpretation of sources.

The origin of the book as a doctoral dissertation is very obvious. The writing style is verbose; for example, it takes G. 164 words to state that it is difficult to define major concepts like ancestral fault (p. 10). The desire to show familiarity with all possible angles, however tangential, results in frequent ‘whatever’ qualifiers (e.g. ‘whatever the case’, ‘whatever we may think’), as well as terminology borrowed from other fields only to be dismissed as irrelevant (e.g. MCI, HADD from cognitive science, pp. 6–7) or heavily qualified to remove their technical implications (e.g. ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ from anthropology, p. 22 and n. 1).

There is no doubting the erudition of this book and its author; the parts, however, are more useful than the whole.