Today, the idea of enjoying ‘art for art's sake’ or relishing an experience – aesthetic, intellectual, erotic – as part of ‘that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves’ hardly warrants a lifted eyebrow, let alone exclamations of dismay. In 1873, however, when Walter Pater (1839–94) expressed such sentiments in the ‘Conclusion' to Studies in the History of the Renaissance, the Bishop of Oxford, enraged, threatened to burn the book in public. Some people may have been unsettled by the prelate's vociferousness; others may have expressed snooty surprise that a Classicist at Brasenose – more famous then for athletes and beer than academic excellence – would know enough about European art and literature to write an entire book. But Pater, unobtrusively polymathic, widely read in contemporary and ancient literature, became a master of what one would now call interdisciplinary and transhistorical studies. He also dedicated himself to sharing his passion for ancient literature, philosophy, religion and art with Oxford students and the general public. From 1867, when his study of eighteenth-century Classicist Johannes Winckelmann appeared in the Westminster Review, to 1893, when he published lectures on Plato and Platonism, Pater demonstrated how the ‘modern spirit’ is incomplete without a thorough appreciation of Classical culture.

Pater the Classicist might seem like an innocuous title, but it is a definite provocation: the editors want Pater specialists to understand the centrality of Classical studies to his œuvre, and they want contemporary Classicists to understand the centrality of Pater's work to the network of disciplines in which their studies take place – ancient Greek and Latin literature in many genres and modes, translation and reception studies, archaeology, religious studies, the visual and plastic arts, philosophy. Seventeen compact and informative essays highlight the complexity of such a project. (Grasping the daunting breadth of Pater's ‘appreciative’ studies is the first step to understanding his intellectual accomplishments; to some extent a highly-wrought style masks intellectual rigour.) W. Davis, for example, deftly assesses how fluidly Pater can move from discussing the ‘formal properties and configurative challenges’ of ancient Greek sculpture to summarising Classical ideals of ethical behaviour and ‘bodily comportment’ (p. 90). The correlation of ancient theories of rhythmoi with Pater's ‘pregnant types’ and arrested ‘moments’ in life and art is particularly informative. D. Kennedy tracks ‘the distinctly “Tibullan” sensibility’ of Pater's Marius the Epicurean and in the process elucidates how Pater's intertextual resourcefulness is both formal and substantive. (An informative mini-tutorial in changing scholarly perceptions of Tibullus’ elegies is also conducted.) Evangelista and K. Harloe's collaborative study of Pater's ‘Winckelmann’ essay demonstrates why the eighteenth-century Classicist was such a crucial figure for Goethe and for Pater – a lesson, both personal and intellectual, as to how ‘the encounter with antiquity generates new forms of knowledge and culture’ (p. 65). Only Pater, however (and however sotto voce), was keen to install Winckelmann's life and writings in a counter-cultural homoerotic canon. L. Østermark-Johansen provides ample contexts for studying Pater's ‘Hippolytus Veiled’, and in the process adumbrates the competing, sometimes contradictory, ways late Victorians imagined antique manhood – chaste, athletic, desired and doomed. C. Ribeyrol balances a discussion of Pater's essays on Classical art, in which a ‘fantasized topography of ancient Greece emerges as both a palimpsest of scholarly sources and a highly personal literary construct’ (p. 202), with an analysis of the ‘Pausanias boom’ in later Victorian scholarship that Pater helped to foster. Pater's interest in Greek religions is capably assessed by R. Fowler – who does not make the mistake of assuming that pre- or non-Christian beliefs and practices were merely ‘pagan’, ‘primitive’ or only ‘myth’ (the pitfall not avoided by Pater's contemporaries such as E.B. Tylor and James Frazer). Pater would approve: unpresumptuously he considered the emotional, cultural and political significance of religious discourse for his academic, periodical and fiction readers.

Three contributions are particularly instructive. Martindale’s salutary introduction – more scholarly essay than obligatory preface – suggests how Pater ‘plays’ with temporalities even as his ‘brand of historicism’ complicates the possibilities of textual mediation. Martindale reserves a bracing, even reproving, tone for readers since the 1870s who have variously underestimated Pater's contributions to the study of antiquity (R. Jenkyns, for example, who undervalues Pater in The Victorians and Ancient Greece and The History of the University of Oxford, vol. vii). Another pleasure of Martindale’s work: he is a discerning close reader of Pater's subtle and often ironic texts (and he appreciates, as few do, Pater's droll humour). J. Porter's vivid and subtle study of Marius the Epicurean not only convinces that Pater is ‘one of the first practicing theorists of classical reception’, but also explains how ‘Pater's idea of the reception of antiquity is in many ways a refractory one’ (pp. 150, 152). Like Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet, Porter is someone who has learned to ‘love the questions themselves’. Among the most important he considers are: ‘Why Pater now?’; ‘What should we make, then, of “an erotics of reception” when the arrow of desire is reversed’ in Pater's narrative?; and ‘But what shall we do when we are faced with no stable object to receive, but only a moving object that shifts historical registers whenever its author turns it around ever so slightly, as Pater never tires of doing?’ (pp. 148, 153, 154). Prettejohn not only reasserts the ‘centrality of Greek sculpture’ in ‘Pater's own sense of his intellectual project’, but investigates why Pater's significance to the emergence of archaeology as a university discipline has been down-played. Attuned to the elegant nuances of Pater's transhistorical and comparative method, Prettejohn highlights how strategically he dispenses approbation (for the sensuousness of Greek sculpture, the ‘variety of materials and craft techniques’ in early Greek art) and critical reservations (for the ‘relentless progressivism’ of Hegelian historicism). As she demonstrates, Pater was ‘constantly testing the boundaries between different possible ways of writing about Greek sculpture: scholarship or journalism, scientific or aesthetic criticism, ecphrasis or technical description, fiction or positivistic history’ (p. 233).

Several contributors – Fowler and Prettejohn stand out in this regard – consider how and why Pater was ‘eclipsed’ by contemporaries such as Jowett or Nietzsche, or Classicists then and subsequently who have wanted to tell a more ‘scientific’ or metaphysically-oriented or heteronormative story about their field. All four essays in the final section – G. Whiteley on Heraclitus, L. Behlman and K. Lampe on Plato, A. Lee on Aristotle, and D. Orrells's comparison of Pater and Richard Nettleship – offer discerning reassessments. Pater's intellectual resourcefulness, aesthetically-inclined historicism, dense intertextuality and commitment to ethical self-fashioning are considered; one can imagine several future projects being inspired by this exemplary, multifaceted work. As Orrells concludes, ‘By putting Pater back into the history of Classics, we can begin to think of an alternative account [of the field] which complicates the teleological narrative of a journey to twentieth-century specialization and professionalism’ (p. 306).

The clear-sighted organisation of the volume is commendable, as is the cogent summary prefacing each section, the useful bibliography and the ample index. It was inadvisable, however, to begin the book with two uneven essays. Half of I. Hurst's comparatively short study of ‘Pater as Professional Classicist’ is not about Pater directly. The discussion of women's access to ‘higher’ learning in the late nineteenth century, as well as the attention paid to Clara Pater and Jane Harrison, are valuable, but seem like material for another paper. B. Coste's essay on ‘Pater the Translator’ is informative, especially when analysing ‘Demeter and Persephone’ (how variously Pater handles quotations; the strategies of ‘domestication and foreignization’ deployed [p. 54]). Yet, considering the ‘visual otherness’ of the printed page takes the place of analysing how Pater's translations compare with those of, say, Francis Newman, Benjamin Jowett or Gilbert Murray.

In 1889, when Pater recast his 1876 essay on ‘Romanticism’ as the postscript to Appreciations: With an Essay on Style, he looked to Pindar to encapsulate the approach to cultural renewal and revitalisation that he was advocating. From the 9th Olympian ode Pater borrowed αἴνει δὲ παλαιὸν μὲν οἶνον, ἄνθεα δ᾽ ὕμνων νεωτέρων as his epigraph, to highlight how the old wine of the ‘classical spirit’ is just as ‘ever-present’, just as much a necessary and ‘enduring principle’, as the ‘romantic spirit’ in its fresh yet ‘strange’ blossom. Pater the Classicist should have a significant and much-deserved impact on Pater studies, Classical scholarship and reception studies. Its generous selection of well-researched and discerning essays – none of them ‘short of the mark’, as Pindar would say – certainly embodies the ‘excellence that comes from training’.