Eros, it seems, does produce grandiloquence and set everyone up for a fall. If only the two younger editors of this strikingly pink-coloured volume had not announced in their introduction, ‘All important thinking about the nature of erôs across the entire span from Hesiod to the Second Sophistic is considered, including the input offered by the figurative arts’ – a claim which, they say, makes the book ‘surely an unprecedented contribution’. Such a declaration does so tempt the reviewer to wonder why there is no discussion of Menander, Theocritus, Apollonius of Rhodes (whose work may be thought to have been quite influential in the sphere of erotic verse); or why – when the last poem mentioned comes from the sixth century c.e. – there is no place for the Gospels, the Letters of Paul, or the Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible and Philo, which helped form the canonical texts of Greek Christianity – again rather important on the topic of erôs. If Christian prose is still somehow not really Greek for Classicists (though I did think that such a strange disciplinary division had rather dissolved after Michel Foucault and Peter Brown), one could add texts like Dio Chrysostom's Euboicus, or the novels of Heliodorus and Chariton. Or the erotic letters of Philostratus, Lucian and Alciphron. Or Nonnus, if the time range allows (to reinforce the Christian point, otherwise …). Of course, it would be a tough call to include every important writer in Greek on erotics from antiquity: the excitement and complexity of the field is in part because of the extraordinary range and amount of different relevant material. But the book does not engage in a focused way with what might be thought central topics, either: there is, for example, no significant engagement with prostitutes, hetairai or pornai; nor with adultery and the law; nor with material culture after the fifth century b.c.e.

It would have been much more helpful and truthful if the editors had instead announced that this is a decent collection of expanded conference papers on some aspects of representing desire in antiquity, with a specific focus in the opening chapters on erôs as an emotion, within the current interest of the history of emotions – certainly a hot topic in classics and beyond – and with a serious commitment to exploring philosophical discussions as well as literary texts. To such a playbill, two immediate criticisms would be relevant. First, if the volume has to be selective – as it does – what justifies its evident exclusions? What, then, is its agenda? Is it really possible to treat erôs coherently across time if you do not consider the changes introduced by Hellenistic culture or by Christianity? Second, while the benefits of having a set of different authors each offer an expert's view of an area or a text are clear, what are the costs? Most insistently, we lose any sense of interaction between the different fields – which together make up a history of erôs. We do not see, for example, what impact the philosophical discussions have on other genres or forms of representation. We lose the interplay between comedy's louche passions and epic's restraints or tragedy's violence – though the self-consciousness of such competing registers is an integral part of the experience of erotics. There are, sensibly enough, introductions to each section of the book, but while they efficiently recapitulate the arguments of the chapters to come, they do not systematically draw out the connections which would make the overall perspective on erôs so much richer.

So far, so duskolos. There is a serious attempt by the editors to produce a coherent book here. The volume is divided into four sections. The first, ‘Phenomenology and Psychology of Erôs’, has the strongest claim to novelty in its explicit engagement with the history of emotions and its willingness to challenge whether erôs is an emotion or an appetite or some other form of experience – a question which also haunts the second section, ‘Defining Erôs in Philosophy and Science’. The first section is framed by D. Konstan who argues that animals normatively cannot experience erôs, and S. Smith who discusses erotic reciprocity among Aelian's animals. This makes for a sparky debate which should continue, not least because it raises some fundamental questions about how human understanding of desire so often takes detours to express its self-implicating confusions and doubts: why are animals so important – right up to contemporary socio-biology – in the representation of human sexuality? Certainly, Oppian and ps.-Oppian should be brought to bear more intensely on the debate about ancient animal concerns.

Less convincing is S.'s account of sexual jealousy in Euripides' Medea. He argues that although the vocabulary of jealousy is not present in the play, the symptoms that a modern understanding of sexual jealousy would expect are all there. This raises the fundamental issue for the book of the degree to which it is committed to a nominalist position. It could be argued that since Medea is a literary construct, all that matters is an audience's expectations of literary or social stereotypes, and thus it is just a modern appropriation to hunt out those symptoms which we can appreciate from our stereotypes, but which find no linguistic recognition in the play. Yet, as J. Robson points out, the word erôs occurs only once in Aristophanes' Lysistrata – but surely it is everywhere in the play. Erôs takes shape in euphemisms, veils, hints and winks, as well as in strutting displays. As Barthes memorably said, it is not nakedness but the flash of half-revealed flesh that is sexy. This makes the hunt for definitions and descriptions of erôs particularly difficult – as several chapters demonstrate, though few adequately theorise. Cupid's nuda simplicitas is always a feint.

The second section focuses on Stoics with an admixture of Plato and Galen, the authoritative, highbrow attempts in antiquity to define erôs. That erôs is such a problem – for philosophers and for everyone else – as a category and as an experience, is a grounding truth that could have been brought out more directly – the invention of the philosophy of desire is itself an extraordinary thing. ‘Erôs is not an epithumia [desire]’ states one source. ‘Erôs is an effort to make friends’, piously claims another. ‘An appetite for pleasure’, is one of Plato's contrary glosses. These essays outline the internal tensions of particular theorists of desire well – but the space between them, where the wild things of disagreement and self-assertion are, remain perhaps too underdeveloped.

The third section, ‘Divine and Human Erôs’, is something of a catchall for G. Most's stimulating piece on Eros in Hesiod, E. Stafford's discussion of cultic worship of Eros through classical vase images, and a thoughtful piece by M. Lucchesi on Plutarch's use of erotics in biography. The final section, equally general, is termed ‘Imagery and Language of Erôs’. It includes some dense and insightful readings of Plato (by D. Cairns) and of a single fragment of Ibycus (by V. Cazzato), together with a good look at lamps and the male gaze by M. Kanellou and A. Fountoulakis.

The overall quality is higher and more consistent than in many collected volumes, and there are several chapters that are stimulating, novel or open a new vista on some old problems. The scholars are a good mix of ages, genders and nationalities. Yet the sheer intractability of a full picture of erôs in Greek culture would have been a better starting point than the impossible claim of comprehensiveness. The anxiety of definitions; the playfulness and violence of expressions; the competing registers between philosophy, law-courts, medicine, comic stage, epigrammatic wit, epic grandeur, religion; and, perhaps above all, our continuing investment in antiquity's erotics; all help to make erôs the winged, unfightable, laughing monster he is, who continues to elude scholarship's fascinated hold.