The books reviewed here offer a chance to look right across our discipline and each subfield’s priorities and approaches. Sometimes, from the perspective of another, these can seem quite alien though there are also common preoccupations. I trace some of those oddities and commonalties here, not at all as a criticism of any of these authors or their disciplines, but as a reflection on the variety of ancient visual and material studies today.

What happens if we translate polutropos in the first line of Homer’s Odyssey as ‘much-travelling’? The result is Jonathan Burgess’ comprehensive and compelling exploration of The Travels of Odysseus.1 By centring the theme of travel in Odysseus’ character and story, Burgess brings together the diverse parts of the multifaceted Odyssey and brings them into conversation with the Iliad, the Cyclic Nostoi, and Telegony, and comparable narratives of heroes such as Gilgamesh, Heracles, Perseus, Bellerophon, and Jason. It is a thematic study, then, that does not confine but rather reaches out and forges new and valuable connections, certainly across the Homeric and non-Homeric epic traditions but also across genres and cultures. The emergence of ‘travel writing’ that we can see in, for instance, Herodotus, Xenophon, or Pliny’s Natural Histories is tracked back to the Odyssey, the stories of the Argonauts, or the Egyptian Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor.

There is a staple criticism that is levelled at scholarship in English by Continental European reviewers, especially when they are pushed for time or short of ideas: engagement with scholarship in languages other than English is too sparse; the bibliography is largely monolingual; there is insufficient openness to debates in other historiographical traditions. To be sure, that is often a pertinent objection. But it is also a trope, and as such it is almost unfailingly lazy and unsatisfactory. Scholarship produced in non-English-speaking academic settings does not necessarily fare better. There is a widespread tendency – understandable and undesirable at the same time – to engage more intensively with work that has appeared in the same language in which one writes and teaches. Moreover, the presence of a suitably multilingual bibliography is not in itself a sign of genuine openness to what different intellectual traditions have to offer to the study of a problem: it might be a sign of scholarly diligence; in many cases, it is barely more than window-dressing.

This paper considers the processes that contributed to the creation of an Athenian red-figure rhyton in the form of an Amazon, signed by the potter Sotades, which was excavated in Nubia in 1921. Despite its secure archaeological provenance, the rhyton has not played a significant role in studies of trade or intercultural interaction because its unusual form and iconography – it features images of Persians defeating Greeks in battle – seemingly make it exceptional. Yet these features are best explained as the result of a feedback loop of information between Sotades and his Persian customers, relayed by merchants. This information was distorted, translated, and perhaps even manipulated in the course of transmission, which contributed to the rhyton’s unusual appearance. Thus the rhyton does not represent a special circumstance, but rather is the culmination of a sustained period of tenuous yet persistent links between Sotades’ workshop in Athens and Persians living in Egypt.

This article traces how changes in the depiction of atimia (loss of honour/citizen rights) in Athenian tragedy provide crucial information for understanding how the actual punishment evolved in the fifth century. Scholarship on the term has long agreed that the archaic personal form of atimia differed from the legal version of the fourth century, but has failed to explain why and when that change occurred. The tragedians’ discussion of atimia reveals when the punishment took on its legal aspects and how its scope expanded after the restoration of democracy at Athens, when the Four Hundred were declared traitors and atimoi.

David Horan has gifted us all with the publication of a new translation of the dialogues of Plato.1 The beautiful two-volume edition is the culmination of a monumental sixteen-year effort. It collects thirty-two dialogues and all the letters attributed to Plato, with a foreword by Professor John Dillon and a brief, beautiful, and fitting introduction by Horan. The list of dialogues includes all those considered authentic, as well as some of disputed authenticity, including Cleitophon, both Alcibiades dialogues, both Hippias dialogues, Minos, and Epinomis. The only thing that I missed in the printed edition was more space in the margins for the many marginalia that I intend to add.

We start with two recent Kernos Supplements volumes, each based on the author’s doctoral dissertation.

I argue that the scenes featuring Briseis and Xanthus in Iliad 19 are closely parallel. Each features a speech from an unexpected source, previously constructed in the epic not as a character but as a valued possession. The audience’s brief access to their fresh perspectives is soon curtailed by the recentring of Achilles’ corresponding speech and familiar point of view, and the enslaved woman and the horse are subsequently relegated to their former object status. These scenes form part of a broader pattern as a private counterpart to the public exchanges that constitute the Greek assembly. Together, the paired speeches throughout Book 19 produce a significant accumulation of unresolved tensions that underlie the superficial consensus of action and mark the limitations of Achilles’ reintegration into the community. It is this dynamic, I suggest, that unifies the book and defines its primary function in the epic.

The article considers unity and its counterpart, digression, as themes within Pindar’s own poetry, rather than a ‘problem’ for criticism to ‘solve’. The article considers Pindar’s treatment of action, time, and place (the so-called ‘Aristotelian unities’) alongside the modern critical concept of deixis (temporal, spatial, and person deixis). The property of indexical statements of being centred on a certain person, place, or time (‘me’, ‘here’, ‘now’; ‘him’, ‘there’, ‘then’) makes them naturally conducive to the creation of centripetal or centrifugal dynamics in a Pindaric ode, according to whether the implied deictic centre is constant or variable. It is argued that an important way of understanding Pindaric unity is as a complex equilibrium and counterpointing of competing and complementary principles of centripetalism and centrifugalism, not only acting within and across the areas of action, time, place, and person, but also observable in Pindar’s handling of grammatical, metrical, and thematic structures.

Introducing newcomers to Latin literature and its history is an important aim, which Laurel Fulkerson and Jeffrey Tatum achieve amazingly well in their ambitious history of Latin literature ‘from its beginnings to the age of Augustus’.1 They provide a thoughtful and exciting introduction to the key genres and texts up to and including the Augustan age: the beginnings of Latin literature; Republican drama; oratory and rhetoric; the ‘personal voice’ in satire, Catullus’ poetry and Cicero’s letters; didactic literature; history and biography; Augustan love poetry; Augustan epic; and the Augustan ‘personal’ poetry of Vergil’s Eclogues, the works of Horace, and Ovid’s exile poetry. The writing is lively and clearly conveys the authors’ passion. I particularly liked the fact that the chapters include discussion of individual lines and phrases, to give readers an idea of the sound, rhythm, and style of the language. Another thread that runs through the volume is the way Latin literature developed through a dialogue with Greek texts, and how later authors kept shaping it in a reaction to both their Greek and Latin predecessors. A number of useful ‘sidebars’ (that appear at the end of each chapter, though) provide introductions to basic concepts such as Roman nomenclature, Latin metre, slavery in Rome, Callimachus’ Aetia, or the civil wars, followed by recommendations for ‘further readings’, of both primary texts in English translation and some key secondary literature, commendably containing a section of a few crucial works in languages other than English. A timeline of historical events and the lives of key Roman authors, maps, and a glossary provide further orientation for readers with no prior knowledge. The only aspect that I thought should have received a bit more attention is the transmission of Latin literature and the role of textual criticism, which would have provided more background, e.g. for the discussion of an important textual variant in the proem of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Otherwise, I very much enjoyed this lucid and intriguing account of Latin literature up to the age of Augustus and hope that it will reach many newcomers as well as students of Latin – and that Fulkerson and Tatum, or others, will soon undertake the task of writing a follow-up volume on imperial Latin literature.

This paper provides a close reading of Phylarchus Fragment 44 (Ath. 4.20–1, 141F–42f) against the backdrop of the Hellenistic discourse of kingship, on the one hand, and the developments in the Spartan kings’ approach to monarchical rule, on the other. It argues that the characterisation of Cleomenes in Fragment 44 is rooted in a discourse on kingship that was contemporaneous with Phylarchus, and that his text’s prevailing theme is the king’s σωφροσύνη as opposed to ὕβρις.