I begin this review with a mega biblion that will be hugely welcomed by Roman historians of all stripes: Tim Cornell and his team's long-awaited new edition of the fragments of the Roman historians, featuring more than one hundred Roman writers of history, biography, and memoir. Cornell and his team have replaced the long-outdated edition of Hermann W. G. Peter with a state-of-the-art three-volume work. The first volume provides an excellent and comprehensive guide to the authors; the second features the parallel texts themselves, alongside new translations; the final volume comprises the commentary, plus the necessary concordances and indices. The clear layout makes it easy to match up the introductions to each author, their testimonia and fragments, and then the related commentary. The selection and presentation of the Roman authors is careful: the introduction describes the aim to present all that is known about the authors and their work but also emphasize ‘the limits of our knowledge’ (7). This is clearly a more conservative selection than before (and rightly so; the thirty-six Historia Augusta ‘historians’, for instance, are relegated to their own appendix). The coverage is broadly chronological, ending in the third century (which is of course slightly disappointing for those interested in the rich body of late Roman historiography). This is clearly a landmark achievement, and it is especially to be welcomed that it is unusually user-friendly, for students as well as for scholars. Another point might be of interest: out of the 111 Roman authors (or groups of authors) featured there is but one woman: Agrippina the Younger (no. 77), whose memoirs were cited by both Tacitus and Pliny the Elder. Of the ten historians involved in this project, incidentally, just one is a woman. These figures have led me to consider the gender ratio of the books under review this time and the results are striking: out of the sixteen books under review, just three have female authors.

Let's start at the very beginning: that is, at the beginning of the history of Rome. This latest volume of the Oxford Readings in Classical Studies makes a clear case for the virtue of reprinting old articles even in an age of supposedly wide digital availability. An obvious virtue here is the fact this collection includes no fewer than seven articles that have been translated into English for the first time. In making this collection, the editors hope to show the continuing lively debate on the nature of the ancient historiographical tradition. Rather than taking a particular editorial line, the collection includes scholars with differing views as to the reliability of this tradition when it comes to early Roman history. That being said, it is not surprising that scholarship that aims wholeheartedly to uphold the historicity of the traditional accounts is definitely outnumbered by studies demonstrating instead the construction of historiographical tradition(s). Nonetheless, Andrea Carandini begins the collection by arguing once more for the congruence of the archaeological evidence and the literary tradition. The articles that follow vary somewhat in approach and in degrees of scepticism – for instance, Fausto Zevi admits a historical core to stories about Demoratus and the Tarquins, whereas Michael Crawford is forthright in his rejection of historicity in the earliest list of Roman colonies. The editors have taken the helpful decision to focus rather more on ‘stories’ than individual authors and this certainly helps shape a thought-provoking collection that can be read with profit rather than just put on the shelf for future reference. In particular, the editors’ suggestion that this volume could profitably be given to students in place of a single ‘authoritative’ version of the history of early Rome, so that they can see that there are indeed different ways of ‘doing’ ancient history, is persuasive. Finally, any selection of papers is, of course, subjective but an article focusing rather more particularly on non-literary historical traditions might have rounded out the picture more fully.

Poiesis is the simple title of the first book under review, and its front cover carries a view of that well-known Attic red-figure kylix in Berlin, ‘the Foundry Cup’, showing bronze sculptors at work. But librarians may wonder where exactly to classify Peter Acton's monograph on craftsmanship in classical Athens. The author himself is categorically unusual: a Classics graduate who became vice-president of a major global management consultancy firm before undertaking his doctoral dissertation, he clearly enjoys the transfer of intellectual property from academia to the world of commerce, and vice versa. ‘The ancient economy’ is probably where this belongs, though its most substantial case study is focused upon pottery production. Some of Acton's opening declarations are made over-confidently: that ‘craftsmen were well-regarded’ (7) is debatable, given the various literary instances of patent disregard for those engaged in ‘banausic’ activity (both concept and reality of the banausos are conspicuously avoided throughout). And there is carelessness in the presentation of details: the potter Cachrylion becomes ‘Cachsilion’ (281), for example, and the account of bronze and stone sculpture (215–25) is somewhat muddled. Nonetheless, Acton does well to insist upon a city of creators, not consumers. A famous passage in Plutarch concerning the multiple trades involved in building the Parthenon (Vit. Per. 12) implies as much, but our stereotypical image of Athens tends to exclude all workshop smoke and grime.

The archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann once met, in London, the poet Alfred Tennyson – who, though he saluted Mount Ida tenderly, never travelled much south of the Dolomites. In the course of conversation, Schliemann remarked: ‘Hissarlik, the ancient Troy, is no bigger than the courtyard of Burlington House’. ‘I can never believe that’, Tennyson replied. Most of us, I dare say, would understand Tennyson's disbelief – and agree, accordingly, with the sentiment that Troy the site is not a marvellous ‘visitor experience’. The location may be broadly evocative – for those imaginatively predisposed to survey a landscape of epic combat. Yet the excavated remains are rather underwhelming, and difficult to comprehend. The huge trench cut through the Bronze Age settlement by Schliemann, and the resultant spoil heap left on the northern edge of the citadel, certainly contribute to a sense of confusion. But that aside, the multiple layers of habitation, from c.3000 bc until Byzantine times, customarily represented like a pile of pancakes in archaeological diagrams, will test even those pilgrims arriving with some expertise in ancient construction methods. Choice finds from the city are lodged in remote museums; and the substantial extent of Troy in Hellenistic, Roman, and possibly earlier times, indicated mainly by geophysical prospection, is hardly discernible. So archaeologists, post-Schliemann, have to work hard to make the ‘Trojan stones speak’ – at least if they also wish to avoid the charge of being obsessed (as Schliemann notoriously was) with establishing some kind of historical reality for Homer's epic. The late Manfred Korfmann, director of the international excavations at Troy since 1988, produced an enthusiastic guidebook. Now his colleague C. B. Rose has made a one-volume synthesis of the results so far, The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Troy. This will be particularly welcome for students unable or unwilling to access the annual excavation journal, Studia Troica. But novices, I fear, may soon despair of grasping the phases of stratification and ceramic assemblage more often cited by the author than explained (e.g. ‘LH III2a/VIh’). And any reader seeking new answers for old questions about the site's relationship to ‘the Trojan War’ should prepare for disappointment. Much of the evidence for Troy in the late Bronze Age – the period of c.1250 bc, generally reckoned to correlate with events transformed into epic – remains elusive: where, for example, are graves comparable to those of Mycenae? On the other hand, the lesson of the multi-period approach is that Troy the historical city largely constructs its identity upon Troy the mythical citadel – as does the Troad region. So Rose does well to devote an entire chapter to the remarkable archaic sarcophagus recovered in 1994 from a tumulus in the Granicus valley, with scenes of the sacrifice of Polyxena, Hecuba's attendant distress, and some kind of celebration. The iconography here may not be easy to relate to the gender of the deceased (a middle-aged man, according to osteological analysis). Yet it makes a visual statement about the sort of mythical bloodline to be claimed in the region: and, in due time (for Rose's survey is chronological), we will see the epigraphic and monumental evidence for similar ancestral claims by members of the Julio-Claudian clan.

Twelves Voices from Greece and Rome by Christopher Pelling and Maria Wyke sounds like a title specially commissioned by this very journal, though, alas, we can claim none of the credit! The collaboration arose out of a BBC Radio 3 series on classical literature in collaboration with the Open University and should have a broad appeal. Of the twelve voices six are Greek, six Latin: for the poets, Homer, Sappho, Virgil, Horace; for the tragedians, Euripides; for the historians Herodotus, Thucydides, Caesar, Tacitus; with Cicero for the orators (and philosophers…) and Juvenal for the satirists, paired with the final ‘voice’ in the collection: Lucian (a striking sign of the growing interest and marketability of Second Sophistic and Imperial Greek authors). This is a stimulating and enjoyable read, which carries one swiftly along. It is not a didactic regurgitation of literary and cultural history (though the final section on ‘Translations and Further Reading’ gives all the references one needs for further research) but a celebration of the continuing relevance of the Classics:

I start this review, which focuses for the most part on publications on Hellenistic philosophy, with a survey of some recent studies on Stoicism. René Brouwer's The Stoic Sage introduces itself as ‘an attempt to bring the early Stoic notions of the sage and wisdom to the fore again’ (1). ‘Again’ alludes to the fact that those notions, which attracted considerable philosophical and scholarly interest at various stages since antiquity, have not received sufficient attention in recent times (specialists in the area will judge the merits of this assessment). The book is divided into four chapters, dealing respectively with the Stoic definitions of wisdom; the ancient puzzles surrounding the nature and very possibility of the change from ‘folly’ to ‘wisdom’; the controversial question of whether the Stoics themselves believed they had achieved the ideal of perfect wisdom; and the intellectual, Socratic background against which the Stoics developed their notion of wisdom. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 contain, in expanded and revised form, material published by Brouwer in self-contained essays between 2002 and 2008. Chapter 1, with its analysis of the Stoic definitions of wisdom as ‘knowledge of human and divine matters’ and ‘fitting expertise’, is fundamental to set the stage for the more focused inquiries of the rest of the book. From this point of view, it succeeds only partially. It helpfully covers a reasonable amount of ground, but because of Brouwer's choice to focus exclusively on the Stoic definitions of wisdom (sophia) at this stage, and not, say, on the descriptions of the Stoic wise man (sophos: Brouwer's preferred translation ‘sage’ hides the etymological connection), it also problematically leaves some fundamental aspects untouched. I was especially surprised not to see the key notion of infallibility discussed at all in this context, despite the fact that Brouwer correctly clarifies that Stoic wisdom is not to be interpreted as a form of omniscience (33–4). This ultimately springs from an insufficiently detailed analysis of the Stoics’ notions of katalēpsis (which Brouwer translates as ‘cognition’, without ever explaining its distinctive status), and then, in turn, of epistēmē and technē, and their Stoic definitions (see also the puzzling reference to ‘weak cognitions’ on p. 62). (I only note here that Paolo Togni's 2010 monograph Conoscenza e virtù nella dialettica stoica examines much more extensively and systematically the psychological and epistemological ground which needs to be covered by a discussion of Stoic sophia.) The attempt to map exhaustively the three key terms of the first definition – knowledge, human and divine – into the three parts of Stoic philosophy, respectively logic, ethics, and physics, is ingenious but too crude and ultimately unconvincing, since logic had for the Stoics its own separate subject matter (not to be identified with ‘human and divine matters’, and not even with knowledge itself, pace Brouwer), and ethics and physics can themselves be described as forms of knowledge. The interconnected nature of Stoic philosophy, which is helpfully emphasized throughout the book, need not be mirrored in the very definition of wisdom. From a broader methodological point of view, the attempt to reconstruct an early Stoic theory of wisdom constantly clashes with the nature of our evidence, and although in several cases Brouwer does carefully justify why a certain late source can be taken to bear witness to such an early theory, in other cases the reader is left to wonder whether such a justification could be given (for example, in the case of some passages from Seneca). There is still much worth pondering in Brouwer's insightful analyses in Chapters 2–4, although one is left to wonder how much added value has been generated by integrating this previously published material into a single monograph.

The first title in this issue's batch of classical reception publications sees Lucy Pollard take us on an engaging and colourful tour of early modern travellers' experiences in Greece and the Levant. This area of scholarship is well trodden, and many readers will be familiar with David Constantine's Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal (1984); but Pollard brings new material to bear by her extensive use of the unpublished diaries of John Covel, the Cambridge scholar and minister who served as chaplain to the Levant Company in Constantinople in the 1670s. These are supplemented with accounts of other seventeenth-century travellers such as George Wheler and Paul Rycaut. Successive chapters cover the logistics of travel, scholarly and archaeological approaches, and perceptions of Greeks and Turks. Pollard tends to let her sources speak for themselves; her arguments about the emergence of a ‘proto-archaeological’ approach to antiquities in the last third of the century, about the importance of perceived religious affinities between Anglican travellers and Orthodox Greeks, and about admiration of the Ottomans as a model for empire are interesting, but made with a light touch. Above all, this provides us with a richly detailed survey of the experiences, challenges, and preoccupations of early modern Englishmen travelling east.