For those readers seeking an engaging general introduction to the classical world, The Ancient World by Jeremy Toner would make an excellent first port of call. It is part of a new (though hardly original) series of ‘Small Introductions to Big Topics’ which thus far includes Politics, Art in History, and Shakespeare. The book chooses to focus not on toga-clad Romans and gleaming marbles temples but on that ‘other’ ancient world filled with noise, colour, death, and disease, populated not primarily by emperors and poets but by the ‘silent’ majority of slaves and the freeborn poor. Despite the catch-all title, this is a book which is more obviously about the Roman than the Greek world. This is, however, a small grumble and Toner's enthusiasm for his subject is infectious. Of particular interest is the discussion of watermills and the generation of energy (71–6), comparison between the empires of Rome and China (104–18), and the way in which a ‘Rome-coloured vision’ from the medieval period up to the high-classical watermark of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries informed the West's perspective of, and engagement with, Islam (122–30). Illustrations are not abundant (and it is a shame not to have included a picture of the Vietnam Memorial discussed on pages 135–7), but they are decent enough, with several helpful maps of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds (with the seas – the Black Sea and Red Sea included – coloured pink – neatly complementing the book's presentation of a less-familiar-looking ancient world).

A Little Greek Reader by James Morwood and Stephen Anderson forms a companion volume to A Little Latin Reader by Mary English and Georgia Irby (though one might be seduced into thinking from the cover illustration and italic title print that this is a volume from the JACT Reading Greek stable). The twenty-plus chapters focus on different points of Greek grammar (for example, ‘Indirect Statement’ [64–74] and ‘Result Clauses’ [99–106]), prefaced with brief grammatical introductions and then illustrated with a selection of unadapted passages in prose and verse. Each passage is supported by linguistic and contextual notes, and an extensive vocabulary is supplied at the back of the book. Although billed as ‘an ideal supplement for undergraduate courses in beginning and intermediate Greek’ (back cover blurb) it should also be of use to sixth-form teachers for revision and extension work (it was, in fact, trialled at the JACT Greek Summer School in 2013). Appendices supply short biographical notes and offer help on meter and dialect. There is also a useful guide to literary terms – though the definition of ‘hyperbaton’ – ‘the dislocation of normal word order, by way of displacing one part of one clause into another’ (213; our emphasis) – seems unnecessarily proscriptive.

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:

Originally published in Dutch in 1995, Antiquity. Greeks and Romans in Context by Frederick Naerebout and Henk Singor aims to provide (in its own modest words) a ‘reasonably comprehensive one-volume’ overview of the Greco-Roman world for undergraduates and a wider interested audience (xiii). The main focus of the work is the Greco-Roman world from 1000 bc to 500 bc (divided into the Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman Imperial periods). Each period is covered under the same three headings (in the interests of comparability): ‘Historical Outline’, ‘Social Fabric’, ‘Social Life and Mentality’. The wider context is, however, by no means ignored. The authors provide a valuable overview of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods (27–35) and of the early civilizations of Eurasia up to 900 bc (36–58). At the other end of the timeline, the book does not simply conclude with the Roman Imperial period but carries on the story up to the tenth century ad and beyond (369–94). A particular emphasis is placed in the introductory chapter on ‘The Ecology of History’ (11–23):

The last few years have brought us handbooks, companion guides and encyclopaedias in serried ranks. In size these works have ranged from magnum (opus) through to double magnum or perhaps (in the case of the 2010 Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome) to jeroboam. The new Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Ancient History outdoes them all in capacity (clearly a rehoboam) and range. This vast work – comprising over 5,000 entries in more than 7,000 pages – advances confidently (note the bold use of the definite article in the title: TheEncyclopedia of Ancient History) beyond the confines of the ‘classical world’ and ‘ancient Greece and Rome’ to provide nothing less than a reference work for the whole of Ancient History from the Near East to the Egypt of the Pharaohs, from the Neolithic to the eighth century ce. The refusal of this work to recognize traditional boundaries would clearly have appealed to the spirit of Alexander III, the Great (whose entry spans an impressive six pages). Alexander would no doubt also be impressed by the remarkable juxtapositions which occur within this alphabetized encyclopaedia: in volume 11 we move within five pages from an Egyptian residence and town associated with Rameses II (Piramese) to the Greek district of Elis around Olympia (Pisa) to a ‘short Jewish magical text of a Late Antique Babylonian provenance’ (Pishra de-Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa; 5337). Alexander's attempts at eastward expansion proved, in the end, too much for his men. One wonders if this work too – in the form of thirteen printed volumes – may prove to be similarly overwhelming to many an undergraduate whose starting point lies in Augustan Rome or Periclean Athens:(consider, for example the daunting thirty-five pages of maps which precede the first entry in volume 1 (not ‘Aardvark’, alas, but ‘Abantes’). However, it is important to consider that the print version of this work is not the end of the project nor even the main point of the project at all. The Encyclopedia of Ancient History is a true child of the World Wide Web. It has clearly been conceptualized as an online resource (not simply as a printed text that can be viewed on a computer screen) that will continue to expand and evolve:

‘Classics, is, to me, the unicycle of education. It isn't especially practical or useful… It won't get you a well-paid job in a fancy office, and it won't necessarily make you attractive to the opposite sex… But none of that is important compared with the simple fact that studying Classics is brilliant’ (253). So says comedian (and former Cambridge classicist) Natalie Haynes on her own one-wheeled whistle-stop tour of the classical world: The Ancient Guide to Modern Life. Haynes is an intelligent guide with a real passion for the Classics and a great sense of humour. The index gives a good indication of what to expect: The Office can be found next to Xenophon's Oeconomicus, Dead Poets Society next to Tertullian's De Spectaculis, and Barbra Streisand sandwiched between Stoicism and Suetonius. Chapter titles are inevitably playful: from ‘Thinking Allowed’ to ‘Frankly, Medea I Don't Give a Damn’ and the inevitable ‘There's No Place Like Rome’. But this is not just a book played for laughs: Haynes's discussion of Aristophanes (199–209) is keen to emphasize that entertainment and education, comedy and Classics are not mutually exclusive categories: as she shows, is it possible both to amuse and advise.

Over the last thirty years or so our understanding of the world of late antiquity has undergone a radical transformation. In addition to the important contributions by historians such as Peter Brown (on the body and society) and Averil Cameron (on the evolution of Christian discourse), new perspectives have also been opened up on the material culture of the later empire. In the arena of literary criticism, however, signs of any analogous transformation have been much less obvious. Though, of course, it is easy to overstate the case, it is nevertheless clear from the bibliographic record that the literature of the late antique period has not yet been subject to the intense critical attention of other epochs, such as the Second Sophistic. This article will attempt on a necessarily modest scale to address this lack of critical attention.

My primary focus is the fifth-century CE epic poem, the Dionysiaca of Nonnus, a product of Roman Egypt, written in Greek in forty-eight chapter-length books. It runs to over 21,000 hexameter lines—some five thousand lines longer than Homer's Iliad—and tells the story of the wine-loving Dionysus, the hero whose destiny it is to become a god. Though its influence on the wider literary culture of late antiquity was profound, it has remained a marginalised and neglected text within the history of modern classical scholarship. The Dionysiaca exists as an often quoted yet rarely read compendium of obscure mythological information, and is periodically mined for allusions to earlier and implicitly ‘better’ poets whose works have only survived in fragmentary form, but it is rarely considered on its own terms.