In my last review I discussed Mark Usher's How to Care About Animals, one of Princeton University Press’ volumes of Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers. The series’ rapidly growing roster now includes Sarah Nooter's book How To Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality. Nooter selects, translates, and introduces a range of texts from Sappho and Plato (most heavily featured) to Homer, Pindar, Alcman, Anacreon, Theognis, and Theocritus (to name just a selection of the selection). There is an important ‘nothing new under the sun’ ethos to this volume, as is the case with many in the series. As Nooter puts it, ‘The past decade has seen a revolution in sexuality… sexual fluidity is now mainstream… And yet the Greeks got there long ago.’ (vii) The Greeks wrote about sexuality ‘with little angst and much wit’, and it is this that Stephen Fry picks up on in his endorsement of the book: ‘our ancestors often had clearer, less guilt-ridden, confused, prurient, and prudish attitudes to the rainbow of sexualities we wrongly think unique to our age’.

In the books reviewed there is a cumulative resistance to the normative discourse, shifting our attention away from the centre and to the margins. This might mean listening to marginalized women, from the poets themselves to characters in poetry, or people today who relate to those female characters’ experiences. It might mean pushing beyond spatial boundaries and encountering dislocation and disjunction in the hazy hinterland of the non-elite. It might mean moving the human to one side, so that nature and the nonhuman can come to the fore (and teach us about what it means to be human, along the way). These books give voice to suppressed groups including women, animals, and the land. They highlight axes of oppression, and give us tools to shift the balance of power: from the language we use to the way we relate to the world around us. And with stories of prophetic horses, sympathetic lions, and pensive pigs, their interpretations – as well as the classical tales they recount – are not to be missed!

How do we read Greek literature? In the original language or in translation? With a theoretical lens or without? Bringing in our modern perspectives or trying to track ancient approaches? Identifying with characters or exercising supposed academic detachment? How we read Greek texts affects what we read in those texts. And who we are affects how we read. A number of recent publications prompt us to interrogate our reading practices by drawing on theories ancient and modern and reflecting on who we are and how entangled we are with other entities (from the objects we use to the poetry we embody to the narratives in which we are immersed).

In this article I review 11 books published since 2010 that bring the ‘material turn’ to classics. Some start from emic ancient perspectives on matter and materiality; others take their cue from current theoretical models such as those of the new materialisms. All offer new insights into our relationship with the material world and consider the material object as active within different paradigms. In reviewing these important volumes together, I question entrenched boundaries: from those between (sub-)disciplines to those between human and non-human agents. I explore the material turn not as an isolated phenomenon, but, first, as a cyclical ‘re’-turn and, second, as an integrated set of ideas incorporating (to name but a few strands) aesthetics, cognitive humanities, embodiment, affect and the senses. The books reviewed range from literary studies to archaeology to art history to material culture to heritage. Taken together, they set new directions for classics, and indeed for our thinking about our place in the world.

Hesiod's Works and Days is self-consciously a poem of the Iron Age. It is addressed to Iron Age men about how to manage the Iron Age human condition. The narrative ventures out of the Iron Age only to explain how we got here and how the present age compares to those which came before. The Iron Age audience is addressed by a narrator who situates himself explicitly (and discontentedly) as a contemporary:

μηκέτ᾽ ἔπɛιτ᾽ ὤϕɛλλον ἐγὼ πέμπτοισι μɛτɛῖναι
ἀνδράσιν, ἀλλ᾽ ἢ πρόσθɛ θανɛῖν ἢ ἔπɛιτα γɛνέσθαι.
νῦν γὰρ δὴ γένος ἐστὶ σιδήρɛον·
Would then that I was no longer among the fifth race of
men, but either died earlier or was born later.
For now indeed it is a race of iron.
(Works and Days, 174–6)