‘Fiddling while Rome burns’ is arguably the most familiar English saying inspired by classical antiquity. The image of Nero actually playing an instrument during the Great Fire is not, in fact, found in ancient sources: the first English reference belongs to Cooper's 1548 revision of Elyot's Latin–English Dictionary, where Nero is said to play a harp during the conflagration. In 1649 the royalist poet George Daniel applied the term ‘fiddle’, and the familiar modern form of the expression, as a byword for a leader's neglect, was apparently coined in a 1680 English parliamentary speech by Silius Titus.

This article explores Alexander Pope's experience as a translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey, particularly his engagement with Homer as a poet and his biographical tradition. The study focuses on how Homer features in Pope's correspondence as he worked on the translations, how the Greek poet is described in the prefatory essay by Thomas Parnell and Pope's own notes to the text, and finally how his physical presence materializes in the illustrations within Pope's translations. The article suggests that, by engaging with the biography of Homer, Pope explores issues such as poetic authority and divine inspiration, promotes his own translations against European competitors, and ultimately establishes himself as a translator and as a poet. Throughout the process, Homer appears as a presence that forces Pope constantly to challenge himself, until he feels he can stand a comparison with the greatest poet ever.

The bronze statues of the Tyrannicides, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, by the sculptors Kritios and Nesiotes, set up in the Athenian Agora in 477 bc, were well known to Athenians throughout the classical and Hellenistic periods. In Thucydides’ account of the deed of the Tyrannicides, he defines the two as lovers (erastes and eromenos), which has led to the assumption that the depictions are in some way likenesses of the two men. I argue that Thucydides’ account has been the source of a misreading of the sculptures. Rather, the models for the figures are contemporary representations of the Gigantomachy – Aristogeiton being based on Apollo – and thus, through the allusion to myth, the sculptors created multivalent figures that were emblematic of something that transcended their deed.

It is well known that Alexander the Great offered inspiration to successive monarchs and autocrats. Few of these, however, could claim to match the affection shown by the Roman emperor Caracalla (198–217 ce). Caracalla is said to have been an almost pathological aficionado of Alexander, constantly promoting a public association between himself and his idol. One aspect of Caracalla's imitatio Alexandri was allegedly the levy of a peculiar phalangite formation based on the arms and equipment of Alexander's time. For years it was impossible to gauge whether this was a real development or a hostile literary fabrication, but the discovery of funerary remains at Apamea in Syria, which appear to memorialize phalangites and lanciarii, confirmed to some the historicity of Caracalla's bizarre levy. This article argues, however, that the apparently convincing combination of evidence is illusory, and that Caracalla's ‘phalanx’ was rather a convenient label applied to an inherently Roman formation.

A number of ancient sources suggests that Roman women in the archaic period were not allowed to drink wine. Various theories have so far been proposed to explain this taboo, most of them assuming that it meant a complete alcohol ban, and relating it to the special role of women in the Roman family. However, a reconsideration of these theories, which takes into account the results of recent studies on the origins of wine consumption in Italy, shows that the archaic wine taboo had more to do with the nature of wine than with the nature of women.

This article discusses differences and continuity in responses to issues of slave management in two texts from different periods of Greek history (Xenophon's Oeconomicus and the Odyssey) and compares these responses to those of slave owners in the Antebellum South, ancient Rome, and the ancient Near East. In particular, it examines different expressions of paternalistic attitudes towards slaves (a well-studied feature of slave-owning classes throughout history) that it finds are present in both of these examples. The article explores the possibility that intertextual links were responsible for these similarities but suggests instead that they are reflective of real Greek slaveholding ideology across hundreds of years, which primarily served to justify an exploitative system and disguise the cruelty and violence inherent in maintaining it.

This article argues that Aelius Aristides adapts the word atopos (‘strange’, ‘out of place’) as figured speech in his Embassy Speech to Achilles, meaning something that is either illogical according to rhetorical topoi or inconsistent with the text of Homer's Iliad. By doing so, he not only expands the semantic range of atopos but also comments on the rhetorical, intertextual, and pedagogical relationship between oratory and the Homeric tradition.

When I reviewed Daniel Harris-McCoy's text, translation and commentary on Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica (G&R 60 [2013], 318–19), I never dreamed that eight years later I would be reviewing two more books on Artemidorus – or, rather, a co-ordinated pair of them. It would be an uncharitable joke to describe Harris-McCoy's translation as a nightmare: even so, I was not alone among reviewers in judging it unidiomatic and often defective. Martin Hammond's characteristically fluent, lucid, and (importantly) accurate translation is supplied with notes on the Greek text and an outstandingly useful sixty-two-page index; Peter Thonemann contributes an informative introduction and explanatory notes on the content.

These have been good years for Ennius perennis. A couple of years on from his Loeb renewal, two superb books keep the lifeblood pulsing. Ennius’ Annals. Poetry and History, edited by Cynthia Damon and Joseph Farrell, is a masterclass of a conference volume. The lucid introduction, a sort of ‘Whither Ennius?’, powerfully situates it in the receding wake of Otto Skutsch's monumental edition and the fresher waves of Ennius and the Architecture of the Annals, Jackie Elliott's powerful challenge to ‘Virgiliocentric’ reconstructions of this fragmentary text. As those studies made plain enough in their different ways, reception and interpretation of the Annals are interlocked to a special degree, and the fourteen chapters in this book (plus afterword by Mary Jaeger) roam nicely around and between both.

I commence this review with a major contribution to the social history of classical Athens. Athenian social history is traditionally focused on polarities of class, status, and gender; while these polarities were obviously important, it is equally significant to adopt an interactionist approach and explore the shape of encounters between people belonging to the same or different groups. Rafał Matuszewski has chosen to focus on the interactions and communication between male Athenian citizens: in particular, the various spaces in which those interactions took place, as well as the means of communication. As regards the spaces, he explores in detail the noisy streets, the Agora, the various shops, workshops, and places of commensality and entertainment, the baths, the gymnasia, and the palaestrae. This is an excellent synthesis of a large number of social spaces in classical Athens, which have never been explored in the same detail as, for example, sanctuaries and cemeteries. Equally fascinating is the second part of the work and its detailed exploration of the body as a means of communication, alongside elements of material culture like clothes, houses, and graves. The wealth of material that is collected and examined and the interactionist framework employed have the potential to revolutionize how we study Greek social and cultural history; it is to be hoped that Anglophone readers will make the effort to engage seriously with this important German book.

After a focus on social and cultural history in the last issue, this issue's offerings return us to more traditional subjects – political institutions, and historiography. That spring review ended with religion, which is where we start here: an apposite reminder that religion pervades all aspects of the Roman world. It is precisely that principle which undergirds our first book, Dan-el Padilla Peralta's Divine Institutions. Padilla Peralta is interested, at root, in how the Roman state became such through the third and fourth centuries bce. That is a story usually told – in a tradition going back to the ancient historians themselves – via a swashbuckling tale of successive military campaigns. Padilla Peralta, however, sets that anachronistic narrativization aside, and instead builds a careful case that between the siege of Veii and the end of the Second Punic War ‘the Roman state remade and retooled itself into a republic defined and organized around a specific brand of institutionalized ritual practices and commitments’ (1). Specifically, he shows that the construction of temples and the public activities they facilitated were a key mechanism – one as important as warfare – by which the consensus necessary to state formation was generated:

For many, the era of COVID-19 has been short of colour. All the more reason, perhaps, to welcome this round-up's starter for ten: a multihued survey of polychromy in Roman portraiture. Facing the Colours of Roman Portraiture is a book that really does lend itself to being judged by its cover: as we turn the volume from back to front, a marble portrait magically metamorphoses between battered original and technicolour reconstruction.

David Conan Wolfsdorf has done a great service in putting together the thirty chapters (only a handful by women) that make up the new collection Early Greek Ethics. As he notes, ethical thinking prior to Socrates has generally been neglected or, in some cases, simply denied. Wolfsdorf's classification of ‘early’ as the ‘formative period’ (late sixth to early fourth centuries bce) prior to Plato's and Aristotle's major ethical works allows him to bring together a rich and diverse group of individuals and topics. He himself acknowledges that different people will feel different kinds of lack within the collection, but he is explicit that its aim is to be ‘quite’, rather than entirely, comprehensive. He is also clear that his aim is to focus on Greek ‘philosophical ethics’ (as he understands it) rather than the sort of significant ethical thinking we might think can be found in Greek tragedy, for example.

From Oxford University Press's ‘Classical Presences’ series, Carol Dougherty's Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature places Homer's Odyssey in dialogue with five twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels which all deal in some way with the ideas of home or travel. The author focuses on novels which, on the whole, do not respond overtly to the Odyssey, but which instead share key themes – such as transience, reunion, nostalgia, or family relationships – with the Homeric poem. The conversations which she initiates between the ancient epic and the modern novels inspire us to rethink previously held assumptions about the Odyssey. For example, Dougherty's exploration of Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918), in which a veteran returns from the First World War with no memory of his wife, prompts her reader to consider Odysseus’ stay with Calypso as ‘a kind of nostalgic amnesia, a necessary break that enables rather than an obstacle that impedes his return’ (111). As ‘an experiment in improvisatory criticism’ (16), this book yields rich rewards for the reader who is already familiar with the Odyssey, as well as for those whose point of entry is one of the five modern novels. The framework applied – in which each chapter presents a reading of a relevant section of the Odyssey before setting out an analysis of the contemporary novel with which it is paired – is perhaps more familiar from comparative literary studies than from classical reception scholarship, yet Dougherty's approach is one which stimulates fresh thought about how we as readers (re-)interpret and ‘receive’ ancient texts based on the contexts in which we encounter them.

One of my favourite undergraduate classes to teach is Greek mythology. At American universities, Greek myth is a popular choice for satisfying humanities credit requirements, and professors are faced with a double dilemma. On the one hand, students have very different levels of knowledge, ranging from, say, a science major with virtually no idea about the ancient world to a know-it-all myth-whiz Classics major at the other end of the scale. The second problem is the choice and organization of material. Tough decisions have to be made, especially if a professor insists on students reading ancient Greek and Latin texts in translation, instead of relying on a modern retelling of myth. Which tragedies to choose? Which sections of Ovid's Metamorphoses? The whole of Homer or just select books? The challenges are real, but the rewards are great. After the initial struggle with Hesiod's Theogony (despite collective grumbling, Hesiod is non-negotiable for me), witnessing the magic of Greek myth at work never ceases to amaze me. In a blink of an eye, the class is passionately defending or attacking Phaedra, or debating fate and the gods; and, of course, everyone is united in hating Jason. It was my early fascination with Greek myth that attracted me to study Classics (the main culprit was the generously illustrated Serbian translation of Gustav Schwab's Gods and Heroes of Ancient Greece) and the crushing sense of responsibility for sparking that first interest in my students is only matched by joy upon seeing it work. I take mythology books very seriously because they are often the gateway to the Classics. Several books on myth landed on my desk this year and I'll start with three general introductions. None of these could serve as introductions to myth for children or young adults, but each could be an excellent first step for those wishing to know more about various scholarly approaches to Greek myths and cults.