The forty-first book of Nonnus' Dionysiaca takes as its central theme Beroë, the sea nymph identified with the city of Beirut in Phoenicia (modern-day Lebanon). Nonnus associates Beroë closely with Amymone. She is pursued sexually by both Dionysus and Poseidon, with the latter proving victorious, a story which Nonnus recounts in the next book of his poem. In Book 41, however, the narrative focuses upon the foundation of the city and Beroë’s birth. Nonnus initially dwells on Beirut's geographical setting and its first inhabitants, before turning to the birth of Aphrodite, who is said to arrive first at Beirut, not Cythera or Cyprus as in other accounts (Nonnus, Dion. 41.97–119).

In September ad 1, on the occasion of his birthday, Augustus wrote to Gaius, his adopted son and grandson by Julia and Agrippa, complaining about his age, stating that he had

In the opinion of Cassius Dio, Septimius Severus' capture of Nisibis and annexation of the province of Mesopotamia were not among the emperor's more worthwhile ventures. The costs were great and the yields slight. Our knowledge of the campaign is sketchy, although we do have a narrative outline supplied by Dio's eleventh-century epitomator, John Xiphilinus. Xiphilinus preserves the following anecdote, which takes place after Severus and his army had crossed the Euphrates and were starting to feel the effects of thirst and heat. The epitomator says:

If Herodotus borrowed from Homer the way the later tradition of historical battle description described fighting, adapted the array of the armies from the Homeric catalogue, and himself invented the ‘weighing’, the historian's declaration about why one side defeated the other, Thucydides was the creator of the battle speech – the paraklēsis or parainesis, cohortatio in Latin – that so frequently became a part of the depiction of ancient battles. There is, of course, a great deal of incidental talking and encouragement during fighting in Homer, and many of the sentiments that later authors were to use can be found in Homer as well. Herodotus borrowed from him the habit of including incidental snippets of encouragement before or during battles by the way (6.11, 8.83, 9.17–18, 9.42), and the habit was adopted here and there in later authors, and especially by Livy. So similarly the epipōleēsis, the general's going along the ranks of his army and addressing a few appropriate remarks to each different contingent: this imitated Agamemnon's tour of his forces in Book IV of the Iliad, and was to have a long life in historical authors.

A prominent feature of the dynamics between Rome and the Greek territories is represented by the extensive use of the imperial figure as a political and ideological instrument. The epigraphic sources underline how the Greek cities offered rites and honours to the emperor who was currently in power, employing them as a key element and the perfect prop to ensure the emperor's approval. Moreover, in their attempts to gain the emperor's favour, cities, leagues, and synods tended to employ a characteristic language that remained broadly unchanged from early Imperial times to the end of the second century ad.

I began my last set of reviews by expressing doubts about the speculative literary prehistory in Mary Bachvarova's From Hittite to Homer (G&R 64 [2017], 65). Near Eastern antecedents also feature in Bruno Currie's Homer's Allusive Art. Currie displays more methodological awareness and more intellectual suppleness: he recognizes the possibility of parallels arising independently (213–15), but denies that his examples can be coincidental, while acknowledging that this confronts us with a ‘glaring paradox’ (217). To be fair, he has a point in this instance, and in many of his other case studies; and his overarching argument is beautifully conceived. On the debit side of the account, there are methodological tautologies: that we should accept conclusions if there is ‘sufficient warrant’ (29) or the evidence is ‘sufficiently compelling’ (174), and not bring charges ‘too quickly’ (32), follows from the meaning of ‘sufficient’ and ‘too’. Adverbial IOUs of indeterminate creditworthiness like ‘arguably’ (×45) are not an adequate substitute for arguments (cf. G&R 63 [2016], 235). ‘Of course’ (×50) is superfluous if it refers to what is genuinely a matter of course, and misleading if not. And, of course, Currie's use of scare quotes is arguably too extravagant. Some weaknesses are more substantive. For example, when trying to determine the Iliad’s relation to a hypothetical antecedent (designated ‘*Memnonis (Aethiops)’), Currie maintains that ‘the short life of Achilleus arguably [!] has the status of “fact” [!] because the audience knows – through familiarity with an earlier version – which way Achilleus is ultimately going to make up his mind’ (62). Regardless of their familiarity with any hypothetical earlier version, the audience of the Iliad knows that Achilles' life will be short because the extant version establishes it as a fact when it makes this a presupposition of the exchange between Achilles and Thetis (Il. 1.352, cf. 416–18, 505–6). From 9.410–5 we might infer that what is presupposed in Book 1 results from Achilles' prior choice: if so, the change of mind implied in his answer to Odysseus is implicitly retracted in his response to Ajax (650–5). ‘The choice that Achilleus is actually going to make only after the death of Patroklos' (62) had therefore already been made. It is disappointingly reductive to say that ‘Diomedes plays out the part of Gilgamesh in this episode of Iliad V, but for this part of the Iliad Diomedes serves as a “stand-in” [!] for Achilleus, and Achilleus in the Iliad more widely plays out the part of Gilgamesh’ (197): Homer's characters are not tokens, and Diomedes is always, and distinctively, himself. The point of putting Od. 19.96–604 alongside an alternative version manufactured to be parallel but different (47–55) eluded me entirely. ‘I do not see’, says Currie, ‘what is gained by refusing to speak of allusion to a particular poem’ (102). Nor do I; and some of his parallels seemed compelling, however hard I tried to resist. Nevertheless, we must balance the loss in refusing to speak of allusion against the risks of building on foundations that may have too high a proportion of sand. Currie has written a brilliant and subtle book. Its contents will need careful sifting.

I still remember the thrill of reading for the first time, as an undergraduate, Frederick Ahl's seminal articles ‘The Art of Safe Criticism’ and the ‘Horse and the Rider’, and the ensuing sense that the doors of perception were opening to reveal for me the (alarming) secrets of Latin poetry. The collection Wordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetry is a tribute to Ahl, and all twenty-two articles take his scholarship as their inspiration. Fittingly, this book is often playful and great fun to read, and contains some beautiful writing from its contributors, but also reflects the darker side of Latin literature's entanglement with violence and oppression. For the latter, see especially Joy Connolly's sobering discussion of ‘A Theory of Violence’ in Lucan, which draws on Achille Mbembe's theory of the reiterative violence of everyday life that sustains postcolonial rule in Africa (273–97), which resonates bleakly beyond Classical scholarship to the present day. Elsewhere there is much emphasis (ha!) on the practice and effects of veiled speech, ambiguity, and hidden meanings. Pleasingly, Michael Fontaine identifies what he calls ‘Freudian Bullseyes’ in Virgil: a ‘correct word that hits the mark’ (141) that also reveals – simply and directly – the unspoken guilty preoccupations of the speaker: Dido's lust for Aeneas, Aeneas’ grief-stricken sense of responsibility for Pallas’ death. A citation from F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night provides the chilling final line of Emily Gowers’ delicious article about what ripples out beyond the coincidence of sound of Dido/bubo. The volume explores subversive responses to power (for example, the articles of Erica Bexley and David Konstan), as well as the risk of powerful retaliation (Rhiannon Ash considers the political consequences of poetry as represented by Tacitus). There are also broader methodological reflections on interpretation, from musings on the reader's pleasure at decoding the hidden messages of wordplay such as puns, anagrams, and acrostics (as Fitch puts it, ‘the pleasure of wit, combined with the pleasure of active involvement’ [327]) to exploration of the anxiety of a reader who worries that they may be over-interpreting a text. Contributions variously address the ‘paranoia’ of literary criticism and the drive to try to ground meaning in the text and prove authorial intention: while John Fitch asks if the wordplay ‘really is there’ in the etymological names used by Seneca in his plays (314), Alex Dressler's article (37–68) helps frame the various modes of interpretation that we find in subsequent articles, by putting interpretation itself under scrutiny. His intriguing analysis introduces the helpful motif of espionage (interweaving Syme's possible post-war role in intelligence with Augustan conspiracy and conspiracy theories) and concludes that – like double agents – ‘secret meanings’ need a handler (53) and we readers need to take responsibility for our own partisan readings.

Three cities dominated the late antique eastern Mediterranean: Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch. Constantinople was the late Roman re-foundation of an archaic Greek apoikia, Byzantion; Alexandria and Antioch were cities created by Alexander and his Hellenistic successors. This review includes two important books that examine the long-term history of two of these cities: Byzantion and Antioch. Both books stress the need to situate these cities within the landscapes and territories from which they drew their economic, political, and spiritual sustenance; both also adopt a long-term perspective, covering roughly a millennium each, which makes it possible to trace wider continuities, trends, and changes.

Let's begin at the beginning, with a book by Jeremy Armstrong that takes us back to the Early Republic, from the sixth to fourth centuries bce, examining the social and political transformations of that period and looking at the very foundation of the Roman state. The challenges of working on this early period are well known. Indeed, Armstrong early on says that he will eschew an overly optimistic, positivistic approach to the later literary account and make use of the substantial archaeological evidence. This archaeological evidence is crucial in drawing up a picture of the social and economic context of early Latium. However, the problematic literary accounts still often appear as rather too unproblematic framing narratives for what follows. Armstrong's account is chronological, taking us, as the title suggests, from the early ‘warlords’ to the military society of the Republic in the wake of the Latin Settlement in 338 bce. What we have here is a properly ambitious attempt to explain this crucial transition – but many problems and questions undoubtedly remain in the study of the early days of the Republic.

Visitors to modern Istanbul struggle to imagine how the city as created by Constantine appeared. But the elongated promenade now usually indicated as Sultan Ahmet Parki, but also known as the At-meidam (‘Horse-Square’), is vaguely conceivable as the ancient Hippodrome, the centre of public life in imperial Constantinople; and of the numerous monuments that once adorned this area, a trio persists along the site of the ‘spine’ of the ancient racetrack. Two obelisks are still conspicuous; between them lurks the ‘Serpent Column’, which was already a piece of antiquity when Constantine had it removed from Delphi. Of all bronzes to survive from the classical world it is perhaps the most deserving of its own ‘cultural biography’. This is what Paul Stephenson offers with The Serpent Column. He starts in the broadest possible terms – mankind's general phobia of snakes – and then guides the reader through two and a half millennia of the vicissitudes endured by a sacred object wrenched from its ‘pagan’ purpose and somehow accorded special status within first Christian and then Muslim theocracies. Several times damaged, but never destroyed, the structure originally erected to mark the Greek victory over the Persians at Plataia in 479 bc now serves as a sort of talisman against snakebites. Stephenson calls upon some esoteric sources to inform its symbolic genesis – though disappointingly attempts no reconstruction of how it originally supported a tripod with cauldron – and shows how that symbolism could be adapted in biblical terms. Constantine's motives for relocating the monument remain obscure; nonetheless, we can surely dismiss Gibbon's conclusion that the emperor reveals merely ‘the rapacious vanity of a despot’. Recall the tradition that in his new forum he buried, beneath a pillar, an ensemble of relics comprising the Trojan-Roman Palladium, Noah's axe, Mary Magdalene's ointment jar, the crosses of the two thieves, and twelve baskets used by the apostles at the feeding of the five thousand. Superstitious he may have been; yet, by his choice of objects, Constantine also shows a fine sense of cumulative tradition at the juncture of Europe and Asia.

As A. K. Cotton acknowledges at the beginning of her monograph Platonic Dialogue and the Education of the Reader, ‘the idea that a reader's relationship with Plato's text is analogous to that of the respondent with the discussion leader’ within the dialogue, and ‘that we engage in a dialogue with the text almost parallel to theirs’, ‘is almost a commonplace of Platonic criticism’ (4). But Cotton has the merit of articulating this commonplace much more clearly and precisely than is often done, and of asking how exactly the dialogue between interlocutors is supposed to affect the dialogue of the reader with the text, and what kind of reader response Plato is inviting. Not surprisingly, her starting point is Plato's notorious (written) concerns about written texts expressed in the Phaedrus: ‘writing cannot contain or convey knowledge’, and will give to the ‘receiver’ the mistaken perception that he or she has learned something – that is, has acquired knowledge – from reading (6–7). She claims that the Phaedrus also suggests, however, that a written text, in the right hands, ‘may have a special role to play in awakening the soul of its receiver towards knowledge’ (17). I have no doubt that Plato thought as much, but Cotton's reference to the language of hupomnēmata at 276d3, and to the way in which sensible images act as hupomnēmata for the recollection of the Forms earlier in the dialogue, fails to support her case: Socrates remarks in that passage that writings can serve only as ‘reminders’ for their authors (16). The book's central thesis is that the way in which writing can awaken the reader's soul ‘towards knowledge’ is not by pointing the reader, however indirectly, implicitly, non-dogmatically, or even ironically, towards the right views, but by developing the reader/learner's ‘ability to engage in a certain way’ in dialectical inquiry (26). The familiar developments between ‘early’, ‘middle’, and ‘late’ dialogues are thus accepted but seen as part of a single coherent educational project towards the reader's/learner's full development of what Cotton calls ‘dialectical virtue’. Plato's reader is invited to treat the characterization of the interlocutors within the dialogues, and the description of their dialectical behaviour, ‘as a commentary on responses appropriate and inappropriate in the reader’ (28). Cotton's programme, clearly sketched in Chapter 1, is ambitious and sophisticated, and is carried out with impressive ingenuity in the following six chapters (the eighth and final chapter, besides summarizing some of the book's conclusions, introduces a notion of ‘civic virtue’ which does not appear to be sufficiently grounded on the analyses in the rest of the book). An especially instructive aspect of her inquiry is the attention paid to the ‘affective’ dimension of the interlocutor's and reader's responses: through the representation of the interlocutors in his written dialogues, and the labours to which he submits us as readers, Plato teaches us that ‘the learner's engagement must be cognitive-affective in character; and it involves a range of specific experiences, including discomfort, frustration, anger, confusion, disbelief, and a desire to flee’ (263). Perhaps because of her belief that what the Platonic dialogues are about is not philosophical views or doctrines but a process of education in ‘dialectical virtue’, Cotton has remarkably little to say concerning the psychological and epistemological underpinnings of the views on, and methods of, education which she attributes to Plato. The Cave allegory in the Republic, which is unsurprisingly adopted as an instructive image of Plato's insights on learning and educational development in Chapter 2, is discussed without any reference to the various cognitive stages which the phases of the ascent in and outside the Cave are meant to represent. Two central features of Plato's conception of learning identified by Cotton – the individual learner's own efforts and participation, and the necessity of some trigger to catalyse the learning process (263) – are not connected, as one might well have expected, to the ‘theory of recollection’ or the related imagery of psychic pregnancy or Socratic midwifery. Even Cotton's laudable stress on the ‘affective’ aspects of the learning process could have been helpfully complemented by some consideration of Platonic moral psychology. Despite these reservations, and the unavoidable limitations and oversimplifications involved in any attempt to characterize Plato's corpus as one single, unified project, I believe that readers with an interest in Platonic writing and method will benefit greatly from Cotton's insightful inquiry.

In American Arcadia, Peter Holliday offers readers a sumptuous and fascinating account of ‘California and the Classical Tradition’. Beautifully presented and illustrated, this book is not only a thought-provoking and pleasurable read but also a valuable addition to the body of scholarship that has explored classical receptions in the United States at some length in recent years. Much of that scholarship has focused on now familiar terrain, from the fixation on antiquity in Hollywood and popular culture more broadly, to the grandiose evocations of classical architecture in eastern cities such as Washington, DC, and New York. California, by contrast, for all its prominence on the world stage and in the cultural imagination, might not spring so readily to mind as a rich locus of classical receptions, but Holliday convincingly demonstrates ‘how Californians used classical antiquity as a metaphor for fashioning the Golden State and their own lives in it’ (355). Although well-known buildings such as the Getty Villa, Hearst Castle, and Caesar's Palace rightly receive lengthy discussion, there are a wealth of examples which are likely to be new to many readers, from the nineteenth-century Hungarian refugee building a Pompeian villa in a self-consciously Arcadian landscape, to the 1960s development of the CalArts campus, whose Modernist architects yet proclaimed their debt to Athens and Rome. Nor is the book solely concerned with architecture. Although the built environment is at its core, the full range of Californian identification with, and appropriation of, classical imagery and ideology is explored. The final chapter, for example, shows how pursuers of the quintessentially Californian healthy lifestyle and body beautiful knowingly looked to classical paradigms on multiple occasions. Resisting the temptation to frame all of this in a conventional ‘classical tradition’ approach, Holliday takes pains to show the full extent of the interaction and innovation that characterizes Californian classicism, and the resulting study is highly recommended.

If you still haven't chosen a book to take with to the desert island, I have a suggestion: L'encyclopédie du ciel. At 1,202 pages, it will keep you occupied day and night: what you read as text by day will help you read by night in the sky. This wonderful and extremely useful book is as difficult to classify as it is to put down. Essentially, it is a compendium of Greco-Roman discourse on the stars and planets, divided into three parts. The first (‘Les images: histoire et mythologie: voir et raconter’) is about the constellations and the planets. It opens with a catalogue in which each constellation is illustrated, explained, and accompanied with appropriate quotations from Eratosthenes’ Catasterismoi and Hyginus’ Astronomica. There follow essays about the names of the constellations, on the Sun, Moon, and the planets, and one on Greek and Roman creation myths. All are accompanied by long passages of appropriate Greek and Latin texts in translation. The second part of the book (‘Les lois: l'astronomie: observer et calculer’) is about the ancient attempts to make sense of and explain the stars and planets as a system, about calendars, and about ancient astronomical instruments and objects. This part of the book also contains a complete translation of Hipparchus’ Commentary on the Phaenomena of Eudoxus and Aratus. It closes with an account of Greek star catalogues. The third part of the book is concerned with various attempts to interpret the celestial phenomena (‘Les messages: signes et influence: interpréter et prédire’). It includes, but is not restricted to, astrology; philosophical ideas are also discussed, such as astral apotheosis, the ascent of the soul through the sky, and the music of the spheres. There is a dictionary of astronomical and astrological terms and a dictionary of ancient astronomers and authors dealing with astronomy. The book closes with parallel star catalogues of Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy.