Polybius uses two terms to describe the extent of Roman power, ἡ οἰκουμένη (‘the inhabited world’) and τῶν ὅλων (‘the whole’), in his account of Rome's rise to hegemony over the Mediterranean. Scholars and translators have treated these two terms as essentially identical, yet this erases a subtle distinction in Polybius’ language. While ἡ οἰκουμένη occurs in a variety of cases, τῶν ὅλων is always in the genitive plural, regularly paired with some noun such as ἀρχή (‘rule’), δυναστεῖα (‘power’), or ἐπιβολή (‘attempt’). Polybius uses the less precise expression, τῶν ὅλων, to refer to objects of the Romans’ own ambitions; ἡ οἰκουμένη describes either the extent of Roman power or the goal towards which fortune, τύχη, directs world events. Polybius does not deny that the Romans, like most ancient states, acted aggressively. However, by not using the more exact term to describe Roman aims, he qualifies their agency, making their expansionist tendency an insufficient explanation of their hegemony over the Mediterranean. Moreover, these same passages lack the rich vocabulary that Polybius used to describe deliberation and planning. This re-evaluation of key programmatic passages suggests that they have been over-interpreted in the search for Polybius’ verdict on Roman imperialism.

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

Between the Battle of Mylae in 260 bc (when Rome defeated Carthage off the north coast of Sicily) and the Battle of Myonnesus in 190 (when Rome defeated the Seleucid navy off the west coast of Asia Minor), the Romans established naval domination over the whole Mediterranean. Scholars generally believe, for quite good reasons, that this process of naval aggrandisement began abruptly, the Romans having previously taken no interest in the sea. That, after all, is what Polybius quite clearly says.

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:

The study of Egyptian personal religiosity during the third century ad presents an interesting opportunity to explore the processes of cultural encounters between Egypt and the Roman Empire. The religious situation was more complicated and variegated than the textual evidence seems to suggest; sometimes one becomes aware of the existence of certain beliefs only through their iconographic record. For this reason, decorated stelae, coffins, and mummy wrappings are crucial materials for research into questions of religious exchange. This article presents the case of a third-century ad shroud from Memphis painted with a woman's portrait and funerary scenes, along with a representation of Isis navigans.

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.

When Endymion, king of the Moon, devised war upon Phaethon, king of the Sun, he decreed that a race of spiders as big as the Cyclades should weave a web between Venus and his lunar dominion, to serve as the battlefield for their regal rumble. And in that region of the heavens he arrayed his army: the king himself led his elite Hippo-vultures in the clouds on the right wing, 80,000 strong; his other cavalry, mounted on giant birds with wings like lettuce leaves, held the left. The Moon's stalwart infantry held the centre, posted on the spider web: Millet-launchers and Garlic-fighters, and his light-armed Flea-archers and Wind-runners, whose long tunics carried them about like sailboats in the fierce winds of the celestial realm. To Endymion's Hippo-vultures, Phaethon opposed the Sun's Hippo-ants (and near two hundred feet long were the insects that bore these cavalry). On the opposite flank of the solar array came the Air-mosquitoes and the formidable radish-flinging Air-dancers. The spears of Phaethon's phalanx, in the centre, were stalks of asparagus, and their round shields were mushrooms. Phaethon's allies, the Cloud-centaurs, expected at any moment from the Milky Way, had not arrived in time for battle.

Mary Bachvarova's large, complex and ambitious From Hittite to Homer argues for long-distance interactions linking the Near East to Anatolia to Greece, and constructs a model of ‘why, how, and when’ (198) those interactions operated. The general thesis is not seriously in doubt, and much of the model's detail seems plausible; but since that is beyond my competence to judge, I will stick to my remit as Greek literature reviewer and focus on what the model, if right in detail, might tell us about Greek narrative poetry. How useful is Bachvarova's speculative literary prehistory, and what is it useful for? Can it illuminate the texts we have? Referential ambiguities expose one problem. The claim that ‘the overarching plot and theme of the Odyssey speak to the values of the warrior-traders that motivated the spread of Near Eastern epic motifs’ (296) is startling: Odysseus never engages in trade; indeed, to call him a trader is a calculated insult (Od. 8.159–64). It emerges a few pages later that the reference is not to the Odyssey, but to a hypothetical original: ‘The Odyssey may have originally addressed the values of heroic trade…but as the values of the Greek aristocratic class changed and trade was viewed more negatively, the role of the hero would have lost its trader aspects’ (298). I'm not sure whether this explanation also applies to (e.g.) ‘Agamemnon rejects the interpretation of his seer, refusing to release Chryseis’ (193) or ‘it has become clear to Achilles that the gods’ intervention, the advice to avoid battle…has been at the cost of his own life’ (194). Contrast the extant Iliad, in which Agamemnon agrees to release Chryseis (1.116–17) and Achilles withdraws on his own initiative (1.169–71). These may just be inaccurate recollections of ‘the supremely sophisticated and complex works that are known to us’ (396). But to the extent that Bachvarova's interpretation of extant texts is skewed by her speculative literary prehistory, or her reconstruction of lost texts is shaped by it, the parallels are not evidence for the hypothesis but artefacts of it. Parallels per se are not, in any case, sufficient evidence of influence: Mesoamerican pyramids were not derived from Egypt. Yet Bachvarova's opening sentences jump directly from parallels to the how and why of influence (1). Is ‘negative reaction to speech’ (44) so distinctive a cultural phenomenon as to make its appearance in different narrative traditions evidence of influence? If parallels between hospitality narratives (142–5) reflect cognate hospitality cultures, why should we appeal to transmission by song to explain them? The similarities between Naram-Sin and Hector (191–5) could originate independently in any two cultures which regarded divination as a source of good advice if (as is likely) they had noticed that leaders sometimes fail to accept good advice. This is a stimulating book; but Bachvarova's approach to diagnosing influence lacks the methodological rigour of Christopher Metcalf's The Gods Rich in Praise (G&R 63 [2016], 251).

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.

My appreciation of textual criticism – a nowadays somewhat marginalized subdiscipline that continues nevertheless to provide the foundation of our subject – has been vastly enhanced by Richard Tarrant's new book on the subject. I read it from cover to cover with great pleasure and satisfaction (several times laughing out loud, which doesn't happen often with works of scholarship), with great interest, and with dismay at my own ignorance, and I came away determined to be a better Classicist. This little volume is the fourteenth ‘suggestive essay’ published in CUP's Roman Literature and its Contexts series (established in 1990 by Denis Feeney and Stephen Hinds), but it does not – sadly – mark a revival of this excellent series, but rather a late addition. (There cannot be many Latinists of my generation who did not, as young scholars, aspire one day to be the author of one of these elegantly concise yet ground-breaking volumes.) On the face of it this volume is rather different from its predecessors, which usually engaged with cutting-edge theory from a Classical perspective; instead, Texts, Editors and Readers opens up to non-initiates such as myself a whole world of existing scholarship into which many literary scholars seldom venture, inhabited not only by the towering ‘heroic editors’ of the past (Chapter 1) but also by colourful characters such as ‘interpolation hunters’ (86), freewheeling neo-sceptics (77), elegant minimalists, and unrestrained maximalists. With a combination of vivid characterization, lucid explanation, and delicious detail, Tarrant outlines the challenges of establishing a decent text, and the techniques involved; in Chapters 3 to 5 we learn about recension, conjecture, interpolation, collaboration, and intertextuality. He also makes exceptionally clear the issues that are at stake in editing a text, and the tensions with which the discipline is charged. At every stage of the process, from the selection of manuscripts for scrutiny to the display of information in the final edition, choices need to be made that are bound to provoke dissent. The twin aims of providing a legible text and legible apparatus are often in conflict with one another. Eventually, to establish a readable text, an editor needs to choose a single solution and put all alternatives in the apparatus, which must then record the evidence and the decision process as far as possible. Done well, it allows us to understand the process by which the text of the edition has been established, and the contributions made by scholars over the years. But within Classics there is no agreement about precisely how this should be achieved, as Tarrant points out. As he makes clear with his comparison of two reviews of the same edition, one reviewer's ‘accuracy’ and ‘methodological rigor’ is another's ‘frivolous superfluities’ (25–6). Tarrant comments that one would hardly believe these evaluations pertained to the same edition of Lucan, but in fact the picture is consistent and the divergence of opinion is telling; what comes across strongly is that these two reviewers want something very different from their editions. The disagreement here is between a scholar who wants progress towards a better text, amending scribal errors and providing confident, robust conjectures, and another who is glad to find a text relatively untouched, but in the apparatus all the material that enables a reader to come to their own decisions about the variants to be preferred. The merits of both are clear; the tensions are between the aspiration for a readable, usable text and the desire to be transparent about the difficulties involved in establishing that text. A decisive reading may obscure ambiguities; excessive hedging muddies the reading. Every choice involves compromise: minimalists may omit important information that might allow the reader to draw different conclusions; maximalists risk cluttering up the page and seeming undiscriminating. Tarrant (a self-confessed minimalist) alarms us on pages 130–1 with the sight of the monstrous apparatus produced by an unrestrained maximalist. Meanwhile, while conservative critics are averse to new conjectures and stick as close to the manuscript reading as possible, conjecture emerges as a creative art form, where natural talent is enhanced by intimate appreciation of Latin literature and style (73); it can attract great admiration. I now aspire to be able someday to compile, as Tarrant does, my own list of favourite conjectures – a bit like a montage of favourite sporting moments, as one revels in the pleasure of seeing the execution of skilful manoeuvres. Chapter 6 brings our attention to a representative case where textual tradition and literary interpretation cannot be disentangled: is Propertius a ‘difficult’ poet, prone to elliptical writing, or is he an elegant writer whose text has been unfortunately mangled in transmission? In other words, where the text is hard to understand, do we spend our energies reading his poetry as if he were a modernist poet, teasing out cryptic meaning, or do we channel our energies into amending the text to something more easily comprehensible? One's prejudice about the nature of Propertius’ poetry inevitably shapes one's approach to editing the text. The question is insoluble, but the debates thereby evoked are illuminating. As Chapter 2 makes clear, this is a discipline that relies on persuasion and is characterized by strong rhetoric; the contempt and disgust that are directed at fellow scholars and inferior manuscripts are remarkable. Language is often emotive and moralizing; the bracketing of problematic lines described as ‘a coward's remedy’ (86, n. 2). Tarrant himself, who takes a light and genial tone throughout, doesn't shy away from describing a certain practice of citing scholars in the apparatus criticus as ‘an abomination’ (161). One of many evocative details is the idea of Housman storing up denunciations of editorial vices without a particular target yet in mind (68). Traditionally, self-belief and decisive authority have been the hallmarks of the ‘heroic’ style of editing, and these qualities are especially unfashionable in our own era, which prizes the acknowledgement of ambiguity and hermeneutic openness. Tarrant encourages us to accept that the notions of the ‘recoverable original’ or the ‘definitive edition’ are myths, but at the same time to acknowledge that they are necessary myths (40) for this ‘doomed yet noble’ endeavour (156). A critical edition is no more nor less than a provisional ‘working hypothesis’ which invites continued and continual engagement. As Tarrant puts it: ‘any edition, to the degree that it stimulates thinking about the text, begins the process that will lead to its being succeeded by another edition’ (147). Textual criticism should be, therefore, a collaborative endeavour to be marked by humility and an acceptance of the open-endedness of interpretation, of the hermeneutic work that an editor needs to undertake, and also of the overlap between the roles of editor and reader. It is easy to perceive textual criticism – with its heyday in the nineteenth century – as constituting the dry and dusty past of Classics, and indeed Tarrant treats us to a most entertaining account of its Heroic Age, when Housman et al. lashed one another with cruel wit and erudite put-downs. However, Tarrant also makes an irrefutable case for the continued relevance, and indeed the exciting future, of textual criticism – despite the fact that it has lost its position at the centre of our discipline, and so many of us are untrained and unable to appreciate its value. Tarrant's depiction of the discipline brings home the lesson – which we already knew, but now really get – that all classical scholars ought accordingly to be aware of these general issues and to have some grasp of the specific routes by which the text they are reading has been reached, the problematic aspects of that text, and the issues involved in attempting to resolve its problems. Such is the information that an apparatus criticus attempts to convey, and it may therefore be judged on how effectively and efficiently it does so. Having made all of this so clear and in such an engaging fashion, Tarrant concludes by providing as an appendix a helpful guide for the inexperienced to reading a critical apparatus. The final chapters explore two questions in particular: what can technological advances contribute (for instance in access to and presentation of manuscripts), and is the current model of the apparatus criticus fit for purpose? On the latter issue, Tarrant would like to see, at the very least, more scope for providing in the notes nuanced indication of the editor's feelings about the choices he or she has made. He proposes the wider use of phrases that allude to the internal struggles behind a rejected variant, for instance (such as utinam recte or aegre reieco) or the introduction of new symbols for the apparatus that would signal degrees of suspicion – although he doesn't go quite so far as to second Donaldson's suggestion for a pictorial symbol of ‘a small ostrich, with head in the sand’ to denote occasions where an editor follows a manuscript out of despair of making actual sense of the text (58, n. 25). Early in his essay, Tarrant expresses regret that new editions are less likely to be reviewed than other forms of scholarship, and, with the decline in the requisite editorial knowhow, it easy to see why: reviewing a new edition of a text is not a job that can be undertaken with confidence by most scholars of Latin literature. How can one pass judgement on an editor's decisions without a very sound knowledge not only of the work but also of the manuscripts available, of the relationships between them, and of the subsequent critical tradition? How can one comment on individual amendments or conjectures without an understanding of the entire interpretative framework which the critic has brought to bear? One of the many valuable things I have learned from Tarrant's book is that it not always necessary to comment on individual cruces; equally useful can be an evaluation of the general approach and principles upon which an edition is both established and communicated.

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.

Mediterranean islands and their adjacent coastlands have long been the subject of a wide range of disciplines and discourses; from prehistory to late antiquity and beyond, the processes of imperial expansion, economic interconnectedness and cultural change have had a deep impact on their history. In recent decades the conceptual apparatus through which we study those processes has started to shift significantly. Earlier approaches influenced by nationalism and colonialism tended to adopt totalizing, top-down, and centre–periphery perspectives. The three volumes examined in this review are evidence that things are changing radically; but they also demonstrate the need for particular disciplines and subdisciplines to pay attention to each other. Though all three volumes focus on, or give major attention to, archaeological evidence, it is quite evident that prehistoric, classical, and late antique scholars follow distinctive scholarly traditions that could all benefit from more cross-fertilization.

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.

This issue's crop of books presents a strikingly diverse and geographically mobile ancient world. In this review we will travel from Britain to Arabia, taking in southern Iberia and Judaea en route, as well as considering the highly topical theme of migration. These books offer some fascinating new insights into the ancient world, as well as suggesting some intriguing historical perspectives on some of the most pressing issues of our present time.

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.

The nineteenth-century French painter Gustave Courbet famously declared that he did not paint angels because he had never seen one. If artists of classical antiquity were ever troubled by such scruples regarding depictions of the supernatural, it is not (so far as I know) documented. This is not to say that the question of how an artist could represent, say, an Olympian deity, went completely unheeded: Dio Chrysostom's Olympic Discourse of ad 97 is one serious attempt to address that topic, with significant implications for the status of an artist (in this case, Pheidias) famed for ‘imagining’ the divine. Yet evidently the task of visualizing spiritual phenomena devolved no less to humble ‘craftsmen’ – as Hélène Collard shows in her monograph, Montrer l'invisible. This gathers a catalogue of 164 Athenian vases, mostly of the fifth-century bc, as case studies of the various formulations devised to show religious experience – many of them images upon objects, such as white-ground lekythoi, that may once have been used in particular rites and observances. Graphic traditions of mythology, and an established series of personification (e.g. Nike, Eros, Hypnos), assisted the process. However, many of the scenes collected by Collard do not apparently attempt to ‘show the invisible’. They seem, rather, to evoke the realities of regular practice – processions, libations, sacrifice, adornment of a stele. Such scenes only become ‘paranormal’ when invested with some extra knowing detail: for example, a large owl alighting upon an altar (presumably indicating the favour of Athena). And sometimes we simply have to look a little closer to apprehend the signs of divine agency. So a herm-head appears to lean forwards – as if to sip at the kantharos held up in propitiation – while the phallus of another herm seems distinctly to elongate in the presence of two ecstatic women.

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.

If you have ever had a premonition, or if ever some inner voice has dissuaded you from a certain action, you might have noticed that this experience involves a different kind of knowledge than that preceded by an inference. We call it a ‘hunch’, an ‘intuition’, or a ‘gut feeling’; in the nineteenth century this particular subvolitional form of thinking was called ‘unconscious cerebration’, and modern cognitive science recognizes it as a specific type of cognition characterized by quick, pre-attentive, and preconscious processing – Daniel Kahneman's famous ‘thinking fast’. The most fascinating aspect of Peter Struck's book on divination is an attempt to distinguish the type of cognition it entailed. The book offers an insightful analysis of Plato's, Aristotle's, the Stoics’, and the Neoplatonists’ views on divination, concluding that they saw divination as ‘surplus insight’, a specific kind of cognition. Since ‘our ability to know exceeds our capacity to understand that ability’, ‘our cognitive selves are to some…degree mysterious to us…The messages that we receive from the world around us add up, sometimes in uncanny ways, to more than the sum of their parts’ (15). Struck argues that, in the ancient world, the process by which we arrive at such surplus knowledge was acculturated as divination. He focuses on the philosophers’ views and does not attempt to provide an analysis of the technical and practical side of divination, which was based on knowledge and skill (though it must have involved intuition to some degree as well), or of the popular views on divination. Nevertheless, his book will be very useful to those interested in the philosophical views on divination and in the cognitive history of intuition. Cognitive science has spurred several important recent studies in Greek religion and is continuing to provide a useful framework for conceptualizing ancient (and modern) religious thinking and behaviour.