During the early archaic period, there was considerable interest in the heroic past and the acts of mythical ancestors, especially as embodied in epic. In particular, there are a number of archaic myths dealing with attempts to evade death and to gain immortality, mostly unsuccessful. All Greek heroes are descended from gods: having at least one god (or goddess) somewhere in the family tree is a prerequisite for achieving anything worthy of note. And in a few heroes, this sliver of divinity may be turned into full-blown immortality. It is a recurring theme in Greek myth, therefore, that there is a narrow window of possibility for a hero to escape his mortal status and not have to die. Behind such myths lies the fiction that, in a past age, immortality had been attainable; the heroes of the past might not have been immortalized often, but the chance had been there. This was contrasted with the present duller age, in which immortality was out of reach.

With the recent publication of the new Sappho song by Dirk Obbink, we now have two largely preserved songs by Sappho apparently dealing with prayers for a brother away at sea. Both are examples of a type of song relating not to eros, marriage, or hymns to gods, but to bonds of love and duty between women and their male family; songs whose primary emotional focus is not other women, but male relatives absent from home.

The consultation of fixed oracles was a central and well-documented feature of ancient Greek life; Greece ought therefore to be able to contribute important evidence to anyone interested in the function of divination in different cultures. But, although no oracle is more famous than that of Apollo at Delphi, so many central questions about its operations are unanswerable that it provides a very shaky basis for comparison. A few points are secure: not only individuals but also states put enquiries to the oracle; and public enquiries related to matters of religious practice and cult, but also on occasion to colonizing projects, alliances, or declarations of war. Beyond these generalities, however, almost everything is contestable. Even the statement just made about public enquiries requires some hedging. On matters of cult they certainly never ceased: in a religion without revelation and specialized religious institutions, the direct access to divine will supposedly provided by the oracle was indispensable to authorize change, or to suggest ritual remedies in a time of crisis such as plague. But the extent to which public enquiries on military and political matters continued to be made after the fifth century is very uncertain.

In May 401 bce the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger started out for Mesopotamia from his satrapy in western Anatolia with an army of levies and Greek mercenaries. Although he did not declare his intentions at the outset, his aim was to win control of the empire from his brother, King Artaxerxes. At the battle of Cunaxa in Babylonia Cyrus was killed, though the engagement itself was inconclusive. Emerging practically unscathed, the Greek contingent began what became an epic march to safety through hostile territory. The journey took them north along the middle course of the Tigris river, into the Armenian Mountains, and finally, in late April 400, to the peaks overlooking the Black Sea. From the Greek colony of Trapezus they proceeded alternately by foot and ship to Byzantium. Their story is told in the Anabasis of Xenophon the Athenian, the only first-hand account of the journey that has come down to us.

One of the final images of Zack Snyder's 2006 box-office-hit film, 300, is of Leonidas, the Spartan king, lying dead on the ground surrounded by his fellow Spartans, having been shot to death by a vast number of Persian arrows. The camera pans over the bruised and bloodied Spartan dead until it finally comes to rest on Leonidas himself, his arms spread out in a gesture that curiously imitates the iconography of the crucifixion of Christ. Whether done explicitly or not, this is not the only time in its reception history that the story of Leonidas’ last stand has been linked with Christ's sacrifice on the cross, or with Christianity more generally. In this article, I will explore some aspects of the story of the battle of Thermopylae's reception by the Carthaginian Christian poet Dracontius.

As Aeschines famously said, phēmē (‘fame’) can't be trusted: that's why ‘famously’ so often prefaces a mistaken report. Karen ní Mheallaigh knows that in Gorgias B23 it is the sophisticated audience which is deceived, and she understands the ‘contractual’ relationship that Gorgias posits between audience and author (e.g. 30, 32, 78). But, making the fatal mistake of calling it ‘Gorgias’ famous dictum’, she hallucinates a reference to madness and says that ‘what is at stake…is the confusion between reality and representation, which is a measure either of the audience's lack of sophistication, or of the artist's supreme skill’ (29). Her invitation to ‘read with imagination, and with pleasure’ (xi) succeeds admirably. Reading her exploration of the self-conscious, extremely sophisticated, and persistently playful fictionality of Lucian (Toxaris, Philopseudes, True Stories) and others (Antonius Diogenes, Dictys and Dares, Ptolemy Chennus) was, for me, an intensely stimulating and pleasurable experience. But the Gorgias aberration was not the only thing that also often made it annoying. ‘The irony that pervades Lucian's work…is not a symptom of exhaustion but of exuberance’ (37): doesn't that state the obvious? ‘Having read Toxaris, it is difficult to read Chaereas and Callirhoe without feeling its improbable storyishness’ (49): is that any less difficult for those who haven't read Toxaris? ‘Is Toxaris a dialogue about friendship, or about fiction?’ (67): the headline answer (‘both: for the theme of friendship is itself entwined with the dynamics of fiction in the dialogue’) is undercut by what follows, which reductively treats the friendship theme as a pretext and pretence (‘in Lucian's work, fiction is almost invariably enjoyed under the pretext of doing or talking about something else, and Toxaris is no exception: it is a dialogue about novelistic narrative, masquerading as a dialogue about friendship’; my emphasis). A fictional speaker's oath ‘compels the reader into acquiescence that the story he is listening to is true’ (68, original emphasis): how is that possible when (given the existence of perjury) even non-fictional oaths don't have that power? Is it true that a ‘constant oscillation between the poles of belief and disbelief…takes place in the reader's mind when (s)he reads fiction’ (70)? The internal audience may be waveringly doubtful about the status of what they are hearing, but sophisticated external audiences of fiction are capable of maintaining a complex attitude free of oscillation. ‘The reader must wonder whether (s)he is him or herself contained within that remote specular image on the Moon, a minute mirror image of a reader and a book, within the very book (s)he is now holding’ (226): that's not the ‘must’ of necessity, since I don't wonder that at all. Am I violating some ‘must’ of obligation? But why should anyone be obliged to wonder anything so daft? I was not disturbed by ‘the disturbing idea that every reality may be a narrative construct, another diegesis in which we are the characters, being surveyed by some remote and unseen reader, perhaps right now’ (225; compare 207), nor unsettled by ‘the unsettling possibility that the real world outside Lucian's text could be just as fictional, if not more so, than the world inside the book’ (230; compare 8). If you are of a nervous disposition, do not read this book: thirty-six occurrences of ‘anxiety’ and ‘anxious’ might make you jittery. Otherwise, read it, enjoy it, and (from time to time) shout at it in frustration.

Among a wealth of excellent studies and translations of individual Latin authors (Plautus, Catullus, Lucretius, Cicero, Ovid, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Martial, Juvenal, and Statius), I was delighted also to find packed into my crate of review books the latest work by Anthony Corbeill, Sexing the World. With the innovative sociological-cum-philological approach familiar from his previous works, which belongs to cultural history as much as to literary and linguistic studies, Corbeill here tackles the question of how grammatical gender in ancient Latin language maps on to, and influences, a Roman cultural worldview that is binary and ‘heterosexual’, where grammatical gender is identified with biological gender. His study argues for the material implications of apparently ‘innocent’ grammatical categories. As a case study focusing on the Latin language and its relation to Roman culture and thought, it also makes a contribution to wider debates about how language shapes human perception of the world. Corbeill's main focus is on the Romans’ own narratives about the origins of their binary gender categories in a time of primordial fluidity, a ‘mystical lost time’ (134), that is reflected in the story told in each chapter, where transgressing gender boundaries is a source of power for gods and poets alike. In Chapter 1 the narrative in question is formed by the etymologizing accounts of the very grammatical term genus as fundamentally associated with procreation, and in Chapter 2 by Latin explanations for non-standard gender of nouns, with Chapter 3 being a demonstration of how Latin poets tap into the supposedly fluid origins of grammatical gender, to access their mystical power. In Chapter 4 the story is of how the androgynous gods of old became more rigidly assigned to one gender or another over time, while in Chapter 5 the shift is from the numinous duality of intersex people to the more mundane concern that they should be categorized in legal terms as either male or female. Each chapter, as Corbeill says, represents a self-contained treatment of a particular aspect of Latin gender categories; in sequence each can also be seen to trace a similar trajectory, from flux to binary certainty. In every case, it seems, early gender fluidity is represented by the Romans as gradually hardening into a clear binary differentiation between male and female. Corbeill is less interested in the reality of these narratives than in what they themselves tells us about Roman attitudes towards sex and gender, with their essentializing message about a heterosexual gender framework. With its wide-ranging erudition, clear and compelling prose, and fascinating insights of broad relevance, this is a thought-provoking study, even though it leaves many questions unanswered, especially in relation to the role of the neuter (‘neither’) gender and its interplay with the compound ‘both-ness’ of hermaphrodites.

Epigraphic studies are usually addressed to specialists and are often timid in terms of asking big questions about their evidence. This review includes four brilliant recent studies, which use primarily Hellenistic inscriptions in order to discuss some major issues of Greek history from new perspectives. The first two books focus on politics and political institutions, while the other two raise similar issues from the point of view of Greek religion. All of them are fruitful applications of novel approaches to Greek communities which move beyond traditional approaches to the polis as a static and self-enclosed entity in favour of new approaches that stress the variability of Greek politics and the historical processes that involved regions and networks of which they formed part.

This crop of books features, inter alia, a real blockbuster, the Roman Guy Fawkes, a host of bishops, and the welcome appearance of some Roman women. The under-representation of women as writers of Roman history has been something I noted in previous reviews; the under-representation of women in Roman history is scarcely news, meanwhile. However, this review includes no fewer than three biographies of Roman women, only one of whom was an empress (who could be considered the ‘usual suspects’).

In 1830 a hoard of Roman silver weighing some 25 kilograms was recovered from farmland near Berthouville, between Rouen and Caen. The silver was mostly worked into drinking vessels and associated items such as jugs, ladles, and bowls. Two statuettes of the god Mercury confirmed this as a votive deposit, as indicated by various dedications from Romano-Gallic pilgrims, notably on nine pieces left by Quintus Domitius Tutus (‘Mr Safe’) in the mid-first century ad. Restored by conservation experts at the Getty Museum, the cache – along with several other treasures from Gaul – has served as witness to ‘Roman luxury’ in an exhibition on tour in the USA. The exhibition's catalogue is a volume that earns its place in any classical library. The Berthouville Silver Treasure and Roman Luxury may not add very much to our understanding of luxuria in Roman discourse: it is left unclear what happens when a ‘luxury object’ is put out of circulation, or at least transferred into the enclosed economy of a sanctuary; and if Mercury was a deity of fortune favoured particularly by freed slaves, perhaps a set of silver spoons was not such an ‘elite’ attribute as supposed? Beyond such factors of value, however, the figurative elaboration on display is striking. At the centre of a libation bowl we find the Lydian queen Omphale in a drunken slumber, exposing her derrière – as if to say ‘Beware how you imbibe’. One wine pitcher shows Achilles leaping aboard his chariot, with the body of Hector trussed in tow; turn the jug round, and there is Achilles again, now himself stricken in battle. On another pitcher, Achilles is among Greeks mourning the death of Patroclus; and there is Hector's corpse in a pair of scales, as the price of his ransom is assessed. We would be impressed to find such ‘sophisticated’ iconography upon objects in use at some stately villa at Rome or around the Bay of Naples. What does its appearance in the moist pastures of Normandy signify – at least for our preconceptions of ‘provincial taste’?

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.