Free labour constitutes the largest black hole in ancient Greek economic and social history. The New Institutional Economics approaches that are currently so influential in Greek economic history focus on growth and transaction costs, but have largely ignored labour; it is not accidental that Bresson's monumental synthesis of ancient Greek economies has no chapter devoted to the issue. This is what makes the volume edited by Edmund Stewart, Edward Harris, and David Lewis on skilled labour and professionalism in ancient societies such an important contribution. The thirteen chapters explore three major issues. The first concerns the processes through which the division of labour and specialization created distinctions between unskilled and skilled labour. The second theme focuses on the major advantages that treasured skills offered to those individuals and groups that possessed them, and the ways in which individuals and states recruited and bargained with skilled labourers. The third is the extent to which it is possible to use the concept of professionalization to describe the process by which some ancient occupations came to constitute professions. The volume examines various case studies: while in some instances it is possible to describe such forms of skilled labour as professions (doctors, sculptors, musicians, actors), in other areas (athletes, soldiers) such a label is highly misleading. Particularly valuable in this respect is the exploration of the impact of various factors and processes on the extent of professionalization of different occupations.

Another bumper edition, again by way of apology for absenteeism in the spring issue (though this time due to paternity rather than plague). We begin with the latest Beard blockbuster. In her Twelve Caesars, based on her 2011 A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Mary Beard turns her trademark combination of penetrating gaze and jovial tongue to the reception of the famed group of elite first-century ce Roman men who span a key moment in the transformation of ancient politics. Belying their importance for ancient historians and archaeologists, they have been rather neglected by art historians of later periods. With an extraordinarily wide lens, spanning from Alexander the Great to the 2017 modern art of Alison Wilding, Beard corrects that omission, demonstrating their central place in the history of Western art, and exploring not just how those emperors have been represented, repackaged, and reused, but what that says about the identities, worlds, and priorities of those who so mobilized them. The result is a tour de force of art and intellectual history. Not only is the reader presented with gloriously arcane anecdotes on almost every page, but their sum amounts to a sustained inquiry into the role that past power has played, and continues to play, in our history, politics, art, and culture.

My first title in fact comprises two independent books. Within a section dedicated to Graeco-Roman art and archaeology, the subject may come as something of a surprise: the case study is not ‘Greek’ or ‘Roman’, nor does it derive from the extended Mediterranean. Rather, From Memory to Marble analyses the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, inaugurated in 1949. Elizabeth Rankin and Rolf Michael Schneider have delivered a pair of volumes almost as monumental as the installation they describe, the first examining the context, origin, and legacy of the building's frieze, the second cataloguing its twenty-seven scenes. One of the many remarkable aspects of these two books is that both have been made available as free downloads. But what really stands out in the analysis is the ‘unconditional collaboration’ (5) between an art historian and a classical archaeologist: on the one hand, the project showcases how a broader art-historical training can enrich the traditional sorts of questions posed by classical archaeology, especially when it comes to issues of pictorial narrative; on the other, it demonstrates what classical archaeological formalism can offer to contemporary art history, and indeed larger debates about cultural history and contemporary identity politics. The result will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the legacy of classical ideas and imagery in South Africa.

In preparation for my first review, I have had the pleasure to read books that showcase the current breadth of contemporary study of ancient visual and material cultures, from subjects as diverse as canine skeletons in Athens, Egyptian papyri, and medieval mosques, and approaches ranging from the close analysis of pigment on Roman marble sculpture to the exploration of ‘viewsheds’ on the acropolis.

As Andrea Nightingale notes in her persuasive new monograph, scholars often seem reticent to acknowledge the theological context within which Plato develops his metaphysics. By analysing and emphasizing the language of divinity applied to the forms, soul, and cosmos across four dialogues, the Symposium, Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Timaeus, Nightingale builds a case for rehabilitating Plato's status as a fundamentally ‘theological philosopher’. She argues that the tendency to sideline Plato's theological thinking compromises our reading of the dialogues: ‘To understand his philosophy, we need to locate his ideas in the context of Greek religious discourses and practices’ (8). Nightingale achieves this in two ways. The first is by offering brief but useful explanations of key Athenian rituals and belief sets, such as the Eleusinian Mysteries, epiphany, and Orphism. The second is by analysing allusions to and adaptations of these practices and ideas within the dialogues. Her conclusion is that, via his explanation of knowledge, psychology, and metaphysics in terms of the divine, Plato develops a novel conception of human beings, and philosophers in particular, in terms of their relation to the divine.

The eleventh volume of the Studia Praesocratica series presents a welcome challenge to scholars of early Greek philosophy to get to grips with the exciting and valuable material found in the Herculanean testimonia. These texts provide a resource that has often been overlooked even by those seeking relatively recently to present comprehensive collections of texts and evidence on the Presocratics, and Christian Vassallo has done a great service in producing this extensive collection of textual evidence, along with English translations and commentary. As Vassallo makes clear in his introduction and individual commentary sections, a close study of the reception of early Greek philosophy in the Epicurean tradition throws up exciting new perspectives that may well provide a basis to challenge standard narratives, particularly with respect to early epistemology and theology. The work is explicitly designed to be of value not just to papyrologists but to scholars of early Greek philosophy too. With this in mind, Vassallo presents the evidence separately for each individual Presocratic, with separate commentary sections aiming to put the evidence into its Epicurean context. He extends the coverage of his already monumental work by including a useful appendix on ‘Diogenes of Oinoanda's Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy’ (595–645). Any scholar of early Greek philosophy seeking to undertake a comprehensive survey of the textual evidence will be grateful to Vassallo for the work he has done and for how accessible he has rendered these texts.

This issue sees five volumes from IMAGINES – Classical Receptions in the Visual and Performing Arts. This series, published by Bloomsbury and edited by Filippo Carlà-Uhink and Martin Lindner, developed from a series of conferences starting in 2007, and has so far produced fourteen books, including both edited volumes and monographs. In keeping with the editors’ aims to work from an anti-hierarchal approach to culture, the books under discussion elaborate on a range of media, without distinguishing between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.

While this issue's selection of books on classical reception is diverse in subject area and methodology, one theme they all share is a focus on place and space. The Classics in South America by Germán Campos Muñoz and Time and Antiquity in American Empire by Mark Storey are particularly focused on Classics and the spatiality of empire. South America's location beyond the extent of the world known to the Roman Empire provided an interesting point of departure for the classically inclined inhabitants of the continent as they considered continuities and disjunctures with the time and space of classical antiquity. Campos Muñoz's second and third case studies discuss an array of material and literary evidence in examining how both colonial and anti-imperial activities were framed with respect to ancient history and epic. We see how a sixteenth-century Spanish nobleman celebrated becoming Viceroy of Peru in a procession through a triumphal arch adorned with Latin hexameter and classical motifs. Similarly, Simón Bolívar, the revolutionary and subject of classical odes celebrating his liberation of South American territories, enjoyed classicizing triumphs and parades (140). These contrasting case studies show the ongoing significance of the Roman Empire to South America, even as its imperial status changed dramatically.

Delphi, one of the most spectacular sites in Europe and an immensely important oracular site of Ancient Greece is the theme of an edited volume originating in a conference organized in 2017. Unlike most conference proceedings, this volume is truly thorough in terms of breadth of coverage, and it is also beautifully produced and equipped with very useful indices which greatly facilitate orientation. There are twenty-three chapters in German and English, divided into six sections: archaeology, the functioning of the oracle, the role of Delphi in Greek history, the representation of the oracle in archaic and classical literature, its role in the theological and philosophical debates of the Roman period, and a brief section on its modern reception. Anyone interested in Delphi will find something useful in this volume.

One of the more salient features of Greek and Roman literature is its archival impulse expressed in the tendency to incorporate lists, enumerations, and catalogues. From Homer's manifold catalogues, via classical historiographers, to Roman poets and beyond, catalogues and lists seem ubiquitous in ancient literature, and ancient authors catalogued all sorts of items: from ships, to war dead, to dog names, to mention but a few. But not only so in literature: in documentary sources with their lists of magistrates, victors, tributes, taxes, and more, we witness the same appetite for creation of order and taxonomy. This is the phenomenon that the edited volume Lists and Catalogues in Ancient Literature and Beyond tackles in sixteen chapters, prefaced by a substantial introduction penned by the editors. As they observe, lists are indeed fashionable in literary studies these days, and the volume aims to provide a theoretically informed overview of the variety of lists and catalogues in ancient literature. The first of the four sections consists of two wide-ranging and inspired papers that provide a theoretical background: Mainberger's piece looks for a site of meaning in a list by analysing, no less, the table of contents of the very volume in which the article is printed, while von Contzen tackles ontological problems and establishes a set of criteria for the assessment and description of a list, before turning to the pragmatics and highlighting the effects that lists may have in the moment of reception: ‘the list is a narrative fascinosum, a literary form that startles and entertains; that attracts and repels at the same time’ (51).