Three recent volumes indicate a growing appreciation of the significance and complexity of Plato's account of mousikē in the Laws. Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi's edited work, Performance and Culture in Plato's Laws, collects fifteen diverse chapters by prominent scholars in Greek literature, philosophy, and culture to produce an immensely rewarding and original range of perspectives on Plato's treatment of performance and poetics in the Laws. As Peponi notes in her brief introduction, the complexity of the cultural background that Plato manipulates and appropriates in the Laws, as well as the intricacy of the Platonic appropriation itself, combine to present a very real challenge to any scholar seeking to understand them. In addition, it is hard to see that any robust treatment of the Laws’ political theory can avoid getting to grips with the fundamental connections between politics and performance established within the dialogue. Any reader with an interest in either Plato's political philosophy or his poetics will be well rewarded by time spent with this volume. The chapters are divided into four sections, which focus in turn on issues of cultural identity (‘Geopolitics of Performance’), the role of the choruses in Magnesia (‘Conceptualising Chorality’), the Laws’ treatment of genre (‘Redefining Genre’), and the later reception of the Laws’ poetics (‘Poetry and Music in the Afterlife of the Laws’). In the second of the volume's two chapters on cultural identity, Ian Rutherford considers the Laws’ representation of Egypt as a culture that successfully resists political and moral decline via a commitment to stability in mousikē. Setting Plato's account against the external evidence, Rutherford suggests that the Laws offers a partial fiction of stable Egyptian mousikē, useful not least for the implications of its possible critical connection to Dorian culture. In the last of five chapters on the Laws’ interest in the civic apparatus of choral performance, Peponi demonstrates the singularity of choral performance in the work. Whereas the Laws treats most types of performance as producing pleasure in the spectator, in the case of choruses, the emphasis is on the pleasure and experience of the performers. Peponi argues that this shift in focus represents a Platonic attempt to ‘de-aestheticize’ the chorus. In this way, Plato seeks to rehabilitate mousikē by divesting it of the psychological and aesthetic flaws identified in the Republic’s extended critique. However, as Peponi notes in conclusion, the Laws is not altogether comfortable with this sort of performative pleasure. In the first of five chapters on genre, Andrea Nightingale discusses the Laws’ manipulation of generic diversity in service of the unified truth represented by the law code at its heart. Nightingale presents a fascinating and original analysis of the law code as a written text rather different in character from that criticized in the Phaedrus as a pharmakon that destroys our memory of truth. Rather, it serves to encourage the internalization of truths by obliterating the citizens’ memories of previous unwanted cultural norms. In the volume's final chapter, Andrew Barker turns to Aristoxenus for help in making sense of Plato's suggestion that music can be assessed as ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’, or as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Contrasting the Platonic focus on mimesis and ethical correctness with Aristoxenus’ assessment of music ‘by the standard of its own intrinsic values’ (413), Barker suggests that, of the two treatments, Plato's is the furthest removed from general Greek opinion. These varied and illuminating chapters are representative of the scope and quality of the volume, which not only serves to open up new directions for research on the Laws but also makes plain that the Laws is at least as important as the Republic for a thorough understanding of Plato's views on art and culture, and their relation to politics.

If asked to cite a single image as symbolic of Athenian democracy, many Classicists would probably suggest the Tyrannicides group. It seems the obvious choice. Yet while no one would deny the ideological value given to the statue(s) raised in commemoration of the event, there are some well-known historical reasons for being sceptical about any democratic ideals harboured by Harmodius and Aristogeiton when they assassinated Hipparchus in 514 bc. In that sense, the Tyrannicides group is inappropriate. So what alternatives come to mind? Here is one possibility, which was once visible, like the Tyrannicides, in the Athenian agora: a fourth-century bc marble relief showing several figures engaged in making footwear (Agora inv. I 7396). The piece carries an inscription, worth quoting:

Sarah Broadie writes on ‘The Knowledge Unacknowledged in the Theaetetus’ for Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy. Her paper makes two main claims: first, that Plato in the Theaetetus rejects the ‘additive’ picture for knowledge, namely, that knowledge is true judgement with something else (e.g. an account); and second, that in the Theaetetus true judgement relies on prior knowledge, especially if that knowledge is arrived at methodically. Thus, true judgement is not necessary for knowledge and sometimes knowledge is necessary for true judgement. Broadie's argument, roughly, is that, in the Theaetetus, true judgement is already a high-level epistemic achievement. She has a number of pieces of evidence for this. The first is Theaetetus 189e4–190a6, where Socrates stresses that a judgement is an assertion that results from a soul having a silent, internal debate. Broadie infers from this that a judgement involves reasons even if those reasons are not good reasons; judgement, for Plato, is more than a mere doxastic attitude (95–6). This already looks unfriendly to the additive picture. Once I have a judgement I have reasons, and when I have a true judgement, I have good reasons. If I have good reasons then what I have is reliable and secure. So, what more could I add to upgrade this cognitive achievement to make it knowledge? Broadie goes on to explore the alternative to the additive picture given in the Sophist and the Statesman. There it turns out that there may be topics that simply cannot be captured by the additive picture: cases where there must be knowledge of an object in the absence of true judgements about that object. This is Broadie's knowledge unacknowledged.

The cinematic and televisual reception of the ancient world remains one of the most active strands of classical reception study, so a new addition to the Wiley-Blackwell Companions series focusing on Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen is sure to be of use to students and scholars alike (especially given how often ‘Classics and Film’ courses are offered as a reception component of an undergraduate Classical Studies programme). The editor, Arthur Pomeroy, himself a respected and prolific ‘early adopter’ of this branch of scholarship, has assembled many of the leading names in cinematic reception studies (including Maria Wyke, Pantelis Michelakis, Alastair Blanshard, and Monica Cyrino), alongside a good number of more junior colleagues, resulting in a varied and rewarding compendium that will provide a useful accompaniment to more detailed explorations of this field. (Some, though not all, chapters offer further reading suggestions, and most are pitched at an accessible level.) The twenty-three contributions span the ‘canonical’ and already widely treated aspects of screen reception, from 1950s Hollywood epics to adaptations of Greek tragedy, as well as ranging across material which has only more recently began to attract the attention it deserves, such as TV documentary, or adaptations for younger audiences. The volume is not as easily navigable as it might be, with the four-part division of the chapters sometimes seeming a little arbitrary. (So, for example, a chapter which discusses ‘The Return of the Genre’ in films like Gladiator appears under the heading ‘Comedy, Drama, and Adaptation’, when it might have been better placed in the first section, on ‘The Development of the Depiction of Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen’.) But rich discussions are not hard to find, especially in those chapters which show how cinematic receptions are indicators of more widely felt concerns relating to our reception of the past, as in Blanshard's assessment of ‘High Art and Low Art Expectations: Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture’. Michelakis’ chapter on the early days of cinema is also a valuable distillation of some of his recent work on silent film, crisply and concisely setting out the plurality of approaches that must inform our understanding of the cinematic medium (for example, spectatorship, colour, and relationships to other media). More broadly, the collection makes a solid and welcome attempt to put this pluralism into practice, with Pomeroy stressing ‘the complexity of understanding film’ early in his introduction (3). Chapters focusing on music, and costumes, for example, allow us to see productions ‘in the round’, a panoptical perspective which is still too readily avoided by much classical reception scholarship. (It is also good to see at least one chapter which ranges beyond screen media in the West.) Other vital areas of film and TV studies could arguably have received more attention. Some contributors touch on the importance of assessing audience receptions of these films, or the impact of marketing and other industrial considerations (such as screening practices), but more chapters dedicated to these approaches might have been a more sustained reminder to readers of just how widely screen scholarship can (and often needs to) range. To that end, a particularly significant chapter in the book – one of only 3 by non-Classicists – is Harriet Margolis’ account of how film historians might evaluate ancient world film. Newcomers to this field should pay particular attention to this, and to Pomeroy's introductory comments on how we should regard film as much more than a quasi-literary medium.

With Killing Hercules, Richard Rowland has produced a wide-ranging trans-historical discussion of re-workings of the relationship between the mythical Hercules and Deinaira, from Sophocles’ fifth-century bceTrachiniae to Martin Crimp's 2004 play, Cruel and Tender, and a 2014 staging of Handel's operatic Hercules. Impressive for the breath-taking variety of receptions of the story of Deianira's killing of her husband, the volume devotes as much attention to medieval, post-Reformation, and eighteenth-century versions as to ancient texts (including, as well as Sophoclean tragedy, receptions in Latin – for example, the pseudo-Senecan Hercules Oetaeus and Ovid's Heroides – which lie behind many post-classical re-workings of the story) and contemporary retellings; the study touches on several Italian, French, and German versions as well as those in English. As a scholar who has direct experience of theatre practice, Rowland draws on his involvement in staged versions of both Trachiniae (his own verse translation, which he includes as an appendix) and Cruel and Tender in order to provide fresh insights on both of these texts. The resulting volume, which illustrates the complex and varied reflections on masculinity and sexual identity prompted by the characters of Hercules and Deianira, has at its heart questions relating to the gendered role of violence in retellings of the myth both on a domestic level and in relation to international politics. Hercules has been seen as everything from the epitome of masculine virtue and heroic self-sacrifice to abuser and serial adulterer, ‘sexual deviant and disastrous husband’ (115); in her turn, Deianira – in some versions denied a voice altogether – has been variously portrayed as duplicitous or insane, or as a victim whose killing of her abuser is deserving of sympathy. The chapter on the Middle Ages illustrates well the re-appropriation of the story to serve a range of political, religious, and social agendas – from condemnation of Hercules’ lack of self-control by Augustine to valorization of his sexual violence, as well as the misogynist and misogamist interpretations of Deianira which were marshalled in service of debates on the role of marriage. Elsewhere, Rowland shows how the tale could be used simultaneously on both sides of a single political conflict – during the Civil War period, both regicides and royalists used lines from Seneca's Hercules Furens to insist on the rectitude of their respective stances (153–4). Even those already familiar with the reception of the figure of Hercules will find something new in this rich exploration of the pliability of one mythical story.

I was very excited to get my hands on what was promising to be a magnificent and extremely helpful Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, and my expectations were matched – and exceeded! This handbook contains no less than sixty contributions written by eminent experts and is divided into six parts. Each section opens with a brief orientation essay, tracing the development of rhetoric in a specific period, and is followed by individual chapters which are organized thematically. Part I contains eleven chapters on ‘Greek Rhetoric’, and the areas covered are law, politics, historiography, pedagogy, poetics, tragedy, Old Comedy, Plato, Aristotle, and closing with the Sophists. Part II contains thirteen chapters on ‘Ancient Roman Rhetoric’, which similarly covers law, politics, historiography, pedagogy, and the Second Sophistic, and adds Stoic philosophy, epic, lyric address, declamation, fiction, music and the arts, and Augustine to the list of topics. Part III, on ‘Medieval Rhetoric’, covers politics, literary criticism, poetics, and comedy; Part IV, on the Renaissance contains chapters on politics, law, pedagogy, science, poetics, theatre, and the visual arts. Part V consists of seven essays on the early modern and Enlightenment periods and is decidedly Britano-centric: politics, gender in British literature, architecture, origins of British Enlightenment rhetoric, philosophy (mostly British, too), science, and the elocutionary movement in Britain. With Chapter 45 we arrive at the modern age section (Part VI), with two chapters on feminism, one on race, and three on the standard topics (law, political theory, science), grouped together with those on presidential politics, New Testament studies, argumentation, semiotics, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, social epistemology, and environment, and closing with digital media. The volume also contains a glossary of Greek and Latin rhetorical terms. As the editor states in his Introduction, the aim of the volume is not only to provide a comprehensive history of rhetoric, but also to enable those interested in the role of rhetoric in specific disciplines or genres, such as law or theatre and performance, to easily find those sections in respective parts of the book and thus explore the intersection of rhetoric with one specific field in a chronological sequence.

I start with two Routledge publications. My general remark has nothing to do with the authors but is directed at the publisher: these books are very expensive as hardbacks, so a paperback, at a third of the cost, might appear to be an attractive alternative. However, my own paperback copy of Understanding Greek Religion fell apart on the second opening and continues to disintegrate with every use because the paper is very thick and the pages are glued instead of bound. In the light of the fact that Larson's book aims to be ‘essential resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of Greek culture and ancient Mediterranean religions’ (i), the publisher's ‘caveat emptor’ approach is especially jarring. In addition, the format of both books (each chapter is followed by the endnotes and a separate bibliography) is not only impractical as it forces the reader to jump forwards and backwards constantly, but also contributes significantly to the further disintegration of the book. I hope that Routledge will be able to correct this problem with its paperbacks.

‘The truth is out there’: the tagline of The X-Files, the iconic spooks'n'aliens TV show from the nineties, is twice borrowed by Jan Kwapisz in his Introduction to Fragments, Holes and Wholes: Reconstructing the Ancient World in Theory and Practice, an edited volume resulting from a conference organized at the University of Warsaw in 2014. The epilogue of this volume consists of a re-enactment, and a record, of discussion exchanges between Han Baltussen and S. Douglas Olson, entitled ‘A Conversation on Fragments’, which indeed is partly a conversation on what constitutes a fragment, but also a conversation on issues of the truth – S. Douglas Olson's pointed claim, printed on the last page of the epilogue states that ‘Greek poetic texts…do not matter much.… There may be no truth, but there is methodology’ (406). Well then, if these two statements are anything to go by, there must have been some lively debates taking place in Warsaw in 2014.