Maria Michela Sassi's masterful 2009 volume on the origins and nature of early Greek philosophy is now available in an updated English translation. Sassi's aim is not to provide a primer of the views of individual thinkers. Rather, she seeks to scrutinize what sense we can make of attempts to unravel the ‘origins’ of philosophy. Her work is useful not only for its wide-ranging assessment of the evidence, including that from beyond the central Mediterranean, but also for its careful engagement with central works of scholarship. Sassi seeks to defend the inherently ‘philosophical’ nature of those who presented their views about the nature of the cosmos (and more), prior to the efforts of Plato and Aristotle to establish the identity of philosophy itself. She is particularly keen to defend the value of Aristotle's account of his predecessors against those who are too hasty to dismiss it as self-serving. For her, ‘Aristotle's exposition [of the beginnings of philosophy] is fundamentally correct’ (xv), and she makes a persuasive and engaging case for this point, working with a conception of philosophy as characterized by a particular kind of critical attitude towards explanations.

Shaul Tor presents an illuminating and wide-ranging treatment of the relation between the epistemology and theology of Hesiod, Xenophanes, Parmenides, and, to a lesser extent, Empedocles. Over six detailed chapters, he combines philosophical innovation with philological and cultural sensitivity to offer new and fascinating insights on several widely discussed and difficult issues of early Greek philosophy. In his first chapter (‘Rationality and Irrationality, Philosophy and Religion’), Tor surveys the scholarly division between ‘rationalizing’ and ‘mysticizing’ readings of early Greek philosophers. His treatment is thorough and nuanced and helps to render with great clarity the assumptions underlying much modern analysis. Starting from the observation that reason and inspiration are generally treated as dichotomous, he begins with a consideration of some traditional ‘rationalizers’ (the Milesians, Hecataeus, the Hippocratics, etc.) and notes that none provide the sort of straightforward separation and rejection of the divine that standard accounts might lead one to assume. He provides a particularly useful critique of the distinction between the rational and irrational and the philosophical and the religious, arguing that the epistemological developments of early Greek philosophy are ‘an essentially theological enterprise’ (48).

As the editors of Once and Future Antiquities point out in their preface, ‘science fiction, fantasy, and the classics have in common the effect of inviting us to reconsider (by speculating, by imagining, by contextualizing) our own world anew’ (xi). The fourteen wide-ranging chapters in this volume eloquently illustrate this point. Contributors explore the multiple ways in which the genres of science fiction and fantasy (SF&F) engage with, respond to, and cast new light on cultural artefacts, story patterns, and characters from the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, reflecting too on how these receptions respond to contemporary preoccupations. Appropriately for a volume on classical receptions, the contributions are all linked by the unifying theme of ‘displacements’ – a concept which refers here both to the movement of ideas, texts, and themes across time and space, and to the disruption of perceived genre boundaries or preconceived ideas about the relationship between receiving and source texts or cultures.

Newly available in paperback in 2018, Simon Perris’ The Gentle, Jealous God. Reading Euripides’ Bacchae in English, sets out to ‘adumbrate a new cultural history for this classic play’ (20). While, as the author points out, the Bacchae has received attention in recent years from reception scholars interested in its performance history – including Erika Fischer-Lichte's 2014 Dionysus Resurrected – less has been written on translated versions or adaptations which are intended primarily for reading rather than performance. Perris’ work moves the conversation forward by examining in detail a series of case studies, while touching on many more examples in the course of his discussion.

Most of us tend to encounter Greek myths in childhood as exciting stories brimming with heroes, monsters, and moody divinities. The story of Odysseus’ homecoming and the story about the Little Mermaid feature different characters, but their relationship to reality is understood to be the same: they are fantasy, and not real. If, like me, you were lucky enough to escape the Disneyfication of fairy tales in your childhood, perhaps you will remember the brutality and harshness of folktales, which puts them on a par with many Greek myths. My first encounters with ancient Greek stories about the gods and heroes were very similar to Sarah Iles Johnston's: we were both captivated by Greek myth as children, and the passion, once kindled, only grew stronger when we became mature enough to read the ‘real thing’. In my case, learning about ancient Greek culture and becoming a scholar of Greek religion required a thorough rethink, as I needed to readjust my stance towards Greek myths in order to understand the role that they played in ancient Greek society as formative narratives about the communities’ identities, early history, and human relationships with the gods. My process essentially required an emotional detachment from the beloved heroes of my childhood and a significant amount of distancing.

‘Why Classics matters’ is an important question and Neville Morley offers his answer in a slim volume published in Polity's Why It Matters series which is advertised as follows: ‘word-leading thinkers make the case for the importance of their subjects and aim to inspire a new generation of students’. Morley opens the book with a chapter entitled ‘What's Wrong with Classics’ and presents himself in the afterword as ‘a historian who does ancient stuff’, whose ‘ability to appreciate Latin poetry…or spot subtle intertextual references is, to say the least, negligible’ (126). His first chapter provides basic information about the standing and importance of classical languages in the Western curriculum from the Middle Ages to the present day and then focuses on the (much discussed) issue of gender and class: yes, Classics used to be the epitome of the aristocratic male education, not only in Britain (the main focus of Morley's book) but throughout Europe. This fact, and the trite topos of the sadistic at worst, mind-numbingly boring at best, Classics teacher is illustrated with many quotations from literature, from Eliot's Middlemarch to Tartt's The Secret History. From classical knowledge as cultural capital Morley pivots to Classics as ‘a weapon in the culture wars and the clash of civilizations’ (35) and to far-right internet memes, which leads him to the conclusion that Classics matters today precisely because it is dangerous and deeply problematic. At some point in this chapter he swerves into narrowing down Classics to mean ‘ancient history’ – approximately at the point where he remarks that classicists themselves have actually been ‘at the forefront of questioning traditional understanding of the classical word and how it should be studied’ (36), so his answer as to why Classics does matter mostly pertains to the study of ancient history (and, to a degree, reception):