Writing in the first century ce, Columella delineates farming practice based on personal experience and observation. Roman attitudes towards slavery, truth, and torture are highlighted in a particularly graphic description of preparing the soil for sowing.

The Charles Keck reliefs on the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO, portray the triumph of white settlers over Native Americans, who are depicted as stereotypically aggressive and ‘barbaric’. Keck's sculptures invite comparison to the metopes of the Parthenon, which depict the triumph of Greek and Athenian ‘civilization’ over ‘barbarism’. The central focus of Keck's reliefs is Fortitude, an allegorical figure whose image throughout art history is indebted to depictions of Athena and Minerva, and who serves for the Nelson-Atkins as a modern American proxy for the Athenian goddess. As the Periclean building programme proclaimed Athenian superiority and had long-term cultural and economic impacts for Athens, the Nelson-Atkins is intimately connected to the economic and urban development of Kansas City, including its history of racist real estate practices, engineered by a founding trustee of the museum, which became a national model.

Verse epitaphs are our main and very abundant source for responses to individual deaths. We can almost never know exactly whose attitudes or values they express, but we can assume that they embody attitudes and values that it was acceptable to express publicly. Many at all dates seek merely to commemorate the dead person or convey grief, but, from about 400 bce onwards, others adopt a position on the fate of the dead person, though often hedged with a cautious ‘if’. Very many possibilities emerge: they range from a plain denial that anything survives death, via claims that the dead person is now (e.g.) in the aither/in the home of the blessed/on Olympos/with the heroes, to, very rarely, declarations that s/he is now actually a god. Strangely enough, support for such claims is never sought in the fact of the dead person being an initiate in a cult that promised advantage in the afterlife. In all this we see not so much individual choices as the range of options available for individuals to believe in. But we must also suspect that belief in the more optimistic options can seldom have been as firm as in a society where such options were authoritatively endorsed and alternatives not publicly countenanced.

The present article will reconsider the historiographical value played by the 182 bc Antigonid military ritual – known as Xanthika. Firstly, in order to appraise ancient historiographical adaptations and modern analytical shortcomings, this article will retrace extant ancient sources and, secondly, its current state-of-the-art. Thirdly, the original Polybian treatment will be discerned from its Livian adaptations, and historiographical distinctions will be proposed for each version. Fourthly, the Xanthika will be reconsidered as a key historiographical device through which Polybius coupled the Hellenic themes of Alexandrian legitimacy, deep-rooted tyrannical discord, and irreversible royal decadence within a larger narrative of the Roman ascendance towards world dominance.

Considering Roman art as a cumulative process could help resolve a small iconographical problem. Cubiculum N in the burial hypogeum under the Via Dino Compagni in Rome (c.350–75 ce) features a series of figure scenes referencing the exploits of the mythological hero Hercules. One of these scenes, presently entitled Hercules Slaying an Unknown Enemy, has no direct equivalent in extant Roman art and so has proved difficult to identify. This article suggests that Hercules’ battle with Cacus is most likely the incident referred to here. This is because Antonine medallions and coins, and third-century Roman sarcophagi, use imagery associated with the Cacus story that collectively could have contributed to the design of the Unknown Enemy panel. Further, identifying the defeated enemy as Cacus fits in with, and indeed helps to clarify, programmatic themes and associations already established in the other figure scenes in this funerary chamber.

In the books reviewed there is a cumulative resistance to the normative discourse, shifting our attention away from the centre and to the margins. This might mean listening to marginalized women, from the poets themselves to characters in poetry, or people today who relate to those female characters’ experiences. It might mean pushing beyond spatial boundaries and encountering dislocation and disjunction in the hazy hinterland of the non-elite. It might mean moving the human to one side, so that nature and the nonhuman can come to the fore (and teach us about what it means to be human, along the way). These books give voice to suppressed groups including women, animals, and the land. They highlight axes of oppression, and give us tools to shift the balance of power: from the language we use to the way we relate to the world around us. And with stories of prophetic horses, sympathetic lions, and pensive pigs, their interpretations – as well as the classical tales they recount – are not to be missed!

The study of the transmission of Latin texts has received an important new addition: the second volume of Stephen Oakley's Studies in the Transmission of Latin Texts, dedicated to the text of Vitruvius, the agricultural treatises of Cato and Varro, Porphyrio's commentary on Horace (or, rather, the abbreviated commentary transmitted under his name in manuscript V and younger related manuscripts), and Priscian's Latin translation of Dionysius’ Periegesis.1 In meticulous analyses and close work with manuscripts and incunables, Oakley traces the transmission of these texts and the genealogical relationships of individual (groups of) manuscripts as well as the progress of the scholarship on their transmission. The book is nicely illustrated by fifty-one images of some of the key manuscripts, and Oakley provides information of how to access these and others online as well.

The new paradigm of ancient economic history that has dominated the last twenty years is based on New Institutional Economics; its key concepts are growth and transaction costs. It has succeeded in proving that the ancient economies were not static and in documenting the significance of ancient markets; but by excising labour, slavery, and exploitation from discussion, the conceptual limits of this paradigm are becoming apparent to more and more people. The volume edited by John Weisweiler on debt in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East is solid evidence that an alternative, non-neoliberal, paradigm is currently in the process of formation.1 The book is obviously an attempt to assess the validity of David Graeber's blockbuster book on debt for the study of ancient economic and social history.2 As with the volume on citizenship presented below, the fact that this collection of twelve essays ranges temporally from the archaic period to the early middle ages and includes Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern societies is an excellent illustration of a growing and encouraging trend in our discipline. This is a highly stimulating volume. The essays explore: the nexus between coinage, slavery, and warfare in various ancient societies; how quantified social obligations colonized various social, political, and intellectual fields; and whether Graeber's concept of the Axial Age is valuable for the study of ancient history. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Graeber's model seems to fit best the world of ancient empires (Roman, late Roman, and Sassanian), but seems to make less sense for the world of Greek poleis. This illustrates, yet again, the need for Greek historians to think seriously about the peculiarities of the Greek world and the appropriate comparisons.

The first book in this review refers back to a theme we have considered repeatedly in previous reviews: cities, in this case those of Roman Italy and the new modes of investigation that are bringing them alive.1 The volume is particularly interested in looking at the diversity of these centres, laying to rest that early twentieth century faith in the regularity of the Roman town plan. Instead, the case studies in the volume show how towns in different areas of Italy fared and failed to meet the demands of their immediate surroundings as well as responding to wider political and economic changes. This changing understanding comes from two directions: our willingness to ask new questions of the cities and the use of new technology. In all the case studies, different kinds of remote sensing technology (clearly laid out by Martin Millett in the first chapter as a preamble to his case study of Falerii Novi) and drone photography allow the city to be mapped and explored in new ways. The book shows how these have allowed new evidence and questions, affecting traditional interpretations. The whole thing is finished by an epilogue by John Patterson, who pulls together some of these themes and points to new questions.

Paul Woodruff, who sadly passed away last year (28 August 1943–23 September 2023), left us an extraordinary and timely gift in his book Living Toward Virtue,1 a masterpiece on practical ethics that engages with and goes beyond the Socratic philosophy found in Plato's dialogues. The book is a tour de force of scholarship, intellectual humility, and philosophical acuity. It offers a neo-Socratic approach to virtue ethics – often contrasting it with neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics – based on the Socratic idea of taking care of our souls, which entails relentless self-examination that maintains us aware of our cognitive limitations and could help us avoid moral injury.

We start this survey in Italy during the early first millennium bce; a context on which Seth Bernard's new monograph offers an exciting, and in several respects transformative, contribution.1 Its general claim is that, while Rome did not develop a historiographical tradition until Fabius Pictor, there was a keen and pervasive interest in history across ancient Italy, since the early Iron Age, which played out across a wide range of venues and media. The brief of the historian must be to jettison any hierarchical approach to the interplay between textual and archaeological evidence, and to take as broad a view on what history amounts to as possible.

Following their 2013 monograph, Helen of Troy. Beauty, Myth, Devastation, Ruby Blondell delivers a study on screen representations of Helen in the USA, ranging from The Private Life of Helen of Troy (1927), via Star Trek, Hollywood epics, and Xena: Warrior Princess, to Helen of Troy (2003).1 Blondell takes a rounded approach to their investigation, looking at different strands in the ancient tradition and analysing numerous factors related to the production and reception of the case studies.

For this General review, I have selected five exciting books dealing with religion. I am very happy to report that we now find selected papers of Robert Parker, one of the luminaries in the field of Greek religion, in a handsomely produced and affordable volume published in the Kernos Suppléments series, whose many virtues I have often extolled on these pages.1 The collection contains twenty articles published over the span of thirty-five years, and, in a way, provides the ‘best of’ of Parker's opera minora. But these are minora in name only: all articles gathered in this volume have been, and remain, highly influential and represent question-defining studies that shaped the way we think about discrete problems in Greek religion.