The precise way any ‘work’ can be said to exist, and persist, is a central question for many disciplines beyond Classics. Some might already see a problem simply in this volume's encyclopedic context, which appears to have already answered that question by assuming that stable, autonomous ‘texts’ can travel through time via their continuous refashioning. Regardless of approach, a book whose goal is to survey the reception of all ancient texts, worldwide, in all forms, from the moment of ‘text-creation’ to the present, is of interest as a collection, if nothing else, for the challenge this represents.

The practical utility of this volume as a work of reference, however, is variously compromised. First, it must avoid overlap with Brill's considerable existing output on classical reception: both the multi-volume coverage of the ‘Classical Tradition’ in the main Neue Pauly series (Vols 16–20), and four previous ‘Supplements’, including The Reception of Myth and Mythology (Supp. 4), and the Dictionary of Greek and Latin Authors and Texts (Supp. 2) which covers textual transmission. The reception of Sophocles’ OT, for example, accordingly does not receive attention in these 600-odd pages (cf. Supp. 4); and summary data about when and where copies, translations and publications of ancient texts were available, to whom, and in what form, is here not readily available (cf. Supp. 2). Second, although W. acknowledges the many questions raised by the book's premise, she sees the gap it addresses as the opportunity to demonstrate precisely the ‘continuous currents’ which such a bold scope might make visible, since other reception studies have tended to focus only on single authors, works, periods or media. To this end, contributors (asked to write entries organised by ancient author, rather than text) were encouraged to select particular works, periods and themes on which to focus, provided they were representative examples of this scope through to the present. This selectivity means many texts are missed. Readers in search of Horace's Ars Poetica, for example, may be disappointed to find that G. Baldo chooses only to discuss the reception of Horace's Odes. The epistle is in fact discussed as part of the reception of Aristotle's Poetics (pp. 57–8) but no reference is made to that in the Baldo entry. In the index of authors under ‘Horatius Flaccus’ the reader is referred to the Aristotle entry, but among seventeen others, and without indicating which Horatian works are involved. A regular index of both authors and titles would have improved the searchability of the printed edition.

Personal summary can be an asset, as in the case of Zimmerman's excellent essay on the history of ‘tragedy’ as a term, genre and concept, which gathers together current preoccupations of scholarship into a valuable corrective introduction to any one aspect of the topic. And for Anglophone classicists, the predominance of German scholarship (of 66 contributors, 11 are Anglophone and 42 German, 15 of these from W.’s own Mainz University), especially the heavily non-Anglophone bibliographies, is itself a valuable insight into how scholarly traditions about the same material differ. The book's greatest value, however, lies in its detailed treatment of reception in antiquity itself, a consistent priority across all entries. From these sections, taken together, the idea of the ‘text’ as self-consciously positioned in a tradition appears to be fundamental to the earliest concepts of ‘literature’, and vice versa. But this is also arguably the book's greatest missed opportunity: for rather than asking how this might change with the advent of the codex, the printing press and later technologies of reproduction (which might have been one advantage of its bold scope) W. appears committed to continuing such a vision. For W., the ‘texture of European intellectual life’ consists in encounters with these texts, whose ‘presence endures miraculously’ beyond antiquity. The index of authors is ‘especially important’ because ‘although this lexicon of works can make no claim to encyclopaedic systematism, it is here that the dramatis personae of this process of human creativity and cultural production will become visible at a glance’. ‘At a glance’ suggests the extent to which W. sees this aggregate memorialised by the book as the value it offers, rather than empowering a reader to look something up.

At the same time as W. asserts that classical reception is as yet undefined, she appears to have a clear idea of what it is. For three of ten pages of the foreword she offers her own model for the ‘processes of rewriting and branching in Graeco-Roman literature … and its reception and onward transmission’, in the form of Freud and his 1900 Interpretation of Dreams. For W., ‘Freud’/‘the Freudian’ (author-and/as-text) connotes less the indeterminate nature of literary experience, than nostalgia for the individuality of unitary subjects and objects. This appears to be the basis for a rejection of the digital present:

To her credit, W. fully acknowledges the hagiographic motivation of this work of science. But this agenda poses a problem for the willing contributor. In the entry on Ovid, for example, Vischer argues that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Heroides were valued as highly as the Metamorphoses, offering the popularity of Helen as an example, despite the fact Paris was changed into a ‘priest, commissioned by God to save Helen's soul by abducting her from an illegitimate marriage to a non-Catholic Greek’. As further evidence of the Heroides’ influence she asserts that in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe ‘heroic epistles were composed almost everywhere in Europe’. But when do we view the burgeoning epistolary conceit per se as no longer reflecting the influence of the Heroides as a specific text? And if a text is re-presented in a way entirely counter to its original gesture, in what way might we say this meaningfully ‘continues’ it? Such scholarship could be seen as an instance of a desire for tradition calling the text into existence, rather than the other way around.

If a thing is also always recognisable as an example of its type, any reference to it, whatever form it takes, can never be to a single entity. And in so far as we can speak of a singular text, any agency it has is not enacted via an autonomous objecthood, but through a series of complexly interrelated perceptions and actions – one of which might be, for example, the choice to conceive of cultural relations in terms of genealogies like this, and to memorialise them in encyclopedic form. That texts do not ‘miraculously’ persist by themselves is important to restate. They are variously re-presented because they serve a present human purpose, or are meaningful in present terms. Their repetition both expresses and constitutes these human investments. As Andreas Bagordo says in his entry on Homer (pp. 154–78), ‘In some respects, writing a comprehensive reception history of Homer means writing a literary and cultural history of Greece’. The present volume does not apply this insight to itself. But it is arguably an insight which ‘classical reception’, however undefined, has to offer the Humanities as a whole, particularly as we enter a post-print digital environment. The radically multiple potentials of the apparently ‘same’ material underscore that, whatever else it is, a work is also who it is for, in a particular present. As W.’s own passionate commitment to the individuality of ‘the book’ reminds us, we cannot reap the benefits of the verities, authorities, records and classifications of print culture in the absence of thoroughly contextualised subject-positions, which acknowledge the many assumptions behind their present capacity to mean, to some person or other.