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.

We start on what might seem very familiar territory, From Kallias to Kritias. Art in Athens in the Second Half of the Fifth Century b.c.Footnote ¹ Curated by Jenifer Neils and Olga Palagia, who provide the introduction, this book features short chapters that re-examine the period in a range of ways, from careful reassessment of sculptural identification, often through the exploration of fragments in the storerooms of the Athens National Museum, to the application of new approaches. Inevitably, in covering a half-century dominated by the completion of the Parthenon and the building of the Erechtheion, much of the volume centres on the Acropolis. Olga Palagia's chapter, ‘The Wedding of Perithous: South Metopes 13–21 of the Parthenon’, offers a plausible interpretation of the fragmentary central metopes as the wedding ceremonies and rituals that precede the Centauromachy, while Jenifer Neils's chapter, ‘Kekrops or Erechtheus? Re-reading the West Pediment of the Parthenon’, uses as a starting point the proposition that the male figure accompanied by a snake in the corner of that pediment is Erechtheus to recast the other figures who populate the pediment either side of Athena and Poseidon. In her reinterpretation, the pediment represents the Athenians’ ties to land and sea, with the autochthonous king and his family on the side of the pediment behind Athena and Theseus and his seafaring relatives on the other behind Poseidon.

Andrew Stewart offers intriguing insight into how figures and stories of sculptural programmes are identified in ‘The Sculptures of the Temple of Ares in the Agora: A Preliminary Report’. Meanwhile, Panos Valavanis, Nikolas Dimakis, Eirene Dimitriadou, and Markos Katsianis's paper, ‘Managing the Open-Air Sacred Space on the Athenian Acropolis’, takes an experiential approach to consider how the thousands of people attending the Great Panathenaia experienced the festival and how the space was managed in order to accommodate them. It is disappointing not to hear about this project at greater length because, in the short space available, the authors cannot fully explain their methods. Readers might need a bit more help to feel comfortable with isovists and viewsheds (17). Nevertheless, thinking about the practicalities of how people moved around and the frustrations and inconveniences that were experienced, alongside the awe-inspiring atmosphere of the festival, is very compelling. Ann Steiner's paper, ‘Feeding the Prytaneis: Eating and Drinking in the 5th-Century Tholos’, is one of the contributions that takes us down into the agora. In investigating the ceramics found around the Prytaneum, she stresses the democratic way of eating, seated on benches rather than reclining (136), from high-quality dining ware marked to show that it belonged to the demos and conforming to standard measurements, emphasizing equality and respect for the laws. Dyfri Williams's paper, ‘Multi-Layered Time and Place: Temples and Statues in Vase-Painting in Later Fifth-Century Athens’, offers a view into other intriguing ways that the city shaped the experiences and imaginations of its citizens, as he considers how the mythic scenes on Attic red-figure pottery might have been inspired by the cityscape of Athens itself. He suggests that the scene of the fall of Troy depicted on a calyx krater is modelled on the Acropolis, where Pausanias records a colossal bronze Trojan Horse that stood west of the Parthenon (236).

While we are in Athens, we might also give brief mention to the latest instalment in the American School of Classical Studies at Athens’ series of ‘picture books’ of the excavations of the agora, this time focusing on Dogs in the Athenian Agora.Footnote ² These well-illustrated booklets offer clear, accessible introductions to archaeology and are the sort of source always popular with school or college students beginning to explore a research topic. The richness of examples and clear text make them well suited to this purpose, though students and other readers might find the lack of referencing extremely frustrating. Tip: all the references to the ancient texts cited are actually listed right at the end (44). The book takes a long-range view, from a dog painted on a late geometric bowl to the local strays who appoint themselves supervisors of the excavations today. Most of the animals are hunting dogs and tiny lap dogs pictured on vases and grave stelai, but the most compelling examples are the evidence of the real dogs who once lived in the agora, the traces of some captured accidentally, such as the footprints trodden with blatant disregard into a still-wet terracotta tile sometime in late antiquity (34), and others more deliberately, such as the skeleton of a dog who died in the Hellenistic period and was carefully buried in a clay-lined pit with a substantial beef bone in his mouth (35). A perfect send-off!

The human quest for such a send-off is explored in Underworld. Imagining the Afterlife in Ancient South Italian Painting, a beautiful book that, as might be expected of a Getty publication, boasts excellent photography and beautiful production.Footnote ³ The very first illustration, of a scene painted on a loutrophoros (water pitcher), conveys one of the main challenges of craftsmen intending to depict the world of the dead. It illustrates Hermes in his role as escort to the Underworld coming for a customer, whose reluctance is conveyed by his firmly seated position and reinforced by the inscription ‘I'm not coming!’ (1). However tempting the imagery, life is preferable.

The book is a catalogue of over forty vessels featuring images of the Underworld, and the accompanying interpretative essays have two aims: to understand what the images can tell us about beliefs about death and to understand the role of the vases in their archaeological context. Sarah Iles Johnston and David Saunders look closely at the iconography to relate it to Greek and Apulian beliefs in the Underworld, tackling the problem of the lack of a coherent or consistent idea of the afterlife. In such an absence, we rely on the Homeric idea of the Underworld and our knowledge of mystery cults to interpret the recurrent characters on these vessels, many of which have Persephone and Hades at the centre, sometimes Kerberos being dragged along by Herakles, and often Orpheus or Dionysos. These scenes have extra resonance because these vessels seem to have been destined to accompany people to the places they depict rather than to be used for the purposes we usually associate with their shapes. Several of the kraters in the catalogue are close to two metres tall, not at all convenient for mixing wine, not least because some of them have holes in the bottom (7). Andrea Celestino Montanaro's full explanation of the role of these vessels in the grave assemblages of the Peucetians and Daunians (the inhabitants of Apulia) is fascinating and will be particularly illuminating for readers who have mostly encountered vases in terms of the scenes painted on them, stressing their particular function in a southern Italian context.

Our next book also concentrates on the dissemination of ideas and motifs around the Mediterranean and raises some of the same questions that dominate the previous one. As motifs travel, do they take their meanings with them? Do they gain prestige because of their associations with the world from which they have come or are they entirely absorbed into local outlooks? Joshua Thomas's Art, Science, and the Natural World in the Ancient Mediterranean 300 bc to ad 100 Footnote ⁴ brings together images of animals from an impressive chronological and geographical range and in different media, from a tomb painting in Marisa, in the Levant, and the Artemidorus papyrus from Egypt, to mosaics and paintings in Republican and Imperial Italy, particularly the Nilotic mosaic in Praeneste. As such it spans public and private settings, both domestic and funerary. The contention is that they are all connected by their shared roots in Hellenistic zoology and natural science, a branch of learning taking its inspiration from Aristotle's On Animals and from the menageries kept by Hellenistic monarchs, a hint of which we find in the account preserved in Athenaeus of the grand procession of Ptolemy II Philadelphos, which included all sorts of animals and birds (30–5). Whereas Romans showed their control over the world's resources by the display and destruction of exotic animals in the amphitheatre, the Ptolemies exhibited their ‘territorial aspirations’ in identifying and cataloguing them (296).

Despite looking to link all these varied manifestations back to the source of Hellenistic natural science, Thomas is careful to consider the immediate contexts of the examples in each chapter, thinking carefully about why patrons might have been drawn to this imagery and to the mechanics of how the craftsmen who carried out these commissions may have sourced their imagery. In doing so, he skilfully avoids straightforward copying and imitation, showing adaptation to local needs and aspirations.

The themes that support the contention that these images all derive ultimately, if circuitously, from the same source are the recurrence not only of particular animals, but also of antagonistic encounters between them (as with the octopuses who regularly grapple with lobsters in the fish mosaics of Republican Italy) and also, most fascinatingly, of the presence, amid so much apparent learnedness, of creatures that strike us as ridiculously fantastical. While the griffin depicted between an oryx and a boar in the tomb at Marisa (108) is a long-familiar mythical creature, others – such as the hippo with the crocodile snout, the xiphias, which appears on both the Praeneste mosaic and the Artemidorus Papyrus – are more novel. Our own credulity is further stretched by the animal–human hybrids, such as the onokentaura (72) on the Praeneste mosaic, which combines a donkey's body with a human female head, or the creature with a human bearded face and a lion's body on the Marisa frieze, possibly a martichoras, a fabled Indian creature (121–2). But in the eyes of their original patrons, all these creatures might fit the same category of coming from the fringes of the world (the oryx, for example, was just one of the many animals depicted in the Marisa tomb that lived in Africa rather than the Levant). In this context, the fantastical creatures may reflect not only the inaccuracies induced by memory of half-recalled creatures but also the instinct to ‘other’ the foreign worlds which they inhabited. They are, moreover, a fascinating reminder of the ways in which the borders between the real and the fantastic were so different for ancient audiences.

Moving fully into the Roman period, we turn our attention to two volumes published in the Archaeological Institute of America's series Selected Papers on Ancient Art and Architecture. Such volumes enable the relatively rapid publication of conference papers, an opportunity to showcase the work of scholars at the beginnings of their careers, and the presentation of a wide variety of subjects and approaches. They can, however, have some weaknesses. Sets of papers can sometimes lack coherence and the brevity of individual papers often leave authors little opportunity to convince the reader of the wider implications of the findings of the case study in hand. The first of these issues particularly arises in the first of the two volumes, Emperors in Images, Architecture and Ritual. Augustus to Fausta, which suffers slightly from a lack of explicit coherence.Footnote ⁵ There is no introduction to explain the aims of the volume and the back blurb simply promises, somewhat vaguely, that the eight papers, presented in chronological order, are a reflection of ‘current research into a variety of questions related to emperors’ use of images and architecture’. That is not to say that the papers are not interesting in themselves. They look largely at numismatic evidence, alongside relief and portrait sculpture, and emphasize the importance of the image of imperial wives (specifically Hadrian's wife, Sabina, and Constantine's wife, Fausta) alongside that of their husbands. Laura L. Garofalo's paper, ‘Sabine Retrospective: Stylistic Archaism in Flavian Imperial Portraiture’, takes a fresh look at the famous Ny Carlsberg portrait of Vespasian to suggest that this is not retrospective verism harking back to the aristocratic imagines of the late Republic but rather a nod to contemporary non-elite and non-metropolitan naturalistic style, establishing Vespasian's credentials as a no-nonsense man of the people. Steven Burges's ‘The Archaeology of Apotheosis: Roman Imperial Funerary Pyres and Commemorative Coinages of the Antonine Dynasty’ concentrates on iconography rather than style. The coins commissioned in the wake of imperial deaths (of emperors and their wives) are so fascinating because they provide a permanent trace of a construction that was by nature a fleeting visitor in the Roman cityscape, but so crucial in the passage of its occupant from the world of the living. The final chapter's analysis of the coins of Fausta reveals the extent to which the treatment of her image corresponds to the aims of that of her husband, Constantine the Great. Just as the sculptors of the Arch of Constantine added Constantine's head to the body of Marcus Aurelius, so that he could claim the noble characteristics of that emperor, the engravers of the mint gave Fausta the hairdo of Marcus Aurelius’ divinized wife, Faustina the Younger, so that she could emulate the ideal imperial wife.

The second volume, Roman Sculpture in Context, Footnote ⁶ is a much more coherent collection with a clear, well-introduced concept. It is based on a series of conference panels that responded to Elizabeth Marlowe's 2013 book, Shaky Ground. Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art.Footnote ⁷ Marlowe's work has had considerable impact, demanding that teachers and authors confront directly the limitations of reliance on so many examples of Roman art that have absolutely no context, arguing that only by favouring pieces with a ‘grounded’ context can we expand our understanding of the roles served by visual and material culture in the Roman world.

Some papers implement Marlowe's approach, with Steven Tuck's paper, ‘Grounding the Ny Carlsberg Vespasian: Analysis and Alternatives’, proposing that the Ny Carlsberg portrait of the emperor, subject of Laura L. Garofalo's stylistic analysis in the previous volume, could more usefully be replaced in books of Roman art by a full-length portrait of a nude Vespasian from the Sacellum at Misenum, on the grounds that this portrait allows us to see the head married to an ideal nude body and has a secure provenance that allows a much clearer understanding of its intended function and relation to its environment and other sculptures (which include a portrait sculpture of his son Titus).

The best chapters of the book offer reinterpretations of the chosen case studies that disrupt some of the complacencies of Roman art. By this I mean those ‘facts’ we learn about Roman art and, despite initially thinking ‘Well, how do they know that?’, obediently absorb, presuming that somebody much more learned knows what they are doing. Elizabeth MacGowan's chapter, ‘The Sleeping Hermaphrodite: Reception and Interpretation in Three Eras’, is one of those that articulates what we have always felt we shouldn't: why should we believe many popular Roman sculptural types are copies of a hypothetical Hellenistic original and not variants of a Roman theme (90–1)? The proposal is speculative but nevertheless bracing. The rest of the chapter builds on Jennifer Trimble's brilliant analysis of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite and considers how the balance and tension between the sexes within the hermaphrodite's body is appropriated in different, later works. In Sandro Botticelli's Venus and Mars, she understands Botticelli to have disaggregated the male and female halves of the hermaphrodite to show a male–female couple as a complementary whole. As with the Athens volume with which we opened, I admired the workings of technical knowledge as Kenneth Lapatin, in ‘The “Lansdowne Homer”: A Neo-Attic Relief Depicting the Seer Calchas Grounded in Ancient and Modern Collections’, shows us the rear of the relief slab to see how it was ‘restored’ in the eighteenth century by adding a suitably bearded head in order to create a saleable item (101).

Nevertheless, one of the frustrations of many of the papers is that, despite offering masterful handling of their material, they do little to explore how privileging these pieces would transform students’ experience of learning Roman art. Kimberly Cassibry's chapter, ‘The Bronze Captive in the Rhône River and Roman Art History’, is exemplary in this regard precisely because it does include explicit if brief discussion of how classroom practice could be improved by encouraging a ‘problem-solving pedagogy’ through engagement with these pieces. This chapter also tackles directly the problems that beset provincial art. This sculpture by rights should be so much more famous than it is: a rare original bronze that has nevertheless failed to make much of an indent against old favourites such as the Dying Gaul and, even worse, often losing out as an example of local art to a marble portrait head found in the Rhône at the same time but that has the dubious advantage that it may or may not be Julius Caesar.

A strength of the volume is that the editors are aware of the dangers of any dogmatic application of Marlowe's principles and are not afraid to be critical. The very first chapter by Julia Lenaghan, ‘The Statues on the Propylon of the Sebasteion Complex of Aphrodisias’, undermines the idea precisely by showing how fragments found in the earth are still subject to our assumptions and interpretations. In ‘Investigating the Ungrounded: The Paired Busts of Septimius Severus and Julia Domna in the Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University’, Julie Van Voorhis and Mark B. Abbe put up a spirited defence of what might be learned by careful examination of the surfaces of these portraits. Benjamin Anderson perhaps pushes the discussion furthest. His paper, ‘Eros and the Army (Constantinople and Context)’, discusses the version of the Eros of Lysippos which once stood in Constantinople and is captured in the frieze of the Column of Theodosius, which itself is captured in drawings made of the column's decoration in the seventeenth century by Gentile Bellini. The Eros was not directly the focus of the column sculptors; rather he appears as a feature of the porticoed street through which the army marches. The frieze captures a particular moment in which Eros is enlivened by juxtaposition with that army: his skill with a bow is emphasized by their military presence, while his presence likewise charges the soldiers with erotic potential. Anderson's point is that a statue may have a fixed physical location but it gains its meaning from the human activity around it and changes as the activity changes.

In the final essay, ‘Final Reflections on Groundedness’, Elizabeth Marlowe is afforded the opportunity to respond to the essays and does so with good grace, acknowledging the ways in which her model could usefully flex a little, though perhaps not as far as Anderson would suggest. Marlowe finds his approach ‘liberating and perhaps reckless’ (285). Personally, I would tend to side with the reckless. We will never ‘know’ the answers to the questions we ask of Roman art and there is room for experimental approaches that may not provide answers but will stimulate new avenues of thought and perhaps remind us of the contingency of some of the things we assume we know. Throughout the volume, while some previously complacently accepted hypotheses (like the legend of the Hellenistic prototype) are rightly challenged, others remain securely in place. As an example, one might ask how the belief that the major driver of Roman patrons was the opportunity to show off their paideia, their learned knowledge of Greek culture, is always a fact and not, in most cases, the sort of unsupported hypothesis Marlowe wishes to avoid.

The final book of this review, Cities as Palimpsests? Responses to Antiquity in Eastern Mediterranean Urbanism,Footnote ⁸ is the first of three volumes published as part of the European Research Council-funded project ‘Impact of the Ancient City’. The project looks at the relationship between ‘cities with a Graeco-Roman past and the long history of urbanism across the Mediterranean’ (vi), an ambitious aim that includes Classicists as just one component of a coterie of specialists of different eras and cultures brought together to explore cities shaped by pagan Greeks and Romans, Jews, and different sects of Christians and Muslims. The idea of cities as palimpsest comes from urban studies and is used to articulate the way that the different historical layers of cities coexist and overlap. As the question mark in the title implies, this volume questions and stretches the metaphor in the pursuit of investigating the complex histories of the cities of the eastern Mediterranean and their material and imaginative cityscapes. The authors wish to find a way of representing these cityscapes that honours their historical complexities and cultural hybridity and resists the urge simply to disaggregate them into their chronological and cultural components. Instead, the volume explores how the different ‘layers’ of these cities are bound up with each other, whether through reuse, deliberate rejection, adaptation, or resilience of previous inhabitants and their traditions.

The first chapter, Gideon Avni's ‘Between War and Peace: Some Archaeological and Historiographical Aspects to Studying Urban Transformations in Jerusalem’, demonstrates the futility of insisting on distinct layers characterized by major events and regime change. He shows how the archaeological evidence supports, for example, the continuation of Jewish presence in the city after the brutalities of the Jewish War in 70 ce (34–7). Suna Çağaptay reveals the influence of medieval Gothic on the architecture of a mosque in Niğde, Anatolia (now central Turkey), built by the Ilkhanids, who had expanded from Iran into the area. Meanwhile, Scott Redford's paper encapsulates the principle of reuse, looking at the Roman and Byzantine spolia adopted in Anatolian cities that came to be under Seljuk command. The spoils were not merely triumphant recycling of defeated pasts but also served as poetic and philosophical reflections of the passing of time.

Benjamin Anderson also contributes. In Sculpture in Context, he looked backwards to what the Column of Theodosius might tell us of the past life of Constantinople. His contribution to this volume does something quite different, working with the tenth-century description of the column in the Patria Konstantinopoleos to show how the inhabitants of early medieval Constantinople saw the column's decoration as a glimpse not of their past but of their future, interpreting the marching soldiers as an invading army – a prophecy that would apparently come true with the capture of the city by the Crusaders in 1204.

Other chapters chart the ways in which different viewers saw different cities even while standing in the same spot. Sam Outewill-Soulsby's contribution, ‘William of Tyre and the Cities of the Levant’, shows how Christian and Muslim accounts of Levantine cities differed drastically as they foregrounded the monuments that best fitted their world-views. These different perspectives are given visual expression in the following essay, by Elizabeth Key Fowden, ‘Portraits of Ottoman Athens from Martin Crusius to Stragetos Makryannis’, as she sifts through the changing foci of early ‘portraits’ of the city of Athens.

The final section looks at the ways in which different groups reshape cities’ past in order to claim them as their own. Edward Zychowicz-Coghill's ‘Medieval Arabic Archaeologies of the Ancient Cities of Syria’ explores how these Arab authors overlooked the Roman development of Syrian cities to situate them in the context of the repopulation of the world by the descendants of Noah. Louise Blake's ‘(Re)Constructing Jarash: History, Historiography and the Making of the Ancient City’, features the contemporary battles fought in the archaeological interpretation of sites, showing how ‘Western’ archaeologists’ traditional privileging of the Graeco-Roman remains of Jarash encouraged neglect of other periods and a disassociation between the site and modern Jordanians, an effect so often documented in the contested treatment of the Roman cities of North Africa.

Closing with the ‘Impact of the Ancient City’ project leaves us contemplating the view towards the possible expanded horizons of Classical scholarship, an exciting prospect.