This being my first attempt at writing the Roman History subject review, some kind of comment on the nature of the field as illustrated by this issue's crop of books seems appropriate. Firstly, the paucity of books focusing on the period of the Roman Republic is striking, especially if Cicero is taken out of the equation; the Imperial period clearly dominates, though the study of Late Antiquity (in which I must declare an interest) is still clearly on the rise. In terms of subject matter, traditional political history is obviously still largely out of fashion, religion is on a roll and the ‘cultural turn’ continues its rise (again I declare an interest), but the economy is making a late comeback (thanks to the formidable industry of the Oxford Roman Economy Project). This issue's collection offers a healthy mix of genres: biographies, student textbooks/sourcebooks, edited volumes, ‘companions’, and substantial monographs, including both revised PhDs and the reflections of more seasoned scholars, books for specialists and novices alike. I shall be interested to see how the balance of both subject matter and methodology appear in future issues.

A quality not much considered here in the past, how often a work is likely be taken from the shelf, prompts me to put Saskia's Hin's The Demography of Roman Italy in first position. For that depends in turn on how reliable, clear, and broad of outlook the chapters are, and where they lead the reader. Though dry and plain it might seem (for all the developing technologies), the subject moves directly towards a hot, polarized topic – ‘the Roman economy’ and its development – with oscillation between extreme positions. It is a particular merit, then, to put forward a fresh view (though previously adumbrated elsewhere) that is not extreme and must be taken seriously. That is where Hin will take historians. But the book is structured in three sections: economic and ecological parameters, demographic parameters (morality, fertility, and migration), and population size. The separate chapters are well supported from a variety of evidence, judiciously treated and well written up. That on climate, with a mildly positive conclusion, needed no apology. If I have a complaint is it about the index: dive into a passage involving ‘Brass modelling’ and you will have to rummage back in the text (111) for hope of identifying it.

Whatever Luca Giuliani writes is usually worth reading. Image and Myth, a translation and revision of his Bild und Mythos (Munich, 2003), is no exception. This monograph engages with a topic germane to the origins and development of classical archaeology – the relation of art to text. Giuliani begins, rather ponderously, with an exposition of G. E. Lessing's 1766 essay Laokoon, ‘on the limits of painting and poetry’. Lessing, a dramatist, predictably considered poetry the more effective medium for conveying a story. A picture, in his eyes, encapsulates the vision of a moment – likewise a statue. The Laocoon group, then, is a past perfect moment. A poet can provide the beginning, middle, and end of a story; the artist, only the representation of a fleeting appearance. Giuliani shows that this distinction does not necessarily hold – works of art can be synoptic, disobedient of Aristotelian laws about unity of place and time (and scale). Yet he extracts from Lessing's essay a basic dichotomy between the narrative and the descriptive. This dichotomy dictates the course of a study that is most illuminating when its author is being neither narrative nor descriptive but analytical – explaining, with commendable care for detail, what we see in an ancient work of art. But is the distinction between narrative and descriptive as useful as Giuliani wants it to be? One intellectual predecessor, Carl Robert, is scarcely acknowledged, and a former mentor, Karl Schefold, is openly repudiated; both of these leave-takings are consequent from the effort on Giuliani's part to avoid seeking (and finding) ‘Homeric’ imagery in early Greek art. The iconography of Geometric vases, he maintains, ‘is devoid of narrative intention: it refers to what can be expected to take place in the world’ (37). In this period, we should not be asking whether an image is ‘compatible’ with a story, but rather whether it is incomprehensible without a story. If the answer is ‘no’, then the image is descriptive, not narrative. Thus the well-known oinochoe in Munich, clearly showing a shipwreck, and arguably intending to represent a single figure astride an overturned keel, need not be read as a visual allusion to Odyssey 12.403–25, or some version of the tale of Odysseus surviving a shipwreck. It is just one of those things that happens in the world. Well, we may be thinking – let us be glad that it happens less frequently these days, but double our travel insurance nevertheless. As Giuliani commits himself to this approach, he is forced to concede that certain Geometric scenes evoke the ‘heroic lifestyle’ – but, since we cannot admit Homer's heroes, we must accept the existence of the ‘everyman aristocrat’ (or aristocratic everyman: either way, risking oxymoron). Readers may wonder if Lessing's insistence on separating the descriptive from the narrative works at all well for Homer as an author: for does not Homer's particular gift lie in adding graphic, descriptive detail to his narrative? And have we not learned (from Barthes and others) that ‘descriptions’, semiotically analysed, carry narrative implications – implications for what precedes and follows the ‘moment’ described? So the early part of Giuliani's argument is not persuasive. His conviction, and convincing quality, grows as artists become literate, and play a ‘new game’ ‘in the context of aristocratic conviviality’ (87) – that of adding names to figures (as on the François Vase). Some might say this was simply a literate version of the old game: in any case, it also includes the possibility of ‘artistic licence’. So when Giuliani notes, ‘again we find an element here that is difficult to reconcile with the epic narrative’ (149), this does not, thankfully, oblige him to dismiss the link between art and text, or art and myth (canonical or not). Evidently a painter such as Kleitias could heed the Muses, or aspire to be inspired; a painter might also enjoy teasing his patrons with ‘tweaks’ and corrigenda to a poet's work. (The latter must have been the motive of Euphronios, when representing the salvage of the body of Sarpedon as overseen by Hermes, rather than by Apollo, divergent from the Homeric text.) Eventually there will be ‘pictures for readers’, and a ‘pull of text’ that is overt in Hellenistic relief-moulded bowls, allowing Giuliani to talk of ‘illustrations’ – images that ‘have surrendered their autonomy’ (252).

Mit Mythen Leben, the 2004 study of Roman sarcophagi by Paul Zanker and Björn Ewald, has appeared (with updated references) in English. This is a cause for gladness among all Anglophones engaged in the teaching of ancient art, because for non-German readers there was frankly nothing to match the intellectual scope and illustrative quality of Zanker–Ewald. Our only regret may be that students will find this explanation of the imagery on the sarcophagi so convincing that further debate seems futile. It is well known that Roman sarcophagi, of which thousands survive from the second and third centuries ad, have had a ‘presence’ or ‘afterlife’ in Western art history for many centuries: some were even re-used for Christian burials (the tale of one such case in Viterbo, the so-called ‘Bella Galiana’ sarcophagus, might be one addendum to the bibliography here). But what did they once signify? Many were produced in marble workshops of the eastern Mediterranean, from which the suspicion arises that Roman customers may not have exercised much discrimination when it came to selecting a subject or decorative scheme. (Our authors rather sidestep the question of how much was carved at sites of origin, such as Aphrodisias, then completed – with portrait features added? – in Rome.) Accepting, however, that an elaborate sarcophagus was a considerable investment – the cost calculated as about six months’ or even a year's salary for a captain in the Praetorian Guard – and supposing that the imagery were more than a status symbol, we are left with essentially two options. One is to follow the Belgian scholar Franz Cumont and others in analysing the iconography in terms of its clues to Roman beliefs about the afterlife. For certain images of myth this seems to work very well – the story of Alcestis, for example; for others, rather abstruse allegories must be sought: what eschatology is lodged in Medea's tragedy, or a scene of Achilles on Skyros? The alternative is to follow Zanker and Ewald in supposing that the sarcophagi do not so much represent the belief systems of the deceased as offer a sort of visual counselling to the bereaved. Hence the title – living with myths, not dying with them: for the regular occasions on which Romans were obliged to remember and honour the dead (parentalia, rosaria, etc.), sarcophagi on display in family burial enclosures provided ‘encouragement to free association’ (31) in various therapeutic and consolatory ways. These of course encompass some of Cumont's reconstructions of Stoic comfort and so on – but with its emphasis upon the response of viewers, the Zanker–Ewald approach clearly allows more flexibility of significance. To say that the message often reduces to ‘it could be worse’ is a brutal summary of the sympathetic and subtle readings expounded in this book. Yet occasionally one could wish for more sophistry. For example, in discussing the consolatory potential of images of Niobe and her unfortunate offspring – a ‘massacre of the innocents’ with obvious pertinence to mors immatura – the authors allude (74) to the curious persuasive strategy deployed by Achilles when he, at last in a mood to yield up the mangled body of Hector, invites the grief-stricken Priam to supper (Il. 24.603 ff.). As Malcolm Willcock long ago showed (CQ 14 [1964], 141 ff.), Achilles resorts to a formulaic paradeigma: ‘You must do this, because X, who was in more or less the same situation as you, and a more significant person, did it.’ Only in this the case the a fortiori argument relies upon a rather implausible twist to the usual story, namely that Niobe, having witnessed the deaths of her twelve children – and with their corpses still unburied, since everyone in the vicinity has been turned to stone – adjourns to dinner. No other telling of the myth mentions this detail: indeed, Niobe herself is usually the one turned to stone. Of course this version suits Achilles well enough: if Niobe lost all her children but not her appetite, why should Priam, who has lost merely one of his many sons and daughters, hesitate to share a meal? But did Homer expect his audience to be disconcerted by such mythical manipulation, or was it typical of what happened when myth served as consolation? And if Achilles/Homer may resort to such embroidery, did educated Romans feel inclined to do likewise? Was this part of the presence of myth in ‘everyday life’?

It might seem unduly cautious to consider reception as still an ‘emerging’ sub-discipline within Classics, but a selection of publications from recent years provides evidence of its continuous development and diversification. Edited volumes (the preferred format in reception studies’ infancy) are still very much in evidence, but, as this subject review indicates, an increasing number of monographs bear witness to the confidence and rigour of new work in the field.

The stream of publications on Socrates and his legacy – including, of course, the nature and extent of Plato's ‘Socraticism’ – continues to flow copiously. This review will consider a sample of titles which have appeared in the last four or five years (several of which have also been released in paperback form more recently). They embody a variety of research aims and approaches, and reflect some of the methodological issues involved in the enterprise of Socratic studies.

A recent special issue of the Classical Receptions Journal marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Charles Martindale's Redeeming the Text. Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception. Although the rich and various examples of classical reception scholarship that have appeared over the past two decades are by no means all cut from Martindale's cloth, the ‘seminal’ and ‘influential’ nature of his study is surely not in doubt. It is fitting, then, that this issue's round-up of reception publications focuses on a small cluster of recent studies that, like Redeeming the Text, explore the complex reception histories of Latin literature, and do so with a keen eye to the theoretical underpinnings of such scholarship; fitting, too, that our first title, Romans and Romantics, features Charles Martindale among its editors. The eighteen essays in this collection in fact range well beyond literature, with visual culture and the physical fabric of the city of Rome playing an important role; but encounters with Latin texts are a central component of the book, and the overarching theoretical and methodological framework for examining them bears the clear imprint of Martindale's reception manifesto. The introduction emphasizes the importance of remaining alert to the two-way dynamics of reception: not only do the contributors explore the ways in which Romanticism was shaped by antiquity, but they also examine the impact that Romanticism has had on subsequent views of antiquity. Although the idea of reception as a two-way process is often parroted, its implications are not always interrogated and explained so carefully as they are here. Most valuably, Romans and Romantics acknowledges and confronts the overly simple ‘myths’ that attach to our ideas of both the classical and the Romantic, showing how notions of what Romanticism ‘is’ are just as contingent and subject to distortion as those of the classical. So, for example, Timothy Saunders' fascinating chapter on ‘Originality’ successfully challenges the assumption that Romanticism was in some way antithetical or inimical to Roman studies, and that it was responsible for the lasting negative impression of Latin (literary) culture as imitative and inferior. Instead, he argues, ‘Romantic notions of originality’ (85) were more complex than we might assume, and could certainly find space for recognizing and celebrating Rome's creative use of its Greek heritage. Other chapters offer useful studies of the ‘varied, vital, and mutually sustaining’ (v) interactions between Romantics and Romans, including accessible accounts of key authors such as Shelley, Byron, and de Staël. Particularly worthwhile, though, is the final section, ‘Receptions’. By focusing on post-Romantic material, it lays bare our own modern preconceptions of the Romantic movement and encourages contemplation of how receptions of Romanticism are as important as receptions of Rome. Ralph Pite's excellent chapter on Thomas Hardy, for example, shows how this author, and many of his late nineteenth-century contemporaries, might be disappointed by visiting Rome: their expectations of the city, shaped by their own Romantic inheritance, could be undermined by the revelation of the modernized capital of a newly unified Italy, ‘threaten[ing] the post-Romantic traveller's cherished idea of ‘an eternal city frozen in time’’ (328).

The last few years have brought us handbooks, companion guides and encyclopaedias in serried ranks. In size these works have ranged from magnum (opus) through to double magnum or perhaps (in the case of the 2010 Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome) to jeroboam. The new Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Ancient History outdoes them all in capacity (clearly a rehoboam) and range. This vast work – comprising over 5,000 entries in more than 7,000 pages – advances confidently (note the bold use of the definite article in the title: TheEncyclopedia of Ancient History) beyond the confines of the ‘classical world’ and ‘ancient Greece and Rome’ to provide nothing less than a reference work for the whole of Ancient History from the Near East to the Egypt of the Pharaohs, from the Neolithic to the eighth century ce. The refusal of this work to recognize traditional boundaries would clearly have appealed to the spirit of Alexander III, the Great (whose entry spans an impressive six pages). Alexander would no doubt also be impressed by the remarkable juxtapositions which occur within this alphabetized encyclopaedia: in volume 11 we move within five pages from an Egyptian residence and town associated with Rameses II (Piramese) to the Greek district of Elis around Olympia (Pisa) to a ‘short Jewish magical text of a Late Antique Babylonian provenance’ (Pishra de-Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa; 5337). Alexander's attempts at eastward expansion proved, in the end, too much for his men. One wonders if this work too – in the form of thirteen printed volumes – may prove to be similarly overwhelming to many an undergraduate whose starting point lies in Augustan Rome or Periclean Athens:(consider, for example the daunting thirty-five pages of maps which precede the first entry in volume 1 (not ‘Aardvark’, alas, but ‘Abantes’). However, it is important to consider that the print version of this work is not the end of the project nor even the main point of the project at all. The Encyclopedia of Ancient History is a true child of the World Wide Web. It has clearly been conceptualized as an online resource (not simply as a printed text that can be viewed on a computer screen) that will continue to expand and evolve:

Originally published in Dutch in 1995, Antiquity. Greeks and Romans in Context by Frederick Naerebout and Henk Singor aims to provide (in its own modest words) a ‘reasonably comprehensive one-volume’ overview of the Greco-Roman world for undergraduates and a wider interested audience (xiii). The main focus of the work is the Greco-Roman world from 1000 bc to 500 bc (divided into the Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman Imperial periods). Each period is covered under the same three headings (in the interests of comparability): ‘Historical Outline’, ‘Social Fabric’, ‘Social Life and Mentality’. The wider context is, however, by no means ignored. The authors provide a valuable overview of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods (27–35) and of the early civilizations of Eurasia up to 900 bc (36–58). At the other end of the timeline, the book does not simply conclude with the Roman Imperial period but carries on the story up to the tenth century ad and beyond (369–94). A particular emphasis is placed in the introductory chapter on ‘The Ecology of History’ (11–23):