The importance of the concept of competition as an explanation of religious change in antiquity has come to prominence in recent times, not least through the work of John North and Angelos Chaniotis. For North the emphasis lies in the movement of religion from a purely civic entity, part of the very fabric of a city or locality, to one characterised by religious group identities, a change which brings about something akin to a religious market place. Chaniotis argues that change is best explained by highlighting evidence of competition for prestige between different cities and shrines, often expressed in a proliferation of superlatives describing a local god. North's work has generated more discussion than Chaniotis's, who to some extent follows in the shadow of the former, but both are important voices in an evolving discussion, which, picking up on nineteenth-century ideas of the classical world as agonistic, potentially presents a more fractious vision of Greek and Roman religion than has normally prevailed.

It is to this developing debate that the volume under review seeks to contribute. In their introduction the editors note that there is still room for discussion both of the forms taken and the roles played by competition, however conceived, as well as the theoretical of a focus on competition. As the editors make plain, the discussion is made more complex by the fact that religion as a distinct and separate concept, as conceived in the West since perhaps the seventeenth century, would have been alien to the ancients, and so conceptions of religious competition necessarily blur into areas of the cultural, ethnic and political. In this context religion can be seen as both driving competition and contributing to it.

The essays range widely both in the historical periods covered, and the way in which competition is conceived. Tom Boiy looks at the rise to prominence of the god Anu in the city of Uruk in the Hellenistic period and the concomitant decline of the importance of Marduk, attributing such a phenomenon to historical circumstances rather than ideas of competition. Esther Eidinow revises views that centres of oracular activity in ancient Greece, like Delphi and Dodona, were in competition with each other. E. Lefka examines the reasons for the condemnation of certain prominent individuals in ancient Greece, not least Protagoras and Socrates, for impiety, arguing that these were only partially religious. D. Briquel writes interestingly on the so-called Etrusca disciplina in Rome, exercised by the haruspices. Though the Romans showed a certain reserve towards reliance upon foreign arts for such activity, Briquel shows how such activity perdured well into late antiquity and came to be seen as a national alternative to Christianity. F. van Haelperen looks at evidence for religious competition in ancient Ostia, the city port of Rome, and is generally sceptical of readings of the archaeological remains along such lines. Van Nuffelen seeks to revise views that competition came to an end in antiquity once Christianity had become the state religion. Disputations continued to take place, and though in some senses artificial, they continued to give voice to an ideal of free debate; and persuasion continued to be a means by which to express religious difference. V. Rosenberger looks at the way in which ascetics inverted the ways in which food could be used to express completion among ascetics – in this context the less eaten the better – showing also how ideas functions on multiple levels. A. Busine shows how Christians adapted in a variety of ways ideas of civic identity which were expressed through elaborate mythologies, showing how such mythologies were eventually dissolved into a Christian equivalent. David Engels, in the longest essay of the volume, shows how ideas of the antiquity of cultic activity, so important to Greek and Roman society, came to be adopted and transformed in different ways by Jewish, Christian and then Islamic writers, often with a strong polemical edge. A final essay by Danny Praet looks at the various theories of Cumont and Renan, which explained the success of Christianity. Both, in different ways, give voice to a broadly developmental view of religious change, in which qualitative judgements about the character of religions play a prominent part in an ordered and periodised narrative. Cumont, it turns out, and for probably political reasons, was far more reticent about giving voice to his understanding of why Christianity succeeded than was Renan, but both implied that it was a stage in the development of man's religious quest. These two titans of an earlier age embody a very different, if important stage, in the discussion of late antique religious change.

There is much that is worth pondering in this volume. Inevitably one does not emerge from it with a single view of the viability of ideas of competition as a means of understanding religious change in antiquity, or indeed of how the concept of competition should be understood. The metaphor of the market, for instance, clearly has its limits, however conceived, though it surely is the case that religious choice grew from the Hellenistic period onwards, not least through the expansion of empires and the movement of cults from their original localities to an ever-growing diaspora. Competition in this context can be understood along a spectrum whose endpoint is proselytism, a subject to which, interestingly, no one essay of this volume is devoted (though it is mentioned by the editors in their introduction). North, whose work, as already noted, is so important for the discussion of religious competition in antiquity, argued that Christianity's commitment to active proselytism constituted a novum in the ancient world, a view that Martin Goodman gave voice to in a well-known work of the mid-1990s. Inevitably, Christianity and its rise can be construed as the ghost in the room for discussions of this kind. The present volume, however, in its desire to study the subject of competition more broadly, is only partially devoted to Christianity, reflecting current historiography in which the latter is seen as a reflection of wider religious change rather than its prime mover, a change to which Renan and Cumont might have objected but which has much to commend it.

It is a pity that this interesting volume should be marred by the too frequent appearance of ungrammatical and infelicitous English. While many of the authors do not have English as their primary language, the editors could perhaps have gone to greater lengths to ensure that the English was consistently good.