Whither Classical Studies? What new directions will it take? This is the second book to appear in the I. B. Tauris series New Directions in Classics edited by Duncan Kennedy and Charles Martindale. The series aims, in the editors’ words, to promote ‘an open-minded classics committed to debate and to dialogue’ and is pitched to a broad audience ‘who want to engage seriously with ideas’. Duncan Kennedy's own book for the series certainly fits the brief. There was a time when innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to the field invariably show-cased their commitment to literary and cultural theory. However strong the resistance in certain circles, feminism, structuralism, new historicism and post-colonialism, as the editors acknowledge, have changed the face of classical studies. Much of the energy which was previously invested in theory has over the last decade or so been redirected to the area of Classical Reception. Reception Studies — interdisciplinary by their nature — sometimes built on these theoretical approaches but at other times relied on more conventional methodologies. The editors of this series have pioneered both a theoretically sophisticated model of reception and a theoretically inflected approach to the ancient world. But if this book is any indication, what they now are doing through this series, is creating a new language for Classics at the intersection of theory and the history of ideas.

The first chapter of Antiquity and the Meanings of Time exemplifies this new approach beautifully. After having introduced Paul Ricoeur's observation: ‘time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence’ (ix) in the preface, K. goes on to analyse Augustine's Confessions. K.'s is a masterful reading which shows the complex entanglements of time, narrative and humanity in Augustine's text. What K. exposes is the theological dimension of Augustine's narrative choices. If, as Henry Chadwick remarks, language ‘is a symptom of the fallen condition of humanity’ (24), the author's ability to control narrative parallels the divine control over human history. K. traces the oscillations of these positions through the shifting temporalities of Augustine's Confessions. The chapter ends with a discussion of Roland Barthes’ famous essay on the ‘The Death of the Author’ whose title K. sees as a clear echo of Nietzsche's ‘Death of God’. Barthes and Augustine, K. argues, occupy opposite ends of the theological spectrum, and yet, through their engagements with narrative, both testify to the power of language to raise crucial questions about the nature of divinity. Despite being framed by insightful analyses of Ricoeur and Barthes, K.'s is neither a Ricoeurian nor a Barthesian reading of Augustine. Rather, Ricoeur, Augustine and Barthes are placed in enlightening juxtaposition with each text enriching the reading of the last. Although there is a recognition that Augustine may have influenced Ricoeur and Barthes, K. is not writing a reception history. Rather, what he produces through this collision of perspectives is the ‘philosophy of ancient and modern literature’ promised in his subtitle.

If theology emerges as the central thematic of the first chapter, then history and politics become the dominant themes of the second. Turning his attention to Virgil's Aeneid, a text which K. has analysed with great subtly elsewhere, he shows how time and narrative are woven into the Imperial fabric of the epic. The imperium sine fine proclaimed by Jupiter is an effect of narrative as much as a ‘representation’ of worldly domination beyond the text. Again, K. finds his modern interlocutors: Derrida, Fukuyama and Hardt and Negri are prominent, but Virgil, Augustine and even Polybius are also called upon to do the work of theory in this chapter.

Chs 3 and 4 in turn deal respectively with ‘Determination’ and ‘Self-Determination’ and here Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Livy's Histories act as the key texts. K. uses Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus to explore the notions of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ time. He opens with Gary Saul Morson's assertion that while in life time is ‘open’ to a plurality of different outcomes, literature, with its compulsion for closure, represents time as ‘closed’ and predetermined. Morson worries that the temporal world-view adopted in literature can affect our experience of temporality in ‘life’. As K. puts it rather more winningly: ‘As you exit the theatre, can you be entirely clear that you have stepped outside the metaphysical discourses which intersect Oedipus?’ (100). As the chapter progresses K. uses Oedipus to address the temporalities of interpretation. He asks whether literature, in its ability to anticipate the theories to which it gives rise, can upset the conventional chronologies of literary criticism. The fourth chapter investigates the phenomenon of counterfactual histories and the productive introduction of the question ‘what if …’ into standard historical narratives. It is an indication of K.'s skill that Heidegger and Livy emerge as natural interlocutors in this exploration.

The final chapter concludes with a return to theology via the antitheology of Lucretius and Epicurus and the ‘Scientific Revolution’ to which they gave birth. One of the themes which reappears insistently here, as it does in the book as a whole, is that while texts exist in time they also resist their own temporal determinism and open onto unknown futures. The rich potentiality which K. locates in the texts he reads perfectly characterizes the book he writes. K.'s volume, and the series to which it belongs, boldly announce the future potential of antiquity.