This paper situates Ptolemaeus Chennus’ treatment of Alexander the Great in the Kainē Historia within the miscellany tradition, and demonstrates how he engages directly in the discourse of his day concerning Alexander. The Alexander anecdotes furthermore reveal the parodic nature of the text: rather than to inform those seeking knowledge as the author claims in the preface, the Kainē Historia provides an opportunity for the already erudite reader to flaunt their own pre-existing knowledge that is necessary to unlock the jokes that sit at the heart of each anecdote. Consequently, the Alexander anecdotes should be understood as a means through which Ptolemy mocks not only the miscellany genre, but also the obstruse knowledge contained therein and the role it played in the performance of paideia.

While the reception of Greek tragedy is by now well-trodden terrain for the classical reception scholar, responses to Old Comedy are still harder to come by. Peter Swallow's study of the reception of Aristophanes in Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century examines the playwright's appearance, following a period in which there had been ‘few translations, and no commentaries’ in English, and his obscure contemporary references proved irksome to Hellenists (23). As a result, while the political – or intentionally apolitical – dimensions of his case studies are a consistent topic throughout the study, we also see Swallow unpick some more subtle or ‘subterranean’ receptions among their more explicit companions. This is particularly the case in the chapter on W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911), who, although known as the ‘English Aristophanes’ (4), showed little in the way of direct acknowledgement of his Attic predecessor. However, characterizing Gilbert as a beloved, but moderate humourist, Swallow identifies several modes of Aristophanic reception across a number of his works. For example, his burlesque Thespis (1871) not only has similar plot points to those found in Birds but also shares with the Aristophanic Jacques Offenbach, whose ‘influence on the British tradition is impossible to overstate’ (98), a cheeky attitude towards the gods. Gilbert's body of work and attitude to classical sources is contextualized with reference to the work of J. R. Planché (1796–1880), in whom classical reception scholarship has already shown a significant amount of interest and who appears throughout this book, even having his own chapter. Here, Swallow helps to fill in some notable gaps in the history of Victorian burlesque and related performance forms.

The first two books of this review are part of the Bloomsbury ‘Cultural History’ series, which has now been around for several years. In this series, a cultural theme is explored over the course of a six-volume set that moves progressively through time from antiquity to the modern age. Each volume works as a stand-alone book exploring that particular era but, to facilitate cross-referencing, each volume is organized in the same way, with a standard sequence of chapters. It is a clever idea, but the two books here, on the theme of furniture and colour, show some of the problems of having to squeeze antiquity into categories designed for the study of later periods.

Recent archaeological discoveries, as well as new readings of the epic, suggest that the poet of the Iliad was well aware of hero cult. The funeral of Patroklos in Iliad 23 has long been recognized as also representing the funeral of Achilles. But moving away from Neoanalysis and Neo-neoanalysis, I argue that the rituals Achilles performs on behalf of his friend point to the future establishment of Achilles’ own cult that will eternally link his name to that of Patroklos. Each action Achilles performs on behalf of his friend offers a blueprint or a script for the rituals intended to constitute the dromena of Achilles’ future cult. While no actual cult of Achilles may have followed this scenario, the Homeric audience would have understood its components – mourning, feasting, ritual impurity, hair offerings, holocausts, and funeral games – as an aition, a ritual foundation, inaugurating Achilles’ cult.

For this General review, I have selected five exciting books dealing with religion. I am very happy to report that we now find selected papers of Robert Parker, one of the luminaries in the field of Greek religion, in a handsomely produced and affordable volume published in the Kernos Suppléments series, whose many virtues I have often extolled on these pages.1 The collection contains twenty articles published over the span of thirty-five years, and, in a way, provides the ‘best of’ of Parker's opera minora. But these are minora in name only: all articles gathered in this volume have been, and remain, highly influential and represent question-defining studies that shaped the way we think about discrete problems in Greek religion.

In the books reviewed there is a cumulative resistance to the normative discourse, shifting our attention away from the centre and to the margins. This might mean listening to marginalized women, from the poets themselves to characters in poetry, or people today who relate to those female characters’ experiences. It might mean pushing beyond spatial boundaries and encountering dislocation and disjunction in the hazy hinterland of the non-elite. It might mean moving the human to one side, so that nature and the nonhuman can come to the fore (and teach us about what it means to be human, along the way). These books give voice to suppressed groups including women, animals, and the land. They highlight axes of oppression, and give us tools to shift the balance of power: from the language we use to the way we relate to the world around us. And with stories of prophetic horses, sympathetic lions, and pensive pigs, their interpretations – as well as the classical tales they recount – are not to be missed!

Greece & Rome is published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Classical Association. It is under the control of a Journals Board consisting of a Chair appointed by the Council of the Classical Association, the Chair of the Council, the Secretary to Council, the Treasurer, and six further members appointed by Council.

Two splendid Oxford Handbooks deserve the opening slot of my review. The Handbook of Greek and Roman Mythography contains forty chapters, each of which closes with a helpful section on recommended further reading. The editors have organized the material in five very well-conceived parts. The first section, ‘Mythography from Archaic Greece to the Empire’, naturally wrestles with the question: When does mythography start? Two initial chapters provide their answers, and the rest of the contributions in this section offer an overview of mythography in Greek (Hellenistic and Imperial period) and Latin. The second section aims to provide an overview of individual mythographers: the stars of this section are Apollodorus, Antoninus Liberalis, Parthenius, Conon, and Hyginus. The eighteen chapters provide informative and concise introductions to authors who specialized in mythography, but also to the mythographic tendencies in authors such as Pausanias or Ovid, as well as in the scholia and even mythographical papyri. The third section is on the typical genres or interpretative models with which mythography tends to intersect: rationalizing historical approaches, philosophical allegoresis, etymologizing, catasterism, local historiography, paradoxography, creative approaches to mythography in ancient education, the role of mythography in political discourse, geography, and, finally, an investigation of the ancient terms used to designate the activity and the writings of a mythographer. The fourth section, ‘Mythography and the visual arts’, is a provocative and highly interesting experiment in viewing visual representations of myth as a mythography of sorts: can vases, frescoes, and sarcophagi be seen as visual pendants to literary mythography? These three contributions are all highly rewarding and thought-provoking. The closing, fifth, section offers richly rewarding discussions of the role of mythography in the age of Christianity, starting with the way early Christian writers draw on Greek and Latin mythographers, followed by chapters on mythography in the Byzantine Empire, the Latin West, and in the Renaissance.