Ancient history often seems to lag behind other areas of history when it comes to adopting new methodological and theoretical approaches. This crop of books, however, does offer contributions in two notable and significant areas of current scholarship: first in the area of memory studies, and second representing what we might call the ‘cognitive turn’. In addition there is a robust defence of a structuralist-informed approach to Greco-Roman religion, as well, of course, as books representing the more traditional areas of ancient history such as epigraphy and biography.

A Little Greek Reader by James Morwood and Stephen Anderson forms a companion volume to A Little Latin Reader by Mary English and Georgia Irby (though one might be seduced into thinking from the cover illustration and italic title print that this is a volume from the JACT Reading Greek stable). The twenty-plus chapters focus on different points of Greek grammar (for example, ‘Indirect Statement’ [64–74] and ‘Result Clauses’ [99–106]), prefaced with brief grammatical introductions and then illustrated with a selection of unadapted passages in prose and verse. Each passage is supported by linguistic and contextual notes, and an extensive vocabulary is supplied at the back of the book. Although billed as ‘an ideal supplement for undergraduate courses in beginning and intermediate Greek’ (back cover blurb) it should also be of use to sixth-form teachers for revision and extension work (it was, in fact, trialled at the JACT Greek Summer School in 2013). Appendices supply short biographical notes and offer help on meter and dialect. There is also a useful guide to literary terms – though the definition of ‘hyperbaton’ – ‘the dislocation of normal word order, by way of displacing one part of one clause into another’ (213; our emphasis) – seems unnecessarily proscriptive.

It is an obvious strategy of revisionism, in Classical archaeology: to see what J. J. Winckelmann said about this or that object, or sort of object, and then to measure ‘how far we have come’, in terms of interpretative enlightenment since the late eighteenth century. With the great Nilotic mosaic of Palestrina, that strategy looks at first sight promising enough. Winckelmann's theory was that it must represent a heroic narrative – specifically, the curious variant of Helen's abduction in which Paris carries off merely an eidolon, while the real Helen is secreted by the gods to Egypt and eventually retrieved from there by Menelaus (for details of the story, see Euripides’ Helen). Winckelmann proposed Menelaus to be the foreground figure in greenish armour holding up a drinking-horn, Helen the lady attendant with a ladle – but there was little else to support his reading, and so alternative theories have multiplied (naturally enough – since the date of the mosaic is not absolutely established). In this case, however, it seems we are still short of a satisfactory resolution. By including discussion of the mosaic in her survey of Egypt in Italy, Molly Swetnam-Burland admits that it could as easily post- as pre-date Rome's annexation of the Ptolemaic kingdom; and yet she does not want it to be generically categorized as a sample of nilotica. ‘Representations of Egypt were rarely if ever to be considered in isolation’ (154). This could be the motto of her study, which explores how objects and ideas from and about Egypt became ‘recontextualized’ by the Romans. We may not have a definitive account for the Palestrina mosaic, but overall the results of this approach are worth reading. Analysis of the process whereby the first two obelisks were brought from Egypt to Rome, for example, demands that we do not content ourselves with seeing these transplanted megaliths as simply the trophies of Aegypto capta, nor just signs of Rome's attempt to rival Alexandria, but part of a claim by Augustus to pharaonic/cosmic powers. The author does not confine herself to archaeology: a substantial section of the book is devoted to an analysis of Juvenal's Satire 15.

Does the discipline of classical reception studies shirk questions of distinctiveness and value? Such is the gauntlet thrown down by Michael Silk, Ingo Gildenhard, and Rosemary Barrow in their 2014 magnum opus, The Classical Tradition. Full consideration of this important work must be reserved for a later issue. It is nonetheless worth rehearsing its opening distinction between ‘the classical tradition’ and ‘reception’, since thinking about it has informed our reading of a number of the books reviewed below.