For those readers seeking an engaging general introduction to the classical world, The Ancient World by Jeremy Toner would make an excellent first port of call. It is part of a new (though hardly original) series of ‘Small Introductions to Big Topics’ which thus far includes Politics, Art in History, and Shakespeare. The book chooses to focus not on toga-clad Romans and gleaming marbles temples but on that ‘other’ ancient world filled with noise, colour, death, and disease, populated not primarily by emperors and poets but by the ‘silent’ majority of slaves and the freeborn poor. Despite the catch-all title, this is a book which is more obviously about the Roman than the Greek world. This is, however, a small grumble and Toner's enthusiasm for his subject is infectious. Of particular interest is the discussion of watermills and the generation of energy (71–6), comparison between the empires of Rome and China (104–18), and the way in which a ‘Rome-coloured vision’ from the medieval period up to the high-classical watermark of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries informed the West's perspective of, and engagement with, Islam (122–30). Illustrations are not abundant (and it is a shame not to have included a picture of the Vietnam Memorial discussed on pages 135–7), but they are decent enough, with several helpful maps of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds (with the seas – the Black Sea and Red Sea included – coloured pink – neatly complementing the book's presentation of a less-familiar-looking ancient world).

As A. K. Cotton acknowledges at the beginning of her monograph Platonic Dialogue and the Education of the Reader, ‘the idea that a reader's relationship with Plato's text is analogous to that of the respondent with the discussion leader’ within the dialogue, and ‘that we engage in a dialogue with the text almost parallel to theirs’, ‘is almost a commonplace of Platonic criticism’ (4). But Cotton has the merit of articulating this commonplace much more clearly and precisely than is often done, and of asking how exactly the dialogue between interlocutors is supposed to affect the dialogue of the reader with the text, and what kind of reader response Plato is inviting. Not surprisingly, her starting point is Plato's notorious (written) concerns about written texts expressed in the Phaedrus: ‘writing cannot contain or convey knowledge’, and will give to the ‘receiver’ the mistaken perception that he or she has learned something – that is, has acquired knowledge – from reading (6–7). She claims that the Phaedrus also suggests, however, that a written text, in the right hands, ‘may have a special role to play in awakening the soul of its receiver towards knowledge’ (17). I have no doubt that Plato thought as much, but Cotton's reference to the language of hupomnēmata at 276d3, and to the way in which sensible images act as hupomnēmata for the recollection of the Forms earlier in the dialogue, fails to support her case: Socrates remarks in that passage that writings can serve only as ‘reminders’ for their authors (16). The book's central thesis is that the way in which writing can awaken the reader's soul ‘towards knowledge’ is not by pointing the reader, however indirectly, implicitly, non-dogmatically, or even ironically, towards the right views, but by developing the reader/learner's ‘ability to engage in a certain way’ in dialectical inquiry (26). The familiar developments between ‘early’, ‘middle’, and ‘late’ dialogues are thus accepted but seen as part of a single coherent educational project towards the reader's/learner's full development of what Cotton calls ‘dialectical virtue’. Plato's reader is invited to treat the characterization of the interlocutors within the dialogues, and the description of their dialectical behaviour, ‘as a commentary on responses appropriate and inappropriate in the reader’ (28). Cotton's programme, clearly sketched in Chapter 1, is ambitious and sophisticated, and is carried out with impressive ingenuity in the following six chapters (the eighth and final chapter, besides summarizing some of the book's conclusions, introduces a notion of ‘civic virtue’ which does not appear to be sufficiently grounded on the analyses in the rest of the book). An especially instructive aspect of her inquiry is the attention paid to the ‘affective’ dimension of the interlocutor's and reader's responses: through the representation of the interlocutors in his written dialogues, and the labours to which he submits us as readers, Plato teaches us that ‘the learner's engagement must be cognitive-affective in character; and it involves a range of specific experiences, including discomfort, frustration, anger, confusion, disbelief, and a desire to flee’ (263). Perhaps because of her belief that what the Platonic dialogues are about is not philosophical views or doctrines but a process of education in ‘dialectical virtue’, Cotton has remarkably little to say concerning the psychological and epistemological underpinnings of the views on, and methods of, education which she attributes to Plato. The Cave allegory in the Republic, which is unsurprisingly adopted as an instructive image of Plato's insights on learning and educational development in Chapter 2, is discussed without any reference to the various cognitive stages which the phases of the ascent in and outside the Cave are meant to represent. Two central features of Plato's conception of learning identified by Cotton – the individual learner's own efforts and participation, and the necessity of some trigger to catalyse the learning process (263) – are not connected, as one might well have expected, to the ‘theory of recollection’ or the related imagery of psychic pregnancy or Socratic midwifery. Even Cotton's laudable stress on the ‘affective’ aspects of the learning process could have been helpfully complemented by some consideration of Platonic moral psychology. Despite these reservations, and the unavoidable limitations and oversimplifications involved in any attempt to characterize Plato's corpus as one single, unified project, I believe that readers with an interest in Platonic writing and method will benefit greatly from Cotton's insightful inquiry.

In American Arcadia, Peter Holliday offers readers a sumptuous and fascinating account of ‘California and the Classical Tradition’. Beautifully presented and illustrated, this book is not only a thought-provoking and pleasurable read but also a valuable addition to the body of scholarship that has explored classical receptions in the United States at some length in recent years. Much of that scholarship has focused on now familiar terrain, from the fixation on antiquity in Hollywood and popular culture more broadly, to the grandiose evocations of classical architecture in eastern cities such as Washington, DC, and New York. California, by contrast, for all its prominence on the world stage and in the cultural imagination, might not spring so readily to mind as a rich locus of classical receptions, but Holliday convincingly demonstrates ‘how Californians used classical antiquity as a metaphor for fashioning the Golden State and their own lives in it’ (355). Although well-known buildings such as the Getty Villa, Hearst Castle, and Caesar's Palace rightly receive lengthy discussion, there are a wealth of examples which are likely to be new to many readers, from the nineteenth-century Hungarian refugee building a Pompeian villa in a self-consciously Arcadian landscape, to the 1960s development of the CalArts campus, whose Modernist architects yet proclaimed their debt to Athens and Rome. Nor is the book solely concerned with architecture. Although the built environment is at its core, the full range of Californian identification with, and appropriation of, classical imagery and ideology is explored. The final chapter, for example, shows how pursuers of the quintessentially Californian healthy lifestyle and body beautiful knowingly looked to classical paradigms on multiple occasions. Resisting the temptation to frame all of this in a conventional ‘classical tradition’ approach, Holliday takes pains to show the full extent of the interaction and innovation that characterizes Californian classicism, and the resulting study is highly recommended.

If you still haven't chosen a book to take with to the desert island, I have a suggestion: L'encyclopédie du ciel. At 1,202 pages, it will keep you occupied day and night: what you read as text by day will help you read by night in the sky. This wonderful and extremely useful book is as difficult to classify as it is to put down. Essentially, it is a compendium of Greco-Roman discourse on the stars and planets, divided into three parts. The first (‘Les images: histoire et mythologie: voir et raconter’) is about the constellations and the planets. It opens with a catalogue in which each constellation is illustrated, explained, and accompanied with appropriate quotations from Eratosthenes’ Catasterismoi and Hyginus’ Astronomica. There follow essays about the names of the constellations, on the Sun, Moon, and the planets, and one on Greek and Roman creation myths. All are accompanied by long passages of appropriate Greek and Latin texts in translation. The second part of the book (‘Les lois: l'astronomie: observer et calculer’) is about the ancient attempts to make sense of and explain the stars and planets as a system, about calendars, and about ancient astronomical instruments and objects. This part of the book also contains a complete translation of Hipparchus’ Commentary on the Phaenomena of Eudoxus and Aratus. It closes with an account of Greek star catalogues. The third part of the book is concerned with various attempts to interpret the celestial phenomena (‘Les messages: signes et influence: interpréter et prédire’). It includes, but is not restricted to, astrology; philosophical ideas are also discussed, such as astral apotheosis, the ascent of the soul through the sky, and the music of the spheres. There is a dictionary of astronomical and astrological terms and a dictionary of ancient astronomers and authors dealing with astronomy. The book closes with parallel star catalogues of Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy.