February 2022 – Rhea Classical Review

Oil, Wine, and the Cultural Economy of Ancient Greece from the Bronze Age to the Archaic Era

Catherine E. Pratt, Oil, Wine, and the Cultural Economy of Ancient Greece from the Bronze Age to the Archaic Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 9781108835640. Reviewed by Evan Vance, University of California, Berkeley, evan.j.vance@berkeley.edu. How did oil and wine become constitutive features of Greek culture, both within the Greek peninsula and in the broader…More

The Story of Garum

Sally Grainger. The Story of Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce and Salted Fish in the Ancient World. Routledge: London, 2021. 9781138284074; 9781315269825. Reviewed by Christopher Stedman Parmenter, University of Pennsylvania, csparment@gmail.com. Commodities bring the world together.1 This is the principle that undergirds commodity biography, the transnational study of how the production, transport, and consumption of material…More

Women and War in Roman Epic

Elina Pyy, Women and War in Roman Epic, The Language of Classical Literature 33 (Leiden: Brill, 2020). 9789004434905. Reviewed by Andrew McClellan, San Diego State University, amcclellan@sdsu.edu. It’s refreshing to see more and more scholars tackle big issues systematically across a range of authors/texts, as Pyy does here in her excellent Women and War in…More

Jerome of Stridon and the Ethics of Literary Production in Late Antiquity

Thomas E. Hunt, Jerome of Stridon and the Ethics of Literary Production in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2020). 9789004417465. Reviewed by Sarah Teets, University of Virginia, sct4ze@virginia.edu Thomas Hunt’s Jerome of Stridon and the Ethics of Literary Production in Late Antiquity explores the relationship of the literary practices of reading and writing to the material…More