Reviews
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Aristotle and the Animals: The Logos of Life Itself
12–18 minutesClaudia Zatta, Aristotle and the Animals: The Logos of Life Itself (London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2022). 9780367409494. Reviewed by Charissa A. Jaeger-Sanders, The Graduate Theological Union, cjaeger-sanders@ses.gtu.edu. In Aristotle and the Animals: The Logos of Life Itself, Claudia Zatta offers a masterful, nuanced, intense philological dive into the word choices that make up Aristotle’s philosophy of science and life, particularly his zoocentric understanding of animals and their connections to humans. Zatta endeavors to…
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Reconstructing Satyr Drama
10–14 minutesAndreas P. Antonopoulos, Menelaos M. Christopoulos, and George W. M. Harrison, eds., Reconstructing Satyr Drama (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021). 9783110725216. Reviewed by Joshua A. Streeter, The Ohio State University, joshua.a.streeter@gmail.com. It is a welcome irony that the massive Reconstructing Satyr Drama, volume 12 of De Gruyter’s MythosEikonPoiesis series, concerns the dramatic genre for which we have the scarcest evidence. In 2016, Andreas P. Antonopoulos and Menelaos M. Christopoulos organized a conference in Patras (Greek Satyr…
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Amor Belli: Love and Strife in Lucan’s Bellum Civile
14–21 minutesGiulio Celotto, Amor Belli: Love and Strife in Lucan’s Bellum Civile (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2022). 9780472132874. Reviewed by Kathleen Cruz, University of California, Davis, kancruz@ucdavis.edu. In Amor Belli: Love and Strife in Lucan’s Bellum Civile, Giulio Celotto argues that Lucan’s poem can be profitably understood as a unified work through its guiding pursuit of the dialectic between Love and Strife as systematized in Empedoclean philosophy. Over an introduction, five chapters, and…
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Analysing the Boundaries of the Ancient Roman Garden: (Re)Framing the Hortus
10–15 minutesVictoria Austen, Analysing the Boundaries of the Ancient Roman Garden: (Re)Framing the Hortus (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). 9781350265189. Reviewed by A.L. McMichael, Barnard College, amcmicha@barnard.edu. Ostensibly, ancient gardens are places that no longer exist. Yet in Analysing the Boundaries of the Ancient Roman Garden, author Victoria Austen touches on many of the ways that we engage with ephemeral garden spaces—collective memory, texts, legal documents, wills, songs, poems, narratives, medicinal instructions, images, oral traditions, stories, and…
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Cosa: The Sculpture and Furnishings in Stone and Marble
5–8 minutesJacquelyn Collins-Clinton, Cosa: The Sculpture and Furnishings in Stone and Marble (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020). 9780472131594. Reviewed by Becca Gaborek, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, rmgab@email.unc.edu. Jacquelyn Collins-Clinton’s meticulously crafted catalogue is an invaluable complement to existing publications on Cosa. It represents decades worth of research on the topic of the Roman site’s sculpture and furnishings in stone and marble, which began as her 1970 doctoral dissertation directed by Otto…
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Roman Imperial Portrait Practice in the Second Century AD: Marcus Aurelius and Faustina the Younger
9–13 minutesChristian Niederhuber, Roman Imperial Portrait Practice in the Second Century AD: Marcus Aurelius and Faustina the Younger, Oxford Monographs on Classical Archaeology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). 9780192845658. Reviewed by Kira Jones, independent scholar, kirakjones@gmail.com. Portraits of notable individuals were ubiquitous throughout Rome, and none more so than those of the imperial family. They could be made of metal, marble, precious stone, paint, or even appear as graffiti; they were on display in private homes…
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Rome and the Colonial City: Rethinking the Grid
11–16 minutesSofia Greaves and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, eds., Rome and the Colonial City: Rethinking the Grid (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2022). 9781789257809. Reviewed by Maarten Schmaal, University of Groningen, m.p.schmaal@rug.nl. This hefty volume is one of the outputs of the ‘Impact of the Ancient City’ project (funded by the European Research Council). It consists of the proceedings of the ‘Rome and the Colonial City’ conference, which was held under the umbrella of this project in January 2020 at…
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Geographies of Myth and Places of Identity: The Strait of Scylla and Charybdis in the Modern Imagination
8–11 minutesMarco Benoît Carbone, Geographies of Myth and Places of Identity: The Strait of Scylla and Charybdis in the Modern Imagination (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022). 9781350118201. Reviewed by Patricia Y. Hatcher, CUNY Graduate Center, phatcher@gradcenter.cuny.edu. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patriciahatcher/Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/fallaxharuspex.bsky.social Almost one hundred years ago, Mikhail Bakhtin developed the theory of chronotope, the idea that “…places [are] defined by ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’ expressed through their literary renown” (p. 15). This intriguing device helps…
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Narrating Power and Authority in Late Antique and Medieval Hagiography across East and West
11–17 minutesGhazzal Dabiri, ed., Narrating Power and Authority in Late Antique and Medieval Hagiography across East and West (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021). 9782503590653. Reviewed by Richard Broome, University of Leeds, rickybroome@hotmail.com. Hagiography—a genre once seen as containing texts that had to be mined for historical nuggets buried within superstitious nonsense—has become one of the most studied genres of medieval literature since the last decades of the twentieth century. Hagiographical texts are now treated as worthwhile sources about…
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Plutarch: On the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon
9–13 minutesLuisa Lesage Gárriga. Plutarch: On the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon: Introduction, Edition, English Translation, and Commentary to the Critical Edition, Brill’s Plutarch Studies 7 (Leiden: Brill, 2021). 9789004458079. Reviewed by Chance E. Bonar, Tufts University (chance.bonar@tufts.edu). Plutarch’s literary repertoire is vast and at times unwieldy, particularly given the multiple hats that he wore throughout his lifetime: biographer, priest, philosopher, Boeotian statesman. In her recent critical edition (as well as subsequent…
Rhea Classical Reviews 