Reviews
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Latin in Modern Fiction: Who Says It’s a Dead Language?
8–11 minutesHenryk Hoffmann, Latin in Modern Fiction: Who Says It’s a Dead Language? (Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2022). 9781622739493. Reviewed by Garrett Dome, independent scholar, gdome@gwu.edu. Henryk Hoffmann’s latest reference book, Latin in Modern Fiction: Who Says It’s a Dead Language?, argues, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the Latin language is not dead. The book offers readers a delightful survey of authors, particularly English and American, who have incorporated Latin into their writing. Hoffmann divides the volume into three…
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Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity
7–11 minutesSara Derbew, Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2022). 9781108492588. Reviewed by Javal Coleman, University of Texas, javalac21@utexas.edu. Race and racism in the study of Classics continues to remain a highly contested field, from Tenney Frank’s “Race Mixture in the Roman Empire” to Benjamin Isaac’s The Invention of Race in Classical Antiquity.1 Sara Derbew makes a significant contribution to this discussion with Untangling Blackness, a monograph based on her 2018 Yale PhD dissertation.…
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Did God Care? Providence, Dualism, and Will in Later Greek and Early Christian Philosophy
10–15 minutesDylan M. Burns, Did God Care? Providence, Dualism, and Will in Later Greek and Early Christian Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2020). 9789004432970. Trevor Jordan Davis, Kilgore College, tdavis@kilgore.edu. Providence is a concept that remains central to a variety of faiths across the world and as a topic of scholarly inquiry by historians of religion and the history of ideas. The notion that there is a god, or gods, who care for and at times intervene in…
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The Search for the Self in Statius’ Thebaid. Identity, Intertext and the Sublime
8–12 minutesJean-Michel Hulls, The Search for the Self in Statius’ Thebaid. Identity, Intertext and the Sublime (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021). 9783110717785. Reviewed by François Mottais, Université Paris Nanterre / École nationale des chartes, fmottais@parisnanterre.fr. Jean-Michel Hulls presents here a study of the construction of a certain number of characters from the Thebaid, primarily approached from the perspective of the question of their identity. This issue is addressed through Hulls’s in-depth analysis of how Statius engages with…
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Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Ancient Rhetoric
7–11 minutesSophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim, and Michael Edwards, eds., Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Ancient Rhetoric (Leiden: Brill, 2022). 9789004373655. Reviewed by Mary Anastasi, University of California, Los Angeles, mkanastasi@ucla.edu. It is all too easy to think of rhetoric as the weaker counterpart of real intellectual pursuits. But Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Ancient Rhetoric, an impressively comprehensive volume, shows how rhetoric goes beyond superficial eloquence, elucidating rhetoric’s influence in society, politics, literature, and…
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Greek Dialogue in Antiquity: Post-Platonic Transformations
10–14 minutesKatarzyna Jażdżewska, Greek Dialogue in Antiquity: Post-Platonic Transformations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). 9780192893352. Reviewed by John Anderson, University of Texas at Austin, johnanderson@utexas.edu. In Greek Dialogue in Antiquity (hereafter GDA), Jażdżewska reconsiders the history of dialogue from Plato’s immediate successors until the early Roman Imperial period. To convince us the genre of dialogue never completely disappeared during this time, GDA assembles complete and fragmentary evidence that might suggest the persistence of the genre alongside…
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The Life of Comedy after the Death of Plautus and Terence
11–17 minutesMathias Hanses, The Life of Comedy after the Death of Plautus and Terence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. ISBN 9780472132256. Mali Skotheim, Ashoka University, mali.skotheim@ashoka.edu.in. In this riveting volume, Hanses argues against the idea that the age of Roman comedy ended in the mid-first century BCE, and demonstrates that in fact, Roman comedy was not only widely appreciated as literature but also performed in Rome well into the Imperial period. He devotes the…
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The Grotesque Body in Graeco-Roman Antiquity
9–14 minutesAnastasia Meintani, The Grotesque Body in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, Image & Context 21 (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2022). 9783110691733. Reviewed by India Watkins Nattermann, University of Cologne, inatterm@uni-koeln.de. The Grotesque Body in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, a reworking of Anastasia Meintani’s dissertation, provides a much-needed reevaluation of the Graeco-Roman corpus of grotesque miniatures. She sheds light on these often-overlooked figurines, arguing they “embodied a grand agenda of joys as well as of fears and social anxieties” (p.…
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Rhetorical Economy in Augustine’s Theology
8–13 minutesBrian Gronewoller, Rhetorical Economy in Augustine’s Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 9780197566558. Reviewed by Zachary Taylor, University of Chicago, zjtaylor@uchicago.edu. In Book IX of his Confessions, Augustine dramatically describes his retirement from an ambitious career as a rhetorician in the imperial Roman bureaucracy. In accordance with a frequent theme in the text up to this point, he draws a sharp contrast between the vain ambitions of his former peers and pupils at Milan and…
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Characterizing Old Greek Deuteronomy as an Ancient Translation
9–14 minutesJean Maurais, Characterizing Old Greek Deuteronomy as an Ancient Translation, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 203 (Leiden: Brill, 2022). 9789004516571. Reviewed by Joseph Scales, University of Agder, joseph.scales@uia.no. Jean Maurais frames this study as an exploration of the active decisions made by the translator of the Old Greek (OG) Deuteronomy. Rather than viewing the translation of Deuteronomy as simply the rendering of a Hebrew text in Greek, he seeks to understand…
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