The Hollywood movie Stranger than Fiction (2006) centres on a tax inspector, Harold Crick, who begins to hear a voice inside his head. This voice, he gradually realizes, belongs to the narrator of a book in which he is the central character. As the plot unfurls, the narrator begins to drop hints that Harold will die at the end of the story. Understandably disturbed by these intimations, Harold decides to confront a university professor, and between the two of them they identify the author as one Kay Eiffel. Harold then tracks down the author and begs her not to kill him off.

Ekphrasis is a slippery topic. Although included in this volume as a rhetorical figure (or figure of speech), its uses and functions far exceed this single classification. Whether defined as a rhetorical exercise, a literary genre (or mode), a narrative digression, a species of description, or a poetic (even metapoetic or meta-representational) technique, the properties associated with ancient ekphrasis are not in doubt. First and foremost are the qualities of enargeia (vividness), sapheneia (clarity), and phantasia (mental image), which, taken together, aim to turn listeners (or readers) into viewers and to evoke an emotional response through an appeal to the immediacy of an imagined presence. Yet, beyond this brief definition, the word ‘ekphrasis’ immediately ushers us into a whole set of questions regarding its intermedial status in a potential contest between verbal and visual representations, the uses of mimesis with regard to verisimilitude (reality–illusion; truth–fiction), and its cognitive, psychological, and mnemonic values in the cultural expectations of its era. It would not be hyperbole to suggest that no other rhetorical term has aroused such interest in recent years among classicists and non-classicists alike, involving aesthetic considerations, theories of vision, modes of viewing, mental impressions, and the complex relationships between word and image.

Dio Chrysostom's First Tarsian Oration (Or. 33) is arguably one of his most entertaining works; it is certainly one of the most peculiar. The speech, which some scholars date to the reign of Vespasian (69–79 ce) and others to that of Trajan (98–112 ce), is addressed to the citizens of Tarsus, a prosperous city in the province of Cilicia in south-eastern Asia Minor. In terms of content and structure, the First Tarsian bears less resemblance to the more ‘political’ Second Tarsian (Or. 34) than to two of Dio's better-known speeches, the Rhodian (Or. 31) and the Alexandrian (Or. 32). In these, as in the First Tarsian, Dio severely criticizes his putative addressees – the given city's inhabitants – for practising an activity that he finds reprehensible and symptomatic of deeper moral failings. For the Alexandrians it is their uncontrolled and wanton behaviour at public performances; for the Rhodians their economically profitable but ethically suspect habit of re-dedicating statues by changing their labels. The First Tarsian's similarities with the Alexandrian are particularly striking: both feature a long exordium in which Dio explains why he has decided to blame and chastise, rather than praise, his listeners, followed by a sustained attack on the vice in question that employs a battery of remarkably parallel mythological allusions, rhetorical analogies, and anecdotes.

Sixty years ago, on 25 April 1953, probably the most influential scientific article of the twentieth century appeared. Its uninviting title, ‘Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid’, concealed the revolutionary discovery by the molecular biologists James Watson and Francis Crick of the structure of what became known as ‘the molecule of life’. The ‘radically different structure’ that they proposed for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA) had ‘two helical chains each coiled round the same axis’. ‘Both chains’, they wrote, ‘follow right-handed helices, but owing to the dyad the sequences of the atoms in the two chains run in opposite directions.’ When Bruno J. Strasser asked in the same journal fifty years later ‘Who cares about the double helix?’, he answered that it marked ‘an age of (lost) innocence, when youth, intelligence and self-assurance were sufficient to make great discoveries in science’.

Street fights seem to have been as common in classical Athens as they are in modern cities. One incident, which probably took place a few years after 394 bc, involved two rivals for the attentions of a young Plataian, Theodotos, apparently a slave and a rent boy. There was a history of violent disagreement between the opponents, one of whom was a wealthy, middle-aged Athenian citizen whose name we do not know. The other, a (probably) younger man named Simon, claimed to have had a contract with Theodotos for sexual services, which was breached when the older man enticed him away. For the sake of a quiet life, the older man left Athens for a time, taking Theodotos with him, and did not come back until he thought Simon would have forgotten about the boy. But not long after their return there was another fight, accounts of which conflicted sharply. According to Simon, the older man went to his house threatening to kill him, and attacked him with some broken pottery, causing a serious head wound. The older man's story was that Simon and his friends got drunk over lunch, then lay in wait near the house where he and Theodotos were inside, and jumped on them as they came out. After a chase through the streets, the incident developed into a general mêlée in which everyone ended up with a broken head. The older man claimed that he had considered prosecuting Simon for assault, but had been too embarrassed and fearful of damaging his reputation. Four years later, though, Simon prosecuted him for trauma ek pronoias, which we may tentatively translate as ‘intentional wounding’.

In a seminal article, J. R. Morgan asserts that the greater part of Heliodorus' Aethiopica explores ‘the antithesis between true love and various corrupt or otherwise unsatisfactory alternatives’. This it does not only through Cnemon's novella, which is narrated mainly in the first two books of the novel, but also through the incident involving the Persian queen Arsake, which to a certain extent replicates Cnemon's story. This narrative duplication is enhanced by the fact that both stories are intertextually related to the myth of Phaedra. Building on Morgan's argument, my contention is that the antithesis between pure love, conditioned by sophrosyne, and illicit desire permeates the entire novel and does not exclusively concern the primary couple or the persons involved in the abovementioned episodes, but relates to almost all the main characters. More importantly, it is precisely this antithesis that constitutes the most fundamental component of the work's structural principle or thesis.

Latin writers in the ancient world are well known to have been familiar with earlier Greek writings, as well as with the first commentaries on those, and to have taken over literary genres as well as topics and motifs from Greece for their own works. But, as has been recognized in modern scholarship, this engagement with Greek material does not mean that Roman writers typically produced Latin copies of pieces by their Greek predecessors. In the terms of contemporary literary terminology, the connection between Latin and Greek literature is rather to be described as an intertextual relationship, which became increasingly complex, since later Latin authors were also influenced by their Roman predecessors.

The Roman Empire received goods from eastern lands through a variety of overland routes crossing the Arabian Peninsula and Mesopotamia, and through seaborne trade via the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. In particular, the sea routes that utilized the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean enabled a significant volume of goods to be imported from the East on ships that may often have been of several hundred tons' capacity. The scale of the trade was significant enough for Pliny to claim that 100 million sesterces were being sent annually to India, China, and Arabia. The veracity of these figures has come in for some debate, especially with the publication of a document known as the Muziris Papyrus, which reveals that a shipment of nard, ivory, and textiles received at one of the Egyptian Red Sea ports in the second century ad was valued at the equivalent of roughly 7 million sesterces. It is nevertheless clear, particularly from the archaeological and numismatic evidence, that Roman trade with the East peaked in the first and second centuries ad, followed by subsequent decline and a limited revival in the Late Roman period.

Richmond Lattimore's translation of the Iliad was first published in 1951, to great acclaim: ‘The feat is so decisive that it is reasonable to foresee a century or so in which nobody will try again to put the Iliad in English verse.’ That testimonial is reproduced on the back cover of the latest reprint, even though Robert Fitzgerald falsified his own prophecy less than a quarter of a century later. Richard Martin's introduction ends by comparing Lattimore's rendering of 9.319–27 with three older and three more recent verse translations. Lattimore's superiority to Fitzgerald, Fagles, and Lombardo emerges clearly – but that's in a short excerpt. I've always felt a stiffness, and a lack of variety and narrative drive, in Lattimore's version that makes it intolerable for reading at length. In a long epic, that's a serious failing.

Gareth Williams’ engaging new study of Seneca's Natural Questions is called The Cosmic Viewpoint, a pleasing title that evokes his central thesis: Seneca's study of meteorological phenomena is a work where science and ethics are combined, designed to raise the reader up towards a cosmic perspective far beyond mortal woes, the better to combat adversity in Stoic style. Chapter 1, ‘Interiority and Cosmic Consciousness in the Natural Questions’, introduces the idea of Seneca's worldview, contrasting it in particular with the approaches of Cicero and of Pliny. In contrast to Cicero, Seneca's emphasis is on interiorization, and his ‘cosmic consciousness’ takes his perspective far above the Imperial consciousness of Pliny's Encyclopaedia, which for all its all-encompassing scope still takes a terrestrial Roman perspective. In Chapter 2, Williams addresses the question of how Seneca's moralizing interludes are to be understood in relation to the technical discussion of meteorology; this is a key issue for Williams, since his overall thesis is that Seneca's work has an integrated ‘physico-ethical agenda’ (73). From now on the chapters reflect this integration between the moral and the scientific. Chapter 3 focuses on Seneca's discussion of the flooding of the Nile in Book 4a and its integration with the theme of the vice of flattery. In a nice discussion of ‘The Rhetoric of Science’, Chapter 4 argues that Seneca's presentation in Book 4b of his investigation into the question of how hail and snow are produced is such as to invite critical reflection on the scientific procedures involved (these procedures are: reliance on influential authority, argument by analogy, argument by bold inference, competing arguments, and superstition in contention with reason), but that the aim is not to reject the possibility of attaining scientific truth, but rather to suggest that to attain it one must rise above these petty arguments to find the cosmic perspective, and that to do this is in itself morally improving regardless of any knowledge gained. Chapter 5 discusses Seneca's treatment of the winds in Book 5 and his implicit contrast of the natural phenomena with the transgressive actions of human beings who plunder the earth's resources and wage war on one another. Chapter 6 examines the ‘therapeutic program’ (256) of Seneca's treatment of earthquakes in Book 6. Chapter 7 explores how Seneca's treatment of ancient theories about comets reflects the ascension of the mind to the celestial plane that is the ultimate aim of his scientific enquiry. In Chapter 8, Williams discusses the significance of Seneca's excursus on divination within his treatment of thunder and lightning. Finally, a brief epilogue explains the way that the progression of ideas across traditional book order (where the final books are Books 1 and 2) can be understood to serve Seneca's moral programme. This is a rich and compelling study of Seneca's Natural Questions that establishes it as a work of considerable literary and philosophical qualities. Williams’ final, gentle suggestion is that we moderns, too, might find some peace and liberation in Seneca's cosmic viewpoint, far above the troubles of our everyday lives.

Bravely stepping into the arena, we first tackle Paul J. Burton's Friendship and Empire, which strikes a blow for the Romans, though he disclaims participation in the ‘defensive/offensive’ imperialism debate. He uses theory, the comparatively optimistic I(nternational) R(elations) Constructivism rather than IR (Neo-)Realism, though without abandoning the latter completely, to show that Roman foreign relations in his period were conceived in terms of amicitia rather than of Ernst Badian's clientela; and, more importantly, that language has an impact on how we construct global realities. History matters, and Roman diplomatic concepts should be considered on their own terms. Once individual friendship and its uncertainties and dissolution have been analysed, three empirical core chapters follow, which apply theory to cases in the categories of ‘Beginnings’, with discussion of socii, deditio voluntary and involuntary, and fides; ‘Duties’ (cf. le don); and ‘Breakdown and Dissolution’ (usually simultaneous). This sensitive contribution is detailed and persuasive, though least strong on breakdown. Look at the outbreak of the Third Punic War: the Romans were disturbed by an ‘internal unilateral adjustment in status-perception’ (323). Action spoke louder than fair words.

The front cover of John Bintliff's Complete Archaeology of Greece is interesting. There is the Parthenon: as most of its sculptures have gone, the aspect is post-Elgin. But it stands amid an assortment of post-classical buildings: one can see a small mosque within the cella, a large barrack-like building between the temple and the Erechtheum, and in the foreground an assortment of stone-built houses – so this probably pre-dates Greek independence and certainly pre-dates the nineteenth-century ‘cleansing’ of all Byzantine, Frankish, and Ottoman remains from the Athenian Akropolis (in fact the view, from Dodwell, is dated 1820). For the author, it is a poignant image. He is, overtly (or ‘passionately’ in today's parlance), a philhellene, but his Greece is not chauvinistically selective. He mourns the current neglect of an eighteenth-century Islamic school by the Tower of the Winds; and he gives two of his colour plates over to illustrations of Byzantine and Byzantine-Frankish ceramics. Anyone familiar with Bintliff's Boeotia project will recognize here an ideological commitment to the ‘Annales school’ of history, and a certain (rather wistful) respect for a subsistence economy that unites the inhabitants of Greece across many centuries. ‘Beyond the Akropolis’ was the war-cry of the landscape archaeologists whose investigations of long-term patterns of settlement and land use reclaimed ‘the people without history’ – and who sought to reform our fetish for the obvious glories of the classical past. This book is not so militant: there is due consideration of the meaning of the Parthenon Frieze, of the contents of the shaft graves at Mycenae, and suchlike. Its tone verges on the conversational (an attractive feature of the layout is the recurrent sub-heading ‘A Personal View’); nonetheless, it carries the authority and clarity of a textbook – a considerable achievement.

‘Classics, is, to me, the unicycle of education. It isn't especially practical or useful… It won't get you a well-paid job in a fancy office, and it won't necessarily make you attractive to the opposite sex… But none of that is important compared with the simple fact that studying Classics is brilliant’ (253). So says comedian (and former Cambridge classicist) Natalie Haynes on her own one-wheeled whistle-stop tour of the classical world: The Ancient Guide to Modern Life. Haynes is an intelligent guide with a real passion for the Classics and a great sense of humour. The index gives a good indication of what to expect: The Office can be found next to Xenophon's Oeconomicus, Dead Poets Society next to Tertullian's De Spectaculis, and Barbra Streisand sandwiched between Stoicism and Suetonius. Chapter titles are inevitably playful: from ‘Thinking Allowed’ to ‘Frankly, Medea I Don't Give a Damn’ and the inevitable ‘There's No Place Like Rome’. But this is not just a book played for laughs: Haynes's discussion of Aristophanes (199–209) is keen to emphasize that entertainment and education, comedy and Classics are not mutually exclusive categories: as she shows, is it possible both to amuse and advise.