In the century since Milman Parry argued that the Homeric poems arose from a long tradition of oral poetic performance, Homeric studies has been grappling in various ways with that argument. The most fundamental question has been the nature and function of the ‘formula’, famously defined by Parry as ‘an expression regularly used, under the same metrical conditions, to express an essential idea’ (M. Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse [1987], p. 13). In the fifty years between the end of World War II and the late 1990s debates about the implications of oral composition were the liveliest area of Homeric scholarship, a period whose vibrancy is best encapsulated in A New Companion to Homer (edd. I. Morris and B.B. Powell [1997]). After a comparatively unproductive interlude in the early 2000s, which was preoccupied with inconclusive debates about what a ‘formula’ is, the last ten to fifteen years have produced innovative studies of Homeric composition and aesthetics. Moreover, as has been the case for the last century, new approaches in other disciplines – including Embodied Cognition, New Materialism and Computational Linguistics – have been put to good use by Homerists. This essay discusses books published in the last decade that have made significant contributions to key scholarly developments both in Homeric scholarship and beyond, as well as new editions, commentaries and essay collections focussing on Homeric epic.

This Profile looks at two technologies that were developed to make source texts in the original Greek, Latin and, indeed, any language directly accessible to audiences who have not yet studied – and may never study – the language itself: (1) translations aligned at the word and phrase level with the original text and (2) rich linguistic annotations explaining the part of speech, regularised dictionary form and syntactic function of each word in a corpus (typically called treebanks, because the syntactic structure is commonly visualised as an inverted tree).

In the last twenty-five years there have been so many ‘turns’ in how the ancient world is approached that you could be forgiven for wondering whether research has tended to simply spin on the spot rather than move forwards in any decisive or meaningful direction. Amongst other things, and in no particular order, the discipline of archaeology, for instance, has undergone spatial, embodied, digital, mobility, ecological, material, symmetrical, relational, ontological, sensory, posthuman and cognitive turns. The specific theoretical and methodological concepts that underpin these directions can vary considerably, but collectively they reflect a shared concern to foreground the complexities of different types of matter in interpretations of past worlds. Many, although not all, also share interests in combining those material complexities with perspectives on experiences of embodiment and/or forms of ‘being-in-the-world’. Within ancient religious studies, a re-orientation towards the sensory, embodied and experiential is well evidenced across recent scholarship, where it is accompanied by a significant paradigm shift away from top-down models of so-called ‘polis’ or ‘civic’ religion, which stress the organising principles and socio-political aspects of religion, towards a focus on ancient rituals as ‘lived’. Both trends have simultaneously stimulated the need to pay close and critical attention to the role of materials in generating ancient religion not as a set of shared beliefs or practices, but as a collection of dynamic and situational lived experiences emerging from ancient people's mutually constitutive relationships with the world.

Recovering the voices of subaltern groups is one of the great challenges facing ancient historians. Whether conceived of as a moral imperative or a historiographical one, attempts to re-centre historical victims of oppression, exploitation and abuse in our picture of ancient societies have become a mainstay of ancient historical research. The three books under review differ in their form, methodologies and outlook. Together, they offer a representative sample of the high quality of recent research conducted on the subjects of slavery and subaltern groups in ancient Greece and of the direction of travel in these areas.

How do ancient (or contemporary) portraits display power? Why is that man (or less often woman) a ruler, and how can viewers (or readers), alone or in a crowd, tell that he represents something more than himself? He stands for something, literally in the case of ancient bronze or marble portrait statuary, signifier of a powerful office, and its individual holder, a basileus (‘king’) or an emperor. His power over me and mine is expressed in physical or literary form by the creation and circulation of his image(s), by their intrinsic attributes, materials or context. Images become powerful not just by their creation, but through contemporary social and political rules (or norms) of representation and by their reception. Mass media rely on specific associations in my (or our) culture, state and/or religion to convey not only a ruler's individual appearance and character, but also his office and its ideals, symbols and authority over me and us.

While different in their approaches, structure and intended readership, the four books reviewed here are connected by their common aim of responding to traditional views of elegy as a minor, ‘softer’ genre, which stands in binary opposition to the magniloquence of epic. These books thus build upon long-established developments in the field of Latin literary criticism, which have contributed to a general reassessment, and deconstruction, of the taxonomic categorisations of Latin texts, and Latin poetry more specifically, pointing out its generic fluidity (e.g. J.E.G. Zetzel, ‘Re-Creating the Canon: Augustan Poetry and the Alexandrian Past’, Critical Inquiry 10 [1983], 83–105; G.B. Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, ed. tr. C. Segal [1986]). Notably, R.O.A.M. Lyne's study on Virgil's Aeneid (R.O.A.M. Lyne, Further Voices in Vergil's Aeneid [1992]) exemplifies this renewed interest in identifying unaligned and ambiguous perspectives (‘further voices’), especially within poetic texts composed in the Augustan or early imperial period. It is no surprise that the elegiac contents have catalysed these underlying streams of ambiguous, unsettled and self-reflective discourse, which – once allowed into the literary landscape of Latin poetry – shake generic boundaries. That Virgil did not write anything that can be formally regarded as elegy, stricto sensu, makes his oeuvre a promising space of enquiry for oblique and subterranean elegiac resonances.

After reading these volumes one can hardly conclude otherwise than that the study of urban space in Roman Italy is thriving. These large volumes, collectively exceeding 1,800 pages and comprising 86 chapters/articles (in addition to supplementary materials), include contributions in four languages – though, perhaps surprisingly, none contain contributions in German. The array of contributors suggests that even more modern languages could have been included, if desired. The authors range from early career scholars to renowned professors.