We start this survey in Italy during the early first millennium bce; a context on which Seth Bernard's new monograph offers an exciting, and in several respects transformative, contribution.1 Its general claim is that, while Rome did not develop a historiographical tradition until Fabius Pictor, there was a keen and pervasive interest in history across ancient Italy, since the early Iron Age, which played out across a wide range of venues and media. The brief of the historian must be to jettison any hierarchical approach to the interplay between textual and archaeological evidence, and to take as broad a view on what history amounts to as possible.

We start this review in the sanctuaries of archaic and classical Greece. The book Between Deity and Dedicator is the PhD thesis of Sanne Hoffmann. Hoffmann's aim is to examine terracotta votive figurines through their entire lifecycle, following their journey from production to dedication to deposition within the sanctuary (fifteen of which are chosen, with a preponderance, never really fully explained, towards those of female deities). Theories of object agency and an emerging interest in object biographies are extremely well-chosen as the frameworks in which to discuss a set of objects that were surely imagined to have some sort of efficacy in prompting a response from the deity to whom they were dedicated. It is so often the case that introductions lay out long explanations of theories that are then never again mentioned in the rest of the book as the author gets stuck in to the ‘content’. Here, though, the theory is evoked effectively and explicitly at key parts throughout the thesis.

This year, Aristotle readers could purchase something old and something new for their libraries. The old thing is Diana Quarantotto's edited volume on Aristotle's Physics I, published in 2018 but now finally available in paperback at an affordable price. People will remember that this book includes excellent commentaries on each chapter of Physics, like those by Andrea Falcon, Timothy Clarke, Laura M. Castelli, Lindsay Judson, David Charles, and Isván Bodnár, to name a few. The volume also contains a preface, an illuminating methodological introduction, and a collaborative translation of Aristotle's text. The main takeaway is a balanced appraisal of the importance of Physics I and its introductory role within Aristotle's physical project.

Following their 2013 monograph, Helen of Troy. Beauty, Myth, Devastation, Ruby Blondell delivers a study on screen representations of Helen in the USA, ranging from The Private Life of Helen of Troy (1927), via Star Trek, Hollywood epics, and Xena: Warrior Princess, to Helen of Troy (2003).1 Blondell takes a rounded approach to their investigation, looking at different strands in the ancient tradition and analysing numerous factors related to the production and reception of the case studies.

For this General review, I have selected five exciting books dealing with religion. I am very happy to report that we now find selected papers of Robert Parker, one of the luminaries in the field of Greek religion, in a handsomely produced and affordable volume published in the Kernos Suppléments series, whose many virtues I have often extolled on these pages.1 The collection contains twenty articles published over the span of thirty-five years, and, in a way, provides the ‘best of’ of Parker's opera minora. But these are minora in name only: all articles gathered in this volume have been, and remain, highly influential and represent question-defining studies that shaped the way we think about discrete problems in Greek religion.

We have two volumes in Bloomsbury's Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing series edited by Laura Jansen, namely, Derek Walcott and the Creation of a Classical Caribbean by Justine McConnell, and J. R. R. Tolkien's Utopianism and the Classics by Hamish Williams. Both texts have three main chapters to which is devoted one aspect of the author's reception of the classical world. In the former, McConnell identifies three recurring approaches or processes in Walcott's creation of a ‘classical Caribbean’, often drawing on postcolonial theory. These are: non-linear or non-colonial temporalities (explored under the heading ‘Time’), ‘Syncretism’, and ‘Re-creation’. At the same time, McConnell not only analyses the St. Lucian author's relationship to classical culture and education, but situates his work within that of other Caribbean writers. McConnell paints a cohesive picture of Walcott's (self-)positioning in these entanglements of times, places, and traditions, and makes a number of useful observations about classical reception more broadly.

In our recent faculty meetings here in Virginia, issues regarding ChatGPT and its uses were often broached, for reasons both good and bad, and this November, as I am writing these lines, turbulences in the AI sector are making the news. In papyrology and epigraphy, we have been relying on advanced digital technologies for a while now, and there's no doubt that recent advances in generative AI will soon bear fruit for all text and image-based disciplines in the humanities. Hence, I will open this general review with four exciting books on ancient science and technology.