LAUSR

Topography, space and movement have become areas of important academic debate in recent decades. The spatial turn, as co-editor W. Riese notes (1), has become an ever more important element in the way that we examine the ancient world, even if it is also true that the turn to the spatial is now several decades old.1 The book edited by Riess and G. G. Fagan goes beyond the spatial, taking a very broad approach to the concept of topography, encompassing (4) “not only the spatial but also the social, ethnical, gendered, political, and religious dimensions of violence”.2 This broad approach allows a range of interesting themes and types of violence associated with, or directed at, specific elements of society to be addressed, yet there is a sense that the chapters when viewed together are slightly diffuse: a tighter focus on the spatial might have allowed for greater comparison between the deployment of different types of violence in specific places within society. Indeed, some of the most successful chapters (Reiss on the topographies of killing in Classical Athens, J. Osgood’s analogous examination of the topography of political killing in Republican Rome, or G. Ward on individual feats on the Republican battlefield) have space as a key consideration, but in other chapters space appears in less clear-cut ways and topography in a general sense is not always clearly in focus. As a whole, however, the chapters do provide clear readings of how violence and space (as well as gender and politics) interacted; they also offer some interesting lines of questioning of the ideologies and realities of different types of violence in the classical world.