This attractive volume collects the plenary lectures delivered at the sixteenth quinquennial International Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy, held over five days in Bordeaux in summer 2022. The volume falls into three sections: the first deals with methodology (particularly digital epigraphy, broadly understood), the second covers thematic questions (gender, economy, urbanism, and so forth), and the third consists of regional surveys of various parts of the Greco-Roman world (the Roman frontiers, the Iberian peninsula, etc.).

The present volume, like the congress, includes papers in French, German, Italian, English and Spanish. Few academic disciplines have resisted the drift towards a linguistic monoculture more effectively than Classics, and epigraphic studies are unusual even within Classics in the depth of their commitment to (western European) multilingualism. This linguistic pluralism has helped to preserve a genuine diversity of national traditions, and the range of intellectual approaches on display in this volume is truly startling: epigraphy in France remains a strikingly different beast from epigraphy in Italy, let alone epigraphy in the UK and US (it is an ongoing oddity of the discipline how little epigraphy gets done in the US). As a case in point, consider Attilio Mastino's arresting long essay "Geografia, Geopolitica, Epigrafia" (125-74), on the relations between contemporary geopolitics and the epistemology of the Roman empire, drawing in the impact of the fall of the Berlin Wall on our knowledge of Roman military diplomas, the state of Libyan archaeology after the fall of Gaddafi, and very much more: exquisitely written, allusive and paratactic in style, haunted by the spectre of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the paper is simply unimaginable in a German or English academic context.

The thematic papers give an excellent sense of the breadth and quality of recent work across the field. Anna Heller's overview of "L'épigraphie quantitative" (185-205) is structured around two case-studies, the epigraphic habit and the spread of Roman citizenship; her paper usefully complements Walter Scheidel's study of quantitative approaches to ancient demography in the acta of the 2007 congress. As Heller notes, quantitative approaches are rare in French epigraphic scholarship, which remains strongly focussed on the history of institutions and collective mentalities; Anne-Valérie Pont's "Cités grecques et Empire romain" (257-86) gives a rich account of recent work on Greek civic institutions and politics under the Roman empire, notably drawing out the vitality of recent research on civic finances and the relations between civic elites and wider citizen bodies. Sociolinguistics has been a major growth area in epigraphic scholarship in recent years, and James Clackson's "Language, gender, and gendered language in epigraphy" (207-21) offers a sparkling analysis of the distinctive lexical choices made by female authors of epigraphic texts: this is a sub-field where much work is still to be done. Ancient economic historians, likewise, have hitherto made less use of epigraphic evidence than they might, and Alain Bresson and Enrique García Vargas ("Instrumentum domesticum and the ancient economy", 223-55) demonstrate with luminous clarity how much light amphora stamps can shed on the institutional frameworks and network complexity of the Greco-Roman economy.

The regional essays are a rather mixed bag. Some offer rapid historical overviews of the region's main epigraphic corpora: Monique Dondin-Payre covers the epigraphy of the three Gauls (345-60) and Miltiades Hatzopoulos summarises the complex epigraphic landscape of Greece (399-413: a small masterpiece of concision and judgement). Others focus on recent developments: Silvia Evangelisti discusses major novelties in the epigraphy of Italy since 2000, with a rich bibliographic overview of recent work (361-98), and Juan Manuel Abascal Palazón surveys the epigraphy of the Iberian peninsula over the last five years (313-43). Perhaps the most stimulating of these regional round-ups is Mustafa Adak's history of epigraphic research in Türkiye, which lays out both the (remarkably recent) development of Turkish epigraphic research and the distinctive working conditions and priorities of epigraphists employed in Turkish universities.

The sharpest disagreements, oddly, are over digital publication. "Oddly", because as Marietta Horster notes in her wise and realistic concluding remarks on "The Future of Epigraphy" (423-38), the whole question of "online vs print" was long ago rendered academic. No undergraduate student consults printed books or journals any longer, and few university libraries have the budget to spend €400 or more on a single slender volume of Inscriptiones Graecae: print publication of an epigraphic corpus, in 2024, means limiting one's readership to a dwindling group of the elderly and the wealthy. The jeremiads in this volume directed against digital epigraphy therefore have a slightly unreal quality to them. Of course, as John Bodel, Jonathan Prag and Charlotte Roueché recognise in their splendid "Open scholarship: epigraphic corpora in the digital age" (91-118), the transition to universal online epigraphic corpora does pose formidable practical challenges of data standardisation, digital sustainability and proper recognition of editorial contributions (not to mention long-term funding). But as Bodel et al. pointedly remark, most of these impediments are not so much technical as cultural.

If the aim of the congress was to come up with a single unified vision for "epigraphy in the twenty-first century", then it was not an unqualified success. As the volume shows very clearly, local idiosyncrasies remain stubbornly entrenched: it seems likely that quantitative social-science methods will continue to flourish in the Anglophone world and the low countries, humanistic approaches will maintain their dominance in Italy, and anyone working on the history of institutions or mentalities will continue to gravitate to Paris. This regional diversity is something to be prized and cherished; the challenge for us all is how to manage a necessarily transnational digital transition without compromising the distinctiveness of our various national ecosystems.

The volume is well edited and very reasonably priced; it is strongly recommended. It appears only to be available in print.

Peter Thonemann