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READING TALES FROM ANTIQUITY IN CHILDHOOD

Published as part of Oxford’s Classical Presences series, this book offers a fascinating consideration of the long and entwined relationship between childhood, children’s literature and classical texts. As such, it is of interest not only to those with a passion for Classics and classical reception studies, but to scholars of children’s literature and childhood studies too. As the authors acknowledge in the preface, their work is situated at the intersection of classical reception studies and children’s literature studies, and it highlights ‘a fundamental affinity between the two fields, both of which are concerned with the construction of a past that is inaccessible but still with us, at once alien and familiar’ (p. vii). This observation encapsulates a main preoccupation of the book, which is to explore the various ways in which the Classics have been presented to (or withheld from) children since the midnineteenth century, and how early encounters with the Classics shaped the childhoods of different authors, influencing in turn the constructions of childhood within their literary texts. Laced throughout with various writers’ reflections on what encountering the Classics in their youth meant to them, the book moves beyond a survey of historical developments in writings about antiquity for children to present a study of ‘the lifelong consequences of childhood encounters with the Greco-Roman past’ for a selection of authors and their audiences (p. vii). In their introduction, Murnaghan and Roberts point out some of the connections between children, childhood and stories about antiquity, including the fact that both childhood and the classical world have been idealised as states that are untainted by later corruption. Antiquity, they note, ‘has often been figured as the childhood of humanity and viewed as an era to which all children have a natural connection’ (p. 5). Throughout their study they investigate how understandings of this connection have shaped how the Classics have been presented to children by adults and how children in turn have received them. This survey is not exhaustive, but rather aims ‘to sketch general trajectories, identify persisting challenges and strategies, and highlight particularly telling or interesting examples’ THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 649