A long time ago, in a land far, far away there lived a child whose process for selecting books had one strict criterion: upon cracking open the cover, there had to be a map delineating the exotic topography that its protagonists would traverse in the course of the story. No matter how fatuous the ensuing tale, the thrill of that initial psycho-geographical encounter kept me coming back for more.

Skempis and Ziogas’ well-curated collection of essays on Greek and Roman epic demonstrate how germane such mental configurations of space are to the process of narration. Even when the epic in question is not explicitly moving its characters along, the association between story and place can be so strong as to unavoidably call specific sites into mind (to many of my generation the opening lines of this review will invariably lead them to Tatooine). Early excursions into the study of epic geography focused on concrete issues: To what extent could authors have obtained first-hand knowledge of the topographies they described? Could the audience of the Argonautica (either version) have successfully navigated their own sea-journeys by following the text? Where exactly was Ithaca? But, just as Tolkien’s maps of Middle Earth tell us more about early twentieth-century geopolitics than the exact distance between the Shire and Minas Tirith, so the places described in Greek and Latin epic serve as a metaspace for exploring (and exploiting) articulations of power, immanence and alterity. The “spatial turn” mediated by philosophers and geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan, Edward S. Casey and Edward Soja has produced a rich crop of literary studies on the narratology of space, and Skempis and Ziogas’ volume brings together many of the key classical scholars in the field to provide a comprehensive and stimulating guide to epic space.