Christopher Kelly writes:

City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish is driven by Parsons’s own irrepressible pleasure in the discovery of the details of individual lives in second-century Oxyrhynchos. The city walls sheltered twenty thousand inhabitants living in less than a square mile. The detailed reports of the local council’s building inspectorate allow the town to be reconstructed: along one main street, Parsons finds ‘the surgery of Doctor Dioskoros, a stable, the school of the teacher Dionysios, the Temple of Fortune, the Temple of Achilles; a record office, a market, a town-crier’s stand, and the house of Thonis the girdle-maker’. The mayor seeks to excuse himself from office: ‘I am sick and coughing from my lungs.’ A schoolboy is forced to parse the kind of pointless sentence found only in grammar books: ‘Pythagoras the philosopher, having disembarked and teaching letters, advised his pupils to abstain from beans.’ A petulant teenager is determined to see the wonders of Egypt’s greatest city: ‘If you refuse to take me with you to Alexandria, I shall not write you a letter or speak to you . . . If you don’t send for me, I shan’t eat, I shan’t drink.’ Advice is given: ‘To keep bugs out of the house, mix goat bile with water and sprinkle it.’

(LRB 21 February 2008)

Phoenix | paperback 312 pp. |ISBN: 9780753822333