Justina Gregory uses educational practices of Archaic and Classical Greece as a framework for approaching literary characters in the Homeric epics and Attic tragedy. She looks at education in terms of its role in socializing young people into their future roles as warriors and leaders. The core of Gregory’s approach consists in a “crisis of disillusionment” and “crisis of empathy”, where characters reflect on the contradictions in the role formed by their education, and progress to empathy with other characters, learning to navigate social expectations and obligations to others based on a shared humanity. The book is stimulating and approachable, since discussions take place primarily at the level of literary character and passages from the original works are presented in translation, so that those without Greek can readily follow the argument. Gregory uses the educational framework to identify tensions and insights in the epics and dramas, but she does so without becoming schematic and keeps the literary works at the center of the discussions.