‘The truth is out there’: the tagline of The X-Files, the iconic spooks'n'aliens TV show from the nineties, is twice borrowed by Jan Kwapisz in his Introduction to Fragments, Holes and Wholes: Reconstructing the Ancient World in Theory and Practice, an edited volume resulting from a conference organized at the University of Warsaw in 2014.Footnote ⁸ The epilogue of this volume consists of a re-enactment, and a record, of discussion exchanges between Han Baltussen and S. Douglas Olson, entitled ‘A Conversation on Fragments’, which indeed is partly a conversation on what constitutes a fragment, but also a conversation on issues of the truth – S. Douglas Olson's pointed claim, printed on the last page of the epilogue states that ‘Greek poetic texts…do not matter much.… There may be no truth, but there is methodology’ (406). Well then, if these two statements are anything to go by, there must have been some lively debates taking place in Warsaw in 2014.

Kwapisz’ clever and captivating introduction, written in refreshingly casual and lively tone, tells several stories – from a remarkable vignette featuring a little-known but fascinating Polish explorer of Palmyra, to a discussion of a recently published collection of epigrammatic incipits (The Vienna epigram papyrusFootnote ⁹ ), and more – all this in order to raise questions about the ontological status of what we call ‘fragments’. Initially, I assumed that this collection would be akin to Glenn Most's edited volume Collecting Fragments, published twenty years ago, in which all essays, save for one, engaged with Greek and Latin texts, focused on textual fragments, and, in some sense, dealt with philological matters, whether they problematized the status and definition of a fragment or not.Footnote ¹⁰ The one outlier in Most's volume was Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's paper, ‘Eat Your Fragment: About Imagination and the Restitution of Texts’, which dealt with scholarly trends of the early nineteenth century, and defined fragments much more broadly. This paper would be perfectly at home in the volume under review here.

The Introduction, ‘Fun from Fragments’, explicitly rejects what is represented as traditional understanding of ‘fragment’ – a ‘piece of one text preserved in another text, or on papyrus, or on stone’ (9) – for the sake of defining it as ‘a unit of information about the ancient world’ (13). This ‘rather broad’ definition, as Kwapisz is quick to acknowledge, requests readers to bring along an open mind and to be ready to occasionally venture past preconceived notions of what constitutes a fragment, for the author states that ‘Fragments are facts, only they are facts with a complicated biography; facts with a question mark’ (14, emphasis in original). If one manages to hush that nagging voice from the back of one's head whispering that ‘all facts are fragments of something, but not all fragments are facts, many are the very opposite of facts – they are, epistemologically and ontologically, de-fects’, and if one temporarily concedes to Kwapisz’ statement (which happened to me quicker than I thought it would), one will find a number of rewarding essays.

The volume is versatile in terms of methodologies applied and in understanding of the very concept of the fragment – and, commendably, explicitly so. Since the introduction honestly states that there will be no ‘one continuous story’ (15), the reader is free to explore, skip, and come back. The twenty contributions are penned by an international cast of established scholars alongside younger colleagues, and the quality of nearly all papers is even and remarkably high: even when one disagrees, one does so while learning a great deal in the process. The essays are split into six sections. Part 1, consisting of three papers, is entitled ‘Prolegomena to Fragmentology’ – ‘fragmentology’ being an oft repeated term in this volume, sometimes used with a wink, at other times apparently earnestly. By the time that the reader reaches the end of the volume, he or she will have realized that ‘fragmentology’ rather resembles Hermann Hesse's glass bead game: the rules of the game are complex and vague yet understood by all; associations are sought and, surprisingly, found between such heterogeneous phenomena as the nature of textual fragments and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip in 1914 (397, 400–2); then, the objective of seeking truth in historical enquiry is declared to be naïve (403); and an editor of several critical editions states that the idea of the ‘pure’ original text (presumably archetype) does not make sense (405).

‘Fragmentology’ aside, the actual work on fragments in this volume is very interesting, so let me summarize, if only fleetingly, individual contributions, since all of them are valuable, written with scholarly rigour, and, unlike some sections of the Epilogue, mercifully abstain from looking for an image of Jesus on a slice of toast. In the first section, Joshua Katz constructs an exciting fragmentary vista of literary pre-histories, such as are apparent when looking at shadows of Proto-Indo-European poetic traditions, and placing Homer (and archaic poetry) towards the middle of (Greek) literary history, rather than at its beginning. Hans-Joachim Gehrke, who, as is well known, had many interesting things to say elsewhere about issues of the truth and ‘intentional history’, builds on C. Lorenz and M. Weber to highlight the structural and hermeneutic problems associated with the relationship between the fragment and the whole of history, and illuminates his abstract discussion with vivid examples; and Annette Harder turns to select passages of Theocritus, Euripides, and Callimachus in order to investigate the figure of Heracles in a vivid, clearly written, and persuasive piece.

Part 2, ‘From Fragments to Contexts’, contains four essays: Han Baltussen's piece, one of the highlights of the volume, deals with Presocratic fragments in post-Aristotelian peripatetic sources, grapples with terminological quandaries (‘what is a philosophical fragment’), and explores hairy issues of fragments within fragments. As someone who attempted to extract and disentangle bits and bobs of the ‘original’ early philosophical thought from later ‘quotations’, I learned a great deal from this paper. Ilaria Andolfi intends to realign the modern perception of Hecataeus as a rationalizing historian, a notion we owe largely to Jacoby's magisterial explorations, by highlighting the intensity of Jacoby's influence in modern scholarship and the degree of speculation necessary to create a coherent general picture of the historian. Gertjan Verhasselt explores fragments of peripatetic Dicaearchus (a student of Aristotle's), showcasing methodological problems associated with attempts to disentangle an actual fragment from the context in which it is quoted – this paper fits nicely with Baltussen's. S. Douglas Olson looks at the unassigned fragments of the comic playwright Eupolis to point out that what we thought we knew about them is in some way unreliable, too.

Part 3, ‘From Contexts to Fragments’, contains three further papers. Renate Schlesier explores fragments of Sappho in Maximus of Tyre, and highlights Maximus’ mirage of ‘Sappho the decorous philosopher’ to rub out this mirage from our eyes in the second step. In a further interesting essay, Eran Almagor explores Plutarch's Life of Solon, and in particular strategies of Plutarch's engagement with fragments of Solon's poetry and laws in his construction of a bios as literary whole. Henriette van der Blom looks at scanty remains of L. Cornelius Sulla's speeches delivered in contio (public assembly). Drawing from passages of Cicero, Sallust, Plutarch, and Appian, she seeks to contextualize Sulla's political activity more precisely by reconstructing the contexts and purposes of the fragmentary evidence which historians adduce in creation of their narratives.

Part 4, ‘Fragments Themselves’, opens with a paper co-authored by Cristophe Cusset and Antje Kolde on Fragmentum Grenfellianum, a contemplation of an anonymous woman on lost love, surviving on a papyrus of Hellenistic age, and defeating attempts at clear generic classification. The authors propose that, instead of trying to reconcile the text with a specific ancient genre, we should read the text with figures from R. Barthes's Lover's Discourse in mind – an interesting and rewarding perspective, as I found. Martin Stöckinger deals with the Einsiedeln Eclogues, a couple of bucolic poems (also known as Carmina Einsidlensia), and the questions of their integrity and fragmentariness. I stared at the face of my own cluelessness in issues of scientific archaeology as I read Victor M. Martínez's piece. He takes a ‘theoretical approach to pottery and pottery sherds in order to shift the conceptualization of information away from the structural paradigm of typologies and toward an approach centered on relationships among data sets’ (234). Several graphs, a mathematical equation with if-function, the author's inclination to employ terminology from the sciences, references to Heisenberg (the physicist, not Walter White), and an occasional analogy with principles in physics rendered this piece largely inaccessible to me.

Part 5, ‘Fragments of Grand Discourses’, begins with an ambitious piece by Lech Trzcionkowski on the murkier-by-the-day concept of ‘Orphism’, whereby bone tablets from Olbia are taken by the author as ‘indisputably made by Orphikoi and used by them’ (257). Regardless of whether one agrees with this statement, one of the reasons to read this piece is that it draws attention to some scholarship which tends to be overlooked in relevant discussions; the big claim of the article – the reconstruction of a putative late antique collection with Orphic material entitled (Hieroi Logoi) in Twenty-Four Rhapsodies (271) – will invite further debate. Marquis Berrey deals with the reconstruction of surgical devices used in antiquity, more specifically with the machine used for reduction of joints devised by Andreas of Carystus (third century bc, a doctor of Ptolemy IV), in order to reconstruct not the machine itself but its cultural significance at a certain point in time. Jennifer Hilder turns to Rhetorica ad Herennium to conceptualize rhetorical exempla as fragments and seeks to illuminate their sociopolitical contexts.

Part 6, ‘Fragmentologists at Work’, contains, despite the title of the section, the most traditional (in the best possible of senses) work on fragments. Ettore Cingano, whose excellent work on archaic poetry is very well known, investigates several epic fragments dealing with Theseus which are embedded in Plutarch's life of the hero – an excellent, clear, and inspiring read. Giuseppe Ucciardello's piece was the first I chose to read after the introduction released me from the duty of sequential reading, and I was richly rewarded: Ucciardello explores notoriously difficult papyrus scraps published together as P.Oxy 32.2624 and containing cultic (I would agree on this with the author's tentative suggestion) songs, perhaps to be associated with Simonides of Keos – this is a superb, clear discussion containing authoritative textual analyses and reconstructions of several fragments (1, 4, 13, 50, and 53), and showcasing great philological sophistication. The final essay, by Karol Myśliwiec, deals with a Hellenistic cemetery from Saqqara at Memphis, which may have been a temporary burial place of Alexander the Great, before his body was transported to Alexandria, and provides a detailed account of this intriguing site. The essay is clear, rewarding, and splendidly illustrated, and the quality of the images is remarkable.

I am impressed by how well made this volume is, not only in terms of editing but also as a physical object. Given the reasonable price tag, the standard of production is outstanding. There is a good, if not comprehensive, index. All in all, an exciting and enjoyable volume, and certainly thought-provoking.

Arjan Zuiderhoek's The Ancient City, published in CUP's successful series ‘Key Themes in Ancient History’,Footnote ¹¹ is a readable and ambitious account of the main characteristics of Greek and Roman urbanism. A challenging task of sketching out the most notable and most important features of Greek and Roman cities in a relatively limited space is mastered well, and, while it is impossible to provide a comprehensive account of the topic, one will learn much more than just the basics from this book, and will be shown the directions and be introduced to current avenues of research.

The book consists of an introduction followed by nine chapters, tailed by a bibliographical essay, bibliography, and index. For Zuiderhoek, there is such an entity as a Greco-Roman city with its distinctive characteristics that separate it from other traditions of urbanism, and while his book covers the period from Homer to late antiquity, it does not, for the most part, trace developments or historical change, but operates, instead, with stand-stills and overlaps. Having laid down the structure of the volume and defined the aims of his inquiry, the author first turns to question of what actually makes an (ancient) city – is it the size of population, or the density, or the demographic structure, or, again, the socioeconomic make-up? Here, Zuiderhoek shows excellent command of the most influential theories and models, from Fustel de Coulanges over Weber and Finley to present-day debates revolving around issues of Eurocentrism and ecology. Chapter 2 deals with the origins of ancient cities and, exceptionally, with diachronic development of cities in the ancient world. This chapter highlights formulation of key architectural elements of ancient cities (principally squares, as public meeting places), and sketches the dynamics of urban spread.

The following chapters deal with broad topics and outline key features of ancient urbanism. In Chapters 3 and 4, the author explores the relationship between the urban core and the territory belonging to the urban core (asty and urbs vs chora and territorium), especially in terms of their economic relations, and in terms of their mutual imaginations of the counterpart, as well as key features of urban layout and urban morphology, with issues of standardization (e.g. spatial layout and Hippodamian town planning) and coordination (e.g. patterning of buildings) in mind. A very interesting discussion of urban living conditions tackles less savoury topics such as public hygiene in ancient cities and its consequences for demographic trends in urban environments. Chapters 5 and 6 cover the political and civic ritual dimensions of ancient urbanism, outlining key political institutions, assemblies, and magistrates, as well as cityscapes as places of negotiation of class identity, assertion of power, and agents of civic cohesion. In the next two chapters, Zuiderhoek first diagnoses demographic diversity, stratification, and class mobility, and then explores urban economy, with its variety of specialized trades and professions and the modes of its control by civic authorities.

In the penultimate chapter, Zuiderhoek returns to the old question of whether poleis were in truth states, and whether it is analytically useful to think of them as states (no, he states [157]), and then sketches the nature of relationships between individual cities within larger political structures. The final chapter fittingly deals with the decline and profound transformations of the ancient city. Here, the issue of change in the politics, administration, and urban economy of late antiquity is tackled, alongside its transformative effects on cityscapes. The bibliographical essay, organized around the central topics of the book, is, despite its brevity, a clear and helpful read, and the subject index is well organized. A concise treatment of a topic of this magnitude will inevitably have various gaps and omissions, but one should not nit-pick: this is an informed, well-written, and helpful book which will be of assistance to everyone interested in ancient urbanism, and it fulfils the aims of the series in which it is published remarkably well.

Literary Territories, Scott Fitzgerald Johnson's concise exploration of ‘cartographical thinking’ in late antiquity,Footnote ¹² is a study of metaphors of geography and maps in late antique literary production. The introduction starts off with an implicit exposition of the author's methodological approach – the reader is first taken through select passages from Borges, Eco, and Somoza (author of The Athenian Murders, a whodunit with Russian nesting-doll levels of narration, set in ancient Athens) that deal with the relationship between the world and the maps, in order to tackle the issue of organization of knowledge from a semiotic perspective. Here, the author's enthusiasm for his theoretical models and the heroes of semiotics (Peirce, Eco, Saussure) occasionally seduces him into switching to lyrical mode, at times at the cost of clarity and structure (e.g. ‘Signs always mean something more than the signified as well as less. Signs are shotguns aimed at the bull's-eye of the signified’ [5]).

The central aims and contentions of the book are expressed towards the end of the introduction, when it is revealed that the author will investigate the relationship between pilgrimage literature – assimilated with gazetteers, cosmographies, and land surveys – and other geographical texts (12, with relevant texts collected in a comprehensive appendix following the conclusion), with the question of cartographical thinking in mind. For Johnson, pilgrimage literature is essentially archival, and ‘archive’ and ‘pilgrim’ are important and theorized terms for him (see esp. 10–11 and 14), although not, it would seem, consistently used as metaphors, as he claims (135). Furthermore, such literature provides us with an opportunity to think about the relationship between map and encyclopaedia ‘through the example of cartographical thinking in late antique literature’ (15).

The first chapter, ‘Pilgrimage and Archive’, intends to explore the ‘literary shape of the genre of travel literature’ (17) by focusing on Pausanias’ Description of Greece, and the Itinerarium/Peregrinatio Egeriae, a fourth-century ad personal account of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land by a woman named Egeria. This chapter is taken as definitional by Johnson, and he dissects here what he identifies as the shared ‘archival aesthetic’ between the two texts and sketches, bullet-point-wise, and the similarities and the differences between the two accounts, stressing that ‘the amassed material is an argument in and of itself’ (26). The archive, for Johnson, thus becomes an organizing principle in the pilgrimage literature, a part of late antique literary trends aiming at organization of knowledge. Chapter 2, ‘An Aesthetic of Accumulation’, first looks at later pilgrimage literature and the geographical literature more generally (the fourth to sixth centuries ad), and the appropriation of periegetic literature by Christian authors, before turning to letters, notitiae (‘records’), and laterculi (‘land registers’), and much more, to highlight what is recognized as the three constitutive elements of the aesthetic of accumulation (‘encyclopedism’, ‘creative two-dimensionality, with distortion’, and ‘burdens placed on the viewer or reader, in terms of making use of the genre for practical purposes’ [59]).

The following chapter, ‘Locus Amoenus/Loca Sancta’, focuses on a fifth-century ad prose work entitled Life and Miracles of Thekla (the biography of Thekla, the follower of Paul the Apostle, is a long-standing interest of the author) to outline ‘the two primary levels of geographical structure in the Miracles: regional and universal’ (76), locus amoenus referring to the former, and loca sancta to the latter. In ‘Apostolic Geography’, the penultimate chapter and the longest of the book, Johnson addresses several related topics. First, he returns to Egeria's report to retrace her steps and examine her sources of information, as well as her ‘archival process’ (with an emphasis on Egeria's knowledge of St Thomas and her familiarity with Thekla); then the argument turns to the processes by which landscapes are turned into archives, and in particular the association of places with names of heroes and saints (illustrated with a medley of interesting examples). This leads the author to turn to a discussion of sortes apostolorum, the allotment of the world to apostles, with the nature of the associations between apostles and geographical places in mind. Here, Johnson draws from a wide and disparate variety of texts and traditions, including biblical texts and Hebrew and Greek material (going as far back in time as Homer), to place the motif of sortes attested in the late antique apocryphal acta into sharper relief. There are interesting observations throughout this section, but somewhat more effort and precision in signposting, and, in particular, more discipline in structuring of this chapter, would not have gone amiss. If some of the texts discussed by Johnson were only superficially familiar to me, the final chapter, ‘The Westwardness of Things’, introduced me to two authors and texts I was completely unaware of – Thomas of Marga and Isho'dnah of Basra, who wrote ecclesiastical histories in Syriac in what can be described, at best, as very late antiquity: the ninth century ad. Here, the argument is made that the geographical framework of the two authors is oriented towards the west, in contrast to the generally ‘Greek or eastward orientation to the intellectual history of the Carolingian period’ (115).

The concise conclusion (133–7) introduces, somewhat surprisingly, and certainly unexpectedly, a new topic – geographical imaginaries of India in late antiquity. India is then defined as another metaphor, mirroring the metaphors from the beginning of the book. This topic takes up half of the already slender conclusion. In the remainder of the closing remarks, the author describes, fittingly and appropriately, his volume as a series of essays attempting to unpack cartographical thinking in late antiquity on the basis of select examples (136). Those familiar with Johnson's publications should be aware that two of the chapters (2 and 4) draw significantly from work published between 2008 and 2014, as he discloses. As a non-expert, I learned interesting things from this volume, but also had the impression, throughout, that the manuscript would have greatly profited from better editing and more attention paid to the disposition, substantiation, and clarity of the structure and of the argument.

Nick Fisher and Hans van Wees have edited another excellent volume together. After War and Violence and Archaic Greece, this is their third joint endeavour, another handsome book published by the Classical Press of Wales, and dedicated to the topic of ‘aristocracy’ in antiquity.Footnote ¹³ And the quotes that they place on the term ‘aristocracy’ matter greatly, for the volume as a whole successfully challenges the very concept of ancient aristocracy, as well as its helpfulness as a tool of historical analysis. The introduction, written by the two editors, is a substantial, clear, and informative essay that incisively demonstrates the methodological difficulties arising from unchallenged and unexamined appropriations of the very concepts of aristocracy, aristocratic society, and aristocratic values in modern scholarship. The essay is a true tour de force performance regarding the way in which the authors manage to synthetize the long and difficult histories of the problems and help the reader understand the problems’ methodological cruces.

The introduction is followed by eleven essays, authored by well-established scholars, and organized into four sections. The first section, entitled ‘Elites in the Ancient Mediterranean: Approaches and Models’, contains three essays and does exactly what it says on the tin. In the first, Alain Duplouy focuses on the archaic and classical periods, and investigates the genealogical strategies employed by those aspiring to a higher social status (chiefly: pretensions to eugeneia, the noble birth; citations of one's own genealogy; erections of images of ancestors), as well as their ‘dynastic behaviour’, a term for which the author borrows Bourdieu's phrase ‘processes of social reproduction’. Guy Bradley turns to archaic Rome and central Italy of the archaic period, and raises questions of social mobility, ideology, and cultural influences, to demonstrate that, contrary to oft-expressed opinions, the elites of early Italy were neither long-enduring nor ‘primordial in origin’, but are more precisely described as ‘unstable and fluid’. Laurens E. Tacoma looks at issues of the social mobility of elites under the Principate in order to examine what the concept of aristocracy might entail in this case. Accounting for the variety (local, regional, imperial) and hierarchy of Roman elites, Tacoma stresses the openness of their ranks, the lack of a distinctive ethos, and the renewability of the elites to conclude that aristocracy, as a concept, cannot be meaningfully employed in their case.

Part 2, ‘Heredity and Social Mobility at Athens’, opens with an article by Antoine Pierrot addressing the old and much-discussed issue of the identity of the Eupatrids in ancient Athens. After a concise but helpful summary of the relevant old and new debates, the author reinforces the traditional argument that Eupatrids represented an old Athenian aristocratic class with monopolies on political and religious power in the archaic period. The term, however, shifted in meaning during the post-Solonian period to denote the well-off while keeping the traditional meaning relating to ‘families with hereditary priesthoods’. Stephen Lambert's piece deals with the Attic genē, and to what extent they can be described as ‘aristocratic’ institutions (170). This is an interesting piece, not least because the author first helpfully clears up some of the most important issues about what a genos is and is not, which builds nicely on Pierrot's and Duplouy's essays, and illuminates the ways in which membership of a genos can contribute to one's status. Noburu Sato examines the structures and modes of operation of Athenian diplomacy and diplomats, underlining the significance of international personal relationships and friendships, and then gauging to what extent such relationships were hereditary and affected by social mobility in the second half of the fifth century bc and throughout the fourth. A helpful table at the end of his paper lists foreign proxeniai held by the Athenians.

Nick Fisher's essay introduces the third section of the volume, ‘Competition and Stratification in the Aegean’. Fisher challenges the conceptual validity of ‘aristocracy’ by examining the concept of charis in the representation of Aeginitian victors and coaches in the epinician odes of Pindar and Bacchylides. He begins by postulating that charis is an inclusive value, not restricted to elites or aristocracies, which contributed to the generation of social harmony, and then turns to recent scholarly trends in the assessment of relevant poems and topics in order to warn of the limits of the concept of aristocracy. Olivier Mariaud's piece takes the bull by the horns and addresses the question of hereditary aristocracy on Samos in the archaic period, and the status of a distinct elite group on the island called Geomoroi (‘Land-sharers’). This paper juxtaposes epigraphic and funerary evidence to literary sources in order to sketch the self-understanding of Samian elite families and to illuminate the issue of the performance of genealogy as a part of the construction of a distinct social identity. James Whitley's discursive paper addresses the question of Cretan elites and the general Greek (competitive) performance of arête to observe that Crete also presents an exception in this regard, as there is no evidence of their participation in the competitive ethos shared by the rest of the archaic and classical Greek world.

The final part, ‘Greek Elites Overseas’, opens with Thomas J. Figueira's excellent essay on modes of colonization and elite integration in archaic Greece. This is a lucid and insightful piece outlining the ways in which elites formed in the context of archaic colonization, and plausibly suggesting that early colonization ‘was a relief valve for elites under pressure from the upwardly mobile’ (315) – a formulation of remarkable insight and precision. Gillian Shepherd explores the display and emergence of elites in archaic Sicily, and discusses literary and material evidence relating to elites in Syracuse, Gela, Megara Hyblaea, Acragas, and Selinus with the question in mind of what it meant to belong to an elite in the context of western Greece. A full index closes the book.

This is a highly interesting and inspiring volume, truly interdisciplinary in nature, and wide-ranging in terms of methodologies applied and topics explored. There is a clear preponderance of papers on Greek history, but Bradley and Tacoma, the two papers dealing with Rome and Italy, do a fine job of addressing larger issues overlapping with those examined in the papers on Greek history. Keeping in mind that the book developed from seeds planted during a panel on aristocrats and elites at the fifth Celtic conference at Cork a decade ago, one can only admire how even in terms of quality this volume is and how successful overall. All of the papers explicitly respond to the intellectual challenges posed by the editors; all of them have interesting things to say on the topic, and, even more impressively, to each other, and cumulatively, to the reader.

From the concept of ancient ‘aristocracy’ we move on to a wide-ranging and broadly conceived edited collection on the concept and the doctrine of popular sovereignty from antiquity to the twentieth century, with which I will end my general review for this issue.Footnote ¹⁴ The editors of the volume, Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner, bring together thirteen contributions written by established scholars working in fields outside Classics – the majority have a background in political sciences, government studies, early modern history, and/or literature (the one exception being Valentina Arena, a Roman historian). The contributions, taken together, sketch out the history of the concept of popular sovereignty across periods and nations. Bourke's introduction traces back the history of the term ‘sovereignty’ and of related concepts from modern-day uses, over the engagement of Jean Bodin (a sixteenth-century French philosopher and political theorist, identified throughout the volume as the linchpin between antiquity and the modern period) with relevant ideas, back to Cicero and the concept of maiestas, and even further, to Aristotle's contemplations on constitutions in the Politics.

The first three essays will be of interest to Classicists. In a substantial contribution, Kinch Hoekstra discusses Athenian democracy and popular tyranny, with early modern interpretation in the foreground: the paper argues that the relationship between early modern theorists of sovereignty and ancient political thought has been misunderstood, and then puts forth the claim that, in Greek thinking, popular sovereignty was ‘analogous to tyranny’ (18), while tyranny, as a concept, was often associated with the rule of the demos – an interesting piece. Melissa Lane addresses the issue of popular sovereignty as control of office-holders and focuses on Aristotle's views of Greek democracy. Valentina Arena turns to Cicero and the late Roman Republic to engage with De legibus and De re publica and explore the relationship between popular sovereignty and aristocratic government in the two works.

The rest of the contributions addresses later periods, and I report their topics here only briefly: Serena Ferente deals with late medieval sovereignty in Italy, with a focus on Marsilio Mainardini of Padua (thirteenth to fourteenth century ad); Richard Tuck considers the relationship between democratic sovereignty and democratic government in Bodin, Rousseau, Hobbes, and beyond; Alan Cromartie discusses the issue of parliamentary and popular sovereignty in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and focuses on the influence of Henry Parker's writings and agendas; Lorenzo Sabbadini also deals with seventeenth-century England and the issue of popular sovereignty during the English Civil Wars; Eric Nelson explores clashes between rival conceptions of popular sovereignty in late eighteenth-century America; Richard Bourke takes Edmund Bourke as the focus of his paper to ponder contemporary British debates on sovereignty; Bryan Garsten traces the development from popular sovereignty to civil society in post-revolutionary France, with an emphasis on the role played by Pierre-Louis Roederer and Benjamin Constant; Duncan Kelly dissects nineteenth-century theories of popular sovereignty, highlighting the connections between nationality, government, and sovereignty; Karuna Mantena's piece charts debates on state, empire, and popular sovereignty as parts of anti-imperial and anti-colonial discourses in India; and the final essay, Timothy Stanton's piece on popular sovereignty in an age of mass democracy, engages with Max Weber, Hans Kelsen, Carl Schmitt, and Joseph Schumpeter, ending with Jürgen Habermas. The volume closes with a bibliography and a very good index.

Much of this book deals with the modern era, and with problems and historical episodes about which I have only elementary knowledge, but the three essays covering the ancient world are thought-provoking. The question of whether the concept of ‘sovereignty’ makes sense when applied to the ancient world and in particular to ancient democracies is one where ancient historians tend to disagree with colleagues from political sciences, but it certainly cannot harm to test our assumptions and convictions every so often. This volume presents a welcome challenge in this respect.