This book aims at a synthesis, appropriate for undergraduate teaching, of the political, economic, social and cultural interactions between Greeks and their neighbours in the first millennium b.c.e. This is a daunting ambition: given the extraordinary mobility of those who became Hellenes and the often dominating presence of those they called barbarians, a treatment of their encounters could easily balloon into a total history of pre-Roman Greece; additionally, the sheer magnitude and processual nature of cross-cultural interaction cannot themselves be captured in particular and momentary instantiations, requiring a kind of pointillist amassing of case studies. The solution to these problems of range and texture of course lies in the architecture imposed on the material, and V. adopts two typologising frameworks, horizontal and vertical.

The meetings of Greeks and barbarians are situated in four discrete but superimposed Mediterranean ‘worlds’, of networks, apoikiai, Panhellenism and empires (Chapters 1 to 3). These horizontal paradigms–and V. intends entire structures of behaviour and interaction, not unlike the modern ‘worlds’ of fashion, diplomacy or finance–combine particular geographies of mobility with specific modes of encounter: so topics such as Sicilian temples, the enslavement of Thracians, and unfortunate king Scyles fit into ‘the world of apoikiai’, Ctesias, the trilingual inscription from Xanthus and Xenophon's anabasis into the ‘world of empires’. This is an effective, flexible hermeneutic, that achieves a sense of the plurality and complexity of the Greek–barbarian interface while accommodating useful potted histories (of colonisation, the Persian Wars, Alexander and so forth) and varied, rich examples. Patterns of interaction that are common to each of these ‘worlds’, including guest-friendship, intermarriage, commensality and cult, are examined together in Chapter 4. In the following, equally wide-ranging chapter, V. comprehensively explores the effects of these four worlds of encounter on the textual and representative genres of Greek culture, from ethnography and myth to utopia and tragedy.

To explore the dynamics and directionality of these interactions V. invokes the vertical processes of globalisation and glocalisation (Chapters 1 and 6). For V., globalisation is the intensification of cross-regional flows that generate material and cultural koinai, such as the use of the alphabet, coinage or monumental sculpture, whereas glocalisation is the localised and particular adaptation of these. The latter concept, originally developed to model the localising strategies of multinational corporations like McDonald's, is here used both to give a small-scale heterogeneity to globalisation's sweep and to restore agency and a capacity for self-interested selection to indigenous communities. Even if these two processes remain necessarily indistinct and more descriptive than explanatory, they present a salutary response to Hellenocentric and homogenising accounts of Mediterranean interactions.

The book closes, conventionally but appropriately enough, with a separate analysis of the Hellenistic world (Chapter 7), where the new phenomenon of Graeco-Macedonian political dominance over eastern neighbours opened unprecedented possibilities and directions of encounter. Notably, ‘Hellenisation’ is here treated exclusively as the affective self-identification as Greek of formerly ‘barbarian’ individuals or populations.

This admirable book will serve as a stimulating resource for undergraduates, perhaps less for its methodological contributions than for the range and historical exuberance of its case studies, which are its meat; footnotes are restrained and deliberately privilege English-language scholarship. Two stances are especially productive. First, V. eschews the traditional battlefield periodisations–of polarity after Marathon and a restored openness with Alexander–in favour of a plurality of modes of interaction from the beginning and throughout. Second, the circulation of Greek peoples, things and ideas is constantly brought into comparison with other, non-Greek globalisations, such as the multi-regional use of Imperial Aramaic, the popularity of the court romance, the spread of Egyptian cults, or Jewish mobility. This not only serves to highlight a central paradox of the pre-Hellenistic Greek–barbarian encounter–the remarkably successful penetration of Hellenic culture at a time when the Greek world remained politically peripheral–but also points to a methodological stance that belies the book's title. That is to say, it hints at the abandonment of the emic and inherited Greek–barbarian doublet in favour of a more capacious, integrated and multidirectional east Mediterranean–west Asian history.