Pride of place in this review goes undoubtedly to Sally Humphreys’ monumental study of kinship in ancient Athens.Footnote ¹ A work in progress for four decades, it is finally published in two volumes of almost 1,500 pages. The book's coverage is vast: the first volume focuses on interactions among kinsfolk (legal, social, economic, and ritual), while the second volume explores the various Athenian corporate groups which employed kinship as their organizing principle (phratries, gene, tribes, and trittyes) and provides an exhaustive discussion of kinship networks attested across all Athenian demes. As a result of its size and encyclopaedic coverage, I suspect that most readers will approach this work in a piecemeal fashion, looking for a particular phenomenon or searching for a particular kinship network; the lack of a detailed introduction or conclusions – features that would have been essential in a work of this size and ambition – does not help in this respect. But this work needs to be assessed as a whole, for three main reasons. The first is that households were the main organizing units of Athenian society, while most Athenian groups were organized on a kinship principle. Their roles were crucial, and they need to complement the social models of Athenian society we employ, alongside class and status. The second reason is that Humphreys makes a very good job of exploring the various contradictory tendencies at work in how Athenian kinship operated: the interests of male heads; of wives, children, and relatives; of wider kinship networks; and of the political community. The third is the combination of literary, epigraphic, and material evidence of Athenian kinship, which reveals in often impressive ways the contradictions and gaps of our various sources: not only will this work be essential reading for those working on Athenian oratory, archaeology, or economy, but its accumulated detail offers the basis for writing a novel history of Athenian society. Of course, a work gestated for forty years will also show the unavoidable flaws of its piecemeal construction; but these are largely of secondary importance, compared to the value of the end product.

Humphreys’ magisterial account is complemented by the important synthesis of Annarita Doronzio on the topography and material culture of seventh-century bce Athens, long perceived as an obscure period.Footnote ² This book provides the foundations for a new understanding of archaic Athenian history on the basis of a comprehensive study of the material culture of seventh-century Athens in four crucial topographical settings: the Acropolis, the Kerameikos, the Agora, and the south part of the city. In this way it brings together the study of sanctuaries, cemeteries, public spaces, and living and work areas that are usually kept apart in separate publications and discussions. The wonderful plans that accompany the volume will offer the reader novel ways of conceptualizing the development of archaic Athens. The author does a good job of challenging traditional images of the Athenian seventh century as a period of retrenchment and crisis, like that offered by Ian Morris in his path-breaking interpretation of burials as evidence for the development of the Greek polis. But this wonderful contextualization of the material evidence will itself require as a complement an engagement with recent approaches to the history of the archaic Greek world, which is largely missing.

The Greek Superpower, edited by Paul Cartledge and Anton Powell, explores the role of Sparta in the Athenian self-definition.Footnote ³ The nine chapters explore the depiction of Sparta in different genres of Athenian literary culture (oratory, comedy, tragedy, historiography, and Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy), as well as how the conflicts between Athens and Sparta are reflected in Greek art of the fifth century; in conclusion, Anton Powell's chapter re-examines the role of Laconism in the Athenian revolution of 404–403, taking a middle way between maximalist and minimalist approaches. Some chapters offer new readings of important texts through the lens of Sparta, such as the Spartan foil in Pericles’ funeral oration or the contrast between Athenian and Spartan forms of deliberation and their relative advantages and disadvantages in Thucydides. In the case of comedy and tragedy, the depiction of Sparta offers a useful Lydian stone of thinking anew about what exactly tragic and comic authors aimed to achieve in their works; instead of generalized statements about the positive image of Sparta in comedy and its negative depiction in tragedy, careful consideration allows us to understand better how these genres actually operated. Marshall Sahlins coined the term ‘complementary schismogenesis’ to account for the entangled history of Athens and Sparta; it would have been particularly useful if more contributors in this volume had engaged with this stimulating concept.

Zinon Papakonstantinou has published an impressive study of sport and identity in ancient Greece.Footnote ⁴ This book provides a comprehensive study of how sport was intimately linked with a wide range of ancient Greek identities. Greek sport was always connected to social status: given the largely performative role of Greek elites, sport played a crucial role in creating elite lifestyles. Papakonstantinou adopts a developmental account, in which, while the link between Greek sport and elite status was always maintained, it was also accompanied by two other processes: the expansion of the social groups that could participate in Greek athletics, and the forging of a link between individual success in sport and communal identities. These two processes were reciprocally related to the institutionalization of Greek sport: the development of palestrae and gymnasia, the institution of the ephebes and the various agonistic festivals. In time, groups that were not originally associated with Greek sport, such as barbarians, slaves, and women, came to enter its spaces and practices in one way or another and to a greater or lesser extent. Papakonstantinou also explores the significance of Greek sport for gender identities, the gradual intermingling of Greek and Roman forms of sport, and the emergence of new forms of urban culture in which sport was inscribed; and he pays attention to various discourses that challenged the predominance of Greek sport as a cultural and social value. The wide geographical coverage and the attention to change over time are among the strongest points of this excellent book.

I move to two works on major Greek islands that bring us to the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods of Greek history. Benedikt Boyxen has written an important study of foreigners in Hellenistic Rhodes.Footnote ⁵ Rhodes was a cosmopolitan port with major connections across the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea; the territorial expansion of Rhodes over parts of Asia Minor and other Aegean islands created new citizens, but also large numbers of subjects; and the Rhodian economy and society had significant need of foreign workers (both slaves and free). This book offers a synthesis on a major aspect of Hellenistic social history. Boyxen explores the various groups of free and slave foreigners, the rich Rhodian terminology for such groups, and the evidentiary problems of identifying these individuals in our sources. At the centre of this book, however, are the various contexts of interaction: among foreigners; between citizens and foreigners; and between the Rhodian polis and foreigners. Boyxen explores various contexts of interaction: the role of foreigners in the famous Rhodian navy; their participation in the booming agricultural economy, which provided staples that were exported widely; and their presence in Rhodian sanctuaries and cemeteries. Unsurprisingly, a significant part of the book is devoted to the significance of the ‘associative phenomenon’ for the social integration of the numerous foreigners in Rhodian society. Despite the various practices that facilitated integration, and the economic and social significance of foreigners, the Rhodian state and its elite managed to maintain exclusivity and hierarchy to a very significant degree; this finding requires comparison with other Hellenistic communities. The social history of the Hellenistic world is still in its infancy. We can only hope that studies like this will soon emerge for many other communities of the Hellenistic world.

The publication of the final volume of the inscriptions of Kos by Dimitris Bosnakis and Klaus Hallof is an important contribution to the history of another major island of the Dodecanese.Footnote ⁶ The book consists largely of funerary inscriptions from the demes of Cos, as well as varia and fragments, alongside the few inscriptions from the islands of Leros, Lepsia, and Patmos that came under Milesian authority. The corpus includes significant numbers of epitaphs that relate to the issues raised by Boyxen's book above, such as the presence of foreigners and the associative phenomena (I single out the epitaph of a freedman: among the very few occasions in the Greek world where non-Roman freedmen identify as such on funerary monuments). Readers of Papakonstantinou's book on the entanglement between Greek and Roman sport will be particularly fascinated by the large number of inscriptions relating to gladiators. Finally, the newly published fragments of cadastral texts from late antiquity are of particular significance for the history of landholding and taxation.

The next three works under review are edited volumes on various aspects of Hellenistic history. The first one, edited by Andrew Erskine, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, and Shane Wallace, focuses on the Hellenistic court.Footnote ⁷ Over the last decade, Norbert Elias’ famous book on the court society of early modern Europe has inspired a number of studies on ancient court societies, and this volume continues this debate very productively. The eighteen chapters of the collection can effectively be divided into two groups. The first group includes chapters that could have featured in any volume on Hellenistic kingdoms and kingship, exploring themes such as royal patronage of works on non-Greek people, Macedonian royal tombs, and royal weddings. Notwithstanding their undoubted interest, the real strength of the volume comes from the chapters that adopt a comparative perspective in order to examine the peculiar features of Hellenistic courts in relation to other court societies: whether there was a Hellenistic equivalent of early modern courtiers and their particular lifestyle; the various Hellenistic equivalents of royal favourites; the extent to which Hellenistic ‘palaces’ fit in with our modern conceptions; the role of Greek mythology in providing models for Hellenistic courts and vice versa; the extent of continuity between Hellenistic and earlier Near Eastern court traditions; the role of courtiers in mediating between the various communities of subjects; and the existence of different forms of courtiers for different kinds of communities.

Seleucid history tends to focus either on the founder of the dynasty or on the spectacular period of Antiochus III. The important volume edited by Kyle Erickson turns our attention to the intervening period of the central part of the third century bce.Footnote ⁸ The ten chapters focus on three large themes. The first of these revisits the narrative of this period of Seleucid history, and in particular the Third Syrian War and the War of the Brothers in the middle of the third century. The second theme is a valuable reconsideration of the various actors of Seleucid history: on the one hand, dynastic houses like that of Achaios; on the other, lesser actors such as the Macedonian warlords, warriors, and colonists who played a crucial role in the colonization of early Hellenistic Asia Minor. The bulk of the volume, however, focuses on the third theme: the various institutions and practices that enabled the Seleucids to maintain control over the vast mosaic of societies over which they ruled: royal cult and joint kingship, but primarily the institution of the client kingdom that allowed the Seleucids to exercise authority in the farther areas of their empire, such as Iran and Bactria. The cumulative impact of the various contributions has revisionist implications for various aspects of Hellenistic history: alongside the volume on Hellenistic courts, this work illustrates the need for more comparative work on the peculiarities of the Hellenistic imperial world and its trajectories of change.

The next volume, edited by Timothy Howe and Frances Pownall, is a particularly valuable contribution to the study of ancient Macedonia and the Hellenistic kingdoms.Footnote ⁹ Like that of Sparta, the history of Macedonia has been based overwhelmingly on sources written by outsiders and their various agendas; the eleven chapters in this volume examine those agendas and the processes that shaped our sources for Macedonian history. They focus on four large themes: the discourses that shaped the representation of Macedonian royal women such as Eurydice I and Olympias; the power politics between the Macedonian kings and the Successors and their friends, and the depiction of figures like Callisthenes and Hephaistion; the self-representation of Macedonian kings across various literary and material media; and finally the memory of Alexander as a model in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. The authors stress the significance in the formation of the literary traditions about Macedonians of two quite different contexts: the early struggle between the Successors and the Roman imperial context employed various discourses and models in order to employ the above themes and the individuals who figured in them for their contemporary purposes. Modern historians who want to use these sources for the history of Macedonia will need to take seriously into account the divergent impact of these contexts.

I move finally to a number of important works on Greek historiography, starting with Rosalind Thomas’ long-awaited monumental book on polis histories.Footnote ¹⁰ Traditionally categorized as local and parochial, these have played a limited role both in the narrative of Greek historiography and in the history of the Greek polis. Thomas makes a persuasive case that we need to take them seriously on both counts. Her exploration of polis historiography challenges the traditional account that takes the political-military history of Thucydides, Xenophon, and Polybius as the main branch of Greek historiography. Not only were works on Greek affairs (Hellenica) and universal history much more diverse in their interests, but polis histories included political, social, and cultural history, and often presented wider accounts of Greek history but seen from the perspective of one particular community. This reconsideration will have major implications for the history of Greek historiography. Polis historiography provided a means through which Greek communities could stake their claim for their significance within the wider Greek world: for some communities, this would include their achievements in politics and warfare; for others, it would focus on the contributions of their famous citizens in literature or art; for many, it would involve the peculiarities of their local lore and their role in the international system of Greek mythology. Thomas stresses the multiple layers of the collective memory of each polis, and the surprising role of barbarians in such tales. The important role of women in local narratives is in accord with other recent works which urge us to abandon the idea of the Greek polis as a male citizen club. There is no space to even mention the many other topics on which this book makes important contributions, but it should be obvious that its implications will occupy scholars in various fields for a long time to come.

Herodotean scholarship is still dominated by two different attitudes: regarding ethnography and archaic Greek history, scholarship largely shifts from historical truth to examine Herodotean narratology and discourses; when it comes to Herodotus’ narrative of the Persian Wars, it is generally considered that Herodotus offers a relatively reliable account. Van Rookhuijzen's book examines the Herodotean topography of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece.Footnote ¹¹ He rightly argues that our understanding of the Persian Wars needs to allow for the fact that Herodotus’ narrative and topography are seriously skewed by the processes of collective memory of Greek communities and the mnemotopes (memory places) that they constructed in the decades that intervened between the Persian Wars and the composition of Herodotus’ text. Van Rookhuijzen constructs a valuable typology of mnemotopes, and employs it to evaluate the Herodotean topography. There is undoubtedly a need for such a study of topography and cultural memory, and many of the author's particular discussions are illuminating, but the overall account is rather marred by two factors. The first is excessive scepticism: van Rookhuijzen doubts even the link between the Athos canal and the Persian Wars. But the bigger problem is his simplistic understanding of intercultural interaction and communication: he assumes that each society has its own distinct culture, so that Xerxes could not have actually sacrificed at Troy, because this does not make sense in Persian terms. Deeper engagement with recent developments in the study of intercultural relations would have significantly improved an otherwise useful study.

The last two books under review are edited volumes focusing on the major Greek historians. The first, edited by Ewen Bowie, concentrates on Herodotus.Footnote ¹² The volume lacks an introduction, and consists of a collection of fourteen studies, primarily by literary scholars, on various traditional themes in Herodotean scholarship. The first theme is that of Herodotus as a narrator, in which historical narrative is considered to be essentially on a par with all other forms of narrative. Contributors explore the narrative techniques of Herodotus and their interrelationship with Homer, Pindar, and tragedy; particularly interesting in this respect is Konstantakos’ exploration of the link between Egyptian narratives and the Herodotean novella of Mycerinus. The second theme explores the interrelationship between Herodotus and various other ‘scientific’ genres that were developing in the course of the fifth century: geography, medicine, and literary criticism. The section I found most stimulating was the last, which looks at non-narrative aspects of Herodotus’ text, such as his terminology and his attitude to objects; particularly interesting were the chapters by Pelling and Thomas on the complexity of Herodotean causation and his subtle attitude to rationalist critiques of sensational tales.

The second volume, edited by Nikos Miltsios and Melina Tamiolaki, is devoted to Polybius.Footnote ¹³ The twenty-one chapters offer a rich tapestry of themes, some in well-established topics of research and others breaking interesting new ground. One major theme concerns Polybius’ ideas and discourses, exploring issues like ethnicity and political regimes such as the Syracusan tyranny. Many chapters focus on narratological issues; particularly interesting are the chapters on the narrative role of digressions and documents in Polybius’ text, as well as the roles of Polybian praise and the importance of perception as a historical factor. A third theme concerns issues of intertextuality and reception. This includes intertextual relationships with earlier historical texts and literary genres like encomium and biography, as well as with later Greek texts, including those of Arrian, Appian, and Roman historiography and poetry. The chapters dealing with Polybius’ relationship with earlier Greek historiography are highly stimulating, emphasizing the significance of fourth-century Greek historiography and the need to circumscribe the supposed significance of Herodotus and Thucydides. Equally fascinating is the last chapter, which explores the reception of Polybius by Oscar Wilde. The importance of this volume does not lie merely in its contribution to our understanding of a major Greek historian; in many of the chapters one can find major arguments for reconsidering the traditional narrative of the history of Greek historiography, in line with the arguments offered by Thomas that we examined above.