In this new edition of a text first published in 1996, F. presents an up-to-date and accessible introduction to the history of the ancient Mediterranean world. The chronological focus of this edition remains decidedly weighted in favour of the Greek and Roman period: F. devotes only six of the book's 36 chapters to the Near East and Egypt. The range of subjects covered, however, is more extensive. Although F. tends to emphasise political history, he does dedicate individual chapters to important topics in social, economic and intellectual history. Furthermore, he supplements these chapters with shorter ‘interludes’ in which he explores either selected subjects that are likely to be of interest to his readers (e.g. ‘Interlude 5: Celts and Parthians’, or ‘Interlude 7: Women in the Roman Republic’), or specific bodies of evidence (such as the Amarna letters in Interlude 1). The result is a text that provides only a brief primer on Egypt and the Near East, but which compensates for that limitation with a truly comprehensive overview of both Greek and Roman history.

In spite of the limited coverage F. assigns to Egypt and the Near East, the book has undeniable virtues. First, F. strives to acquaint readers with the nature and limitations of the surviving evidence without sacrificing his desire to present clear and coherent narratives concerning a wide range of historical topics. F.'s treatment of aspects of archaic Greek and Roman history provides convenient examples of how he integrates commentary on the sources with the traditional concerns of narrative history. Both in his discussion of Greek colonisation during the eighth and seventh centuries b.c.e. and in his discussion of the early Roman state in the sixth and fifth centuries, F. offers cogent presentations of what many readers will recognise as conventional narratives: his account of early Greek colonisation (pp. 147–55) is weighted in favour of a model in which settlements abroad were founded as a result of organised projects undertaken by early Greek states, while his narrative of the early Roman Republic (pp. 371–8) seems influenced by accounts that depend heavily on Livy. In both cases, however, F. takes pains to make his readers aware that the evidentiary grounds for his preferred narratives are not as solid as we would like them to be. Thus, he prefaces his comments on colonisation with the observation that the conventional narrative owes much to authors of the classical period, who wrote of colonial settlements ‘as if they were normally set up by a mother city’, even though ‘[I]n the eighth century the polis was scarcely developed in much of Greece and migration may have taken place in a much more haphazard way’ (p. 150). Likewise, F. acknowledges that what we can know of early Rome's political history is limited both by the complete loss of the works of the earliest Roman historians, and also by the fact that even early writers like Fabius Pictor based their knowledge of Rome before the fourth century b.c.e. on ‘a variety of legends from both Greek and Roman sources’ (p. 368).

Second, F. has not only taken great pains to ensure that his chapters are based on up-to-date research, but also alerts readers when his own view differs from arguments presented in recent scholarship. His analysis of Roman imperialism during the third and second centuries b.c.e. is a case in point. Here, F. chiefly follows a model defended most forcefully by W.V. Harris in his classic monograph, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327–70 b.c . (1979) – a model in which the Romans pursued a particularly aggressive foreign policy in the middle and late Republican periods because of the political and cultural importance that they attached to the military glory that could be won on campaign by soldiers and by commanders (see especially pp. 378–80 and 392–3). Although he does not engage directly with the more recent research of A.M. Eckstein (whose own approach to Roman imperialism is influenced heavily by contemporary international relations theory), F. does explicitly draw attention to Eckstein's work by recommending it as additional reading within the body of the text itself (p. 393). Only on rare occasions does F.'s narrative point to a gap in his knowledge of relevant and recent scholarship rather than to a decision on his part to prefer one scholarly reconstruction over another. One suspects, for example, that he would not have been so quick to claim that ‘it is hard to find any evidence of an imperial ideology’ during the period of the Roman Principate (p. 504) had he included C. Ando's Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty (2000) in his bibliography.

The main weakness of F.'s book, on the other hand, is its failure to develop in a clear and explicit way the two main themes to which F. draws attention in his introduction and in his first chapter. One of these is the ‘lively interchange of cultures’ (p. 17) that was characteristic of the ancient Mediterranean world for extended periods of its history; the other is the way in which that interchange gave rise to ‘the foundations of the western world’ (p. 15). Although each of these themes is present in at least an implicit way in several of the book's chapters, F. develops neither one systematically enough to permit it to function as the kind of dominant narrative thread that is arguably necessary in a broad and sweeping survey of this kind. F. admittedly gives some prominence to the theme of cultural exchange in the text, for it functions as an important structuring concept in the tenth chapter, ‘Travelling Heroes: the Greeks in a Wider World, 800–600’, in which F. provides a clear overview of the so-called ‘orientalizing revolution’ in the archaic Greek world. It also performs comparable work on a smaller scale in a handful of other chapters (most notably, in Chapter 20, ‘Tensions and Creativity: the Hellenistic World, 330–323 bc’). Apart from these examples, however, F. seems content to limit his explicit comments on cultural exchange to brief references that he makes only in passing, such as his suggestion that Hesiod's poetry reflects ideas and sentiments that had been expressed in the literature of Middle Kingdom Egypt (p. 140). F.'s tendency to invoke what should ostensibly be a main structuring theme only tangentially is even more apparent in those passages in which he returns to the idea that the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean laid the foundations of the western world. Because the book makes no effort to define concepts like ‘the western world’ or ‘western thought’ in a way that would make it possible for F. to structure his narrative around them, his explicit remarks on this theme are never more than incidental to the text. So, for instance, F. notes that Plato's account of Socrates is ‘one of the most enduring images of western cultural and political history’ (p. 283), and that ‘[t]he western intellectual tradition could be said to be founded on the dual legacy of Plato and Aristotle’ (p. 292) without defending these claims in detail. As a consequence, it is more difficult than F. likely intended for readers to discern a clear logic in his decision to survey the Near East, Egypt, Greece and Rome in a single volume.

This weakness need not affect the utility of the book as an instructional text in an introductory course on ancient history, since F.'s chapters do provide cogent and up-to-date overviews of key topics. It may also work to the advantage of instructors if they can use it to invite students to reflect on the validity of a concept like ‘the western world’. At the very least, this new edition of F.'s book merits serious consideration for those interested in finding a new text for classroom use.