The Athenian ‘tyrannicides’ Harmodius and Aristogeiton have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, both as sculptures and as political monument and myth. Brunnsåker's 1955 study The Tyrant-slayers of Kritios and Nesiotes definitively gathered the archaeological evidence and established how the groups should be restored; Taylor's The Tyrant Slayers: the Heroic Image in Fifth century b.c. Athenian Art and Politics (1981) explored the early political history and reception in art; Fehr's Die Tyrannentöter oder: kann man der Demokratie ein Denkmal setzen? (1984) began also to explore something of their legacy. The tyrannicides have been a key example for all discussions of oral history in Athens, and recent work, particularly by J. Shear (see her ‘The Tyrannicides, their Cult and the Panathenaia: a Note’ JHS 132 [2012], 107–19 with further references), has drawn attention to the tyrannicides as objects of cult and the effect that the statue group had on the activities and the other statues erected in the vicinity.

A.’s book, which derives from his habilitation, is interested in the whole tyrannicide phenomenon. Building on all the above work, he traces, in the course of eleven chapters, the ever-changing significance of the tyrannicides, from the deed itself through to the surprising legacy of Kritios and Nesiotes’ statues in Nazi and Soviet art. As he puts it in the conclusion, the long life of the Tyrannicides is structured by the figure of the double. The pair of tyrannicides spawned both two traditions, in one of which they were heroic champions of liberty, in the other murderers incompetent in the execution of a plot born of sexual jealousy, and two groups of two statues, those of Antenor, taken off to Persia by Xerxes and returned (as A. thinks most probable) by Alexander, and those of Kritios and Nesiotes. The latter group was itself copied on pottery and in sculpture (it was indeed first identified in its reproduction on the ‘Elgin Throne’), and used as a model for figures in scenes of myth. At the same time the act of tyrannicide was held up as the model for acts vindicating freedom, as the Athenians committed themselves to performing and honouring renewed acts of tyrant-slaying in the face of these statues. The original honorific statue group, it was then doubled and redoubled as the fourth-century Athenians clustered further honorific statues and groups around it. In the course of the Hellenistic period the epigrams, the act of tyrannicide and the statues themselves came to be exported to other Greek cities and then to Rome, serving to align Roman liberty to Greek liberty when Sulla, as A. argues (following Colini and Reusser), brought copies to display on the Capitol, and Cicero invoked the tyrannicides to justify Milo killing Clodius. A prime focus within the public space of discourse at Athens from the moment of their deed, the tyrannicides retained their privileged position far enough into the Roman empire to meet the learned mockery of Lucian. Rediscovered as historical figures only in the eighteenth century (and as a statue group only in the nineteenth), the tyrannicides lived again a double life, as much heroes of the political right (Charlotte Corday killing Marat) as of the left, and figures whose erotic other life was widely suppressed (except in Germany).

Although a historian rather than an art historian, A. is a sure guide to the whole of this story, picking his way sure-footedly through the layers of scholarly speculation, and only occasionally (as in his late date for the Antenor group) preferring what seem to me to be unlikely positions. The book sits itself rather uncomfortably between popular history and scholarly thesis, assuming absolutely no knowledge of its readership, which makes the early part of the book, in particular, seem over-long, but at the same time supposing that the reader will be interested by what particular scholars have said. Those who persist beyond the initial longueurs will be richly rewarded. The index is strikingly good.