B. presents in this book the conclusions of his years-long engagement with the Iliad. Despite its title, this is much more than a historical review of Homeric society, since it includes new literary readings of many passages. It is also heavy on theory (economics, sociology, anthropology and philosophy), which, although informative, could have been reduced. B. is versed in an impressive array of scholarship, from Mauss and Lévi-Strauss to Bourdieu, Baudrillard and Vernant, Nagy, Calame, Seaford and Martin, among others.

B. describes his purpose as to ‘think through what the Historian's relationship to the Iliad might be and what the consequences of that encounter entail’ (p. ix) and tackles the methodological problems this involves. He understands the Iliad not as a simple historical document but as a performance, its ‘narrative being formed by a context it is at the same time complicit in creating’ (p. 3).

In the introduction B. broaches the problematic ‘referentiality’ of the Iliad’s performance to the surrounding reality and announces the book's contents: the concept of value and evaluation, politics in Archaic Greece, symbolic exchange etc. B.’s main thesis is that the distribution of prizes of honour (geras) according to the will of the group of warriors (dasmos) collapses and is replaced in the Iliad by a different and more objective system, represented by laws of inheritance (as in the famous Gortyn code) and sports contests (agones) in funeral games. The Iliad reflects a moment of a political and social crisis resulting from the absence of such institutions. B. reflects on the initial dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon, as a crisis affecting the whole economy of value in Homeric society. This crisis is resolved only at the end of the poem, when Achilles organises the funeral games in Patroclus’ honour as a way of distributing prizes that substitutes for the dasmos.

The book, inspired by novel connections between ‘meaning, performance and the occasion of epic poetry, real or imagined’ (p. 2), is divided into two parts and six chapters. In the first two chapters (Part 1), B., following Vernant, argues that changes in the warrior's role in the post-Mycenaean world problematised the geras (‘gift of honour’) as a marker of status, causing it to become instead a marker of worth. The Iliad illustrates the difficulties caused by a lack of a framework for adjudicating performance. The first two chapters offer an examination of the semantics of geras and dasmos (Chapter 1) and the language of worth, value and evaluation (τίω, τιμή etc.) and a detailed and perceptive review of Achilles’ and Agamemnon's dispute from this perspective (Chapter 2). B. demonstrates convincingly how this quarrel highlights the dasmos’ deficiencies, since it does not satisfy the expectations of the participants. Hence the need to find new methods. The result has a political cast: Achilles is ‘reaching into uncharted terrain for a way to express his social and political identity as a rational and autonomous artifact’, which represents the ‘crises in the developing polis rather than … a simple dispute between tribal chieftains’ (p. 142). B. summarises the thesis of Chapters 3 and 4 thus: ‘the key objects of succession and contest – patrimony and the prize – are presented in the Iliad as solutions to the proto-civic impasse objectified both in the geras in particular (Iliad 1) and in the heroic economy in general (Iliad 9)’ (p. 145).

B. states that a passage in which Cronus’ three sons dispute their inheritance (15.165–7) and whose language ‘deliberately echoes that of Achilles and Agamemnon in Iliad 1’ demonstrates the relation between the transmission of inheritance and the division of spoils. Comparing this passage to the Gortyn code, B. picks outs some key shared concepts such as isomoros: ‘to be the recipient of an equal share is the political and economic definition of having the same status (homotimos)’ (p. 151). This homology is further confirmed by other shared terms, such as the verb δατέομαι, used in Archaic and early Classical Greek for both division of spoils and partition of patrimony, while in Classical Athens it is exclusively used for patrimonial division.

The patrimonial division, according to B., is a system superior to the dasmos, since it has an external framework for regulating disagreements and claims that includes: (1) appointment of a judge; (2) external standards for fixing a share's value; (3) penalisation of offences; (4) formal representation of competing claims and (5) production of witnesses (p. 166). The juridical apparatus (inexistent in the Iliad), as attested by the Gortynian Law, is the most important contribution of the new system.

The funeral games for Patroclus in Iliad 23 (Chapter 4) delineate the main lines of the new economy of prestige. B. suggests that just as inheritance disputes are resolved by a legally mandated process, so too athletic contests, linked to the funeral through ‘the convergence of social practices and institutions’ (p. 194). The system (p. 202) weaves the juridical function of the funeral together with practices of worth assignment, celebrated in public with rules (the contest) that prevent arbitrary decisions. The Iliad narrative, B. argues, transposes terms of gift-exchange into contexts of awarding prizes, which can be viewed as precursors of coinage: they are precious objects independent of personal relations and their value is fixed publicly, certified by the community. A more abstract notion of timê as ‘honour’ can now emerge (p. 211).

The Iliad, then, participates in a fundamental change in Greek culture regarding the assignment of (social) value that is closely connected with other economic and political developments, such as the emergence of currency, the concept of citizenship and the hero-cult. ‘The quality of symbolic capital produced in epic and at local festivals is fundamentally the same’ (p. 212).

Chapters 5 and 6 bring ‘together a theory of practice in the economy of exchange with epic conceived as a poetics of ritualized performance event’ (p. 190). In the footsteps of Nagy, B. analyses the role of Patroclus as the sacrificial double of Achilles and of Achilles’ subjectivity. Regarding Agamemnon's behaviour in Book 9, B. argues that not going himself to supplicate to Achilles shows his insincerity (p. 295). But no one in the poem suggests so. Agamemnon quite reasonably avoids a direct confrontation with Achilles now, as he did when he first took Briseis.

Chapter 6 concludes with excellent observations on symbolic and political exchanges, as in B.’s comparison of Achilles’ sceptre (thrown to the ground as a sign of his alienation in Il. 1.234–9) with the bed of Odysseus in the Odyssey:

The book closes with important reflections on myth and its variants, orality and writing, and the performance of poetry and ritual, as well as Hecataeus of Miletus, who initiates what is later called history, all at a time when the political subject is abjuring the symbolic power controlled by basileis and asserting his own competence to make judgements, ‘in essence following Achilles’ lead by snapping the skeptron and firmly fixing kratos at the center of the laos’ (p. 351).

This is a complex work, and I have only sketched its riches. Although there are points that allow for disagreement and B. seems sometimes to read too much into the text (and the language is occasionally turgid), the book will interest not only Homerists and historians but also scholars working on religion, economy and law in Greece.