In this revision of his doctoral dissertation, S. looks at social memory, a term which he prefers to collective memory, in Athenian public discourse in primarily the fourth century b.c. He asks ‘how did … Athenians learn about their past, and what did this past mean to them? Second, how did individual speakers make use of the past and operate within the complex Athenian memorial network? Third, to what extent did these shared images of the past influence the decision-making process in … fourth-century Athens?’ (p. 3). More specifically, the book focuses on how Attic orators in the fourth century and what we might call their proxies, especially Xenophon and Herodotus, remembered Thebes' interactions with the city of Athens in four specific situations: Thebes' medising in 480, the burial of the Seven (against Thebes), Thebes' aid to the exiled Athenian democrats in 403 and the Theban proposal to eradicate Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War. ‘Contextualizing the orators’ allusions within the complex net of remembrances and beliefs held by their audiences', S. seeks ‘to assess the ideological and emotive power of these shared memories’ (p. 4). At the same time, he is particularly concerned to ascertain what ‘actually’ happened, hence his emphasis on ‘distortions’ and ‘clues’, and to combat the notion that all political decision-making is done on the basis of realpolitik. For S., R. Thomas' Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (1989) ‘provides a viable model for my case study’ (p. 22) which also seeks to ‘serve as a model for other studies of historical social memory and discourse in the ancient world’ (p. 7). Concentrating closely on the Theban examples, the volume will be of particular interest to scholars working on fourth-century Athenian oratory. It does not, however, unpack the workings and politics of Athenian social (or collective) memory nor is it designed as an introduction to memory studies in the Greek world.

After a preface, an introduction sets up the project's work and central premises and outlines its organisation. It then turns to ask what social memory is and to explain how it functions. A final section details S.'s ‘underlying assumptions concerning the nature of public discourse and decision making’ (p. 7). Chapter 1, as its title ‘Carriers of Athenian Social Memory’ suggests, returns to methodology to explore thematically the fields and media, which S. calls ‘carriers’, through which information about the past was made available in classical Athens. It consists largely of descriptions of occasions: festivals and public commemorations (funeral orations, dramatic festivals, cult and festivals), different memory communities (tribes and demes, family traditions, the symposium, xenia and proxenia), and monuments and inscriptions. S. states that memory is created on these occasions, but he does not elucidate the processes and their politics. The strongest discussion is about the symposium, while the rituals fare particularly badly. The chapter would benefit from full engagement not only with the scholarly works mentioned on p. vi, but also with M. Scott, Delphi and Olympia: the Spatial Politics of Panhellenism in the Archaic and Classical Periods (2010) and especially A.S. Chankowski, L'éphébie hellénistique: étude d'une institution civique dans les cités grecques des îles de la Mer Égée et de l'Asie Mineure (2010). This chapter does not unpack how Athenian social memories were created and maintained; instead, these processes are assumed to have taken place.

With Chapter 2, the volume turns to the first of the four events which the Athenians particularly used to remember Thebes and her actions collectively. Here, the focus is on Thebes' conduct during Xerxes' invasion of 480 and the ways in which ‘the Athenians perceived the Thebans as their own counterimage’ (p. 344). Readers are given a series of close readings of passages, some of which are approached multiple times from different angles. Chapter 3 looks at the Athenians' response in the deep past to the Thebans' refusal to allow the burial of the Argive Seven against Thebes. It explores the origins and formative influences of the myth and then, through a series of close readings, it examines how it was put to use in Athenian political discourse. Incidentally, the Nike Temple cannot reflect the battle of Delion, since it was already completed in the middle of the 420s (see P. Schultz in Art in Athens during the Peloponnesian War, ed. O. Palagia [2009], pp. 128–67). In Chapter 4, S. turns to occasions and periods which promulgated positive images of Thebes, in contrast with the negative ones discussed in the previous two chapters. Looking particularly at Theban help apparently given to Athenian democrats in 403, S. asks whether ‘the Athenian decision to ally with the Thebans in 395 and 378 [was] merely governed by considerations of Realpolitik, which led the Athenians to cast their resentments overboard’ (p. 212). I would agree that the Theban decree aiding the democrats probably entered Athenian memory spheres in the context of the alliance of 395, but I remain unconvinced that it was collectively remembered as part of the events of 404/3. As signalled in the preface (p. vi), the section on the overthrow of the Thirty has not fully engaged with some recent work on the subject. Chapter 5 focuses on the proposed eradication of Athens in 404 at the end of the Peloponnesian War. It seeks to discover what actually happened and why the memory of a proposal which was never actually carried out was so persistent in Athenian public discourse. Devotees of J. Assmann's ‘cultural memory’ would do well to pay attention to this chapter: it shows clearly how memories of three events from three previous periods, the Thebans' medism (145 years earlier), her destruction of Plataea (92 years before) and her proposal to eradicate Athens (69 years earlier), all worked in the same way. The volume is rounded off by a conclusion which usefully provides concluding sections for the individual chapters. Anyone seeking to gain a quick overview of the book would be well advised to begin here. The indexes will also prove very helpful in tracing discussions of particular passages and themes.

Despite deriving its approach from memory studies, this book is at its best when it performs close readings of literary texts. Its thematic organisation marks its lineage within classical studies, as do the profusion of references to the ‘Athenian master narrative’, which S. prefers to the more common ‘Athenian official tradition’. This term reifies what was actually a process and renders it static and inert. In Chapters 4 and 5 in particular, this reification sits awkwardly with what were clearly changing memory traditions. Although S. signals his positioning within European memory studies in the introduction, he does not share their concerns with the relationships between individual and collective memory, even though he provides much material for investigating just those intersections. Despite the repeated emphasis that orators were limited in what they could say about the past, much more could have been done with A. Appadurai's seminal article (Man 16 [1981], 201–19) on the finite nature of the past and with the model which is presented there. Organised thematically rather than chronologically, this book also misses the opportunity to explicate the Athenians' memory profile of Thebes during the fifth and fourth centuries b.c. The material collected here would very much have benefited from engagement with J.K. Olick's The Politics of Regret: on Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (2007), and it could have provided an important case study of a memory profile in a time and place which is not twentieth-century Europe. In sum, S.'s volume provides a valuable service in opening up a number of areas with which scholars of ancient Greece must engage, if they are to make contributions not only to classical studies, but also to memory studies more broadly.