Early on in this collection of studies, G. declares, ‘Philology … is still the fountain head of the study of classics’ (p. 6). Indeed, each chapter of this volume demonstrates that, at least where the study of ‘Hellenism in the East’ is concerned, this, of necessity, is true.

G.'s purpose is to amass and evaluate all the literary evidence for Greek civilisation in Graeco-Roman Palestine and to demonstrate that its intellectuals were no different than their counterparts elsewhere. He begins, in Part 1, with a ‘Prosopography of Greek Intellectuals’ which assembles all the known authors, rhetors and pepaideumenoi of Palestine (including Gadara), with the exception of those who have been covered sufficiently elsewhere. This lengthy chapter, which originally appeared in Hebrew, contains all sorts of connections and interconnections of Greek intellectuals (aside from the fifth- and sixth-century School of Gaza) that otherwise would be a challenge to pin down.

This effort sets the stage for Part 2 in which G. moves beyond the usual emphasis on individual personalities in order to situate a group of Greek intellectuals in their Palestinian setting and to demonstrate that these intellectuals very much belonged to the larger Hellenistic world. Seven chapters are devoted to the ‘Greek Intellectuals from Ascalon’ and are divided between the ‘early witnesses’ to the flourishing of Hellenistic culture in the late-second to first centuries b.c.e. and the ‘Second Flourishing’ in Late Antiquity. The main source for the earlier period is the sixth-century Stephanus of Byzantium from whom we learn that Ascalon had two grammarians, two otherwise unknown historians and four philosophers. G. finds it odd that there are no poets in this group so he turns to Gow and Page's Greek Anthology and makes the case that all or most of the eleven epigrams assigned to a Euenus, only one of whom is designated ‘of Ascalon’, should be assigned to that figure. G.'s study of the other intellectuals assigned to Ascalon by Stephanus leads him to conclude that Palestine produced two influential Greek philosophers at Rome at the end of the Republic, Philodemus of Gadara and Antiochus of Ascalon, and that Ascalon had two important grammarians, Ptolemaeus and Doritheus, who could ‘prescribe pure Attic Greek to the entire educated world’ (p. 70). G.'s ‘economical solution’ to the identification of Euenus of Ascalon allows him to conclude that ‘An elegant epigrammatist suits this milieu to perfection’ (p. 84).

G. acknowledges that we are somewhat in the dark when it comes to Hellenistic intellectual life in mid-first to fourth-century c.e. Ascalon but insists that its ‘second flourishing’ in Late Antiquity did not come out of nowhere. He rightly alludes to the cultural magnificence of the city during the Roman period – presumably that to which the material evidence attests, which he does not really devote attention to. Perhaps he felt that was unnecessary since for him a thriving intellectual life in the fourth to sixth centuries does not ‘mash’ with an earlier ‘cultural desert’ in the second and third centuries (p. 88). Here I found myself in agreement with G., as I have resorted to similar reasoning to offset recent contentions that Judaism had all but disappeared after the Bar Kokhba revolt in the Land of Israel only to be resuscitated once the rabbis got their act together centuries later in Late Antiquity. Roman Palestine was home to many intellectual currents, some pagan, some Jewish and some Christian, all of which G. is clearly aware of.

G. turns to the tenth-century Suda to piece together the evidence for various figures named Eutocius whom, he argues, all belonged to the same family tree. The Suda mentions a Thracian soldier named Eutochius who ran off with his unit's money and found his way to Ascalon. G.'s close study of the name reveals it is usually associated with Palestine and Egypt, so it is not impossible that the Thracian soldier, the Eutochis of the Letters of Libanius, a ‘Eutokos’ who is a rhetor associated with late third- or early fourth-century Caesarea in the Palestinian Talmud (Meg. 3.74a) and the famous seventh-century mathematician Eutocius were related. The latter, G. concludes, was ‘a man of the world’ with close ties to Alexandria, Constantinople and Antioch. The upshot of all this is that ‘Ascalon was hardly just Gaza's poor relative (or neighbor)’ (p. 106).

G.'s treatment of Julian of Ascalon, which originally appeared in 1992, is a fitting inclusion here. This c. sixth- to seventh-century figure has only sporadically been given the treatment he deserves (most recently by B. Hakim). G. maintains that he was both an architect and an engineer responsible not only for a legal text but also for a metrological work. Ludwig Fenner von Fenneberg actually argued long ago (1859) that the metrological table ascribed to Julian was derived from Jewish measures, a view that G. disputes in detail. He creatively draws upon two archaeological witnesses, an inscription from the time of Justinian on the aqueduct leading to Jerusalem from the area of Bethlehem, which threatens legal action against anyone building within fifteen feet, and a measuring rod depicted in an early seventh-century mosaic floor from Shelomi in Western Galilee, which helps him establish the length of a cubit. Apparently, there were at least two measuring systems in Palestine, an official and a local one, which seem to be what Julian is presenting. Julian is not writing with an awareness of Jewish, specifically rabbinic, practices in mind but rather with knowledge of Byzantine laws and measures that were followed locally in the cities of Palestine. As shown long ago by S. Lieberman, and noted by G. (pp. 114–15), both the Palestinian Talmud and Julian were aware of specific local customs in Palestine pertaining to builders, construction and the responsibilities of landlords who owned different floors of a building, which made their way into Byzantine law.

G.'s final chapter in Part 2 is devoted to ‘Two Shrines in Ascalon’. His interesting analysis of Asclepius λεοντοῦχος leads him to conclude that the epithet is not a reference to a lion but to a serpent. Accordingly, ‘the good people of Ascalon’ were not engaged in ‘bizarre worship’ but rather in ‘mainstream … Greek religion’. G. further examines the ‘tsrif of Ascalon’ mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud (‘Abod. Zar. 11b), which he connects, not to ‘Serapis’ directly, but to a ‘pyramid’ (tsrif)-like shrine, which might be an allusion to the Egyptian Serapis. G. admits, however, that this is a bit of a stretch.

Part 3, ‘Latin Literature in Palestine’, is an attempt to demonstrate that ‘the spread of Latin was part and parcel of Hellenism in the East’ (p. 150) and the language was not, as is usually assumed, limited to the Roman army and administration. G.'s discussion is very useful even if he forces the issue somewhat. Much of his argument hinges on military and administrative figures who undoubtedly had other Latin cultural interests, but the documentation for these is rather thin. This is certainly true for the Roman period. G. is compelled to resort to some reasonable deductions which are derived from relatively late testimony: for example, Jerome's Latin school in Bethlehem, Procopius of Gaza's allusion to the study of law, Latin-speaking Christian pilgrims.

Readers of G.'s book need to keep in mind the subtitle, which indicates that this is a collection of ‘studies’. A concluding chapter synthesising what we can learn from them about the larger topic of Hellenism in the East would have been a useful addition to those who do not want to work their way through the myriad philological arguments at the heart of this work or those who remain unconvinced by some of them. Nevertheless, G.'s volume should be welcomed by scholars of Hellenism, Byzantine and rabbinic law, and those interested in reconstructing the cultural life of Graeco-Roman Palestine and the East.