Long a footnote in the history of political thought, isonomia now receives an entire monograph. While most scholars take an Atheno-centric perspective, S. argues that only a far-ranging, diachronic survey of the evidence can help us grasp the concept. Accordingly, S. looks beyond the reforms of Cleisthenes in Athens, during which, according to M. Ostwald, isonomia first became a political slogan, to trace its fortunes from its earliest occurrence to late antiquity. Although, per the TLG, there are not more than a dozen occurrences before the first century ce, S. takes a magnifying glass to them and seeks to discern commonalities and differences, devoting attention not only to historiography but also to philosophy, medicine and inscriptions. S. shows that isonomia was a nuanced and subtle idea, but at its most basic it was a concept of political order (‘Ordnungsbegriff’, p. 11) that entailed equal participation by all the citizens in the community's political institutions. For S. this goes some way to explain why the embrace of isonomia so rarely, if ever, led to calls for isomoiria, equal distribution of property/wealth. Isonomia was firmly rooted in the political (in the sense of French ‘le politique’), having to do with a collective right to participation in the administration of the community and less with individuals’ claims to particular resources or goods, the negotiation of which is the stuff of politics as most people know it (‘la politique’). There is thus something abstract and heady in S.'s understanding of isonomia, but S. argues that it was also operationalised in concrete situations on the ground, not only in Athens, but also in Magna Graecia and especially in Ionia. Starting in the second half of the sixth century, she argues, isonomic movements rose that fundamentally shaped the course of Greek history as well as the development of democracy.

The first chapter sets the stage for the argument by looking at early sources for political thought, especially Solon and the Ionians Anaximander and Xenophanes, to show that there was a wide concern in the Greek world about good order within a community (Solon's eunomia and Xenophanes’ eukosmia) and what it meant to live in a polis (p. 25). The second chapter turns to Ionia. S. argues that before the battle of Lade Ionians experimented in both theory and practice with different forms of community organisation, from Thales’ and Bias’ pan-Ionian proposals, to epigraphically attested koina in Teos and Phocaea, to constitutional regulations in Chios, to Heraclitus’ use of the term xynon. She suggests that there was, at core, a similarity between the reforms of Cleisthenes in Athens and the Ionian movements. For instance, Thales’ suggestion of a central pan-Ionian Council prefigures the centrality of the Athenian Council in Cleisthenes’ deme organisation. The next chapter, on Athens, explores this suggestion at greater length, finding in the herms of Hipparchus, which marked the distance from the centre of Athens to the periphery of Attica, another precursor to the Cleisthenic programme. S. follows Ostwald in taking the Harmodius scholion, as preserved by Athenaeus, as reflecting, more or less, a song popular in the last decade of the sixth century. If true, this would make the song not only the oldest attestation of the word before Herodotus (leaving the controversially dated Alcmaeon to one side), but the only evidence for the word isonomia current in Athens around the reforms of Cleisthenes. This raises a methodological problem for S.'s argument. While she relies on Herodotus to characterise Ionian politics as tending towards isonomia, Herodotus is silent about any connection between Cleisthenes’ reforms and isonomia. His characterisation of Athens after the tyrants as an isegoria is hardly the same thing (pp. 98–101, 141). The next chapter deals with Magna Graecia and seeks to draw a double analogy: between the political upheavals in Sicily, Athens and Ionia; and between Ionian and Pythagorean thought. S. discerns a similar interest in social balance and harmony coinciding with a push for more koinon-based polities. The next chapter ranges widely among authors and eras, from Thucydides, Plato, Isocrates and Aristotle to Plutarch and Cassius Dio and even Cicero and Livy. It shows how the concept's meaning started to change, becoming overshadowed by questions about democracy and the nature of equality. A final, short, chapter shows that in late antiquity the metaphoric sense of the term comes to dominate and isonomia completely loses the political, revolutionary sense it once had, as Christian writers use it to describe the believer's special relationship with God.

S. deserves praise for writing the first book-length history of the word isonomia as well as for going beyond Athens to pay careful attention to all the available instances of the term and their historical contexts (as best as they can be recovered). For me, the book also raises some questions along the way that it does not address. S. does not try to revive the suggestion of P. Vidal-Naquet and P. Lêvêque that Cleisthenes might have been a Pythagorean (which even they hesitated to more than suggest), but then what is the connection between Ionian or Pythagorean speculation and Cleisthenes’ political reforms? Surely the political situation in Ionia was very different from Sicily and very different from Athens. So why should we see the same ideas in response? And how does an intellectual concept become a political slogan, or vice versa? Such questions are hardly answerable on the state of our evidence, but the book's juxtapositions make asking them inevitable. On the other hand, when a book spans nearly 1,000 years of history, it feels petty to criticise it for not going on; still, I would like to know, if isonomia lost its political sense in late antiquity, how and why did it get it back in the seventeenth century? As F. Hayek pointed out (Constitution of Liberty [1960], pp. 164–7), that was when the term started appearing in print, notably in Philemon Holland's 1600 translation of Livy. By 1875 the term had become so trite that a brewer-turned-sportsman could name a horse ‘Isonomy’ (who would go on to belie his name by becoming one of the most successful British racehorses of the era). For Hayek, as already for G. Vlastos (AJP 74 [1953]), and presumably for Isonomy's owner, the term signified nothing less than the rule of law. S. devotes scarce attention to this sense of the term; yet a history of the concept should make clear why it was that meaning that resonated throughout the centuries, and, if it is wrong, how the error came about.