This book is a collection of papers presented at a conference held in Münster in June 2010. That event had two aims: to gather those scholars who had agreed to contribute to an edited volume intended to provide an up-to-date account of ‘Greek federal states’ for discussion about that project; and to present and discuss papers on the narrower theme of so-called federal sanctuaries in those states. The larger edited volume has now appeared as H. Beck and P. Funke (edd.), Federalism in Greek Antiquity (2015). And though there is some inevitable overlap between the two volumes, the special devotion to federal sanctuaries created space for the exploration of material in this book that was excluded from the more general one. (It should be noted that not all speakers chose to publish their conference papers in the volume under review.)

F.’s introduction sets out a few guiding analytical principles. If the intersection of religion and politics has been well studied on both the local and the panhellenic levels, it has been less fully scrutinised on the regional level. For this question those sanctuaries that were of importance to multiple communities within a region are an excellent set of case studies. F. suggests that these regional sanctuaries served two functions which can be broadly conceived as political: they fostered a sense of identity among and facilitated the integration of otherwise discrete polities. These two themes – identity and integration – are explored in chapters devoted to Achaea (A. Rizakis) and Achaean southern Italy (M. Fronda), Aetolia (F.), Acarnania (K. Freitag), Boeotia (A. Ganter, née Kühr), Elis (J. Roy), Triphylia and Arcadia (T.H. Nielsen), the mainland Locrians (G. Daverio Rocchi), Phocis (J. McInerney), Thessaly (R. Bouchon and B. Helly), Macedonia (M. Hatzopoulos) and the Aegean (K. Buraselis).

One broad and important – if unsurprising – point emerges from these surveys, namely that there is significant variation in the role played by regional sanctuaries in the formation and maintenance of federal states in the Greek world. The ancient gatherings at Thermum in Aetolia, at the Itonium near Kierion in Thessaly and, purportedly, at the sanctuary of Zeus Homarius in Achaean Aegium are paradigms of the identity and integration model. Hatzopoulos' lucid analysis of Macedonian engagement with and uses of the sanctuary of Zeus at Dium in the Classical and Hellenistic periods suggests a similar role for a regional sanctuary within a monarchy with federal features. In other regions, such as Acarnania, Arcadia, Triphylia and Hellenistic Crete, sanctuaries played no evident role in the emergence of a shared identity or political integration. And in some of the best documented cases the relationship between regional sanctuaries and political integration appears to have been highly contentious. This is admirably brought out by Ganter, who digs beneath the veneer of Boeotian identity and integration to focus on the ways in which common sanctuaries could be used as weapons in conflicts between poleis. In a rather different way, McInerney's study of Phocis exposes similar dynamics. He argues that the instrumental value of the regional sanctuaries at Kalapodi, Kranaia and Abai as ‘nodes within regional networks’ (p. 190), as well as the material value that accumulated at such sanctuaries over time, made them focal points for group identity, not vice versa. Their political integration occurred in the sixth century not as a result of some Durkheimian ritual effervescence and sense of shared destiny but rather because they supposed it would help them to compete with neighbouring settlements that were excluded from the new state for ‘control of a key area brimming with wealth, prestige, and status’ (p. 198).

For a book about ancient sanctuaries, precious little attention is paid to archaeological evidence. We hear a bit about particular dedications (e.g. Ganter's discussion of the bronze statuettes dedicated at the Ptoion), and there are occasional quick overviews of major excavations (e.g. Hatzopoulos' description of the astonishing site of Dium), but there is an overwhelming tendency among these historical contributions to prioritise literary evidence and inscriptions. McInerney's careful discussion of archaeological evidence for metalworking at Kalapodi and the dedications of eastern luxury goods and weapons from the eighth to the fifth centuries thus stands out and enables him to make one of the more innovative contributions to the volume.

Inscriptions tend to be extremely valuable for questions about the political functions of particular sanctuaries. It is on the basis of one recently published text that Bouchon and Helly make an important contribution to our understanding of this dynamic. A Thessalian decree granting ateleia, politeia and epigamia to the Aeolians, Coans and Magnesians, found at Aegae in Aeolis (ed. pr. H. Malay and M. Ricl, Epigraphica Anatolica 42 [2009], 39–60), states that copies of the decree were to be set up in ‘Olympion, and in Itounos, and in La(ri)ssa at the sanctuary of Apollo Kerdoios' (lines 30–2). Itounos is certainly the ancient sanctuary of Athena Itonia near Karditsa, well established as an important regional sanctuary for Thessalians since the eighth century, while the sanctuary of Apollo Kerdoios was a local sanctuary of Larissa. The sanctuary of Zeus Olympius, however, is new, and the clear evidence that it served as a repository of decrees of the Thessalian koinon in the third century b.c. suggests to Bouchon and Helly that the cult was established, or at least became a focal point for the activities of the koinon, in order to reflect the increased power of Larissa within the koinon of the third century, quite distinct from the more widely diffused or ‘multipolar’ structure of the Thessalian state in the sixth to the fourth centuries. This is a fascinating observation, built on new evidence appearing from an unlikely quarter, and while Bouchon and Helly emphasise its importance in their fine paper, the broader significance of this development for the way we think about ‘federal sanctuaries’ is lost in the volume, perhaps because the introduction is so brief and generic. What we see is a deliberate yoking together of political and religious change. This kind of dynamism begs for an analytical explanation, one rooted in the work that religious practice does for political actions and structures, and this the volume fails to provide. The optimistic focus on identity and integration insists on seeing ‘federal states’ as, at least in aspiration, something like organic wholes, where they are in fact composite entities defined by a multipartite, multiscalar institutional structure. What emerges from the new inscription attesting the use of a Larissaian sanctuary of Zeus Olympius as a repository of federal decrees alongside the ancient Itonion is a multidirectional tension, between the competing interests of individual poleis on the one hand and between local and regional interests on the other, which also surfaces in the papers by Ganter and McInerney.

In the midst of numerous papers in this volume, the reader gets glimpses of the intersection of economic behaviour, practices and institutions with religious activity and political priorities: pastoralism at Thermum (F.); transhumance and metalworking at Kalapodi (McInerney); the accumulated value of dedications at Elis (Roy); and the production of coinage emblazoned with the portrait of the regional god (Freitag, Rizakis, Daverio Rocchi et al.) are but a few examples. The focus on the role of regional sanctuaries in identity formation and political integration precluded full exploration of these issues in most cases. The contributors have thus provided a useful and reliable starting point for further investigation.