My first contact with sourcebooks came through the old Lewis and Reinhold sourcebooks on Roman Civilization (1951). These were intended as the Roman counterpart to an earlier set on Greek civilisation published as part of a series called Records of Civilization. Precious few such volumes were available in the 1970s, but now there seems to be an unending stream of source volumes dedicated to every aspect of antiquity. Such collections clearly save time and energy by excerpting snippets of ancient authors and, perhaps more importantly, inscriptions and papyri, with the goal of illuminating more brightly this or that corner of the ancient world. For this volume, ‘sources’ is a broadly inclusive term and includes both archaeological and literary material.

The volume proposes to accomplish a task that is at once both welcome and frustrating: it is welcome because it provides yet another option for those engaged in teaching either history or civilisation courses, frustrating because as with all such texts the selections are bound to exclude passages that some would like included and the treatment of the sources is necessarily thin. Some instructors may be unhappy to discover that the introduction to coinage, for example, consists of three brief paragraphs, one of which discusses one specific coin represented in the text. The volume covers a long range of history, c. 800–323 b.c., in 579 pages (plus 32 pages of bibliography and 30 pages of indexes) and a companion website. There is no coverage of the Bronze Age, unless you accept Homer's vision of the oikos as a reflection of BA rather than Geometric society. R. assumes that the Homeric poems reflect post-BA Greek society, and the discussion of the Homeric question is decidedly brief.

R. states that his intention is to offer an introduction to the sources and a part of that introduction is some discussion of how ancient sources can be used, what sort of questions one can ask of a particular body of material and what sort of answers one can expect. Thus a brief but illustrative discussion of the material from Toumba at Lefkandi demonstrates both the helpful side of material culture and some of the frustrations attached to artefacts as well. The material from Toumba is used to make the point that without corroborating literary evidence, archaeologists are forced to rely on theory to provide an interpretative framework. R. clearly succeeds in showing how to consider the various aspects of an ancient source, and how different the process is of working with ancient material from that of working with modern material.

While the emphasis in the literary sources is clearly on political, economic and military developments, social history is also represented. As noted above, the book has a companion website and it is to here that R. has relegated, for instance, all the sources on slavery in the classical period. Gender and other society issues in the archaic period are addressed in a chapter of their own, and gender in Classical Athens receives some fifteen pages of coverage, plus more material on the website. One full section treats archaic religion, but sources on religion in other periods are contained within the various sections. Otherwise comments on social issues are embedded in the 39 sections into which the volume is divided. There is virtually nothing on such practical affairs as science and mathematics, water supply and so on, and so those considering the book for a course in civilisation will need to supplement it for those issues. It is not clear, nor does R. attempt to justify, why some sources are online and others in the text.

R. is likewise peculiarly selective about the background discussion of the major authors included. While there are introductory sections on Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon and Diodorus, as well as an extremely brief section on Plutarch, R. includes only one line about Polybius, and nothing on Strabo or Pausanias. There are brief notes on these authors when they appear as sources later in the book or on the website, but it seems odd not to include something about their reliability and use where the other authors are discussed. Only fifteen inscriptions are cited. This reviewer would have preferred better representation of this important body of material and I suspect that many others will feel the same. In what seems a peculiar omission, there is no discussion of chronology or calendar systems in the introductory material, except for the one line that ‘the Athenian calendar was lunar and the Attic year began in the summer’ (p. xl). Students should really have at least a brief presentation of how dates in the ancient world are calculated, but apparently R. assumed that instructors would address that issue.

On the website one finds additional literary sources as well as illustrations of sites and various archaeological material. If one clicks on a link to additional sources, the material is downloaded as a pdf file. The ‘General Links’ tab takes one to a Microsoft Word document that contains four pages of links that include all the standard sites such as Perseus, The Ancient World Mapping Center, etc., under headings labelled Maps, Image Banks, Museums and so on, while the ‘Further Links by Chapter’ calls up eleven pages of additional sites. Some will find the websites of the additional links section maddeningly thin. For example the additional link – there is only one – for Chapter 11 on Cleisthenes and Athenian Democracy is a virtual tour of the Athenian Agora. The extremely helpful material on the link to Cleisthenes at stoa.org, to name just one, is nowhere to be found. Likewise although the discussion of numismatics is extremely thin, there is no link to the Numismatic Museum of Athens (www.nma.gr), nor the American Numismatics Society (www.numismatics.org) where one can find a good deal of helpful information. Such omissions are curious because they do not add extra cost to the production of the volume.

Typographical errors are few. In the table of contents, for instance, the selection from Pausanias 18.10.11, the Stoa Poikile, is incorrectly labelled WEB 108, although it is correctly labelled WEB 109 in the index. (Curiously the link for the Stoa Poikileon on the companion website does not take one to the ASCSA Agora Website, but rather to a site designed for tourists.) Although it is not a typographical error, R. states on p. 27 that Schliemann identified Hissarlik as Troy, a falsehood that S.H. Allen's book on Frank Calvert put to rest some years back (S.H. Allen, Finding the Walls of Troy: Frank Calvert and Schliemann at Hisarlik [1999]).

In spite of its idiosyncrasies (for example R. accepts the authenticity of the Peace of Callias [p. 290] and acknowledges that the Themistocles Decree is a copy but accepts the authenticity of the decree itself [p. 231]), this is a useful volume for those who teach civilisation and history courses. Users will still need to supplement it to fill out their own particular purposes, but that would be true for virtually any such volume. While the stream of themed source books flows strong, there is still a place for such a comprehensive volume as this and R. is to be congratulated on providing us with another choice in the classroom.