‘Help one's friends and harm one's enemies’ was a commonly expressed sentiment in classical Greece, and especially Athens, where it can be found as a recurring motif in the works of the Attic Orators. There have been many studies of ancient Greek friendship (especially, although not exclusively, in the various works of D. Konstan), but A.’s book – which originated as a 2010 doctoral dissertation at the University of Florida – is, according to the blurb on its rear cover, the first book ‘dedicated solely to the study of enmity in ancient Athens’.

In the introduction, A. distances himself from previously proposed models of ‘feuding’ in classical Athens, particularly those of D. Cohen's Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens (1995) and G. Herman's Morality and Behaviour in Democratic Athens: a Social History (2006). Against both Cohen's view – that Athens was a ‘feuding society’ in which the pursuit of revenge against one's enemies through the legal system was expected and accepted behaviour – and Herman's view – that Athenian litigants were expected to curtail their impulses towards seeking revenge and contrast their own restraint with the excesses of their opponents – A. suggests a more nuanced approach that emphasises the flexibility of the ‘rhetoric of enmity’, and how different circumstances in a given court case could result in the employment of a broad range of rhetorical strategies.

Chapter 1, ‘The Social Dimensions of Enmity’, aims – in A.’s own words (p. 2) – to provide ‘a model for how enmity worked’ in classical Athens. This chapter is not, perhaps, as successful in its aims or as systematic in its analysis as it might have been. A. is certainly clear (pp. 27–8) that his study is concerned with intra-polis rather than inter-polis enmity – in Greek terms, with echthroi rather than polemioi. Yet in acknowledging ‘enmity’ (echthra) as the inverse of ‘friendship’ (philia), A. misses an opportunity to explore further the extensive literature on the latter as a means of providing a greater conceptual clarity to the former. Similarly, A. provides (pp. 38–48) a useful reminder of the competitive context of Athenian public life, particularly the system of liturgies and its attendant legal proceedings; yet whilst acknowledging that this system ‘harnessed the Greek competitive spirit for the good of the state’ (p. 41), the enmities between Athenian liturgists that were generated and exacerbated as a result are treated merely as unavoidable side effects. A. does not seem to have considered, for instance, the possibility that such enmities may have been deliberately encouraged as a means of ‘discouraging class solidarity within the ranks of the wealth elite’ (J. Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens [1989], p. 242). Nonetheless, A. does clearly establish that ‘Athens deserves the appellation of a culture of enmity because of the importance of hostile relationships in the way society was organized’ (p. 54).

Chapter 2, ‘The Rhetoric of Enmity as a Legal Strategy’, focuses on the rhetorical manipulation of enmity within the corpus of the Attic Orators and its implications for the role of enmity within Athenian society. Expanding upon the historiographical critique set out in the introduction, A. seeks to prove that ‘the currently prevailing methodology for constructing models of Athenian belief and practice rests on a misunderstanding of the purposes behind the rhetoric of enmity’ (pp. 57–8). With reference to various case studies, A. makes a highly persuasive case that both Cohen and Herman (among others) have been too ready to assume that ‘the speakers’ narrative of their own conduct was normative for all Athenians’ (p. 75), and thus too willing to extrapolate general societal norms concerning enmity and feuding from individual and idiosyncratic rhetorical strategies.

Chapter 3, ‘The Flexibility of the Rhetoric of Enmity’, is – at only 23 pages – by some distance the shortest of the main chapters and in many respects functions as an appendage to Chapter 2. It expands on the previous chapter by exploring the influence of various legal and institutional factors – particularly the type of legal procedure for which any given speech was composed – upon the rhetorical presentations of enmity by the Attic Orators. For the most part, A. argues sensibly against overly schematic models that seek to map rhetorical treatments of envy onto broad procedural classifications of lawsuit (e.g. A. Kurihara, CQ 53 [2003], 464–77, which offers the generalisation that litigants in public suits denied enmity as a motive whereas litigants in private suits affirmed it). One key difference that does seem to have been neglected when A. considers trials for homicide (pp. 101–4) is that of the jury's composition – the difference between the mass audiences of the regular jury courts and the smaller, more experienced juries of the Areopagus and other homicide courts. Broadly speaking, however, it is hard to disagree with A.’s general argument that ‘the orators’ rhetoric is not relatable to a code of behaviour that provides straightforward information about Athenian ideology’ (p. 116).

Chapter 4, ‘Enmity under the Law: the Limits to Vengeance’, outlines the extent to and means by which, A. argues, the Athenians imposed limits upon enmity and feuding within the polis in three key areas: in the institutions of ‘participatory government’ (Assembly, Council, magistracies), in day-to-day legal activity in the courts and in Athenian society more generally. The first of these three, which receives scarcely three pages of attention (pp. 118–21), is by far the least effective and barely progresses beyond familiar generalisations about the prevalence of sortition, collegiality and mass participation within Athenian democracy. The other two areas are rather better developed. A. presents an elaboration of the argument outlined in the introduction, highlighting the limitations of Cohen's and Herman's overly systematised models of enmity; he concludes with thoughtful observations on the connection between key tenets of democratic ideology – as Aristotle famously put it in the Politics (1317a40–b17), the freedom to ‘live as one likes’ and to ‘rule and be ruled in turn’ – and the collective Athenian desire to impose limits on feuding between individual citizens, which might threaten these freedoms.

The conclusion, ‘Personal Enmity and Public Policy’, is generally concerned with raising new questions than with summarising those tackled within the book. There are tantalisingly brief discussions of critical issues that arise from the study of enmity and feuding – above all the perennial Athenian, and indeed Greek, concern with stasis and the means by which it might be avoided (pp. 154–7) – which are not explored within the main body of the book. Of course, A.’s book is not primarily a study of stasis, and in so far as its base of evidence (the Attic Orators) overwhelmingly belongs to a period that was atypically free of extended civil strife, the absence of such extended discussion is understandable.

Indeed, A.’s book might perhaps have been more accurately titled Enmity and Feuding in the Attic Orators. It represents a valuable and welcome contribution to a particular debate (the extent to which fourth-century Athens was characterised by a ‘feuding culture’) which revolves around the evidence of the Attic Orators, but in so determinedly focusing on this one category of evidence, A. inevitably limits the scope of his potential conclusions. Was, for example, fifth-century Athenian enmity fundamentally similar to its fourth-century counterpart? When a key institution such as ostracism receives the same amount of discussion as O.J. Simpson (one passing mention apiece), one cannot help but note that there remains much more to be said about enmity and feuding in classical Athens. Yet A.’s book, even if it does not meet the lofty goals it seems to set for itself, represents an advance in our understanding of classical Athenian society and a good foundation upon which future scholarship can build.