Attitudes towards wealth and luxury are never simple. In modern western culture, we mythologise the dream of a better life, as we deplore the greed of many who have achieved it; we idolise the lifestyles of the rich and famous, while mocking and castigating their excesses, especially when coming from the children of wealth – ‘entitled’ inheritors of a lifestyle they have not earned. From the earliest instances in Homer and Hesiod, Greek attitudes towards wealth and luxury demonstrate a similar complexity, built around questions of how wealth was earned, how it was used, and whether more wealth meant greater happiness or simply precipitated a more spectacular fall.

G. & G. deal partly with this complexity, but the main aim of their study is to explore the history of one particular attitude towards luxury, long held to be central to the Greek moral worldview: ‘the idea that luxury corrupts and even destroys’ (p. 2); or, more specifically, ‘the conceptual model … that luxury led to effeminacy, which generated acts of hubris, which provoked retribution and ruin’ (p. 75). The usual assumption, as G. & G. characterise it, is that this concept of corrupting luxury was well established in the Greek mind by the Classical period when Herodotus made it an essential trope of ancient historiography. But G. & G.'s surprising and thought-provoking conclusion is that ‘pernicious luxury’ as a causative force in history does not originate in the Greek moral landscape. Instead, Greek authors only adopted the idea as a result of contact with Roman moralistic historiography.

G. & G. suggest two main causes for the common misconception. The first is philological. Analysing Archaic and Classical word usage, G. & G. argue, in Chapter 1, that scholars (and dictionaries) have too often used imprecise English words, such as luxury and softness, each of which carry loosely articulated pejorative senses, to interpret a broad range of semantically specific Greek terms and concepts, lumping them together into a ‘vocabulary of luxury’ (pp. 25–46). In particular, G. & G. believe that τρυϕή, a ‘pernicious luxury’ buzzword, has been misunderstood. Rather than a general way of life, associated with luxury and effeminacy, they argue τρυϕή is a psychological disposition in which the τρυϕερός person expects his or her needs to be met. By associating τρυϕή simply with luxury or softness, scholars incorrectly map the subtext of ‘pernicious luxury’ back onto the original Greek passage.

Similarly scholars have inferred the theme of ‘pernicious luxury’ in Herodotus’ Histories, the subject of Chapter 2, despite the fact that no statement attributing the downfall of an individual or community to great wealth exists (p. 76). One would expect to find the theme of ‘pernicious luxury’ in the narrative of Croesus and the Lydians, for example. Yet as G. & G. observe (pp. 120–2), at the time of their defeat, the very moment at which ‘pernicious luxury’ should reveal itself most clearly, Herodotus says there is no one more manly in all of Asia than the Lydians (Hdt. 1.79.3). The Persians, too, are singled out for their manliness and courage; it is only their subjects that are accused of effeminacy (pp. 95–108). If Herodotus does have a moral, it is that historical downfalls occur despite great wealth, not because of it (pp. 133–4).

Do G. & G. claim that the Classical Greeks display no negative attitudes towards wealth and luxury? Not quite. G. & G. acknowledge that τρυϕή can at times be associated with effeminacy and softness, when the expectation of having one's needs met leads to the neglect of care (ἐπιμέλεια) for military training, while at others it causes hubris and violence. But they argue that these phenomena are not evidence for ‘pernicious luxury’, because they are not united into their ‘conceptual model’ outlined above, nor are they inevitable outcomes of τρυϕή (pp. 46–65; 74–5). Insistence on this single model seems unnecessarily narrow at times and one longs for a deeper analysis of the complexity of the material. Solon's poetry, for example, is quickly removed from consideration because the focus ‘is decidedly on hubris in obtaining wealth, not in the lifestyle of luxury’ (p. 27). G. &. G.'s aim, however, is not to elucidate Classical Greek beliefs about wealth and luxury, but to show that one particular concept has been incorrectly attributed to them. In this they are quite persuasive.

The second main cause of the misconception about ‘pernicious luxury’ is methodological. Much of the evidence for ‘pernicious luxury’ in the Hellenistic historiographers comes from citations by Greek authors of the Roman period, especially Athenaeus. Yet as G. & G. see it, one should not assume that a passage cited as evidence of a moral phenomenon, like ‘pernicious luxury’, by Athenaeus had the same emphasis in the original. Thus in Chapter 3, they develop a methodology for separating original content from cover text in the Deipnosophistae. Employing a synchronic and diachronic analysis of the occurrence and use of words and phrases, they determine that common Athenaean composition techniques and stock phrases, such as ἐξοκείλαντες εἰς τρυϕὴν (‘running aground on’ τρυϕή) and εἰς τοῦτο τρυϕῆς (‘to such an extent of’ τρυϕή), give the impression that moral censure existed in places where none originally existed. Then, in Chapter 4, G. & G. survey Athenaeus’ use of five Hellenistic historians, Clearchus, Ctesias, Ephorus, Theopompus and Heracleides Ponticus, who are commonly believed to be advocates of the ‘pernicious luxury’ theme. In all cases, they argue, moral attitudes about luxury cannot reliably be attributed to the original author and likely indicate Athenaeus’ (re)interpretation of the texts.

Here G. & G.'s analysis is on its surest ground. Their cautious approach to the Athenaean material is sensible and exemplary, a valuable contribution in itself to the growing scholarship on Athenaeus (D. Braund and J. Wilkins [edd.], Athenaeus and His World: Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire, [2000]; D. Lenfant [ed.], Athénée et les fragments d'historiens [2007]). Likewise, their conclusions have significant implications for our understanding of the Hellenistic historiographers, as it rests almost entirely on fragmentary citations of the Athenaean variety, from which we have deduced a distinctively moralistic tone.

Finally, in Chapter 5, G. & G. make the positive case for the presence of ‘pernicious luxury’. In contrast to the earlier material, the theme of ‘pernicious luxury’ can clearly be found in Greek works of the Roman period. Moreover, it is in this period that τρυϕή is ‘stripped of much of its original, very precise meaning’, becoming a ‘generic vice’ alongside ‘other vague moral shortcomings, such as pleasure, extravagance, and a degenerate lifestyle characterized by wine, women, and song’ (p. 426), as it appears in LSJ.

It should be clear that this is an ambitious work, both in the breadth of material addressed and in its double goal of overturning a longstanding assumption about the ancient material and offering a new methodology for interpreting a difficult set of texts. At times, one wishes for a deeper engagement with the sources, especially in the analysis of the Classical material, when ideas seem to float around ‘pernicious luxury’ but never actually land on it. Engagement with scholarship is light, often relegated to footnotes, and G. & G. are far from exhaustive, as they themselves admit (p. 4). Much more remains to be said about what Greek attitudes towards wealth and luxury actually were, but G. & G. convincingly challenge old assumptions that will have to be re-examined, if not completely abandoned. Their study is also quite timely, as Classicists reflect on Greece's potential exit from the European Union, and the New York Times publishes Op-Ed's titled ‘What Would Thucydides Say about the Crisis in Greece’ (R. Zaretsky, New York Times 1 July 2015: A29. Print). Clearly we want to know what the ancient Greeks thought about wealth and luxury – G. & G. show that the answer might not be what we expect.