On the cover of the dust jacket of K.’s thorough narrative on the Hellenistic Peloponnese is an image of a statue of the Achaean Philopoimen. Sculpted by the French artist David d'Angers (c. 1831), it shows the statesman and general wounded and bleeding at the battle of Sellasia. Known, thanks to Plutarch (Phil. 46–125), as ‘the last of the Greeks’, d'Angers created a moving classicising portrayal of the general that is simultaneously traditional, conservative and affecting – just like the book it adorns.

The book is organised around eight narrative chapters that trace the history of the Peloponnese from the Battle of Leuctra (371 bc) to the Roman conquests of L. Mummius (in 146), followed by a long ninth chapter that examines interstate relations within the Peloponnese through time and a concluding chapter. The evidence for the Hellenistic Peloponnese is patchy, bound-up in literary fragments, scattered epigraphic resources and polis-centric narratives that frequently neglect the wider political world in which these states operated. K.’s work is both a product of this fragmentary evidentiary basis and a reaction to it: the nature of the evidence promotes speculation, and K. does not hesitate to speculate, but she does so with careful, cautious and conservative justifications.

The work is framed, in part, as a response to the polis-centric approaches of previous scholars of the Peloponnese. It seeks to re-situate the importance of the Achaean League while returning Sparta to a place of central significance in the history of the Peloponnese, both in terms of Sparta's actions and its absence from key political debates within the peninsula. For K., Sparta is an ever-present force, and I think she is right to argue that the polis was far from broken by the aftermath of Leuctra. Spartan politicians and Sparta's reputation amongst other Peloponnesian states both worked to ensure that the polis was always a factor in shaping the historical narrative. Long-standing pro- and anti-Spartan feelings within certain poleis almost certainly helped shape policy through successive generations, as she convincingly argues for Arcadian poleis in the late fourth to mid-third centuries (Chapters 3 and 4) and the growing Achaean League (or Confederacy, as she puts it) in the late third and early second centuries (Chapter 5 especially).

To my mind, the most significant contribution of the book lies in the final substantive chapter (pp. 399–488), which examines friendly interactions amongst Peloponnesian states. Given that most of our literary sources, and by extension most of our histories, are focused on conflict, this chapter is an important contribution to an alternative history that reminds us that deep-seated cultural and religious networks between poleis often bound them closely together. The focus of this amity is the attribution of honours, like proxenia and theorodokia, from epigraphic material, which serves as proxy evidence for peaceful interactions. The motivations behind these interactions are hard to pin down, given the problems of dating, the anonymity of many of the proposers of honours and the repetitive nature of the language of the decrees, but K. convincingly links religious festivals and interstate politics in a nuanced way. These honours were a tool for both large and small poleis to create, maintain or even dissolve alliances.

There is no denying that K. knows the material like no other scholar of the Peloponnese currently publishing, and she has a deft command of the most important historical scholarship in Greek, French, English and German. The fact that she brings together this material in English is reason enough to recommend the book, and her interpretations of the literary sources and her reading of the epigraphic material are also impressive. But ultimately this is a traditional work that could have been written at any point in the last 100 years. Archaeology does not feature at all, and though the work purports to look at the Peloponnese, there is nothing on the landscape or topographic backdrop of the myriad political and military actions informing the work. In fact, there is no justification for the Peloponnese being the focus of the study, despite recent work that examines the cultural, geographic and political definitions of the Peloponnese as a discrete region (as in C. Grandjean [ed.], Le Péloponnèse d’Épaminondas à Hadrien [2008], or W. Cavanagh and J. Roy [edd.], Being Peloponnesian [2008]). Of course, Athens, Thebes and various Epirotes and Macedonians feature – but the reality of a bounded and discrete Peloponnese is simply assumed throughout. This is significant not only because it is the framing device for the entire study, but also because it presupposes that the focus of the Peloponnesian states was always fundamentally on the Peloponnese, and that requires justification.

Similar gaps appear when we turn to networks other than those defined within this study. Key to the success of the Achaean League, and the ultimate failure of Sparta, was the nature of the economic networks affecting the Peloponnese – but here too K. is silent. The last 30 years of scholarship have shown us that the economy was socially and politically embedded in ancient societies, and the flip side of that is that we must see politics as also being socially and economically embedded. This should feature in her discussion of proxenoi and other honours, but it does not. Scholars looking for a cutting-edge analysis of social change and its economic and political impacts through time will be disappointed.

D'Angers’ statue was commissioned by the government of Louis-Philipppe to sit alongside other notable people from antiquity, a statue garden of ‘great men’ to serve as moral exemplars for the public (G. Bresc and A. Pingeot, Sculptures des jardins du Louvre, du Carrousel et des Tuileries, II [1996], pp. 146–8). It is hard to fathom now how the public of France was expected to receive moral education from static displays of long-dead figures from antiquity in a nineteenth-century formal garden, and the statues have long since been dispersed to different collections. Philopoimen now stands alone in the Louvre, removed from his original context. K.’s book is an attempt to recreate that garden, to bring those statues back together, to repave the paths and direct the moral gaze. It is, as the subtitle says, a narrative and analytic history. It is ambitious, it brings the evidence together in one place, the significance of which should not be underestimated, but ultimately we are wandering through a nineteenth-century French formal garden staring at the statesmen and not at the ancient societies of which they were a part.