This volume is presented as the first outcome of a ‘small, discussion-oriented’ conference held at the University of Bielefeld in 2017 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of August Boeckh’s seminal Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener (Berlin 1817) and to ‘update the interdisciplinary and innovative heritage of Boeckh’ (131). In a brief introduction, editors Sven Günther and Dorothea Rohde provide some background on Boeckh and Die Staat-shaushaltung der Athener and review the programme of the 2017 conference. They note the division of the volume into three conceptual parts that map onto those of Boeckh’s work: price formation (Alain Bresson, Armin Eich, Christophe Flament), state expenditure and administrative structure (Günther, David Pritchard), and revenues/taxation (Rohde, Wolfgang Franzen, Josiah Ober).

To start with the good: almost all the articles are high-quality contributions to scholarship on the economy of Athens. Particularly outstanding are the economic models of Bresson and Ober on money supply and income (in)equality, respec-tively; both deliver on the promise to update Boeckh by attempting to compensate for the paucity of evidence in a variety of areas, which has remained a problem from Boeckh’s time to the present day. Franzen’s application of the modern field of tax psychology to the various forms of taxation employed in Classical Athens is without doubt the most exciting and interdisciplinary work in the volume. Several excellent decisions were made in terms of formatting (and this may reflect more on the Journal of Ancient Civilizations than on this particular volume): specifically, the use of footnotes (rather than endnotes) and the clear, visually appealing bibliography included after each article.

There are, unfortunately, a variety of problems with the volume, almost all of which must be laid at the feet of the editors. There is a troubling lack of standardization in the use and translation of non-English texts. For example, in Bresson’s piece, English translations are provided with the Greek text in a footnote, while Flament places both Greek and English side by side and Eich provides no Greek text at all. Translation of non-English modern material also varies from article to article. Further standardization problems are that Xenophon’s treatise on improving the finances of Athens is sometimes called Poroi (203) and sometimes Vectigalia (222), and that one of Rohde’s publications appears in very different forms in the bibliographies of Günther and Rohde (227 and 267, respectively).

These issues of translation and consistency touch on accessibility, as they hinder the ability of non-expert readers to work with the volume. They are not the only accessibility problems that the volume presents. Ober’s article includes a graph of a Lorenz curve, but there is no explanation of what a Lorenz curve is and the graph has neither a key nor labels for its x or y axes. (A Lorenz curve plots percentiles of population on the x axis against cumulative income or wealth on the y axis. Income inequality is thus visualized as the gap between the graphed curve and a straight diagonal line with a slope of 1.) In one article the abbreviation G2P is used without any explanation; in another, a German acronym is introduced (Forschungsstelle für empirische Sozialökonimik – fores, 274), but left completely undifferentiated from the surrounding text, neither italicized nor capitalized. Most seriously, the contributions written in whole or in part by Günther, who serves as Executive Editor in Chief of the Journal of Ancient Civilizations, read like material translated directly from German, to the extent that on a number of occasions passages are nearly incom-prehensible.

The most disappointing aspect of the volume, however, is the failure of the articles to communicate with each other. Athorough survey of the footnotes reveals only ten citations of other works in the volume, none of which points to specific sections or arguments. Beyond the footnotes, in the main bodies of the contributions, only Ober engages with the work and conclusions of his fellow contributors. Such a lack of interaction might be understandable if the articles were all on very different subjects with little natural overlap. That is not the case. In two instances contributors treat subjects so closely related that it would have been preferable for them to collaborate on a single article: Flament and Bresson on the production of the mines at Laurion and its impact on Athenian money supply; Günther and Rohde on the evolution of Athenian democratic financial administration during the Classical period.

Ultimately, it is to be hoped that the promise of the introduction is fulfilled and that this volume is not the final publication to come out of the 2017 Boeckh bicentennial conference. The volume offers the reader a tantalizing taste of the exciting conversations that must have taken place at the conference, but, in the end, the articles themselves show almost no sign of being influenced by those conversations.