‘Entre les temps différents de l'histoire’, pronounced Fernand Braudel (‘Histoire et sciences sociales: la longue durée’, Annales 13 [1958], 733), ‘la longue durée se présente … comme un personnage encombrant, compliqué, souvent inédit’. The difficulty, therefore, is fitting this awkward customer into the heart of the historical métier. D. examines freedom – a long-lived idea in the Greek world, but freedom as a slogan – and his time-frame extends from the fifth century b.c. to the fall of Corinth, with a nod at the end to the Principate and the pax Romana. The upshot, testimony to the difficulty of making the awkward customer fit in, is a book which is really two books: the first about freedom and autonomy in Greece from the Peloponnesian War to the end of the third Diadoch war (311), and the second about Roman diplomatic communication with Greek states and leagues from 229 to 146.

The pre-Roman book goes through to page 141 of the main text, and seven of the nine appendices belong to it. Cannily, D. commences (p. 15) with the speech of Brasidas at Acanthus in 424 (Thuc. 4.85.1–87.6) – cannily because that text takes discussion straight into slogan-land – then he broadens out into considering whether there was an ‘autonomy clause’ in the Thirty Years' Peace. A negative answer leaves the Brasidas speech, and its counterpart in Xenophon (Hell. 2.2.23), as in effect the testimonia to the creation of a meme: an idea to conjure with, more so than its possible antecedents, namely moves to secure autonomy for Greek cities against the Persians earlier in the fifth century. At Acanthus, in the debate following Brasidas' statement, his slogan proved attractive, but there was a second factor: ‘The Acanthians, after much had been said on both sides, partly under the attraction of his words, and partly because they were afraid of losing their grape harvest, determined by a majority, voting secretly, to revolt from Athens’ (Thuc. 4.88).

At his subtlest in expounding the texts and terminology germane to diplomatic history, D. moves from the Peloponnesian War to the days of Alexander and the Successors, bringing a new close reading to the texts of the ‘Common Peace’ era – avoiding sounding (as T.T.B. Ryder allegedly did) ‘like a Labour Foreign Secretary defending American policy in Vietnam’ (W.G. Forrest, CR 19 [1969], 211). The King's Peace and its ‘reincarnations’ bequeath ideas which Philip II then uses ‘to establish his own domination over the Greek world’ (p. 66); and yet D.'s programme mandates that he must ever chase the shadow in preference to the substance. After Philip, Alexander and then a string of lesser rulers held or claimed the position of protector of Greek freedom (p. 140). Like the Acanthians, other Greeks, however happy to hear promises of freedom, could never forget to vote – if they had a vote – for the grape harvest.

As often, the early third century is thinly discussed; then, at the beginning of the Roman book, enter Flamininus, to make his pronouncement at the Isthmian Games in 196 (p. 143). Not deliberately empty propaganda, D. argues, the declaration should be seen rather the way E. Gruen sees it: as ‘a convenient mode of expressing magnanimity’ (p. 165). And the Romans got the slogan from the Greeks: in point of origin, already, Graecia capta ferum captorem cepit (Hor. Ep. 2.1.156). D. even knows when: it was ‘during the negotiations between Lampsacus and Smyrna with Rome late in 197’ (p. 198). Like the Spartans under the King's Peace, the Romans changed local constitutions to suit their own aims (p. 279); but again, the encounter with Greece affected the Romans at the level of ideas – changing their conception and practice of deditio in fidem. The phrase differed in meaning from deditio (surrender) because deditio in fidem left ‘everything to Roman discretion (fides)’ (p. 281): D. argues that as fides become more associated with good treatment, ‘cases o[f] prearranged surrenders were interpreted (in the text of Livy, in particular) as instances of surrendering in fidem’ (p. 281).

Over time, the Romans came to use the freedom slogan ‘not for containment but for aggression’ (p. 359); and yet the sword was two-edged – Greeks could use the same slogan to make opposition to the Romans ‘coherent and continuous’ (p. 362). Nor was it a matter of rhetoric versus realpolitik: ‘using this slogan was, in fact, the real politics of Rome’ (p. 362). The strength of D.'s case across the three centuries and more which he analyses, then, lies in the chameleon-like adaptability of this organising principle.