As B. remarks at the start of this magnificent book, Rhodes, despite its huge political, military, economic and cultural importance, remains far less well studied than Athens, the only city it can in any way be compared with. This is not for lack of sources: despite the absence of the ‘grands textes’ which make Athens so uniquely accessible, there is an abundance of documentary evidence, especially inscriptions, of which more than 2,500 are known from the city of Rhodes alone. Half as many again come from the three constituent communities of Ialysos, Kamiros and Lindos, which, in 408 b.c., synoikised into the new political and territorial unit that became the polis of Rhodes. Together with inscriptions from both the incorporated cities and the ‘subject’ Peraia, they reach a remarkable total of just over 5,000.

But, in the words of C. Habicht, ‘proper historical use of inscriptions can only be made if they can be dated’ (‘Rhodian Amphora Stamps and Rhodian Eponyms’, REA 105 [2003], 541–78). It is this simple-sounding, not very fashionable, but fundamental, dictum, which underpins the present book. B.’s stated aim is modest, but it is of capital importance: to establish, with the aid of all available sources, a new chronology of Rhodian inscriptions by reconstructing a reliable system for the workings of Rhodian institutions (which were based on a complex rotational, tripartite principle of representation, both at the centre and in each of the three constituent communities). He is aided in this by a particular feature of Rhodian epigraphy, namely its relative abundance of lists: both diachronic ones, of magistrates, and synchronic ones, containing hundreds of names of individuals contributing financially to collective gifts or funds. One such is TRI 33, the so-called ‘grande liste des presbuteroi’ of c. 80 b.c. (redated by B.), which alone determines ‘la chronologie de près d'un millier de Rhodiens’. Together with a number of lists annotated in margine with the festivals celebrated during the tenancy of the serving magistrates, it also allows for a better understanding of the festive cycle and the reconstruction of the intercalary cycle of the Rhodian calendar (Chapter 6).

Painstaking cross-referencing of a number of core documents constitutes the weft and warp of B.’s method, allowing for the plotting of fixed chronological points. The famous list of priests of Athana Lindia (TRI 12), its early fragments in part redated, serves as the chronological ‘épine dorsale’ to which the evidence gained from other documents can be attached, and by means of which other dating criteria (palaeographic, linguistic, prosopographical) can be refined and in turn put to use. Other lists of importance are TRI 8, with almost 500 names of damiourgoi of Kamiros, going back to 283 b.c.; and a list of the earliest priests of Halios (TRI 1), inscribed in 382/1 b.c., whose starting date B. puts convincingly back to 407 b.c., immediately after the synoikismos, against V. Gabrielsen's attempt to downdate both to the early 350s.

And although Rhodian epigraphy is surprisingly lacking in civic decrees, thus depriving us of a means of reconstructing institutional developments, the island has yielded a unique source of evidence in its amphora stamps, found far and wide throughout the Mediterranean and the Black Sea area, totalling well over 100,000. Stamped since the final years of the fourth century b.c. with the city's eponymous magistrate, the priest of Halios (table pp. 249–67), it is their stratigraphy and typology which have been mainly used to establish a relative chronology, first in a series of pioneering articles by V. Grace, then more recently in a study by G. Finkielsztejn (G. Finkielsztejn, Chronologie détaillée et révisée des éponymes amphoriques rhodiens, de 270 à 108 av. J.-C. environ [2001], with a full bibliography of Grace's work on pp. 15–16), whose revision of Grace's chronology has been widely accepted. Until Habicht's article of 2003, the evidence of the stamps had not, however, been systematically exploited in conjunction with the many inscriptions dated by Halios' priest.

B. considerably widens the scope of Habicht's investigation, using the entire body of epigraphic documents published between 1898 and 2012. His has been an enormous task: the inscriptions are not easy of access, spread as they are over more than 200 publications (listed on pp. 455–65; cf. the excellent epigraphic index at 485–96). The amphora stamps are not for the amateur either, but B. has established himself as a leading amphorologist and is an editor of the Bulletin amphorologique (cf. www.amphoreus.org). The complexity of the reconstructions offered in this book cannot be underestimated: they require the laborious ‘mise en série’ of dispersed evidence, careful unravelling of earlier certainties about dating and prosopography, and ‘unthinking’ of textual and contextual restorations (a list of ‘nouvelles lectures et restitutions' is on pp. 496–8).

The core of the book consists of eight chapters in which the main argument is gradually developed. A brief review cannot possibly do justice to all its detail, and I can only signal some of the most important results (there is a useful, fuller, summary on pp. 201–2). In Chapter 1, the Rhodian calendar is set on a firm footing, the sequence of months is conclusively fixed, and the two different years, the eponymous and the civic, are brought in relation to one another (the two never coincided: the priest of Halios entered office two months before the civic year ended, at the start of Dalios, the eleventh month – table on p. 19). In Chapter 7 B. convincingly establishes the position of the intercalary month Panamos bis (after Panamos, the tenth month) and elucidates the rhythm of the intercalary cycle, which operated within an eight-year term on the dual principle of 1:4 and 1:8, resulting in three intercalary years in eight. The system was guided by the need to integrate the cycle with the three-year rotational principle of the three Rhodian communities, so that none had to serve a thirteen-month period of office more than twice in one cycle (table on p. 140). As a result, the Rhodian festive cycle can now be seen to display after all a regular and satisfactory pattern (the intercalary festival of the Dipanamia is central to the explanation), and a firmer chronology for the priests of Halios can be established by placing those officiating in an intercalary year (Chapter 8 and Appendix 3) according to the 1:4 and 1:8 principle. The names of 43 such eponyms survive over a period of 125 years (during which there would have been 48 intercalary months).

Chapter 2 not only offers a new dating and reconstruction of the fragments of the all-important lists of the priest of Athana Lindia, but also shows that the interval between the tenure of this major priesthood and that of Poseidon Hippios was often longer than Blinkenberg and others had allowed for; the reform of the priesthood of Poseidon Hippios is downdated by a decade, from 325 to 315 b.c. (Chapter 4).

The eight chapters are followed by a brief synthesis and a 40-page table of all Rhodian inscriptions. Five appendices make up the next 60 pp.: they include a dated catalogue of sculptors, entirely revised from the lists published by Blinkenberg and others (art historians please note, and note also, on pp. 108–9, the downdating of a much-discussed relief in the archaising style). A useful catalogue (TRI) of the 72 inscriptions central to the book's argument, revised, (re-)dated and translated, occupies the final 150 pages. The indexes are excellent. The editing is exemplary: I have noted very few errors. Though complicated, the book is extremely user-friendly in all its parts.

This book – may its author forgive the pun – is a colossal achievement. One of its many virtues is B.’s scrupulous engagement with the work of his predecessors: Hiller von Gaertringen, van Gelder, Blinkenberg, Fraser, Pugliese Carratelli, and in particular Mario Segre, to whom B. pays a moving tribute in his introduction.Footnote ¹ This is a work that builds convincingly on the foundations laid by earlier scholars, aware of every nuance in their argument. It is scholarship at the highest level. It will be indispensable for anyone working on, or interested in, the history of Rhodes, but its importance stretches well beyond the history of the island alone.