Using Greek local historiography as a source poses many problems for scholars seeking a broader range of historical evidence or better understanding of the writing of history in antiquity. T., in an ultimately rewarding monograph, deploys the fragments to develop answers to specific historical questions. The existing collections of fragments – Felix Jacoby's imposing multi-volume collection (Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker [1923–58]), more recent additions to that project and the newer online Brill's New Jacoby – made these texts accessible to scholars and students, but left open questions about how to use them as evidence both for the writing of history and for the cultural and political history of the communities they describe. This book fills that gap, examining the writing and use of these histories within cities, islands and peoples, and using them to answer questions about political identity and culture across the Greek world.

T. helps the reader by pointing to parallels with more familiar texts, particularly Herodotus’ Histories; gossip about tyrants and their families are a recurring feature of these texts. She chooses examples well: Athens in political decline, Megara existing as a buffer state between Athens and Corinth, the cities of Cycladic islands asserting their individual identities and the factional historiography of particularly troubled communities such as Samos. Her detailed case studies assert the multiplicity of these histories’ form and function, and her critique treats them as a unitary phenomenon, a by-product of Jacoby's grand schema. Like all subsequent investigations into the fragments of Greek local history, T.’s effort engages with Jacoby's structures and analysis, first outlined in a 1909 article (F. Jacoby, ‘Über die Entwicklung der griechischen Historiographie und den Plan einer neuen Sammlung der griechischen Historikerfragmente’, Klio 9 [1909], 80–123; translated by M. Chambers and S. Schorn as On the Development of Greek Historiography and the Plan for the New Collection of the Fragments of the Greek Historians. The 1956 Text with the Editorial Additions of Herbert Bloch, Histos Supplement 3 [2015], online at https://research.ncl.ac.uk/histos/documents/SV03JacobyOnTheDevelopment.pdf). Jacoby's categorisation of sub-genres of historiography, and the developmental model which underpinned it, has hindered as much as helped later scholars. T.’s emphasis on context – time and place – foregrounds historical causation rather than literary practice.

T.’s justified elevation of context means that no unifying grand narrative emerges to explain the profusion of local histories or the selectivity of authors in choosing cities to commemorate. The most significant theme to emerge is that ‘some other imperative’ than antiquarianism, typically political circumstance, drove cities and citizens to record their culture and its past. T. considers ideas of ‘popularity’ among readers and scholars of later antiquity as a further explanation of the profusion of histories, and the lack of literary qualities valued in later antiquity for the eventual failure to transmit their texts. She also examines the ‘intentional history’ model, which has dominated recent discussions; hers is a rather more elegiac model of the writing of history, as memorial rather than brochure (L. Foxhall, H.-J. Gehrke and N. Luraghi [edd.], Intentional History: Spinning Time in Ancient Greece [2010]). However, after a brief introduction to the post-Jacoby status quaestionis, T.’s further observations on current scholarship are scattered through the book. Modern historiographers, including Jacoby himself, are not indexed.

Building this model, T. treats the histories as repositories of cultural memory. The idea that many polis histories are documenting cities in moments of decline, threat or even total destruction recurs in many case studies. From Athens to Asia Minor, T. finds the ‘sense of being slightly beleaguered’ (p. 224) driving the composition and compilation of histories that asserted a Hellenic identity rooted in the distant past over the often multicultural realities of the present-day city. Her accumulated case studies offer a new approach that places more emphasis on location and historical context. Chapter 5, for example, builds a compelling dossier, investigating the way in which local historians in the cities of the Ionian Greeks in Asia Minor and the islands off its coast accounted for and in many cases revised the past of their own communities. In many cities (Chios, Miletus, Ephesus) polis histories exalt a specific moment of foundation, assimilate and subordinate other episodes and minimise the role of non-Greek peoples in the establishment of community and the ancestry of the peoples. These examples illuminate one of the thorny questions about these histories: to what extent are such foundation narratives historical? Are the authors presenting an account of events that they believe to have happened as narrated? One of T.’s opening claims is that these texts construct ‘imagined communities’, a helpful approach; her examples warn of the consequences of disregarding the role of imagination and intention in a genre that could easily slip into propaganda, a function already ascribed to historiography in the ‘intentional history’ model. One could make further parallels with contemporary debate about the function of history and its texts in education.

The local histories of Athens have received the most attention from previous scholars, but here they are considered within the broader phenomenon, allowing for the exceptional size of Athens and the development of its political institutions. T.’s critique of the generic uniformity of local history pays out in her reading of the fragmentary Atthides. By assigning all the fragmentary Athenian local histories the name Atthis, a misleading impression of generic unity was created, in both antiquity and in modern scholarship. T. differentiates the ‘Atthidographers’ by their aims, so far as they can be discerned from the fragments, moving the debate on from the claims that the texts are either antiquarian or politically partisan, and showing that antiquarian documentation of cultural practice and its aetiology can be a response to political circumstances, whether Phanodemos’ apparent optimism for a renewed Athens under Lycurgus or later writers’ awareness of the possibility of loss.

T. also responds to the continuation of Jacoby's project, which includes politeiai texts, focused on the development of political institutions and culture, as histories (G. Schepens and J. Bollansée, ‘Frammenti di «politeiai», «nomoi» e «nomima»: prolegomeni ad una nuova edizione’, in S. Cataldi [ed.], Poleis e Politeiai [2004], pp. 259–85). She considers the Aristotelian politeiai as a distinctive sub-genre of local history, noting that the authors of the politeiai tend to go ‘off piste’ from their proper function and wander into anecdotes about past rulers. But such stories, she suggests, are significant in building community from acts of resistance to tyranny, and their inclusion is evidence for the role of the texts as containers for communal cultural memory.

T. closes with a consideration of the role local historiography can play in developing a better understanding of the Hellenistic city. In moving the focus away from Athens and towards a wider range of Greek cities in changing political circumstances, she demonstrates that these works were not simply ‘erudition merely for the sake of it’ (p. 393), but can enhance our understanding of ancient political cultures in times of uncertainty and change.