This volume is a long overdue charis to the intellectual achievements of J.K. Davies. Based on the conference celebrating his retirement in 2003, the volume survived unforeseen delays caused by failed negotiations, only to be rescued in 2016 by its current publisher. It sadly reflects the increasing difficulties in publishing similar kinds of books. In the preface the editors focus on key features of Davies's methodological choices in studying ancient history and in particular his concern to deconstruct and reconstruct the role of human agency (both individual and collective). His efforts often assist us not only in clarifying how social structures are shaped, but also in providing a narrative framework. However, this is not a one-way process as social structures and institutions have an impact on agents, instilling attitudes, ideas, expectations and diffusing an overall ethos.
The volume includes eleven essays pertaining largely to most of the themes dear to Davies, such as Athenian prosopography, the impact of wealth and the power of wealth in the life of the polis and the lives of their inhabitants (citizens and residents), societal values and how they motivated individuals to shape their public role and image, as well as the polis economies of the Hellenistic era. At the end of the volume P.J. Rhodes provides a brief account of Davies's academic career and intellectual interests. The volume concludes with a bibliography of the honorand to 2018, plus a helpful index of sources and a general index of persons and themes. Especially useful and important are the little known charts 1.1–5 on pp. xxiii–xxvii; they represent the increased complexity of resource movement from household self-sufficiency level to polis-state level. They may appear, at first, mind-boggling, but they deserve a closer, careful reading since they accurately describe not only the complexity of ancient Greek society and economy but also the arduous effort of Davies to disentangle its various facets. One striking omission should be noted; there is no contribution (with the exception of M. Mari's reference to Amphipolitan land sales) dealing directly and squarely with archives and legal institutions, to which Davies devoted some of his most thought-provoking and incisive articles.
While the essays are arranged in chronological order, some of them create clusters, and they should be read closely, such as those on historiography (E.M. Harris and Haywood) or those on Macedon (Archibald, Mari and A.J.N.W. Prag et al.) or those on the impact of individuals (Haywood, Mari, K. Nawotka) and collectivities (S. Lambert).
S.C. Humphreys, in ‘Imaginary Propertied Families: Kinship in Epic Poetry’, reviews the evidence provided in epic poetry (Homer and Hesiod) on family related subjects such as marital residence (neolocal or joint household), kinship and affine relations, marriage and property transfers. She urges for more research to be done on the internal dynamics of myths, before embarking on speculation about the adaptation of epic material in the emerging new socio-political contexts during the archaic period.
N.R.E. Fisher, in ‘“Charis, Sweetest of Gods”: Wealth and Reciprocity in Classical Athens’, focuses on a particular aspect of the exchange of services and rewards between the individual and the polis community, that is on the idea of charis. Integrated into the system of reciprocity and its variables, charis is important and significant to all segments of Greek society, and it is not restricted only to aristocratic circles. In this respect the charis terminology penetrates and establishes itself in the honorary vocabulary of the Athenian polis subdivisions and private associations (in this respect see also R. Osborne's essay). What is significant in Fisher's account is the claim that charis permeates and cohabitates with financial considerations and economic choices in the same habitat.
Harris, in ‘Herodotus and the Social Contexts of Memory in Ancient Greece: the Individual Historian and his Community’, browses Herodotus’ Histories for the ways in which oral traditions are intertwined with physical monuments (and the often inscribed text) to form ‘lieux de mémoire’. These places may have been circumscribed spaces such as built structures in the urban landscape (e.g. temples, shrines, tombs with the dedicated objects within), features in the countryside landscape, boundaries of territory as well as grants of privileges (land or immunity from taxation), oracles preserved by families and genealogies.
Haywood, in ‘From Croesus to Pausanias: Tragic Individuals in Early Greek Historiography’, provides historical accounts of eminent individuals undergirded by tragic themes, i.e. dramatic reversal of fortune or calamitous downfall. The tragic individual is a recurrent theme in early Greek historiography, and Haywood opts to discuss the Herodotean accounts of Croesus and Xerxes and that of Thucydides about Pausanias. These individuals exemplify the ways and the contexts in which warning signs of their imminent demise may be misread, misunderstood or simply ignored, unaware of the mutability of the fortune and the divine envy of human prosperity.
R. Osborne, in ‘Euergetism and the Public Economy of Classical Athens: the Initiative of the Deme’, returns to his investigation of Athenian demes, focusing this time on what their epigraphic output can reveal about the relation between euergetism and deme finance. Despite different conceptualisations of euergetism (sometimes confused with megaloprepeia, for which Osborne provides a useful review), he points out that in deme decrees the individual contributions that led to benefactions and honours were not in any way compulsory, like liturgies. Whether these manifestations of generosity were a response to a crisis is not clear in all cases; it seems that generosity went well beyond that. Demes were different from the Athenian demos in that they provided substantial rewards to benefactors, tolerance and encouragement in erecting substantial monuments of their services as choregoi. Demes honoured choregoi whose support for drama performances passed unnoticed at polis-level.
Lambert, in ‘The Priesthoods of the Eteoboutadai’, offers an extremely useful and interesting suggestion on the priesthoods held by the Athenian genos of Eteoboutadai. Following a thorough investigation of the available literary and epigraphic evidence and analogy with practices recorded for other genê, he convincingly establishes that Eteoboutadai were involved in the cult of Boutes and Hephaestus on the Acropolis, as well as that of Athena Polias and Poseidon Erechtheus.
Archibald, in ‘Tegeas from Torone and Some Truths about Ancient Markets’, moves away from the traditional centres of the Greek world. She contributes an attractive reconstruction of the economic implications of a lead-letter from Torone (in Halkidiki) dated to the second half of the fourth century bc. The sender requests the provision of a certain quantity of wood (the restoration of l.3 as [ἑπτ]ὰ is not the only one possible, [τρί]α is equally possible; in l.1 the restoration of the place name as M[ένδη] is certainly plausible, but we should not exclude the restoration Μ[ηκύβερνα]); this unremarkable demand allows Archibald to examine how ‘transfers of resources can be connected with wider patterns of exploitation and consumption’, in this case of fire wood, and launch a fascinating journey in the contexts where (fire)wood was indispensable, for example iron and charcoal.
Mari, in ‘At the Roots of a Revolution. Land Ownership, Citizenship and Military Service in Macedonia before and after Philip II’, turns the light on a towering figure of ancient Greek history, Philip II of Macedon, and how he reconfigured land ownership, military service and citizenship in his expanding kingdom, and especially on the example of Amphipolis and Pydna (both conquered in 357). Certain parts of the conquered lands were granted not only to hetairoi but, more importantly, to Macedonian ‘colonists’ for exploitation, thus offering opportunities for social advancement to less wealthy immigrants. That, coupled with the obligation to provide military service, created a hybrid (for the Greek-poleis standards) citizenship displayed as Makedon ex Amphipoleos. In this sense we can see the birth of a territorial state.
The next essay, ‘A Twenty-first Century Philippic’, is a challenge to classicists and ancient historians, as Prag, J.H. Musgrave and R.A.H. Neave revisit their argument about the identification of the remains in Vergina Tomb II with Philip II, recently challenged and attributed to Philip III Arrhidaios. Inadequate anatomic and archaeological knowledge about the impact of cremation on the bones impedes the reviewer to provide a salient account of that part of their argument. However, this is compensated by the results of applying a new technique called facial mapping, one that allows the authors to compare busts of Philip II and a portrait of Philip III with the reconstructed skull from the Tomb. This comparative exercise supports their initial identification of the skull as belonging to Philip II.
In ‘Apollo, the Tutelary God of the Seleucids, and Demodamas of Miletus’ Nawotka delves into the ideology of the Seleucids and the adoption of Apollo as a tutelary god after c. 300 bc. He suggests that, apart from the Seleucid links to Apollo's sanctuary at Didyma, pivotal to the allocation of this role to Apollo was a prominent Milesian royal friend, Demodamas.
A. Bresson, in ‘From Xerxes to Mithridates: Kings, Coins and Economic Life’, throws light on the economic history of Kelainai-Apameia (Kibotos) from Achaemenid times through Alexander's successors (though Demetrius Poliorcetes could not have been born there, as maintained on p. 287) to the early Empire. He argues, based on numismatic evidence, that Kelainai, thanks to its geographical location (at the crossroads from inner Asia to the Aegean coast) and a fertile hinterland (not that much different from Hierapolis in Phrygia), was a vibrant urban conglomeration long before the first century bc.
The volume is almost impeccably produced, despite the wild variation of themes included. I could spot only five editing slips (not always minor) on pp. 156, 158, 214, 265 and 335.
Despite delays, the volume is a fitting antidoron to a scholar who combines an intense and minute attention to individual pieces of evidence (literary, epigraphic, numismatic and archaeological) with a preoccupation to integrate their information in reconstructing the wider picture of ancient Greek society.
