Epigraphic studies are usually addressed to specialists and are often timid in terms of asking big questions about their evidence. This review includes four brilliant recent studies, which use primarily Hellenistic inscriptions in order to discuss some major issues of Greek history from new perspectives. The first two books focus on politics and political institutions, while the other two raise similar issues from the point of view of Greek religion. All of them are fruitful applications of novel approaches to Greek communities which move beyond traditional approaches to the polis as a static and self-enclosed entity in favour of new approaches that stress the variability of Greek politics and the historical processes that involved regions and networks of which they formed part.

Benjamin Gray employs modern political theories and ancient inscriptions in order to provide a highly original discussion of Greek political thought and practice.Footnote ¹ He uses the phenomenon of exile as a litmus test for exploring Greek politics and political thought: exile crises between 404 and 146 bce provide excellent opportunities to observe foundational Greek assumptions about politics and communal life. He traces two divergent traditions that informed how Greeks conceived and practised politics: one emphasized the ‘communitarian’ features of politics such as civic solidarity and the common good (the ‘Nakonian model’), while the other privileged a ‘contractarian’ approach based on tit-for-tat reciprocity of rights and services (the ‘Dikaiopolitan model’). Gray shows how both traditions informed Greek politics but also how these traditions pulled in different directions. Whether his two models are the best way to conceptualize the rich and contradictory evidence that he has assembled together will be the subject of a very stimulating future discussion; but this book is a major contribution that needs to be read by anyone interested in Greek politics and its modern reception, particularly for showing the need to pay serious attention to Hellenistic history, normally sidestepped by far too many scholars.

Epigraphists love dossiers of inscriptions dealing with particular institutions or phenomena. The institution of proxenia (public guest-friendship), mostly known from epigraphy, would provide an ideal epigraphic case study. It is an indication of what can be achieved when epigraphy is joined with wider historical perspectives that William Mack manages to turn the study of proxeny into a thought-provoking exploration of what it meant to be a polis in antiquity.Footnote ² Mack persuasively argues that a polis is a system phenomenon – it only existed as part of networks of peer-polity interaction, in which proxenoi acted as links between communities and displayed their status in the international world. The success of proxenia and its long-standing epigraphic commemoration depended both on the prestige it brought to individual proxenoi as members of an international elite and on the anarchic nature of Greek peer-polity interaction, which lacked an overall umpire. The disappearance of proxenia in the first century bce attested the extent to which Roman hegemony transformed fundamentally major aspects of polis-style peer-polity interaction. Accordingly, proxenia can be used as a litmus test for understanding networks and communities in ancient Greece. Finally, the study is a major exercise in how to take epigraphic traditions seriously, with significant methodological discussions of the interpretation of epigraphic languages and the patterns of surviving evidence.

If Mack examines the networks and communities established through the institution of proxenia, Ian Rutherford provides a magisterial study of how theoria (state pilgrimage) constituted another major aspect of Greek peer-polity interaction.Footnote ³ The institution of theoria created networks of state pilgrims and sacred observers who attended festivals and sanctuaries on behalf of their community; it thus reflected the ways in which poleis used religion as a framework for interacting with the wider world. This brilliant book offers a detailed study of the purposes of theoria (festival announcement, oracle consultation, conveyance of offerings, festival attendance and participation) and the journeys and other activities of theoroi; what is even more significant, however, is its exploration of how theoria was adapted and transformed by successive changes in the world of Greek interstate politics (the Athenian empire, Hellenistic monarchs, Rome) and also accounted for some major features of Greek culture (choral performance, philosophical and literary theoria). The fact that, in contrast to proxenia, theoria came to an end only at the beginning of Late Antiquity shows that a long-term history of Greek poleis and their systems of interaction will need to adopt multiple temporalities for different aspects.

Maria Mili employs the case study of ancient Thessaly in order to ask us to rethink our understanding of religion and society in ancient Greece.Footnote ⁴ Her book makes excellent use of a corpus of 500 Thessalian inscribed dedications, alongside literary, archaeological, and topographic evidence. She emphasizes the need to combine the diversity of the Thessalian communities and their religious landscapes, cults, and deities with the generalizing stereotypes that played a significant role in terms of how Thessalians conceived themselves and were conceived by others. She attaches great significance to the political dimension of religion in Thessaly: the impact of the oligarchic regimes that predominated in Thessaly, the constitutive role of poleis in Thessalian religion, and the role of the Thessalian ethnos as imagined community and federal state. But, alongside the hard structures of politics, Mili makes a persuasive case for the need to integrate in our analyses the stereotypes that emerged from and informed Thessalian space–time, with particular attention to how notions of landscape and its products (‘a land rich in herbs’ [185]) informed images of Thessalian religion.

A regional perspective similarly informs Zosia Archibald's study of the economies of the north Aegean in the classical and Hellenistic periods.Footnote ⁵ Despite its economic focus, the book ranges widely, discussing politics and political structures, dining cultures, and the cultures of commemoration associated with death rituals. The volume is held together by a series of major themes: the diversity of resources in the area (metals, timber, animals), which provided the basis for great concentrations of wealth and power and attracted multiple outsiders; the significance of the routes that gave the region its interconnectedness and the commodities and flows that circulated through them; the constitutive role of the royal economies of Macedonia and Thrace; the entanglement between the inward landscapes and their resources and the maritime world of the Greek coastal poleis; and the significance of major events such as the Persian Wars in framing regional polities and political economies. The excessively pointillist and digressive style adopted by the author does not make this an easy book to read and it is often difficult to follow her train of thought. Nevertheless, the wealth of information and the range of themes make the book a welcome step in the process of constructing new regional approaches and accounts.

Andrew Monoson and Walter Scheidel have edited an impressive volume on the fiscal regimes of pre-modern states.Footnote ⁶ Inspired by the new fiscal sociology, the volume presents a global panorama of pre-modern fiscal regimes: alongside chapters on Mesopotamia and Egypt, ancient Greece, the Hellenistic empires, the Roman Republic, the early and late Roman Empire, and Byzantium, the volume includes chapters on American (Incas, Aztecs), East Asian (China, Japan), and Islamic empires (Umayyads, Ottomans). The stimulating chapters challenge some of the major assumptions of fiscal sociology: instead of ahistorical ideal-types such as domain state or tax state, they show the diversity of co-existing fiscal practices employed by states and the lack of any single uni-linear trend, while also challenging long-standing assumptions (such as the supposed Greek equation of direct taxation with tyranny). Future work will need to go further in order to shed the functionalist assumptions of sociology still employed by the editors and enlarge the field with other factors: instead of taking states and taxes for granted, we need to focus more on the major assumptions about communities (it is unfortunate, for example, that the volume hardly discusses the norms behind liturgies and evergetism, in which only the rich fund major communal services) and about identities (what identities are compatible with taxation and contribution: Roman proletarii, French aristocrats).

Alfonso Moreno and Rosalind Thomas have edited a Festschrift for Oswyn Murray, originating from a conference organized a decade ago; the volume includes an epilogue by Murray and a detailed list of his publications.Footnote ⁷ The editors frame the papers around the concept of epitedeumata: an untranslatable Greek word combining ‘practices’ and ‘moeurs’ with a strong emphasis on agency and intentionality. The concept will certainly generate future work and plays a significant role in the paper by Schmitt-Pantel, exploring the epitedeumata of Athenian politicians and their role in Athenian political culture, and in Moreno's exploration of their role in providing a structuring theme for Theopompus’ ambitious historical work. The rest of the chapters range widely on various Greek cultural practices; many of them constitute thought-provoking jewels. The Trojan horse forms a common link in d'Agostino's exploration of dedications and Bowie's attempt to resurrect a poem by Sacadas, while Lissarague focuses on the early Greek practice of erecting temporary war trophies, and Hornblower uses the case study of Agariste's wedding to explore its links to early Greek athletics. I would like to single out the major implications of four papers: Luraghi's emphasis on how the idea of the cunning tyrant shows the deep ambiguities and contradictions of Greek attitudes to tyranny; Thomas’ overview of Greek ‘polis history’ and the need to radically rethink long-standing assumptions going back to Jacoby; Davidson's thought-provoking study of the significance of running in Greek culture and society; and Kosmin's exploration of how a Seleucid Babylonian cylinder provides a means of ‘seeing double’ between Greek and Mesopotamian cultural practices and assumptions.

Two books in this review focus on the history of emotions in ancient Greece. Ed Sanders explores envy and jealousy in classical Athens.Footnote ⁸ He makes an eloquent case for the utility of modern psychological theories, and shows that they fit nicely with Aristotle's discussion of phthonos; equally significant is his methodological call to avoid making ethnocentric assumptions and limiting our investigation to lexical occurrences by adopting a script approach to emotions and constructing a typology of scripts related to the emotion of phthonos. Sanders detailed typology of phthonos scripts is particularly stimulating; he then applies this approach to Aristotle, oratory, comedy, and tragedy. A final chapter examines the case of sexual jealousy in classical Athens, for which there was apparently no word before the fourth century; even when the word zelotypia appeared it remained relatively rare. Sanders shows how the script approach can identify an emotion even where an explicit word is missing, as he shows in his analysis of the Medea and Trachiniae; but at the same time a script approach tends to elide the question of why certain terms appear historically at certain points, and this historical understanding is something that future work should seriously take into account.

While there has been a long-standing and wide-ranging scholarly preoccupation with sexuality and love in antiquity, a recent volume, edited by Ed Sanders, Chiara Thumiger, Chris Carey, and Nick Lowe, aims to complement existing work through a particular focus on eros as an emotion.Footnote ⁹ The volume is divided into four sections: the first two are particularly concerned with the variegated emotional aspects of eros, while the final two complement the study of emotions with explorations of the divine figure of Eros and erotic imagery and language in ancient Greek literature. The eighteen papers range widely, in terms of both sources and chronological range: alongside the expected focus on archaic and classical Greek literature, the editors have included chapters that bring us all the way to the Second Sophistic; I found the strong focus on philosophy and medicine particularly stimulating. The first section includes six papers on the phenomenology and psychology of eros, with particularly interesting contributions by Konstan and Smith on how Greek thinkers conceptualize the human/animal divide in regards to eros, and papers by Thumiger and Sanders on erotic madness and sexual jealousy in tragedy. The four papers in the second section (Renaut, Rosen, Leontsini, Gill) focus on philosophy and medicine, tracing Platonic meditations on eros and the reactions and transformations of later thinkers, from the Stoics to Galen. The three papers of the third section explore the link between divine and human eros in Hesiod (Most) and Plutarch (Lucchesi), and trace the cult of Eros in Athens and its changing mapping to homosexual and heterosexual domains (Stafford). The final section, on erotic imagery and language, includes chapters on Plato (Cairns), Aristophanes (Robson), Ibycus (Cazzato), and the epigram (Kanellou, Fountoulakis).

Finally, this review includes three books devoted to Greek historiography and the study of the past. Jonas Grethlein's new work explores the relationship between experience and teleology in ancient historiography.Footnote ¹⁰ He argues that narratives of the past are in a perennial tension between focusing on the experience of actors as they live past events without knowing what lies ahead and the teleology of hindsight, from which a historian is able to appreciate things invisible to past actors. Grethlein argues that ancient historians can be set in a spectrum on the basis of whether they favour experience or teleology in their narratives. The first section examines the role of experience in Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch's Alexander, and Tacitus; the second explores teleology through Herodotus, Polybius and Sallust; the third moves beyond historiography to examine Augustine's Confessions. Alongside its stimulating readings of specific texts, the book's main contribution is the examination of the techniques employed by ancient historians in order to render vivid the experience of past actors in their narratives. But Grethlein's preference for experience over teleology seems to misconceive what historians aim to do and makes more sense for historical novels than for the aims and needs of historiography as a distinctive species of narrative literature. As Momigliano argued long ago, the study of ancient historical narratives cannot be profitably divorced from their ambition to record and explain the past.

Investigations of the language of kinship as a means of conceptualizing relationships between communities have been particularly prominent both in studies of Greek ethnicity that focus in particular on the archaic period and in studies on kinship diplomacy that focus on the epigraphic explosion documenting this phenomenon from the Hellenistic period onwards. It is thus particularly welcome that Maria Fragoulaki's recent book explores in detail the role of kinship in a foundational classical text (Thucydides).Footnote ¹¹ In line with recent developments in the anthropological study of kinship, Fragoulaki argues that we need to recognize a wider category of relatedness, alongside the blood relationship of kinship. Accordingly, she proposes studying together the genealogical links between metropoleis and apoikiai (‘colonies’), the links among members of the same ethnic community, ‘national kinship’ on the basis of a shared space, and relatedness created by shared customs and practices. The result is a rich book that explores in detail the kinship links of the two main protagonists in Thucydides, Athens and Sparta, alongside the link between Corinth and her apoikiai, which constitutes a prominent Thucydidean theme, Aeolian kinship, and relationships between Greeks and non-Greeks in the West. The book's major advantage is its argument for the multivalence and variability of the language of kinship and the ways in which it was employed by the Greeks. Instead of rigid definitions like those of Jonathan Hall, thinking of kinship as a ‘total social fact’ emphasizes its complex entanglements: Fragoulaki's discussion of how kinship and relatedness figure in the fraught relationship between Corinth and her colonies, or in the decision of Amphipolis to break from her Athenian metropolis, should be food for serious thought for ancient historians.

How would Greek notions of the past look, if the words of Greek historians had not survived? John Marincola, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, and Calum Maciver have edited a volume that asks its readers to imagine history without historians in archaic and classical Greece.Footnote ¹² The volume ranges widely, including papers on epic (Grethlein, Currie), lyric poetry (Boedeker, Bowie, Pavlou), drama (Scodel, Romano, Henderson), oratory (Hesk), philosophy (Morgan), religion (Kearns), visual and material culture (Shapiro, Foxhall, Llewellyn-Jones), and epigraphy (Lambert, Shear); it also includes a brief introduction by Marincola and short concluding commentaries (Goldhill, Saïd, Pelling). It broadly examines three different forms of past: the heroic past, examined mostly in papers on Greek literature but also through Greek art (Shapiro); the primordial past of ancient cataclysms (Morgan), races of metal (Currie), or the era before animal sacrifice (Kearns); and the past of recent times as reflected in Greek depictions of Persian history (Llewellyn-Jones) or references to past events in oratory and comedy. Despite its promising theme and stimulating individual chapters, the volume lacks focus or any overall argument, and is particularly handicapped by the lack of a proper introduction or conclusion, although the commentaries offer some interesting, if contradictory, points. Although many papers simply focus on aspects of the treatment of the past in one particular genre or author without offering a wider argument, some chapters raise important issues that will require future attention: particularly intriguing are the arguments of Currie and Morgan that the temporal schemes present in Hesiod and Plato might be doing radically different things compared to historical narratives, or Henderson's and Lambert's tracing of changing attitudes in dealing with the past in comedy and epigraphy.