With this inaugural volume of the Princeton History of the Ancient World O. provides ‘a new narrative history of Greek political and economic development’ from 1000–300 b.c. Rejecting what he calls the ‘standard premises’ of an impoverished Greece, popularised by historians from Herodotus to Zimmern, O. envisions a wealthy Hellas laden with material goods as well as cultural riches, its economic prosperity occasioned by the rise of citizen-centred politics. While new data receive supporting roles, particularly quantitative analyses of the records within An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (2004), the stars of this innovative history are the interdisciplinary methodologies that structure its arguments. Continuing along the trail blazed by Democracy and Knowledge (2008), O. has exchanged his earlier interest in the histories of ideologies for the analysis and modelling of institutions broadly understood.

The contrasting halves of this volume reflect O.'s disciplinary commitments. The first half describes wealthy Hellas and elaborates O.'s hypotheses regarding her origins, while the second half tests these hypotheses against the history of Archaic and Classical Greece. In the preface O. links historical study and modern policy: while the ‘wealth-and-democracy package’ we take for granted is a historical anomaly, comparative study of other such societies may enhance our ability both to spark growth and keep it aflame. The central concept of ‘efflorescence’ is introduced in Chapter 1 as a period marked by a ‘dramatic rise in population, welfare, and culture’; the magnitude and length of the Greek efflorescence, stretching from roughly 600 b.c.–a.d. 300, was ‘distinctive in premodern history’. The Greek city-state ecology surveyed in Chapter 2 comprised hundreds of communities situated within those Mediterranean regions favourable to cultivating wheat, olives and grapes; the Greeks’ continued reliance on this triad, joined with regional variations in productivity, ‘rewarded intensification, specialization, and cooperation’. The flourishing of this ecology, marked by the decentralisation and dispersal of authority both across and within city-states, remains mysterious: how, in the absence of domination and hierarchy, were common ends conceived and accomplished? Drawing brilliantly on Aristotelian politics and modern myrmecology, in Chapter 3 O. develops his ‘theory of effective collective action’. Citizen self-governance, aided by institutions that encouraged the sharing of information and the alignment of individual and community ends, enabled both the plenteous production and fair distribution of public goods, thereby inspiring further innovation and specialisation. The resulting wealth of Hellas is documented in Chapter 4. Citing ten archaeological, onomastic and numismatic proxies O. argues that classical Greece enjoyed substantial economic and demographic growth, with the total population growing perhaps ten-fold and per capita consumption nearly two-fold between 800–300 b.c. This accumulating human and financial capital enabled efflorescence, which in Chapter 5 O. ultimately roots within Greek political life, specifically the institutions (rules) and civic culture (social norms) that fostered learning and innovation. Greater security from domestic and external threats encouraged individuals to invest, strategise and specialise; within this simultaneously egalitarian and highly competitive environment, creative destruction and expanding access promoted continued growth. In short, ‘[f]air rules and competition within a marketlike ecology of states promoted capital investment, innovation, and rational cooperation in a context of low transaction costs’.

Diving from this hypothesis into the narrative, O. knifes through the ‘roiling surface of battles and personalities’ with barely a mention, the better to explore the deeper currents driving efflorescence (Chapters 6–9). The severity of the Bronze Age collapse left Hellas without ideological or governmental inheritance, thereby enabling the emergence of the city-states. Within and across these modestly-sized communities Aristotelian egalitarianism trumped Hobbesian domination, since the tactics of hoplite warfare meant citizen-centred (if not necessarily democratic) politics were adaptive. The Malthusian pressures propelling the Age of Expansion were not merely alleviated but eventually escaped, thanks to the economic specialisation and commercial exchange catalysed by colonisation. The relative failure of Greek tyranny resulted from the ‘strength of egalitarian values in Greek society’; freed from Peisistratid rule, democratic Athens’ sudden emergence may be explained not simply by Herodotean ‘equality of speech’ but by advantages accruing from federalism, cultivation of citizens’ technical and social knowledge, and careful deployment of positive (rewards) and negative (ostracism) incentives. The pro-growth alignment of individual and community interests enabled Athens’ leadership against the Persians; when their antagonist – and the purpose of the League – retreated, Athenian rule rested on allies’ ‘rational acquiescence’ to the economic benefits deriving from hegemony. Despite the trickling-out of these benefits across Hellas, Spartan fear and the other Greeks’ ‘desire for strong citizenship and local autonomy’ led to the Peloponnesian War. The decades between Aegospotami and Chaeronea were marked not by decline but by growth and adaptation. On the mainland, the Spartan hedgehog rose and fell with its phalanx; the fox-like Athenians not merely modelled advantageous institutions but, from Solon to their own Lycurgus, benefited from refining and refreshing their institutions. Sicilian turmoil and renaissance revealed regional frailties and Hellenic resilience, while the Asian Greeks, rationally acquiescing to external rule by reasonable rulers, fared well under Athens, Persia and Macedon alike. Chapters 10 and 11 address the ‘political fall’ of the city-state ecology and its cultural ‘immortality’. Philip and the Macedonians succeeded where Persians and Carthaginians failed because they, in addition to their material and demographic advantages, willingly employed – and improved on – Greek financial and military expertise. Such adaptations ensured that wealthy Hellas endured beyond Chaeronea and even Ipsus, as the Successors’ shattered dreams of unified empire allowed the Hellenistic city-states freedom to continue their innovation, strategic cooperation and celebration of Greek culture. Rather than closing with a tragic decline, then, O.'s narrative focuses on Greece rising sufficiently – materially and culturally – to endure.

This reassessment of Greek history may be read profitably and enjoyably by all ancient historians. Although O.'s revisionist arguments emphasise new data rather than well-known literary or epigraphic evidence, his engagement with diverse ancient and modern sources is scrupulous and thought-provoking throughout; his explanatory hypotheses and their falsification conditions – if either increased innovation or rule-egalitarianism correlate negatively with increased material wealth – are comprehensible and regularly referenced. I conclude with three thoughts for continued research. First, even if there remain limitations to, and ambiguities within, the evidence available for wealthy Hellas, the ‘new institutional’ approach championed here by O. (and foreshadowed by classical Athenian remarks on the value of laws and customs) encourages renewed scrutiny of familiar sources. Second, as Athenian evidence underlies many of O.'s extrapolations and Athenian institutions were, as he notes, emulated by classical and Hellenistic poleis, I wonder whether responsibility for this efflorescence ought to be attributed less to the genus of Greek egalitarianism than to that peculiar, contingent species of Athenian exceptionalism. Of the three poleis examined by O.'s periodised case studies, Athens fits splendidly, Syracuse moderately well, and ‘Lycurgan’ Sparta only rather uncomfortably within his arguments. Third, while acknowledging O.'s explicit focus on economic history and model-building, I worry that this is a history of Greece without the Greeks. ‘Competition’, for example, is regularly invoked as a catalyst for growth, yet the implications of the Homeric and Hesiodic texts go unmentioned, the soul-consuming fire of αἰὲν ἀριστεύειν unfelt. Those celebrated ‘high-cultural products’ are glimpsed occasionally from afar, as they breach the churning waves of growth, yet the character of these glories – the values, desires and beliefs cherished by their creators and embodied within temples and tragedies alike – is left unexamined. Is it these artefacts’ mere survival that distinguishes classical Greece from the seventeenth-century Minoan efflorescence? These and myriad other lines of inquiry will arise from readers’ careful engagement with this volume, thanks to the customary clarity and conviction with which O. has elaborated his model of wealthy Hellas.