This long-awaited corpus brings together some 700 Greek (and a handful of Latin) graffiti on pottery and other ceramic objects from sixteen sites along the Dalmatian coast and its islands, spanning the late sixth to the first centuries bce. The bulk of the material derives from two sanctuaries of Diomedes – on the islet of Palagruža and at Cape Ploča – whose scale now places them alongside Naukratis and Gravisca as major deposits of dedicatory graffiti from the Greek world. That two sites of this importance should appear here for the first time in full, after decades known only through preliminary notice, is reason enough to welcome the volume; that the material is the fruit of excavations directed by two of the four collaborators, Kirigin and the late Čače (to whose memory the book is in effect a monument), gives it the authority of first-hand acquaintance with both find-spots and finds.

The arrangement is by site, running from north to south (Venac, Nin, Zadar, Murter, Cape Ploča, Marina, Trogir, Resnik, Brač, Hvar, Vis, Palagruža, the Nakovana cave, Korčula, Lastovo and finally Gradina in an appendix), each prefaced by a sketch of the site’s history, excavation and bibliography. The editors explain their preference for this geographical ordering, rather than one by type of object or formula, as a consequence of the fragmentary and frequently illegible state of so much of the material (p. ix); few readers will quarrel with the choice, even if it means that the all-important anetheke- and synnautai-formulae recur scattered across several chapters rather than gathered for comparison. Each entry is given with the relevant find-context where known, transcription, apparatus of earlier publication, a judgement on type and date, and a drawing and/or photograph.

The two great Diomedes sanctuaries inevitably dominate. At Palagruža the material runs from the late sixth century to the end of the Hellenistic period and is overwhelmingly post-firing graffiti on open Attic vessels; the editors group it not strictly by type but by content – the ‘Diomedes’ group giving the hero’s name alone in the dative and in a variety of epichoric alphabets, the ‘anetheke’ group preserving the single complete dedication (Pa41, Σολειος ανεθέκε, c. 500 bce) and the rare ‘synnautai’ formula, ‘X and his shipmates [give] to Diomedes’, securely restored only twice but clearly diagnostic of the cultic and commercial character of the site. At Cape Ploča, where the cult is attested from the fourth century bce into the Roman period and has long been associated with Pliny’s promunturium Diomedis (Plin. HN 3.141), 231 of 341 unpublished fragments receive full treatment, the remainder – those too worn for confident reading – being merely listed. The imported drinking vessels, drawn from Italy, Albania and Asia Minor, are eloquent testimony to the sanctuary’s place on Adriatic shipping routes, a point the editors might have pressed rather harder than the brief general comment allows.

The smaller assemblages – Vis/Issa, Hvar/Pharos, the Nakovana cave with its phallic stalagmite and votive drinking-vessels, Korčula (familiar from the Lumbarda psephisma) and the rest – are individually slight but cumulatively valuable, since stone epigraphy from this stretch of coast before the Roman period is almost non-existent, and these scraps of incised and painted pottery are often all that survives. The editors are right to insist, in the closing pages, on the importance of non-alphabetic marks alongside true graffiti: ownership marks, numerals and symbols have too often been passed over by editors with an eye only for legible Greek, and their inclusion here is a genuine methodological advance.

If the chief virtue of the book is to have made accessible, in one place and with reasonably full apparatus, material previously confined to scattered preliminary reports in Croatian-language journals, its chief vice is one of production rather than scholarship: the photographs are frequently too poor to allow independent verification of a reading, and the line drawings do not always agree with the printed text (the editors’ own preference for drawing over photography, on grounds of surface wear, does not really meet the objection). Some proposed restorations will not command universal assent – the Ionian attribution offered for Pa14, for instance, rests on very little –; and the apparatus of diacritics is erratic enough to cause occasional difficulty. A fuller synthetic discussion of what this material as a whole reveals about contact between the Adriatic and the wider Greek world, explicitly disclaimed by the editors as beyond their scope, is sorely missed and would have rewarded the labour of compilation.

These are real shortcomings, but they do not diminish the corpus’s importance. The painstaking publication of two major sanctuary deposits and the rescue from obscurity of a great deal of minor material besides, make this an indispensable working tool for anyone concerned with the Greek presence on the eastern Adriatic, with the cult of Diomedes or with the epigraphy of dedication more generally. One hopes that an online database, allowing higher-resolution images and the correction of readings as study continues, may yet follow.