Ancient Greek history can have no serious future in which the study of slavery does not play a prominent role. But in order to fulfil this role, the study of slavery is in urgent need of new approaches and perspectives. David Lewis’ new book is a splendid contribution in this direction.Footnote ¹ Lewis stresses the fact that slavery is primarily a relationship of property, and develops a cross-cultural framework for approaching slavery in this manner. Using this framework, he shows that Greek slavery cannot be equated with slavery in classical Athens, but consisted of various epichoric systems of slavery. Spartan helots and Cretan woikeis were not serfs or dependent peasants, but slave property with peculiar characteristics, as a result of the peculiar development of these communities. These findings have major implications for the study of Greek slavery. At the same time, he presents a comparative examination of Greek slave systems with slave systems in the ancient Near East (Israel, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, and Carthage). While previous scholarship assumed that slavery in the Near East was marginal, Lewis shows that slaves constituted a major part of elite portfolios in many of these societies. This has revolutionary implications for the comparative study of Mediterranean and Near Eastern history in antiquity. Finally, he presents a model for explaining the role and significance of slavery in different ancient societies, which includes the factors that determine the choice of labour force, as well as the impact of political and economic geography. It is remarkable that an approach to slavery based on a cross-cultural and ahistorical definition of property does not lead to a homogenizing and static account, but on the contrary opens the way for a perspective that highlights geographical diversity and chronological change.

J. G. Manning's new book is the first single-authored synthesis of the economic history of the Mediterranean world.Footnote ² Manning largely follows the currently dominant neo-institutionalist approach, as demonstrated by his focus on factors such as climate, demography, institutions, and growth. Nevertheless, this is an innovative account for four reasons. The first is that it engages seriously with the historiography of the study of ancient economic history, and the implications that this has for current approaches. The second is that it is the first synthesis to pay serious attention to issues of periodization and change. The third, and probably most important, is that it makes an important case for the need to incorporate into ancient economic history, which so far has focused on the Mediterranean, the economic histories of Mesopotamia and Egypt, with their significantly different ecologies and institutions. And finally, and in contrast to neo-institutionalist approaches, it accords to labour a central role in economic history. On the other hand, despite the author's prodigious knowledge, the style and composition of the book make reading a difficult experience. Manning often raises four or five different issues in the same paragraph, without always making clear what the point or his view is. Nevertheless, this is a very useful synthesis which opens new issues that will need to be grounded in future work.

It is rare for ancient historians to engage deeply in theoretical debates in history and the social sciences; Greg Anderson's new book is the first postmodernist history of ancient Greece.Footnote ³ Anderson challenges the modern Eurocentric ontology of individuals, civil society, and state, or society and economy. He argues that, in order to understand pre-modern worlds like that of classical Athens, we need to employ ontological history, which posits the existence of distinctive ‘lifeworlds’ inhabited by people in the past and present, each of which can only be understood from within. The Athenians imagined their lifeworld as an ecology consisting of independent households, which produced and reproduced life through their relationships to gods and land. Their community, the Athenian demos, existed as a ‘unitary human superorganism’, a fiction that was brought into life as a group of citizens in the assembly, as worshippers in a procession, or as the volunteers who undertook an action in the name of the demos. This superorganism came into existence in order to deal with issues that affected all Athenians in three circumscribed areas: relations between the demos and the gods, relations between the Athenian demos and other communities (diplomacy and war), and the hosia that were held in common by all Athenians (such as water supply). For everything outside this circumscribed range, households, phratries, and tribes were self-regulating groups whose members lived ‘as they wished’. Anderson presents a model with major implications for how we understand Athenian history; but this was not the single model that Athenians had for conceptualizing their world, and the idea of self-enclosed lifeworlds, without contradictions, alternative conceptualizations, debates and disagreements, and change, is ultimately untenable, both for ancient Athens and for anywhere else. By challenging the idea that Athens was an early version of modern societies, Anderson raises a number of very important issues and rightly challenges a whole nexus of preconceived assumptions; even if one disagrees with some of his answers, this is a thought-provoking book that must be read and engaged with widely.

An alternative way of understanding how the Athenians conceptualized their social world is provided by Sviatoslav Dmitriev.Footnote ⁴ His book focuses on the birth of the Athenian community in the archaic period, but covers a much wider chronological range, reaching the Hellenistic period. Dmitriev argues persuasively that, instead of talking about a unitary community of Athenian citizens, we need to distinguish three Athenian communities which partly overlapped and were partly different. The first was the kinship community of those who could marry through engyetic marriage, which, after Solon's reforms, excluded bastards. The second was the legal community, whose members had the right to use certain courts, to own real property, and to be protected from enslavement, torture, and other forms of mistreatment. This community emerged as a result of Solon's reforms and included all legitimate members of the kinship community, male and female, as well as enfranchised foreigners. Finally, we need to distinguish the political community, whose members included only those male adult Athenians who had various political rights. Although the Athenians did not have a separate word to distinguish members of the legal community from members of the political community, but used the word polites for both, Dmitriev persuasively shows the advantages of distinguishing between the two, not least in relation to Athenian women. The book raises many other issues for debate; while some arguments, like the idea that fifth-century enfranchised foreigners were not deme members, or that Athenians did not consider participation in the assembly as part of political rights, are rather unlikely to convince, the undermining of the unitary conception of Athenian citizenship is undoubtedly an important step forward.

To continue with studies on classical Athens, we turn to David Pritchard's book on the Athenian democracy at war.Footnote ⁵ The volume consists of eight studies, some previously published, which explore various aspects of the connection between Athenian democracy and warfare. Undoubtedly, the most important part is the chapter on Athenian armed forces, which occupies more than half the volume. This is an excellent, up-to-date discussion of the composition and methods of conscription and remuneration of Athenian hoplites, sailors, archers, and horsemen. Pritchard successfully dismantles a number of traditional theories about the class composition of the Athenian armed forces, stressing the disjuncture between the Solonian classes and the composition of each force. The other chapters explore Athenian attitudes to naval matters, the relative costing of festivals and warfare, and the relationship between sport and warfare in Athens. Pritchard explores the financial reasons and cultural presuppositions that made Athenian democracy both willing to engage with warfare on a constant basis, and able to finance such engagements. While these enquiries are stimulating, they also raise the issue of the aims for which Athenian democracy employed war – an issue that urgently requires further study.

The title of Stephen Lambert's Inscribed Athenian Laws and Decrees in the Age of Demosthenes should not mislead readers into thinking this is a rather technical volume.Footnote ⁶ On the contrary, this collection of eleven chapters is a particularly important contribution beyond its value for the study of Athenian epigraphy. Inscriptions have long been treated as minefields of facts, providing historians with evidence which is largely absent from other ancient sources, in particular documentary and archival data. More recently, scholars have turned to the cultural history of ancient inscriptions both from their literary point of view (narrative, discourse, memory) and as forms of material culture (monumentality, location, visuality). The essays explore issues such as the types of decisions inscribed and where they were exhibited, stressing the various messages and audiences with which the polis wished to communicate, as well as the gaps between literary and epigraphic sources; the role of the inscriptions in the construction of the Athenian past and the processes of memory; and what light inscribed decisions can throw on continuities and changes in Athenian foreign policy and the processes of Athenian democracy during the ‘age of Demosthenes’. Lambert persuasively challenges a number of accepted truisms regarding the role of ordinary citizens in the assembly, and the relationship between the assembly and the Council of the 500. This volume is of major value for any future reconstruction of fourth-century Athenian history.

Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s the study of Greek law came to be emancipated from the Roman framework that had long dominated it. Novel approaches, influenced by social anthropology, stressed the social and political framework of Greek law and the lack of professional jurists: as a result, historians tended to see Greek law and justice as mere means for the achievement of various social and political aims. Over the last decade, a countervailing tendency has attempted to correct some serious misconceptions created by the anthropological approach and to stress the autonomous role and function of Greek law and legal discourse. The volume edited by Paula Perlman includes eleven important essays which further substantiate the need to rebalance the study of Greek law.Footnote ⁷ One major theme is the exploration of the conceptual framework for studying Greek law: the distinction between oral and written law, the relationship between public and private law or ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ law, and the existence or not of a separate field of sacred law. A second major theme is the attempt to account for the peculiarities of Greek law, in particular the purported lack of substantive juridical definitions. Various chapters employ an instrumental perspective, which explains the peculiar features of Greek law in terms of the needs and aims that the Geeks tried to address: the needs of a democratic society, the requirement of dealing with matters of communal interest in the absence of state prosecution, and the involvement of slaves in economic life. A third theme concerns the perennial issue of the ‘unity of Greek law’: various chapters develop new ideas about the ways in which we can conceptualize the laws and procedures of the various Greek communities as being part of a wider whole.

I move to an important volume on the Hellenistic polis, edited by Henning Börm and Nino Luraghi, which consists of a short foreword and ten chapters.Footnote ⁸ Many years ago the Hellenistic polis was considered moribund or in crisis; but over the last four decades various studies have documented the vitality of many aspects of Hellenistic polis life. One theme of this volume is the attempt to explore the historical development of the forms of peer-polity interaction in the Hellenistic poleis, studying phenomena such as interstate arbitration, the participation in Panhellenic festivals, and the relationship between poleis and federal states. A second theme is continuities and changes from the politics of the classical period in phenomena such as the prevalence of stasis and the nature of oligarchy; I single out Luraghi's chapter, which explores how the ideology of the autonomous polis made Hellenistic Athenians choose to present their political history in terms of struggles between oligarchs and democrats rather than concede the influence of outside powers in Athenian politics (an issue linked to the volume by Lambert examined above). A third theme that appears in various chapters concerns economic issues, with Oliver's contribution stressing the need to complement the prevailing neo-institutionalist approach with the significance of events and crises and how poleis and their members attempted to deal with them (raising issues akin to those addressed in Manning's book above). But the pièce de résistance is undoubtedly Chaniotis’ chapter on ‘What Is Hellenistic in Hellenistic Nights’, exploring the developments in polis life that expanded or changed the way in which Hellenistic cities colonized and experienced the night.

This review includes two volumes of narrative history. The first is Robin Waterfield's new history of ancient Greece.Footnote ⁹ This is undoubtedly the best current one-volume introduction to ancient Greek history in English. It has a wide chronological coverage, including the archaic, classical, and Hellenistic periods, while also combining narrative political history with social, economic, cultural, and religious history. As far as I can tell, nothing equivalent has so far been on offer; and all is presented in a style which is simple and yet compelling and stimulating. Waterfield has made a valiant effort to present a distillation of the latest scholarship in the various fields of Greek history. Given the very wide subject matter, it is unsurprising that the result varies: while his discussion of Greek warfare or the economy of ancient Greece is a good reflection of current research, his discussion of Sparta or Greek sexuality is a bit dated. The volume features some of the general problems of current approaches to Greek history: but it is quite interesting, for instance, that, while Waterfield manages to avoid prioritizing Hellenistic monarchies by giving equal attention to cities and federations, his account of fourth-century Greek history is presented as ‘the futility of war’. Greek historians will learn a lot by reflecting on which aspects of this account have been considered anew over the last few decades, and which aspects are still approached with frameworks and questions that are dated.

If there was one character from ancient Greek history who should have long ago become the topic of a Hollywood movie, it is undoubtedly Alcibiades, the topic of a new large-scale biography by David Stuttard.Footnote ¹⁰ Stuttard manages to produce a lively and gripping narrative, which successfully maintains a difficult balance between presenting Alcibiades’ personal story and offering the history of his world seen from Alcibiades’ point of view. Given his personality and notoriety, he has attracted numerous anecdotes with dubious historicity. Stuttard does a very good job of treating such stories carefully and incorporating them into an illuminating contextual framework. As he notes, Alcibiades is remarkable for his ability to fit in in a variety of different worlds, from Athens and Ionia to Sparta, the Persian satrap courts, and Thrace. Stuttard does a great job of using Xenophon in order to illustrate Alcibiades’ sojourn in Thrace, though his depiction of Sparta and the satrapal courts is rather flatter. Deeper engagement with modern scholarship on sexuality and religion could have turned a very good book into a masterpiece. But, perhaps most telling, Stuttard's account, in line with most other narrative histories of the fifth century, is shaped by Thucydides’ portrayal of Athenian democracy; at the same time, most studies of Athenian democracy eschew any engagement with the world of events. Can we escape from this cul-de-sac? Whatever the case, this book is a stimulating step in the right direction.

I turn next to three volumes that explore issues of ethnicity and the cultural relations between Greek and other Mediterranean cultures. The kingdom of Lydia played a significant role in archaic Greek history, and it has usually been approached as an appendix to that story. Peter Högemann and Norbert Oettinger have written the first synthesis on Lydian history for more than a century.Footnote ¹¹ On the one hand, they stress the Hittite and Luwian background of Anatolia, and the necessity to take it into account in order to reconstruct the history of Asia Minor in the first millennium bce. The Hittite background to Troy and Homer has attracted some attention in recent years, and Greek historians will profit immensely from the way in which this book makes accessible and relevant its implications for Lydia and the Greek cities of Asia Minor. On the other hand, Herodotus remains the major source for Lydian history. The authors want to reconstruct the ethnographic and historical background of his Lydian logos, and in this respect they use parallels not only from the Hittites and the Luwians, but also from Israel and other areas of the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. Some of them are more convincing than others, but it is a pity that an important advance in the knowledge of the non-Greek cultures with which Herodotus interacted is not matched by engagement with how the study of Herodotus has advanced over the last few decades. The authors stress the role of Lydia in fostering the archaic Milesian colonization – a thesis that will generate important debates.

The second book, by Erik Jensen, is titled Barbarians in the Greek and Roman World.Footnote ¹² This book adopts a wide chronological canvas, stretching from the emergence of Greek identity in the Late Bronze Age to the barbarian invasions, migrations, and transformations of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Jensen adopts an approach that challenges the Orientalist and Eurocentric narratives that have dominated the study of the interaction between Greek and Roman cultures and the other cultures and communities of the ancient world. Accordingly, the book attempts to counter existing and perpetuating myths of cultural difference and stress the significance of cross-cultural interaction. Given the enormous chronological, geographic, and thematic coverage, and the lack of any new approach or framework, the book suffers from uneven coverage. As the work is primarily based on secondary literature, different chapters exhibit the advantages or limitations of the scholarship on which they are based; occasionally, we come across some really bizarre ideas, such as the statement that Persian culture abhorred slavery. Nevertheless, the book offers a panorama of interactions and encounters across almost two millennia and three continents which will undoubtedly be valuable to lay readers and non-specialists.

The third work under review provides a link between the study of ethnicity and a number of works on ancient settlements. The returning hero is the subject of a volume edited by Simon Hornblower and Giulia Biffis.Footnote ¹³ The concept of the returning hero originates with the tales of the Nostoi of the heroes after the Trojan War, and their travels and travails across the Mediterranean; but the volume manages to link these tales to the wider issue of the ‘traditions of Mediterranean settlement’. The book comprises an introduction and eleven chapters that range widely, chronologically, geographically, and thematically. A number of chapters explore the representation of Nostoi in various Greek literary genres, from Homer and lyric poetry to tragedy and comedy. A second major theme revolves around the function of Nostoi tales for Greek communities and intercultural interaction in the ancient world. Certain chapters adopt an intentionalist approach by exploring the role of Nostoi in the construction of archaic ethnicities and local identities in Greece, Asia Minor, and Italy. Others consider the mental assumptions and operations of such myths: the gendered reasons for which women are absent from Nostoi tales or the ways in which such tales enable people to turn new surroundings into familiar places, as in the case of Alexander and his Macedonian companions. A final theme picks up how the wider patterns of Mediterranean mobility shaped the ways in which ancient individuals and communities constructed conceptions of home and departure, and formulated reciprocal relationships between metropoleis and their various foundations. The location of Greek heroic myth in global space is one of the peculiar features of Greek culture which had major implications for intercultural interactions in antiquity. This volume brings out the significance of various aspects of this phenomenon, but thereby stresses the need for a comprehensive treatment of this peculiar issue which is sorely missing.

Moving to the study of ancient settlements, the next two books are histories of famous cities in the eastern Mediterranean world. Naoise Mac Sweeney provides a short but stimulating guide to the history, archaeology, and reception of ancient Troy.Footnote ¹⁴ As the book title indicates, Mac Sweeney approaches the topic from three different but interlinked angles. The first concerns the myth of Troy: how Troy is represented in ancient Greek mythology, how the myth led to the rediscovery of Troy in the nineteenth century and to further archaeological exploration from then until now, and whether archaeology can verify any aspects of the myth. The second focuses on the archaeology and history of the city, from its Anatolian background in the Bronze Age through its revival in the first millennium bce, to its glorification in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The third explores Troy as an icon in the medieval, early modern, and modern worlds, focusing on themes such as genealogy and ethnicity, love and romance, and the nature and purpose of warfare. The book is a remarkable achievement in managing to present in a lively and accessible manner a huge amount of scholarly work on Troy, past and present scholarly debates about various aspects of Troy's myth and history, and the fascinating story of its reception, aspects of which will mesmerize many a reader.

From Troy we turn to Palmyra, another crossroads for different cultures, which is the subject of a fascinating book by Michael Sommer.Footnote ¹⁵ How can we understand this desert city, which presents such a strange hybrid of Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman elements, and whose rulers even managed to govern the Roman Empire of the East between 260 and 272 ce? Sommer shows persuasively that the history of the city can only be understood through its long-term interaction with the wider world of communities, networks, and empires from the Bronze Age to late antiquity. This includes the changing relationships between the Palmyra oasis and the Syrian landscapes of the steppe, the desert, and the sown; the developing forms and routes of long-distance trade; the changing geopolitical balance between rival empires, from the Seleucids and Parthians to the Romans and Sassanians; and the emergence of the Greek and Roman currents of globalization and their skilful glocalization by the Palmyrenes. In this respect, the book doubles both as a history of Palmyra and as a stimulating reflection on these wider processes. Sommer illustrates the significance of the Indian Ocean trade for the acme of Palmyra, and explores the institutions and practices that allowed the Palmyrenes to insert themselves into this trade and profit handsomely from it. If there is anything to complain about this thought-provoking book, it is that culture and religion receive less treatment than they could have.

After two books on really famous ancient cities, I shall conclude this review with one on an ancient village, a form of study that has not been a high priority for classical scholars. Brice Erickson's book focuses on the small settlement of Lerna in the Argolid.Footnote ¹⁶ Lerna is among the few ancient villages which are described in some detail by an ancient text; but Pausanias’ description of the sacred topography of Roman Lerna seems a world away from the small Geometric cemetery and the few well deposits from the archaic, classical, and Hellenistic periods that form the data for Erickson's account, not only chronologically but also in terms of the facets of life they illustrate. Erickson shows that Lerna was a settlement that participated in the processes of Mediterranean connectivity, as demonstrated by the range of imported objects. Furthermore, the significant number and range of drinking vessels raise interesting questions about the geographic and social diversity of the Greek practices of commensality and entertainment. In the process of discussing the Lerna evidence, Erickson also offers a stimulating overview of current work on the material culture of landscape use, household activities, religious and social practices, and identity and state formation. Populating ancient landscapes and settlements, and writing a history from below that does not focus solely on urban elites are major desiderata of future work in Greek history and archaeology; this is a stimulating contribution in the right direction, which provides a careful methodological reflection on the difficult way ahead.