It is not easy to know who this book is intended for. It presupposes an audience happy to read untranslated German (Max Weber) and English but entirely ignorant of the ancient Greek world. It offers an account of the archaic Greek city that stresses, unsurprisingly given the author’s earlier work, the absence of an aristocracy, on the one hand, and the importance of the idea of citizenship, on the other. Although at various points very much written against a way of understanding the archaic Greek world that the author wishes to reject (essentially views that retroject the classical polis onto the archaic Greek world), the engagement with others’ constructions is highly selective, certainly outside scholarship in French. At points the account engages in detail with the archaeological record, but the eight illustrations hardly offer much of an overview of the archaeological evidence (though they do accurately reflect the absence of the seventh century BC from the book): images of warriors on pots from Paros, Lefkandi and Thronos Kephala in Crete; geometric bronze horses from Argos, Sparta, Athens and Corinth; a sex scene on a pot from Eretria; the scene of the Calydonian boar hunt from the François Vase; a cut-out with a hunter from Symi Viannou; and a scene of sexual harassment of a serving boy at a symposium on an Athenian red-figure cup. There are no maps or plans, and there is no general index, only indexes of ancient texts cited, names of places and names of scholars.

The long introduction is devoted largely to an exposition of the French tradition of thinking of the Greek city as rational. The first chapter asks, ‘What city?’ and briefly traces the constitutional/institutional approach from Herodotus’ constitutions debate (3.80–82), Plato and Aristotle through German and French scholarship to the work of the Copenhagen Polis Centre (which is one of Duplouy’s bêtes noires). It then sketches its approach to replacing that view with a view of the city built up of individuals. Here, as throughout the book, discussion focuses on the citizen. Duplouy insists that archaic citizens should not be discussed through stressing what they lack that classical citizens have, but his own text is full of classical discussions on citizenship (Aristotle, Politics 3; [Demosthenes] 59, Against Neaira). The absence of Homer (and of Haubold’s Homer’s People (Cambridge 2000)) and his many mobile individuals, and of Hesiod’s father (who supposedly arrived as an immigrant but whose sons have a landed estate to argue over) seriously skews the discussion. The chapter ends with some theoretical foundations for how we might think about archaic communities, but we have performance here without Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (London 1990) and Pierre Bourdieu without doxa, which was central to An Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge 1977) and is an idea Duplouy badly needs.

The second chapter is the most archaeological, sketching the contours of the community by discussing, first, places of cult (Duplouy is keen on Mazarakis-Ainian’s model in From Rulers’ Dwellings to Temples: Architecture, Religion and Society in Early Iron Age Greece (Jonsered 1997), where cult moves from chieftains’ houses, and keen too on communal meals), then burial (a long and useful critique of Ian Morris’ Burial and Ancient Society: The Rise of the Greek City-State (Cambridge 1987), but one that in attacking the construction that Morris builds upon the archaeology does not seriously delve into the archaeology itself). The third chapter is interested in how community relations are formed, with a section on the ‘city of images’ over-obsessed by images of warriors and failing to make anything like adequate use of Susan Langdon’s Art and Identity in Dark Age Greece (Cambridge 2008). There is then a long discussion based around Thucydides’ distinction between an ‘old’ way of life and a ‘recent’ way of life (esp. Thuc. 1.6) – though Duplouy ends by admitting that the presentation of these ways of life as chronologically sequential was misleading.

The final chapter is concerned with how the community perpetuated itself, starting with the question of inheritance and how important family lines were, and then moving to ‘soft’ ways of transmitting community values: education, hunting and pederasty, music and dancing, drinking and the sumposion. The conclusion attacks the ideas that the polis was born in the eighth century, that the polis was rational and that communities should be divided between poleis and other sorts of community. Duplouy acknowledges that within a single community several different lifestyles might be maintained by different groups and that lifestyle was more important than blood or institutions for maintaining these groups. Yet he also claims, ‘[i]n archaic Greece every community came into being through a process of social distinction between insiders and outsiders’ (280, my translation), and wants to maintain that the two Thucydidean lifestyles were central mechanisms of distinction. It is as if his attachment to the idea of citizenship, which Isee no reason at all to foist on any Greek community prior to 500 BC, has skewed his whole perception.