Two important recent books re-examine long-standing orthodoxies which have come under fire in recent decades. Julia Kindt challenges the orthodox model of Greek religion which has put the polis as its central organizing principle, as manifested in the work of Christianne Sourvinou-Inwood and the Paris school.Footnote ¹ The book combines methodological and theoretical discussion with a series of case studies ranging from the Archaic period to the Second Sophistic. Kindt does not deny the value of the polis-centred model for major aspects of Greek religious life; rather, her main disagreement is that it creates simplistic polarities and leaves aside or treats as exceptions many important aspects of Greek religion. While the polis model sees religion as embedded in the structures of the polis, Kindt argues persuasively for the need to conceptualize Greek religion as a series of interrelated but distinct layers. She rightly stresses the autonomy of religion as a symbolic and figural system; and she emphasizes the significance of personal experience and agency and the ways in which practices such as magic illustrate the multiple links between personal experience and agency and the religious community of the polis. Finally, of particular significance is her challenge to the standard polarity of local versus Panhellenic and the need to adopt a wider spectrum of layers and identities.

Another long-standing orthodoxy, which took its more recent shape in the works of Victor Davis Hanson in the 1980s and 1990s, posits a hoplite revolution in the early Archaic period which combined a new way of infantry fighting in mass formation with the emergence of a middling stratum of farmers as a dominant force in Greek economies, societies, and politics; this model has come under a sustained revisionist critique in recent decades. Donald Kagan and Gregory Viggiano have edited a very stimulating volume bringing together most of the major participants in this debate.Footnote ² The collection makes evident the deep divisions in opinion, but is also an impressively wide exploration of many key aspects of archaic and classical Greek history. Viggiano defends the orthodox take on the hoplite revolution, while Snodgrass presents the case for a more gradual development; Krentz argues in favour of a more flexible image of Greek battles, while Schwartz's analysis of weapons shows the importance of close-hand fighting; Hale emphasizes the significance of Greek mercenary activity in the Near East as a major factor in the emergence of hoplite fighting, while Raaflaub claims that there is no Near Eastern impact on Greek hoplite fighting; finally, while Foxhall and van Wees strongly challenge the existence of a large section of middling farmers living in the countryside before 550, Hanson and Viggiano defend Hanson's original position. Notwithstanding the wealth of ideas, it is a pity that only van Wees's essay tries to come up with a full-scale alternative sketch of both the socio-political and the military aspect of hoplite fighting. The orthodox model was holistic in positing a straightforward link between socio-political and military developments; any new model will have to combine gradualism, discontinuity, diversity, and flexibility, as well as accept a less straightforward connection between socio-political and military aspects.

Two recent books are devoted to the legal and political processes of Athenian democracy in the late fifth and fourth centuries bce. Both of them focus on the close analysis and interpretation of decrees and legal enactments, but take divergent positions regarding the authenticity and interpretation of some important sources. Edwin Carawan has written a detailed study of the history of the amnesty that followed the regime of the Thirty Tyrants and its impact on Athenian legal and political procedures.Footnote ³ The volume opens with Carawan's reconstruction of the terms of the reconciliation agreement and the various stages that it passed through between the overthrow of the Thirty in 403 and the re-unification of Attica in 401, arguing that the original agreement of 403 was not a blanket amnesty, but a series of remedies concerning restitution of property, compensation for losses, and restoration of rights, which had to be redefined under the altered conditions of 401. Carawan then moves on to examine in detail six trials (of Callimachus, Agoratus, Eratosthenes, Andocides, Socrates, and Nicomachus) that took place between 401 and 398, exploring how they relate to the terms of the reconciliation agreement. The problem of how to balance the sense of justice and the power of the people with contractual obligations and the integrity and consistency of the legal system was constantly negotiated in the period examined here. The book emphasizes the contractual arrangements and obligations that lay at the heart of the reconciliation agreement and argues that they shaped a contractual principle that defined how Athenian legislation redefined the ‘ancestral laws’ from the late fifth century onwards.

The monograph by Mirko Canevaro (including a chapter by E. M. Harris) focuses on the documents included in the textual corpus of the Athenian orators.Footnote ⁴ While the authenticity of these documents was much debated during the nineteenth century, there has been a long lull in discussion, punctuated by focus on specific works. Canevaro examines the documents in the Demosthenic corpus as a whole and uses the vastly increased output of Athenian documents on stone in order to test the authenticity of those preserved in the literary tradition. He concludes that there is a significant divergence between the documents incorporated in Demosthenes' speeches 23 and 24 (partly), which were included in the original edition of Demosthenes' works, and those in speeches 59, 21, and 18, which were inserted at various points in the history of the textual transmission. The reliability of these documents varies extensively, from being largely faithful copies of the original documents, through being relatively valuable reconstructions by ancient scholars, to misleading pastiches on the basis of the paraphrases found in the oratorical texts. Given how much of Athenian political, legal, and institutional history depends on these documents, Canevaro's discussion is a very rich text. His conclusions need careful attention by a wide range of scholars and will take time to be addressed accurately across the board.

From Thucydides' Cleon accusing the Athenians of confusing the running of the state with watching a spectacle to Plato's concept of theatrocracy, the link between democratic deliberation and theatrical performance has been a powerful way of criticizing Athenian democracy. Noémie Villacèque has devoted a major study to the exploration of the representation of this link in the ancient sources, alongside an argument about how modern historians can reconstruct the role of this link in ‘reality’.Footnote ⁵ The volume is divided into three parts, which examine the representation of political assemblies in the dramatic performances in the theatre, the role of performance and theatricality in the processes of the Athenian law courts, and the role of spectacle in Athenian assemblies. The author argues convincingly against a misleading polarization between deliberation and spectacle by illustrating the role of deliberation in theatrical performances involving a choir and an audience, as well as the role of spectacle in Athenian democratic deliberation. Her effort to trace a distinct phase of the theatralization of political life between the death of Pericles in 429 and the restoration of democracy in 404/403 has consequences for various fields of Athenian history and Greek literature and will certainly generate further discussion.

In recent years the study of the Athenian polis has been increasingly complemented with case studies of particular demes. Danielle Kellogg's book on Acharnae is a welcome addition to this growing trend.Footnote ⁶ The book examines in detail the surviving evidence on settlement structure, demography and population mobility, the political and financial administration of the deme, the local identity and its reflection through the stereotypes presented in the literary sources, the forms of local religious life (stressing the peculiarity of the cult of Ares and Athena Areia), and the strong participation of Acharnians in the wider range of Athenian religious networks; finally, it includes a very useful gazetteer and prosopography. While the book reflects the serious problems presented by the paucity of available evidence, Kellogg's stress on the local peculiarities and diversity of demes such as Acharnae has wider relevance. The argument that the settlement structure of Acharnae comprised a series of related settlements rather than a single nucleated centre will reinforce a recent trend emphasizing the diversity of settlement in the Attic landscape. The epigraphic evidence also shows Acharnians distributed among the local deme, the conurbation of Athens and Piraeus, and the rest of the Attic countryside. If one accepts that the surviving evidence is representative, Kellogg's argument that we need to pose a more diversified pattern of mobility within Attica has significant implications.

Acharnae is also the finding place of the document that constitutes the centrepiece of Paul Cartledge's new book.Footnote ⁷ The book is part of the new Oxford series ‘Emblems of Antiquity’, and focuses on the famous Oath of Plataea. This is a text purporting to be the oath sworn before the battle of Plataea, inscribed alongside the text of the Athenian Ephebic Oath on a stele dedicated in the later fourth century bce by the Athenian priest of Ares and Athena Areia. The book offers a discussion of that least-known but most decisive battle of the Persian Wars, and more broadly on the complex clash between the alliance of some of the most famous Greek communities on the one hand, and the Persian Empire and its Greek subjects and allies on the other. The authenticity of the Oath has long been disputed, and Cartledge takes a firm position in favour of conceiving the text as an ‘invented tradition’ created in the aftermath of the Athenian defeat at Chaeroneia. This gives him the opportunity to study the text not so much as a source on the battle of Plataea but as the product of the intersection of two contexts: the long-term rivalry of the Greek poleis on the commemoration of the Persian Wars and the Athenian re-working of their military, religious, and cultural practices in the aftermath of the Chaeroneia defeat.

Deborah Lyons devotes a very interesting book to the relationship between gender and exchange in ancient Greece.Footnote ⁸ Fruitfully informed by a long tradition of anthropological theory, she uses exchange as a means of exploring the relationships that women formed with husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers; the book largely focuses on the Homeric epics and Athenian tragedy, but thoughtfully discusses other sources, including Athenian vase iconography. Lyons examines women both as objects of exchange and as participants in exchange transactions. The book provides an interesting discussion of ‘gendered wealth’, tracing how metal objects are associated with men and textile objects with women, and the dangers and problems encountered in Greek myth when women become involved in the exchange of metal objects, such as Eriphyle's necklace. Equally, Lyons explores how tragedy problematizes the codes of ‘gendered wealth’ by turning textile gifts into means by which women such as Clytemnestra and Deianeira kill their husbands. While this short book offers a selective treatment of the topic of women and exchange in epic and tragedy, Lyons' larger point – that marriage constitutes a focal point of anxiety in the triangulation between women, exchange, and their marital household – seems persuasive and worth further exploration.

This review includes two interesting sourcebooks. James Robson contributes a new volume on Sex and Sexuality in Classical Athens to the Edinburgh series on ‘Debates and Documents in Ancient History’, combining an extensive and very readable introduction to the topic and the scholarly approaches with a selection of sources.Footnote ⁹ The book includes five chapters, on marriage and domestic life, same-sex relationships, prostitution, adultery and rape, and beauty and sexual attraction. It illustrates well not only how far the discipline has advanced but also the problems involved in writing the history of sex when we no longer take our sources at face value. While the chapter on same-sex relationships is a brilliant discussion of the discourses and concerns that focus the attention of our sources to a specific range of aspects while sidelining others, and a stimulating exploration of the relationship between discourse and reality, the chapter on heterosexual unions tends to accept the legal and discursive framework as paradigmatic, and to treat the messy situations revealed by our sources as exceptions. Robson's selection of literary and archaeological sources is impressive, and very effectively incorporated into the discussion; it is only a pity that epigraphy, and particularly curse tablets, are almost completely ignored.

Brendan Nagle and Stanley Burstein have presented a second edition of their sourcebook on Greek history from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period.Footnote ¹⁰ The arrangement of materials resembles that of other relevant volumes, with the standard chronological division in periods and centuries. Although the Hellenistic period and the Roman conquest are given limited space, they are presented in a very lively fashion, while it is particularly important that significant attention is paid to the long-term interaction between Greeks and non-Greeks. Nevertheless, some of the topics chosen – such as the crisis of the polis in the fourth century – have generally been abandoned by scholarship, for various good reasons. The most positive aspect of the volume, and obviously the key one in such a work, is the selection of sources. The authors have done a good job of complementing the usual selection of major literary sources with less well-known texts and a range of very interesting epigraphic and papyrological sources, some of which have been discovered only recently. On the other hand, it is rather unfortunate that many of the sources used for early Greece derive from the classical period (with Xenophon, for instance, used to illustrate the archaic hoplite ideal and archaic Sparta) without raising the methodological and historical problems created by such selections. All in all, this is an idiosyncratic selection, but one I enjoyed a lot.

Moving to studies of Greek historiography, Rosaria Munson has edited a two-volume collection of articles on Herodotus in the Oxford Readings series.Footnote ¹¹ This is a very valuable collection, which brings together twenty-nine classical articles in Herodotean studies; both volumes commence with an introduction by the editor, which provides the wider context of Herodotean scholarship within which the individual articles are situated. Volume 1 focuses on Herodotus' method and sources for creating a historical narrative about the past. It examines the historiographical reception of Herodotus, the relationship of his work to that of his contemporaries and to the oral tradition on which he built, the emplotment and narrative structure of the Histories, and finally the meaning, teleology, and uses of history that the text had for its author and its readers. Volume 2 switches attention to the relationship between Herodotus and the wider world that occupies such an important place in his work. This involves an exploration of the various aspects of the world that appealed to Herodotus' extraordinarily wide interests, from the physical world of geography, through the role of women and religion, to the various non-Greek people who appear across the text and the polarities and identities that inform their representation. Equally important, however, is the exploration of the theoretical issues of the Herodotean methods, images, and strategies for processing and representing this huge wealth of material, from the persona of the tourist and the wanderer to the use of analogy and the nature of historia. Although the collection is heavily tilted towards Anglophone scholarship, it is particularly commendable that the editor has included translated work from the French (Darbo-Peschanski, Rossellini and Saïd, Hartog), Italian (Luraghi, Corcella), and German (Strasburger, Burkert) scholarly traditions, which will provide an excellent introduction to these traditions for those lacking the linguistic skills. It would be futile to list articles that one might think should be present in this collection, but there seem to be two areas where gaps are notable. One concerns the interpenetration of different genres, traditions, and authorial voices as revealed in detailed analysis of specific Herodotean stories, which studies by writers such as Reinhardt, Griffiths, and West have so penetratingly explored. More surprising, given the focus of Volume 2 on non-Greeks, is the lack of space devoted to Herodotus' narrative of Greek history, in particular given the fact that he is our major source for archaic Greek history. This generally reflects the impression that the selection seems to have in mind more of a literary rather than a historical audience.