This is a particularly rich crop of books on Greek history. I commence with two important volumes on citizenship in archaic and classical Greece. Traditional narratives of Greek citizenship are based on three assumptions: that citizenship is a legal status primarily linked to political rights; that there was a trajectory from the primitive forms of archaic citizenship to the developed and institutionalized classical citizenship; and that the history of citizenship is closely linked to a wider Whig narrative of movement from the aristocratic politics of archaic Greece to classical Athenian democracy.

The first volume, on archaic citizenship, edited by Alain Duplouy and Roger Brock, includes ten chapters alongside an introduction and conclusion by the editors.Footnote ¹ It provides a devastating critique of the assumptions above; but what should replace them? Some chapters in this volume focus on citizenship as performance, arguing that membership in the citizen community was based on the successful performance of activities such as commensality, cult, hunting, and athletics, rather than being a clearly defined legal status. There is no doubt that there is great value in this approach, not only with regard to the archaic period but also for the classical, and Cartledge's presentation of Spartan citizenship as successive stages of successful performances is illuminating. On the other hand, there is clear evidence that archaic communities attempted to institutionalize and formalize citizenship. The Solonian census shows that archaic citizenship could be linked to clearly defined statuses; but, as van Wees shows in an important contribution on warfare, archaic citizenship could be a conglomerate of a clearly defined status for the elites that had military and economic obligations and a much looser status for the majority of the population, who had few obligations but also few entitlements. Particularly stimulating is the exploration of civic subdivisions in Athens and Sparta, and the extent to which poleis cannibalized and transformed the various pre-existing associations for their own needs. Finally, the volume includes an extraordinary essay on archaic state formation by John Davies that should be required reading for a long time.

Josine Blok's book on classical Athenian citizenship is an important complement to the previous volume.Footnote ² Her primary target is the Aristotelian conception of citizenship as equivalent to political rights, which has so long dominated the field and tends to portray the Athenian polis as an adult male club. Blok documents successfully the existence of an alternative Athenian conceptualization of citizenship that focused on membership and participation in hiera and hosia: that is, cult and the social practices and conventions that were pleasing to the gods and maintained the cosmos. This focus meant that citizenship applied equally to men and women, and was conceptualized as the inheritance of family property, which included both tangible (material goods) and intangible elements, such as participation in political institutions. While both men and women were citizens and had obligations and entitlements arising from their community membership and participation, not all citizens inherited the same tangible and intangible elements: for example, the intangible inheritance of political rights was limited to male citizens. This is undoubtedly a convincing argument that should stand at the basis of future debate. But we also need to incorporate in our new models the startling fact that the Greeks came to categorize their political systems on the basis of which and how many citizens had political rights: the Aristotelian approach is not merely a peculiarity of Aristotle. The emergence of this alternative conceptualization of Greek citizenship and the history of its co-existence with the model excavated by Blok will require further study.

The next book, by Paulin Ismard, is a remarkable effort to use Greek public slaves as a means of rethinking slavery, the repertoire of social and legal statuses of ancient Greece, and the nature of Greek politics and the state.Footnote ³ Ismard discusses the multiplicity of tasks entrusted to Greek public slaves: bureaucrats and scribes, coin-testers, policemen and guards, artisans, and unskilled labourers. While the function of every complex community requires certain kinds of knowledge, ancient democracies conceived of politics as the exchange of information among equal citizens and refused to accord to experts a separate prominent position. The decision to turn over the administration of public affairs to public slaves had a double effect: it made administration invisible in Greek conceptions of politics, while guarding against the emergence of a state apparatus with its own interests and agendas. The book is also important because it challenges the ahistorical theory of Orlando Patterson that conceives slaves as dishonoured people by nature. While the link between slavery and dishonour is common, the public slaves honoured with decrees and public seats show that we need to think more carefully about the processes that link slaves, dishonour, and the state. Public slaves, honoured like free people but punished like slaves, present an excellent case study for rethinking the peculiarity of legal and social statuses that are encountered in ancient Greece.

I move to two major recent works in another area of state business, that of warfare and interstate relations. The first book, by Roel Konijnendijk, explores classical Greek military tactics.Footnote ⁴ The traditional approach to Greek warfare posits an archaic period dominated by agonal warfare, best exemplified in the ritualistic hoplite battle, which is progressively undermined from the Peloponnesian War onwards by a new kind of total warfare. This book examines how this view emerged in the nineteenth century and why it needs to be finally abandoned. Konijnendijk shows that Greek tactics cannot be understood without two essential cultural facts: most Greek armies consisted of amateurs who valued their freedom. This meant that there were strict limits both on what commanders could achieve with amateur soldiers and on the level of discipline they could impose on them. Furthermore, Konijnendijk shows that the dominance of hoplites in Greek battles could only emerge by tactical decisions that aimed to negate the catastrophic results of facing peltasts and cavalry without a tactical advantage. Instead of a ritualized conflict, what emerges from this book is the attempt by Greek armies to use any advantage possible to annihilate and humiliate the enemy, but within the constraints created by Greek culture and technology. This splendid book raises, but does not try to answer, two further questions: the first is the process through which this kind of battle and its attendant tactics emerged out of the looser and mixed fighting of the archaic age and the reasons for this change; related is the question of the range of purposes for which Greek states fought battles – both are questions for another book that is urgently required.

This link between warfare and states is at the focus of the second volume, an excellent collection of articles on warlords and interstate relations in the ancient Mediterranean.Footnote ⁵ Traditional historiography has tended to explore warfare as individual conflicts between states. This volume attempts to bring together two interrelated topics: the changing structure of international relations in the Mediterranean and the way that it affected warfare, as well as the agents of violence beyond the state. The twenty chapters range widely from the classical period to late antiquity, with most focusing on the Hellenistic and republican periods. Most papers agree that the modern concept of the warlord cannot be generally applied to the ancient world, and explore the reasons for which the emergence of warlords tended to be a transient phenomenon, as well as the few cases where particular conditions made possible the emergence of real warlords. Many case studies exemplify a grey zone of interlinking between states, international relations, agents of violence, soldiers, and local communities; of particular interest are the chapters that examine why certain states opted to employ relatively autonomous agents of violence, as well as the ways in which state generals could function as warlords. Equally stimulating are the chapters that explore the structure of interstate relations in the Hellenistic Mediterranean; one can only hope that such studies will also finally emerge in relation to the archaic and classical Mediterranean.

This review includes four volumes that deal with the history of the Persian Empire and its interactions with the Greek world. The first one is a monumental collection of twenty-eight previously published articles of Pierre Briant, translated into English for the first time.Footnote ⁶ Alongside Amélie Kuhrt, the translator, Briant is undoubtedly the doyen of modern Achaemenid studies, having played an instrumental role in liberating them from the Hellenocentric perspective and the relative marginalization that dominated the field until fairly recently. The articles document Briant's approach to the Persian Empire as a structure that linked on the one hand the king, court, bureaucracy, and imperial diaspora of the Persian ethno-class, and on the other the mosaic of local communities, potentates, and structures of power that came under Persian rule. The articles explore this link both through detailed examinations of particular documents, such as the Xanthos trilingual, and through case studies of institutions and practices that held the empire together, such as the royal roads, the management of water and other resources, and the collection of tribute. Apart from their obvious relevance for the history of the ancient Near East, the articles have major implications not only for the study of classical Greek history but also for the light they throw on the aftermath of the Persian Empire, allowing us to see in novel ways the history of Alexander the Great, the Hellenistic monarchies, and the fate of the Iranian diaspora in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Equally important is their significance for the comparative study of empires and imperial globalization.

Over the last two decades there have appeared a number of editions and commentaries of works on ancient Persia by Greek authors, such as Ctesias, Deinon, Heracleides, and Plutarch. Jan Stronk's latest work is a translation of the only surviving complete narrative history of Persia, in Diodorus Siculus’ Historical Library.Footnote ⁷ Stronk selects from Diodorus’ universal history those passages that deal with the history of Assyria, the Persian Empire, and the campaigns of Alexander and the Diadochs till 304 bce; the translated passages are accompanied by short commentaries where necessary. The volume also includes an introduction to Diodorus, an extensive discussion of his sources, and a conclusion. The significance of this collection is obvious: it brings together a narrative framework of Persian history which is invaluable. And, while it illustrates that what appears in Diodorus is not strictly speaking a Persian history but primarily a history of Persian–Greek interactions, there is also enough valuable information that does not solely focus on the Greeks. Presenting the history of the Persian Empire, Alexander, and the Diadochs as Semiramis’ legacy is one of the main points of this book: Stronk traces how this legendary queen of Assyria was intimately linked with the idea of the empire of Asia and the continuity and translation of empire.

Thucydides’ unitary vision of the Peloponnesian War and his limited interest in Persia have created serious problems when modern historians try to understand the military conflicts between Greeks and Persians after 480 bce. John Hyland's new book on Persian Interventions is a very welcome contribution for two reasons.Footnote ⁸ On the one hand, it moves away from Thucydides’ chronological framework and argues for the need to explore together the events between 450 and 386; on the other, it offers a long-needed narrative account of these events from the Persian point of view. Hyland attacks the traditional theory that saw Persian policy after the Peace of Kallias as an attempt to keep a balance between continuously fighting Greek states. Instead, he proposes that Persian royal ideology led the kings to attempt to expand their hegemony over the wider Greek world, while at the same time royal interest in increasing their revenues from trade shaped their preference for negotiated settlements rather than military spending. Even if one does not accept Hyland's theory, the book raises a number of important issues. We tend to think of the Achaemenid Empire as a financial colossus in relation to the Greek poleis, but the book documents clearly the constraints of money and manpower under which Persian agents operated in the period 450–386. This does not negate the resources potentially available to the Persian kings; but the cases in which these potential resources were mobilized, the reasons, and the agencies and the structures (satraps and their households, the imperial diaspora, the structures of commanding resources, the local potentates and communities, various networks) through which this happened are in need of further elaboration. The perspective from the imperial centre needs to be seriously complemented with these various agencies and structures, as Briant has so persuasively argued.

Finally, Robert Garland's new book looks at the Persian Wars from a novel perspective.Footnote ⁹ Instead of the campaigns and battles that have stood at the centre of earlier accounts, he attempts to recreate the experience of the Athenian men, women, and children, citizens, metics, and slaves, who lived through the experience of the double mass evacuation and destruction of Attica in 480 and 479. A book focusing on the experience of refugees will certainly resonate with contemporary readers. However, given the nature of the available sources, Garland is often forced to speculate on their experiences by trying to fill in the gaps by means of contemporary accounts of Dunkirk, or of the 1940 Paris evacuation. But, in order for these speculations to become illuminating, it is essential to incorporate them into what we know about the world in 480–479 bce. And this is where this book is disappointing, in failing to engage appropriately with recent scholarship and the interpretation of the sources. An account, for example, of how the Athenians evacuated twice and maintained in exile the whole population of Attica would have gained immensely by engaging with Hans van Wees's recent reconstruction of the archaic Athenian state, its finances, and naval organization. Herodotus’ account is taken at face value, with merely the necessary rationalist corrections. New accounts of the Persian Wars, which are urgently required, will need to engage seriously with recent developments in the study of archaic Greek history, the Persian Empire, and Herodotus in order to make any significant contribution.

I conclude with three new volumes devoted to the study of fifth-century Greek history. The first is the Oxford Handbook of Thucydides.Footnote ¹⁰ It includes forty chapters, divided into four sections. The first section examines Thucydides as historian, exploring his historical practices as well as the relationship between his narrative and the history of the fifth century. The second section is literary-centred, and explores primarily Thucydidean narratology. I found these two sections by far the best in the volume: the chapters carefully cover all the major aspects, with most exhibiting a healthy balance between providing readers with an overview of scholarship and offering new points of view. They also illustrate the achievement of narratology in offering new ways of understanding Thucydides, in terms both of exploring his literary techniques and of evaluating the historical value of his account. On the contrary, I found the sections on Thucydides and political theory and Thucydidean contexts and reception to be less successful. While the chapters relating to Thucydides’ intellectual milieu provided a stimulating overview, the chapters on reception and political theory did not seem to be part of any overall plan and some exhibited serious flaws. It is remarkable that so many contributors believe that they can say something useful about Thucydides without engaging at all with the study of Greek history; while the chapters by Greek historians in this volume demonstrate how much they have learned from narratology and political theory, it is high time that political theorists and literary scholars start to behave in a similar manner with regard to Greek history.

The second work is the long-awaited collection of fifth-century Greek historical inscriptions by Robin Osborne and Peter Rhodes, which will finally replace the collection of Meiggs and Lewis (M–L), originally published half a century ago.Footnote ¹¹ The collection includes ninety-five translated and commented inscriptions, thirty-three of which did not appear in M–L. Major new finds since M–L – such as the Thasian laws, the treaty between Sparta and the Erxadieis, the sacred law from Selinous, and the lead tablets from Camarina – are included and extensively commented. This is the first collection since the collapse of the consensus on the dating of fifth-century Athenian inscriptions in the 1990s. The authors succeed in presenting their own proposed datings alongside the alternative views, and this will certainly stimulate debate, even if one does not accept all of their proposals. This is also an immensely valuable tool for studying fifth-century Greek history beyond Athenocentrism and the foci of Thucydides. Fifty years ago, what counted as ‘Greek historical inscriptions’ was fairly obvious; in 2018 this is no longer the case, and the authors have regrettably not tried to explain the reasoning for their selections. Why is the laconic dedication of Hieron (101) worthier of inclusion than the epitaph of Phrygian Mannes, who died fighting for Athens in the Peloponnesian War (IG I³ 1361)? Given the expectations concerning their final collection of archaic inscriptions, the authors would do us a great service by discussing explicitly how they understand their project and their criteria for selection.

The third volume is a short history of Periclean Athens by Peter Rhodes.Footnote ¹² The book presents an overview of fifth-century narrative history, Athenian democracy, and the empire, as well as developments in religion and philosophy and the arts and literature. Rhodes makes a good job of incorporating in his account the major documents, such as the inscriptions in the collection mentioned above. Notwithstanding the title, he rightly argues that a meaningful biography of Pericles is largely impossible; and, while he dismisses the Thucydidean view that Pericles was the de facto ruler of Athens, he argues that Athenian fifth-century developments moved largely in tandem with Pericles’ policies and interests. Rhodes's overview presents the mainstream image of fifth-century Athenian history, largely based on Aristotle's Constitution of the Athenians, Thucydides, and Plutarch. Over the last decade, a number of works have started to challenge various aspects of this consensus, even if no alternative account has yet emerged. Rhodes attempts to incorporate elements of these new approaches, in articular with regard to the Athenian empire and its newly conceptualized sixth-century prehistory. But, as the studies on citizenship mentioned above show, the traditional narrative of the history of Athenian democracy is due for a radical deconstruction in the very near future.