In the Philosophy of History, Hegel says that the only thing anyone ever learns from history is that no one ever learns anything from history. Josiah Ober dissents. He believes that the study of ancient Greek history provides valuable lessons for maintaining democratic polities in today's world. Athenian Legacies is comprised of 10 essays—eight published previously, lightly revised. Ober is primarily a cultural historian. He describes this field as “concerned with functional explanation: how members of a society, or subgroups within a community, negotiated a set of meanings that allowed them to continue to live in an existing community” (p. 177). This volume can be read as a follow-up (one of several) to his important 1989 work, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens. That study explores the role of discourse and ideology in alleviating conflict between richer and poorer citizens in ancient Athens and so contributing to democratic stability. In this new book as well, Ober's central concern is how products of public culture contributed to the reconciling of differences in Athenian identity, thus helping the Athenians “go on together.” The essays were written for different audiences: political theorists, classicists, moral philosophers. But the collection is more unified than many such works, as most essays bear to some degree on the central idea of “going on together.”

After a general introduction, Ober discusses lessons contemporary democracies can learn from radically participatory Athenian democracy, with Athenian institutions conceived as “inter-connected nodes of knowledge exchange, of civil learning, and of public teaching” (p. 31). This is followed by an inquiry into how a community can borrow moral authority from an interpretation of its past. He uses Thucydides as an example, arguing that the latter's attention to the recent past was intended to serve as a counterweight to the amnesty passed by the Athenian democracy when it returned to power, in the year 403. As opposed to the historical forgetting dictated by the amnesty, Thucydides attempted to provide Athens with a positive, usable past.

In the fourth essay, Ober argues that Athenian identities were characterized by thin coherence, due to overlapping allegiances to many different communities, in contrast to the extraordinarily thick coherence associated with Sparta, or the ideal cities of Plato's Republic and Laws. This is followed by a discussion of how participatory Athenian politics gave rise to “quasi-rights” (more on which later). Essay 6 describes how the “process of sociocultural reproduction” in Athens was carried on through participation in public institutions, not by means of the state-directed system of intensive education practiced in Sparta and, again, recommended by Plato for his ideal cities. This is followed by an attempt to overcome the notorious conflict between Socrates' rigid adherence to the law in Plato's Crito and his proclaimed willingness in the Apology to disobey a law that would require him to stop philosophizing. Ober's main claim is that Socrates viewed himself as following the law in the Apology, because impiety was against Athenian law, and Socrates believed that to cease his mission would be impious. The remaining essays concern mainly questions of interpretive methods: competition between cultural history and rational choice explanations, the meaning of Greek boundary markers, and the nature and significance of the public iconography of tyrant killing.

This is a rich collection; almost all readers will learn from most essays. Ober provides detailed accounts of Athenian culture while keeping his eye on larger themes. But given the breadth of his claims, there is much to argue with or to criticize. For instance, in keeping with his interest in cultural history, in the second essay, he examines how the distinctive institutions of Athens contributed to democracy as clearinghouse networks for social information, rather than through the direct political effects of open participation in the Assembly and rapid rotation of offices, especially in the Council of 500, which controlled the Assembly's agenda. In regard to the institutions' contribution, it is instructive to contrast Ober's claims with the more conventional argument of A. W. Gomme in a well-known essay, “The Working of the Athenian Democracy” (History 36 [February and June, 1951]). Gomme compares the structure of the Athenian Council and that of the Roman Senate, describing how differences in institutional form allowed Athens to avoid the concentration of power that effectively eliminated democracy in the Roman republic.

Ober provides a fascinating account of Athenian boundary markers, horoi, and their significance. For instance, on each marker surrounding the Athenian Agora was carved “I am the horos of the Agora.” The author argues persuasively that the meaning of these stone “texts” was not self-evident. However simple their ostensible message, understanding them properly required detailed knowledge of their place in the Athenian legal system, and allowed varying interpretations by people who approached them from different perspectives. Ober's conclusion: “Artifacts and texts alike gain meaning through their situation in a broader cultural context” (pp. 210–11). But this conclusion is unremarkable, differing little from Quentin Skinner's celebrated argument for reading historical texts in accordance with the linguistic conventions of their authors' societies. Skinner's classic works on this subject are missing from Ober's bibliography.

For political theorists, the most interesting essay is probably the fifth, on quasi-rights. By this expression, Ober means rights that are granted by a given state's legal system, without implications that they are ontologically or metaphysically grounded (p. 96). He seeks to lessen the divide between democratic participation and protection of liberal rights—between Benjamin Constant's liberties of the ancients and moderns. While many theorists question natural affinities between these liberties, Ober discusses a case in which participatory democracy gave rise to formal legal protections—for women and slaves as well as for democratic citizens. The rights in question concerned gradual extension of prohibitions against hubristic behavior to members of all these classes of people. Ober describes the relevant mechanism as follows: “Lacking any clear distinction between citizenship and government, or any metaphysical basis for the assertion of rights claims, the Athenians saw that establishing and maintaining individual dignity and democratic public authority must be predicated on the actions of society's members” (p. 127). But Ober's wider claim that this case “may point towards the development of a model for deriving liberalism from democratic participation” (p. 93) is questionable, given that the rights in question protected their bearers from little more than physical assault and were not extended further.

In the final analysis, readers' responses to Athenian Legacies will likely depend heavily on their attitudes toward historical explanations that concentrate primarily on cultural factors. But for even those with little sympathy, engagement with Ober's essays will enrich their understanding of Athenian history and its relevance for contemporary concerns.