Lavinia Del Basso’s L’evoluzione del ginnasio in Grecia, II sec. a.C.–IV sec. d.C., published in the Studia Archaeologica series, is a revised and updated version of the author’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Venice. The book addresses a field with a long scholarly tradition: ancient Greek education and, more specifically, the gymnasium and the ephebeia, institutions central to the collective education and civic formation of the young in Greek cities.

Despite the extensive literature on these subjects, significant gaps remain, particularly concerning the long-term development of the gymnasium as an urban institution and the transformation of its functions under Roman rule. Jean Delorme’s foundational study established the principal historical and typological framework for the study of the Greek gymnasium, while more recent work, notably by Miltiades B. Hatzopoulos, Nigel M. Kennell, Andrzej S. Chankowski, and Christopher de Lisle, has substantially revised our understanding of the ephebeia.Footnote ¹ What has remained lacking, however, is a sustained examination, focused specifically on Greece, of both the institutional development of the ephebeia and the changing architectural settings in which its activities took place from the late Hellenistic to the later Imperial period.

D.B.’s principal contribution lies precisely in this shift of perspective. Rather than concentrating on the origins, typology, and classical functions of the gymnasium, she examines its adaptation and transformation under Roman rule and, ultimately, the decline of the institution and the abandonment of its traditional architectural settings. Her study focuses on the cities of the Roman province of Achaea and asks how the gymnasium was accommodated within the changing social, political, and cultural environment of Greek cities after the Roman conquest. This institutional perspective is one of the book’s principal strengths. The gymnasium is treated not merely as an architectural type but as an urban institution whose functions were bound up with changing conceptions of education, citizenship, political participation, and social identity. D.B. accordingly restricts her corpus to urban gymnasia, excluding those attached to major sanctuaries such as Olympia and Delphi.Footnote ² The decision lends greater coherence to the material, while at the same time leaving open an important field for future comparison between urban gymnasia and those operating within major sanctuary contexts.

The volume is divided into two parts. The first Chapters (Chapter 1–8, 15–169) offer a synthetic treatment of the relationship between the gymnasium and Roman society, changes in the composition of its users and its educational functions, its architectural development, and the gradual abandonment of gymnasium buildings. Particular attention is also paid to gymnasia in Roman colonies, above all Corinth. The second part (171–480) consists of a geographically organized catalogue of fifty-one attested gymnasia in Achaea. Literary, epigraphic and archaeological evidence is brought together for each site to reconstruct, where possible, its location, architectural form, and historical development. Photographs, plans, maps, and detailed indexes considerably enhance the value of this section as a work of reference. D.B. is appropriately cautious about the severe limitations of the evidence. The archaeological record is highly uneven: only a small number of gymnasia have been excavated and published in sufficient detail to permit a secure reconstruction of their building histories, whereas many are known only from inscriptions or literary references. With the notable exception of Eretria, the chronology of urban buildings identified as gymnasia, therefore, often depends heavily on the paleographical and onomastic dating of associated inscriptions. The measured discussion of these difficulties in Chapter 2 is one of the book’s methodological strengths, since it establishes clearly what the available evidence can – and cannot – support.

Among the most interesting sections of the study is Chapter 3, which is devoted to the relationship between the Greek gymnasium and Roman society. D.B. situates the question within the broader process of Roman engagement with Greek institutions and emphasizes the cultural negotiations that allowed the gymnasium not simply to survive but to acquire new forms of social significance. Rather than functioning as a residual institution inherited from the pre-Roman polis, it remained an important arena of social integration and identity formation. D.B. considers Roman elite involvement in the gymnasia of Greek cities, the introduction of the imperial cult into spaces traditionally associated with the education and civic formation of the young, and the participation in the ephebeia of the sons of Romans and Italians settled in Achaea. She is rightly cautious, however, about attempting to quantify this participation or to reconstruct Roman attitudes towards specifically Greek aspects of gymnasium culture, including nudity and athletic training. Here, the geographical range of comparison might profitably have been extended beyond Achaea. Evidence from other Greek-speaking provinces, and particularly Macedonia, where young men with Roman names are attested among the ephebes, might have provided a useful comparative framework for assessing the integration of Roman and Italian families into Greek educational institutions.Footnote ³

Chapter 4, which examines access to the ephebeia and changes in its content after the Roman conquest, raises a more substantial methodological issue. D.B. takes as her starting point the gymnasiarchic law of Beroia and the ephebarchic law of Amphipolis and attempts to identify the survival or transformation of individual provisions in the evidence from Roman Achaea (mainly 51, 55, 56, 64). The two laws remain among our fullest sources for the institutional organization of the gymnasium and the ephebeia. Yet the extent to which they can serve as an interpretative framework for a substantially different historical context deserves further consideration. Scholarship has situated both laws within the institutional framework of the Macedonian kingdom,Footnote ⁴ while the ephebeia itself underwent important changes during the Imperial period. Although epigraphic evidence shows that the institution survived until at least the third quarter of the 3rd c. CE, neither its content nor its social function can simply be inferred from Hellenistic precedents, as the further examples assembled by the author from Achaea and elsewhere in the Greek-speaking East also suggest. De Lisle’s recent study of the Athenian ephebeia has demonstrated particularly clearly the extent to which the institution was reshaped under Roman rule.Footnote ⁵

Especially interesting are the so-called non-local ephebes, young men enrolled in the ephebeia of a city other than their own. Although the evidence is too sparse to permit firm conclusions, the phenomenon suggests that the gymnasium could operate within networks extending beyond the civic community itself (62–64). The limited evidence assembled by D.B. for the presence of children and young men (69–71), in the gymnasia of Achaea, relates primarily to competitive activities and public ceremonies.

In Chapter 5, D.B. revisits the long-standing debate over the relationship between physical, military, and intellectual education. She rightly distances herself from the older, largely linear model associated above all with Henri-Irénée Marrou, according to which the military dimension of the ephebeia progressively declined from the late Hellenistic period onwards as gymnasium education became increasingly intellectual. In line with more recent scholarship, D.B. instead emphasizes the continued coexistence of physical, military, and intellectual functions. Military training did not necessarily disappear, although in many contexts it acquired a more symbolic, civic, and educational role, while the balance between different forms of training varied from city to city.Footnote ⁶ This more differentiated model is better suited to the institutional diversity of Greek cities under Roman rule.

A subsection devoted to representations of ephebes in art and, more specifically, to funerary reliefs from the province of Achaea could have further enriched this chapter with original observations. Some relevant observations on representations of Attic ephebes have already been made in von Moock’s work,Footnote ⁷ while the potential of such an approach is also demonstrated by a recent study addressing a comparable theme in Roman Thessalonica.Footnote ⁸

The most suggestive questions raised by the volume, however, emerge from Chapter 6 and its discussion of the architectural development of the gymnasium and its relationship with the Roman bathing culture. D. examines the introduction of heated bathing facilities into gymnasium contexts from the 1st c. CE onwards and revisits the familiar distinction between Achaean gymnasia and the monumental multifunctional complexes of Asia Minor conventionally described as bath-gymnasia Footnote ⁹ . She follows the prevailing interpretation that no comparable architectural type developed in Achaea, attributing this partly to the constraints of the existing urban fabric and partly to a degree of architectural and cultural conservatism.

At the level of architectural typology, this conclusion is persuasive. Achaea lacks complexes comparable in scale and organization to the great bath-gymnasia of Asia Minor. Yet architectural discontinuity need not imply functional discontinuity. The more significant historical question is, therefore, not simply whether gymnasium buildings were transformed into bath complexes, but whether activities, practices and symbolic associations previously centered on the gymnasium migrated into these new bathing establishments.

This distinction between architectural form and institutional function deserves greater emphasis. As D.B. herself notes, baths were frequently constructed over or adjacent to earlier gymnasia. A more systematic investigation of the baths themselves – particularly their epigraphic and cultic contexts – might, therefore, reveal forms of continuity that remain invisible if the evidence is approached through architectural typology alone. The baths at Sicyon, with three similar altars dedicated to Hermes, Herakles and Apollo, and those at Argos, where inscriptions connected with gymnasiarchs have been found, are especially suggestive. Despite the fragmentary nature of the evidence, it suggests that the relationship between the gymnasium and the bath was more complex than a straightforward process of succession or replacement.

The implications extend beyond Chapter 6. They bear directly on the problem addressed in the final chapter (Chapter 7): the abandonment of gymnasium buildings, beginning in some cases as early as the mid-1st c. CE and occurring more generally by the second half of the 2nd c. CE, and the later decline of the ephebeia as an urban institution during the 3rd c. CE. D.B. rightly situates these developments within the broader economic, social and religious transformations of the later Roman world and avoids explaining them in terms of any single cause. Changes in agonistic culture and in the forms through which cities represented themselves publicly are treated as long-term processes.

Yet, the chronological divergence between the abandonment of gymnasium buildings and the continued epigraphic visibility of the ephebeia raises an obvious spatial and institutional question: where were ephebic activities conducted once the buildings traditionally associated with them had ceased to function as gymnasia? The possibility that some of these activities gradually shifted to baths or other public complexes deserves to be formulated explicitly as a working hypothesis. A systematic investigation might begin with the archaeological and topographical contexts of inscriptions connected with ephebes, gymnasiarchs, and related cults. The evidence may ultimately prove insufficient for definitive conclusions, but the formulation and testing of such a hypothesis would move the discussion beyond architectural succession towards the transformation of institutional practices and add an important element of interpretative originality.Footnote ¹⁰

A second interpretative line, also deserving fuller development, emerges from the chronology of investment in gymnasium buildings. The evidence appears to reveal two periods of renewed interest: the age of Augustus and his immediate successors, illustrated by cases such as Messene and Corinth, and the period from Hadrian to the end of the 2nd c. CE, represented particularly clearly by Mantinea and Athens. These episodes invite consideration not simply in terms of local building activity but within the broader history of Roman engagement with the Classical Greek past. The gymnasium, as one of the most recognizably Greek civic institutions, offered an especially appropriate setting in which traditional cultural forms could be reinterpreted within the political and ideological language of Empire.

The Hadrianic gymnasium at Athens is particularly revealing in this respect. Its construction is closely connected with the foundation of the Panhellenion and the associated imperial cult. Theodosia Stefanidou-Tiveriou’s suggestion that new iconographic types presenting the emperor alongside the deified Antinoos as a heroized Greek ephebe were developed in Athens specifically for an imperial cultic setting associated with the gymnasium is, therefore, particularly significant.Footnote ¹¹ Such evidence invites a broader question: to what extent did renewed investment in gymnasium buildings reflect not merely local educational or architectural needs but also the appropriation and reconfiguration of Classical Greek cultural symbols within Roman imperial ideology?

The detailed catalogue in the second half of the volume remains one of the book’s most valuable achievements. By assembling fifty-one attested gymnasia and systematically combining literary, epigraphic and archaeological evidence, D.B. provides a coherent overview of material that is otherwise highly dispersed and unevenly documented. The catalogue also draws useful attention to the spatial relationships between gymnasia and other civic and sacred buildings and thus contributes more broadly to our understanding of urban organization in Imperial Greece.

At the same time, the catalogue exposes the limitations of the available archaeological evidence. In numerous cases, the location of a gymnasium can be proposed only hypothetically, through the reconstruction of the original contexts of displaced finds or the correlation of literary testimony with topographical evidence. Megara, Thebes, and Sparta provide instructive examples, in which associations between gymnasia, nearby sanctuaries and cult practices permit plausible reconstructions but still await archaeological confirmation.

The ancient gymnasium of the Academy at Athens illustrates the problem particularly well. D.B. follows Ada Caruso’s interpretation of the two large structures excavated there: the southern rectangular building with a peristyle courtyard, considered Roman in date and of uncertain function, and the northern square building, interpreted as a palaestra. The identification remains uncertain because much of the excavation material has yet to be fully published. Of particular relevance is the more recent proposal by Michalis Tiverios, unavailable to D.B., who instead interprets the square structure as a possible sacred precinct dedicated to deities associated with the gymnasium.Footnote ¹² Whatever the eventual identification of the building, the debate has wider methodological implications. Gymnasia cannot be understood simply by identifying spaces designed for practical educational or athletic functions; their religious and symbolic environments formed an integral part of the institution.

D.B.’s monograph is, overall, a careful, well-informed, and valuable synthesis of the evidence for the gymnasium in Achaea from the late Hellenistic to the later Imperial period. Its greatest strength lies in the systematic organization of highly dispersed evidence and in its insistence on approaching the gymnasium not as a static survival from the Classical polis but as a social and cultural institution capable of adaptation under Roman rule. However, some of the broader interpretations remain within lines of enquiry already established by previous scholarship, while the individual cases on which they are based are largely familiar from earlier publications. The extensive inclusion of literary passages and previously published inscriptions, both in the original and in translation, makes the volume self-contained and accessible, although it does not in every instance substantially extend the interpretation; a somewhat more economical presentation could perhaps have allowed greater scope for comparative and synthetic analysis. This limitation is also, paradoxically, one of the book’s principal virtues. By collecting and organizing the evidence so comprehensively, D.B. provides a firm basis from which more explicitly interpretative work can proceed. Two questions seem particularly promising. The first concerns the history of the ephebeia across the Greek-speaking East in the Imperial period and, more specifically, the changing spaces within which ephebic activities were performed. The second concerns the relationship between gymnasia and bathing complexes, not simply as architectural types but as public institutions capable of inheriting or reshaping practices, cults and forms of social interaction traditionally associated with gymnasium culture.

The volume thus constitutes an important point of reference for the study of a fundamental institution in the history of the Greek city under Roman rule. Further progress will depend increasingly on primary archaeological and historical research, especially into the changing character of the ephebeia after the 2nd c. CE and the relationship between gymnasia, baths, and the transformation of urban public space. By bringing the available evidence together so thoroughly, D.B. has made such questions both easier to formulate and more urgent to pursue.