Three cities dominated the late antique eastern Mediterranean: Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch. Constantinople was the late Roman re-foundation of an archaic Greek apoikia, Byzantion; Alexandria and Antioch were cities created by Alexander and his Hellenistic successors. This review includes two important books that examine the long-term history of two of these cities: Byzantion and Antioch. Both books stress the need to situate these cities within the landscapes and territories from which they drew their economic, political, and spiritual sustenance; both also adopt a long-term perspective, covering roughly a millennium each, which makes it possible to trace wider continuities, trends, and changes.

Thomas Russell's book on ByzantionFootnote ¹ is the first local history of a Greek community that takes seriously into account the agenda of linking ecology, history, and anthropology that was presented by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell in the Corrupting Sea almost twenty years ago;Footnote ² in this respect, it is a very important volume for a number of reasons. At the centre of the book's attention is how the peculiar and diverse micro-ecology of the Bosporus created a range of opportunities and problems and how a number of communities have dealt with them and shaped local landscapes of exploitation, created extended hinterlands, and forged networks and identities. Russell examines how the peculiar hydrological system of the Bosporus affected practices such as navigation and fishing, and how Byzantion, as well as other communities such as Athens, have shaped it to their benefit in order to create facilities for taxing maritime traffic, to construct closed currency systems, and to impose state monopolies on fishing. Alongside these important arguments, the book is equally significant for presenting a model of how the history of Greek apoikiai can be written without accepting the colonialist narrative that has shaped their study for so long. Instead of treating the Megarian elements of Byzantine culture as evidence of a Megarian foundation event, and the limited presence of Thracian features as evidence of the exclusively Greek character of Byzantion, Russell argues that they should be seen as conscious choices of the Byzantines in terms of how to present the history of their community and its links to other communities. This processual study should be required reading for all Greek historians.

Andrea de Giorgi's study of Antioch shares many features with Russell's book.Footnote ³ Most attempts to write the history of Antioch start from two of the richest corpora for writing the social history of any late antique city: those of Libanius and John Chrysostom. This tends to obscure the paucity of evidence for the history of the city before the fourth century ce; reliance on these corpora also tends to focus on the city of Antioch, to the neglect of the wider local and regional context within which the city operated. De Giorgi rightly insists that it is only the archaeological evidence that can allow us both to reconstruct the long-term history of the city from the Hellenistic period to the Arab conquest and to study the interaction between the urban community and the various landscapes and communities that formed its changing hinterland. The book includes surveys of the history of the archaeological exploration of Antioch and the urban landscape and its development; but its core is an exploration of the interrelationship between Antioch and three regional micro-ecologies: the plain of Antioch to the north and east, the southern highlands, and the western Orontes plain. The final chapter on the ethnography of the people of Antioch is rather sketchy and tentative: it is here in particular that one regrets that de Giorgi does not really try to engage with the rich corpora of Libanius and Chrysostom. Such a synthesis of literary and archaeological sources on Antioch will have to wait for the future; but its achievement will require the utilization of the archaeological survey of this important work.

The modern study of Greek history has a distinctly peculiar feature. On the one hand, it concerns the investigation of hundreds of communities, which differed significantly in terms of their economic, political, social, and cultural history, but which also exhibited some strikingly similar features. On the other hand, given the nature of the sources and the course of Greek history, modern accounts have been distinctly Athenocentric, with other Greek communities approached in the light of Athenian models, or as foils to Athenian patterns and developments. The next two volumes under review exhibit an interesting take on this peculiar feature of Greek history.

The first book is a major study of the origins of Greek evergetism by Marc Domingo Gygax.Footnote ⁴ Writing on evergetism tends to focus on the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and can accordingly utilize the wealth of the epigraphic evidence in order to investigate the phenomenon across the Greek world; the study of its origins faces the problem that the evidence is primarily Athenian. But Domingo Gygax manages to offer a Panhellenic framework, while also using the Athenian combination of democracy and elite benefaction and reward to explore both the Athenian peculiarity and the overall development of the system. He argues persuasively that Greek evergetism needs to be situated within the phenomenon of gift-giving, and offers a rich anthropological exploration of its complexity and contradictions: elite benefactions were intimately linked with rewards. I found particularly important his distinction between formal and informal rewards: while the reciprocity of benefactions and rewards existed in the archaic period, benefactions by elite citizens drew informal rewards until the late fifth century. Formal rewards were originally restricted to foreigners and athletes, and Domingo Gygax traces the process through which, in the course of the fifth and fourth centuries, Athenians gradually extended formal rewards to citizens for political and military benefactions, the successful performance of office, and monetary contributions, while ultimately creating the link between benefaction and office-holding that would predominate in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. This is a very rich work and, while begging a number of questions with regard to archaic and classical elites, it will stimulate research for a long time to come.

The second book is a volume edited by Anton Powell and Katerina Meidani, which explores anti-Athenian attitudes in the classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods, thus linking Athenocentrism with the wider Greek world.Footnote ⁵ The volume is a rich collection of twelve essays, which exhibit a number of foci and thematic links. One axis consists of three papers focusing on Aegina, the famous ‘eyesore of Piraeus’ that provides the theme for the book's title. The conflict between Athens and Aegina played a major role in late archaic and fifth-century Greek history. Thomas Figueira provides an overview of the society, economy, and politics of Aegina, while Anton Powell focuses more specifically on the Athens–Aegina conflict, raising some interesting points by trying to look at it from the contemporary point of view of the Aeginetans. Dorothy Figueira takes this conflict to the modern period, by exploring the reasons for which the early nineteenth-century fascination with the Parthenon and the Aegina marbles led to widely divergent assessments of their importance for ancient art and its modern reception. A second axis concerns anti-Athenian attitudes by subjects of the Athenian Empire. Dominique Lenfant examines the allies’ view of the Athenian Empire through Plutarch's Lives; Martin Dreher explores the various factors that shaped whether members of the Second Athenian League reacted to Athenian rule or accepted it; Lynette Mitchell argues that anti-Athenian attitudes in Sicily were surprisingly limited and seeks various explanations for this phenomenon; and Christy Constantakopoulou traces an aggressive assertiveness of the Delians in reaction to Athenian appropriation of their myths and sanctuary. A third axis concerns the hostile reception of Athens in classical, Hellenistic, and Roman sources. John Davies assesses the reliability of Theopompus’ vituperative portrait of Athenian demagogues; Kostas Buraselis explores how the image of Athens was employed in the aftermath of Pydna in the contest between Athenian, Achaean, and Roman interests; Ioanna Kralli examines the negative representation of Athenian aggressiveness and timidity in late classical and Hellenistic sources; Maria Plastira-Valkanou discusses criticisms of Athens in the Greek epigram; and Nikos Giannakopoulos provides a sophisticated overview of negative portrayals of the Athenian past and present in the imperial period.

This review includes a number of books of narrative history. Long seen as the main form of history writing, narrative history became outmoded with the rise of social, economic, and cultural history from the 1960s onwards; while most important ancient historians before the 1960s would have written at least one work of narrative history, most important historians since have avoided the genre. In my view, the current revival of narrative is a very positive development. It is also a diverse phenomenon: this review includes narratives that cover a whole period, a series of events stretching over a century, a decade of military clashes, and the lifetime of an individual. But the revival of narrative cannot be simply a repetition of old recipes: it will have to take into account the narratological revolution and the advances in social, economic, and cultural history of past decades.

The first two works under review are part of C. H. Beck's new series on the history of antiquity. Klaus Bringmann's book concerns the history of early Greece, from the Dark Ages to the Persian Wars.Footnote ⁶ It is divided into six chapters, covering the Dark Ages, the Homeric and Hesiodic world, migration, state-building, the Persian Wars, and the late archaic world of knowledge. In many ways, this is a rather conservative account, in comparison with other histories of archaic Greece that have appeared over the last three decades. The history of material culture (cemeteries, sanctuaries, architecture, houses, consumption, and deposition) and cultural history more generally are largely missing; the discussion of Greek ‘colonization’, which occupies one out of six chapters, is rather old-fashioned, and takes little advantage of developments in the field over the last twenty years, as seen in Russell's book discussed above. The chapter on state-building takes a Little Greece approach, by focusing on Athens and Sparta and leaving outside purview the major state-building processes in Greek Sicily. Nevertheless, the book makes a consistent and valuable effort to insert the development of Greek history within the Near Eastern framework of reference that is essential for its understanding. Its discussion of migration is important for looking at wider patterns of mobility than just ‘colonization’, while the exploration of the archaic Greek world of knowledge makes an excellent job of linking it to the expansion of Greek horizons due to mobility and intercommunication; finally, by inserting the early development of Athenian democracy within a discussion of the Persian Wars, the book shows how much the history of events needs to inform our study of institutions.

The other volume in the same series is Peter Scholz's history of the Hellenistic world.Footnote ⁷ Given the multi-focality and enormous complexity of any narrative of Hellenistic history, and the absence of an authoritative ancient account, Scholz has chosen to arrange his story on the basis of two main issues. The first, as mentioned in the title, is the institution of the royal court, and its significance for some major aspects of Hellenistic history, from dynastic change, diplomacy, and war to elite lifestyle and the various networks that linked the king and court with their subjects and allies. From this point of view, Scholz is surely right to start the story with Philip and Alexander, rather than with the Successors. He provides a successful politico-military narrative, which manages to include the minor dynasties alongside the Ptolemies, Seleucids, and Antigonids, as well as the crucial impact of Rome. The other major axis is the issue of ‘Hellenization’, or the adoption and adaptation of elements of Greek culture by various rulers and communities in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, and their historical results. As with any focus on certain aspects, some issues remain sidelined (the Greek poleis, the federal states, social and economic history), but this is undoubtedly an informative and valuable introduction to Hellenistic history, whose foci illuminate rather than obscure.

The next volume under review is the German translation of James Romm's 2011 book Ghost on the Throne.Footnote ⁸ There are innumerable Alexander histories, as well as histories of the major dynasties of the Hellenistic world; Romm's work focuses instead on the short period between the death of Alexander in 323 bce and the death of his mother, Olympias, in 316, which effectively ensured that the extinction of Alexander's Argead dynasty was a foregone conclusion. As Romm persuasively argues, the main protagonists of this period cannot be regarded as Alexander's Successors, in that the fate of Alexander's empire and its rulers was not yet settled. Accordingly, it is essential to study this tumultuous period without teleological assumptions about the inevitability of the partition of the empire and the emergence of the three main Hellenistic dynasties. Despite the notorious problems of the ancient sources for this period, Romm does a good job of showing the basis of his arguments, while producing a gripping narrative that does its best to reconstruct how the variety of contemporary actors would have looked at developments, reached their decisions, and acted. This is a very effective political narrative that reaches beyond the protagonists to include the thoughts and actions of many minor actors.

The struggle between Athens and Sparta for Greek hegemony constitutes the subject of Jennifer Roberts’ new book.Footnote ⁹ Roberts argues that we need to uncouple Thucydides from the history of the Peloponnesian War (xiv); furthermore, she argues that, in order to properly understand the Peloponnesian War, we need to extent our account beyond the Thucydidean limit of 404, all the way to the smashing defeat of Sparta at Leuctra in 371 bce. These are highly stimulating propositions, which should have made a wonderful book; but the outcome is unfortunately disappointing. Despite its claims, the narrative of the Peloponnesian War is hardly more than a paraphrase of Thucydides and reproduces unacknowledged all the problems and aporias of his narrative; and Roberts never actually shows what we gain in understanding by extending the account to 371. Beyond old-fashioned moralizing about political and military mistakes and the futility of endless warfare, there are hardly any new insights. We badly need a new narrative of the Peloponnesian War which will not be shaped by Thucydides’ agenda; but this account would need to grapple seriously with the insights of the last decades concerning Thucydidean narratology, new approaches to the Athenian Empire, the Athenian democracy, Sparta and Persia, the regional perspectives of Greek history, the structure of Greek interstate relationships, and the nexus between honour, violence, wealth, and political discourse.

Similar remarks can be made about the last narrative account under review, Thomas Martin's biography of Pericles.Footnote ¹⁰ Our sources regarding Pericles are extremely limited: they are effectively restricted to Thucydides’ biased portrait of Pericles’ role in Athenian politics and Plutarch's interpretation of fragments of Old Comedy and other stories about Pericles. Accordingly, a biography is impossible without a detailed contextualization of the fragmentary evidence. Martin has rightly undertaken this task: in fact, half of the book concerns the early years of Pericles’ life, for which we have almost no evidence concerning him; but I find plausible Martin's argument that the major developments of those years fundamentally shaped Pericles’ character and outlook. The biography is thus effectively a narrative of fifth-century Athenian history; while much of it is interesting, the overall contextualization seems to me quite problematic. We cannot assess Pericles’ role in Athenian history without a serious engagement with the Thucydidean and Plutarchean authorial agendas; we cannot dismiss Athenian inscriptions as sources – because Pericles does not appear in any of them – without thinking seriously about the implications of this absence for Pericles’ historical significance. The book would have gained massively from engaging with recent works that reinterpret major aspects of fifth-century history, such as Mann's fundamental re-examination of fifth-century Athenian demagogues, or Kallet's and Davies’ rethinking of the long-term history of the Athenian Empire.Footnote ¹¹