Greek History

This review commences with three very important recent works that raise an important question: how is it possible that we should have to wait until 2021 to have works devoted to these fundamental subjects? First, Athens is, for better or worse, at the very centre of what we understand and practise as Greek history; yet there are hardly any books that attempt to give an overview of Athenian political, social, economic, and religious history alongside its material and visual culture. It is probably no longer possible for a single scholar to write such a book; but the fact that, despite the surge of companions and handbooks of all sorts over the last fifteen years, there has been no Companion to Athens until now, raises some very interesting questions. Second, Greek economic history has experienced an explosion of publications over the last fifteen years, which have constructed new approaches, examined new questions, and utilized new forms of evidence in innovative ways. How is it possible that there has been no systematic attention paid to the most fundamental institution of Greek economies, that of the household? Finally, the Hellenistic period is one of the most vibrant fields of Greek history, but why are there almost no volumes devoted to Hellenistic social history, in particular given the substantial number of available sources? I will comment below on the contribution of these three works, but pondering on these questions, and trying to identify other huge black holes in the study of Greek history, has a value of its own.

The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Athens, edited by Jenifer Neils and Dylan K. Rogers, is a truly magnificent contribution to the study of Athens.¹ The thirty-three chapters of the volume manage to present an overview of all facets of Athenian history, archaeology, and culture. The volume is divided into six parts. The first part focuses on the urban fabric, presenting the main areas of habitation within the city, the sanctuaries, cemeteries, axes of communication, forms of water management, and houses. The second part examines the non-human and human inhabitants of Athens and their forms of social organization. An excellent third part explores the economic life of the city, including the structures of work and trade, coinage, the maritime sector, and the ceramic and sculptural workshops. The fourth part ranges extensively over the social and cultural life of the city, from the pleasures of eating, drinking, and sex, through religion, theatre, and athletics, to the philosophical schools. The brief fifth part devoted to public life, with three chapters on associations, lawcourts, and the army, is useful, but seems a bit of an afterthought in the volume design. Finally, the last part examines the reception of archaic, classical, and Hellenistic Athens into the Roman Imperial period and from the early modern period to the modern archaeological work on the city. Apart from the value of individual chapters, the most important contribution of the volume is that it brings to a wider audience a huge amount of epigraphical and archaeological evidence which is largely unfamiliar to most non-specialists and even many specialists. The printed volume is accompanied by a dedicated website which adds further material, primarily visual. Alongside the successful recent Companion to Sparta,² Greek historians have now excellent tools for the study of the two most influential Aegean poleis.

Moritz Hinsch's monumental study of the role of the household and the theory of the household in ancient Greek economies is a major contribution to ancient Greek history.³ The traditional divide between primitivists and modernists in ancient economic history has long posited a fundamental distinction between households, considered to be archaic and autarkic, and market economies, considered dynamic. The recent trend against static approaches to the ancient economies has overwhelmingly focused on markets and has paid very little attention to households. However, as Hinsch rightly argues, the juxtaposition of markets and households is highly misleading, because households constituted the fundamental units of ancient market economies, as there was no such thing as business firms. This does not negate the significance of ancient markets but it requires exploring how markets were mediated by the operations of households and how the peculiar features of households as social organizations affected Greek economic structures and performance. The book is divided into four major sections. The first creates a framework for the study of Greek households, and is particularly valuable for setting out the wider social and economic environment within which they operated. The second section explores the Greek theory of the household economy, examining the three relevant works of Xenophon, Aristotle, and Pseudo-Aristotle, and setting them within their Greek intellectual and literary contexts. The third and fourth sections explore the praxis of Greek households, offering a valuable commentary on the complementarity and disjuncture between theory and practice. The third section focuses on the structures of households and the various economic roles within them created by the operation of gender, age, and slavery. The fourth turns to strategies, examining how Greek households utilized rationalization, the optimization of opportunities, the minimization of risk, and the conversion of capital through consumption in order to achieve their aims. Hinsch shows the embedding of Greek economic operations in social and political processes, without resorting to a primitivist or static approach to ancient economies. The space available here is not sufficient to present the enormous value of this book; I seriously hope that it will find a huge audience, despite its large size and the fact it is in German.

The volume edited by Stéphanie Maillot and Julien Zurbach constitutes a major contribution to the study of Hellenistic social history.⁴ It focuses on the interconnection between legal status and labour; as the editors rightly comment, not only is there far too little work devoted to ancient labour, but the discussion of legal status has been largely dissociated from the trajectories of economic history. The volume makes an important case for the multiplication of legal statuses in the course of the Hellenistic period, which will certainly generate further discussion. The fifteen chapters focus largely on Aegean Greece and Asia Minor, but also include discussions of Egypt, Italy, and the Black Sea. The chapters address four major themes. The first is associations: despite a huge amount of work on ancient associations, the two chapters in this volume are excellent case studies of the link between associations, statuses, and labour. Equally significant are the three impressive contributions on land, labour, and status in Asia Minor, which offer an excellent overview of past scholarship and new paths of research. A third important topic is that of the changing history of statuses like those of Lacedaemonian perioikoi and Athenian metics. Finally, the volume includes a series of excellent essays on slavery in Hellenistic Greece, which pay particular attention to the issue of historical change. This excellent volume must be followed by further research along the paths it sets out.

I move on to two important contributions to the study of Greek slavery. Sara Forsdyke's book is the first synthesis on Greek slavery in over twenty years.⁵ As is expected, the volume is both an attempt to give an overview of the topic and an introduction to new trends in the field over the last two decades. In this respect, it is an excellent illustration of a key theme of current research: that of slave agency. Forsdyke does a good job of presenting the constitutive role of slave exploitation, domination, and dishonour in ancient Greek societies. But the best part of the book is its consistent effort to excavate the experience of slaves and to show the variety of ways in which they tried to make the best of the difficult circumstances in which they lived. The book presents the variety of strategies employed by slaves in relation to their masters, other free people, and the state, as well as the communities they created or participated in. Equally important is the significance paid to the cultural aspect of slaves and slavery, and the processes of identity formation and acculturation that slaves entered willingly and unwillingly. The book focuses on the classical period, and in particular largely on Athens. This has advantages, as Forsdyke presents various sources from a new and often illuminating perspective. But it is a pity that she largely examines Greek slavery as an undifferentiated whole, without taking fully into account David Lewis’ work on the diverse epichoric slave systems of the Greek world.⁶ The welcome focus on slave agency will need to be balanced with serious attention to historical change and spatial diversity. Nevertheless, this is undoubtedly an important step in the right direction and the best existing introduction to Greek slavery.

Given the enormous amount of work that has been expended on the study of slavery and the study of sexuality in the ancient Greek world over the last few decades, it is truly astonishing how little the two topics have been studied together. Following the traditional focus on what happened to ancient slaves, most scholarship on the link between slavery and sexuality has concentrated on prostitution and rape. The value of the volume edited by Deborah Kamen and C. W. Marshall is that it shifts focus to slave agency and what slaves did.⁷ The thirteen chapters of the book, divided almost equally between the Greek and Roman worlds, explore the sexual agency of both male and female slaves in a variety of contexts. The contributors successfully illuminate three important aims. The first is the move beyond the traditional focus on relations between masters and slaves to explore relations between slaves and third parties apart from their masters; the chapter on homoerotic relations between slaves and free people is a particularly good example. The second is the need to take into account the agency of the various groups involved in the institution of slavery: free mistresses did not normally have sexual relations with slaves, but their role in the maintenance of the link between sexuality and slavery within their own households was crucial. The third is to navigate successfully the complicated terrain of sexual relations, which included domination alongside the full range of human feelings like love, jealousy, shame, and calculation. The volume shows well why sexuality is an excellent field for thinking about the difficult issue of slave agency.

The study of ancient euergetism is inscribed in two different registers: on the one hand, the link between benefactions and honours and the different degrees of emphasis that scholars have placed on either aspect; on the other hand, the changing history of the Greek polis. The volume edited by Marc Domingo Gygax and Arjan Zuiderhoek is an important contribution to both registers.⁸ Traditional assumptions about the history of the ancient polis and its various points of crisis, decline, and fall, from the fourth century bce to late antiquity, have come under challenge over the last two decades; the impact of these new views on the study of euergetism is a significant theme of this book. On the one hand, the twelve chapters ranging from Homer to late antiquity present a long-term history of euergetism as a fundamental aspect of Greek poleis; given the open-ended nature of Greek elites, public benefaction and its attendant honours was always a fundamental aspect of elite formation in the Greek world. Euergetism can be used as a means through which to study the conflicts and tensions within Greek communities, and whether these tensions and conflicts were successfully contained or not, as various chapters show. On the other hand, the contributors are equally keen on stressing transformations and re-adaptations within this long-term continuity: from the Homeric world to the late archaic polis, the fourth-century bce adaptations, the new situation created by the monopolization of power by the Roman emperors, and the re-adaptations of euergetism by bishops and late antique elites. Finally, one of the most significant contributions of the volume is the stress put on scale as an essential aspect in assessing the phenomenon of euergetism. Let us hope that it will generate more work specifically focused on the significance of scale as a historical factor.

The study of Greek history has long been dominated by two complementary foci. The first concerns studies devoted to local communities, usually undertaken by specialists in those particular areas (e.g. Thebes, Samos, Sicyon); the second concerns the study of an entity called ‘Ancient Greece’ – that is, the whole of the Greek world. But until now there has been no study of how the numerous local communities were linked to that overarching entity. Hans Beck's latest book sets out to achieve this particular aim by examining the phenomenon of localism in Greek history.⁹ Beck reacts to recent attempts within ancient history to create trans-local frameworks of analysis; he stresses instead the quintessential role of the local for Greek history. The book ranges widely, in terms of theories, issues, and geographical coverage. Beck stresses the significance of land for Greek communities, both in terms of economic exploitation and in terms of territorial mentalities and identities. He rightly focuses on the key role of local worlds of knowledge and of identities based on local knowledge worlds; similar arguments are presented for the role of the local in Greek religious experience and in the collective memory of Greek communities. While his analysis is largely persuasive, it is a pity that he has not made a better effort to incorporate the significance of the local within the emerging trans-local approaches. That a book about the local in ancient Greece is almost completely silent about the sea is an eloquent witness of the need to integrate the existing different approaches into a single framework.

Charlotte Schubert's book offers a fascinating history of the emergence and development of the concept of isonomia in ancient Greek thought.¹⁰ Schubert combines the study of Greek political and military events in the archaic period with the history of political thought and political practice, as well as the wider cosmological and philosophical thinking; in combination, these three elements played a crucial role in the emergence of the concept. The book follows the appearance and development of isonomia in three historical and political contexts: sixth-century Ionia and the conflicts with Lydia and Persia, tyranny, and the development of philosophy; sixth-century Athens, the cultural programme of the tyrants, their overthrow, and Cleisthenes’ reforms; and late archaic and early classical Magna Graecia, and the political and theoretical work of the Pythagoreans and Alcmaeon. Schubert rightly stresses that the emergence of isonomia was not a teleological process and was informed by a variety of developments; isonomia was the combination of the equal participation of citizens in the polis with the right balance between different elements developed by archaic tyrants and philosophers. The book follows the development of a strong link between isonomia and democracy in fifth-century Athens to the application of the concept by Greek historians of Rome, while also briefly examining its development in philosophy all the way to early Christian thought. The value of the work lies both in the overall argument and in the discussion of the various individual contexts and aspects explored.

Paolo Cecconi and Christian Tornau have edited an interesting volume on the representation of the image of particular ancient cities in ancient Greek and Latin myths and literary texts, and the interaction between these representations and ancient politics and propaganda.¹¹ The twelve chapters range widely, from Homer to late antiquity; while most focus on literary texts (primarily Athenian tragedy), Meyer's exploration of the image of Athena in Athenian visual culture is particularly interesting. Thebes has the lion's share of ancient Greek cities discussed, featuring in almost half of the chapters, perhaps unsurprisingly given its prominence in the mythic circles represented in Greek tragedy. This is significant, as the importance of Athens from the classical period onwards tends to obscure the extent to which mythical prominence in archaic Greek literature constituted one of the major sources of Greek city-states. States of minor mythical distinction like Athens or Macedonia had to do a lot of work to convert their newfound wealth and power into the cultural capital that cities such as Sparta, Argos, and Thebes possessed in abundance. While most chapters have a literary bend, with more focus on myth and literature than on politics and propaganda, the volume as a whole makes a valuable contribution to the imaginaire of Greek geopolitics that historians should take carefully into account.¹²

Catherine Pratt explores the long-term processes through which oil and wine became indispensable commodities in the ancient Greek world.¹³ Her book links three important issues: the economic aspect of oil and wine production in the very long term; the cultural aspect of the entanglement of these commodities with multiple facets of Greek social and religious life and their transformation into ‘cultural’ commodities; and finally, the environmental aspect of the responses of Aegean producers of these commodities to the changing climate history of the Mediterranean. Pratt constructs a fascinating narrative that takes us from Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece, through the post-palatial period and the early Iron Age, into the archaic period. For each period, she explores the evidence for the production, storage, and exchange of oil and wine, and the entanglement of these commodities with commensality, gift-giving, and religious rituals. It is a remarkable narrative of 1,500 years of Aegean history told through two major commodities. It examines not only long-term continuities but also significant changes in different periods, stressing in particular the difference between the centralized control of these commodities in the Bronze Age societies with the more centrifugal setting of the first millennium bce. But undoubtedly it is primarily the successful entanglement of economic and cultural history that makes this book so fascinating.

The study of Greek burials goes back to the origins of Greek archaeology as a discipline. However, while most publications are interested in the objects deposited in graves and in the funerary rituals, it is only relatively recently that burials have been used to study the societies that produced them.¹⁴ Assuming that burials reflect social structure, this new approach has largely focused on the canonical forms of burial that account for the overwhelming majority of the attested cases. The great value of the new book by Dimitrios Bosnakis is that it constructs a historical anthropology of Greek societies from the opposite point of view: by concentrating on burials that deviate from canonical forms.¹⁵ Bosnakis offers an exhaustive collection and discussion of five categories of Greek deviant burials: mass burials as a result of pandemics, warfare, or civil wars; dishonoured disposals of corpses in wells; shameful burials for the insulted dead, like suicides and stigmatized captives; burials of the dangerous dead; and burials of criminals and the executed. The book uses these deviant burials to explore the impact of war and social crises in the Greek world and the various forms of dishonour, marginality, and disgrace in Greek societies. It is a highly stimulating study that needs to be read extensively.

This review concludes with two important volumes on the history of the Black Sea in antiquity. The first work is Barry Cunliffe's synthesis of Scythian history and archaeology in the first millennium bce.¹⁶ The book succeeds in allowing the reader to perceive how the immense steppe corridor created interconnections between societies and cultures from the Altai Mountains all the way to the Black Sea and beyond the Carpathians, and from Siberia through the Caucasus into Anatolia and the Near East. It also uses the remarkable preservation conditions of Scythian tombs to discuss funerary rituals and afterlife views, clothing, and tattooing, as well as warfare and social structure. As with Cunliffe's other books, the illustrations, and in particular the wonderful maps, create an especially vivid experience for the reader. Notwithstanding these very positive features, the book has serious drawbacks. The author is not a specialist on the Scythians, and this shows time and again with descriptions which are abstract and even misleading. The work is much better in description than in offering explanations; Cunliffe's explanatory palette is limited to climate change and population increase, and these are applied in a very general manner. And while he makes an effort to describe the economic, political, and cultural transformations that affected the nomad societies of the steppe in the long term, the attempt is only mildly successful. The volume is an excellent appetizer for people unfamiliar with the Scythians and the significance of the immense steppe world for ancient history, but for the main course one would have to turn elsewhere.

The second work, edited by Altay Coşkun, is dedicated to the memory of Heinz Heinen, who played a crucial role in the modern study of the ancient Black Sea region and in linking scholars and scholarship in eastern Europe with their counterparts in the West.¹⁷ The volume consists of fourteen chapters, divided into four distinct areas. The largest number of contributions is devoted to the study of stereotypes and ethnic constructions in the Black Sea, examining the complexity and contradictions of the Greek and Latin anthropology of Pontic peoples, and cultural interactions between Greek colonists and local populations, as well as a fascinating study of the Iranian and Sarmatian stereotypes in the work of Rostovtzeff. The second section focuses on the dynasties of the kingdoms of Bosporus and Pontus: on the one hand, the assertion of a Greek identity by the Bosporan kings; on the other hand, the stress of the Persian heritage by their successor, Pharnaces II. I single out a fascinating discussion of the centrifugal consequences of the peace of Apameia in the geopolitics of the Black Sea. The third section includes three chapters by Coşkun on various aspects of the historical geography and topography of Pontus and Colchis, while the final part includes two essays that extend coverage to late antiquity, examining the impact of Christianization on urban topography and changes in agricultural practices.