Greek history

I commence this review with a number of important works in Greek social history. As I commented in my last review for this journal, the study of labour is among the biggest holes in current research in Greek history. An important contribution towards filling this gap is the Cultural History of Work in Antiquity, edited by Ephraim Lytle.¹ The volume gives an excellent overview of how work is represented and discussed in both literary and archaeological sources; at the same time, it situates work and workers within four important contexts: the structures of ancient economies and the level of trade and specialization determined demand in urban and rural labour; the changing form of workplaces determined the division of labour among workers; different forms of work developed highly divergent workplace cultures; finally, practices and organizations for the transmission of skills and knowledge were of critical importance. Work and workers are then placed within wider contexts: chapters explore the role of mobility in ancient labour markets, and how political communities and attitudes about different forms of work affected workers. Finally, work is profitably juxtaposed to leisure practices and ideas. Perhaps the strongest point of most chapters is their attention to regional diversity and historical change: the volume sets the groundwork for ultimately producing a dynamic narrative of the history of work in antiquity.

The second important work concerns the history of private associations in the Greek world.² The collective volume edited by Vincent Gabrielsen and Mario Paganini focuses on the regulations of Greek associations and the formation of group identities. The nine contributions, alongside the introduction and epilogue by the editors, explore the norms expressed in the regulatory documents of these associations and how they constructed an image of the associations in the eyes of its members and of the various external audiences; at the same time, they explore how such norms enabled associations to perform their activities and chosen aims, and the extent to which such norms differed from those current in the wider environment and the political communities in which associations operated. The volume covers the full range of ancient associations, with their varying memberships and aims; at the same time, it has a very wide geographical and chronological vista, covering the whole Greek-speaking Mediterranean in the Hellenistic and imperial periods. Particularly fascinating is the opening to an even wider Eurasian horizon, covering the emergence of a similar associative phenomenon in South and East Asia.

There are plentiful works devoted to the study of ancient Greek agriculture; the value of the Blackwell companion edited by David Hollander and Timothy Howe is the context it offers.³ Most studies of Greek agriculture tend to focus on the local worlds of the Greek countryside, but this volume sets agriculture in the ancient Aegean alongside the development of ancient societies from the Bronze Age to late antiquity across the Mediterranean, the Near East, and temperate Europe. As a result, the excellent Greek-focused chapters on the Aegean and Anatolia, Magna Graecia, the Black Sea, and Hellenistic and Roman Egypt can be profitably examined alongside different agricultural systems in Italy, Africa, Mesopotamia, and even Central Asia, India, and China. Each chapter offers an overview of the relevant sources, and a discussion of the development of techniques, tools, and plants, the socio-economic aspects of agriculture, while finally offering reflections on future developments in each field. I found particularly useful the focus of most chapters on historical change; if there is any misgiving, that concerns the higher attention that could have been devoted to ecological connectivity.

Carrie Sulosky Weaver has published a fascinating book on the contribution of bioarchaeology to the study of marginalized populations in the ancient Greek world.⁴ It examines how the study of human remains can illustrate three aspects of marginality in the ancient world: physical disability, the socio-economic status of the individuals involved, and ancestry and ethnicity. The book does an excellent job in terms of its primary aim: to familiarize in a comprehensible way non-specialist readers with the nature of osteo-archaeological evidence and the techniques employed by specialists, the interpretations that can be deduced from the evidence and the methodological pitfalls, and the existing osteo-archaeological corpora that have been analysed so far. The author makes evident how much ancient historians can learn from this body of evidence; at the same time, it also illustrates the extent to which interpretations will need to develop further: how exactly should we interpret the surprising evidence that skeletons from the Laurion mines seem to share the same diet with those of Athens? Clearly, there is much to be learnt, and co-operation between historians and bioarchaeologists will enhance the value of the evidence.

I continue with two important works on archaic Greek history. The first is Jan Meister's book on nobility and social differentiation in archaic and early classical Greece.⁵ Studies by Alain Duplouy and Hans van Wees have shown that there was never a hereditary aristocracy in the ancient Greek world.⁶ Meister builds on their conclusions, by employing the sociological theories of Simmel and Luhmann in order to present a framework for studying the processes of elite differentiation in the Greek world. Competition and institutionalization are the two key concepts of this framework: the institutional regulation of subfields of competition, like election to power and athletics, played a key role in the emergence of a more stable elite by the classical period. Meister turns the traditional narrative of a transition from Homeric aristocracy to classical democracy on its head: it is, rather, the emergence of democracy that leads to the emergence of aristocratic ideas. He also rightly stresses both the agrarian character of Homeric elites and the role of urbanization in the process of archaic elite differentiation. The book is full of very fascinating ideas worth further exploration; at the same time, its execution is wanting in places, and the ultimate focus on Athens to the neglect of the rest of the Greek world does not serve the argument in the best possible way. Finally, van Wees’ distinction between legitimation and differentiation values would have been particularly useful for the argument pursued here.

Meister's book is closely connected with a collective volume on competition and institutionalization in archaic Greece, which he has co-edited with Gunnar Seelentag.⁷ This is a truly impressive volume in terms of its conceptual fertility. The book includes various elaborations of the concepts of competition and institutionalization, borrowed from Simmel and Luhmann; different chapters explore the institutionalization of forms of competition in different fields, like athletics, warfare, intellectual life, or assembly politics, and the process of social differentiation of elites that emerged out of these practices. Some chapters introduce and apply other important concepts; these include Simmel's concept of the cartel, as the process of reducing competition for a variety of reasons and purposes. Another important idea is that of Elias’ key monopolies in state formation, which distinguishes between aspects and areas monopolized by the magistracies and the form (centralized or decentralized) in which state monopolies are enforced. The volume is equally strong in the application of these concepts to the archaeological material, including the emergence of banquet houses, funerary monuments, and colossal objects and buildings. Finally, I note a fascinating comparison between medieval Iceland and the archaic Greek world. All in all, this is an extremely fertile volume that should be widely and carefully read.

The study of Greek history is divided between the traditionalist diachronic narratives of political-military histoire évènementielle (narrative history), and synchronic accounts of economic, social, and cultural history. Two important recent contributions are major steps towards bridging this divide, by exploring the significance of big events for wider processes. The volume on the destruction of cities in the Greek world, edited by Sylvian Fachard and Edward Harris, explores the significance of major events like natural or man-made catastrophes on the economic, social, and political lives of ancient cities and their populations.⁸ The book explores the varying ways in which destructions affected the lives of cities and the diverse ways in which survivors were able to reconstitute their communities, or newcomers created novel ones. The fourteen chapters range widely, both chronologically (from the late archaic period to late antiquity) and geographically (from Sicily to Asia Minor, including northern Greece, the Peloponnese, and the Aegean). They constitute fine methodological contributions to the integration of literary and archaeological evidence for the study of a single phenomenon; at the same time, they offer excellent overviews of the history of important sites like Athens, Corinth, Eretria, and Selinus, while introducing the readers to important newly-excavated sites like Methone.

If the volume above focuses on archaeology, the recent book of Mustafa Adak and Peter Thonemann shifts its focus on epigraphy.⁹ The book focuses on six recently discovered or older epigraphic documents, which are republished with extensive commentary. The authors use these documents in order to study in detail the peculiarly strong relationship between two communities: Teos in Asia Minor and Abdera in Thrace. People from Teos had settled in Abdera in the sixth century bce, while the Abderitans in their turn had helped refound Teos, and there was a strong political connection between the two communities across the centuries, maintained alongside their changing fortunes. The inscriptions studied here explore the collaboration between the two communities in the face of catastrophic events, like the destruction of Abdera, the pirate attack on Teos, and Abdera's conflict with neighbouring states over control of land and resources, but they also document the attempt of these communities to avert potential catastrophes (the famous Teian public curses) or to take advantage of newfound possibilities, like the emergence of the important association of the Dionysian artists. This is a very rich volume of relevance to various fields of Classics, including an excellent discussion of the sculptural representation of the demos of the Teians.

The current review includes two more important volumes on Hellenistic history. The first is Noah Kaye's major synthesis on the Attalid state and second-century bce Anatolia.¹⁰ This brilliant study is a very rare bird that combines the study of economic and administrative history with the history of culture and identity. At the core of the book is an examination of the diverse and subtle ways through which the Attalids managed to exercise their authority over the Greek cities and various non-Greek communities of Asia Minor in the post-188 bce world. The detailed study of the curious cistophoric coinage, a collaboration between the Attalid monarchy and local communities, stands as a symbol for how the Attalids were able to inscribe their power within local practices and institutions. The gymnasium as an excellent locus through which the Attalid state could both support polis institutions while also inserting its power within the poleis forms a very fruitful part of the book. Equally fascinating is the discussion of how Anatolian communities constructed new forms of organization and identity through a creative engagement with the processes of Hellenistic globalization and glocalization. Overall, this is a highly stimulating book, which deserves to be read attentively by very many different audiences.

The other Hellenistic work is a collective volume on cultures of resistance, edited by Paul Kosmin and Ian Moyer.¹¹ Its subject is resistance (and the lack of resistance) to Hellenistic monarchies by the societies and cultures of the Hellenistic East. At the core of the volume are the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucids and the Thebaid revolt against the Ptolemies; these cases are rounded with studies of Babylonian reactions to Seleucid rule, as well as reactions from Asia Minor and the Hellenistic Far East. An important aim of the contributions is to set the record straight, correct misleading impressions of the nature of these revolts and reactions, and discuss the evidence of the various literary genres involved. A second aim is to explore the cultural scripts, the moral economy, and the cultural memory of local societies that shaped their reactions to Hellenistic states. A third aim is the attempt to account for the lack of revolts against the Hellenistic states in areas like Asia Minor or Babylonia. This is a stimulating volume, which raises important questions, but its value would have been strongly enhanced if contributors had engaged systematically with recent works on ancient globalization and the multifaceted nature of Hellenism.

A different aspect of cross-cultural interaction is explored in another important collective volume on migration, mobility, and language contact in the ancient Mediterranean.¹² Most chapters focus on mobility and language contact in first-millennium bce Italy, in particular between Oscan speakers and Greek and Etruscan languages and scripts, but there are also chapters on Delos, Egypt, Central Europe, and Rome. The volume examines the presence of multiple languages in a single setting, the multilingual individuals and groups and their choices in employing these various languages, and the social and cultural consequences of these multilingual contacts. A second major axis of the volume is an examination of the methodological issues in identifying mobility through various genres and corpora like onomastics, graffiti, and inscriptions. Chapters successfully examine the linguistic choices of different individuals and groups, like mobile craftsmen, mercenaries, traders, and soldiers. I single out a very stimulating discussion of the absence of inscriptions in languages apart from Latin and Greek from the imperial Roman metropolis, despite the documented existence of a mosaic of foreign speakers; the methodological implications should be carefully pondered by Greek historians.

Until now, the study of Greeks beyond Greece was generally pursued within works on ancient Greek colonization. The great advantage of the Blackwell Companion to Greeks across the Ancient World, edited by Franco de Angelis, is that it sets aside this problematic framework, which usually focuses on the archaic period, the great era of Greek colonization.¹³ Instead, by focusing on mobility, the chapters explore the long-term history of Greeks abroad across the Mediterranean and temperate Europe, in the Aegean, Asia Minor and the Near East, and in the Black Sea. The chapters give excellent overviews of the current state of knowledge in the various areas. The second major advantage of this volume is its attention to historiography: five chapters explore the study of Greek mobility in English, French, Italian, German, and Russian academic traditions. Finally, the volume includes a number of chapters that present different theoretical frameworks for the study of Greek mobility, which both explore the Greek perception of mobility and colonization and situate Greek communities across other diasporas, like the Phoenicians.

I conclude this review with a number of works on Greek military history. I commence with Blackwell's Companion to Greek Warfare.¹⁴ The volume is a mixed success, partly as a result of its structure. On the one hand, it has three brilliant chapters on hoplites, cavalry, and siege warfare, which will be required reading for anyone interested in Greek warfare. The volume is also strong in regard to the technical and economic contexts of war, as well as the participation of and impact on wider groups like camp followers, slaves, and women. Equally useful is the attention given to the experiential aspects of war and its interconnection with religion, art, and literature. Other sections of the book, like the historical surveys of Greek wars from the archaic to Hellenistic periods are not as successful, while the section on war with non-Greeks is not co-ordinated with the rest of the volume, and one wonders how exactly it illuminates Greek warfare. Finally, what is rather surprising are the absences: naval warfare is completely missing, while there are no chapters devoted to the diverse purposes served by Greek warfare and its links to the changing nature of Greek geopolitics.

Sean Manning's monograph on the Achaemenid army fills a truly incredible gap in our knowledge of the Persian Empire.¹⁵ Given the absence of any earlier book-length synthesis, the existence of unsupported stereotypes, in particular among Greek historians, is unsurprising. The volume is a comprehensive presentation of all available evidence in various ancient languages, including also the archaeological data. It does an excellent job of situating the Persian armies within the wider Near Eastern traditions of Assyria and Babylonia. Given the nature of the evidence, Manning explores in detail the structures of military recruitment and remuneration, as well as the remains of camps and military sites; this is undoubtedly the strongest part of the book, and gives the reader an excellent impression of the variety of individuals and groups who participated in Persian armies. The discussion of strategy and military employment, which is effectively based on the Greek and Roman sources, is more problematic; Manning challenges traditional assumptions on, for example, the use of scythed chariots or the numerical superiority of Persian forces, and argues that Persian armies showed flexibility and often changed practices.

Richard Evans and Shaun Tougher have edited an interesting volume on various aspects of generalship in Greco-Roman antiquity and Byzantium.¹⁶ The volume includes four chapters on the Greek world, seven chapters on Rome and late antiquity, and five on Byzantium. The chapters range widely, from representations of generalship in particular authors or genres, to the nature of generalship in different historical periods and the reconstruction of the careers of individual generals. I single out an excellent discussion of archaic generalship, which puts another nail in the coffin of the agonal model of early Greek warfare and makes an important contribution towards rewriting the history of the development of archaic warfare: an exploration of the literary construct of the glorious defeat at Thermopylae, which turned a terrible defeat into an act of heroism; an examination of the absence of distinction between military and diplomatic skills among the early Seleucid court elite; and a fascinating exploration of how Middle Republican generals acquired the skills and knowledge to conduct their campaigns, despite their limited terms of office.

Finally, we reach Simon Elliot's book on warfare in the ancient Greek world in the very long term, from the Mycenaean period to the early Hellenistic world.¹⁷ The book is heavily illustrated with excellent photos, as well as fascinating modern reconstructions of battlefields and warriors that certainly stimulate the imagination. Despite its title, it is rather a history of great battles, rather than a history of warfare in the Greek world, accompanied by a useful introduction to the political and diplomatic history of the Greek world. Unfortunately, the author shows little if any acquaintance with the scholarship of the last thirty years that has revolutionized the study of Greek warfare. As a result, the accounts of battle and campaigns are quite stale, and show little understanding of the problems created by the nature of the evidence for each battle. On the other hand, the book can serve as a useful introduction for non-specialist readers interested in the traditional military narratives.