This volume represents a cautious and detailed study of the political and economic history of the Cycladic islands, with a particular emphasis on relations with Athens, from the late Archaic period to the end of the fourth century b.c.e. The Cycladic island group is defined traditionally, but Delos, the very centre of the nesiotic circle, is taken as exceptional and discussed only for the temple's loans to individual islanders and Cycladic poleis. Given relatively recent work on the Delian economy in both the Classical (V. Chankowski, Athènes et Délos à l'époque classique [2008]) and the Hellenistic (G. Reger, Regionalism and Change in the Economy of Independent Delos, 314–167 b.c. ) periods, and given the tremendous volume and technicality of the evidence from the island, this exclusion was perhaps prudent, but it yields a somewhat distorted picture. A comprehensive account of the Cycladic economy is thus still wanting (though Chankowski, REA 103 [2001], 83–102 is a welcome step in the right direction).

R. proceeds by examining evidence for the Cycladic islands in a traditional narrative history of the Aegean, interspersed with contextual analyses of economic activity on the islands. The late Archaic period (Chapter 3) emerges, unsurprisingly, as one of prosperity and power. Political independence and constant interaction among Cycladic poleis are taken as the enabling conditions for this material flourishing, which is evidenced by the widespread local production of silver coinage, the construction of monumental temples (Naxos and Paros and, to a lesser degree, Karthaia and Siphnos) and fortifications, and the building and maintenance of warships (Samos, Naxos). How to explain the proliferation of such evidently profligate expenses undertaken by so many small states? R. appeals to C. Renfrew and J. Cherry's ‘peer polity interaction’ model (Peer Polity Interaction and Socio-Political Change [1986]) to suggest that innovations on one island sparked competitive imitation on others. R. speculates that the shipbuilders were motivated by a desire to ‘control local trade’, but what this meant in practice is uncertain. Naxos and Paros assume their familiar role as major powers in the region, their wealth generated by the export of their fine local marble and used to fund the construction of ships with which they were able to engage in further trade.

The fifth century is the period of Cycladic history that has received most attention, and it is rightly dominated by the issue of Athenian control of the region. In this crowded field R. makes several interesting points. Athenian demand for grain appears not to have drained all supply away from the islands through whose ports such cargoes had to move (p. 105). The obligation to pay tribute to Athens could (note the subjunctive) have been seen by the islanders as a reasonable price to pay for secure trading conditions (pp. 109–10). And the cessation of minting activity in the Cyclades, the start of which was such a prominent feature of the late Archaic period, is to be explained (pace T.J. Figueira, The Power of Money: Coinage and Politics in the Athenian Empire [1998]) by the fact that Athenian silver flooded the market, not by any absolute prohibition on minting imposed by the Standards Decree, nor by general poverty and decreased trade in the region (pace K.A. Sheedy, The Archaic and Early Classical Coinages of the Cyclades [2006]). It is also, R. suggests, a function of the decline in peer polity interaction that resulted from Athenian hegemony; island interactions were now always mediated by Athens.

The Cyclades have been largely ignored in histories of the fourth century, and here R. stands to make his most important contribution. R. argues against the prevailing assumption that the Second Athenian League was a vehicle for Athenian abuses of power and material exploitation of allies much like the fifth-century archē. He points to the rapidity with which the Cycladic poleis joined the alliance after the Battle of Naxos in 376, to the loyalty they showed throughout the 360s and the Social War, and to the fact that, whatever the syntaxis levies were, they were not enough on their own to float the Athenian navy. Other episodes frequently cited as abuses – garrisons and governors installed at Arkesine and Andros, the clerouchy installed at Samos in 366 – are treated as exceptional. The broad pattern of voluntary participation and loyalty is emphasised instead. After the Social War R. detects signs of renewed prosperity in a return to some of the phenomena that distinguished the late Archaic period: minting coins (on both the Rhodian and the Attic standard) and building monumental temples (on Andros, Paros and Tenos) and fortifications (on Andros, Kythnos, the newly relocated polis of Tenos, and perhaps Arkesine). He promotes the view that the Cyclades benefited directly from Athenian efforts in the later fourth century to promote trade, much of which came across the Aegean and by necessity touched the harbours of these small islands, without facing any direct drain of resources to Athens by way of tribute or syntaxis. This rosy situation is described as ‘a (nearly) perfect symbiosis’ (the title of Chapter 6).

R. paints a clear and simple picture of the economic situation of the Cyclades and its relationship to Athens. Is it persuasive? Much of the argument, particularly regarding the fourth century, depends upon the suspension of critical disbelief. Can Athenian efforts to combat piracy, for example, really be seen as anything other than self-interested measures to protect their own trade and to derive profit by providing ‘protection’ for merchant ships from pirates, whose very existence was the source of this valuable revenue? V. Gabrielsen's important work on the symbiotic relationship between pirates and thalassocrats (REA 103 [2001], 219–40) is duly cited but seems not to have been digested. Equally problematic is the lack of critical engagement with the very concepts used to advance the central argument of the book. For every period under consideration, R. finds evidence for ‘economic integration’ or ‘economic unification’, whether of the Cyclades as a whole or of the Cyclades and Athens. Conditions said to lead to such a state include the minting of coinage on the Aiginetan standard in the late Archaic period (p. 62), the payment of tribute to the Delian League (p. 94), the evanescent naval hegemony of Sparta in the early fourth century (p. 138), and the proliferation of trade routes to both the south-east (Dor, Phoenicia, Crete) and west (Etruria, Carthage, the Peloponnese) in the later fourth century (p. 218). It is difficult to see how these radically different phenomena could all have yielded the same (purportedly intrinsically desirable) outcome of economic integration. Indeed one could argue that each of these conditions could have resulted in greater economic differentiation between the poleis of the Cyclades: if in fact Siphnos supplied most of the silver for the Archaic coinages, it stood to gain tremendously from that activity, at the literal expense of others; tribute might have unified the Cyclades only in fiscal depression, if differential levies did not favour all equally; and new trading relationships benefited those few islands blessed with high-value commodities – Paros and Naxos again – more than those who might have participated in the export of lower-value commodities like pottery. Differentiation and complexity within the Cycladic group could also have been profitably explored by considering the ecological variations and local histories of settlement, land-use and exploitation as revealed by survey and other evidence, rather than dismissing such data out of hand as ‘problematic’ and ‘hazardous’ (p. 42). In this respect R.'s Odyssean resistance of the siren's song of P. Horden and N. Purcell's The Corrupting Sea (2000) is to be regretted.