The re-publication of this important study in a good English translation is a welcome event. In it I. takes a comparatively neglected aspect of the institutional framework of Athens and uses the scattered surviving evidence for it to make a forceful argument about the nature of Athenian political society (and, by extension, that of other poleis). I.’s central thesis is that the use of public slaves instead of citizen specialists to perform some of the necessary administrative functions of government enabled the Athenians to resist the creation of ‘an agency separate from society’ (p. 132) and thus, effectively, to strangle ‘the state’ at birth, at least as a potential rival to the citizen collective. After an introduction, which situates this work in the context of comparative studies of slavery, I. begins by exploring the pre-Classical evidence for public workers (demiourgoi), whom he considers, in terms of their functions and expertise, the forerunners of the demosioi (Chapter 1). In the two chapters that follow I. then proceeds to analyse the surviving evidence for the functions demosioi are attested as performing, at Athens and elsewhere (Chapter 2), and for their status (Chapters 3). In the final chapters I. develops his main argument about the implications of the use of slave experts for Athenian democratic ideology and its insistence that specialist knowledge did not justify political power (Chapter 4) and for the development of the Greek state, supplemented by a detailed analysis of three famous literary demosioi, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, Plato's Phaedo and the Acts of the Apostles (Chapter 5).

This book has many virtues. Not the least is I.’s deep engagement with studies of public and royal slavery in other periods. However, in his efforts to write an engaging account of demosioi based on an exiguous and problematic record, I. sometimes reads too much too quickly into the sources. For example, the public slave in Ancient Athens ‘in charge of clearing away the dead bodies lying in the street and of maintaining the roads’ introduced by comparison with Joe, the public slave of Athens, Georgia, in I.’s opening vignette is not quite what we find in the Ath. Pol. 50.2. Here these functions are assigned, among others, to ten citizen astynomoi, who are recorded as having public slave-attendants (perhaps principally in relation to the distasteful job of clearing away dead bodies). At p. 41 I. doubts that the seal used by Lakon, the probable coin verifier, to seal a box of false staters was the state seal of Athens, which leaves us with the intriguing possibility that some public slaves may have had access to personal seals to function within the Athenian bureaucracy. The discussion of the forerunners of public slaves (Chapter 1), in seeking to establish a genealogy for democratic demosioi, pays too little attention to the importance of the examples cited, especially the extraordinary position for Spensithius, hereditary archivist of Dreros, as alternatives to the weak slave bureaucracies I. reconstructs. There are also some slips, at least one of which (Corinth and Corinthians for Samos and Samians, pp. 31–2) might cause some confusion to the Anglophone undergraduates in whose hands we can now, happily, place this stimulating book.