It is quite remarkable that the study of Greek economic history has been long pursued in the absence of any overall synthesis. The revised translation of Alain Bresson's The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy, originally published in French in 2007, is undoubtedly a major contribution that will have a significant impact on how the subject is taught and studied in the Anglo-Saxon world.Footnote ¹ The volume is effectively divided into two parts. The first situates Greek economies in their environment, by exploring demography, sources of energy, agriculture, pastoralism, and non-agricultural production. The second part focuses on the nature of ancient markets, by examining internal and external markets, the international division of labour, and the role of currency, credit, and taxation. While the first part is primarily a useful summary of current research, the second part is an original contribution to our understanding of Greek markets. Not only are we given for the first time a detailed analysis of how the agora and the emporion functioned, but Bresson is able to fully document the existence of complex networks creating an international division of labour. These are major advances, but the work has two major problems. Despite its size, it is a lopsided analysis. It is remarkable, for example, that there is not a single chapter devoted to labour, and that its nineteen-page index lacks any reference to terms such as wages, class, exploitation, poverty, or consumption. And, while Bresson offers an excellent description of many economic aspects, the book is distinctly unconvincing whenever it tries to explain patterns or the nature of Greek economic growth. It will be essential for any future work in Greek economic history, but for a comprehensive framework that can actually explain things, we will unfortunately have to wait.

This review includes a series of stimulating contributions to the history of Athens, the community that dominates ancient sources and modern accounts of classical Greek history. But, before we move to them, it is a pleasure to highlight the publication of two major works on archaic and classical Crete. Scholars are increasingly challenging the Athenocentrism of traditional scholarly accounts, but it is only with large-scale corpora and syntheses like these publications that we can seriously hope to change our histories of archaic and classical Greece. With the exception of classical Athens and its law court speeches, the only other Greek community whose legal system we can seriously study is Gortyn, where the famous great inscription is only part of a large corpus of inscribed laws, a phenomenon particularly common across central Crete between 650 and 400 bce. These inscriptions are written in a difficult dialect, are often very fragmentary, and are usually the domain of a small group of specialists. The long-awaited publication of Cretan legal inscriptions with translation and commentary by Michael Gagarin and Paula Perlman offers the potential to make this material available to a very wide audience.Footnote ² The authors have certainly done an excellent job. The volume includes an extensive introduction on Cretan society, economy, and politics, on the language and form of the inscriptions, and on the major features of Cretan laws as they can be reconstructed through the inscriptions. Particularly strong and commendable is the emphasis given to the archaeological evidence in terms of understanding the history of the communities that set up those inscriptions and their archaeological context. The authors insist on two significant methodological points: that, instead of studying the inscriptions through the framework of the non-Cretan literary sources, we need to study the inscriptions on their own terms and as the laws of individual Cretan communities, rather than as emanations of ‘Cretan law’. The volume faithfully expresses the editors’ long-held views on Cretan law and history, with all the concomitant advantages and disadvantages. While I personally disagree with a number of their approaches (as, for instance, their views on Cretan slavery), the significance of this volume is beyond any doubt.

It is particularly fortunate that Gagarin and Perlman's work can now be read alongside Gunnar Seelentag's monumental synthesis on archaic and classical Crete.Footnote ³ Traditional narratives of Greek history present a teleological account that leads from ‘Homeric society’, through the archaic ‘emergence of the polis’, to the classical Athenian democracy. The fact that all Greek poleis had assemblies, councils, fixed-term magistrates, and clearly defined citizenship lends itself easily to such teleological approaches. But if we look at processes, rather than essentialized institutions, as Seelentag argues, then we can better grasp how institutionalization had diverse actors and led to quite divergent outcomes in different parts of the Greek world. While Gagarin and Perlman correctly warn against the pitfalls of assuming a homogeneous ‘Cretan society’, Seelentag equally convincingly argues in favour of perceiving common trends among Cretan communities. The book explores in depth two facets of institutionalization: on the one hand are political institutions such as the chief magistracy (kosmos) and institutionalized contexts of decision-making (agora, bola, polis); on the other are the particular Cretan institutionalization of communal activities and performance (paideia, andreion). Through these processes of institutionalization, Cretan elites managed to maintain their long-term hold on power through transforming the ways and the contexts in which they functioned. Alongside these points, Seelentag's plea to abandon the traditional periodization between archaic and classical for Crete, and his study of the peculiar patterns of Cretan material culture, have major implications for all fields of Greek history.

Alongside these important novel contributions it is worth placing a collection of classical essays by the late Michael Jameson on Greek religion and society.Footnote ⁴ Jameson was a pioneering figure for many aspects of post-war Greek history, in particular for his inimitable combination of epigraphy and archaeology. This collection includes thirteen essays, divided in four sections, with a general and section introductions contributed by Paul Cartledge, Fritz Graf, Christopher Faraone, Robert Parker, and Jan Bremmer. Jameson avoided propounding general theories, and this is why this collection is important. It allows readers examining disparate papers together to see in greater light his ability to raise major questions through the study of obscure phenomena and difficult sources, as well as his skill in making striking connections between diverse phenomena through the employment of the full range of sources, from tragedy and inscriptions to vases and animal bones: the various essays in this collection that relate, in one way or another to sacrifice, are excellent illustrations of this. I conclude by singling out the last essay, one of the very rare attempts to understand Greek religion through comparison with the other major, and still existing, polytheism of India: even if one does not accept Jameson's conclusions, the attempt should encourage serious imitation, which will pay off handsomely.

Let us now move to a number of books on Athens. The debate about enmity and violence in Athenian society has been shaped by the radically opposed approaches of Cohen and Herman. In a highly stimulating contribution, Andrew Alwine offers a new methodological perspective that shifts the debate to new directions.Footnote ⁵ His major methodological point is that we cannot take the law court speeches, our major source for Athenian social history, as a direct reflection of Athenian attitudes. Enmity appears as part of rhetorical strategies, and we need to situate these enmity motifs within the particular strategy of each speech. Taking into account the full range of source material beyond orations (drama, curse tablets, prose), Alwine argues that Athens was a culture of enmity in which Athenians took for granted that they had enemies. While Athenians fully accepted the legitimacy of harming enemies, at the same time they tried to put limits on how strategies of enmity were pursued. The structure of Athenian politics aimed to limit the chance that private enmities would dominate the running of public affairs. Law courts allowed enemies to pursue long-standing feuds, but on condition that each trial was about a punishable offence based on existing law. And, while feuding was considered normal, the use of violence against a fellow citizen in feuding was strictly prohibited.

The second, revised, edition of Mark Golden's work on children and childhood in Athens manages to remain as fascinating as the first edition a quarter-century ago.Footnote ⁶ Golden's book is almost unique among studies devoted to classical Athens in the persistent attention to comparative history, not only (and not primarily) in terms of using comparative evidence to fill in the gaps of the ancient sources, but even more in terms of linking debates among ancient historians to debates in other periods and showing their (ir)relevance for classical Athens: from imperial Rome through early modern England to the antebellum American South, Golden uses approaches engendered in other periods to fruitfully frame his own perspective on Athenian childhood. Equally significant is his attention to variability and contradiction in Athenian attitudes and practices: decisions on infanticide are not on the same level as appreciation of surviving children. Golden does not focus merely on the relationship between parents and children, but places equal emphasis on various other relationships with siblings, other relatives, and, in particular, slaves. Equally rare and welcome is his effort to eschew approaching childhood in an undifferentiated classical Athens, but to discuss the methodological and substantive issues for framing change in terms of practices and attitudes.

Edward Cohen's latest work is the sole book-length treatment of Athenian prostitution, seen in particular from its economic aspect as a form of business.Footnote ⁷ In contrast to many accounts that present prostitution as effectively limited to metics and, in particular, slaves, Cohen presents a persuasive argument that male and female citizens played a non-negligible role in prostitution. Furthermore, he tries to link sex work with Athenian work ethics: while working for somebody else was considered as inherently servile, and thus prostitutes in brothels were effectively exclusively slaves, free people involved in prostitution tried to present themselves as free agents who made a living by working on their own. Cohen is also right to stress the significance of the existence of sex contracts – but he is rather imprecise on their purpose and function. In addition, he explores the major role of women as entrepreneurs in the sex business, and attempts to calculate the costs and rewards of sexual services. As with other books of his, an important point is often marred by using the primary sources in problematic or untenable ways: the reader will need to examine carefully every single citation on its own. And while Cohen is right that Athenian social reality cannot be reduced to the models and stereotypes of the Athenian social imaginaire, the attempt to write the history of Athenian prostitution by disposing of the norms about the roles of women will ultimately not do.

Ancient history is still divided between diachronic narratives of histoire événementielle, focusing on political and military history, and synchronic accounts analysing political, economic, or social institutions and structures. Debra Hamel's new book is an excellent attempt to combine narrative and analysis. The book is about the battle of Arginusae in 406 bce, in which the Athenians employed an emergency fleet to miraculously defeat the Spartans, only to then execute their generals for failing to save the shipwrecked. Hamel uses it both as a means of exploring a crucial episode in the history of the Peloponnesian War and also as a window to illuminate the political, military, and social institutions and practices of fifth-century Athens.Footnote ⁸ Alongside a gripping narrative, she provides excellent discussions of Greek naval warfare, the nature of Athenian generalship, and the link between Athenian democracy and the conduct of war, and a detailed analysis of a series of council and assembly meetings over the fate of the generals that presents a brilliant illustration of how Athenian democracy worked in practice. Hamel makes an excellent job of allowing the reader to see how historians use their problematic sources to reach their conclusions. She is probably correct that, generally, speaking the trial and execution of the generals does not represent Athenian mob rule, although she largely avoids trying to explain why the Athenians ultimately decided as they did on that occasion.

Polybius famously argued that Arcadian communities could not have survived in their harsh environment without the practice of music, and readers of Aristotle and Plato will observe the remarkable link between music and politics that they posit. Robert Wallace's new book makes a significant contribution to the exploration of this link, by providing a full-scale study of the enigmatic figure of Damon the Athenian.Footnote ⁹ Known for his contribution to musical theory, as well as for his political friendship with Pericles that ultimately led to his ostracism, Damon has been unjustly forgotten in studies of Athenian culture and politics, partly because of factoids created by a scholarly approach that has taken the wrong path. Wallace presents the first full collection of Damon's testimonia and fragments, and on the basis of them is able to present a new picture of the man. He dismantles the theory of Damon as a conservative theorist who inspired Isocrates, and argues that he developed a theory of music that stressed its powerful effects in all fields of human life and claimed that it could be used to mould people in particular ways. This theory had a deep impact on Pericles and Pericles’ political project. Alongside its contribution to the study of Damon, Wallace's book therefore invites us to explore new aspects of the link between Athenian culture and politics.

Linking Athens and the wider Greek world with ancient historiography is Sarah Ferrario's new book on historical agency.Footnote ¹⁰ The fourth-century historian Theopompus famously titled his work Philippika, or a history of the world in the time of Philip the Macedonian; and this was obviously followed in the long tradition of the Alexander historians, who made an exceptional individual and his actions the centrepiece of their accounts. Ferrario attempts to trace the origins of this view of the Great Man as a significant historical agent and its culmination in the age of Philip and Alexander. The book ranges from accounts of individual and collective agency in the overthrow of tyranny in Athens in 508 bce, through individual and collective agency in Herodotus and Thucydides, changes in fourth-century Athens, and perceptions of agency in the cases of Lysander, Pelopidas, and Epaminondas, to finally Philip and Alexander. This is a particularly fascinating book, and I find commendable its effort to link textual accounts with perceptions of agency in inscriptions and funerary monuments. There is much that can be said about the methodological problems of linking such disparate forms of evidence and whether a single narrative can be constructed on their basis, but this book is a welcome advance in a field where ancient historians tend to ascribe agency either to collective abstractions (the polis) or to unencumbered individuals.

Neville Morley's latest book is another output of his wider project on the reception of Thucydides.Footnote ¹¹ In this volume, Morley explores the reciprocal process that involved the impact of the reception of Thucydides on the discipline of historiography from the early modern period till the present and in turn how changing conceptions of the nature of historiography affected the interpretation of Thucydides and his work. From early modern and modern discussions of the nature of Thucydides’ speeches, through the role of the invented speech in historiography, to the relationship between antiquity and modernity, Thucydides provides an excellent Lydian stone for tracing the history of historiography. Morley explores how early modern discussions on historiography started from a perception of history as magistra vitae, according to which Thucydides was a valuable source of exempla, and were transformed through the emergence of developmental accounts, according to which Thucydides constituted a novel, scientific stage of historiography. In a similar process, discussions of historiographical method moved from attributing Thucydides’ value as historian to his character and then to an examination of his evidentiary and interpretative methods. If this meant that many nineteenth-century historians tended to see Thucydides as a colleague, the emergence of socio-economic history as a major field transformed the appreciation of Thucydides for historians interested in different things. Morley's stimulating book ranges widely and will be of interest to a broad range of Classicists and ancient historians.

Strabo's massive Geography, with its seventeen books, has long been studied by two different audiences: a small group of specialists on ancient geography, and the overwhelming majority of classicists and ancient historians, who in the course of their research will have at some point consulted his text for one detail or another. As with Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists, the very size and variety of the work has largely discouraged scholars from reading and treating it as a whole. Duane Roller's book offers, for the first time, a translation of the whole work in English in a single volume.Footnote ¹² The translation is accompanied by an introduction, a glossary of untranslated words, a list of the ancient sources used by Strabo, and detailed indexes of the passages cited and places and people mentioned. It is undoubtedly a major achievement, which provides an up-to-date and dependable translation of the ancient text; nevertheless, there are a number of mistakes which the absence of the Greek text makes invisible. This volume is intended to be accompanied by a detailed commentary, which should be eagerly awaited. Perhaps equally significant is the freely accessible online map of the located place-names mentioned by Strabo.