Greek history

I commence this review with six important works on mobility, diasporas, ethnicities, and intercultural relations in antiquity; after a decade of relative dearth of significant contributions, it is truly wonderful that the field is moving again. Jonathan Hall and James Osborne have edited an excellent volume on the interregional networks in the eastern Mediterranean between 900–600 bce. The volume aims to link the novel approaches to Mediterranean history espoused in the major syntheses by Nicholas Purcell – Peregrine Horden and Cyprian Broodbank respectively, with new approaches to the study of cross-cultural interaction and material culture. The editors explicitly and convincingly argue in favour of employing multiple models for explaining the Early Iron Age Mediterranean; the ten chapters exemplify both multiplicity and important common themes. Certain contributions accept the concept of globalization as a useful way of explaining the changes evident across the Mediterranean. While some contributions problematize the concept of style as a means of drawing clear ethnic lines among artists and artistic traditions, other scholars argue for the need to maintain traditional ethnic labels like that of the Phoenicians, which is facing a current deconstructive trend; equally interesting is the stress on the agency of specific groups, like mercenaries, as agents of connectivity. Particularly significant, finally, is the focus on areas that have usually remained at the margins of discussion of Iron Age interconnectivity, like the North Aegean and the Troad, the Black Sea, Anatolia and Egypt.

Milinda Hoo's book takes us from the Iron Age Mediterranean to Central Eurasia in the Hellenistic period. 3This wonderful book combines three different tasks.It offers a synthetic overview of the history and material culture of five places and settlements in central Eurasia that have been at the forefront of scholarly discussion: the city of Ai Khanum, the Oxus temple at Takht-i Sangin, and the citadel of Old Nisa in Central Asia, and the cities of Seleukeia on the Tigris and Babylon in Mesopotamia.Alongside this synthesis, Hoo examines the concept of Hellenism as applied to this area of Eurasia, and shows the manifold contradictions between different interpretations at different sites, some of them focusing on being Greek, others on doing Greek, or on the concept of Philhellenism; particularly interesting is her discussion of Hellenism and religion, and the limited consideration of the absence of Greek religious architecture in any of the above sites.Finally, Hoo offers an excellent discussion of globalization as applied to the intercultural relations in antiquity; her concept of translocal localism offers a useful way of explaining the diverse roles of Greek culture in Hellenistic Central Eurasia.This is a book with substantial implications for all periods and areas of Greek history, so it deserves to be read widely and intensively.
I continue with two important works on the history of immigrants and diasporas in the ancient Mediterranean.Romain Guicharrousse examines resident foreigners in classical and early Hellenistic Athens. 4The author puts aside the usual approach that focuses on status distinctions and the foreign origin of metics in order to explore the spaces and practices through which foreign residents were integrated in Athenian social, economic, and cultural life.The nucleus of the book consists of three excellent case studies.The first concerns the cult of the Thracian goddess Bendis in Athens, the associations that organized participation in the cult, and the role of this cult within the wider religious life of the city.This discussion is particularly significant, because it will force us to rethink the Thracian character of this cult and its participants, and more generally the nature of ethnic labelling in the ancient Greek world; it should be profitably read alongside Hoo's book.The second turns our attention to the philosophical schools that emerged in fourth-century Athens, the interactions between citizens and foreigners within the schools, and the role of the schools in city life.Finally, the third example concerns the funerary practices of Heracleots and Thracians in Athens, their integration in the funerary landscapes of the city, and their participation in the range of Athenian commemorative practices.While the emphasis on integration is salutary, the absence of visible manifestations of foreignness in Athens should also force us to think of other concurrent explanations alongside integration.
While Guicharrousse focuses on classical and Hellenistic Athens, Denise Demetriou devotes a splendid book on Phoenician immigrant communities across the ancient Mediterranean during the first millennium BCE. 5 The book focuses on Phoenician immigrant communities in the Greek world, but is illuminatingly complemented by a study of Phoenician migrants in Egypt, Carthage, and the islands of the central Mediterranean.At the same time, Demetriou makes an important argument for the long-term history of the Phoenicians that should not end with the conquests of Alexander.But the most significant contribution of the book is the study of the adaptive repertoire of immigrants that allowed them to integrate in foreign communities, retain aspects of their original identities, and maintain links to their homeland communities; particularly interesting is the discussion of the peculiarity of Phoenician trade associations in late classical Greece.Seen from the other end, Demetriou also examines the migration regimes of Greek communities and the means they employed to attract and maintain the right kind of immigrants and to establish links with the homeland communities of immigrants.The creation of multicultural communities, the strategies of intercultural translation and integration, and the interlinking of the whole Mediterranean through migration and diasporic networks is why migrants mattered in the ancient Mediterranean.This thought-provoking book should also make us ponder whether the Phoenician model can be applied to other migrant communities, or is in fact one model among many.
Demetriou's book provides the link with the next work, a short history of the Phoenicians by Mark Woolmer. 6The volume offers a historical overview of the Phoenician city-states from the Bronze Age to the conquests of Alexander; an analysis of Phoenician structures of politics and state organization, economic production and exchange, and social institutions and practices; a detailed discussion of Phoenician religion; a truly excellent chapter on Phoenician material culture and art; and, finally, a discussion of what the author calls 'Phoenician expansion', examining the presence of Phoenicians abroad, from groups of resident Phoenicians in Greek cities to the large-scale network of Phoenician settlements in Central and Western Mediterranean.The primary purpose of the volume is to offer to non-specialist readers an easily accessible introduction to the main aspects of Phoenician history and a pathway to the relevant sources and scholarship; in this, the volume is undoubtedly highly successful.On the other hand, the issues raised in the volume by Hall and Osborne discussed above show the need for a better way of incorporating Phoenician (and Greek) history in the changing history of the wider Mediterranean world.Finally, the decision to stop the history of the Phoenicians around 300 BCE is quite problematic, even if it can be defended in terms of space availability.Sarah Derbew's book focuses on the roles of black skin colour in the literary and material culture of the ancient Greek world. 7Derbew examines five main case studies: janiform cups from ancient Athens where one of the two faces is black; and the representation of people with black skin across a wide range of Greek literary genres (Aeschylus' Suppliants, Herodotus, Lucian, and Heliodorus' Ethiopica).Black skin in Greek culture is not associated only with people from sub-Saharan Africa, but also with Egyptians and Indians, although this fact is not utilized fully in the book.Derbew argues that the understanding of black skin in ancient texts and material culture cannot be dissociated from the racist assumptions present in the world of modern readers; furthermore, the discussion of ancient texts and objects is accompanied by a critique of modern practices, like the representation of Nubia in modern museum exhibitions.While the embedding of ancient blackness in modern critical race theory and performance studies can be undoubtedly illuminating, the volume would have certainly benefited from a deeper engagement with the historical study of cross-cultural interactions in antiquity.
Richard Stoneman's contributions to the study of Alexander the Great and his reception have been many and seminal; his latest work is a magnificent edited volume on Alexander the Great in world culture. 8The volume includes a short introduction and eighteen chapters that examine the reception of Alexander from the time of his death all the way to the twenty-first century.The contributions cover three major aspects.The first concerns the reception of Alexander in ancient culture, from the significance of Ptolemaic Alexandria in the formation of his legend, through the crucial significance of Roman receptions of Alexander to his reception among Jews and Christians and in classical art.A significant aspect in all these chapters is the gradual formation of the tradition that is encapsulated in the Alexander Romance.The Romance is at the centre of the second major issue, as it was the crucial source for the shaping of Western European, Byzantine, Persian, and Arabic receptions in the medieval and early modern periods.Finally, the third issue concerns the reception and study of Alexander in modern Europe, examining both scientific texts as well as literature and opera; in the chapters focusing on this issue we see the growing significance of other ancient sources apart from the Alexander Romance in shaping Alexander's reception.This volume is a true feast, but undoubtedly its greatest value is that it is a truly global history: Alexander's reception functions as a means of illustrating the connected history of Western Eurasia from antiquity to the present.
Sonya Nevin has written a fascinating volume on the battle of Marathon and its reception from antiquity to the present. 9The book starts with a valuable background overview of Athens, the wider Greek world, and Persia in the late sixth century (which could have benefited from deeper engagement with Iranian scholarship).It then presents the Ionian revolt that triggered the series of events that led to the Persian expedition and the battle of Marathon.The book then moves on to the first major issue examined, that of the battle itself.Nevin examines the topography of Marathon and presents the evidence about the battle and the limits of our knowledge in a very successful way.The second major aspect examined is the reception of the battle, originally in its fifth-century context, which is discussed in detail, but also in later contexts.Particularly interesting in this respect is the Roman context of the Second Sophistic and the Herodian impact, as well as the post-classical history of Marathon's reception.I was particularly intrigued to find out about the ancient novel concerning Metiochus, Miltiades's son captured by the Persians, and the medieval Iranian poem Wamiq u Adrha inspired by it.This is undoubtedly a very readable and informative contribution to the study of a key event of ancient Greek history.
With the battle of Marathon we have moved to the topic of Greek military history.I continue with a very useful edition and commentary by Francesco Ginelli of the biographies of Greek commanders from the fifth century BCE composed in Latin by Cornelius Nepos. 10 The volume includes the eight short biographies of Miltiades, Themistocles, Aristides, Pausanias, Cimon, Lysander, Alcibiades, and Thrasybulus.The detailed introduction discusses the nature of Nepos' De viris illustribus, from which the current selection derives, the sources used by Nepos and the impact of the encomiastic literature, the literary form and structure of the work, and finally the manuscript tradition.The Latin text of the biographies is unfortunately not accompanied by modern translations, which would have made consultation by a wider audience easier.The commentary is largely focused on linguistic aspects, whose treatment is excellent; at the same time, it offers sufficient detail on the topographical, military, and historical issues raised in the text to make it a very useful tool for specialists and the wider audience alike.
A third volume on Greek warfare is Owen Rees's work on Military Departures, Homecoming and Death in Classical Athens.11Rees focuses on the issue of the transitions between the civilian and military spheres for classical Athenian soldiers.He examines military departures, the return of soldiers from campaigns and the return of their remains, and the multiple ways in which these transitions were negotiated in private and public contexts in classical Athens through specific practices, institutions, and rituals.The examination is based on literary and epigraphic sources, as well as the relevant depictions in Athenian visual culture.This is a very informative book on a number of aspects that have usually not been examined in detail.At the same time, the author positions the book as an examination of the question of the existence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among classical Athenian soldiers and the wider question whether it is possible to identify universal psychological outcomes of warfare, or whether phenomena like PTSD are relevant only for the conditions of modern warfare.Unsurprisingly perhaps, the volume's contribution on the latter question is more difficult to establish, although studies like this can ultimately build the foundations for answering this important question.
Moving to a different subject, The Cultural History of Objects in Antiquity, edited by Robin Osborne, should set the stage for a whole new field of study within ancient history and classical archaeology. 12The so-called material turn and its various intellectual sources, from Latour's actor-network theory and posthumanism through materiality studies to Hodder's work on human-thing entanglement, has started to have its effect on Classics as well, though so far overwhelmingly on Roman rather than on Greek studies.The eight chapters of this volume offer a thought-provoking introduction to the diverse ways in which we can study the impact of objects on ancient people and the changing contours of objects and their consequences across space and time in antiquity.Some of the chapters are examinations of categories of objects, like the excellent chapters on technology, everyday objects, and bodily objects.Other chapters illustrate how we can profitably reconceptualize particular fields of study from an object point of view: economic history needs to complement anthropocentric approaches with approaches focusing on objects and their material consequences; architecture and art can be profitably re-examined by starting from objects and their materiality and entanglement.
The relationship between ancient oikonomia and its relevant discourses and the ancient economy is the subject of a stimulating volume edited by Iris Därmann and Aloys Winterling. 13Most of current work on ancient economies focuses on issues of market performance and pays little attention to the discourses and ideologies of ancient actors; but, as Neville Morley rightly argues in his contribution to the volume, there is a growing current of scholars who argue for the significance of social and cultural aspects in our understanding of the ancient economy.The eight contributions examine three major issues.The first concerns ancient texts and discourses about the economy and the diverse assumptions they include, alongside their changing relationship to actual economic practices; the comparison between Hesiod and Xenophon on the one hand, or between Xenophontic, Platonic, and Aristotelian economic theories on the other is quite revealing.The second axis examines the significance of economic structures and practices and their entanglement of economic and social concerns; the chapter on transregional monetary systems is particularly worth reading.Finally, and really interesting, is the discussion of the reception of ancient theories concerning the oikonomia in the early modern world before the emergence of political economy as a distinct conceptual field.
I turn now to a splendid volume on sex and the ancient city, edited by Andreas Serafim, George Kazantzidis, and Kyriakos Demetriou. 14The volume includes twenty-one chapters that range widely across five main axes.The first focuses on ancient homoeroticism, with particularly interesting contributions on male prostitution, the representation of female homoeroticism, and the homoerotic dimensions of sneezing.The second axis turns our attention to the link between sex and the body in the corpora of ancient medicine, examining clitoridectomy and epilepsy.A third axis explores the representation of sex in visual and material culture, focusing in particular on Athenian vases and the representation of erotic spectatorship, foreplay and sex toys, as well as on the issue of agalmatophilia.A fourth axis turns to sexual liminality, from satyrs through to human-animal sex.Finally, a fifth axis examines sexual scripts across various literary and documentary corpora; I single out particularly fascinating contributions on the subject of ancient erotic letters and a number of texts concerning unhappy marriages from late antique Oxyrhynchus.The various contributions will undoubtedly stimulate significant future discussion.
This review includes a number of important recent works on ancient Greek historiography.I commence with the highly interesting study by Katharina Wojciech on the representation of the past in Athenian public speeches. 15The author makes efficient use of modern theoretical approaches like those of Halbwachs, Ricoeur, and Assmann in order to successfully challenge the traditional assumption of the existence of an official tradition about the past in Athens.Instead, she argues that Athenian collective memory included a variety of different ideas about the past that could co-exist simultaneously, therefore making the process of negotiating the past both unavoidable and an essential aspect of its employment in political discourse.Imitation, legitimation, and criticism are the three main uses for which the past is employed.The book examines the selective remembering of events from the Athenian past, the link between truth and the representation of the shared past, the role of exemplary individuals in Athenian collective memory, and the historical negotiation of a particular event, that of the battle of Chaeroneia.
A particularly fascinating contribution to the study of ancient historiography is the recent volume edited by Kingsley, Monti, and Rood. 16The volume acts as a Festschrift for John Marincola through critical engagement with Marincola's major work on authority and tradition in ancient historians. 17The book consists of nineteen chapters that revolve around four major axes.The first axis focuses on the role of myth, fiction, autopsy, and coincidence in terms of how ancient historians construct their authority.The second major axis concerns the manipulation of the point of view in historical narrative as well as in related genres like choral poetry and commentaries.The third axis examines generic transformations between historiography, political philosophy, and biography; finally, the fourth axis explores the entanglement between tradition and innovation in ancient historiography.Many of the chapters are really excellent contributions that will form the basis of future debate in their respective fields.My only misgivings are that, given the value of the individual contributions, the volume required a more ambitious introduction, and, secondly, that many contributors to the volume exhibit the wider tendency of scholars working on ancient historiography to ignore developments in the study of ancient history.

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Eurasian Localisms.Towards a Translocal Approach to Hellenism and Inbetweenness in Central Eurasia, Third to First Centuries BCE.By Milinda Hoo.Oriens et Occidens series, volume 41.