Content area
Full text
Konrad H. Kinzl (ed.), A Companion to the Classical Greek World. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Pp. xviii + 606. ISBN 978-0-631-23014-4. GBP85.
According to the publisher's publicity, this particular companion 'provides scholarly yet accessible new interpretations of Greek history of the Classical period, from the aftermath of the Persian Wars in 478 B.C. to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. Topics covered range from the political and institutional structures of Greek society, to literature, art, economics, society, warfare, geography and the environment. It discusses the problems of interpreting the various sources for the period and guides the reader towards a broadly-based understanding of the history of the Classical Age'. This volume does so in twenty-seven chapters written by twentysix authors.
Chapter 1, 'The Classical Age as a Historical Epoch' (pp. 1-25), by Uwe Walter, is, as one might say, the theoretical backbone of this book. It discusses many of the issues of what precisely constitutes the 'Classical Age' and sets it off as a separate historical period. Originally the word 'classical' primarily had a qualitative connotation that gradually also obtained a chronological component, notably connected with literature and art. Though the term 'Classical Age' essentially is a modern concept, some of its features were already discerned in the period itself as models suitable for emulation (pp. 7f.). One might therefore maintain that in several respects the 'Classical Age' was already recognised as an 'independent' era with its own characteristics by its contemporaries, not only in Athens and Sparta, for example, but in most of the more than 1 000 states that constituted Greece. A number of these states clustered in federations, while they continued striving at the same time for freedom (eleuthereia) and hegemony (arche). Moreover, since citizens identified more with their own states than with the federations, the concept of the federation finally failed in the classical period.
Chapters 2-4 discuss the sources: 'The Literary Sources' (P. J. Rhodes, pp. 26-44), 'The Non-Literary Written Sources' (P. J. Rhodes, pp. 45-63), and 'The Contribution of the Non-Written Sources' (Björn Forsén, pp. 64-83). For the literary sources Rhodes primarily focuses on Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon (but not omitting other historians), next on orators and pamphleteers, and finally on poets (Simonides, Aischylos, Sophokles,...