Greek History and Epigraphy. Essays in honour of P.J. Rhodes (review)

Reviewed by: Greek History and Epigraphy. Essays in honour of P.J. Rhodes Sean Corner Lynette Mitchell and Lene Rubinstein, eds. Greek History and Epigraphy. Essays in honour of P.J. Rhodes. Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2009. Pp. xxviii + 301. US $110.00 ISBN 9781905125234. This volume stems from a conference held on Rhodes in 2005 to celebrate the sixty-fifth birthday of P.J. Rhodes. It contains fifteen essays by former students, collaborators, and colleagues of Professor Rhodes. The eminence of the contributors is itself tribute to the place Rhodes holds in the field. The long list of his publications at the end of the volume tells the story of forty years of major contributions to our knowledge of ancient Greece (a flow which, from the list of works forthcoming, gladly shows no sign of abating). As readers of this journal will be well aware, Rhodes has long been a major authority on the political history and political institutions of Athens and its democracy. His work has been concerned with the particular workings of government at Athens and at the same time (and by implication) with Athens’ status as a polis. Thus another strand of Rhodes’ work concerns comparison among forms of Greek states, and also inter-state organizations such as the league and empire, as well as relations between states. A hallmark of his approach has been to bring epigraphic and literary sources together in tackling these questions. While, as is natural in a Festschrift, the essays represent discrete studies, treating a diverse assortment of topics, they are united in reflecting some central themes in Rhodes’ scholarship. The major theme is, as suggested by the collection’s title, the essential role of epigraphic evidence in the reconstruction of Greek history. Various essays raise various questions about the interpretation of this evidence, including that of the historical significance of “the epigraphic habit” (the title of the original conference) itself. Naturally, given the material, many of the papers concern political relationships within or between communities, or [End Page 333] the inter-relationship between the two. Most of the essays provide object lessons in what epigraphy can show us that literary sources do not and at the same time in the necessity of viewing things from the vantage of both together. Epigraphy and literary sources together, for example, yield a broader view of Greece than that afforded us by literary sources alone, allowing us to view conditions beyond only the larger states—especially Athens. This may combat Athenocentrism in the sense of unwarranted generalization from the peculiar Athenian case, but, as a couple of the essays suggest, it is equally Athenocentric to assume that phenomena seen at Athens, such as the epigraphic habit, are to be understood as per se Athenian and democratic when in fact they are at once more broadly Greek and at the same time of different significance in the particular circumstances of each polis. The editors in their introduction draw out and reflect upon these common themes and implications of the collection. Aptly to the occasion, and echoing the book’s epigraph, the first essay concerns friendship. Lynette Mitchell treats the egalitarian discourse of friendship in the ideology of the polis, in the theorizing of social and political relations, and in the relationship between the Hellenistic cities and kings. She argues that the language of friendship served to obscure inequality but at the same time to make unequal relationships assume a more equal aspect. Using Metropolis as a case study, Boris Dreyer argues that the cities of the Attalid kingdom were dependent on the personal relationships that elite citizens enjoyed with the Attalid court and, later, with Roman senators, and that it was thus to these relationships that the elite owed their posts in city government. David Whitehead returns to the subject of the language of honorific decrees to argue that andragathia was adopted by the Athenians as a term of approbation free of the elitist associations of arete, but that, with its democratization during the fourth century bc, arete came to be used as the term for the virtue of the aner agathos and andragathia used instead more narrowly, to mean prowess in sport...

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