The Cambridge Ancient History

Abstract

The new C.A.H. rolls majestically on its way. The Fifth Century (covering in effect 478-404 B.C.), though shorter than volume IV, is still (at 2 lbs. 5 ozs.) a substantial book and a reviewer who has read it from cover to cover (ineluctably, but with a faint sense of absurdity, for what normal reader will do the same?) harbours the uncomfortable conviction that it is now time to begin again, like painting the Forth Bridge. But although most readers will treat this as a reference book to dip into, not to swallow whole, its organization has a rationale which is worth grasping. After an initial chapter on sources, chronology and method, the first third of the volume charts a (mostly) political and chronological path through the Pentecontaetia in Greece and the Aegean, with a chapter on Sicily as coda. There is then a marked change of tempo as chapter eight, containing some two hundred pages by seven different authors, provides a wide-ranging thematic survey of culture and society. The final third returns to the original key with three very substantial chapters on the Peloponnesian War. At the end are short chronological notes, a chronological table, a good (though not always completely up-to-date) bibliography, in the style of earlier volumes, and a reasonably full index (but no index locorum). The ' political' chapters are, to mince no words, wholly admirable, both in selection of material and soundness of judgement. The reasoning is (naturally) often debatable but never indefensible. D. M. Lewis's chapter on sources lays a reassuringly sound foundation in treating Thucydides as a great historian whose ' high competence and devotion to truth are not to be doubted'. J. K. Davies, after a perceptive discussion of what made Greeks feel Greek, argues less conventionally that the 470s constitute a period of uncomfortable transition for the polis. Two chapters by P. J. Rhodes (on the Delian League to 449 B.c. and on Athenian internal affairs down to Pericles' ascendancy) and two by D. M. Lewis (on Mainland Greece 479-51 B.C., and on the Thirty Years Peace) provide a massively judicious survey of political developments. (Among judgements of interest note the view that Thucydides' figure of 460 talents for initial tribute may have come from an over-optimistic assessment list; the Delian League may have been initiated as a permanent alliance to bind Athens as much as the allies; the chronological Gordian knot of the 470s and 460s is cut by supposing that Themistocles' flight coincided neither with the siege of Naxos nor that of Thasos (this is over-sceptical); Dipaea is put before the Messenian war and Oenoe almost disappears in 456. The Messenian war goes on till 456/5, leading to a treatment of Athenian policy as relatively aggressive in the early 450s.) After a slightly shaky start, where it is unclear whether Sicily is being divided into four political blocs or six, D. Asheri provides a most useful excursus on Sicily from 478 to 431 B.C. (Why, however, are the Greeks in S. Italy excluded, and why is attention to Sicily after 431 confined to a Peloponnesian War perspective?) The rationale of the central sections (chapter 8) is explained in the Preface as being that the old separate chapters on drama, philosophy, historiography and art 'have been replaced by an attempt to show the cultural achievements in their historical, social and religious contexts'. In the present reviewer's opinion (admittedly a non-