Belonging and Isolation in the Hellenistic World ed. by Sheila L. Ager and Riemer A. Faber (review)

The Hellenistic world that followed Alexander of Macedon’s conquest of the East was marked by new political configurations, movements of peoples (especially Greeks) to areas previously part of the Persian Empire, dislocations, adjustments, and major changes in both society and economy. For the inhabitants of that area, all this added up to a disruptive experience. The emphasis of Belonging and Isolation in the Hellenistic World, the recent volume so finely edited by Sheila Ager and Riemer Faber, forms a welcome change from the more common themes of identity or ethnicity, allowing the eighteen authors included here to investigate their different topics from new and interesting angles. The editorial grouping of these studies, three by three, into six parts with short introductions to each and a longer introduction to the volume as a whole, cleverly makes sense of these somewhat disparate investigations that originated in a scholarly meeting at the University of Waterloo in 2008. A further feature of the volume is the bringing together of literary, historical, archaeological, and even linguistic studies (as for the Galatians), shedding different pools of light on different areas of this new world.

In part 1, “Intercultural Poetics and Identity” forms the unifying theme for two studies on the poet and philosopher Meleager by Regina Höschle and Kathryn Gutzwiller, together with a fascinating, if inconclusive, study of Hermeias of Kourion by Peter Bing. Meleager, whose collection of epigrams in a Garland forms a leitmotif throughout, is shown to typify a Hellenistic man of culture. Born in Gadara, visiting Tyre, and ending up in Kos, the cosmopolitan Meleager was trilingual in Syrian, Phoenician, and Greek; his life and works raise many of the book’s recurrent themes. In addition, Gutzwiller considers Meleager’s possible links with Rome, whose ultimate conquest of the Hellenistic East constitutes a further theme. Part 2 (“On the Margins?”) collects studies on the Galatians (Altay Coşkun), where a map would have been welcome; on the new power of the Aetolians (Joseph Scholten); and on the continuation of democracy in Athens and the Black Sea region (Glenn Bugh). In part 3 (“Symploke: Mediterranean Systems and Networks”) Arthur Eckstein shows with admirable clarity how International Systems Theory may be interestingly applied to the account of Rome’s takeover by the Achaean historian Polybius, and Gary Reger takes the island of Delos as the location for a convincing demonstration of the application of network studies (combined with New Institutional Economics) to the Hellenistic economy. With Claude Eiler’s study of the Hasmonean state, the themes of integration and isolation return to the fore.

Part 4 (“Alexandria: The Invention of a City”) treats the new capital of Egypt (Andrew Erskine on the different foundation myths; Daniel Ogden on birth myths of Ptolemy I) and the problems involved in analyzing what has in the past been termed Alexandrian art (Craig Hardiman on Alexandrianism). Part 5 (“Integration”) links literature (Christina Vester on Menander’s Samia and the citizen’s role), and archaeology (Ruth Westgate’s impressive investigation of varying house plans on Delos and Crete, well interpreted within the book’s overall framework), with Patrick Baker’s lengthy study of a group of inscriptions illustrating the fate of some Cretan mercenaries in Miletus. Finally, part 6 (“Insulae: Geopolitics and Geopoetics”) contains Ephraim Lytle’s important (and convincing) re-evaluation of the role of fish and fishing in the Hellenistic world, a masterly study of loans from the Delian temple treasury (Léopold Migeotte), and a consideration (Mary Depew) of Kallimachos as an Alexandrian poet for whom rivers and water sources formed important themes (though given its location east of Pelousion it is hard to understand how Mount Kasios might ever be considered a source of the Nile).

With its broad geographical range, fresh methodological approaches, and new insights into a wide range of subjects, this forms a stimulating volume, in which the Greek experience of...