Reviews
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Oil, Wine, and the Cultural Economy of Ancient Greece from the Bronze Age to the Archaic Era
12–18 minutesCatherine E. Pratt, Oil, Wine, and the Cultural Economy of Ancient Greece from the Bronze Age to the Archaic Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 9781108835640. Reviewed by Evan Vance, University of California, Berkeley, evan.j.vance@berkeley.edu. How did oil and wine become constitutive features of Greek culture, both within the Greek peninsula and in the broader Mediterranean? Pratt pursues this question by tracing the production, consumption, and movement of oil and wine over five geographic and…
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The Story of Garum
11–16 minutesSally Grainger. The Story of Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce and Salted Fish in the Ancient World. Routledge: London, 2021. 9781138284074; 9781315269825. Reviewed by Christopher Stedman Parmenter, University of Pennsylvania, csparment@gmail.com. Commodities bring the world together.1 This is the principle that undergirds commodity biography, the transnational study of how the production, transport, and consumption of material goods link (in the words of Sidney Mintz) “people unknown to one another . . . through space and time.”2…
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Women and War in Roman Epic
10–15 minutesElina Pyy, Women and War in Roman Epic, The Language of Classical Literature 33 (Leiden: Brill, 2020). 9789004434905. Reviewed by Andrew McClellan, San Diego State University, amcclellan@sdsu.edu. It’s refreshing to see more and more scholars tackle big issues systematically across a range of authors/texts, as Pyy does here in her excellent Women and War in Roman Epic. Not that studies of individual authors or texts will ever lose their value, of course, but the broad…
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Jerome of Stridon and the Ethics of Literary Production in Late Antiquity
12–17 minutesThomas E. Hunt, Jerome of Stridon and the Ethics of Literary Production in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2020). 9789004417465. Reviewed by Sarah Teets, University of Virginia, sct4ze@virginia.edu Thomas Hunt’s Jerome of Stridon and the Ethics of Literary Production in Late Antiquity explores the relationship of the literary practices of reading and writing to the material world in Jerome’s writings of the period 386–393 CE. Hunt argues that for Jerome, Christian literary production is inherently ethical.…
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Irrigation in Roman Western Europe
8–12 minutesAnna Willi, Irrigation in Roman Western Europe, Deutsche Wasserhistorische Gesellschaft 17. Clausthal-Zellerfeld: Schriften der Deutschen Wasserhistorischen Gesellschaft, 2021. 9783869487533. Reviewed by Daniel Plekhov, Brown University, daniel_plekhov@brown.edu Willi’s Irrigation in Roman Western Europe is a comprehensive study of the archaeological, textual, and epigraphic evidence for irrigation within Western Europe during periods of Roman rule. As an encyclopedic review of available sources, this book is welcome. It provides a clear synthesis of decades of research on irrigation…
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Luwian Hieroglyphic Texts in Late Bronze Age Scribal Tradition
5–8 minutesFred C. Woudhuizen, Luwian Hieroglyphic Texts in Late Bronze Age Scribal Tradition, (Wiesbaden: Harrowitz Verlag, 2021). 9783447115315. Reviewed by Josh Cannon, University of Pittsburgh, jwc70@pitt.edu This volume is unique and of great value in that it presents the full known corpus of Late Bronze Age (LBA) hieroglyphic Luwian texts (minus those texts that contain less than a full phrase). The book examines thirty-one of these texts, an impressive number given that the closest competitor (also…
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Dynastic Deeds
15–22 minutesAlessandro Poggio, Dynastic Deeds: Hunt Scenes in the Funerary Imagery of the Achaemenid Eastern Mediterranean, (Oxford: BAR Publishing, 2020). 9781407356389; 9781407354668. Reviewed by Stephanie Kimmey, Colorado College, skimmey@coloradocollege.edu Poggio’s book fits in its art historical context by exploring dynastic funerary monuments, while also using a wider range of supporting evidence, such as iconography of other media and textual sources.1 It is also situated within a current publication trend centered on the study of the Achaemenid…
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Other Natures: Environmental Encounters with Ancient Greek Ethnography
17–25 minutesClara Bosak-Schroeder, Other Natures: Environmental Encounters with Ancient Greek Ethnography (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020). 9780520343481. Reviewed by Emily S. Wilson, Colorado State University, wilsones@colostate.edu. A video from the exhibit “Restoring Earth” at the Field Museum in Chicago asks, “What can the past teach us about living with nature?” (170). Quite a bit, it turns out, as Bosak-Schroeder meticulously shows in this slim volume, which covers quite a lot of ground in 185 pages…
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Figurines in Hellenistic Babylonia: Miniaturization and Cultural Hybridity
25–37 minutesStephanie M. Langin-Hooper, Figurines in Hellenistic Babylonia: Miniaturization and Cultural Hybridity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 9781108769020. Reviewed by Leticia R. Rodriguez, Florida State University, lrrodriguez@fsu.edu. Intimacy, interaction and play, and social norms as activated and understood through the miniature are but some of the themes that Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper rigorously and playfully explores in this volume on various types of anthropomorphic figurines in Hellenistic Babylonia. With her chronological parameters less fixed than more canonical…
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The Undeciphered Signs of Linear B: Interpretation and Scribal Practice
13–19 minutesAnna Judson, The Undeciphered Signs of Linear B: Interpretation and Scribal Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 9781108494724. Reviewed by Theodore Nash, University of Michigan, theonash@umich.edu. This review has been reverted to its unedited version per the request of the reviewer (1/4/2022) In the story best known, Linear B was deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952.[1] Other tellings add more heroes—John Chadwick, Alice Kober, Emmett Bennett—but do not generally challenge the notion that, as a…
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