Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World by Claire Taylor Kostas Vlassopoulos

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 199 antique y trouvera de la manière la plus commode les articles fondamentaux du maı̂tre de l’étude documentaire des finances publiques de la Grèce ancienne. University of Chicago Alain Bresson Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World. By Claire Taylor and Kostas Vlassopoulos. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2015. Pp. 320, 7 illustrations, and 15 tables. The animating idea of this volume is to encourage scholars to move beyond a poliscentered view of the ancient Greek world, and to examine communities and associations that existed within and beyond the polis. Of special concern are those communities that cut across distinctions between citizens and other groups. This approach is clearly an extension of Vlassopoulos’s Unthinking the Greek Polis (Cambridge 2007) and draws on network theory among other methodologies from the social sciences to challenge conventional views of Greek society. In “Social Networks and Social Mobility in Fourth-Century Athens,” Claire Taylor examines micro-level communities such as small cultic groups as a way of shedding light on social networks and social mobility among marginalized (i.e., non-citizen) groups. She argues that by focusing on the polis level, we lose sight of the ways that citizens and non-citizens interacted, as well as of the active formation of communities by noncitizens . By contrast, dedicatory inscriptions by diverse communities in Attica illustrate that slaves, ex-slaves, men, and women often celebrated a god and their own status as worshippers, thereby improving their quality of life and making a claim to belonging to the community. Taylor’s approach is informed by Amartya Sen’s “capabilities approach” to social mobility, which considers what marginalized groups are able to do, rather than whether they necessarily move up the social and legal status hierarchy.1 Though Sen’s approach was formulated in relation to modern developing countries, it also illuminates micro-level activities of marginalized groups in classical Athens. Esther Eidinow (“Ancient Greek Religion: ‘Embedded’ . . . and Embodied”) seeks to deepen our understanding of how religion was embedded in Greek society by challenging the now orthodox view that polis religion was always public, communal, and based on practice rather than faith. As she rightly points out, this view presents polis religion as a static structure and makes change hard to explain. Instead, Eidinow proposes that Greek religion consisted of relational ties between individuals who participated in the constant production of narratives that negotiated central concepts and practices. Focusing her study on the stories told in the law courts about the nature of impiety (asebeia), she argues that it was through such processes of discursive communication that religious culture was produced and maintained. Eidenow draws on Mark Granovetter’s adaptations of Polanyi’s idea of the “embedded economy” and in particular the role of individuals in social networks whose actions are shaped but not fully determined by social values.2 For Eidinow, action at the level of the individual helps explain how Greek religion could 1 A. Sen, Commodities and Capabilities (Oxford 1999). 2 See, for example, K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York 1944); M. Granovetter, “A Theoretical Agenda for Economic Sociology,” in M. Guillen et al., The New Economic Sociology: Developments in an Emerging Field (New York 2002). 200 PHOENIX change over time, but also captures the dynamic nature of Greek religion, where central concepts were always under negotiation. Paulin Ismard (“ ‘Playing with Scales’ in the Classical City: The Case of the Marathonian Tetrapolis”) demonstrates the multiplicity of levels of community below and beyond the polis through a study of the sacrificial calendar from the Marathonian Tetrapolis. Despite the fragmentary and complex nature of this inscription, Ismard succeeds in establishing the existence of many overlapping religious associations in this region of northeast Attica. Most importantly, he demonstrates that these groups operated largely outside the civic frame and constituted a set of networks that is wholly lost from the perspective of polis religion. Indeed, Ismard shows that ritual life in this region was more likely to be oriented towards Delphi and Delos than toward the civic cults of Athens. By restoring this middle-level perspective—between the micro-level of the family and the macro-level of

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