Download Christian Habicht. Athens from Alexander to Antony. Translated by

Reviews of Books
1724
challenge is not only progressive Catholicism, as the
author emphasizes, but traditional Catholicism's hold
on the population at large. Pentecostals have won
election to public office in Brazil and manage large and
powerful television networks. They have become a
national force with an independent base, unattached to
the traditional networks of patronage, influence, and
power.
ROBERT M. LEVINE
University of Miami,
Coral Gables
EUROPE: ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL
CHRISTIAN HABICHT. Athens from Alexander to Antony.
Translated by DEBORAH LUCAS SCHNEIDER. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press. 1997. Pp. viii, 406. $39.95.
The last comprehensive treatment of the history of
Athens between the battles of Chaironeia, which
ended resistance to Macedonian hegemony in Greece,
and Actium, which marked the ascendancy of Octavian
as sole ruler of the Mediterranean world, was published in 1911. William Ferguson's Hellenistic Athens:
An Historical Essay, truly a wonderful work of synthesis, has been the historian's constant companion since
then. But research and new discoveries march on, and
no one who has consulted Ferguson in recent decades
can be unaware of how outdated much of his text has
become. A replacement has long been a desideratum;
now, with the publication of an English translation,
slightly updated-and with a snappier title-of Athen:
Die Geschichte der Stadt in hellenisticher Zeit (1995),
Christian Habicht has filled this need, and filled it
splendidly.
Habicht is uniquely qualified for this task. Author of
two important monographs and dozens of articles on
aspects of Athenian history in the Hellenistic period,
he has helped to reshape our understanding of Athens
after Chaironeia. It must be said that, even at the end
of the twentieth century, the standard view of Hellenistic Athens among historians who do not specialize
in the Hellenistic period takes the fifth century (and
perhaps the early fourth)-the glory days of Athenian
democracy, power, and culture-as the point of comparison and cannot find anything afterward but decay
and decline. The former birthplace of democracy is
said to have become an oligarchy of the mediocre; in
place of Socrates and Plato, we have Epicurus and the
dreary cataloguers of the Academy. Habicht's best
achievement is to show that all this is simply beside the
point.
To be sure, political circumstances had changed,
starting in the later fourth century. The emergence of
Macedon under Philip II as the great power in Greece
imposed new limits on the freedom of action of the old
Greek poleis, even if they were slow to realize the
change. The Hellenistic world saw the creation of great
new territorial empires under the rule of kings, and,
after 200 B.C., the appearance on the scene of Rome,
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
whose presence ultimately reconfigured the political
complexion of the Greek world. But within these new
terms, Athens continued to playa role, sometimes an
important one. Habicht stresses, quite rightly. the
persistent attempts of the Athenians up through the
Chremonidean War to compete with the great powers:
a picture of the Athenian state very different from the
exhausted and defeated polity typically depicted after
the battle of Chaironeia. From sometime after the
mid-third century, Habicht argues, the Athenians retreated to a more self-serving politics, seeking to be on
the winning side in the great conflicts they could no
longer control; and in this they were usually strikingly
successful, reacquiring parts of their old Aegean empire (albeit under different terms) in the second
century and enjoying the patronage of the great powers of the day, who contributed buildings, grain, and
money to the city.
It is perhaps the myth that democracy died at
Chaironeia that Habicht demolishes most effectively,
not least because of his mastery of the epigraphic
material in which we can see, if we but know how to
look, the continuing health of the system. With the
reforms of thc fourth century, the Athenians seem to
have struck a good balance between popular sovereignty and the need for individual leadership; honorary inscriptions like that for Kephisiodoros show us the
interplay between these two poles. And to judge by
Athens's successes in the Hellenistic period. the democracy worked remarkably well.
Unlike so many books on the life of Greek states,
which concentrate on political history and then throw
in culture in a chapter at the end, Habicht interweaves
discussions of the cultural and political life of Athens
through the book. These aspects of life were inseparable for the Greeks and, in the case of Athens, of
special importance, in that the city continued to enjoy
preeminence in philosophy and drama (particularly in
the New Comedy). Habicht's appreciation for this
aspect of civic life is obvious, and his manner of
treating it allows us to see, in ways that are usually
more obscure, the fundamental importance that it had
for contemporaries. In this, Habicht offers a model for
connecting political and civic life that I hope others
will follow. Habicht has given us a book we have long
needed. It will be the starting point for anyone interested in learning about the history, in the broadest
sense, of a great Greek polis in a period too often
disregarded.
GARY RH,ER
Trinity College
JON D. MIKALSON. Religion ill Hellenistic Athens. (Hellenistic Culture and Society, number 29.) Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1998. Pp.
xii, 364. $48.00.
The study of classical Greek history has focused on
Athens for many reasons: the abundance of literary
sources; the cultural achievements of the age of
DECEMBER 1999