FINLEY, M.I., (ed.), — Studies in Ancient Society.

Routledge, London / Kegan Paul, Boston, 1974. X,324p. Original blue hard cover with dust wrappers. Spine gilt titled. ‘It is interesting to compare Finley’s essay on the rise of the Athenian demagogues, viewed here not as a class phenomenon but as a necessary outgrowth of their system of direct democracy, with Brunt’s study of the Roman mob, an illustration of the politics of violence clearly linked to class and social discontent. Thompson’s description of the peasant revolts in the third to fifth centuries A.D., on the other hand, underlines their lack of coherent aims and organisation. This was despite the very real grievances of the rural lower class which were compounded by the taxation system which bound peasants increasingly to the soil. (…) The preservation of the status quo and mechanics of social change is investigated by Hopkins and Weaver in their studies of social mobility in the Principate. (…) four essays deal with the relations of the Christians with the imperial government. (…) E.L. Bowie’s meticulously documented study of the Greeks and the Second Sophistic is a study of attitude, an explanation of the nostalgic backward look indulged in widely by educated Greek society in the first and second centuries A.D., which was engendered by disenchantment with the dull present in comparison with a golden and independent past. That ancient society was complex emerges clearly from this volume, indeed it is really a succession of societies which are under discussion, The underlying unity, such as it is, may be definable structurally but only so long as modern concepts of analysis are not superimposed uncritically but rather to explore the realities of the ancient world as it really existed. By and large, the essays in this volume succeed in the task.’ (C.E. KING in The Economic History Review, 1975, p.153-154).