A mixture of fascinating and frustrating. I liked the quantitative approach to Greek history, the data Ober presented about the size of Greek poleis and their economies, and the nature of their constitutions. But after 3-5 pages of fascinating data you'd inevitably reach the end of what could be stated with confidence and come to a sentence like, "We can guess that..." followed by an extensive section based on a supposition.

This book expanded my knowledge of classical Greece, but I don't think I can recommend it as a standalone book. It's a good supplement if you already have a solid knowledge base about the period, to be able to take its facts apart from its speculation. (And I don't object to its economic-political science approach to classical history, though I imagine some people might not like reducing the period to numbers and rational choice theory. Frankly I wish the book had gone further with this approach — or recognized that the data didn't support going further and refrained from extrapolating based on theories.) ( )

Fairness warning: my rating is unfair. I'm just trying to correct for all the equally unfair five star reviews. This is a solid three star book. My review is more negative than it should be, only because others have been too positive.

The three stars are due to the impressive attempt to study the actual material conditions of an ancient society. Two cheers! My two negative stars were caused by i) the book's neo-liberal triumphalism, and ii) its extremely shoddy historical thinking, which claims causation where there is maybe, kind of, sort of, perhaps, some correlation, but also just ignores historical events that can't be reduced to numbers.

i) Little more needs to be said. The point of this book is that Classical Greece was Great because it was more or less a modern, neoliberal state; all such states, we can assume, are, in turn, great. This is transparently false (e.g., they had slavery and we have capitalism; also, we are not great). I hesitate to say that Ober's book caused Trump's election victory, but one might think its success was a sign that certain portions of the American population were at least a little bit out of touch with reality.

ii) If you have the book in front of you, you might like to have a look at figure 4.3, on page 99. This is Ober's summary of his data. It is supposed to show that 'core Greece' reached an exceptionally high level of wealth because of democracy. A quick check will suggest that core Greece's ascent started around 1000 B.C., reached a plateau during around the end of the Athenian and Spartan empires, and then rapidly descended back to historical norms. I would have thought this suggested that imperialism, rather than democracy, was the driving force behind Greece's wealth (and, if I were a good Stanford classicist, I would then immediately hint that something similar might be true of the modern West). But I would only say that because I have no Panglossian wish to pretend I live in a post-imperialist, democratic utopia, or that anyone else ever does or has, for that matter. ( )

This is that rare thing: a history of Classical Greece that brings a fresh perspective to a much-studied era. The influence of the Annales School is on every page and while the source material is not nearly as rich as was available to Braudel in his histories of the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean, the statistical estimates of demographics, trade, and the economy in this book are more rigorous and reap the benefits of fifty years of scholarship. Ober uses these statistics to test several hypotheses regarding the source of the dynamic culture that arose from the balance of cooperation and competition between the over 1000 poleis that formed the political units of Greek civilization. While Herodotus, Thucydides, and Aristotle all make appearances, Ober places them in the context of a long-term evolution from the ruins of the Mycenae-era kingdoms to the "Greek efflorescence" of Classical Greece, an efflorescence that Ober shows survived the deprivations of the Peloponnesian War, the Macedonian invasion, and even the Roman conquest. ( )