Despite being a general overview, Hornblower does go into some significant depth on certain topics. However, other topics feel underdeveloped or are omitted entirely. Athens, for instance, receives the lion’s share of attention in The Greek World. This is hardly surprising, given the overwhelming Athenocentricity of much of the source material commonly described as ancient ‘Greek’, but when compared to the detail other parts of the Greek world are given, this weighting feels intentional. Athens not only receives its own chapter (pp. 129–154), it is also, naturally, the centre of the discussion on the Athenian Empire, including a discussion on the Ephialtic reforms of the mid-fifth century BC (pp. 18–43). The chapter on Athens alone is greater than those on Sparta, Corinth, and Argos combined – Sparta, the other best attested of Greek poleisonly receives nine pages, although later, fourth-century developments are interwoven into the book’s main discussion of the fourth century BC. Yet even with the emphasis on Athens, Hornblower’s discussion of which is generally enlightening, some details are not included, such as the murder of Ephialtes, despite Hornblower’s emphasis on the political rivalries in Athens at the time. This is hardly surprising for a book that attempts to cover poleisregions, and events that entire books, sometimes more, have been dedicated to, but it can be frustrating.
Moreover, despite Hornblower admirably claiming that the “Greek world means Greek world” (p. xvii), whole regions of the Greek world go undiscussed in any significant detail. The most obvious example of this is the poleis of the Black Sea region. This is hardly due to a lack of sources, ancient or modern, since a great deal of work has been done on these poleisespecially Olbia, much of it published long before the fourth edition of The Greek World was published, yet it makes no appearance in any great detail. Rather, this exclusion may be based on the region’s connection to the central narrative of the Greek world in the Classical period – that is the First and Second Peloponnesian Wars and the rise of Macedon. For instance, Hornblower writes how Argos was “more important than the poor state of the sources suggests” (p. 82), and it was certainly an important player in period. The Black Sea was not that closely involved in these conflicts. Yet it also had a close relationship to Athens, being the source of its grain supply – something Hornblower repeatedly asserts – as well as close social and political connections (see, for example, Mattingly, 1996; Burnstein, 2006; Braund, 2007; and Moreno, 2007). The focus on regions and poleis in accordance to their importance to political developments of the Classical period is supported by the fact that, ultimately, The Greek World is a political narrative history of the period, with little exploration of cultural developments – there is no in-depth discussion of slavery and the slave trade, the theatre, nor the position of women in ancient Greece. Alternatively, the Greeks of the Black Sea may not have been included simply due to concerns of space, an argument Hornblower gives to explain the absence of other poleis from the Argolid, such as Epidaurus, from his chapter on Argos (p. 335, n. 6).
