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Greek tragedy has held sway over the imagination of audiences for well over two millennia. This collection of essays on Athenian drama, the proceedings of a conference held at the University of Texas at Austin in 1992, demonstrates that Greek tragedy still retains its power to provoke debate and to engage the interest of specialists and non-classicists alike.

The book includes essays by seven of the foremost scholars of Greek drama—Helene Foley, Michelle Gellrich, Peter W. Rose, David Rosenbloom, Richard Seaford, Bernd Seidensticker, and Froma I. Zeitlin. These writers explore the work of all three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and approach them from a variety of perspectives on history and theory, including poststructuralism and Marxism. They investigate the possibilities for coordinating theoretically informed readings of tragedy with a renewed attention to the pressure of material history within those texts. The collection thus represents a response within classics to "New Historicism" and the debates it has generated within related literary disciplines.

Honor and Profit offers a welcome corrective to the outmoded Finleyite view of the ancient economy. This important volume collects and analyzes economic evidence including government decrees for all known occasions on which Athens granted honors and privileges for services relating to trade.

The analysis proceeds within the intellectual framework of substantive economic theory, in which formal market behavior and institutions are considered to be but a subset of a larger group of economic behaviors and institutions devoted to the production, distribution, and exchange of goods.

Honor and Profit merges theory with empirical historical evidence to illustrate the complexity and dynamism of the ancient Greek economy. The author's conclusions have broad implications for our understanding not only of Athens and environs but also of the social and political history of Greece and the ancient Mediterranean world.

Darel Tai Engen is Associate Professor of History at California State University, San Marcos.

Also of interest

An Introduction to Greek Epigraphy of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods from Alexander the Great down to the Reign of Constantine (323 B.C.---A.D. 337)
By B. H. McLean

The Athenian Empire Restored: Epigraphic and Historical Studies
By Harold B. Mattingly

The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508---490 B.C.
By Greg Anderson