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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;FitzNigel, post: 7433677, member: 74712&quot;]Linda Kallet and John H. Kroll.&nbsp; <i>The Athenian Empire: Using Coins as Sources</i>.&nbsp; Guides to the Coinage of the Ancient World.&nbsp; Series Editor Andrew Meadows. Cambridge: University Press, 2020.</p><p>ISBN: 978-1107686700</p><p>Cost: $22.99</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1290179[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>Grade: B+</p><p><br /></p><p>Like Thonemann’s <i>The Hellenistic World</i>, the most recent volume in the ‘Guides to the Coinage of the Ancient World’ is a nice overview of the topic of finances in the Athenian Empire, but doesn’t feel as polished as Rowan’s <i>From Caesar to Augustus</i>.&nbsp; Like other volumes in the series, the chapters are broken up into easily read chunks, and it is packed with great illustrations of coins relevant to the text.&nbsp; In particular, I liked how this work focused on the coinage of Athens and the various members of its ‘Arche’ as found throughout the Aegean.&nbsp; Since many catalogues of Greek coins follow a geographic organization, it is easy to forget that Athens had allied states in a wide variety of areas, and Athens’ economic policies affected those areas.&nbsp; Kallet and Kroll do well to bring in a variety of primary source material to aid in interpreting the evidence of coins.&nbsp; Most of this boils down to member states changing the weight standards of their coins and minting practices to fit with the large number of Athenian tetradrachms used in wider trade.&nbsp; Or, in the case of rebelling states, to change their the standards away from the Athenian model.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>There were a couple of small frustrations with this volume that I believe were not an issue in the previous volumes.&nbsp; I suspect the order of when material was covered was changed a number of times before the final publication.&nbsp; I say this because there were a number of times when a coin type would be mentioned, but would not be illustrated until a later chapter of the book (something previous volumes avoided).&nbsp; There was also at least one instance where an illustration number was given, for a picture that didn’t exist: page 87 refers the reader to figure 5.14 for an image of a coin from Salamis.&nbsp; Chapter 5 only has 10 illustrations (so no 5.14), and the coin in question was figure 4.13 on the following page.&nbsp; These are minor quibbles, but it did make reading and keeping track of the coins in question a little frustrating for someone who is not intimately familiar with Ancient Greek coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>Still, it was an enjoyable read with some good theories and insights on the role of coins in Athens and the member pole is of the Delian League/Athenian Empire.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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