This engaging volume concludes the work of the Legacy of Greek Political Thought network, which developed in 2010 out of the Classical Reception Studies Network (itself founded as a collaborative UK-based project in 2004). As David Carter makes clear in the introduction, the notion of 'Legacy' as a way of describing human interactions with ancient political thought is purposefully loaded, as it embraces the idea that agents draw selectively on the past as a way of validating or justifying their views and behaviour. Carter succinctly proposes (4-5) a view of 'reception as evolution' to emphasise how the reproduction of classical ideas functions and accounts for their dispersal or disappearance.

The sixteen papers that make up this collection are arranged into four parts. Part 1 explores the interpretation of the political thought of Hesiod (Ioannis Evrigenis), Thucydides (Neville Morley) and Plato (Robert Ballingall). Evrigenis' contribution explores the reception of Hesiod's notion of the Golden Age and its aftermath in both ancient times and early modern thought down to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Kant took the view that it was only after the end of this era that humanity needed reason and law to support sociability. Morley's survey of the treatment of Thucydidean ideas in the fields of international relations, political activity, knowledge and morality draws the conclusion that it is the strangeness of Thucydides' text which makes it enduringly illuminating for modern political thinking. Ballingall shows how two mid-twentieth-century analyses of Plato's notions of the philosophical life (by Simone Weil and Leo Strauss) illustrate radically variant interpretations of his imperatives; these in turn create a virtual dialogue about his work that can challenge contemporary positivistic approaches to epistemology.

Part 2 turns to the manifestation of ancient thought in some well-known and less well-known contexts: the Roman world (Jed Atkins), English republicanism (Richard Foxley), sixteenth-century France (Rebecca Kingston), modern ideas about liberty (Paschalis Kitromilides), the early American republic (Arlene Saxonhouse) and Islamic political thought (Vasileios Syros). Atkins shows how writers of the Roman republican era processed Greek critiques of democracy, sometimes emancipating their views but at other times challenging them: the work of Cicero emerges as an important intermediary in the transmission of Greek thought to the Roman tradition. Foxley shows how two thinkers of the era of the English Revolution (1640-1660) and short-lived republic (known as The Commonwealth of England, 1649-60) made a case for a politics of virtue that was founded on ancient thought: John Milton, who was interested in ethics and decision-making; and James Harrington, who focussed upon institutions and the balance of property ownership. Kingston focuses upon the 1532 French vernacular translation of Plutarch's Principles of Statecraft, arguing that it supported a notion of 'public humanism' concerning the attitudes, behaviour and practices of public officials. Kitromilides' paper demonstrates how modern ideas about liberty have been developed in dialogue with ancient ones, pointing to the famous examples of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Benjamin Constant but also the less well-known but remarkable 'Of the Republic of the Florentines' (published in Greek in 1439) of Leonardo Bruni. Saxonhouse emphasises that the ostentatiously modernist late eighteenth-century founders of the American Republic appeared to find little of interest in ancient Greek politics, though in early nineteenth-century American political rhetoric there did emerge some affinity with the freedom-loving aspect of the Greek legacy. Syros highlights the breadth of mediaeval and early modern Islamic perspectives on human organisation which suggest a degree of synthesis between earlier Islamic and Greek theories about social genesis even where the former had stressed the divine origins of political authority and justice and the latter a naturalistic approach to the creation of society.

The subject of Part 3 is the invigoration of adaptations of Greek thought over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Alan Cromartie's starting point is the aphorism in John Rawls's Theory of Justice (1972) that 'justice is the first virtue of social institutions'. In an important contribution, Cromartie challenges Rawls' assertion that his own theory of justice is essentially Aristotelian, and argues instead that it is a product of the contract-based tradition of justice developed in the work of Hugo Grotius (1587-1644), who critically responded to Aristotle, and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Liz Sawyer's contribution assesses the prominence of translated ancient political texts in twentieth-century US Great Books pedagogy, juxtaposing it with the slowness of Oxford undergraduate education to embrace engagement with translated texts. The Great Books methodology was also challenged by Quentin Skinner's impactful emphasis on considering ancient political thought within the historical framework of ideas. Tomasz Mrόz outlines the breadth of interpretations built upon the reception of Plato's political works in nineteenth-century Polish scholarship, and demonstrates how the philosopher's work offered much to socialists, conservatives, Christian theologians and democrats. Carol Atack's paper explores the ways in which, during the 1960s, Cornelius Castoriadis and Jacques Rancière drew upon ancient texts to dispute Marxist orthodoxies: their works informed the late twentieth-century structuralist perspectives of Vernant, Vidal-Naquet and Loraux on ancient Athens.

Part 4, the most idealistic part of the collection, underlines the ongoing potential of Greek political thought. Alexandra Lianeri argues that decolonised histories of ancient democracy, accentuating the uncertainty and ambivalence of politics, can challenge the liberal appropriation of the ancient example. Tony Burns' sociological reassessment of Aristotle emphasises his interest in associations (koinoniai) and their form of justice which demanded reciprocity in terms of obligations and expectations. This may, as Burns notes, have contemporary relevance for the political character of institutions such as modern Universities. Barbara Goff's study of the deployment of Greek tragedy offers a global perspective on how its themes of suffering and homelessness can offer challenging resonances for communities in crisis.

This exceptionally fruitful volume breaks new ground in demonstrating the depth of Greek political thought's legacies. One sign of its effectiveness is that, for the most part, the contributors do not revert to the ideas of 'influence' or a passive view of 'reception', and treat their themes with careful attention to their historical context. Taken as a whole, the book successfully demonstrates that ancient Greek thought has been, and continues to be, an inspiring starting point for political analysis and debate; moreover, it shows that the eternally widening spectrum of perspectives brought to it by its readers serves to unlock its great riches. The book's index is a welcome aid to navigating the volume.

Peter Liddel