I started this review about six months ago, and then a million and one things intervened. The review is now done (just in time for me to get another book to review) and a working draft is at the end of this post.
One thing that Dixon’s book did get me thinking about – other than Corinth and the Corinthia – is the recent boom in interest in the Hellenistic world. When I was in graduate school, the next big thing was Late Antiquity, and this was really the long tail of a small, but influential body of scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s that inspired a generation of Late Antiquitists. These Late Antiquitists, in turn, produced a generation of graduate students who finished their degrees in the last decade of the 20th and first decades of the 21st centuries. Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity (1971) and the late antique contributors to Alexander Khazdan’s Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (1991) provide useful bookends to the formative phase in the development of Late Antiquity as a boom field.
I’m not as familiar with the develop of the Hellenistic world as a field, but my two main regions of study have show and significant uptick in the number of dissertations and scholarship focusing on the Hellenistic era. Much of the scholarship with which I am familiar is archaeological and I suspect that Susan Rotroff’s work has had a significant impact in our view of the archaeology of Hellenistic Greece and Aegean. As far as Hellenistic Cyprus, there is an impressive cohort of freshly minted Ph.D.s ready to write the history of this period on the island. If I was an investor in academic futures, I’d be all-in on the Hellenistics, right now.
So Dixon’s work represents the first in what will most likely be an impressive groundswell of scholarship on Hellenistic Greece and Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean more broadly. As such, it should be seen as a useful bellwether.
Archaeology of the Mediterranean World 