In the past three decades, scholarship on the history and culture of ancient Greece has undergone profound transformations. The impact of archaeology affects the historical views of the archaic, classical, and Hellenistic eras. The written material itself, both literary and epigraphical, is being reassessed in the light of recent theories, including those on orality and literacy. The contacts between Greece and the Near East, and with the Mediterranean west and north are now considered to have played a formative role in historical processes in the Greek world and in those broader developments which scholars of the past tended to conceive through their Greek lenses. Patterns of social life and the interaction between religion and society are reinterpreted from the perspective of historical anthropology. The application of social and political theory to ancient evidence changes our understanding of legal and political life. Gender studies are renewing and transforming our view of Greek society.

The fascinating and challenging results of these changes affect the views of scholars in different ways, conditioned among other things by their country of origin, language, discipline, and institutional affiliation. Moreover, the enormous increase in the number of publications makes it difficult to keep in touch with all the developments that seem to be most promising for one’s field. Against this background, twenty-two years ago, a small group of scholars around Josine Blok created the European Network for the Study of Ancient Greek History. The main objective of this koinōnia was precisely to meet these challenges by bringing scholars and scholarship from different areas and diverse backgrounds together.

Every once in a while, the Network would organize a larger thematic conference, but the core idea has always been to regularly bring together—in a friendly but rigorously critical atmosphere—this koinōnia of colleagues representing several generations of scholars differing in their training, professional experience, national scholarly traditions, and hence in their attitudes towards important problems of ancient Greek history in its broader historical context of the Mediterranean and the Near East. This lively circle of friends has been animated by the common idea of discussing works in progress, ambulating from one university to another for yearly gatherings—from Helsinki to Trento and from Tel Aviv to Paris—to engage with one another and with various local audiences. Over the years, the result has proven interesting and refreshing in that their scholarly interests to some extent converged—both nurtured by their regular exchanges and by their general focus on what can be considered critical issues of ancient Greek studies nowadays. Not by chance, to some extent at least, they corresponded nicely with the scholarly focus and achievements of one of the original conveners and driving spirits of the Network, Josine Blok.

This volume was born of an affectionate gift presented to our colleague on the occasion of her retirement from the University of Utrecht in the Autumn of 2019. We planned for it to be published in 2021, that is twenty years after the opening session of the would-be Network, which Josine has done so much to bring to life and energize during all these years. The global upheavals of our times prevented us from publishing the volume then, but gave us the opportunity to pause briefly to reflect on our common path thus far and into the future. We also took the time to weave the wreath of our papers in resonance with the scientific interests of our honoranda, whom we had invited to contribute with the English version of her valedictory lecture given in Dutch in October 2019. The book closes with this lecture, preceeded by three thematic sections, devoted respectively to (1) citizenship, (2) historiography, ancient and modern, and (3) participation in politics and beyond.

We are particularly grateful to Brill for accepting this volume at a time when Festschriften are no longer popular with publishers. We cannot claim to have been more successful than other projects of the same type in providing a coherent whole. However, this book is a faithful reflection of the kind of scientific conversation that has taken place over the past twenty years within a group whose strength lies in the variety of its interests and methods.

Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge & Marek Węcowski

For the European Network for the Study of Ancient Greek History.¹