Clarke opens Chapter 1 with Solon's famous meditation on the length of a man's life to introduce first a philosophical discussion about the concepts of time (natural and constructed) and then an anthropological framework for the significance of mapping time for a culture. She suggests that temporal frameworks were important in Greece not only for chronographers and historians, together with their audiences and readers, but also for a broader range of society. To support her argument, she uses references in Athenian literature to the water clock, not just in oratory, but also in Aristophanes, which depend on jokes about the manipulation of the calendar. The calendars - solar, lunar, festival, and civic - regulate the events in a year and remind citizens of history, since they form a basis for the regular commemoration of events important in both the mythological and historical past.

In Chapter 2, Clarke studies the interests, approaches, and scholarship of professionals, the historians and chronographers who devoted themselves in varying ways to understanding the past. She notes that scholars of local festivals also often seemed to work on calendars, revealing an interest in etymologies, aetiologies, and dates. Because of this overlap of subjects, it can be difficult to assign fragments to specific works, but this may reflect the interests of the excerptors as much as or even more than the authors, as Clarke recognizes. Chronographers, she suggests, attempted to reconcile different systems of dating - Olympiads, regnal dates, and Athenian archons, among others - as they dated events across the Mediterranean (Greece, Rome, and beyond), throughout the centuries (as early as pre-Trojan War), and for different cultures and religions (Jewish, Christian, and others). There was even a competitive element among chronographers to fix dates on everything.

Clarke begins Chapter 3 with Thucydides' efforts to provide a synchronized dating for events, then examines Ephorus' universal history as an example of the opposite of local histories. Although recognizing that there is not enough evidence from the fragments to be sure, she theorizes about how Ephorus might have organized space and time. After a brief sketch of the development of Olympiads as a dating system and Polybius' methods of dating, Clarke turns to Diodorus Siculus and Strabo. Clarke notes that, unlike Ephorus, Diodorus includes the mythical era and makes only vague references to generations and the Trojan War for dates during it; for the historical era, time dominates space, as Diodorus combines Olympiads and the eponymous officials of Athens and Rome to date events, depending on an annalistic structure. In contrast to Diodorus, Strabo gives precedence to space over time and shows little interest in chronology. For Strabo, the Trojan War is not only a chronological marker but also a turning point in geography. Greek studies of non-Greek cities and civilizations, especially Etruria, Rome, Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, and India, close the chapter. Such studies seem to be a mix of timeless ethnography and chronologically structured histories, perhaps reflecting sources.

With Chapter 4, Clarke begins anew, focusing on local histories against the background of chronography and universal histories sketched in Chapters 1-3. She surveys the scholarship, especially Jacoby and those who respond to him. For her, local history is perhaps a reaction to universal history, not always written by a local and preserved orally rather than in writing, and with elements of lyric poetry. Among the vast numbers of local histories, there is a consistent interest in the mythological past, particularly of foundation tales, though the mythological and historical eras are often confused. Just as in universal histories, in local histories, there are many ways to date an event - by generations, reigns, dynasties, and magistrates. Athenian months are used to date events by local historians of cities other than Athens, though Olympiads are not often used. There is a surprising overlap between local histories and public documents such as the Parian Marble. According to Clarke, the histories of Sicily (especially by Timaeus) and Athens stand out from other local histories, but she does not state clearly why: it may be that they are different in quality from other local histories or that they simply are different in quantity, that more of Sicilica and Atthides survive.

In Chapter 5, Clarke turns to the Athenian orators, comparing their versions of the past to those of local historians and speculating on the reactions of the audience to these narratives. She distinguishes between two aspects of the past, that which is generally accepted and that used by an orator to inspire his audience to vote as he wishes. In Athens, mythical history is generally much more a part of historiography than of oratory: Demosthenes and Aeschines both make greater use of the recent past (back to the Persian Wars), while only Isocrates uses the distant past, especially the Trojan War, early Athenian history, and Heracles. This may reflect the epideictic nature of Isocrates' work. Orators draw on epic, lyric, and tragic poetry, inscriptions, and rituals as links between the past and the present to inspire their audience to emulate their ancestors.

Chapter 6 contains some of Clarke's most stimulating juxtapositions. She opens by comparing the annalistic format of local history with the episodic sense of the past in the epitaphios and visual arts. Then she studies how poleis use the past in inter-polis arguments (Rhodes vs. Priene, for example) and in intra-polis struggles. Public inscriptions display history, as revealed by the Lindian Chronicle and the Parian Marble, and honor historians for their role in creating a city's past. Historians have a role which can overlap both orators and poets; some of the honorific inscriptions for these historians are in verse. The evidence for itinerant historians continues throughout the Roman empire, offering a balance to the centrifugal force of links to the emperor in the center; there may even have been a loosely formed corps of diplomat-historians who traveled from city to city, performing each one's past.

Clarke has written a book which is rich in ideas, evidence, and connections between authors, times, and places. Her mastery of an extraordinary amount of material enables her to see patterns and to suggest links which have not been seen before. In particular, her discussion of the qualities which poets and historians, poems and histories, share is valuable; I was only surprised that she did not cite Aristotle's comment about the difference between an historian and a poet - it is not one of metre and prose, but of what might have happened and what did happen (Poetics chapter 9). I would also be curious to know whether she sees any differences between the uses of calendars in sanctuaries, especially the Panhellenic ones, and cities. Because of the breadth of material, it can sometimes be difficult to follow Clarke's points and I would have preferred longer discussions of fewer examples, rather than the reverse. This is, however, a book to which I will return again and again as I study the Greek understanding and creation of their past.

Carolyn Higbie