| Book Review | The American Historical Review, .

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Book Review

Europe: Ancient and Medieval

Leslie Kurke. Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1999. Pp. xxi, 384. Cloth $65.00, paper $29.95.

The advent of coinage in the Greek world is now attracting much belated attention from classicists and ancient historians. This excellent book provides a new approach to the subject, which is both scholarly and eminently accessible. It is not Leslie Kurke's purpose to enter the debate about the date and circumstances of the appearance of coins in Greece, although she does provide a useful review of current theories that analyze the spread of coinage between the late seventh and mid-sixth centuries B.C.E. Kurke is concerned rather with the symbolic and social orders within which Greek coins functioned in their first 100 to 150 years and with their relationship to the wider historical forces at work in the archaic city-state, or polis. 1

Kurke's book is lucidly and coherently written. Its overall and complex argument is previewed with great clarity in the introduction, while the separate parts of the argument are summarized in the conclusion to each of her subsequent chapters. Shorter routes into individual areas of discussion have also been made available, for Kurke has succeeded in her aim of producing a book that both stands as a whole and also functions as a "constellation of free-standing essays grouped around related issues" (p. 37). You do not have to read this work in its entirety, but having sampled some of its chapters you may well want to explore further. . . .

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