Greek federal organisations have attracted less scholarly attention than Greek cities, but they deserve more attention, and Dr. Rzepka makes an important contribution to the subject in this book. As nobody has done before, he focuses particularly on the language used by and with reference to the federations’ institutions, and shows how the Greeks developed ways of thinking and writing about federal organisations as well as about cities.

Dr. Rzepka studies the words used of federations, particularly koinon (community) and ethnos (tribe); representative councils (most often called synhedrion though sometimes boule as in cities); enactments by the assemblies (usually attributed to the koinon, though in Boeotia to the demos, as often in cities); the use of one or more strategoi as principal officers; collaborative language, particularly favoured by Polybius but not originated by him, which made particular use of compounds with syn- (‘together’) and with koino-; the vocabulary of shared citizenship (isopoliteia, sympoliteia, synteleia), and the terms used when a new member was attached to an existing federation; and the ways in which citizens of a federation identified themselves with reference to their individual city and / or their federation. In an epilogue he looks at the survival of federations and federal language under Roman rule.

P.J. Rhodes

Jacek Rzepka, Greek Federal Terminology (Akanthina Monographs 13), Gdańsk 2017, s. 110.