THE CLASSICAL REVIEW

In 1988 Jean Bousquet published an extraordinary inscription from Xanthus in Lycia. Ambassadors from Cytenium in mainland Greece had approached this distant city to raise money for the reconstruction of their own city's walls. The inscription preserves the elaborate mythological arguments used by the Cytenian ambassadors as they sought to demonstrate to the Xanthians that their two peoples were related (REG 101, 12-53). That arguments based on kinship, whether mythical or historical, were part of the Greek diplomatic repertoire was no new discovery, but this inscription was a revelation in its detail. Its publication drew attention to the need for a substantial study of the r6le of kinship in ancient diplomacy. Louis Robert had long promised such a book, but only with his death have others dared to trespass on his territory. First there was 0. Curty, Les parentes legendaires entre cites grecques (Geneva, 1995), and the discussions that it provoked (notably from A. Giovannini, S. Hornblower, and E. Will). Now follows Jones's study, S. Lucke's Syngeneia. epigraphisch-historische Studien zu einem Phdnomen der antiken griechischen Diplomatie (Frankfurt, 2000), and my own contribution, Troy between Greece and Rome: Local Tradition and Imperial Power (Oxford, forthcoming). J. has written a short, rather dense, book, which incorporates numerous examples of kinship diplomacy within a laconic survey of Greek and Roman history from the time of Homer through to late antiquity. The book is as much about the changing nature of ancient diplomacy as it is about the r6ole of kinship in diplomatic exchanges. As political conditions change, so the practices and objectives of diplomacy also change. Thus, argues J., the instability of the Hellenistic world led cities to use diplomacy in the pursuit of self-preservation (pp. 58-63 on the spate of diplomatic activity at the end of the second century B.C. bring out vividly the sense of crisis), whereas in the more stable environment of the Roman empire cities directed their diplomatic activities towards the search for prestige. Diplomacy itself gradually came to lose its importance as power came to be increasingly in the hands of individuals rather than communities. Much of the evidence for the use of kinship in diplomacy stems from the Hellenistic period, declining under the Roman empire, though not disappearing. J. is, however, not only concerned with change; he also explores the way in which kinship is used to establish links with non-Greeks. This is in fact 'one of the main functions of kinship diplomacy' (p. 16), as common ancestry draws in those on the margins of the Greek world, hence the space that J. devotes to the Macedonians, Epirotes, Lycians, Jews, and, of course, the Romans. J. is in danger here of understating the importance of kinship in exchanges between Greeks. Nonetheless, this Greek willingness to embrace such peoples within their kinship networks helps call into question the supposed exclusivity of the Greeks. J. tends to like brevity; the text is short, the notes concise, the bibliography select. This does not always help clarity. The Trojan ancestry of the Romans is an important theme in the book, but J.'s interpretation of it is at times obscure. Much of Chapter VII seems to assume that Trojan ancestry would have prejudiced the Greeks against the Romans (cf. pp. 84, 86); the absence of any clear explanation for this is frustrating, especially as on p. 88 the prejudice is apparently overcome. In the same chapter the unwary reader might think that Polybius tells us of the Trojan past of Eryx or Segesta