The Inscriptions of Dodona and a New History of Molossia. By Elizabeth A. Meyer. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2013. Pp. 201.

Abstract

The conventional history of Molossia in the fourth and third centuries, as told above all by Peter Franke, N. G. L. Hammond, and Pierre Cabanes, is a history of rapid institutional change marking the development of a highly unusual state-a hybrid of monarchy and federalism. 1 A relatively typical northwestern monarchy, in the hands of the Aeacid dynasty, was transformed circa 400 BCE into a koinon, some form of representative government encompassing multiple cities and ethnē, following the Molossian seizure of the sanctuary of Zeus at Dodona, which had previously been in the hands of the Thesprotians living to the west of the sanctuary. This state expanded significantly in the mid-fourth century by making territorial acquisitions and granting these new populations representation in the Molossian state. Following the death of the Molossian king Alexander I in 331/0, the state expanded further, now incorporating all of Thesprotia, and renamed itself accordingly: "Apeiros," or "those of the Epirotes who are allied." This new Epirote state was governed by a robust constitution that imposed narrow confines around the activities of their kings, including the remarkably active Pyrrhus and his son Alexander II. The state of Apeiros was transformed yet again in 232 BCE by the death of the last member of the Aeacid dynasty. The Epirotes now fully embraced federalism in a form that was relatively standard for third-century Greece and proceeded without a monarch, but their long-standing alliance with the Macedonians eventually led the Epirotes to clash with the Romans, resulting in the defeat at Pydna and the complete desolation of the region at the hands of Aemilius Paullus in 167. Elizabeth A. Meyer offers us a new history of the Molossian state to 232, arguing that "the Molossians" and the "koinon of the Molossians" appearing in official documents before that date represent "a self-identifying community rather than. .. a constitutional entity" (p. 78). This community and the Aeacid kings remained in partnership with one another until the end of the dynasty in 232, but the kings were the sovereign rulers of the state. This new history is based above all on a critical reappraisal of the dating of the inscriptions from Dodona, which has in the past been done primarily, if not exclusively, on the basis of letter forms. But M. notes that because of the variety of media (stone and bronze) used at Dodona, and the variety of incising techniques even on a single medium (pointillé and repoussé), "linear dating by letter-form, if rigidly applied. .. and if applied without taking the medium of the inscription into account, leads only to hopeless confusion" (p. 29). Instead, M. compares letter forms in the same medium and incising