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(C.) Tuplin Ed. Xenophon and his World. Papers from a Conference held in Liverpool in July 1999 . ( Historia Einzelschriften 172). Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 2004. Pp. 524, illus. €84. 3515083928.

In this sprawling, high-powered book, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins uses a critique of Thucydides' History to advocate what he calls an 'anthropological historiography'. Apologies to Thucydides comprises three chapters. Ch.l (The Polynesian War') rehearses the view of Thucydides as the inventor of rational history premised on the concept of a universal human nature. S. then forges a superficial analogy between the Peloponnesian War and the 'Polynesian War' between the Fijian kingdoms of Bau and Rewa (AD 1843-55), using the cultural particularities of the latter conflict to show how different an anthropological history of the Peloponnesian War would look. Ironically, S.'s antihistorical analogy between the Peloponnesian War and the Polynesian War, which plays loose with terms such as arche and polis, exhibits the very universalizing tendencies that he criticizes in Thucydides. As a reaction against the understanding of historical agency that S. finds in Thucydides, ch.2 ('Culture and agency in history') explores the interplay between collectivities and individuals in history. This is achieved by splicing a discussion of different models of historical change (cleverly illustrated by examples from the history of baseball) with a study of the political crisis that arose in Miami in 1999 in response to the question of the Cuban Elian Gonzalez's right to asylum in the US. Finally, in ch.3 (The culture of an assassination'), S. analyses the causes and ramifications of the assassination of the Bauan chief Ratu Raivalita in August 1845 as an example of how historical contingencies are determined by the cultural order in which they occur.