Bodies, bodies everywhere; bodies that attract desire, disgust, anger, curiosity and, recently, the attention of academics in a host of different disciplines. Andrew Stewart’s compelling, lucid and handsomely illustrated Art, Desire, and the Body in Ancient Greece is part of this trend; it argues that we need to examine freshly countless bodies—from the supremely beautiful to the monstrous and deformed—depicted during Greece’s archaic and classical periods (eighth to fourth century B.C.).

Stewart takes as his starting point the “Greek infatuation with the human body,” which he proposes to elucidate by combining recent critical methodologies with close readings of the images themselves. Stewart does not reject what he calls the older “archaeological” approach to art criticism, with its focus on questions of provenance, date and attribution; rather, he wants to include it within a more holistic account, one willing to address the function and meaning of artworks and to ask, above all, how ancient viewers responded to them. For example, in analyzing the naked young girls fashioned in bronze to serve as mirror handles in Sparta, Stewart attempts to imagine the experience of the aging woman who gazed into the mirror’s polished surface as she held the still nubile form in her hand.

What informs Stewart’s readings at every turn is his belief that images should be treated as “utterances” that demand some kind of response from the viewer. In his account, very many (for some readers, perhaps too many) of these images are objects of desire, explicitly designed to attract the viewer’s gaze, to engage the viewer erotically and to set up a charged relationship between art object and audience. Stewart portrays the act of looking as something like a courtship; the viewer attempts to place himself in an amorous relationship with the body on display, whether as a narcissist who projects himself into the scene, a voyeur who takes pleasure in watching the act while remaining unseen, or a fetishist who perhaps delights in the muscles of Polykleitos’s body-builder-like Doryphoros. Stewart argues, for example, that the youthful, naked male so prominent in Greek works of art is an invitation to the “ideal viewer”—the adult male citizen—to see in the painted or sculpted body a potential beloved (eromenos). We should gaze at the riders who adorn the Parthenon frieze, fall in love with them, quite literally, and wish to make them our own. But part of the “charge” in the relationship between object and viewer has to do with the fact that this desire, once aroused by a statue or vase, is immediately rendered problematic. A statue of a youth (kouros), so alluring in its marble radiance, overlooks the man who tries to catch its eye; and the fair-bodied Harmodios and Aristogeiton advance on the desiring spectator as though the viewer were a second tyrant whom these famous Tyrannicides would slay.

Nor are the images of women any less appealing or any less fraught with danger—whether depicted half-clad, in diaphanous garments, or nude. One marble maiden, a kore, pulls her robe tightly across her body, the better to reveal the forms beneath, and Praxiteles’ notorious Aphrodite Knidia so powerfully emanates sexuality and desirability that one impassioned viewer supposedly tried to make love to the flawless form, and killed himself when he failed to achieve his end.

Central to Stewart’s argument concerning the eroticization of the viewer’s gaze is his focus on the techne or “facture” (“material-plus-technique-plus-skill”) of a work of art. This is a necessary reminder that metal, stone, clay and paint are themselves sensuous objects with the power to attract and engage the viewer’s eye, holding him enthralled no less than does the living body. “A series of tales,” he writes, “show how the Greeks believed that desire and the eroticized glance were built into the artwork from the very start, but that its very materiality, its inescapable otherness, ultimately frustrates what it began by encouraging.”

If Greek viewers did not surrender to the illusion that an artistic image is a living being, contemporaneous texts suggest that the distance between the two wasn’t always so wide. In fifth-century B.C. drama, lovers sometimes liken the objects of their passion to sculpted monuments: In Euripides’ Andromeda, the beautiful damsel in distress about to be devoured by a sea monster looks like a statue in the amorous eyes of Perseus, her rescuer. More intriguing is Pandora, the very first mortal woman, whom the gods mold like a vase and then decorate as if she were the statue of a goddess. Why would Zeus decide to create the irresistibly beautiful and alluring Pandora not as a human but as an animated piece of craftsmanship?

Stewart introduces another major concern: the body in its social and political context. Here perhaps lies the book’s greatest originality, as the author attempts to situate ancient Greek vases, statues and monuments within an evolving historical landscape. The kouroi have often been interpreted as expressions of the values of a social elite, embodying the moral and physical excellence that those who raised the statues claimed for themselves. But Stewart goes further; to him, the many marble youths erected in Attica are better understood as expressing the status anxieties of a privileged minority feeling the ground slipping away from under its feet. Polykleitos’s famous statue of the Doryphoros (spearbearer) thus acquires fresh significance in Stewart’s hands: He interprets the statue as articulating the loneliness and fear of a Greek infantryman on the verge of battle. Or again, the proliferation of representations of Amazons in the fifth century B.C. makes sense when linked to Pericles’ citizenship law of 451 B.C. Like the new law, these painted maiden warriors may have served to express Athenian anxieties about their own unmarried girls, who risked being passed over in favor of the daughters of the city’s foreign population.

In these and other conjectures, Stewart abides by the notion that works of art are not straightforward expressions or reflections of an external reality; rather, as any present-day advertiser or political propagandist knows, they help to construct that reality, to shape perceptions and experiences. Because we internalize the messages they broadcast, images are prescriptive, too, and nowhere more so than in fifth-century B.C. Athens, where Pericles and others used them as statements of a developing civic ideology. Whether designed to educate the citizen in his duties, or merely to titillate the diner as he reclined with his wine cup in hand, the paintings and statues featured in this book emerge as objects that have a powerful impact on their viewers’ bodies and psyches.

By emphasizing this performative aspect of Greek works of art, their power to do things to their audience, Stewart not only succeeds in making the overly familiar seem potent and strange but invites us to revisit the galleries where these images now stand—and to take a second look.

History does repeat itself, quipped Karl Marx—the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

That is the comic answer to the question, Why do we need economic studies of ancient civilizations? The serious answer is that to know ourselves means to know what preceded us. Two of the greatest sociopolitical thinkers of the last two centuries, Marx and Max Weber, felt the need to present a detailed picture of the ancient economy, primarily to act as a foil for their theories about the rise of modern capitalism.

But both Marx and Weber based their analyses of the ancient economy on evidence from Greece and Rome. In their days, material from Mesopotamia and Egypt was so poorly understood that it could not be used to reconstruct their economic systems. In this century, however, the amount of data from the ancient Near East has grown considerably; still, no major theories about the ancient economy have been inspired by this evidence. Models based on Greco-Roman material have been applied wholesale to the ancient Near East.

This has happened even though the evidence from the ancient Near East is more extensive than that from Greece and Rome. Economic historians of ancient Greece are largely limited to allusions in texts concerning politics and society. Until the Hellenistic and Roman papyri from Egypt appear, virtually no receipts, contracts or direct records of an economic act are known. The Mesopotamian material, on the other hand, is much richer. Although it does not provide any precepts concerning economic behavior—like Cato’s maxim, “A paterfamilias should be a seller, not a buyer” (De agricultura 2.7)—it does include numerous sale documents. Indeed, cuneiform writing was developed for recording economic transactions, and most of the preserved tablets are economic documents. This is not to say that ancient Greek and Roman societies functioned without such records; they are simply rarely preserved, as the papyrus and parchment on which they were written have decayed in the humid climates of Greece and Italy.

So far, the ancient Near Eastern material has only been used as evidence for or against economic theories based on Greco-Roman sources. This is partly due to the ignorance of historians about ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian sources. The thousands of records cannot be fully comprehended by anyone who is not familiar with the Sumerian, Akkadian and Egyptian languages and systems of measurement. Ancient Near Eastern scholars have, unfortunately, often been bogged down in the minutiae of philological research, without making the material available to a general audience. An economic history of the ancient Near East, by a Mesopotamian scholar or an Egyptologist, has never been written.

Until now. Daniel Snell’s Life in the Ancient Near East is a first: a comprehensive history of the economic and social practices of the Near East from prehistory to the fourth-century B.C. conquest of the region by Alexander the Great.

In a work of this nature, the author has to make many choices: how to delimit the time frame of the study, how to present the evidence and how to control the massive amount of available material. Because Snell relies primarily on written data, he gives only a summary treatment to prehistory; the real beginning of the book comes with the appearance of Sumerian writing in the late fourth millennium B.C. Snell justifies his endpoint not by the Greek conquest of the area but by an aspect of intellectual history, what the 20th-century philosopher Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age.” To Jaspers, around 500 B.C. fundamental changes in intellectual attitudes occurred from classical Greece to Israel, Persia, India and China—the ancient world, so to speak, turned on its axis. Earlier beliefs, primarily concerned with divine will and its explication, were discarded and more self-conscious modes of thought began to prevail. Mesopotamia and Egypt did not experience this intellectual revolution, and Snell seems to suggest that they were left behind in a fast-developing world. Whatever the merits of the Axial Age concept, it does not tell us much about socioeconomic history: Plato’s philosophy had no repercussions on Greek economic life, as far as I can see. The crucial change after the Greek conquest, for Mesopotamian scholars, is that the textual record gradually disappears because Greek administrators preferred writing on parchment, a material that does not survive as long as clay tablets.

No scholar can write such an economic history, or any history, without taking some philosophical stance regarding the nature of ancient societies. One major asset of this book is the appendix on “Theories of Ancient Economies and Societies,” in which Snell outlines the importance of Marx and Weber and their influence on later theorists. Snell focuses primarily on trade rather than on production or consumption. His emphasis on economic exchange places him within the group of scholars who consider it possible to study ancient economies with the tools neo-classical economic theories use to study modern capitalist societies. Another stance would lead to a quite different economic history.

In deciding what to include in his book, Snell sorted through an immense body of secondary literature, in a large variety of languages—as is clear from the lengthy and numerous footnotes (the book contains 160 pages of text, followed by 60 pages of notes and a 40-page bibliography). We are thus presented with a gold mine of information about ancient socioeconomic conditions.

Snell has done something unprecedented in a scholarly book in this discipline: Each chapter is introduced by a “tableau vivant”—for example, a little story of a Babylonian man petitioning his king to be released from his debts. Many of my colleagues will frown at this as pure fiction, but I found several of them entertaining. They demonstrate that we are dealing with real people, something we sometimes forget. Part of the fun of this scholarly discipline is that we can use our imagination to make men and woman long dead familiar to us. Snell’s book, consistently thorough and systematic, is of invaluable use for information about our ancient Near Eastern predecessors. Now no one interested in ancient economies can claim that the material is inaccessible.