Based on a
search, it doesn't look like anyone has discussed Josiah Oier's The Rise and Fall of Classical
Greece on the
forum. I am only about one third of the way through it, but it seems like the sort of thing that would interest many here.
The book is economic
history and (so far) not much concerned with who went marching where with 1,000 peltasts from Somewhere, but it reads easily for such a dense subject. There are lots of charts and the backing data (kind of hard to interpreted on a Kindle) that will look familiar to students of social science. In short, he is trying to quantify the most recent and best understanding of the archeological evidence. I say this as a non-specialist, but it will probably
help if you somewhat enjoyed statistics.
If the you want to know more about the relative wheat-wage paid between different Greek cities and what that said about their relative level of economic well-being as contrasted with... the Hanseatic League or palace-centered economies, then this is the book for you.
He builds a very persuasive case for Classical
Greece as a place with historically anomalous levels of both urbanization and wide spread prosperity.
There is a potion of the book where he uses social
insects like bees as an analogy for human behavior at the macro
scale. I fundamentally find this observation to be very useful, but it rankles some.
TRAFOCG is adding a lot of depth to my limited but expanding appreciation of classical and pre-modern economics.
Worth the read if that sort of thing appeals to you. Advanced but rewarding.
https://www.amazon.com/Classical-Greece-Princeton-History-Ancient/dp/0691173141
