From the Pillars of Hercules to the Footsteps of the Argonauts

This volume, containing 16 chapters in English and French, is dedicated to Jean-Paul Morel. It is in two parts: 'Greeks and Celts in Provence and Languedoc before Roman Rule' and 'From Etruria to the Black Sea'. The first part, on Greeks and Celts in southern France, demonstrates the vitality of archaeological research and the new discoveries and new methodological approaches it has fostered: excavations and surveys, geomorphological and paleo-environmental studies have shed new light on the evolution of indegenous cultures and relations between Celtic communities, Greeks and others, studied in their geographical and historical contexts. Massalia's domination of the coast began in the Archaic period but was firmly established only three centuries later, after the Second Punic War. Old theories of a general and regular Hellenisation of the whole region must be discarded once the complexity of relations between Celts, Greeks, Etruscans and Ibero-Punic communities is brought into focus. The second part looks at Demaratus of Corinth and the Hellenisation of Etruria, recent research at Apollonia Pontica, the urbanism of Histria, the prosopography of the Greek cities and native peoples of the northern Black Sea, and various scenes depicted on pottery, their interpretation, and the interpretation of pottery itself. The book is amply illustrated.