"By incorporating some of the key turns in the field of ancient history over the last thirty years--spatial, temporal, global, and local, as well as the move towards network based explanations--Beck has produced an important history that reads quite differently from the narrative familiar to many. He emphasizes the local not merely as a category of analysis but as a source of conflicting, resistant, alternative modes of discourse that added immeasurably to the richness of archaic and classical culture."--Jeremy McInerney, author of Ancient Greece: A New History "In creating a compelling case for the importance of the local, Beck provides a much-needed corrective to a scholarly orthodoxy that has underestimated the importance of place. Throughout, Beck displays a dazzling virtuosity with regard to his command of the scholarship and his ability to mesh literary sources--many of them drawn from relatively obscure and fragmentary authors--with numismatics, visual imagery, pottery styles, landscape archaeology, and archaeological field survey. It will certainly add a fresh new voice to the ongoing debate about connectivity."--Jonathan Hall, author of Artifact and Artifice: Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian