The gymnasium in Greece from the Hellenistic Period to late antiquity

sec.d.C., published in the Studia Archaeologica series, is a revised and updated version of the author's doctoral dissertation at the University of Venice.The book addresses a field with a long scholarly tradition: ancient Greek education and, more specifically, the gymnasium and the ephebeia, institutions central to the collective education and civic formation of the young in Greek cities.Despite the extensive literature on these subjects, significant gaps remain, particularly concerning the long-term development of the gymnasium as an urban institution and the transformation of its functions under Roman rule.Jean Delorme's foundational study established the principal historical and typological framework for the study of the Greek gymnasium, while more recent work, notably by Miltiades B. Hatzopoulos, Nigel M. Kennell, Andrzej S. Chankowski, and Christopher de Lisle, has substantially revised our understanding of the ephebeia.1 What has remained lacking, however, is a sustained examination, focused specifically on Greece, of both the institutional development of the ephebeia and the changing architectural settings in which its activities took place from the late Hellenistic to the later Imperial period.D.B.'s principal contribution lies precisely in this shift of perspective.Rather than concentrating on the origins, typology, and classical functions of the gymnasium, she examines its adaptation and transformation under Roman rule and, ultimately, the decline of the institution and the abandonment of its traditional architectural settings.Her study focuses on the cities of the Roman province of Achaea and asks how the gymnasium was accommodated within the changing social, political, and cultural environment of Greek cities after the Roman conquest.This institutional perspective is one of the book's principal strengths.The gymnasium is treated not merely as an architectural type but as an urban institution whose functions were bound up with changing conceptions of education,