[Authors and titles are linked at the end of the review]
The collection Épire et Illyrie méridionale dans l’Antiquité. Opera Selecta, edited by Cabanes’ student François Quantin, gathers into four volumes and nearly 1800 pages 99 studies from the extensive work of Pierre Cabanes (1930–2023), thereby making accessible an oeuvre published over several decades in numerous journals and edited volumes. The edition, planned together with Cabanes and completed after his death, arranges the contributions thematically and is framed by a biographical preface by Quantin and a personal afterword by Miltiades Hatzopoulos. A complete bibliography facilitates an overview of the development of his scholarship.
Cabanes’ academic career began with his dissertation L’Épire de la mort de Pyrrhos à la conquête romaine (272–167 av. J.C.), supervised by Pierre Lévêque and published in 1976. The region treated there—long regarded as a “border zone” of the Greek world—would remain at the center of his work. Cabanes was an explorer of margins, a scholar who shifted the boundaries of the canonized geographic imagination of Classical archaeology and ancient history, and who drew new understandings of the center from the so-called peripheries. His scholarly biography is closely tied to world-political developments: the foreign-policy shift in Albania after Enver Hoxha’s break with China in 1978 opened, for the first time in decades, a space for cautious international cooperation. In this historical moment, pioneers such as Cabanes (and, on the German side, Guntram Koch), working together with Albanian colleagues, succeeded in bringing into international scholarly view archaeological resources that had until then been almost inaccessible. At the same time, scholars in Greece continued to reassess the historical importance of Epirus and Macedonia—an effort particularly associated with the names Sotirios Dakaris and Miltiades Hatzopoulos. This produced a rare and productive convergence of scholarly curiosity, historiographical reorientation, and geopolitical circumstance.
That a collection such as the Opera Selecta is necessary and justified lies not only in the dispersal of the original publications and the limited accessibility of some of them, but above all in the fact that Cabanes’ work has lost none of its relevance. His writings range from excavation reports and epigraphic and prosopographical detail to large-scale syntheses that conceptualize Epirus and Illyria not as isolated territories, but as nodal points of mobility, exchange, and political formation. As Hatzopoulos emphasizes in his deeply personal afterword, Cabanes played a decisive role in bringing the northwestern Greek landscapes out of the periphery and into the field of vision of classical scholarship—not as marginal zones, but as integral parts of the ancient Greek world.
The collection is organized into four major thematic sections, each introduced by students and colleagues.
I. Géographie historique et culturelle: genres de vie et organisation de l’espace
The first section addresses how the northwestern Greek and southern Illyrian region was structured, used, and politically organized in antiquity. Cabanes’ interest is directed not only toward topographical facts, but also toward the ways in which space was conceived politically and socially: settlement patterns, communications networks, boundary formations, defensive systems, and the relations between mountain regions and coastal cities. Characteristic is his refusal to treat landscape as a static backdrop; instead, it appears as an active factor in social and political development. These studies form the foundation in which his later work on society and governance is rooted: they show Epirus and southern Illyria not as peripheral regions, but as historically coherent spaces with their own forms of organization.
II. La société: la vie collective des communautés, de la famille à l’état
The second and by far most extensive part of the Opera Selecta constitutes the core of Cabanes’ work: the study of the social foundations of political life in the northwestern Greek world. His investigations into family, neighborhood, slavery, village community, city, and larger, loosely organized alliances show that, for Cabanes, history does not begin with ruling dynasties, military campaigns, or diplomatic decisions, but with those elementary forms of life in which belonging is constituted, labor shared, and political obligation made conceivable.
It is in these studies that the lasting value of Cabanes’ contribution becomes clearest. He did not merely “open new territory”; he demonstrated that the history of the polis cannot be understood through its most famous examples alone, but must be approached from its borders and transitional zones. In Epirus and southern Illyria, political order emerges from real social ties rather than from abstract institutional models. This perspective corrects a century of Athenocentric scholarship and opens the view toward a Greek history that is not homogeneous but historically diverse in its development. The significance of this approach becomes particularly clear in specific case studies.
A particularly instructive example is Bouthrotos. The manumission inscriptions preserved there show how closely personal dependence, familial belonging, and civic publicity were intertwined. Manumission does not take place in a private context but before the community; it is not merely an individual act but a social process publicly acknowledged. Cabanes repeatedly emphasized that such documents are not marginal, but are key to understanding the political culture of the western Greek world: they show how authority, law, and community take shape through the public articulation of personal relationships.
A second example is the Chaonian social order. Here it becomes clear that political form does not grow out of urban centralization, but out of a system of local aristocracies whose interaction rests not on abstract institutions but on lineage, prestige, and the ability to mediate. Cabanes demonstrated that the Chaonian leadership class does not represent a feudal peculiarity, but an alternative path of Greek state formation. The history of the polis is not one-dimensional; it has multiple trajectories.
A third, fundamental example is the organization of the Molossian koinon. Here the transition from kinship-based loyalty to territorial community and thus to a form of supra-local political organization can be observed. Cabanes showed that the Molossian king did not function as an autocratic ruler, but as mediator and guarantor of balance. Political authority arises from the ability to absorb and resolve tensions within recognized legal forms. The significance of this becomes clear when one considers that Cabanes interprets political developments in the Adriatic and Balkan region not as sequences of external events but as the result of deep social structures.
III. Une histoire balkanique et méditerranéenne
In this section, Cabanes broadens the horizon to the larger historical context in which Epirus and southern Illyria are situated: colonization and migration, Greek–Illyrian relations, the role of Macedonian and Epirote kingship, and ultimately Roman expansion along the Adriatic coast. The significance of these studies lies in the fact that they do not reason from political centers outward, but from points of contact, transition, and negotiation. The Adriatic appears not as a peripheral boundary of the Greek world, but as a dynamic zone of interaction and movement. The political formations of the western Greek world emerge as historically coherent forms of Greek political life.
IV. L’antiquité contemporaine
The fourth section addresses the conditions of research, excavation practice, and the management of archaeological heritage since the nineteenth century. Here Cabanes appears as a historian of scholarship itself. Of particular importance is his account of Albanian archaeology in the twentieth century, its political frameworks, and its methodological development. At the same time, the complex relationship between scholarly work and national identity formation becomes clear. This section shows that Cabanes understood the history of Epirus and southern Illyria not as concluded, but as a continuing field of negotiation over how the past is administered, interpreted, and made public. It highlights that archaeology is always conditioned by intellectual climate, political openness, and scholarly ethos.
The structure of the four volumes makes clear that the edition is not a simple compilation of scattered articles, but a deliberately constructed scholarly instrument. Its organization follows the internal architecture of Cabanes’ work: first the space in which history unfolds; then the social forms that shape that space; then the political and cultural processes that link it to the wider Mediterranean; and finally the conditions under which such knowledge is produced. This sequence reflects Cabanes’ central conviction that the Adriatic–Balkan region is not external to Greek history but belongs to its historical core. For contemporary scholarship this has two consequences. First, it places the political and cultural developments of western and northwestern Greece on a solid, well-documented foundation. Second, it makes visible the conditions under which historical spaces can be studied at all: the cultivation of scholarly relationships, patience in working with difficult materials, and the willingness to engage local intellectual traditions.
The editorial presentation of the volumes is clear and purposeful. The articles are reproduced in facsimile, preserving their original layout, and the thematic organization and bibliography offer reliable orientation across a dispersed corpus. The edition removes the practical obstacle posed by the physical separation of the original publications and provides a stable point of reference for future research on Epirus, southern Illyria, and the wider western Greek world. Its achievement lies not in presenting new theses, but in making an influential body of scholarship accessible in a coherent and usable form. It allows one to return, with clarity and composure, to research that has shaped the field for decades and will continue to do so.