"The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World"

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Well, I wanted to like this book. How many Marxist analyses are there of Antiquity anyhow (apart from Perry Anderson's)?

But G.E.M. de Ste. Croix lost his credibility for me when he defined women as a class in the Marxist sense - because of their role in the reproduction of human beings and their subordination to men in this regard. He admits that he is 'correcting' Marx and Engels in taking this foolish step.

The author was a classics magpie. He had spent a lifetime reading the Greek and Latin source texts and had a beyond-encyclopedic knowledge of even the most obscure manuscripts. The material is overwhelming in its fine-grained detail - and consequently unreadable unless you are a specialist-scholar. In the latter case, you are likely to be as unimpressed by the superficiality of his repetitive analysis as you are overwhelmed by his dense, fine-grained historical accounts and endless quotations

I think it would be wiser to stick to Perry Anderson's far superior "Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism" and "Lineages of the Absolutist State".