Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History
by Sarah Pomeroy, Stanley Burstein, Walter Donlan, Jennifer Roberts

Written by four leading authorities on the classical world, here is a new history of ancient Greece that dynamically presents a generation of new scholarship on the birthplace of Western civilization.

Ranging from Greece's first beginnings in the Bronze Age through the tumultuous Hellenistic era dominated by Alexander the Great, this volume offers a truly wide-ranging portrait, blending the traditional political and military approach with a more modern accent on social and cultural history. Everything is included here--the sweeping philosophical systems of Plato and Aristotle, the daily lives of women in Athens, dramatic sea battles in the Aegean, the epic poetry of Homer, the rise of the city-state. The book offers illuminating descriptions of Sparta and Athens, recounts the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, evaluates the contributions of notable figures such as Solon, Cleisthenes, Pericles, and Philip II of Macedon, and discusses the remarkable rise of Alexander the Great. Throughout the book, the editors trace the slow evolution of Greek culture, revealing how the early Greeks borrowed from their neighbors, but eventually developed a distinctive culture of their own, marked by astonishing creativity, versatility, and resilience.

Featuring 17 original maps, over 80 photographs, and numerous "document boxes" which highlight a variety of primary source material, this book provides an account of the Greek world that is thoughtful and sophisticated while remaining accessible to the nonscholar. A dynamic collaboration between four renowned scholars Sarah Pomeroy, Stanley M. Burstein, Walter Donlan, and Jennifer Tolbert Roberts it is the definitive portrait of the fountainhead of Western philosophy, literature, science, and art.

Problems in Ancient History, Vol. 1

Problems in Ancient History, Vol. 1: The Ancient Near East and Greece
edited by Donald Kagan

Selected ancient sources in translation and modern commentaries provide a survey of major problems in ancient history from Sumeria to the late Roman Empire and offer insight into historical methods and techniques.

The Greek Dark Age or Ages (ca. 1200–800 BCE) are terms which have regularly been used to refer to the period of Greek history from the presumed Dorian invasion and end of the Mycenaean Palatial civilization around 1200 BCE, to the first signs of the Greek city-states in the 9th century BCE. These terms are gradually going out of use, since the former lack of archaeological evidence in a period that was mute in its lack of inscriptions (thus "dark") has been shown to be an accident of discovery rather than a fact of history.

The archaeological evidence shows a widespread collapse of Bronze Age civilization in the eastern Mediterranean world at the outset of the period, as the great palaces and cities of the Mycenaeans were destroyed or abandoned.

Around this time, the Hittite civilization suffered serious disruption and cities from Troy to Gaza were destroyed. Following the collapse, fewer and smaller settlements suggest famine and depopulation. In Greece the Linear B writing of the Greek language used by Mycenaean bureaucrats ceases.

The decoration on Greek pottery after c. 1100 BCE lacks the figurative decoration of Mycenaean ware and is restricted to simpler, generally geometric styles. It was previously thought that all contact was lost between mainland Hellenes and foreign powers during this period, yielding little cultural progress or growth; however, artifacts from excavations at Lefkandi on the Lelantine Plain in Euboea show that significant cultural and trade links with the east, particularly the Levant coast, developed from c. 900 BCE onwards, and evidence has emerged of the new presence of Hellenes in sub-Mycenaean Cyprus and on the Syrian coast at Al Mina.

Black Folk Here and There, Vol. 1

Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology, Vol. 1
by St. Clair Drake

Professor Drake's Black Folk Here and There is essential reading for anyone concerned with the history and legacy of slavery and race in the contemporary world. This book provides the best review of the specialized literature on race and slavery, making available a great deal of knowledge heretofore confined to university libraries. St. Clair Drake was one of the deans of Black Studies as well as American Sociology, and he applied that rare background to an analysis and evaluation of modern theories of race and racism. His main targets are the theory of black inferiority and the theory of universal black contemptability. Did every civilization develop racism against "blacks"? In order to challenge that idea presented by some psychologists and historians, including the prize winning Professor Carl Degler, Drake reviews the history of Egypt, Ethiopia, Europe and Christianity in the Middle Ages, slavery and Islam, and the rise of the Atlantic Slave Trade. And he finds that there was no universal contempt for blacks. The evaluation of blacks throughout the ages, depended on their status in various civilizations. The high point of black social and cultural status was in ancient Egypt and Ethiopia as well as during the Middle Ages as revealed in such folklore as Prester John and the Black Madonna. However, with the emergence of the Atlantic slave trade as the modern world took shape, Black Africans took on a distinct ly degraded social and cultural status that was spread by modern communications throughout the world. In terms of encyclopedic knowledge on this subject and hard hitting analysis, Drake's study is unrivaled! As a professor of history, I use it as the best introduction to the global problems of race and racism left behind by modern slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. No one knew this subject or wrote with the scope as did Professor Drake.

"All and Nothing"

"All and Nothing: Reflections on Experience and Transcendence in the Eurasian Axial Age, c. 800-200 BCE"

by Peter Von Sivers

After critically examining the concept of the Axial Age in the writings of Jaspers, Voegelin, and Eisenstadt, the paper examines the specific concepts with which the Axial Age thinkers described their "breakthroughs" to transcendence. On one hand, the thinkers denied that Unity, encountered in the Beyond of transcendence, is intelligible and can be expressed conceptually. On the other hand, they developed detailed analyses of Being (Greece), of the Self (India and China), and of the Personified One (Yahweh in Israel, Ahuramazda in Iran), in which they made transcendence intelligible. They did not resolve the inconsistenies resulting from this two-pronged approach, while in contemporary thought the dichotomies contained in the concept of Unity are considered to be irresolvable.

Poetics

Poetics

by Aristotle

This useful book, an extended study of the Poetics , treats such subjects as Aristotle's general aesthetic views; mimesis; pity, fear, and katharsis; recognition, reversal, and hamartia; tragic misfortune; the nontragic genres; and the historical influence of the work. Aristotle emerges as holding a deeply cognitivist view of poetry and as rejecting the attempt to judge art primarily by external (e.g., moral, political) criteria; his call for the relative autonomy of art, however, neither commits him to an aestheticist view nor prevents him from attributing to art a significant moral dimension.

A War Like No Other

A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

by Victor Davis Hanson

One of our most provocative military historians, Victor Davis Hanson has given us painstakingly researched and pathbreaking accounts of wars ranging from classical antiquity to the twenty-first century. Now he juxtaposes an ancient conflict with our most urgent modern concerns to create his most engrossing work to date, A War Like No Other.

Over the course of a generation, the Hellenic city-states of Athens and Sparta fought a bloody conflict that resulted in the collapse of Athens and the end of its golden age. Thucydides wrote the standard history of the Peloponnesian War, which has given readers throughout the ages a vivid and authoritative narrative. But Hanson offers readers something new: a complete chronological account that reflects the political background of the time, the strategic thinking of the combatants, the misery of battle in multifaceted theaters, and important insight into how these events echo in the present.

Hanson compellingly portrays the ways Athens and Sparta fought on land and sea, in city and countryside, and details their employment of the full scope of conventional and nonconventional tactics, from sieges to targeted assassinations, torture, and terrorism. He also assesses the crucial roles played by warriors such as Pericles and Lysander, artists, among them Aristophanes, and thinkers including Sophocles and Plato.

Hanson's perceptive analysis of events and personalities raises many thought-provoking questions: Were Athens and Sparta like America and Russia, two superpowers battling to the death? Is the Peloponnesian War echoed in the endless, frustrating conflicts of Vietnam, Northern Ireland, and the current Middle East? Or was it more like America's own Civil War, a brutal rift that rent the fabric of a glorious society, or even this century's "red state-blue state" schism between liberals and conservatives, a cultural war that manifestly controls military policies? Hanson daringly brings the facts to life and unearths the often surprising ways in which the past informs the present.