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The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World

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Description

Charles Freeman‘s The Greek Achievement traces all the course of ancient Greek history across thousands of years–from the Mycenaean and Minoan civilizations of the Bronze Age through the Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods. This brilliant account celebrates the improbable range of Greek achievement: the architectural marvels of the Athenian Acropolis; the birth of drama and the timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles; Homer‘s epics; the philosophical revolutions of Plato and Aristotle; and the conquests of Alexander the Great. Lavishly illustrated with photographs and maps, The Greek Achievement paints a sweeping panorama of the ancient Greeks’ world and provides a rich, contemporary overview of their enduring contribution to world civilization.
The idea of an entity called Greece is a modern one, which a Thracian of Homer’s time or an Athenian of the age of Pericles shouldn’t have recognized. Ancient Greek politics was once organized along the lines first of family, then of clan, then of neighborhood, and then in any case of town or city; the concept of nationhood, the existence of a nation called Greece, scarcely entered the discussion.

But if there was once no Greece in ancient times, there is multiple ancient Greece. One, writes the noted classical historian Charles Freeman, can also be found symbolized in the Parthenon of Athens, its graceful architecture and statuary bespeaking ideals of freedom, citizenship, truth. But another, Freeman continues, can also be found early in the pages of Thucydides, who writes of, among other atrocities, the Athenians’ slaughtering the citizens of Melos upon their give up after a long siege. “Whatever the achievements of the Greeks might have been,” he writes, “they developed against the backdrop of a real world, one in which human beings were degraded by disease and where brutality was once an on a regular basis a part of life.”

Freeman traces both the real and the ideal Greek world in this comprehensive survey of ancient history, which opens with an up-to-date assessment of the Greek peninsula’s Bronze Age cultures and closes with a view of the survival of classical customs and ways of thought in the Western tradition. Gracefully written, Freeman’s fine history will find a welcome place on classicists’ bookshelves. –Gregory McNamee

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