Category: Ancient Greece

Eric Cline achieved something of a surprise commercial success with 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, an early volume in the Turning Points in Ancient History series. In After 1177 B.C., he returns to answer the obvious next question: What happened between the collapse of the Late Bronze Age, beginning around 1200 BC,, and the…

Anthony Everitt’s The Rise of Athens: The Story of the World’s Greatest Civilization (2016) is an engaging narrative history of how a relatively obscure Greek city-state rose to become the dominant political, military, and cultural power of the ancient Mediterranean during the fifth century BC. Despite its title, however, the book chronicles not only Athens’…

There is no shortage of biographies on Alexander the Great. This one from Robin Lane Fox, now over three decades in print, may be the best. Fox seeks to retrieve, from the murky depths of the ancient past, Alexander the man, chipping away at the myth and libel that have become part of his towering…

“He was the first martyr of free speech and free thought.” So claims I.F. Stone in this 1988 bestseller about the trial and execution of Socrates, the great Athenian philosopher, in 399 BC. Thirty years after its initial publication, the relevance of the story has never been greater. In a world of campus safe spaces,…

Barry Strauss is a world-class academic classicist, but “The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter that Saved Greece — and Western Civilization” is geared for the more general reader. He tells the story of the Persian invasion of Greece in 490 BC and the decisive naval battle at Salamis with an easy style focused on…

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. The same could even be said for its title. Paul Rahe’s latest effort, “The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta: The Persian Challenge,” is an excellent book, it just doesn’t have all that much to do with the grand strategy of classical Sparta. Rather, it is…

The great Greek historian Thucydides remarked that Athens in the 430s BC “was in name a democracy, but really a government by the first person.” That first man – “protos amer” in Greek – was Pericles, son of Xanthippus, the hero of the Battle of Mycale against the Persians in 479, mentee of the radical…