Athens
A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A lively and accessible history of Athens's rise to greatness, from one of the foremost classical historians.
The definitive account of Athens in the age of Pericles, Christian Meier's gripping study begins with the Greek triumph over Persia at the Battle of Salamis, one of the most significant military victories in history. Meier shows how that victory decisively established Athens's military dominance in the Mediterranean and made possible its rise to preeminence in almost every field of human eavor--commerce, science, philosophy, art, architecture, and literature. Within seventy-five years, Athens had become the most original and innovative civilization the ancient world ever produced.
With elegant narrative style, Meier traces the birth of democracy and the flourishing of Greek culture in the fifth century B.C., as well as Athens' slow decline and defeat in the Peloponnesian War. The great figures--from politicians and generals like Themistocles and Alcibiades to the philosophers Socrates and Plato--emerge as flesh-and-blood human beings, firmly rooted in their times and places. This is history in the tradition of Simon Schama and Barbara Tuchman--learned, accessible, and beautifully written.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Meier gets his massive study of Athens off to a marvelous start. It is 480 B.C., and the entire population of the city, around 100,000 people, have left everything behind in their race for the harbor, hoping to escape the approaching Persians and board ships to the island of Salamis, and safety. Defeated by the Greeks in a brilliant naval maneuver, the Persians head home, allowing the uninterrupted evolution of the peculiar "Greek way" democracy. "There are very few instances in history when so much was at stake in a single battle," writes Meier, a professor of ancient history at the University of Munich. Without the Greek victory at Salamis, he asks, "would there have been the incentive for such amazing growth of rational thought?" His answer is yes, and his book explains why. Following the battle of Salamis, east and west were no longer points on a compass, but two different worlds. Although the Persians allowed Greek culture to thrive in Asia Minor, it was the Greek peninsula with its difficult terrain and patchwork of small city-states that gave birth to a people stubborn and independent enough to reinvent the rules of world history. This remarkable age lasted about four generations, and even though their achievements changed history, the Greeks had lost their grip on major political power by the turn of the next century. Meier's re-creation of this era is thorough, compelling and greatly aided by the Kimbers' scholarly yet accessible translation. He succeeds in his stated goal of writing history as if it were a literary endeavor, creating a clear, indelible picture of a fascinating era. Editor, Stephen Hubbell.
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