| Title | : | The Classical Greeks |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | 347 |
| Publication | : | First published September 1, 1989 |
The Golden Age of ancient Greek city-state civilization lasted from 490 to 336 BC, the period between the first wars against Persia and Carthage and the accession of Alexander the Great. Never has there been such a multiplication of talents and genius within so limited a period and Michael Grant captures this astonishing civilization at the height of its powers.
The Classical Greeks Reviews
-
A visualization of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (** below). It soared above the ruins of the city for sixteen centuries before being brought down by a succession of earthquakes from the 12th to the 14th centuries. One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
the author
Michael Grant, the author of this book, was an English classicist. His original research field, by which he obtained his graduate degree, was “academic numismatics”, the study of ancient coins. After WW II, while writing several books on both ancient coinage and ancient history, he held various academic and educational positions at Cambridge, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Khartoum, culminating in the position of vice-chancellor of Queen's University in Belfast from 1959 to 1966. He then retired from academe to pursue writing full time
His 1956 translation of Tacitus's Annals of Imperial Rome remains a standard of the work, and he translated several works of Cicero. He wrote biographies of Julius Caesar, Herod the Great, Cleopatra, Nero, Jesus, St. Peter and St. Paul. His publishing specialty eventually became popular history, in which he produced many works on ancient Greece and Rome which were very popular. (This book is one.)
As a popularizer, it is said that one of his hallmarks was “his unwillingness to oversimplify or talk down to his readership.”
ages of Greek history
The history of ancient Greece is generally divided into three periods: the Archaic (800-480 BC), the Classical (480-323 BC) and the Hellenistic (323-146 BC). The year 800 BC is chosen just because it’s a nice round number (for reference, Homer lived before this date, and the first Olympic Games are thought to have occurred in 776). The other boundaries are delineated by the battle of Thermopylae in 480, the death of Alexander the Great in 323, and the final conquest of the heart of Greece by the Romans in 146 – though scholars debate the appropriate ending of this period.
Grant’s “classical Greece” period is pretty close to the above dates. He goes a little further back, to around 500 BC, and (at least in the “stories” he relates) one year further forward, to 322, when both Demosthenes and Aristotle died.
narrative form
Grant chooses an interesting way of presenting the history of this era of ancient Greece. Instead of presenting a chronological narrative, he focuses on telling the stories of 37 men (one per chapter) who lived in, or at least were connected to, Greece at this time, and whose contributions were seminal in defining and bringing about the Classical era and the events in it. As Grant says in his introduction, this approach runs the risk of leaving out much that was important beyond these few men; but on the other hand, he argues, “if you subtracted the achievements of these almost forty persons there would not be a great deal of the classical world left.”
Once I understood where Grant was going to take me, by concentrating on some three dozen “great men”, I immediately thought of Plutarch’s Lives. I expected to find a great deal of overlap between the characters in Grant’s book and Plutarch’s. But, first, Plutarch covers a greater period of time than the less than two centuries of this book. Even so, when I made a list of Grant’s characters and found only six that were treated by Plutarch, I was surprised. But during the exercise I had already seen why this was. Grant treats not only the military leaders and politicians of the Greeks, but much more so the artists (poets, dramatists, painters, sculptors, architects) and the philosophers who flourished in the Classical age. This has a great deal to do with the rating I’ve given the book.
more on the design and features of the narrative
Grant divides the book into seven sections. I was just going to list them, but decided without listing all the characters in his story of the Classical Greeks, I’d be doing a disservice to any readers who might be drawn to the book if only they’d known … So, here’s the whole contents:
The seven sections are in chronological order, though the characters’ lives and periods of influence often overlap sections. In each section Grant supplies a List of Events, which provides an overview of the occurrences which are the common backdrop to the individual stories (and in many cases are integral parts of some).
Each story (chapter) generally follows a similar outline. First Grant discusses briefly the prior history of the particular part of Greece which is the setting of the story, and how it led up to and influenced or produced the culture and political milieu in which his character lived, and the problems which he faced. Then there’s a short bio of the character (where and when he lived), followed by the main part of the story, his description of the significant contributions he produced over the course of his life; and usually an assessment and summary of the man’s importance. (But to summarize the format in this way makes it sound a bit more formulaic, even tiresome, than it actually is.)
extra stuff in the book
The CONTENTS pages show, preceding the main text:
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Introduction
After the list of sections and chapters (as shown in the spoiler above), CONTENTS shows an EPILOGUE [a must read wrapup] and these other items:
ted-awards for extra material
Grant’s style and voice
Throughout all of this Grant conveys a sense of an author in perfect command of his material. Presumably this command came from a combination of having read much (if not all) of the primary Greek and Latin source material, as well as secondary modern sources.
I’ll end this overlong review with some quotations.
On Euripedes’ Orestes
… his most melodramatic and exuberant tour de force, replete with novel theatrical effects and, in its later scenes, crammed with violence and crime. In antiquity it surpassed all other tragedies in popular esteem. Traditional mythology is stood on its head to display an all too human world steeped in venality and pitiless malice, where the interplay between one degenerate individual and another, and between their competitive wickednesses and demented loyalties, creates a debased squalor from which only divine intervention can bring release.
On Aristophanes’ The Clouds
What is particularly interesting about the play is the attack on Socrates, who is blamed for all the faults of the new education launched by the sophists and detested by Aristophanes as constituting an irresponsible threat to traditional religion and social morality … It is Socrates whom the comic dramatists singled out as the scapegoat because he alone was known to the ordinary people who could be relied upon to distrust and ridicule intellectuals. The dispute between the Just and Unjust Cause is the most brilliant of the ‘contests’ characteristic of Aristophanes’ theatrical construction, and the choruses contain some of his finest poetry.
On Thucydides
Although fifth-century Athens produced one of the most important civilizations the world has even known, for large chunks of its story we are almost solely dependent on very personal, and uncheckable, judgements and selections: those offered us, so potently, by Thucydides … despite his giant steps forward and his unique cleverness, he was not, as Macauley believed, the ‘greatest historian who ever lived’, since he is too insistent upon giving his own views of what happened – upon telling us, that is, what we have to believe.
** On the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
… even though it was not really a ‘hero’s shrine’, as has been suggested, Lucian was right to point out that it exalted the ruler to an extent that had never been seen before. Gleaming with white marble and stucco veneering, this building was the visual center of the waterfront of Halicarnassus, and dominated the entire city; it was subsequently acclaimed as one of the Seven Wonders of the World … a rectangular structure, with a height of 140 feet … its roof was another pyramid … and upon its apex stood an enormous marble four-horse chariot, driven by Apollo as the sun-god Helios – a symbol of the passing of the dead …
On Aristotle
His devotion to individual facts … began, at long last, to free the sciences from the domination of philosophy … the debts owed to his work by Stoics and Epicureans have now been shown to be more substantial than was previously believed. An Aristotelian element also found its way into subsequent versions of Platonism, and this influenced early Christian thought …
Aristotle was the man who established the major and still accepted divisions of philosophy … it is from him that philosophers and scientists, of one generation after another, have derived their philosophical terminology which has entered into the inherited vocabulary of educated men and women, so that we employ these terms continually without any longer recalling their source.
He has been seen throughout the ages as the supreme scholar pursuing the life of the intellect for its own sake; and his posthumous prestige has been more enduring than any other thinker’s … It is impossible to think of any [classical Greek] whose contribution to the world was greater than Aristotle’s.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Previous review:
Iberia (second review)
Next review:
Anna Karenina
Older review:
Children of Dune
Previous library review:
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II
Next library review:
The Nature of Alexander -
The Classical Greeks is the middle book in a historical trilogy by Michael Grant. I started with this one because it covers the time period of most interest to me and I already owned it.
Each chapter in The Classical Greeks is divided into 7 periods and told through the stories of 37 key figures. The wars, large and small, as well as times of relative peace, determine the various ages which Grant has chosen. His prominent players come from all walks of life: philosophers, warriors, politicians, artists, doctors, historians, builders, poets, rulers, playwrights, orators, sculptors, teachers, etc. They each impacted Greek history significantly; their individual stories became part of the larger collective story.
Due to the individual chapter biographies, it lacks flow; the offset being, it allows focus on just one individual if desired.
Although I listened to the book, I found it frequently necessary to go back and reread or re-listen to large sections as there was so much information to take in. This is one of those books I would not recommend in the audio unless you also have a copy of the text. That said, it was so good and so packed with information, I already want to start over and listen to it again.
Grant is an excellent historian! -
In this book, Michael Grant describes the culture and achievements of the classical Greeks by focusing each chapter on a particular philosopher, dramatist, artist, historian, or political leader - each being one of the best that Greece produced - as being exemplary of a particular accomplishment or development in Greek history. The book leaves the reader wanting to delve more deeply into the lives and accomplishments of the persons discussed, which is perhaps the best proof possible that a general overview of this sort has been successful. On the whole, I give the book four stars.
-
Fred asked me why I keep reading Grant's books when I am always disappointed. I can't tell you. I found this blah. Each chapter was about an individual who Grant felt was important. I didn't particularly like that strategy or the outcome.
-
Beginning with Miltiades and the Battle of Marathon (490 BCE) – or perhaps Pythagoras, discussed in one of the appendices – the eminent Antiquities scholar Michael Grant has taken a rather unique approach to telling the stories of the Greek intellects, artists, politicians, and generals of the 5th century BCE ending just prior to the ascension of the future Macedonian emperor, Alexander (336 BCE). Each chapter – and there are 37 of them – runs around 5 pages long, is chock full of historical details, discusses suppositions where needed, but is lacking any narrative niceties. Therefore, in many ways, one could consider this book a collection of historical figure sketches and you would not be half wrong. You could just flip the book open to a given chapter, read it, and generally not feel any the worse for missing previous chapters. Instead, I did read it from cover-to-cover, including the 5 interesting, albeit also brief appendices labeled Women, Metics, Between Free Men and Slaves, Slave and the aforementioned Pythagoras. Grant approaches that 160+ years by grouping the chapters chronologically into parts. Therefore we have Wars Against External Enemies, The Periclean Age, The Peloponnesian War, The End of Classical Greece, etc. Under those sections each chapter is devoted to a general (Themistocles, Epaminondas), a politician or tyrant (Cimon, Dionysus), a historian (Herodotus, Thucydides), a dramatist or poet (Aeschylus, Euripides), an artist or architect (Polygnotus, Phidias), or a philosopher or scientist (Hippocrites, Socrates).
This methodology in writing about those Classical Greece years may not provide a fluid and dynamic narrative (it doesn’t) but Grant does pack a lot of information in the book and though one may be inclined to dismiss it as being a form of Grecian Cliff Notes, don’t. Instead, I look at the The Classical Greeks as a reference piece. When reading more detailed narratives focused on one event or series of events (an all-too-frequent war, for instance) I find myself pulling this book off the shelf and re-reading the relevant, personality-centric chapter(s) that is Grant’s synopsis. His language is both spare and even, which suits this sort of book. Where the historical ‘facts’ as detailed by Herodotus or Xenophon (for instance), are suspect – or at least open for discussion – Grant does so and his conclusions seem both logical and likely; marks of a good modern historian. The book is also filled with maps – not beautiful ones but certainly adequate – as well as notes, references and a bibliography at the end; all part and parcel of good historical writing.
If you don’t mind a survey approach to the Classical Greek Age that is long on information but short on narrative drama, then this is the book for you. -
Dry overview of Classical Greece via 40 personalities. Largely emotion-free statements of facts, names, dates. Interesting with respect to providing a survey.
-
Lots of interesting history and analysis, well-balanced. But the unusual organization does nothing to promote insight or readability. Finding places and dates of events is far too hard.
-
Very interesting book that concisely covers this period of history and the prominent leaders of that period some of whom Were new to me.
