"Ancient Greece"

Urn art: so pretty!

One of my favorite books as a child was an illustrated collection of Greek myths. There was something fantastic and evocative in imagining those people and times: the fierce gods, mountain palaces, extravagant feasts, sleek ships, sun-dappled olive groves, secluded riverbanks, valleys echoing with Pan's mournful flute melodies.

Thomas Martin's "Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times" surveys the history and culture of the land and people who told those tales. Surprisingly, it also convinced me to add two additional works to my one-day reading list. A few takeaways follow.

Before reading this book, I wasn't familiar with the bronze age collapse. Before around 1200 BCE, rich civilizations flourished throughout the Mediterranean, but various factors led to their decline and a Greek dark age that lasted for several centuries. Many of the myths and great epics like The Odyssey look back to this earlier time period.

The golden age of Athens, encompassing most of the 5th century BCE, is the other time period I found particularly memorable. This century saw Socrates and Plato, as well as Xenophon, a historian and (for a time) professional soldier. He and 10,000 Greek mercenaries were hired by Cyrus the Younger, a Persian prince, to help seize the throne from his brother. Cyrus's armies were defeated and the Greeks were stranded without their commanders thousands of miles from home. Xenophon's Anabasis, which recounts this expedition, is now on my reading list.

Finally, I'd like to read more about Alcibiades, who sounds like one of the most self-serving – and self-sabotaging – leaders of all time. As a politician during the Peloponnesian War, he instigated a disastrous expedition to Sicily, was threatened with arrest by the Athenians, fled and defected to Sparta, offered the Spartans strategic advice to strangle the Athenian economy, earned Sparta's ire by sleeping with the king's wife, consorted with Persians, and on and on. It's the kind of life adventure novels are based on.

Verdict: thorough yet relatively short, "Ancient Greece" is a competent overview of Greek society and culture, and has opened my eyes to new historical avenues to explore. Recommended.