Ancient Greece

Customer Reviews

• Very Informative

  One of the most readable summaries of the Greek experience I have read in years. This book provides a quick overview of Greece. Though this has some great images of ancient artefacts, it is not an extremely light read. If you have an interest in Greece this is a good start, though. I appreciated Martin pointing out that, in many ways, what we know of Greek history is actually a history of Athens, and therefore, not truly Greek history--since the various city-states of Greece had very different cultures and methods of operation.

• What n awful book!

  Here is a scholar who thinks (page 113) that Athens, not Atlanta, is the capital of the state of Georgia, and that it is vital to the reader of his 202 page tome that the (rather insignificant) city of Sparta, Tennessee, "...was the setting for the famous movie of pre-civi rights racial intolerance, starring Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier, In The Heat of The Night". Wow, thanks for sharing that in a history book about Greece - VERY PERTINENT!
  Seriously fellow lovers of culture - do not buy this awful book.

• Excellent Little Book

  For a book of such brevity, this is a remarkably full accounting of the Ancient Greeks. As Cartledge observes, ancient mainland and Aegean Greece included over 700 individual city-states (poleis), as well as hundreds more Greek colonies and trading-posts along the rims of the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Thus it is salutary that Cartledge chooses to approach ancient Greek history through the technique of considering 11 representative Greek city-states in 11 successive chapters, and an Epilogue. This is appropriate, as the polis remained the fundamental unit in over two millennia of Greek History, even when under the later hegemony of such Great Powers as Macedon, Rome, and Constantinople.
  The poleis Cartledge chooses are as follows: Prehistory: Cnossos (on Crete) and Mycenae; Dark and Archaic Ages (ca. 1000-500 B.C.):Argos, Miletus, Massalia, and Sparta; Classical Period (500-330 B.C.): Athens, Syracuse (on Sicily), and Thebes; Hellenistic Age (ca. 330-31 B.C.): Alexandria; and, finally, Byzantion (later Constantinople and Istanbul). As Cartledge makes clear, this list of necessity leaves out many other worthy contenders such as a Black Sea settlement (though Byzantion is on the narrows of the Bosporus, which lead into the Black Sea); the significant North African city of Cyrene, on the eastern Libyan coast (though Alexandria is later placed some 400 miles east, on the coast of the western Nile Delta); or a city of Magna Graecia (mainland Italy), maybe Cumae, on the Bay of Naples.
  Through the cities Cartledge DOES choose, he is well-able to narrate the history of Ancient Greece, including the Minoans on Crete; the Mycenaeans on Crete (after 1400 B.C.) and the mainland (Mycenae, Argos) who used Linear B, (deciphered as the earliest known written form [ca. 1400 B.C.] of Greek by Michael Ventris in 1952) mainly for taxation and inventory purposes; colonization; the rise of tyrants; the Greco-Persian Wars (ca. 500-479 B.C.); the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens (431-404 B.C.); the ascendancy of Thebes (early 4th c. B.C.); the rise of Macedon (ca. 338 B.C.); and the coming of Rome (2nd c. B.C.).
  Professor Cartledge's mind is clearly brimming with a lifetime's learning, and he ranges with alacrity across this sweep of time and geography. This is the first book by Cartledge that I have read, and I quite enjoyed it. He has an engaging style, often leavened by humor. As the book was published in 2009, Cartledge is able to incorporate the most recent scholarship, often archaeological. We learn that a Linear B tablet was found at Thebes with a word that looks like "Lakedaemon," the southwestern region of the Peloponnese which includes Sparta, and is mentioned frequently in Homer as the home of Menelaos, King of Sparta, original husband of Helen (later "of Troy"). No Mycenaean palace (as would have housed King Menelaos), has yet been found in Lakonia, but recent surface finds of Linear B fragments in the vicinity of Sparta offer tantalizing prospects.
  Also, in Athens, the recent tunneling for the new subway uncovered mass graves, probably from the plague that swept Athens in 430-29 B.C. and took the life of Pericles (builder [and rebuilder] of the sacred structures on the Athenian acropolis) and countless other Athenians.
  In his narrative, Cartledge notes some interesting facts. He states that Sparta was by far the largest Greek polis in terms of land area, followed by Syracuse, and Athens/Attica in third place. He mentions that at the height of its "Athenian Empire," (ca. 440 B.C.) Athens was collecting 1,000 talents a year from its "allied" poleis, an huge sum not to be equaled by a Greek power until Alexander the Graet pillaged the seemingly limitless wealth of the Persian Empire after 331 B.C.
  Cartledge also makes the important point that, to the "Old Greeks" in the eastern homelands, the colonies of Sicily, Italy, and the western Mediterranean, represented the "Golden West:" a region of rich agricultural lands and favorable settlement sites. Indeed Sicily, known as a breadbasket and land of sumptuous local coinages, exerted a powerful pull on the Athenians' imagination; and fantasies of riches led to the Athenians' ill-fated Sicilian naval expedition in 415-13 B.C. This horrific defeat at Syracuse planted the seeds for the Athenians' final defeat by Sparta in 404 B.C.
  Cartledge brings the narrative full-circle by ending with Byzantion. Originally founded as a colony of Megara (on the eastern coast of the Isthmus of Corinth) in 688 or 657 B.C, Byzantion controlled the trade-routes to the rich grainlands of today's Ukraine and south Russia. Constantine moved his main capital from Rome to Byzantion (renamed "Constantinople") in 324-30 A.D. Here Latin was the official language until the reign of Justinian the Great (527-65 A.D.). Later, as the capital of the "Byzantine Empire," (through 1453 A.D.) the inhabitants spoke Greek, but continued to call themselves "Romans."
  To me, Cartledge's book is a compact but rewarding read. However, as some other reviewers note, it may not be the ideal introduction to someone who knows very little about Ancient Greece. If you paid attention in a decent college survey of Ancient Greek History, much of the book should be familiar. But if there are too many names and places coming too fast, I would suggest reading Cartledge's "Ancient Greece: A History in Eleven Cities" along with H.D.F. Kitto's "The Greeks" (1951), or Moses Finley's "The Ancient Greeks" (1964), both short treatments that will further flesh out the details. The maps in Cartledge's book are quite good, and there in a helpful Glossary, Who's Who, and suggestions for further reading. All in all, a very good book.

• Tour 11 cities and a few millenia of history!

  As an exceedingly brief albeit readable account of its subject, Paul Cartledge's //Ancient Greece: A History in Eleven Cities// is entertaining and even occasionally insightful. Given its length, there is no chance of offering a complete review of such a rich and complex topic, nor does it appear that this was the author's goal. Instead, by focusing on the city -- the irreducible unit of ancient Greek political identity - this volume offers an interesting context into which the author pours an overview of an enormous sweep of history. While some will doubtless complain about its brevity, this work falls into a genre of writing with which British academics have a long history. Thoughtful, and at times more than a little cheeky, it will offer something to every level of interested reader, even if sometimes only a taste of a far more complex whole, as well as a sense of the variety of ancient Greek political experimentation. Well versed readers may find this a strange format, and at times it can feel a bit forced, but overall, I thought it successful and entertaining.

• good idea, badly written

  it was a good idea to focus upon a number of the most important cities of ancient greece. a problem was that the information hopped around to different centuries and so became choppy to read. The big criticism is that the writing style is irritating.