Books - Classics & Byzantium
Ancient Athens on 5 Drachmas a Day - Philip Matyszak
The book takes us on a travel back in time, to 431 BC Athens, giving the reader a vibrant sense of what everyday life must have been like in the ancient city during the pinnacle of its glory. Read more: |
Philip Matyszak, a British non-fiction writer, with a doctorate in Roman history from St John's College, Oxford has published an entertaining guidebook entitled “Athens on 5 drachmas a day”. 
It's All Greek to Me - Charlotte Higgins
Charlotte Higgins, Guardian's chief arts writer has written the book “It’s all Greek to me” as a result of her long love-affair with ancient Greek literature. The writer believes that ancient Greek culture has very much moulded modern thought and that "the great writers of Greece - such as Homer and Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles and Sappho” are still relevant and entertaining as they "have left us vivid, exciting, provocative, often devastating, often hilarious reads." In an extract of her work published in the Guardian, titled “Do you speak more Greek than you think?” Higgins explains the Greek origins of words like spartan, laconic, aegis, thespian, tantalising, colossal, draconian etc. Read more: |
From Homer to the Hippocratic Oath: How Ancient Greece Has Shaped Our World
Travelling Heroes by Robin Lane Fox
The book follows the journeys of the people from the Greek island of Euboea (modern Evia), who travelled outwards, east and west, to explore, to trade and to discover new worlds and thus tries to explain the origin of a great deal of Greek myth - including such famous stories as the rape of Europa and the death of Adonis. The Euboeans took the stories that they heard from the diverse peoples with whom they came into contact during their travels to the near East, Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and the Levant. Influenced by the mythologies of those peoples and the new and exotic locations and conditions they found, the Euboeans created the myths of the Ancient Greeks. Lane Fox uses linguistic, textual and archeological detailed evidence to support his case on the creation of the Greek myth, although behind the fascinating story one can see that it’s somewhat speculative. Read Reviews:
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Travelling Heroes is the adventure story of the Euboeans through the Mediterranean world of the 8th century BC.
The many ages of Herodotus (TLS, 25.06.2008)
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Herodotus as good neighbour, warmonger, narrative syncopator and the first great artist of Greek prose.
Kitty Ferguson: The Music of Pythagoras
How an ancient brotherhood cracked the code of the universe and lit the path from antiquity to outer space
Pythagoreanism played a sometimes important role in Western science before Newton, especially in astronomy, as Kitty Ferguson illustrates in "The Music of Pythagoras," an engaging survey of the ideas that have been thought of as Pythagorean. In general, Ms. Ferguson's theme is that Pythagoras himself is responsible for the notion that numbers reveal hidden patterns in nature and that this notion amounts to a fundamental principle in science. Sources: |
Born around 570 B.C. on the cultured Aegean island of Samos, Pythagoras founded his own school at Croton in southern Italy, where he and his followers began to unravel the surprising deep truths like uncovering the ratios of musical harmony, and recognizing that hidden behind the confusion and complexity of nature are patterns and orderly relationships.
Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend
"Crusaders and jihadis, philosophers and alchemists: all have laid claim to Alexedner the Great as one of their own. 'A Life in Legend': so Richard Stoneman subtitles his fascinating and prodigiously learned new book on the great conqueror. Like his subject, Stoneman is able to strike deep into fabulous and exotic territory. Whether it is Hellenistic notions of utopia, or cities of death in the Arabian Nights, or the origins of the manticore in Indian fable, the extraordinary range of Alexander's afterlife has enabled Stoneman to write a veritable book of wonders." Read the entire review here.
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Tom Holland reviews Richard Stoneman's book (Telegraph, 30.03.2008)
The Greeks & Greek Love
"Following on from his rapturously received Courtesans and Fishcakes, James Davidson's latest examination of Greek mores is sub-titled "A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece". This study widens into an examination of an entire culture, far more fascinating and alien than we commonly imagine. The Greeks & Greek Love excavates terrain that should have been excavated years ago, and shows that there's a lot more to Greek love than the crude enquiry, did they or didn't they? Davidson, with his wit, range and learning, is able to admit honestly the limitations of historical understanding, while never being less than fascinating." Read the entire review here |
Christopher Hart reviews James Davidson's book (The Independant, 23.03.3008):
Homer's The Iliad And The Odyssey - A Biography
Instead of penning a biography of Homer, a fairly impossible task likely to produce thin work anyway, the Argentinean critic and translator Alberto Manguel offers a so-called biography of the epic poems themselves, and it turns out that we find in their lives reaching back over 2,000 years all the complexity and contradictions of any eminent life, and then some. As Manguel says, long ago, with these poems, 'we already had words to name our most bewildering experiences and our deepest and most obscure emotions.' Read the entire review here. |
In his review (We're All Homer's Children, Washington Post, 09.03.2008) of Alberto Manguel's book Tracy Lee Simmons writes:
Robert Strassler on Herodotus and Ancient Greece's influence (Wall Street Journal, 22.12.2007)
The book, which is illustrated with photographs, flanking footnotes and 127 maps, is intended to help readers understand where they are in Herodotus's ambitious chronicling of the Persian Wars. The New York Sun has described the book as "a Global Positioning System for Herodotus's world."
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Robert Strassler edited the 1,024-page book "The Landmark Herodotus" for the everyday reader.
Holiday Books : The Greeks (New York Times, 2.12..2007)
The hundreds of color photographs that overflow the pages of this opulent large-format volume exhibit uncontested masterpieces of Greek art in all their glory. Some, just to scratch the lustrous surface, are as familiar as the bronze charioteer from Delphi or the Victory of Samothrace, which now stands atop the Daru staircase in the Louvre. These ancient treasures, together with historic photographs of the major excavations, aerial panoramas of splendid sites, old watercolors and lithographs, and 19th-century architectural renderings, are enough to leave a deep impression on anyone with a drop of philhellenic blood. The result is an invigorating and congenial tour through the mainland and the islands. Most of the major sites are covered - Athens, Delos, Delphi, Olympia, Knossos and Mycenae - with bracing excursions to places like Poliochni on Lemnos, considered to be the first urban center in Europe, and Salamis in Cyprus, site of tomb sacrifices of horses and humans, seemingly inspired by scenes recorded in the 23rd book of Homer’s Iliad. Read more... |
Great Moments in Greek Archaeology - Book Review by Steve Goates
The Byzantine empire: The lasting glory of its art (The Economist, 4.10.2007)
Judith Herrin, a professor at King's College London sets out to show that there many important reasons to study and admire the civilisation that flourished for more than a millennium before the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and whose legacy is still discernible all over south-east Europe and the Levant. She presents Byzantium as a vibrant, dynamic, cosmopolitan reality which somehow escaped the constraints of its official ideology.Ms Herrin also shows that there was a fluid and perpetually evolving relationship between the competing influences of classical Greek learning, Greek Christianity and popular Byzantine culture. Read more... |
From the Economist review of Judith Herrin's book "
How to be a modern Goddess (Times Literarly Supplement, 3.10.2007)
"Joan Breton Connelly’s Portrait of a Priestess is the biggest, fullest and most up-to-date study of these important women from the time of Homer through to the early years of Christianity. Beautifully illustrated and substantially documented, it is also highly argumentative and certainly more ambitious than merely a catalogue of known priestesses, their images and a description of their functions, which would have been enough of a subject in itself." Read the entire review here |
James Davidson reviews the book: "Portrait of a Priestess - Women and ritual in ancient Greece" written by Joan Breton Connelly and published by Princeton University Press:
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