The Birth of Classical Europe

A History from Troy to Augustine

By: Simon Price, Peter Thonemann

Narrated by: Don Hagen

To an extraordinary extent we continue to live in the shadow of the classical world. At every level, from languages to calendars to political systems, we are the descendants of a “classical Europe,” using frames of reference created by ancient Mediterranean cultures. As this consistently fresh and surprising new audio book makes clear, however, this was no less true for the inhabitants of those classical civilizations themselves, whose myths, history, and buildings were an elaborate engagement with an already old and revered past - one filled with great leaders and writers, emigrations and battles. Indeed, much of the reason we know so much about the classical past is because of the obsessive importance it held for so many generations of Greeks and Romans, who interpreted and reinterpreted their changing casts of heroes and villains. Figures such as Alexander the Great and Augustus Caesar loom large in our imaginations today, but they themselves were fascinated by what had preceded them.

A stunning work of research and imagination, The Birth of Classical Europe is an authoritative history, covering two millennia of human experience and casting new light on the world that in many ways still defines our own. In their thoughtful look at the twin engines of memory and culture, Simon Price and Peter Thonemann show how our own changing values and interests have shaped our feelings about an era that is by some measures very remote but by others startlingly close.

©2011 Simon Price, Peter Thonemann (P)2011 Gildan Media Corp

Excellent Book

The authors seem to have impressive and wide knowledge of the subject and write very well

So much history

As ever, there is never enough time to learn all that should be known. This book took me a little further.

Solid

I liked the inset boxes. It's a good book. If you are looking for a lot of narrative history, you will be very disappointed.

Amazing Book, Everyone should read this.

This book takes you from the beginning of civilization to the end of Rome. The writing is amazing and so is the narration. The correct dating system is used which was a real treat

Excellent overview of the Classical World

There are thousands of books about the classical world so one might ask if we really need another. The answer is yes we do. Our understanding of the past is constantly changing as new information is discovered. New writers have new ways of looking at old subjects. Most of all as the world we live in changes we need new books to help us connect with a past that is constantly moving.

The Birth of Classical Europe is a wonderful introduction to the ancient world. The authors focus on Greek history and then move on to Rome. They do not spend a lot of time on the civilizations of Mesopotamia, the Ancient Near East, and Egypt. That is not because of any Eurocentric prejudice, but rather they focus their story on one specific region. They spend a lot of time on Minoan and Mycenaean cultures. Using archeological discoveries from the last 20 years they build up a picture of the ancient world that is a little less catastrophic than the previous pictures that we have had. They argue more for a story of a sequence migrations that ends with assimilation. This is a little less sudden than the image of hordes of invaders wiping out the natives and resettling the region.

The authors spend a lot of time with ancient authors and recognize the value of the ancient sources. They do not accept the ancient stories at face value, that would of course be a mistake. Instead they look at the archeology and see how that illuminates the stories. Often credible theories of the past can be built when one uses this method.

This book is not meant to be a comprehensive history of the ancient world. Instead it is an introduction to the period. As the first volume of The Penguin History of Europe its purpose is to give the reader an understanding of the foundations of European civilization. The book is designed for the general reader. If you are not well read in the period you can pick this book up and learn a lot. I consider myself to be moderately well read in the period and I learned a lot. The Further Reading section at the end has a wonderful list of books, both scholarly and general reader, that should keep the person interested in the period satisfied for a long time to come.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who would like to learn about the ancient world. This can be read as a general reader book and could also be used as a high school level textbook for home schoolers or others interested in providing young people with well written book that is informative and enjoyable.

Not a History

I spent 20 minutes writing an in-depth review on my phone and the Audible app flushed it into oblivion, so now you get the short, angry version. This book sucks. It's not "a history [of Europe] fro Troy to Augustine;" it's a look at how Greeks and Romans intrepreted and reinterpreted their own histories in different situations. If you don't already know much about Greek philosophy, or the social structure of Sparta, or slavery in the ancient world, or Roman family life, or basically anything that isn't a dead classics professor banging on about how Greek towns in Asia Minor used made-up connections to the Iliad as part of their diplomacy with the Athenians, you'll learn nothing from this book. The omissions are so numerous I couldn't begin to list them, but let me just repeat the one I consider the most damning: no Greek philosophy. None. Not a single paragraph on Platonism or Stoicism. I don't envy William Chester Jordan when he has to explain Aquinas in volume III to readers who know nothing about Aristotle.

Now, if you wanted to defend this book, you could point as that as a work of historiography (a topic that most ordinary people know almost nothing about), it's very interesting and informative, with lots of fascinating connections to contemporary culture ranging from I, Claudius to Freud to Black Athena. Which is true, except this isn't just some isolated book: it's the first volume in the Penguin History of Europe, a series that focuses mainly on social, cultural, religious, and political history; in other words, all the stuff Simon Price and his co-writer left out of this book! My guess is David Cannadine, the editor of the series, knew that Price was dying and didn't want to deny him the chance to finish this passion project before he kicked the bucket, even if it didn't really fit with the rest of the series. But I don't care. This a really good series and it doesn't deserve a off-topic passion project as an opener.