Showing titles in Greece

Few warriors, in life or literature, have challenged their commanding officer and the rationale of the war they fought as fiercely as did Homer's hero Achilles. Today, the Iliad is celebrated as one of the greatest works in literature, the epic of all epics; many have forgotten that the subject of this ancient poem was war - not merely the poetical romance of the war at Troy, but War, in all its enduring devastation.

From classicist James Romm comes a thrilling deep dive into the last decades of ancient Greek freedom leading up to Alexander the Great’s destruction of Thebes - and the saga of the greatest military corps of the age, the Theban Sacred Band, a unit composed of 150 pairs of male lovers.

During the course of a day we meet twenty-four Athenians from all strata of society—from the slave-girl to the councilman, the vase painter to the naval commander, the housewife to the hoplite—and get to know what the real Athens was like by spending an hour in their company. We encounter a different one of these characters every chapter, with each chapter forming an hour in the life of the ancient city.

Donald Kagan—Yale’s Sterling Professor of Classics and History—delivers a compelling new look at revisionismin Thucydides’ classic History of the Peloponnesian War. To determine how accurate and dispassionate the Athenian general really was, Kagan exposes his epic to an enlightening and thorough analysis. Using contemporary and modern sources, Kagan reveals the exiled aristocrat’sbiases, prejudices, and his clear intention to spin events in his own way.

Venus and Aphrodite brings together ancient art, mythology, and archaeological revelations to tell the story of human desire. From Mesopotamia to modern-day London, from Botticelli to Beyoncé, Hughes explains why this immortal goddess continues to entrance us today - and how we trivialize her power at our peril.

Acclaimed classics scholar Edith Hall's Introducing the Ancient Greeks is the first book to offer a synthesis of the entire ancient Greek experience, from the rise of the Mycenaean kingdoms of the sixteenth century BC to the final victory of Christianity over paganism in AD 391. Each of the ten chapters visits a different Greek community at a different moment during the twenty centuries of ancient Greek history.

When Alexander the Great died at the age of 32, his empire stretched from the Adriatic Sea in the west all the way to modern-day India in the east. In an unusual compromise, his two heirs - a mentally damaged half brother, Philip III, and an infant son, Alexander IV, born after his death - were jointly granted the kingship. But six of Alexander's Macedonian generals, spurred by their own thirst for power and the legend that Alexander bequeathed his rule "to the strongest," fought to gain supremacy.

With his characteristic clarity and elegance A. C. Grayling takes the listener from the worldviews and moralities before the age of the Buddha, Confucius and Socrates, through Christianity's dominance of the European mind, to the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and on to Mill, Nietzsche, Sartre and philosophy today. And, since the story of philosophy is incomplete without mention of the great philosophical traditions of India, China and the Persian-Arabic world, he gives a comparative survey of them, too.

Tribune Cato and Centurion Macro, hardened veterans of the Roman army, have faced the empire's enemies from Britannia to Parthia, from Hispania to Judea. Now once again they are on a mission that will imperil their lives and those of all who serve with them. Loyal to the last to their comrades in battle, fearless in the face of the most brutal or barbaric opponents, they are the finest men the emperor can call on in the service of Rome.

One of the masterpieces of classical literature, the "Histories" describes how a small and quarrelsome band of Greek city states united to repel the might of the Persian empire. But while this epic struggle forms the core of his work, Herodotus' natural curiosity frequently gives rise to colorful digressions - a description of the natural wonders of Egypt; an account of European lake-dwellers; and far-fetched accounts of dog-headed men and gold-digging ants. With its kaleidoscopic blend of fact and legend, the "Histories" offers a compelling Greek view of the world of the fifth century BC.

On a late September day in 480 BC, Greek warships faced an invading Persian armada in the narrow Salamis Straits in the most important naval battle of the ancient world. Overwhelmingly outnumbered by the enemy, the Greeks triumphed through a combination of strategy and deception. More than two millennia after it occurred, the clash between the Greeks and Persians at Salamis remains one of the most tactically brilliant battles ever fought.

Rudolf Steiner uses the history of Atlantis and Lemuria to discuss the esoteric evolution of man. He covers in more detail what is suggested in An Outline of Occult Science. There was a time when a continent called Atlantis still lay between Europe and America. This portion of the worlds surface was at one time land; this land now forms the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Plato alluded to the last remaining remnant of that lost continent when he spoke of the Island of Poseidon.

Over two millennia ago, the prescient insights of Anaximander paved the way for cosmology, physics, geography, meteorology, and biology, setting in motion a new way of seeing the world. His legacy includes the revolutionary ideas that the Earth floats in a void, that animals evolved, that the world can be understood in natural rather than supernatural terms, and that universal laws govern all phenomena. In this elegant work, the renowned theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli brings to light the importance of Anaximander’s overlooked influence on modern science

For the first time, By the Spear offers an exhilarating military narrative of the reigns of these two larger-than-life figures in one volume. Ian Worthington gives full breadth to the careers of father and son, showing how Philip was the architect of the Macedonian empire, which reached its zenith under Alexander, only to disintegrate upon his death.

In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative. When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancient tablets, Europe's earliest written records.

Adam Nicolson sees the Iliad and the Odyssey as the foundation myths of Greek - and our - consciousness, collapsing the passage of 4,000 years and making the distant past of the Mediterranean world as immediate to us as the events of our own time.

If you want to discover the captivating history of the Peloponnesian War, then pay attention. The Peloponnesian War enveloped the entire Greek world, from Syracuse on the island of Sicily to the shores of western Turkey. It ravaged the Greek population and produced great hardships, and it led to the eventual downfall of the Athenian Empire and the rise of the Spartan Empire.

In 431 BC, the long simmering rivalry between the city-states of Athens and Sparta erupted into open warfare, and for more than a generation the two were locked in a life-and-death struggle. The war embroiled the entire Greek world, provoking years of butchery previously unparalleled in ancient Greece. Whole cities were exterminated, their men killed, their women and children enslaved.

Titus Livy's only known surviving work is a monumental history of Rome that was originally written in Latin. It is estimated that Livy's The History of Rome was written between 27 and 9 BC and covers the legends of Aeneas, the fall of Troy, the city's founding in 753 BC, and Livy's account ends with the reign of Emperor Augustus. The History of Rome is a must-have for anyone interested in ancient history and the Roman era. With colorful detail and intriguing insight, Titus brings to life some of the most turbulent times in human history.

In Decoding the Heavens, Jo Marchant tells for the first time the full story of the 100-year quest to decipher the ancient Greek computer known as the Antikythera Mechanism. Along the way she unearths a diverse cast of remarkable characters and explores the deep roots of modern technology in ancient Greece and the medieval European and Islamic worlds. At its heart, this is an epic adventure and mystery, a book that challenges our assumptions about technology through the ages.