On a rocky, sea-fractured peninsula at the edge of the ancient world, a small and quarrelsome people invented an astonishing share of the things we still live by: democracy and political theory, philosophy and science, history and the theatre, the Olympic Games and the very idea that the human mind, freely exercised, can understand the world.This is the whole sweep of ancient Greece in a single volume: the lost palaces of Minoan Crete and Mycenae; the dark age and the rebirth of the city-state; the desperate wars against the Persian empire at Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis; the golden age of Athens and the Parthenon, of Pericles and the tragedians; the long, ruinous Peloponnesian War; the genius of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; the meteoric conquests of Alexander the Great; the brilliant cosmopolitan world of the Hellenistic kingdoms; and the coming of Rome.Vivid, sourced, and clear-eyed, this is a popular history that gives the battles their drama and the ideas their weight - and that never forgets the slaves, the women, and the subjects on whose unrecorded labor the glory was built. It tells the story of how a poor and divided people changed the world, and why, two and a half thousand years later, we still measure ourselves against them.
