Ancient Greece History

The story begins in Minoan Crete, but quickly shifts to a dimly understood mainland culture. We follow the heroic deeds of the Mycenians and the Trojan War, the glorious artistic and intellectual triumphs of the Ionians, the turmoil of the Doric invasion and resultant dark age, the slow recovery culminating in the epic Persian wars and the renewed splendor of Periclean Athens.

The religion of the ancient Greeks has lain dormant for too long. In Hellenismos, Tony Mierzwicki shows how to bring it back in all of its primal glory. Learn how to forge personal relationships with the ancient Greek deities. Recreate the practices of the Greeks and enjoy the richness of their spiritual practices.

The ancient Greeks believed there were a great number of gods and goddesses. These gods had control over many different aspects of life on earth. In many ways they were very human. They could be kind or mean, angry or pleasant, cruel or loving. They fell in love with each other, argued with each other and even stole from each other.

In Alexander the Great, Anthony Everitt judges Alexander’s life against the criteria of his own age and considers all his contradictions. We meet the Macedonian prince who was naturally inquisitive and fascinated by science and exploration, as well as the man who enjoyed the arts and used Homer’s great epic, the Iliad, as a bible. As his empire grew, Alexander exhibited respect for the traditions of his new subjects and careful judgment in administering rule over his vast territory. But his career also had a dark side.

Greeks were history’s great men of thought. John Haaren has collected stories from the lives of thirty famous Greek men, detailing the rise, Golden Age, and fall of Greece. Among these men are Aristotle, Ptolemy, Ulysses, Pericles, and Alexander the Great. Children will be delighted to listen to and understand why the scope of Greek accomplishment is still known today as the “Greek Miracle.”

From the moderator of The New York Times philosophy blog "The Stone", an audiobook that argues that if we want to understand ourselves, we have to go back to theater, to the stage of our lives.

From about the ninth to fifth centuries BCE, the population of Greece grew unprecedentedly large, expanding from about 800,000 people to as many as 13 million. About a quarter million of these lived in Athens. The average size of urban households during this period grew considerably, a fact that suggests that food was suddenly available in excesses sufficient to keep larger families healthy and alive much more effectively than just a millennium earlier. Bigger families meant bigger armies and larger communities that would eventually grow into the metropolises of Classical Greece.

The last and longest war of classical antiquity was fought in the early seventh century. It was ideologically charged and fought along the full length of the Persian-Roman frontier, drawing in all the available resources and great powers of the steppe world. The conflict raged on an unprecedented scale, and its end brought the classical phase of history to a close. Despite all this, it has left a conspicuous gap in the history of warfare. This book aims to finally fill that gap.

The secretive Mysteries conducted at Eleusis in Greece for nearly two millennia have long puzzled scholars with strange accounts of initiates experiencing otherworldly journeys. In this groundbreaking work, three experts - a mycologist, a chemist, and a historian - argue persuasively that the sacred potion given to participants in the course of the ritual contained a psychoactive entheogen. The authors then expand the discussion to show that natural psychedelic agents have been used in spiritual rituals across history and cultures.

Although it is no longer quite as well remembered as it was thousands of years ago, one of the most important cities in the ancient world was Ephesus, a city that dates back nearly 3,000 years and can lay claim to the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Moreover, while Sparta and Athens were often the centers of power in ancient Greece, Ephesus, located in present-day Turkey on the coast of Ionia, was an instrumental part of the Ionian League.

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.

From morning till evening, the average Greek's life is described as he awakens, goes about his work, spends his leisure time, educates himself, exercises, and observes religious rites. The hardships of slaves, the narrow confines of female activities, and the constant drill of military routine are also minutely examined. If you have ever wanted to know what it was like to be an Athenian during the time of Pericles, listen to this riveting account of life in ancient Greece by one of the modern era's greatest historians.

A History of Greece continues with the bitter struggle between Sparta and Athens for mastery of the Hellenic world. Though Sparta finally emerges victorious, her victory soon turns to ashes with the ascendancy of Thebes and the still greater power of Philip of Macedon. Philip unites an unwilling Greece with his iron policy. Athens gives up her independence, but maintains an aloof intellectual and artistic leadership in the Greek world.

Herodotus is not only the father of the art and the science of historical writing, but also one of the Western tradition's most compelling storytellers. In tales such as that of Gyges, who murders Candaules, the king of Lydia, and usurps his throne and his marriage bed, thereby bringing on, generations later, war with the Persians, Herodotus laid bare the intricate human entanglements at the core of great historical events.

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.

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.

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.

Plutarch’s Lives remains one of the world’s most profoundly influential literary works. Written at the beginning of the second century, it forms a brilliant social history of the ancient world. His “parallel lives” were originally presented in a series of books that gave an account of one Greek and one Roman life, followed by a comparison of the two. Volume 1 compares Theseus and Romulus, Alcibiades and Coriolanus, and Aristides and Marcus Cato, among others.

Slavery was a universal and totally accepted feature of ancient Greek society, so much so that while the conditions under which slaves lived and worked varied considerably, many ordinary citizens kept at least one slave, often working alongside their owners, while larger commercial enterprises involved huge numbers, many of whom could rise to positions of authority and wealth. It was possible for some slaves to buy their freedom, while others lived and died in conditions of appalling brutality.

What will freedom cost her? Enslaved in an Ancient World of Money and Power, Tessa Dares to Find Love. Raised as a courtesan to wealthy and powerful men, Tessa of Delos serves at the whim of the corrupt politician, Glaucus, on the opulent isle of Rhodes.? But when Glaucus meets a violent death, Tessa sees a glimmer of hope for escape. Forsaken by the gods and her mother, she has locked away her heart and surrendered her dreams of freedom and love. But now, with the possibility of escape within her reach, Tessa must navigate a dangerous web of deception and political intrigue to break free. ...