Customer Reviews

A History of Greece: From the Time of Solon to 403 BC

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This is the sort of book that I tend to pass up because it's outdated. I mean, archaeology has come a long way since the 1870s, right? However, Grote's writing is so enthrallingly readable and memorable as to make me feel like most of my prior reading in this area (non-professional, but not exactly light) has been a waste of time. If you read, say, the Routledge History of the Ancient World volumes covering this period, you'll be up-to-date--provided you can retain any facts at all from the verbal oatmeal that those volumes' authors purvey. If you read Grote, however, you'll remember who these ancient Athenians were, and why they mattered. He's not the last person to read on this subject, but I'm finding that he provides an excellent starting point, helping me to contextualize folks like Herodotus and Thucydides, Kleisthenes and Solon, and to realize how much more sense modern Western political history makes sense when they're in the picture. (His description of the popular appeal of the oligarchical party at Athens, vs. the more truly democratic Pericles who was nevertheless scorned as being hard for poor people to relate to, brought back thoughts of the 2008 Presidential election.)