I had thought that this book might be an easily digested summary of ancient Greek History....suitable for my son who will be studying ancient history next year. However, after reading it, I must say that I have changed my mind. I have read another book by the author, Peter Green, which was titled "The Year of Salamis" but re-printings have been titled "the Greco-Persian Wars" and I found this superb. The current book is also good and has lots of B&W photos to illustrate it. However, it is a big subject to cover in a short book and inevitably things get either short shrift (eg Marathon and Thermopylae) or else one gets lost in a series of power struggles where leadership changes hands a bit too fast to follow. I did learn quite a lot, however, from reading the book. For example, Green makes the point that "throughout the Aegean world there existed an international and often intermarried networks of upper-class elitists, who had far more in common with each other than any of them did with their own democratic governments". The other thing that Green reports on ...sometimes to the extent of it becoming rather tiresome and hard to follow.....is that there tended to be a constant see-sawing of control between the aristocrats and the yeoman farmers and citizens. Certainly, there appeared to be very few periods of real peace. And a constant string of talented leaders seemed to find themselves being banished. This often seemed to be counterproductive as these talented banished (ostracized) individuals often seemed to take up with the enemy.
Green covers a vast expanse of Greek history from around 2000 BC to Alexander the Great's death in 323 BC. He manages to interweave the poets and dramatists into the narrative...linking their writings with the political events of the moment. But I did find it interesting that the major events in received Greek History such as the Battle of Marathon, the Naval battles at Salamis, the contributions of Plato and Aristotle and Alexander the Great are covered-off rather briefly. And maybe this is really a strength of the book that it keeps a sense of perspective.
Another thing that impressed me was the difficulty of getting agreement on just about anything by the polis.....there always seemed to be a powerful opposing body with a different viewpoint. Certainly, the democracy that we know today is rather different to the democracy that operated in Athens about 400 BC.
All in all, a good overview of ancient greek history....but probably not all that great for a 15 year old. I give it four stars. ( )

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