Greece in the Making, 1200-479 BC (The Routledge History of the Ancient World) - Softcover

Osborne, Robin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415469929 ISBN 13: 9780415469920

Publisher: Routledge, 2009

Synopsis

Greece in the Making 1200–479 BC is an accessible and comprehensive account of Greek history from the end of the Bronze Age to the Classical Period. The first edition of this book broke new ground by acknowledging that, barring a small number of archaic poems and inscriptions, the majority of our literary evidence for archaic Greece reported only what later writers wanted to tell, and so was subject to systematic selection and distortion. This book offers a narrative which acknowledges the later traditions, as traditions, but insists that we must primarily confront the contemporary evidence, which is in large part archaeological and art historical, and must make sense of it in its own terms.

In this second edition, as well as updating the text to take account of recent scholarship and re-ordering, Robin Osborne has addressed more explicitly the weaknesses and unsustainable interpretations which the first edition chose merely to pass over. He now spells out why this book features no ‘rise of the polis’ and no ‘colonization’, and why the treatment of Greek settlement abroad is necessarily spread over various chapters. Students and teachers alike will particularly appreciate the enhanced discussion of economic history and the more systematic treatment of issues of gender and sexuality.

About this title

Review:

'The present second edition...is perhaps the most up-dated and the most systematic of all such syntheses currently available in English.' - Palamedes

From the Back Cover:

The archaic Greek world was the world in which Homers Iliad and Odyssey were composed, in which the Doric and Ionic orders of architecture were invented, in which athletic competition first became a cultural event and in which democracy was invented.
Archaic Greece is also a period of prehistory. No Greek writer ever attempted to describe or analyse the events of his own lifetime or of the immediate past until Herodotos and Thucydides in the fifth century. Our knowledge of Greece before 479 BC is dependent on the stories which the later Greeks told about their past and the indirect testimony of the material and poetic monuments of the archaic age.
Greece in the Making shows how we can write a history of this period, and the insights which can be gained by doing so for our understanding of later periods of history. It goes beyond tradition and exploits the literature, art and archaeology of the period. Richly illustrated, this book makes much new information readily accessible and puts the reader i

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0415469929
• ISBN 13: 9780415469920
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 400