What do you think?
Rate this book
A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great
A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great is a massive, nearly 1000 page history of Greece by the noted historian, J.B. Bury.
A table of contents is included.
925 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1900
58 people are currently reading
422 people want to read
About the author
John Bagnell Bury
453 books50 followersJohn Bagnell Bury (often published as J.B. Bury) was a classical scholar, historian, and philologist. He held the chair in Modern History at Trinity College, Dublin, for nine years, and also was appointed Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity, and Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
February 27, 2019
When studying British history at school in the eighties, you could take one of two courses; 'Constitutional and Political', or 'Social and Economic'. This book falls into 'Greek History: Military and Diplomatic'. It starts off well enough, archaeological evidence is the only source for early Greece. But once the Greeks start writing their own histories, little else is considered. Although philosophy and literature, which the Greeks also produced in quantity, are occasionally and enjoyably summarised. The bulk of the book, however, is the detailed discussion of interminable, inconsequential, internecine wars. By comparison, when we consider the history of Italy in the middle ages - another age of City States - we concentrate on the product not the process. I wish the same had been done here, I still want to know more about the economy, technology and the arts.
What perhaps should not be surprising is how modern seem the political problems the Greeks faced. However I am still surprised at how brutal were their solutions to them. A war was the best approach to a diplomatic impasse, and a massacre was the best approach to a military impasse. I was surprised to learn the Greeks treated military resistance as an excuse to kill all the men, rape all the women and enslave all the children. But they did, again and again and again. Greek or Barbarian were treated alike, as they were in the associated diplomatic shenanigans. Greeks fought more times with Persia against other Greeks than they did with other Greeks against Persia. If you come away with your popular illusions about Greek civilisation intact, you've not been paying attention. Taken in conjunction with the praise lavished on Alexander's Hellenistic empire in the closing chapters, you have to wonder if the writers weren't actually biased against the culture of the Greek city states. Perhaps a history which focused on their cultural achievements wouldn't have left me so feeling so disabused.
I stole this book from my boarding house library at school in 1985 - it was the standard text for A'level Ancient History. I had just unsuccessfully completed two years of Maths, Physics and Chemistry. I thought Perhaps things would have turned out better I if I had tried to make a classicist of myself instead. Having finished reading it 34 years later, I conclude that no, they wouldn't. Ancient military history would have left me just as despondent as covalent bonding. I suspect it would also would have jaundiced my view of Greek philosophy when it was finally introduced to me at university four years later. So in this case, at least, things turned out for the best.
What perhaps should not be surprising is how modern seem the political problems the Greeks faced. However I am still surprised at how brutal were their solutions to them. A war was the best approach to a diplomatic impasse, and a massacre was the best approach to a military impasse. I was surprised to learn the Greeks treated military resistance as an excuse to kill all the men, rape all the women and enslave all the children. But they did, again and again and again. Greek or Barbarian were treated alike, as they were in the associated diplomatic shenanigans. Greeks fought more times with Persia against other Greeks than they did with other Greeks against Persia. If you come away with your popular illusions about Greek civilisation intact, you've not been paying attention. Taken in conjunction with the praise lavished on Alexander's Hellenistic empire in the closing chapters, you have to wonder if the writers weren't actually biased against the culture of the Greek city states. Perhaps a history which focused on their cultural achievements wouldn't have left me so feeling so disabused.
I stole this book from my boarding house library at school in 1985 - it was the standard text for A'level Ancient History. I had just unsuccessfully completed two years of Maths, Physics and Chemistry. I thought Perhaps things would have turned out better I if I had tried to make a classicist of myself instead. Having finished reading it 34 years later, I conclude that no, they wouldn't. Ancient military history would have left me just as despondent as covalent bonding. I suspect it would also would have jaundiced my view of Greek philosophy when it was finally introduced to me at university four years later. So in this case, at least, things turned out for the best.
July 28, 2017
Not being a native English reader, this is the 2nd book about ancient Greece written in English I ever finished.
I just love it.
Quoting the the comments on the death of Agesilaus, to me it sounds like a verse -
Though not in any sense a great man, though not in the same rank as Lysander, Agesilaus had been for forty years a prominent figure in Greece. There is something melancholy about his career. He could remember the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War; he had seen the triumph of Sparta, and had conducted her policy during a great part of thirty years of supremacy; and then, as an old man, he shared in her humiliation. He had begun by dreaming of the conquest of Persia; he had been forced to abandon such dreams; and he had translated his ardour into a bitter hatred against an Hellenic city. It is tragic to see him, at the age of eighty-three, going forth against Persia once more, not now for conquest or glory, but to earn by any and every means the money needed by his indigent country.
I just love it.
Quoting the the comments on the death of Agesilaus, to me it sounds like a verse -
Though not in any sense a great man, though not in the same rank as Lysander, Agesilaus had been for forty years a prominent figure in Greece. There is something melancholy about his career. He could remember the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War; he had seen the triumph of Sparta, and had conducted her policy during a great part of thirty years of supremacy; and then, as an old man, he shared in her humiliation. He had begun by dreaming of the conquest of Persia; he had been forced to abandon such dreams; and he had translated his ardour into a bitter hatred against an Hellenic city. It is tragic to see him, at the age of eighty-three, going forth against Persia once more, not now for conquest or glory, but to earn by any and every means the money needed by his indigent country.
September 26, 2020
To appreciate the appeal of J.B. Bury’s legendary old masterpiece, one has to transport oneself into the mindset of a teenage boy for whom the exploits of an Alexander the Great, a Charlemagne or a Napoleon are exciting and worldly glory counts for something. Bury has condensed all the ancient documents and stitched together a connected narrative stretching over nearly a thousand years, up to its terminus ad quem in 323 BC. The reader will revel in an almost blow-by-blow account of the battles against the invading Persian army under Xerxes at Thermopylae and Salamis, the Peloponnesian war, the fall of Athens and the Spartan supremacy, the second Athenian league, the hegemony of Thebes, the rise of Macedonia under Philip II and, in culmination, a circumstantial retelling of Alexander’s campaigns in Persia and the far East. How memorable is the tale of the bravery of Alexander in his final engagement, at the very outer limit of the world in Hindustan, surmounting the walls of the citadel of Sangala and leaping, alone, into the keep to confront the enemy! He vanquished his foe and in the process received an almost mortal wound, before his compatriots could open the gate and come to his aid.
When this reviewer was a freshman at Princeton, his old-school professor of history Robert Connor organized a mock hoplite battle among the students enrolled in his lectures, with cardboard shields but minus the spears, on an open field next to the astrophysics and mathematics departments, so that one could gain a visceral impression of what it is like to fight in closed ranks. These days, one could scarcely repeat the like; for one thing, the empty ground has been covered with a trendy postmodern library. Every newly appointed self-important administrator wants to make his mark by erecting something new and supposedly indispensable, an institute here, a program of studies in whatever there, and this establishes an ineluctable inbuilt bureaucratic imperative to wreck what is old. Every last tree has to be cut down, every last quad paved over or crammed with ugly architecture that clashes with the collegiate Gothic. There is no countervailing pressure to preserve what is good on the existing campus (this unfortunate fact of life goes under the heading of what economists call the tragedy of the commons; there are any number of good economists on the faculty but none, it seems, is moved to apply what he teaches about in the classroom to the active preservation of the commons outside his very office window). Sad to think that if one were to seek to revisit one’s old haunts, one would doubtless only find that most all of them have long since been obliterated. Ironic, for all the Ivy League universities’ salutary efforts to include underrepresented minorities, by the time they get to the campus whatever once made it distinctive will have disappeared and they will experience only just another bleak urbanized sprawl.
Back to the text under review. Bury’s tome is confessedly a strictly political history, as we may gather from this extract from the preface to the first edition: ‘It was a necessary consequence of the limitations of space which I imposed upon myself, that literature and art, philosophy and religion, should be touched upon only when they directly illustrate, or come into some specially intimate connection with, the political history. It will be found that I have sometimes interpreted this rule liberally; but it is a rule which could be the more readily adopted as so many excellent works dealing with art, literature, and philosophy are now easily accessible. The interspersion, in a short political history, of a few unconnected chapters dealing, as they must deal, inadequately with art and literature seems useless and inartistic’ (p. vii).
Therefore, it will come as little surprise that the text is weak on cultural understanding. Mycenaean civilization and the heroic age are covered fairly well, however, as one has only the archaeological record to rely on; and the same goes for the succeeding dark age, the Dorian invasion, the expansion of the Greeks into Ionia and later the colonization of Magna Graecia. At this point, the narrative of political events can pick up, once extant sources become available. Here the focus narrows and the omissions become glaring. Religious developments during the age of Solon and the spread of Orphism get a mere couple pages each; there is nothing whatsoever on Greek drama or poetry, aside from a paragraph or two notice on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Thus, reading Bury one won’t gather very much of a feeling for what a typical ritual sacrifice at a communion meal was like or what could have happened when one underwent the Eleusinian mysteries. For this one might turn to Walter Burkert’s staid classic monograph Greek Religion or, if more daring, perhaps to Walter Otto’s Die Götter Griechenlands: Das Bild des Göttlichen im Spiegel des griechischen Geistes or his more concise and pointed Theophania: Der Geist der altgriechischen Religion.
As for philosophy, Thales, Heraclitus and Parmenides are disposed of in a few sentences each, Xenophanes in a paragraph; the other pre-Socratics merit no mention at all. Bury’s rationalistic viewpoint is brought out well by the following summary passage: ‘With Parmenides and Heraclitus, philosophy in the strict sense, metaphysics as we call it, was fully founded. We have not to pursue the development here; but we have to realise that the establishment of the study of philosophy was one of the most momentous facts in the history of the Greeks. It meant the triumph of reason over mystery; it led to the discrediting of the Orphic movement; it ensured the free political and social progress of Hellas….We may say, with propriety, that a great peril was averted from Greece by the healthful influence of the immortal thinkers of Ionia. But this, after all, is only a superficial way of putting the fact. If we look deeper, we see that the victory of philosophy over the doctrines of the priests was simply the expression of the Greek spirit, which inevitably sought its highest satisfaction in the full expression of its own powers in the free light of reason’ (p. 199).
Can a professor at Cambridge in the first half of the twentieth century really have been so simplistic? Apparently so! Needless to say, there is nothing here on Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, either.
All the same, one should bear in mind that Bury’s conventional politically-oriented history is very good for what it is and not tax him too hard for omitting material on other aspects of culture he is scarcely equipped to handle, anyway. Political developments and military engagements are discussed in full detail, with a survey of the geographical terrain, sketches of the motivation, war aims and strategy of the respective players and so forth. Once in a lifetime one ought to rehearse a connected narrative of individual historical events at a granular level and learn to know the names of the principal actors (the same applies to Roman history). Who were Solon, Lycurgus, Draco, Pericles, Isocrates and so on? Later on, one can indeed familiarize oneself with the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, visit a museum and inspect a Cycladic figurine, an archaic torso or a painted amphora etc. and begin to ponder what it all means, but without a sturdy framework of what actually happened and when into which to fit one’s reflections, one will be as if lost at sea and condemned to superficiality. One fears most everyone these days finds himself in the latter position, bewildered and unable to comprehend the past beyond a handful of clichés.
Back in the day, of course, one would not have needed a textbook such as Bury’s at all as one would have been expected to do for oneself what he does for us, by reading through and assimilating all the extant primary sources in the original Greek and Latin. But everyone knows that educational standards decline with time and that the humanistic curriculum has to be abolished for the sake of egalitarianism. At least, at Princeton during this reviewer’s tenure there we read Herodotus and Thucydides in English translation; one doubts whether anyone in the current crop of freshmen does even this much. So keep a dusty copy of Bury on one’s bookshelf as a reminder of a bygone, more civilized era!
When this reviewer was a freshman at Princeton, his old-school professor of history Robert Connor organized a mock hoplite battle among the students enrolled in his lectures, with cardboard shields but minus the spears, on an open field next to the astrophysics and mathematics departments, so that one could gain a visceral impression of what it is like to fight in closed ranks. These days, one could scarcely repeat the like; for one thing, the empty ground has been covered with a trendy postmodern library. Every newly appointed self-important administrator wants to make his mark by erecting something new and supposedly indispensable, an institute here, a program of studies in whatever there, and this establishes an ineluctable inbuilt bureaucratic imperative to wreck what is old. Every last tree has to be cut down, every last quad paved over or crammed with ugly architecture that clashes with the collegiate Gothic. There is no countervailing pressure to preserve what is good on the existing campus (this unfortunate fact of life goes under the heading of what economists call the tragedy of the commons; there are any number of good economists on the faculty but none, it seems, is moved to apply what he teaches about in the classroom to the active preservation of the commons outside his very office window). Sad to think that if one were to seek to revisit one’s old haunts, one would doubtless only find that most all of them have long since been obliterated. Ironic, for all the Ivy League universities’ salutary efforts to include underrepresented minorities, by the time they get to the campus whatever once made it distinctive will have disappeared and they will experience only just another bleak urbanized sprawl.
Back to the text under review. Bury’s tome is confessedly a strictly political history, as we may gather from this extract from the preface to the first edition: ‘It was a necessary consequence of the limitations of space which I imposed upon myself, that literature and art, philosophy and religion, should be touched upon only when they directly illustrate, or come into some specially intimate connection with, the political history. It will be found that I have sometimes interpreted this rule liberally; but it is a rule which could be the more readily adopted as so many excellent works dealing with art, literature, and philosophy are now easily accessible. The interspersion, in a short political history, of a few unconnected chapters dealing, as they must deal, inadequately with art and literature seems useless and inartistic’ (p. vii).
Therefore, it will come as little surprise that the text is weak on cultural understanding. Mycenaean civilization and the heroic age are covered fairly well, however, as one has only the archaeological record to rely on; and the same goes for the succeeding dark age, the Dorian invasion, the expansion of the Greeks into Ionia and later the colonization of Magna Graecia. At this point, the narrative of political events can pick up, once extant sources become available. Here the focus narrows and the omissions become glaring. Religious developments during the age of Solon and the spread of Orphism get a mere couple pages each; there is nothing whatsoever on Greek drama or poetry, aside from a paragraph or two notice on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Thus, reading Bury one won’t gather very much of a feeling for what a typical ritual sacrifice at a communion meal was like or what could have happened when one underwent the Eleusinian mysteries. For this one might turn to Walter Burkert’s staid classic monograph Greek Religion or, if more daring, perhaps to Walter Otto’s Die Götter Griechenlands: Das Bild des Göttlichen im Spiegel des griechischen Geistes or his more concise and pointed Theophania: Der Geist der altgriechischen Religion.
As for philosophy, Thales, Heraclitus and Parmenides are disposed of in a few sentences each, Xenophanes in a paragraph; the other pre-Socratics merit no mention at all. Bury’s rationalistic viewpoint is brought out well by the following summary passage: ‘With Parmenides and Heraclitus, philosophy in the strict sense, metaphysics as we call it, was fully founded. We have not to pursue the development here; but we have to realise that the establishment of the study of philosophy was one of the most momentous facts in the history of the Greeks. It meant the triumph of reason over mystery; it led to the discrediting of the Orphic movement; it ensured the free political and social progress of Hellas….We may say, with propriety, that a great peril was averted from Greece by the healthful influence of the immortal thinkers of Ionia. But this, after all, is only a superficial way of putting the fact. If we look deeper, we see that the victory of philosophy over the doctrines of the priests was simply the expression of the Greek spirit, which inevitably sought its highest satisfaction in the full expression of its own powers in the free light of reason’ (p. 199).
Can a professor at Cambridge in the first half of the twentieth century really have been so simplistic? Apparently so! Needless to say, there is nothing here on Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, either.
All the same, one should bear in mind that Bury’s conventional politically-oriented history is very good for what it is and not tax him too hard for omitting material on other aspects of culture he is scarcely equipped to handle, anyway. Political developments and military engagements are discussed in full detail, with a survey of the geographical terrain, sketches of the motivation, war aims and strategy of the respective players and so forth. Once in a lifetime one ought to rehearse a connected narrative of individual historical events at a granular level and learn to know the names of the principal actors (the same applies to Roman history). Who were Solon, Lycurgus, Draco, Pericles, Isocrates and so on? Later on, one can indeed familiarize oneself with the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, visit a museum and inspect a Cycladic figurine, an archaic torso or a painted amphora etc. and begin to ponder what it all means, but without a sturdy framework of what actually happened and when into which to fit one’s reflections, one will be as if lost at sea and condemned to superficiality. One fears most everyone these days finds himself in the latter position, bewildered and unable to comprehend the past beyond a handful of clichés.
Back in the day, of course, one would not have needed a textbook such as Bury’s at all as one would have been expected to do for oneself what he does for us, by reading through and assimilating all the extant primary sources in the original Greek and Latin. But everyone knows that educational standards decline with time and that the humanistic curriculum has to be abolished for the sake of egalitarianism. At least, at Princeton during this reviewer’s tenure there we read Herodotus and Thucydides in English translation; one doubts whether anyone in the current crop of freshmen does even this much. So keep a dusty copy of Bury on one’s bookshelf as a reminder of a bygone, more civilized era!
September 22, 2020
M-am obisnuit sa vad si sa judec Grecia Antica prin prisma artelor vizuale, filosofiei, dramaturgiei, poeziei, democratiei.
Nu m-am gandit ca, de fapt, 3000 de ani inainte de Hristos (de la civilizatia minoica si apoi miceniana pana la moartea lui Alexandru cel Mare) au fost dominati de nenumarate lupte si razboaie.
S-au razboit pentru suprematie orasele-stat, Sparta, Teba, Beotia, Atena, s-au luptat pana la moarte grecii impotriva persilor si a altor semintii de mult disparute.
Am reconsiderat putinele cunostinte pe care le aveam.
Iar la finalul acestei lucrari-monument am inteles inca o data ca istoria ne invata, in primul rand, sa incercam sa fim mai destepti decat cei care ne-au marcat trecutul.
Nu m-am gandit ca, de fapt, 3000 de ani inainte de Hristos (de la civilizatia minoica si apoi miceniana pana la moartea lui Alexandru cel Mare) au fost dominati de nenumarate lupte si razboaie.
S-au razboit pentru suprematie orasele-stat, Sparta, Teba, Beotia, Atena, s-au luptat pana la moarte grecii impotriva persilor si a altor semintii de mult disparute.
Am reconsiderat putinele cunostinte pe care le aveam.
Iar la finalul acestei lucrari-monument am inteles inca o data ca istoria ne invata, in primul rand, sa incercam sa fim mai destepti decat cei care ne-au marcat trecutul.
September 3, 2014
It's a good, solidly-written, and very exhaustive political history of Greece, containing many episodes of Greek history that are glossed over and that I only had a passing familiarity with: the hegemony of Thebes after the decline of Sparta after the Peloponnesian War; the history of Syracuse under Dionysius and his successors; the rise of Philip and his achievement of Macedonian hegemony.
With that said, it is solely a political history, focusing on the states that were most powerful at the time. That's all it set out to be, but, with such a storied civilization as the classical Greeks, it's still disappointing. I would not have minded talking more about the influence of the playwrights (especially Aristophanes and Euripedes, the most political) as well as of the philosophers, but they get only a cursory treatment.
With that said, it is solely a political history, focusing on the states that were most powerful at the time. That's all it set out to be, but, with such a storied civilization as the classical Greeks, it's still disappointing. I would not have minded talking more about the influence of the playwrights (especially Aristophanes and Euripedes, the most political) as well as of the philosophers, but they get only a cursory treatment.
November 5, 2020
This is the standard introduction to ancient Greek history (prehistory to the Hellenistic kingdoms) which has been used by English-speaking college students in various updated editions since its first publication by Bury in 1900. Dry and scholarly, but thorough, well written and very clear, with useful maps and columnar side notes.
June 25, 2014
Wonderful read. But then I'm an Ancient Greece enthusiast.
April 3, 2022
A decent recap of the history which finds itself lacking in some particulars ala The Sacred Band of Thebes were just really good friends.
June 20, 2024
Wonderful and very interesting read on a very broad expanse of history. Written wonderfully. Very dense yet covering the proper amount. Would like to learn more about the technological and cultural aspects next to complement the great information on the political and military aspects developed here. Maybe more recent books, considering this one is rather old.
August 2, 2023
Absolutely fascinating history of Greece. Once you make it through the dry first chapter on pottery shards it really makes the history come alive. The battle descriptions were gripping and I loved reading about Alexander. What a character!
August 2, 2016
Greek History
This covers the history of Greece up to the death of Alexander the Great. You learn about great figures in Greek history and their contributions to western civilization.
This covers the history of Greece up to the death of Alexander the Great. You learn about great figures in Greek history and their contributions to western civilization.
January 4, 2015
This is my standard reference book whenever it comes to Ancient Greece. A absolute necessity for any enthusiast of the period.Comprehensive to the hilt.
August 9, 2022
Enjoyed this so much! So informative!
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews