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The Oxford History of the Classical World
The history, achievements & legacies of Greek & Roman antiquity come to life in the pages of this comprehensive & beautifully illustrated volume. Following a format similar to that of The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, this brings together the work of 30 authorities & organizes their contributions into three main sections. The 1st covers Greece from the 8th to the 4th centuries, a period unparalleled in history for its brilliance in literature, philosophy & the visual arts. The 2nd deals with the Hellenization of the Middle East by the monarchies established in the areas conquered by Alexander the Great, the growth of Rome & the impact of the two cultures on one another. The 3rd covers the foundation of the Roman Empire by Augustus & its consolidation in the 1st two centuries AD. A concluding essay discusses certain aspects of the later Empire & its influence on Western civilization, notably thru the adoption of Christianity. Within each section, chapters dealing with political & social history alternate with ones on literature, philosophy & the arts. Maps & chronological charts--not to mention over 250 illustrations, 16 in color--enrich the basic text, along with bibliographies & an index.
John Boardman is Lincoln Professor of Classical Archeology at the University of Oxford. Jasper Griffin & Oswyn Murray are Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford.
John Boardman is Lincoln Professor of Classical Archeology at the University of Oxford. Jasper Griffin & Oswyn Murray are Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford.
893 pages, Hardcover
First published July 17, 1986
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June 6, 2017Thirty-two chapters divided chronologically into three sections (Greece, Greece & Rome and Rome) covering topics with essays on literature, history, the arts and architecture from the Archaic period through to Late Antiquity. Well illustrated and accompanied by maps throughout. It is an excellent book to have handy when you need a three page essay on Virgil or Hellenistic Philosophy . Potentially it is also of great use in an exercise regime as the hardback is rather bulky - certainly easier to desk at a table or desk than elsewhere. I acquired a copy as part of an introductory deal for a book club back in the day when such things worked through the postal system rather than the internet. I'd have never got it otherwise and so been deprived of its Bible style two columns of text per page with unBiblical representations of graven images.
January 20, 2015
3.5 stars.
A very ambitious book trying to explore all different facets of ancient western civilization (Greece and Rome - the latter with a focus primarily on the late Republican and Early Empire periods).
While political and military history are (to some extent) covered by this book, a significant part is actually dedicated to complementary aspects such as society structure and evolution, economy, literature, art and culture, philosophy and religion.
The book does not present a uniform, continuous narrative (there is no strict timeline throughout the reading), and it is structured as a series of essays by different authors.
Because of this approach, and because of the overambitious nature of this book (I think it is just impossible to cover all these facets of ancient Western Civilization in just one book, even a book of 900 pages like this one), the quality and level of detail fluctuate significantly from one subject to another: for example, some periods and subjects (such as Late Antiquity, or Neoplatonic philosophy) are just barely touched and leave the more knowledgeable reader quite dissatisfied.
If you are after a detailed scholarly treatment of these subjects , then I am afraid that this is probably not the best book for you - I must say that there is little that I did not already know, and which I already found elsewhere treated at a significantly deeper level of detail.
On the other hand, this book represents a nice, interesting, multidimensional introductory overview of all major cultural aspects of ancient Western Civilization.
September 8, 2020
Anthologies, while they can be informative, often disappoint owing to the uneven quality of the contributions. The editors John Boardman, Jasper Griffin and Oswyn Murray, however, manage to maintain a consistently very high standard in this Oxford History of the Classical World. At nearly nine hundred pages, this copious and lavishly illustrated volume covers multifarious aspects of the history of the ancient Graeco-Roman world—social, political, military, literary, artistic, intellectual, religious etc. The only major omissions fall in the areas of mathematics and the natural sciences.
Strongest by far are the sections on literature and the arts. What is distinctive is that every major author or literary work receives a miniature portrait, if not a full-length essay one might expect from a literary critic. Oliver Taplin kicks off with an outstanding twenty-eight page treatment of Homer. Taking the Iliad and the Odyssey apart line by line, he shows how they thematically shape time and place. Then, he enters into an extended discussion of the problem of Homeric authorship, citing the classic work on oral tradition by Milman Parry and some more recent reactions to it. Ewen Bowie continues with an analysis of lyrical and elegiac poetry, which goes into close detail on Archilochus, Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon, Pindar and Simonides. Peter Levi summarizes the evolution of Greek drama and illustrates his statements with a close look at Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and Meander. Not as detailed, perhaps, but more in the vein of a specialized dictionary are the entries on Hellenistic poetry (Dioscorides, Callimachus, Apollonius). But then Peter Brown supplies a discussion of early Latin literature at a comparable level to what we have just seen with the Greek authors, on Plautus, Terence and Ennius. The poets of the late Republic, Lucretius and Catullus, have a chapter to themselves followed by one on Augustan poetry and society (Horace, Propertius and Ovid), while Virgil of course gets a full chapter to himself. After the Augustan age, one proceeds onwards to prose in the early empire (Seneca, Pliny, Plutarch, Lucian and Aristides). Lastly, there is a full-length chapter on the Latin silver age of Quintilian, Lucan, Juvenal, Petronius and Apuleius. In each case, the analysis is satisfying and one feels one has learned something about the poet’s distinctive personality and artistry.
The great Greek and Roman historians (Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus and Suetonius) receive a similar treatment to that of the literary figures in chapters of their own. This Oxford history strives to provide coverage of all the major historical developments in the ancient world as well, with full chapters on the history of the archaic period, the classical period, the Hellenistic period, early Rome and Italy and the expansion of Rome beyond Italy into the Mediterranean world. Here, the focus is on politics, not nearly as minutely detailed on this score as Bury, but enough so that one can follow the main lines of what happened. Perhaps the best part is on the decline and fall of the Roman republic, where one meets the major players Cicero, Pompey, Cato, Caesar and Crassus. Almost as good is the account of the founding of the empire by Octavian, later Augustus, and the first century through the succession of Tiberius, Caligula and Nero to Vespasian. Compared, say, to Michael Grant’s standard history of Rome, the fuller picture of the personalities and their motivations one gets here enables one to reconstruct the course of events and why they took the form they did. Very much to be appreciated.
Having set the bar so high on literature and politics, perhaps it is too much to achieve a comparable level in the treatment of philosophy. Martin West’s chapter on the pre-Socratics is reasonably good, but not truly outstanding. The selected scholars for the classical and Hellenistic periods, Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes, are very reputable, to be sure, yet what they have to say, while reasonably full at least for Plato if not for Aristotle, is not quite as inspired as what we found above on the poets. Nevertheless, the exposition of Epicurus, the Stoics and middle Platonists, Philo and Plotinus, is fairly satisfactory. Perhaps, when it comes to ethics and such, an approach centering on biographical portraiture can be successful. The authors here, however, decline to get very technical on metaphysics, natural philosophy, logic or epistemology, and their preferred method does not work so happily on these subjects. One would not understand very well from this volume, for instance, what Aristotle or his disciple Theophrastus are all about.
The present Oxford history seems to be weaker on religion, too. Certainly, the chapter on Hesiod and on Greek mythology is good, comparable to the one on Homer. After this promising start, though, there are no further chapters dedicated to religion per se. Thus, one will encounter only the most fleeting notices on Judaism, the beginnings of Christianity, Gnosticism and other assorted Christian heresies or the remarkable penetration of classical society by the Oriental mystery cults (Isis, Mithraism, Manichaeism etc.) that took place during later centuries. In as much as ancient peoples were profoundly religious and the thousand-year period under discussion saw a number of revolutions in the religious sphere, the overall portrait of the classical world one gets from this volume is therefore wanting. One could have wished, at least, for a more adequate investigation of the relation of religion to philosophy in its nascent stages than one can derive from Bury, for instance. For surely, things are not quite as simple as Bury or Burnett seem to think. Consider just the locus classicus of the fragment by Anaximander or Parmenides’ ascription of his philosophical poem to an unnamed goddess. And Xenophanes himself is by no means a simple-minded rationalist, despite what a superficial look on the part of those detained by modern prejudices might suggest. Perhaps the best one can do at this juncture would be to refer to the somewhat dated monograph by Cornford [From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation, originally published in 1912].
One more remark. As expansive as it is, the present volume cannot embrace everything. There is no material at all on the predecessor civilizations of Mesopotamia, Elam, the Hittites, Minoan Crete, Phoenicia, Egypt and Mycenae, and very little on surrounding cultures with which the Graeco-Roman world stood in constant interaction—Celtic, Germanic, Scythian, Parthian, Persian, Arabian. Late antiquity in general receives short shrift in this volume; there is on this subject only one twenty-page chapter by Henry Chadwick entitled ‘taking leave of antiquity’. Compared to earlier chapters it is very sketchy. This means, in particular, that the early church, the rise of Christianity and the downfall of paganism are breezed over most perfunctorily, with only some discussion of ethics but none whatsoever of doctrine or theology. Here is just not the place to look; one had rather refer to the authoritative writings of Peter Brown, for a start.
Altogether though, the present volume can be heartily recommended to someone wishing to round out his appreciation of the classical world. What is more, every chapter concludes with a detailed annotated bibliography, so the curious reader will have good leads to follow up on any given topic.
Strongest by far are the sections on literature and the arts. What is distinctive is that every major author or literary work receives a miniature portrait, if not a full-length essay one might expect from a literary critic. Oliver Taplin kicks off with an outstanding twenty-eight page treatment of Homer. Taking the Iliad and the Odyssey apart line by line, he shows how they thematically shape time and place. Then, he enters into an extended discussion of the problem of Homeric authorship, citing the classic work on oral tradition by Milman Parry and some more recent reactions to it. Ewen Bowie continues with an analysis of lyrical and elegiac poetry, which goes into close detail on Archilochus, Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon, Pindar and Simonides. Peter Levi summarizes the evolution of Greek drama and illustrates his statements with a close look at Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and Meander. Not as detailed, perhaps, but more in the vein of a specialized dictionary are the entries on Hellenistic poetry (Dioscorides, Callimachus, Apollonius). But then Peter Brown supplies a discussion of early Latin literature at a comparable level to what we have just seen with the Greek authors, on Plautus, Terence and Ennius. The poets of the late Republic, Lucretius and Catullus, have a chapter to themselves followed by one on Augustan poetry and society (Horace, Propertius and Ovid), while Virgil of course gets a full chapter to himself. After the Augustan age, one proceeds onwards to prose in the early empire (Seneca, Pliny, Plutarch, Lucian and Aristides). Lastly, there is a full-length chapter on the Latin silver age of Quintilian, Lucan, Juvenal, Petronius and Apuleius. In each case, the analysis is satisfying and one feels one has learned something about the poet’s distinctive personality and artistry.
The great Greek and Roman historians (Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus and Suetonius) receive a similar treatment to that of the literary figures in chapters of their own. This Oxford history strives to provide coverage of all the major historical developments in the ancient world as well, with full chapters on the history of the archaic period, the classical period, the Hellenistic period, early Rome and Italy and the expansion of Rome beyond Italy into the Mediterranean world. Here, the focus is on politics, not nearly as minutely detailed on this score as Bury, but enough so that one can follow the main lines of what happened. Perhaps the best part is on the decline and fall of the Roman republic, where one meets the major players Cicero, Pompey, Cato, Caesar and Crassus. Almost as good is the account of the founding of the empire by Octavian, later Augustus, and the first century through the succession of Tiberius, Caligula and Nero to Vespasian. Compared, say, to Michael Grant’s standard history of Rome, the fuller picture of the personalities and their motivations one gets here enables one to reconstruct the course of events and why they took the form they did. Very much to be appreciated.
Having set the bar so high on literature and politics, perhaps it is too much to achieve a comparable level in the treatment of philosophy. Martin West’s chapter on the pre-Socratics is reasonably good, but not truly outstanding. The selected scholars for the classical and Hellenistic periods, Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes, are very reputable, to be sure, yet what they have to say, while reasonably full at least for Plato if not for Aristotle, is not quite as inspired as what we found above on the poets. Nevertheless, the exposition of Epicurus, the Stoics and middle Platonists, Philo and Plotinus, is fairly satisfactory. Perhaps, when it comes to ethics and such, an approach centering on biographical portraiture can be successful. The authors here, however, decline to get very technical on metaphysics, natural philosophy, logic or epistemology, and their preferred method does not work so happily on these subjects. One would not understand very well from this volume, for instance, what Aristotle or his disciple Theophrastus are all about.
The present Oxford history seems to be weaker on religion, too. Certainly, the chapter on Hesiod and on Greek mythology is good, comparable to the one on Homer. After this promising start, though, there are no further chapters dedicated to religion per se. Thus, one will encounter only the most fleeting notices on Judaism, the beginnings of Christianity, Gnosticism and other assorted Christian heresies or the remarkable penetration of classical society by the Oriental mystery cults (Isis, Mithraism, Manichaeism etc.) that took place during later centuries. In as much as ancient peoples were profoundly religious and the thousand-year period under discussion saw a number of revolutions in the religious sphere, the overall portrait of the classical world one gets from this volume is therefore wanting. One could have wished, at least, for a more adequate investigation of the relation of religion to philosophy in its nascent stages than one can derive from Bury, for instance. For surely, things are not quite as simple as Bury or Burnett seem to think. Consider just the locus classicus of the fragment by Anaximander or Parmenides’ ascription of his philosophical poem to an unnamed goddess. And Xenophanes himself is by no means a simple-minded rationalist, despite what a superficial look on the part of those detained by modern prejudices might suggest. Perhaps the best one can do at this juncture would be to refer to the somewhat dated monograph by Cornford [From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation, originally published in 1912].
One more remark. As expansive as it is, the present volume cannot embrace everything. There is no material at all on the predecessor civilizations of Mesopotamia, Elam, the Hittites, Minoan Crete, Phoenicia, Egypt and Mycenae, and very little on surrounding cultures with which the Graeco-Roman world stood in constant interaction—Celtic, Germanic, Scythian, Parthian, Persian, Arabian. Late antiquity in general receives short shrift in this volume; there is on this subject only one twenty-page chapter by Henry Chadwick entitled ‘taking leave of antiquity’. Compared to earlier chapters it is very sketchy. This means, in particular, that the early church, the rise of Christianity and the downfall of paganism are breezed over most perfunctorily, with only some discussion of ethics but none whatsoever of doctrine or theology. Here is just not the place to look; one had rather refer to the authoritative writings of Peter Brown, for a start.
Altogether though, the present volume can be heartily recommended to someone wishing to round out his appreciation of the classical world. What is more, every chapter concludes with a detailed annotated bibliography, so the curious reader will have good leads to follow up on any given topic.
November 2, 2014
A range of academic essays dealing with many aspects of the histories of the Greeks, the Hellenic era and the Romans, while not actually getting around to narrating most of their stories, without which it all seems a bit ... academic. There seem to me to be significant gaps in the topics covered, such as Roman sponsorship of early Christianity, and description of the later period seems especially sketchy. I worry a lot about implying that the Greek and Roman worlds can be taken as the sum of our ancient history, even in Europe. The early essays do in fact make clear that while the Greeks were getting around to forming their civilisation, they lived in the ruins of older societies and learned from existing, thriving cultures around the Mediterranean and beyond. The Romans in turn were not so much the heirs of Greek civilisation as its conqueror. The Roman destruction of both Corinth and Carthage represented the triumph of brute force, not the onward march of Western enlightenment. Greek culture arrived in Rome as war booty.
There are enough interesting essays to make the book pleasing to read but for the many exciting and colourful stories it ignores, maybe we just have to turn to YouTube and the History Channel. Obviously, an academic can assume that other academic readers already know the basic story of the people and periods they describe and I appreciate that the university staff can knock out some weighty history tomes by making a swift trawl through their filing cabinets (has anyone got an essay about Roman architecture?) but a few more concessions to the general reader would surely be worth making. On the whole this volume seems to me to represent the smug and self satisfied blather of the over confident academic. It is as though both the "Classical World" as defined here, and the elite university sponsoring this tome, were too big and too dominant to be questioned in a critical way - a modern plutocracy appealing to an ancient plutocracy.
There are enough interesting essays to make the book pleasing to read but for the many exciting and colourful stories it ignores, maybe we just have to turn to YouTube and the History Channel. Obviously, an academic can assume that other academic readers already know the basic story of the people and periods they describe and I appreciate that the university staff can knock out some weighty history tomes by making a swift trawl through their filing cabinets (has anyone got an essay about Roman architecture?) but a few more concessions to the general reader would surely be worth making. On the whole this volume seems to me to represent the smug and self satisfied blather of the over confident academic. It is as though both the "Classical World" as defined here, and the elite university sponsoring this tome, were too big and too dominant to be questioned in a critical way - a modern plutocracy appealing to an ancient plutocracy.
May 1, 2021
This is an excellent resource for anyone interested in learning more about the Classical world of Ancient Greece and Rome. It does not replace reading more detailed books on the period, but the bibliographies at the end of each chapter are useful.
November 16, 2013
My main problem with this book is the misleading application of history in its title. I do not believe it is unreasonable to assume that a history book will, for better or worse, focus on the political history in question. Be that a valid pigeonholing of history or not, it is nonetheless what the reader expects. (It is because of this that we add qualifiers when the term history is used differently, i.e. art history, etc.) Well, of the 33 chapters in this collection only about 6 deal with political history, and even then they do so in an overly generalized way. The rest of this book is dedicated to philosophy, literature, religion, architecture, art and the cultural life of the period. These are all certainly valid points from which to study history, but not at the cost of understanding the political aspects that by and large shaped this era. Thus we end with a completely unbalanced book, where the political history is so minimized so as to not even serve as background for the unending chapters on architecture, philosophy and the rest. Throughout the work the reader feels as if one ought to have already read the political history to understand this book. Key aspects of the political, and thus cultural, formation of this period, like the Peloponnesian and Punic Wars or the end of Roman Republic, are simply glossed over. This is not to say that they were not brilliantly written chapters, like the one on Homer and the Greek Myths, but the book overall fails to give the reader an understanding of the political evolution of this era to the point where the literature, philosophy and art cannot be understood in context. In my opinion, the best thing that can be done for this book is to remove the few political chapters included, suggest in the introduction the need to have read the political history of the period and then change the title to “The Oxford Cultural History of the Classical World”.
January 10, 2014
Phew, what a ride. This book is split up into two parts: Greek civilization, and primary Republican Rome. As far as the entirety of the 'classical world', its primary focus is on these two sovereigns, with some insight into other people from those perspectives.
There is no strict timeline throughout the reading; and it is mostly structured around cultural contrasts, where new ideas are introduced as needed. It is clear this is not a political, or military historical perspective; much if anything is sparse and quickly mentioned-- You won't learn much about the Persian wars, or the great battles with Hannibal. Again, this is a cultural review: from society, norms, philosophy and people. This is my first immersion with the Greek world, so I can not appreciate the details as much as a proficient reader would; but the Roman latter half is absolutely riveting. The final years of the Republic of Rome are written through a chapter dedicated to the orator, Cicero. The Greek-Latin linguistic affairs is fascinating, and the chapters on historical, and philosophical figures were my favorite-- likewise, in the Hellenistic first-half.
Every chapter ends with a 'further readings' addition. Which is great if you're simply interested in that chapter's topic, or simply a fan of all-things antiquity. Most of the recommended readings are the priceless Loeb Classics - which most are free in their original 1912 publication around the internet - and the cheap Penguin Classics translations.
There is no strict timeline throughout the reading; and it is mostly structured around cultural contrasts, where new ideas are introduced as needed. It is clear this is not a political, or military historical perspective; much if anything is sparse and quickly mentioned-- You won't learn much about the Persian wars, or the great battles with Hannibal. Again, this is a cultural review: from society, norms, philosophy and people. This is my first immersion with the Greek world, so I can not appreciate the details as much as a proficient reader would; but the Roman latter half is absolutely riveting. The final years of the Republic of Rome are written through a chapter dedicated to the orator, Cicero. The Greek-Latin linguistic affairs is fascinating, and the chapters on historical, and philosophical figures were my favorite-- likewise, in the Hellenistic first-half.
Every chapter ends with a 'further readings' addition. Which is great if you're simply interested in that chapter's topic, or simply a fan of all-things antiquity. Most of the recommended readings are the priceless Loeb Classics - which most are free in their original 1912 publication around the internet - and the cheap Penguin Classics translations.
September 12, 2013
This book was given me by the husband of a colleague. Jim DeVoto was a professor of Classics at Loyola University Chicago. We first met at an in-person registration at the Water Tower Campus downtown while he was signing up for a German class. Introduced by his wife and my colleague, Paula, we soon became friends, sharing lunches together at both the Lake Shore and Water Tower campuses. As I'd had a bit of an intellectual hobby with classical antiquity since high school, his wealth of knowledge about the period led to interesting discussions and, ultimately, to an association with the Ares Press, publishers of The Ancient World, with whom Jim was a writer and with whom I was to become an associate editor until their move to Golden, Colorado.
July 26, 2014
10/10
Simply amazing. Recommended for anyone remotely interested in the classics.
Simply amazing. Recommended for anyone remotely interested in the classics.
May 3, 2015
Wonderful book
February 16, 2024
More of an academic reference book. Does not read like a novel. I learned some good stuff.
October 5, 2018
Obviously, Oxford University series "Oxford History of..." are amazing reference books. This particular text covers a great deal of material with black & white illustrations where possible. Writing a review is actually quite pathetic as it is such a scholarly and advanced book, there can be no true criticism.
January 27, 2025
Each chapter is written by an expert on a particular aspect of Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman culture, making for brilliant reading. Unfortunately, this survey effectively ends after the Antonine period, cramming the ~460 years of history between Commodus and the Islamic Conquests into a single chapter.
December 26, 2019
Very interesting and well researched review of the world of Rome and Greece. Written by a experts in different areas, so it doesn't have a 'thesis', as does Mary Beard's excellent SPQR. But very good background reading.
July 14, 2020
This was a very educational book, especially for someone who is well versed in history.
February 11, 2013
A cynical trade on Oxford's reputation. Each chapter is a discrete essay by a different author on a specific topic. Some essays are clumsy combinations of old lecture notes and journal articles. Some are the indifferent ghostwriting of the author's grad student. The chapter on the Imperial Era was, I kid you not, a long essay on how there was not an imperial bureaucracy. The best chapter in this book was, sadly, the first one. It was written by this guy. I look forward to reading his book.
October 28, 2019
Most books are rated related to their usefulness and contributions to my research.
Overall, a good book for the researcher and enthusiast.
Read for personal research
- found this book's contents helpful and inspiring - number rating relates to the book's contribution to my needs.
Overall, a good book for the researcher and enthusiast.
Read for personal research
- found this book's contents helpful and inspiring - number rating relates to the book's contribution to my needs.
April 2, 2014
I read this one off and on. It's a thorough review of all aspects of Greek and Roman history and culture.
June 13, 2014
A pretty good history book.
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