Status Updates From The Life of Greece (The Sto...

"The city-state had proved incapable of solving the problems of government; it had failed to preserve order within, and defense without; despite the appeals of Gorgias, Isocrates, and Plato for some Dorian discipline to tame Ionian freedom, it had discovered no way of reconciling local autonomy with national stability and power; and its love of liberty had seldom interfered with its passion for empire" (554).

"Amid all the excitement and chaos of his campaigns he kept clearly at the center of his thoughts the great purpose that even his death would not defeat: the unification of all the eastern Mediterranean world into one cultural whole, dominated and elevated by the expanding civilization of Greece" (542).

150 BC, child-rearing included strategies such as leaving daughters in the elements to die. Very, very unusual for a girl to have a sister .

In this masterful work, readers will learn about:

- the siege of Troy- the great city-states of Athens and Sparta- the heroes of Homer's epics- the gods and lesser deities of Mount Olympus- the teachings of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle- the life of Alexander the Great

From the days of Crete's vast Aegean empire to the final extirpation of the last remnants of Greek liberty, crushed under the heel of an implacably forward-marching Rome. The dry minutiae of battles and sieges, of tortuous statecraft of tyrant and king, get the minor emphasis in what is preeminently a vivid recreation of Greek culture, brought to the reader through the medium of supple, vigorous prose.

Literature from the literate 5th century Greece. Form and order and beauty! A complex simplicity!

"The most fortunate of men is he who combines a measure of prosperity with scholarship, research, or contemplation; such a man comes closest to the life of the gods" (534).