Ancient Greece History

Procopius appeared to be a loyal part of the Byzantine establishment, his official writing glorifying the deeds of the Emperor Justinian (d. AD 565). However, he also produced a work that he knew could never be published within the Emperor’s lifetime: The Secret History, a vitriolic indictment of the rule of Justinian and his wife Theodora. In The Secret History, the general Belisarius is presented as an idiot who is manipulated by his conniving wife Antonina, while the Emperor is depicted as a demon king, a dishonest and autocratic destroyer of established institutions.

Discovering ancient shipwrecks hasn't been a novelty for thousands of years, but when artifacts were salvaged from a Roman shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900, the discovery of one set off one of the great mysteries of antiquity. When sponge divers investigated the shipwreck, they found the kinds of items often associated with such discoveries, including marble statues, pottery, jewelry, and coins, but they also discovered a strange object, the likes of which nobody had ever seen before.

Mount Athos: The History of the Greek Mountain and the Center of Eastern Orthodox Monasticism looks at the unique region and what life has been like there since medieval times. You will learn about Mount Athos like never before.

Greek myths and legends have inspired men and women around the world for hundreds of years. The stories of Apollo, Perseus, Achilles, and others have sustained the imaginations of old and young alike, even into the present. In fact, characters of Greek myth and legend have found their way into mainstream culture in the form of popular television and film characters. Greek mythology was so influential that even formed the basis of Roman myth. Here, you will be exposed to the exciting tales of gods and heroes that formed the canon of the ancient Greek religion.

Is the Greek alphabet all Greek to you? Is geometry your Achilles heel and does your knowledge of Homer have more to do with The Simpsons than the Sirens? From engineering and architecture to drama and democracy, the world around us is founded on the principles and discoveries of the Ancient World, yet our understanding of it is episodic at best.

Think of the ancient Greek society like a ladder. The bottom steps are always the slaves and the soldiers while the high steps are the aristocrats. The slaves and the soldiers lived pitiful lives doing all the dirty work but with little or no pay. They’re made to feel like they were only born to serve. Unfair, isn’t it? This audiobook will detail more.

The myths surrounding Sparta are as old as the city itself. Even in antiquity, Sparta was a unique society, considered an enigma. The Spartans' often bizarre rules and practices have the capacity to horrify as much they do to fascinate us today. But the truth behind these stories of the exotic other can be hard to discover, lost amongst the legend of Sparta which was even perpetuated by later Spartans, who ran a thriving tourist industry that exaggerated the famed brutality of their ancestors. As Andrew Bayliss explores in this book, there was also much to admire in ancient Sparta.

While they are still well-known, the Olympic Games of Ancient Greece are more relevant today than most people know, and the ways in which athletic sports pervade contemporary culture is comparable only to the spirit of athleticism in Hellenic Greece. Today, a large section of the media industry is devoted exclusively to sports, and in some nations sports even figures as a critical component of their identity.

This audiobook contains the most exciting and essential parts of the Iliad, capturing the final 50 days of the Trojan war and bringing to life ancient men and heroic battles. It provides an integral beginning to the infamous journey of Odysseus. Translated by Stanley Lombardo.

Современная Древняя Греция – книга, которая окажется не только ценным пособием для студентов-историков, но также станет надежным проводником в мир легендарных событий прошлого, отголоски которого оставили глубокий след в мире современном. Ведь именно история является ключом к пониманию того настоящего, в котором мы живем.

The Oracle of Delphi was one of the greatest religious institutions in Ancient Greece. It played a significant role not only in the formation and collective decisions of Hellenic localities and city-states but also in the personal lives of Greeks known and unknown. The site was dedicated to the god Apollo, and the Greeks believed the god spoke his oracles through his prophetess known as the Pythia.

Lying in the middle of a plain in modern-day Iran is a forgotten ancient city, Persepolis. Built two and a half thousand years ago, it was known in its day as the richest city under the sun. Persepolis was the capital of Persia, the largest empire the world had ever seen, but after its destruction, it was largely forgotten for nearly 2,000 years, and the lives and achievements of those who built it were almost entirely erased from history.

Ancient Greece first coined the concept of democracy, yet almost every major ancient Greek thinker - from Plato and Aristotle onward - was ambivalent toward or even hostile to democracy in any form. The explanation for this is quite simple: The elite perceived majority power as tantamount to a dictatorship of the proletariat. In ancient Greece, there can be traced not only the rudiments of modern democratic society but the entire Western tradition of antidemocratic thought.

This comprehensive work by E. M. Berens starts with the primordial deities of the Greeks and the myths on the origin of the world, followed by the Olympian, sea, and minor divinities; nymphs; nature spirits; and Roman divinities.

If you want to discover the captivating history of the Peloponnesian War, then pay attention. The Peloponnesian War enveloped the entire Greek world, from Syracuse on the island of Sicily to the shores of western Turkey. It ravaged the Greek population and produced great hardships, and it led to the eventual downfall of the Athenian Empire and the rise of the Spartan Empire.

The Neolithic period came before the Bronze Age and is generally regarded as the final subdivision of the Stone Age. During this time, communities domesticated plants and certain animals but still relied on hunting and gathering to a considerable extent, and beginning sometime around 7000 BCE, handmade pottery was developed, along with more advanced stone axes that enabled people to clear vast forests.

Although the city had been destroyed, the legacy of the Persians survived, even as they mostly remain an enigma to the West and are not nearly as well understood as the Greeks, Romans, or Egyptians. When considering this empire’s rulers, the two most often referenced are Xerxes, the leader of the Persian invasion of Greece which caused the heroic sacrifice of the Spartans and their allies at Thermopylae, or Cyrus the Great, the man who created the Persian Empire.

One of the masterpieces of classical literature, the "Histories" describes how a small and quarrelsome band of Greek city states united to repel the might of the Persian empire. But while this epic struggle forms the core of his work, Herodotus' natural curiosity frequently gives rise to colorful digressions - a description of the natural wonders of Egypt; an account of European lake-dwellers; and far-fetched accounts of dog-headed men and gold-digging ants.

This book, like the first of the series the Book of the Ancient World, was used in its original manuscript form by one of my history classes. It carries on the story of the way in which man has been learning how to live from the time of the coming of the Greeks to the loss of Greek independence in 146 BC. The spirit of a nation is expressed, and its history is recorded in three ways: in its political history, in its literature, and in its art.

The book contains myths of the Trojan cycle outlined by the poem of Homer's "Iliad," the tragedies of Sophocles, poems of Virgil, Ovid's "Heroines", and fragments of other works.