Front cover image for Early Greece

Early Greece

Within the space of three centuries leading up to the great Persian invasion of 480 B.C., Greece was transformed from a simple peasant society into a sophisticated civilization which dominated the shores of the Mediterranean from Spain to Syria and from the Crimea to Egypt -- a culture whose achievements in the fields of art, science, philosophy and politics were to establish the canons of the Western world. The author places this remarkable development in the context of Mediterranean civilization. He shows how contact with the East acted as a catalyst to transform art and religion, analyzes the invention of the alphabet and the conceptual changes it brought, describes the expansion of Greece in trade and colonization and investigates the relationship between military technology and political progress in the overthrow of aristocratic governments
Print Book, English, 1980
Fontana Paperbacks, [London], 1980
History
319 pages, 4 unnumbered leaves of plates : illustrations, maps ; 18 cm.
9780006333487, 0006333486
6847150
Myth, history and archaeology
Sources
The end of the Dark Age: the aristocracy
The end of the Dark Age: the community
Euboean society and trade
The Orientalizing period
Colonization
Warfare and the new morality
Tyranny
Sparta and the Hoplite state
Athens and social justice
Life styles: the aristocracy
Life styles: the economy
The coming of the Persians
The leadership of Greece: Sparta and Athens
The Great Persian War
Includes indexes