When the rapacious warriors of the Fourth Crusade seized Constantinople at the beginning of the thirteenth century, two Byzantine princes set up an empire-in-exile stretching from Georgia along the Black Sea coast. This new empire outlived the parent city. Until 1461, writes Anthony Bryer, it remained an unconquered outpost of Greek-Christian civilization.
Peter Green introduces Hesiod, a Boeotian farmer who, towards the end of the eighth century B.C., wrote his poem known as The Works and Days. His cantankerous, radical, earthy views present a remarkable contrast to the stylised grandeur of the contemporary Homeric vision of Greek society.
E. Badian studies the political background of Alexander’s plans for world conquest.
Geoffrey Chandler analyses the complex pattern of reasons why Greece became the arena where the first violent post-war trial of strength took place between Communism and the West.
The author of Whisky Galore played an active role in the Great War, experiencing both the horror of the Dardanelles in 1915 and the intrigues of wartime Athens. Yet his diplomatic ham-fistedness forced his premature exit. Richard Hughes explains.
Owing to the researches of the late Michael Ventris, Greek scripts of some six or seven centuries before the Age of Homer can be read. Here, L.R. Palmer here examines the basis of Ventris's achievement in classical scholarship.
At the close of the third century B.C., Rome and the Seleucid Empire confronted one another in the neutral ground of disputatious Greece. By E. Badian.
Wedged between warring parties, Greece was vital to supplying the isolated Kingdom of Serbia but remained divided by pro-Entente and pro-German factions.
Among the ruins of ancient Pylos— which, together with all the other major strongholds of Mycenaean power, was destroyed at the end of the Hellenic Bronze Age—a library of clay tablets has come to light, depicting a threatened society “in the throes of total moblization.” By L.R. Palmer.
In Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War, P.A. Brunt sees why and how the Greeks failed to encompass peace and unity.
