Until recently, popular biographers and most scholars viewed Alexander the Great as a genius with a plan, a romantic figure pursuing his vision of a united world. His dream was at times characterized as a benevolent interest in the brotherhood of man, sometimes as a brute interest in the exercise of power. Green, a Cambridge-trained classicist who is also a novelist, portrays Alexander as both a complex personality and a single-minded general, a man capable of such diverse expediencies as...
The Hellenistic Age, the three extraordinary centuries from the death of Alexander in 323 B. C. to Octavian's final defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium, has offered a rich and variegated field of exploration for historians, philosophers, economists, and literary critics. Yet few scholars have attempted the daunting task of seeing the period whole, of refracting its achievements and reception through the lens of a single critical mind. <i>Alexander to...
This is a reissue, with a new introduction and an update to the bibliography, of the original edition, published in 1970 as </i>The Year of Salamis<i> in England and as </i>Xerxes at Salamis<i> in the U.S.<br /><br />The long and bitter struggle between the great Persian Empire and the fledgling Greek states reached its high point with the extraordinary Greek victory at Salamis in 480 B.C. The astonishing sea battle banished forever the specter of Persian...
A lively combination of scholarship and unorthodoxy makes these studies in ancient history and literature unusually rewarding. Few of the objects of conventional admiration gain much support from Peter Green (Pericles and the «democracy» of fifth-century Athens are treated to a very cool scrutiny) but he has a warm regard for the real virtues of antiquity and for those who spoke with «an individual voice.»<br /><br />The studies cover both history and literature, Greece and Rome....
