Peter Green

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 patricide or the massacre of civilians. Green describes his Alexander as "not only the most brilliant (and ambitious) field commander in history, but also supremely indifferent to all those administrative excellences and idealistic yearnings foisted upon him by later generations, especially those who found the conqueror, tout court, a little hard upon their liberal sensibilities."This biography begins not with one of the universally known incidents of Alexander's life, but with an account of his father, Philip of Macedonia, whose many-territoried empire was the first on the continent of Europe to have an effectively centralized government and military. What Philip and Macedonia had to offer, Alexander made his own, but Philip and Macedonia also made Alexander form an important context for understanding Alexander himself. Yet his origins and training do not fully explain the man. After he was named hegemon of the Hellenic League, many philosophers came to congratulate Alexander, but one was conspicuous by his absence: Diogenes the Cynic, an ascetic who lived in a clay tub. Piqued and curious, Alexander himself visited the philosopher, who, when asked if there was anything Alexander could do for him, made the famous reply, "Don't stand between me and the sun." Alexander's courtiers jeered, but Alexander silenced them: "If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes." This remark was as unexpected in Alexander as it would be in a modern leader.For the general reader, the book, redolent with gritty details and fully aware of Alexander's darker side, offers a gripping tale of Alexander's career. Full backnotes, fourteen maps, and chronological and genealogical tables serve readers with more specialized interests.

This is a reissue, with a new introduction and an update to the bibliography, of the original edition, published in 1970 as The Year of Salamis in England and as Xerxes at Salamis in the U.S.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 invasion and occupation. Peter Green brilliantly retells this historic moment, evoking the whole dramatic sweep of events that the Persian offensive set in motion. The massive Greek victory, despite the Greeks' inferior numbers, opened the way for the historic evolution of the Greek states in a climate of creativity, independence, and democracy, one that provided a model and an inspiration for centuries to come.Green's accounts of both Persian and Greek strategies are clear and persuasive; equally convincing are his everyday details regarding the lives of soldiers, statesmen, and ordinary citizens. He has first-hand knowledge of the land and sea he describes, as well as full command of original sources and modern scholarship. With a new foreword, The Greco-Persian Wars is a book that lovers of fine historical writing will greet with pleasure.

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. Alexander to Actium was conceived and written to fill that gap.In this monumental work, Peter Green―noted scholar, writer, and critic―breaks with the traditional practice of dividing the Hellenistic world into discrete, repetitious studies of Seleucids, Ptolemies, Antigonids, and Attalids. He instead treats these successor kingdoms as a single, evolving, interrelated continuum. The result clarifies the political picture as never before. With the help of over 200 illustrations, Green surveys every significant aspect of Hellenistic cultural development, from mathematics to medicine, from philosophy to religion, from literature to the visual arts.Green offers a particularly trenchant analysis of what has been seen as the conscious dissemination in the East of Hellenistic culture, and finds it largely a myth fueled by Victorian scholars seeking justification for a no longer morally respectable imperialism. His work leaves us with a final impression of the Hellenistic Age as a world with haunting and disturbing resemblances to our own. This lively, personal survey of a period as colorful as it is complex will fascinate the general reader no less than students and scholars.

The Hellenistic era witnessed the overlap of antiquity’s two great Western civilizations, the Greek and the Roman. This was the epoch of Alexander’s vast expansion of the Greco-Macedonian world, the rise and fall of his successors’ major dynasties in Egypt and Asia, and, ultimately, the establishment of Rome as the first Mediterranean superpower.The Hellenistic Age chronicles the years 336 to 30 BCE, from the days of Philip and Alexander of Macedon to the death of Cleopatra and the final triumph of Caesar’s heir, the young Augustus. Peter Green’s remarkably far-ranging study covers the prevalent themes and events of those centuries: the Hellenization of an immense swath of the known world–from Egypt to India–by Alexander’s conquests; the lengthy and chaotic partition of this empire by rival Macedonian marshals after Alexander’s death; the decline of the polis (city state) as the predominant political institution; and, finally, Rome’s moment of transition from republican to imperial rule.Predictably, this is a story of war and power-politics, and of the developing fortunes of art, science, and statecraft in the areas where Alexander’s coming disseminated Hellenic culture. It is a rich narrative tapestry of warlords, libertines, philosophers, courtesans and courtiers, dramatists, historians, scientists, merchants, mercenaries, and provocateurs of every stripe, spun by an accomplished classicist with an uncanny knack for infusing life into the distant past, and applying fresh insights that make ancient history seem alarmingly relevant to our own times.To consider the three centuries prior to the dawn of the common era in a single short volume demands a scholar with a great command of both subject and narrative line. The Hellenistic Age is that rare book that manages to coalesce a broad spectrum of events, persons, and themes into one brief, indispensable, and amazingly accessible survey.

Peter Green discusses the personality and achievements of Alexander the Great, and continues with the military and political violence of the successor-kingdoms that fought over his inheritance.

Discusses the intellectual and political developments that distinguished the country's history from the beginnings of Minoan culture to the death of Alexander

Best-selling classicist Peter Green recreates the life and times of the Greek lyric poet Sappho in this beautifully conceived, sharply detailed work of historical imagination. We meet Sappho at the age of fifty, when she is shaken by her fatal and final love affair with Phaon. She narrates her own story from the vantage point of self-questioning middle age, and her candid meditations make intimate, engrossing reading.Only fragments of Sappho's poetry survive. In imagining Sappho's life Green found his task "rather like that of an archaeologist reassembling some amphora from hundreds of shards―of which more than half are missing." Yet, in his synthesis of historical evidence and ebullient invention, Green produces a seamless, moving, and persuasive portrait. He recreates Sappho's life by interweaving her surviving poetry into the narrative, not as quotations, but as her own imagined speeches and thoughts.Sappho's life spanned one of the most exciting periods in Greek history. Green's novel, full of details about daily life on ancient Lesbos, draws the reader into the political and social climate of her the civil strife accompanying the transition from aristocracy to mercantilism, the household relations between slave and aristocrat, the details of sea travel in the Aegean. Green wrote the novel while living on Lesbos, and his graceful rendering of the landscape, the rhythms of the seasons, and the varied flora of Sappho's island pervades the narrative.Sappho's poetry reveals a direct, spontaneous woman who eschewed artifice and embellishment. Green's extraordinary talent captures those qualities and brings this woman of unflinching honesty very much to life.

This novel is a reconstruction of the life of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who ruled the dying Roman Republic forty years before the death of Julius Caesar, as he himself might have written it.Sulla was born in an uneasy generation which had lost faith in the stern yet obsolete code of the old Republic. Out of Peter Green's reconstruction of the historical scene Sulla emerges not as a figure in a history book but as an intensely human personality - full-blooded, hardened by disappointment, a tyrant despite himself. Though him and his friends and enemies - not to mention his four remarkable wives - the author brings the Roman Republic to life for us in all its splendour and cruelty.

In this collection of sixteen literary and historical essays, Peter Green informs, entertains, and stimulates. He covers a wide range of subjects, from Greek attitudes toward death to the mysteries of the Delphic Oracle, from Tutankhamun and the gold of Egypt to sex in ancient literature, from the island of Lesbos (where he once lived) to the challenges of translating Ovid's wit and elegant eroticism into present-day English verse, from Victorian pederastic aesthetics to Marxism's losing battle with ancient history. This third volume of Green's essays (several previously unpublished) reveals throughout his serious concern that we are, in a very real sense, losing the legacy of antiquity through the corrosive methodologies of modern academic criticism.

All the outrageous daring that made Alcibiades the prodigy and scourge of ancient Athens springs to life in the pages of this biographical novel. Destined to play both hero and villain in one of history's most fascinating dramas, the great general of the Peloponnesian War emerges here from the shadows of time with a blazing intensity, rivaling the most extravagant figures of romance.--dust jacket.

Democracy's symbolic birthplace, the famed Acropolis, stands today as a rubble-strewn reminder of the glory that was Greece. The ancient citadel, once the center of Athenian religion and civic pride, is surmounted by half a dozen ruined buildings, among them the most famous temple in the Western world, the Parthenon.

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."The studies cover both history and literature, Greece and Rome. They range from the real nature of Athenian society to poets as diverse as Sappho and Juvenal, and all of them, without laboring any parallels, make the ancient world immediately relevant to our own. (There is, for example, a very perceptive essay on how classical history often becomes a vehicle for the historian's own political beliefs and fantasies of power.) The student of classical history will find plenty in this book to enrich his own studies. The general reader will enjoy the vision of a classical world which differs radically from what he probably expects.

Essays In Antiquity

In a 1988 conference, American and British scholars unexpectedly discovered that their ideas were converging in ways that formed a new picture of the variegated Hellenistic mosaic. That picture emerges in these essays and eloquently displays the breadth of modern interest in the Hellenistic Age.A distrust of all ideologies has altered old views of ancient political structures, and feminism has also changed earlier assessments. The current emphasis on multiculturalism has consciously deemphasized the Western, Greco-Roman tradition, and Nubians, Bactrians, and other subject peoples of the time are receiving attention in their own right, not just as recipients of Greco-Roman culture.History, like Herakleitos' river, never stands still. These essays share a collective sense of discovery and a sparking of new ideas―they are a welcome beginning to the reexploration of a fascinatingly complex age.

"I hadn't, till I really started digging, gauged the fierce intensity of the need for myth in the human psyche, of any age, or sensed the variety of motives dictating that need," writes Peter Green in the introduction to this wide-ranging collection of essays on classical mythology and the mythic experience. Using the need for myth as the starting point for exploring a number of topics in Greek mythology and history, Green advances new ideas about why the human urge to make myths persists across the millennia and why the borderland between mythology and history can sometimes be hard to map. Green looks at both specific problems in classical mythology and larger theoretical issues. His explorations underscore how mythic expression opens a door into non-rational and quasi-rational modes of thought in which it becomes possible to rewrite painful truths and unacceptable history—which is, Green argues, a dangerous enterprise. His study of the intersections between classical mythology and Greek history ultimately drives home a larger point, "the degree of mythification and deception (of oneself no less than of others) of which the human mind is capable."

Les guerres médiques opposèrent pendant cinquante ans les cités grecques à l’empire perse. De la plaine de Marathon (490 av. J.-C.) où les hoplites athéniens mettent les troupes perses en déroute, au défilé des Thermopyles que les fameux trois cents Spartiates de Léonidas défendent durant des jours face au Roi Xerxès (480 av. J.-C.) ; et de Salamine où, la même année, les trières de Thémistocle coulent la flotte perse lors de la plus importante bataille navale de l’Antiquité, jusqu’au choc de Platées (479 av. J.-C.) qui marque la fin des hostilités sur le sol grec, Peter Green rend intelligible et accessible ce vaste ensemble de batailles sanglantes. Lutte longue et âpre entre l'empire perse et les cités helléniques, ces guerres opposèrent des conceptions du monde et des idéaux en totale confrontation. À la liberté et l'indépendance, si chères aux cités, Darius puis Xerxès, autocrates perses tout-puissants, opposèrent la force du despotisme oriental. En dépit de leur infériorité numérique et contre toute attente, les Grecs sont victorieux. Ils bannissent à jamais le spectre de l'occupation perse. La voie est désormais ouverte pour un vent d'innovation, d'indépendance et de démocratie qui sera source d'inspiration pour les siècles à venir. De coups de théâtre en retournements dramatiques, Peter Green relate brillamment, d’une écriture limpide et prenante, la succession des événements qui ont déclenché les offensives perses, les stratégies militaires, le quotidien des soldats et des citoyens, livrant au lecteur un éclairage indispensable sur cet événement historique majeur que furent les affrontements gréco-perses sans lesquels l’histoire de l’Europe et de l’Asie eut été sensiblement différente.

"Not for a long time, we believe, has such a brilliant and compellingly readable collection of stories appeared as Peter Green's Habeas Corpus. The eight stories which the well-known novelist and critic has assembled here range over such varied subjects as the disastrous effects of a lost passport, the idiosyncrasies of an expert of Greek dialects, a visit to a haunted rectory, and the mouvemente evening of a Great Lady of the entertainment world on a Burma airfield." --from the book jacket copy

This rare and vintage book is a perfect addition to any bibliophile's collection