Jeff Clay's Reviews > The Classical Greeks

Beginning with Miltiades and the Battle of Marathon (490 BCE) – or perhaps Pythagoras, discussed in one of the appendices – the eminent Antiquities scholar Michael Grant has taken a rather unique approach to telling the stories of the Greek intellects, artists, politicians, and generals of the 5th century BCE ending just prior to the ascension of the future Macedonian emperor, Alexander (336 BCE). Each chapter – and there are 37 of them – runs around 5 pages long, is chock full of historical details, discusses suppositions where needed, but is lacking any narrative niceties. Therefore, in many ways, one could consider this book a collection of historical figure sketches and you would not be half wrong. You could just flip the book open to a given chapter, read it, and generally not feel any the worse for missing previous chapters. Instead, I did read it from cover-to-cover, including the 5 interesting, albeit also brief appendices labeled Women, Metics, Between Free Men and Slaves, Slave and the aforementioned Pythagoras. Grant approaches that 160+ years by grouping the chapters chronologically into parts. Therefore we have Wars Against External Enemies, The Periclean Age, The Peloponnesian War, The End of Classical Greece, etc. Under those sections each chapter is devoted to a general (Themistocles, Epaminondas), a politician or tyrant (Cimon, Dionysus), a historian (Herodotus, Thucydides), a dramatist or poet (Aeschylus, Euripides), an artist or architect (Polygnotus, Phidias), or a philosopher or scientist (Hippocrites, Socrates).

This methodology in writing about those Classical Greece years may not provide a fluid and dynamic narrative (it doesn’t) but Grant does pack a lot of information in the book and though one may be inclined to dismiss it as being a form of Grecian Cliff Notes, don’t. Instead, I look at the The Classical Greeks as a reference piece. When reading more detailed narratives focused on one event or series of events (an all-too-frequent war, for instance) I find myself pulling this book off the shelf and re-reading the relevant, personality-centric chapter(s) that is Grant’s synopsis. His language is both spare and even, which suits this sort of book. Where the historical ‘facts’ as detailed by Herodotus or Xenophon (for instance), are suspect – or at least open for discussion – Grant does so and his conclusions seem both logical and likely; marks of a good modern historian. The book is also filled with maps – not beautiful ones but certainly adequate – as well as notes, references and a bibliography at the end; all part and parcel of good historical writing.

If you don’t mind a survey approach to the Classical Greek Age that is long on information but short on narrative drama, then this is the book for you.