Ancient Greek Civilization

David Sansone is Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a former editor of Illinois Classical Studies, served on the editorial boards of Classical Philology and Bryn Mawr Classical Review, and was a member of the Board of Directors of the American Philological Association. While his research focuses on Greek literature of the Classical Period, his publications include work on such subjects as textual criticism, theories of the origin of sport, Bronze Age iconography, John Milton, and Richard Wagner. He is the author of Greek Athletics and the Genesis of Sport (1988), Plutarch: Lives of Aristeides and Cato (1989), and Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric (Wiley Blackwell, 2012).

List of Figures vii

List of Maps xi

List of Timelines xiii

Foreword: Looking Backward xv

1 The Greeks and the Bronze Age 1

2 Iron Age Greece 29

3 The Poems of Hesiod and Homer 49

4 Poetry and Sculpture of the Archaic Period 67

5 Symposia, Seals, and Ceramics in the Archaic Period 87

6 The Birth of Philosophy and the Persian Wars 107

7 Setting the Stage for Democracy 125

8 History and Tragedy in the Fifth Century 147

9 The Peloponnesian War: A Tale of Thucydides 167

10 Stage and Law Court in Late Fifth-century Athens 191

11 The Transformation of the Greek World in the Fourth Century 211

12 Greek Culture in the Hellenistic Period 233

Afterword: Looking Forward 263

Glossary 283

Index 287