Includes:
•Charles River Editors’ original history of Ancient Athens
•Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War
•Plutarch’s Life of Pericles, Life of Alcibiades, Life of Nicias, Life of Demosthenes, Life of Themistocles
•Plutarch’s Comparison of Fabius Maximus with Pericles, Crassus with Nicias, Demosthenes with Cicero
•Pericles’ Funeral Oration
•The Life and Times of Pericles and the Golden Age of Athens by Evelyn Abbott
•Demosthenes and the Last Days of Greek Freedom by A.W. Pickard
“What I would prefer is that you should fix your eyes every day on the greatness of Athens as she really is, and should fall in love with her.” – The Funeral Oration of Pericles, quoted by Thucydides
Dominated to this day by the sprawling white marble complex of the Acropolis, Athens is a city which is immensely and rightly proud of its past. For a period of roughly three centuries, the polis of Athens stood, if not in a position of unchallenged supremacy among the cities of Hellas, then at the very least among its three most important polities. Its fledgling Empire, though small by the standards later set by Alexander or the Romans, or even by those of its ancient enemy Persia, nonetheless encompassed cities as far afield as Asia Minor and Southern Italy, a remarkable fact considering such expansion was achieved by the inhabitants of a single city and its immediate surroundings, rather than by an entire nation.
For much of its history, the Athenian navy was the single mightiest force in the Mediterranean, having defeated the overwhelming might of Persia in pitched battle upon the open sea numerous times. The Athenian army itself, though subordinate to its naval power – a sop to the fact that it was trade and empire-building that had made Athens rich – was nothing to be sneered at, as it succeeded in meting out a humiliating defeat to Darius’s Persians at Marathon.
Yet despite a martial tradition that, if taken as a whole, was second to none save the Spartans, Athens is chiefly remembered for two reasons: its political system, which would in time form the nucleus of all Western democratic systems of government, and the remarkable number of outstanding individuals which, during the Golden Age of Athens, lived and flourished in the enlightened city-state. The Ancient Athenians formed the backbone of the West’s entire culture, from the arts to philosophy and everything inbetween.
The Ultimate Ancient Athens Collection comprehensively covers the history and culture of the famous Greek city-state, looking at their religious, political, and military past, and examining all their accomplishments. This collection includes an original history of Athens, Plutarch’s biographies of the famous Athenians, Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War, and biographies of Pericles and Demosthenes by Evelyn Abbott and A.W. Pickard. It also includes pictures and a Table of Contents.
