Scan barcode
A review by jaredwsaltz
A Brief History of Ancient Greece, International Edition: Politics, Society, and Culture by David Tandy, Stanley Mayer Burstein, Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Sarah B. Pomeroy, Walter Donlan
4.0
Pomeroy et al seek to provide a balanced approach to Greek history by shortening and refocusing their successful Ancient Greece (2011). Providing short chapters that cover Greece and its environs from the Bronze Age until the Hellenistic era, this book excels and providing a (you guessed it) brief political history overview of the various events of the period while giving greater emphasis to cultural and social history.
Don't get me wrong: this is a short book. At 365 pages of history to cover that much time and a people as variegated as the Greeks, Pomeroy et al had to seriously truncate many of the chapters and / or provide cursory treatment or "Observe the Passover." There were times when you can tell that the authors had run out of pages for a given chapter and, essentially, said, "everyone else died, so X was the victor."
But this is a necessary evil for a book like this, which would excel as a textbook for undergraduates. I know of no other introductory text for this period that so effectively uses primary sources (in translation) interspersed through the main text to provide better flavor of the periods and topics addressed. Similarly, I thought that the inclusion of sections for each chapter dedicated to various social, religious, or cultural institutions to be a refreshing change from those texts that solely provide political history or else focus entirely on other approaches.
I would certainly use this as a text for an undergraduate course in Greek history and it functions just as well as an introduction to the subject to those who are at a higher level but are ignorant of the subject, such as graduate students in related fields.
Don't get me wrong: this is a short book. At 365 pages of history to cover that much time and a people as variegated as the Greeks, Pomeroy et al had to seriously truncate many of the chapters and / or provide cursory treatment or "Observe the Passover." There were times when you can tell that the authors had run out of pages for a given chapter and, essentially, said, "everyone else died, so X was the victor."
But this is a necessary evil for a book like this, which would excel as a textbook for undergraduates. I know of no other introductory text for this period that so effectively uses primary sources (in translation) interspersed through the main text to provide better flavor of the periods and topics addressed. Similarly, I thought that the inclusion of sections for each chapter dedicated to various social, religious, or cultural institutions to be a refreshing change from those texts that solely provide political history or else focus entirely on other approaches.
I would certainly use this as a text for an undergraduate course in Greek history and it functions just as well as an introduction to the subject to those who are at a higher level but are ignorant of the subject, such as graduate students in related fields.