Table Of ContentThe Oxford History of the Classical World
-Edited By John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, Oswyn Murray.-
Contents:
Book Cover (Front) (Back)
Scan / Edit Notes
List of Colour Plates
List of Maps
Acknowledgements
Introduction (By Jasper Griffin)
Greece
1. Greece: The History Of The Archaic Period (By George Forrest)
2. Homer (By Oliver Taplin)
3. Greek Myth And Hesiod (By Jasper Griffin)
4. Lyric And Elegiac Poetry (By Ewen Bowie)
5. Early Greek Philosophy (By Martin West)
6. Greece: The History Of The Classical Period (By Simon Hornblower)
7. Greek Drama (By Peter Levi)
8. Greek Historians (By Oswyn Murray)
9. Life And Society In Classical Greece (By Oswyn Murray)
10. Classical Greek Philosophy (By Julia Annas)
11. Greek Religion (By Robert Parker)
12. Greek Art And Architecture (By John Boardman)
Greece And Rome
13. The History Of The Hellenistic Period (By Simon Price)
14. Hellenistic Culture And Literature (By Robin Lane Fox)
15. Hellenistic Philosophy And Science (By Jonathan Barnes)
16. Early Rome And Italy (By Michael Crawford)
17. The Expansion Of Rome (By Elizabeth Rawson)
18. The First Roman Literature (By P.G. McC. Brown)
19. Cicero And Rome (By Miriam Griffin)
20. The Poets Of The Late Republic (By Robin Nisbet)
21. Hellenistic And Graeco-Roman Art (By Roger Ling)
Rome
22. The Founding Of The Empire (By David Stockton)
23. The Arts Of Government (By Nicholas Purcell)
24. Augustan Poetry And Society (By R.O.A.M. Lyne)
25. Virgil (By Jasper Griffin)
26. Roman Historians (By Andrew Lintott)
27. The Arts Of Prose: The Early Empire (By Donald Russell)
28. Silver Latin Poetry And The Latin Novel (By Richard Jenkyns)
29. Later Philosophy (By Anthony Meredith)
30. The Arts Of Living (By Roger Ling)
31. Roman Life And Society (By John Matthews)
32. Roman Art And Architecture (By R.J.A. Wilson)
Envoi: On Taking Leave Of Antiquity (By Henry Chadwick)
Tables of Events
Further Reading
Descriptive List of Illustrations (Removed)
Index (Removed)
Scan / Edit Notes
This has to be one of the best all in one History books dealing with Roman and Greek periods that I have
ever had the privilege of scanning. Due to its enormous size (approx 882 + pages with more pictures
than I care to count) all of which had to be scanned one page at a time (pictures scanned separately);
there will be no text or pdb version. The text alone was over 2 MB in size. IMHO the effort was well
worth it as this is a treasure house of knowledge.
Unfortunately due to its size I will be breaking the book up into chapters (linked) instead of using the
newer method of making one large html file with bookmarks. -Sorry about this-
Versions available and duly posted:
Format: v1.5 (HTML)
Format: v1.5 (Ubook-HTML)
Genera: History
Extra's: Pictures Included
Copyright: 1986 / 1993
Scanned: November 10 2003
Posted to:
alt.binaries.e-book (HTML-PIC)
alt.binaries.e-book (HTML-UBook)
Note:
The U-Book version is viewable on PC and PPC (Pocket PC). Occasionally a PDF file will be produced
in the case of an extremely difficult book.
~~~~
Structure: (Folder and Sub Folders)
{Main Folder} - HTML Files
|
|- {Nav} - Navigation Files
|
|- {Pic} - Graphic files
-Salmun
TOC
List of Colour Plates
Caeretan hydria: Heracles leads Cerberus
Northampton amphora: Triton, floral fantasy
Athenian oil vase: a Muse on Helicon
Statue of a girl from the Athenian Acropolis
Bronze warrior from Riace
Iron corselet from the tomb of Philip II of Macedon
The Athenian Acropolis
The fourth-century theatre at Epidaurus
Engraved Greek gems, finger rings and jewellery
Detail of the Alexander mosaic
Hellenistic earrings
Interior of the Tazza Farnese
Painting of a frightened girl, Pompeii
Tablinum of the house of M. Lucretius Fronto, Pompeii
Pont du Gard, Nimes
Detail of the Canopus in Hadrian's Villa, Tivoli
Head of Autumn, Cirencester
Mosaic from Tivoli: Nile boat-trip
Arretine bowl made by M. Perennius Tigranus
Decorated Roman glassware from the Rhineland
TOC
List Of Maps
1. Greece and the Aegean World
2. Greek colonization
3. The Athenian Empire
4. Attica
5. The Hellenistic World
6. Alexander's journeys
7. Italy
8. The growth of Rome in Italy
9. The Roman Empire
10. The Growth of Roman Rule
TOC
Acknowledgements
The editors wish to express their thanks to the many institutions and individuals named in the List of
Illustrations for provision of photographs and drawings, and permission to use them; and to Philippa
Lewis who did the picture research. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Roger Ling who undertook
the main responsibility for the choice of illustrations and the writing of captions from Chapter 13
onwards. The pictures and captions of earlier chapters were chosen and written by John Boardman.
Oswyn Murray compiled the Chronological Charts. The index was compiled by Peter Tickler. Many
members of the Press have devoted their skills to the creation of this volume, but our principal debt must
be to the authors for their patient cooperation.
TOC
Introduction
By
Jasper Griffin
The subject of this book is enormous. In time it covers a period of well over a thousand years, from the poems of
Homer to the end of pagan religion and the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. In geographical extension it
begins in Greece with small communities emerging from a dark age of conquest and destruction, and with
Bronze Age villages on the hills of Rome; it ends with an Empire which unified the Mediterranean world and a
great deal besides, from Northumberland to Algeria, from Portugal to Syria, from the Rhine to the Nile. The fall
of Rome was further removed in time from Homer than we are from the Norman Conquest; as for political scale,
the Roman Empire comprised the whole or part of the territory of what are now thirty sovereign states, and it was
not until 1870 that Italy, for instance, achieved again the unity which Rome had imposed before the birth of
Christ.
That world is given the title 'classical'. The word carries the implication that the works of art and literature
produced in Graeco-Roman antiquity possess an absolute value, that they form the standard by which all others
are to be judged. In the Renaissance and even after it that was indeed what many people thought; Swift's Battle of
the Books expresses the idea with wit and brilliance, and in painting such works as Raphael's Parnassus in the
Vatican, showing Apollo and the Muses with the great poets of Greece and Rome, or the ineffably academic
Apotheosis of Homer by Ingres, give it visual form. The time is past when it could make sense to think of the
ancient world as passing judgment on its successors. On the one hand, the technical advances of the last five
generations have transformed life in too many respects for such a comparison to make sense; on the other,
interest in other early cultures outside the classical framework has shown that Greece and Rome were less unique
than our ancestors supposed.
Yet while we can no longer allow to classical antiquity the exclusive dominance which its study once enjoyed in
the schools and universities of Europe, it must retain a special interest for the western world. The art of
Michelangelo and Rubens, the poetry of Milton and Keats, the architecture of our cities, with their domes and
triumphal arches deriving from Rome and their pillared porticoes deriving from Greece, are only a few examples
of the pervasive presence of the ancient world in the modern. No less important has been Greek mythology:
Helen, Oedipus, Narcissus, the Minotaur in the labyrinth. Other myths have been no less haunting: Athenian
democracy, Spartan austerity, the stern virtue of the Roman Republic, the luxury and order of her Empire. And
that world presents, as no other can, the prospect of a society which, though distant, was not merely barbaric, but
which attained high sophistication and produced great works of art, and which is in addition directly linked by
history with that of the modern West, as the societies of ancient China and Peru, for instance, are not. Western
civilization grew out of the classical world, and it never lost the knowledge that a high culture had preceded it,
whose legacy was there to be emulated and exploited. The study of that distant but not completely alien world
can allow us to understand that there are alternatives to our own ways and assumptions, and so it can help to
liberate us from the tyranny of the present.
The story is a long one, the setting is wide and varied. Many varieties of human society are to be found in it:
primitive villages, fiercely independent city-states, great kingdoms, even federal leagues. Democracy was
invented, practised, lost. Tyrants seized power; aristocrats fought to retain it; philosophers argued and speculated
on the origins of society, the nature of justice, the duties of the citizen. In the beginning there was verse and song,
and with time prose literature can be seen coming into being, with philosophy and history and fiction. Rational
thought struggles out of the mythical and poetic mode. We see the interaction of Greek intellectual supremacy
and the irresistible military might of Rome, in many -ways a tragic story, and one which is full of significance for
our own time. Not less resonant for us is the twofold breach of continuity at beginning and end of our work. The
polished society which produced the palaces of Minoan Crete -was destroyed, and the splendours of Mycenaean
Greece, the imposing citadels, the ivory and the gold, found no successors in the next three hundred years of low
artistic standards, depopulation, and poverty. The fall of Rome was followed by an age of barbarian invasions,
universal insecurity, destruction of cities and works of art. High civilization, once achieved, can be lost: that is
among the reflections suggested by the study of the classical world.
The ancestors of the Greeks, like those of the Romans, belonged to the great Indo-European family of peoples,
which spread in the course of many centuries from an original home somewhere near the Caucasus into India,
Iran, and Europe. They began to enter Greece from the north about 1900 B.C. From the great steppes they
entered a world in which the sea was of primary importance for communications; the land of Greece is
mountainous, broken up into a multitude of separate small plains, river valleys, and islands. The fierce
particularity of classical Greece, in which every city as a matter of course had its own coinage and even its own
calendar, with jealous hostility and intermittent war the rule between neighbouring cities, is clearly connected
with the terrain. Italy, too, is not a country of great navigable rivers: the Romans were astonished by the broad
and equable rivers of Gaul. The climate of Greece is temperate, although the Aegean Sea is notorious for sudden
storms, and a man needed little-by the standards of the wet and chilly North-for reasonable comfort. Open-air
gatherings and a life largely lived out of doors came naturally in such surroundings. However spectacular the
public buildings on the Acropolis, the life-style of a classical Athenian was very modest. The Greeks themselves
said that poverty was their great instructor in hardihood and self-reliance.
A River Valley In Arcadia, east of Olympia. Rivers in such a landscape are treacherous in flood though
commonly dry in midsummer, and have earned away much cultivable soil even since antiquity when the land may
have been better wooded.
Mycenaean Greece was culturally dependent on the sophisticated arts of the Minoans, the non-Indo-European
people flourishing on Crete and some of the Aegean islands. It was in contact also with other ancient cultures of
the Near East: Hittites, Egyptians, Syrians. The sea made it natural for Greeks to turn to neighbouring maritime
peoples rather than to the hill-dwellers who lived on the European mainland. Egypt and Asia Minor were more
interesting than Macedonia or Illyria. From those already ancient cultures these early Greeks learned many
things: the names of exotic gods and goddesses such as Hera and Athena, who became fully naturalized, part of
the classic pantheon; luxury arts; music and poetry. When all the other arts were temporarily lost in the dark age
which followed the fall of the Mycenaean citadels about 1150 B.C., poetry and song survived and kept alive the
memory of an age of great kings and heroes, of Mycenae, not an abandoned ruin but rich in gold, the seat of
Agamemnon king of men. The Bronze Age Mycenaean culture was the setting of the myths, whose importance
for classical Greece cannot be exaggerated. In the dark age which followed its fall the complex inheritance from
the earlier centuries was digested and organized. At its end the pantheon is virtually complete, and religion has
taken its lasting form; contact with the East is restored; and the polis, the independent city-state, is settling into its
classic shape.
It is a revealing piece of evidence for the importance of the surrounding cultures that in Greek most names of
musical instruments, and even those of many poetical forms, such as elegy, hymn, iambus, are loan-words from
languages which were not Indo-European. Poetry and literature always remained the supreme arts in Greece, both
in social prestige and in impact; and their forms, like their mythical content, went ultimately back to a time when
the ancestors of the Greeks found themselves arriving in a world of settled dwellings, palaces, frescoes, music.
That early contact must be a great part of the explanation for the Greek achievement. Their distant kinsmen who
invaded the Indus valley found there cities and temples, which gave a flying start to Aryan culture in India; the
first Greeks, similarly, were helped by contact with sophisticated societies to develop along lines very different
from the Germans and the Celts, wandering in the northern forests, who remained for centuries in something far
more like the original tribal society.
The Lion Gate At Mycenae. This monumental gateway to the citadel at Mycenae was built in the mid thirteenth
century B.C. and was never lost to view. It, and the massive walls, thought by classical Greeks to have been built
by giants, were a reminder to them of the achievements of their Age of Heroes, the period about which Homer
sang. It is shown in this old photograph as it may have appeared to the Greeks themselves.
The Greeks themselves were aware of their debt to Phoenicia for the origin of their alphabet, to Egypt for their
early style of sculpture, to Babylon for mathematics. In Greece all these things developed in a particular and
characteristic way, sculpture, for instance, achieving a realism and also a range quite different from Egyptian art,
while in mathematics a keen and novel interest arose in questions of proof and the basing of the whole system on
axiomatic foundations. The alphabet was perfected into a script which in its Roman form has satisfied the
western world ever since. Above all, the human scale, both in art and in society, characterized Greece. The
independent city-state, in which alone a man could develop to the full as a citizen, is the central Greek
achievement. It was possible because the great kingdoms of the East, which were close enough to give seminal
inspiration, were not close enough to subjugate Greece: when Xerxes finally tried, it was too late.
Greek culture was competitive. Each successive historian and philosopher made a point of showing how he
improved on his predecessor; the great Panhellenic occasions, at Olympia and Delphi, centred on athletic
competitions; when tragedies or comedies were put on in Athens, it seemed natural that they should be ranged in
order by a panel of judges. It was also a culture which raised in acute form all the basic questions about human
life: Is slavery wrong ('against nature')? What is the ultimate source of law, human or divine? Should the family
be abolished? (Plato abolished it in theory, and Sparta went a long way towards abolishing it in fact.) Is civil
disobedience sometimes right? How can the rule of law be established over blood-feud and family loyalties?
What justifies a state in ruling other states? What is the ideal size for a community? What is the role of heredity
and what of education in the formation of character?
A View East Across The Eurotas Valley, near Sparta, from the Byzantine hill-town of Mistra. This is one of the
broader, fertile valleys of south Greece, some 5 km across and with easy access to the sea at the south: an easier
landscape than most in the Peloponnese but dominated by the massif of Mount Taygetus on the east.
It was marked in all its aspects by an extraordinarily strong feeling for form. That was what gave Greek art and
