Volume V of the new edition of The Cambridge Ancient History encompasses the first Classic age of European civilization--the fifth century BC. This was the first and last period before the Romans in which great political and military power was located in the same place as cultural importance. This volume, therefore, is more narrowly focused geographically than its predecessors and successors, and hardly strays beyond Greece. Athens is at the center of the picture, both politically and culturally, but events and achievements elsewhere are assessed as carefully as the nature of our sources allows. Two series of narrative chapters, one on the growth of the Athenian empire and the development of Athenian democracy, the other on the Peloponnesian War that brought them down, are divided by a series of studies in which the artistic and literary achievements of the fifth century are described.

Volume VI of the new edition of The Cambridge Ancient History covers years that include the rise of Macedon and the campaigns of Alexander the Great. The volume treats the politics and economy not only of old Greece but also of the Near East and the western Mediterranean. It has sections on the continued development of classical art and the formation of the philosophical schools in Athens. This second edition, completely replanned and rewritten, is a full and reliable guide to the advances in scholarship of the past sixty-five years.

The first section of this volume examines the Persian empire, the regions it comprised, and its expansion under Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes. In Greece, Sparta attained maturity as the leader of a military coalition and Athens passed through a period of enlightened tyranny to a moderate democracy of dynamic energy and intelligence. Given the contrast between Greek idealism and Persian absolutism a clash between the two empires was inevitable. Important chapters deal with the revolt of Ionian Greeks against the Persians, and the two Persian invasions of Greece including epic battles at Marathon, Tthermopylae, and Salamis. The book's third part turns to the Western Mediterranean: Italy becomes a significant factor in the area's historical development and is explored in terms of its peoples and languages from the Bronze to the Iron Ages.

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