Herodotus, one of the earliest and greatest of Western prose authors, set out in the late fifth century BC to describe the world as he knew it - its peoples and their achievements, together with the causes and course of the great wars that brought the Greek cities into conflict with the empires of the Near East. Each subsequent generation of historians has sought to use his text and to measure their knowledge of these cultures against his words.
This commentary by leading scholars, originally published in Italian, has been fully revised by the original authors and has now been edited for English-speaking readers by Oswyn Murray and Alfonso Moreno. It is designed for use alongside the Oxford Classical Text of Herodotus, and will replace the century-old historical commentary of How and Wells (1912) as the most authoritative account of modern scholarship on Herodotus.
Books I-IV cover the history and cultures of Lydia, Egypt, Persia, and the nomads of Scythia and North Africa, in their contacts with the Greeks from mythical times to the start of the fifth century BC; these themes, with many digressions, are woven into an account of the expansion of the Persian Empire and its relations with the Greeks.

Athens: Its Rise and Fall, originally published in 1837, is the most important and readable of the Victorian histories of ancient Greece. It stands alongside Macauley and Carlyle as a great historical work of British Romanticism, and anticipates the thinking of George Grote and John Stuart Mill on Greek history by over a decade. Originally published in two volumes, this new one-volume edition includes the text of the never-before published 'third volume' on which he was working at the time of his death, recently rediscovered by Oxford academic Oswyn Murray. An absolute must for any scholar of ancient Greece.

Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton was once Britain's most famous historical novelist, rivalling and outselling Dickens in his day. His best-known book was "The Last Days of Pompeii"; yet he was also responsible for a great work of history. "Athens: Its Rise and Fall", originally published in 1837, is one of the most important and readable of the Victorian histories of ancient Greece. It stands alongside Macauley and Carlyle as a great historical work of British Romanticism, and anticipates the thinking of George Grote and John Stuart Mill on Greek history by over a decade. Routledge is reissuing this influential work, as 2003 is the bicentenary of Bulwer-Lytton's birth. This new edition includes the text of a never-before published "third volume", recently discovered by Oxford academic, Oswyn Murray.

Symposion is the Greek word for 'drinking together'-the social institution of reclining on couches and enjoying the pleasures of wine, sex, and song. Although the Greeks learned the rituals of communal drinking from the Near East, they turned them into a way of life entirely their own, such that for the male revellers they were elevated into a conception of euphrosyne (bliss), the highest form of pleasure. The symposion became a focal point of Greek aristocratic art and culture in the archaic age, proclaimed in poetry and the visual arts, while its structures affected the Greek attitude to life in all its aspects, from the perception of politics, society, philosophy, and psychology, to attitudes towards sexuality, death, and religion. Even when the symposion began to lose its dominance in the classical democratic city state, it was never abandoned, but continued throughout the Hellenistic age and was transmitted through trade and cultural contact to the Etruscans, the Romans, and throughout the Mediterranean. One of the longest surviving works from antiquity is an encyclopaedia of Greek drinking customs compiled in the third century AD, and we can still trace the remnants of this sympotic culture today: the story of Greek pleasure thus lies both at the heart of antiquity and of the western history and conception of pleasure, and even now continues to resonate down the ages. Oswyn Murray's research on ancient Greek drinking customs, beginning in 1983, ignited a major new field of research in archaeology, art history, Greek literature, and Greek history and established him as an expert in the field. This volume consolidates his unrivalled contribution by gathering together the numerous essays on sympotic subjects that he has written over a span of thirty years, and charting half a lifetime of thought on a theme on which he has had a shaping influence.

How the modern world has understood the ancient Greeks and why they matter today

The study of ancient Greek history has been central to the western conception of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History traces the shifting patterns of this preoccupation in the last three centuries, in which each generation has reinterpreted the Greeks in the light of their contemporary world, through times of revolution, conflicting ideologies and warfare. It aims to offer a new history of Greek historiography from the Enlightenment to the present, and to acknowledge the continuing spiritual importance of the ancient Greeks for European culture in the twentieth century under totalitarian persecutions. Through the study of different historians, many of them unjustly forgotten, it shows the problematic nature of the Anglo-Saxon tradition and the importance of ideas from the continent of Europe, the ambiguities of democracy, and the impossibility of understanding the past or the present outside our common European heritage. It ends by offering suggestions for the future of the study of the Greeks in the context of world history.

The Greek city-state or polis is the earliest advanced form of social organization in the western world, and is the starting-point for western political thought. Fourteen new essays by leading scholars from Britain, Denmark, France, Italy, and North America present leading aspects of this phenomenon. The Greek city is placed in the general context of Mediterranean history and its impact on the urbanization of Italy is assessed. Other chapters consider the geography of the polis and the relationship between city and countryside, its political and religious institutions, and the distinction between public and private spheres. The first essay seeks to define the uniqueness of the phenomenon of the polis, and the last assesses the reasons for its decline.

The book is written for the general reader and the student of social sciences as much as for professional historians of the ancient world.

The Swiss scholar Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97) is well known as the author of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, which has remained in print since its publication in 1860. He is far less well known for his pioneering studies in ancient Greek history, which were an important influence on his most celebrated student, Friedrich Nietzsche, and which shaped the modernist view of Greek civilization not as an expression of the heights of human reason, but as an irrational and often dangerous construct. Burckhardt believed that the ancient Greeks' myth-laden view of their own past, full of sociopathic heroes and tragic victims, was an expression of this state of unreason: "The wildest variations and contradictions," he writes, "were not found at all disturbing."

Even less disturbing to the Greeks, he continues, was the systematic violence—and even human sacrifice—that erupted when a city like Athens wished to extend its territory or when a leader wished to extend his power. That violence, Burckhardt holds, was a natural result of the ancient Greeks' pursuit of honor, which accrued by facing and defeating danger. One such danger was the mere act of standing out in any way whatever, which could net a would-be hero a charge of being impious—witness, Burckhardt notes, the fates of Socrates and his contemporary Alcibiades. Drawing from examples of mythology, tragedy, oratory, and comedy, Burckhardt touches on themes such as Greek society's contempt for women and its apparent readiness to embrace all sorts of antidemocratic demagoguery—in the person, for instance, of the famed hero Lysander, who "combines depravity with natural gifts in a way that was typically Spartan and yet generally Greek." Burckhardt's deconstruction of classical history, ably edited by Oxford historian Oswyn Murray, reads as if it were written in our own time.

In less than fifty-three years, Rome subjected most of the known world to its rule. Written by a team of specialist scholars, this book traces the rise of Rome from its origins as a cluster of villages to the foundation of the Empire and its consolidation in the first two centuries CE.

Within the space of three centuries leading up to the great Persian invasion of 480 BC, Greece was transformed from a simple peasant society into a sophisticated civilization that dominated the shores of the Mediterranean from Spain to Syria and from the Crimea to Egypt-a culture whose achievements in the fields of art, science, philosophy, and politics were to establish the canons of the the Western world. Oswyn Murray places this remarkable development in the context of Mediterranean civilization. He shows how contact with the East catalyzed the transformation of art and religion, analyzes the invention of the alphabet and the conceptual changes it brought, describes the expansions of Greece in trade and colonization, and investigates the relationship between military technology and political progress in the overthrow of aristocratic governments.

This authoritative study covers the period from the eighth century BC, which witnessed the emergence of the Greek city-states, to the conquests of Alexander the Great and the establishment of the Greek monarchies some five centuries later.

Within the space of three centuries, up to the great Persian invasion of 480BC, Greece was transformed from a simple peasant society into a sophisticated civilization which dominated the shores of the Mediterranean from Spain to Syria and from the Crimea to Egypt - a culture whose achievements in the fields of art, science, philosophy and politics were to establish the canons of the Western world. The author of this book places this development in the context of Mediterranean civilization, providing an account of the transformation that launched Western culture.