Receive Your Copy The Greco-Persian Wars Formulated By Peter Green Distributed As Booklet

brief, characterful and accessible style makes it mostly a pleasure to read, though the later chapters drag, and he offers, in places, a valuable and fascinating position on the events depicted.
The book is of frustratingly limited scholarly usefulness due to Green's refusal to properly cite, selective attitude toward evidence and his overwhelmingly opinionated perspective, but is otherwise a competent introduction to the period, if not one of the better ones for its breadth.
Take Green with a pinch of salt, or else read him in combination with or as a supplement to primary sources.
Green points out in his introduction to thisreprint that he had been accused of blurring the line between his work as novelist and historian.
But the result is that increasingly rare thing, narrative history which is enjoyable to read, The Historian knows his sources and is happy to discuss problems of evidence the novelist appears occasionally to add what used to be called "telling detail' to a scene.
Between them they keep the story moving, While a fine coverage of the Persian Invasion, it's also a fine commentary on Herodotus, so anyone reading one should read the other.
Excellent book about the period, A pleasure to read with a bit of life put into the story, The first part leading up to Salamis might be the best part, but i read it a long time ago and it might be that i was a bit less free in my time reading the last bit, or that the maritime strategy interested me more than the pure land campaign after Salamis at that time.
Will probably reread it in the near future, Read for research It took me a while to warm up to this book, Frankly, the subject matter isn't the most scintillating, I'm not a very visual person anyway, and I found the maps virtually useless, I had a hell of a time distinguishing between land and water, Greece and Western Turkey are a morass of islands, peninsulas, bays, isthmuses, and straits, Fortunately, there is Wikipedia, and I used it often to sort my way through the geography, I had to do a lot of backtracking and rereading to really "get it," especially the battles, The sections describing politics I grasped better, Despite all this bitching, I really did enjoy the book, The fact that it was a lot of work for me has more to do with my issues than any failing on the author's part.
J'ai rarement lu un récit aussi "vivant" et "humain" sur la Grèce antique, Le destin et la réussite des petites cités grecques est époustouflante :

"On ne peut vivre que fort peu de temps sur les hauteurs suprêmes du sacrifice, du courage et de l'idéalisme altruiste.
Ces moments de lumière illuminent l'Histoire, mais ils sont insoutenables dans la durée" dit Green

A la fois précis, érudit et plaisant, ce livre est un de ceux que j'ai préféré de ceux lu ces dix dernières années !



A vividly written account, perhaps the best on the subject.
An interesting compendium, although I can't quite tell where on the populartoacademic spectrum Green wanted to sit, He is startlingly dismissive of Persian anthropological contributions at the beginning, He also has an amusing penchant for the word "aplomb",

His last paragraph was deeply touching:

"Freedom, in the last resort, implies the privilege and right to abuse freedom, a privilege of which every Greek state availed itself liberally throughout its history.
To follow that melancholy yet inspiring story further is not, at present, my concern, As Xenophon said at the end of
his Hellenica, 'for me, then, let it suffice to have written thus far and what followed thereafter may be some other man's care'.
Let us leave the Greeks in their brief and incandescent moment of triumph over the Barbarian: a timeless instant when as at the apogee of a successful revolution all values are simple and clearcut, every human ideal achievable.
Such fragile and perfect revelations cannot long exist in time: for one day only, perhaps and yet that one day, sub specie aeternitatis, continues to irradiate and quicken our whole Western heritage, now and for ever.
" A favourite. A clear, wellresearched,fluidlywritten account of the wars that shaped Greece's view of itself and allowed Athens' rise to empire, glory, and doom.
Green never allows himself to be blinded by the version of the story that the Greeks would make so famous, and gives due regard to the Persian side of the tale.
Green's famous or notorious wit is in evidence, as is his sharp sense of historical probability, Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea, it's all here, as are the great figures of history and drama Themistokles, Darius, Xerxes, Leonidas.
Very much worth your while if you have any interest in the greatest of the wars of ancient Hellas, The first book of my summer reading on the GrecoPersian wars and it was a great introduction,

It starts with the creation of the Persian Empire and ends with the hints of an Athenian Empire, I am not sure how easy it is for a person who knows nothing of the conflict since the author sometimes references events that has not happen chronologically yet or been dealt with by the author.
The language is as always a bit hard when it comes to dealing with ancient/classical works since there are allot of places that don't exist anymore, names that are not so common anymore and sometimes people are mentioned just once such as in this battle X son of Y heroically did this and then never mentioned again, just a minor detail.
Peter Green also uses allot of french sentences and words which for the most part was new to me, I know allot of terms from political philosophy but most of these were completely new so be prepared to check up the meanings of these french sentences while reading.


In general I liked the book very much, it had some good maps but sometimes the maps weren't on the pages that I would have liked them to be but its just a detail.
I will definitely read Peters Greens book on Alexander the great once I get to that era of history,
The struggle that seeded panhellenism in the surprisingly disjunct ancient Hellenic world, described at length,

I'm a new fan of Themistocles : Donald Kagan calls Mr, Green's GrecoPersian opus magnus "a brilliant piece of popular scholarship, " It is definitely scholarly with extensive Notes and Bibliography sections, As well Green explores and expounds upon the strategy and tactics of all the players whilst keeping focus and without wandering down any hairofthegnat rabbit holes.
I suspect that Kagan uses the adjective "popular" as a mode of conveying Green's pace and writing style, Many history books and certainly most text books earn the appellative of being a bit dry, The GrecoPersian Wars was as much a pageturner as Kagan's The Peloponnese War, Both are lucid and cleareyed, wellpaced and superbly written, And, though I had just finished two other accounts of the GrecoPersian conflict one focused on the battle of Thermopylae and the other on Salamis Green's accounting was more thorough beginning with Darius and the earlydays conflict in Ionia and ending with Xanthippus' destruction of Xerxes' last Hellespont outpost of Sestos and held my interest despite the lack of any historical surprises.


Green does have one literary tic that gets a little annoying at times, He sprinkles his text with Latin and and a little less often French phrases, some quite common and others leading to a bit of headscratching.
Flip to seemingly almost any given page and the italicized en masse, ab initio, in suto, bienpensants, sic transit, en passant, terminus ante quem, etc.
, are there for either an "aha" moment or a quick Googlecumdictionary search, Don't get me wrong, there are definitely times when a good en route or in toto is going to be appropriate.
And, I feel my language skills can always be stretched, So, this is less a complaint than just a note, Therefore, it should not dissuade anyone from picking up this superlative history, et credo, A vividly written account and, perhaps the best on the subject, although a few more explicit maps would have been welcomed.
I originally had to read this for a class, It is one of the very few times I actually read an entire assigned book, I recently watched ':Rise of an Empire' and felt a strong urge to reread this favorite it was also one of my alltime favorite classes!.
A wonderful retelling of the Persian wars, exciting and immediate, by a great classicist warms to the task and makes the book a pleasure.
I'm not totally sure that I should be writing this review because I purchased the book recently though I actually read it someyears ago as "The year of Salamis".
And I purchased this revised and updated book published infor my son who is about to engage in a couple of years of ancient history study.
Obviously the book made a big impression on me because I am basically writing this review on the basis of my recollections of the original.
. . someyears ago. I confess that I have not reread in entirety in truth, very little of the new version, However, I HAVE read the author's introduction where he describes some of the changes he has made and some of the academic criticism directed at the original version.
For example, he was accused of fictionalising his characters a bit too much and having the novelist's desire to avoid a gap in the story.

However, from my perspective that is one of the things that i really liked about the work, It runs like a story yet has fascinating facts injected, . . such as the military expert who looked over the terrain that Xerxes had to cover and looking at the water resources in Particular, estimated that the Persian army, at most, numbered about,not the.
M infantry plus about another,estimated by Herodotus,
I was just rereading the section on the Battle of Marathon and I must say, that Peter Green tells a good story.
He had me captivated again,
Although the book is focused on the events in the straits of Salamis and the naval victory of Greeks over Persians, he sets the stage well.
From the victory of Marathon to the invasion by the massive Persian army and fleet and the follow up land campaigns, Green tells a fascinating tale.
He writes well, and as I said above he is a great story teller, Though apparently this is not really appreciated by the academic historian critics,
My version of the book is a bit tattered and marked I bought it second hand and i am contemplating buying a new version.

One of the things that I remembered reading someyears ago was the importance of Themistocles to the victory at Salamis.
. . his insistence on building an expensive fleet of triremes, Also the luck of finding a wealth of silver at the mines in Laurium, Though to get his way with the assembly and get access to the silver and authority to build the fleet, he did not refer to a war with Persia.
. . but with a more direct threat from Aegina, . . which was cutting off trade from Piraeus,
And, of course, the famous battle at Thermopylae which Green manages to turn into something like a thrilling narrative.
Certainly, it engaged me. Although the Spartan's lost the battle there, he quotes William Golding on the eventual outcome: "If you were a Persian.
neither you nor Leonidas nor anyone else could force that here thirty year's time was won for shining Athens and all Greec eand for all humanity.
. A little of Leonidas lies in the fact that I can go where I like and write what I like.
He contributed to set us free",
I really like this book, And I think Green has done an excellent job of making history more than just interesting, It's made it quite fascinating, Five from me. .